This week, the House Committee on the Budget held a hearing at which Peter Orszag, Director of OMB, testified. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the ranking Republican on the committee.
RYAN: Thank you, Chairman, and thank you for this hearing. I look forward to having a number of these hearings on this budget. What a week we just had last week. Let's go through it for a second. On Monday, we had the Fiscal Responsibility Summit. On Tuesday, we witnessed a very eloquent, ambitious and even inspiring speech by the president of the United States echoing those themes of fiscal responsibility. Then on Wednesday, Congress passed a bloated $410 billion spending bill with 9,000 earmarks. And on Thursday, we received the mother of all budgets, a truly sweeping transformation of the federal government, the likes of which we have not seen since the New Deal.
Finally, on Saturday, the president threw down the gauntlet. Rather than echoing the theme of changing the tone in Washington or bringing people together to forge a bipartisan compromise, he essentially said, "You're either with me or you're against me." He claimed opponents of this transformative budget are quote, "Tools of special interest and the powerful." This is not changing the tone of Washington or forging a compromise. This is staking out an ideological conquest. It's playing the oldest political trick in the book, which is if someone disagrees with you impugn their motives. Don't debate the facts. Destroy their credibility and win the argument by default.
This power play strikes me as an incredible gamble with the U.S. economy and with those principles that built this country. Now the facts surrounding this budget are disturbing. It proposes to bring the size of our government to its largest level ever since World War II. It doubles the national debt in eight years. During a recession, it seeks to impose a $1.4 trillion tax in our economy on work, on savings, investment, energy, on manufacturing.
