[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 22]
[Senate]
[Page 30852]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             FISCAL POLICY

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, at this point, I will respond to my friend 
from Kentucky, the distinguished Republican leader.
  We have something new in town that has been going on now for almost 
11 months, and that is we are paying for things. That is the reason the 
Clinton economic machine worked as well as it did. When we had a new 
program, we paid for it. When taxes were decreased, we paid for that.
  We are going to go ahead and do the AMT fix, but we are going to do 
it by paying for it. We cannot continually run this country in the red. 
I repeat what I have said on a number of other occasions. When 
President Bush took office 7 years ago, we had a $7 trillion surplus 
over 10 years. He has driven us into near bankruptcy as a result of his 
fiscal irresponsibility.
  We are responsible. We are going to fix AMT before the end of the 
year, but we will do it the right way; we are going to pay for it.

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