[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 16 (Thursday, January 26, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H696]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT

  (Mr. MEEHAN asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago, I invited voters from my 
district to a meeting in Concord, MA. to try their hand at cleaning up 
the budget mess. Roughly 260 people took me up on the offer. They
 broke into small groups, and went to work drawing up plans to balance 
the budget.

  With the full range of budget choices laid out before them, the 
players were asked to make the decisions needed to balance the budget. 
Only 16 of the 25 groups had produced a plan 1\1/2\ hours later. Not 
one Democrat or Republican managed to balance the budget without 
raising taxes.
  Let us face it, Congress needs a balanced budget amendment to 
eliminate the deficit. But it is not going to take the rest of the 
country very long to figure out what the people in Concord, MA, 
discovered last weekend: That the Contract With America version of the 
balanced budget amendment is a hoax. If we are serious about balancing 
the budget, we cannot take anything off the table yet--not even tax 
increases.
  Let us stop trying to fool the American people. Vote for the 
Stenholm-Schaefer amendment today, and pass a real balanced budget 
amendment.


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