There was a very famous person 150 years ago that came over to the United States of America. His name was Alexis de Tocqueville . A lot of people do not know this. But de Tocqueville came over here to study our system. When he got here he was so impressed with the wealth of this Nation, with the fact that people could work and take home the products of their own labors, and that that had produced an incredible wealth that had not been dreamed of any time in the history of the world. It was all happening right here in this new world. But he was a very intelligent man. And de Tocqueville wrote a book about the wealth of this country. I am paraphrasing. He said once the people of this country find they can vote themselves money out of the public trust, the system will fail.

Are we almost there now? Yes, we are. They say that when that moment comes, it is when you have the majority of people on the receiving end of government and the system will fail because productivity will be gone.

The 10th argument that has been used by the well-meaning Senators, those who are very articulate, is one that I hope you will listen to very carefully, Mr. President. They said:

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The 1990 and the 1993 budget deals worked. The way to deal with the deficit is to continue the successful deficit reduction efforts of the last 5 years.

This is a Senator saying this on this floor.

Since 1990, we have achieved over $900 billion in deficit reduction. We did not do it with a balanced budget amendment. But we did it with two major budget agreements, detailed blueprints which raised revenues, cut expenditures, and made hard choices. These budgets were on the table. All the details were fully debated.

Remember they said the 1990 and the 1993 budget deals worked, the successful deficit reduction efforts of the last 5 years.

This is the big problem we have in America. A lot of people believe that stuff. We have a President of the United States who stood up in the State of the Union Message and talked about all of this deficit reduction. Yet, while he is in there, every day the debt goes higher and higher and higher. Please do not think I am disrespectful when I talk about our President.

Teddy Roosevelt said:

Patriotism means stand by your country. It does not mean stand by the President of the United States or any other elected official, save exactly the degree that he stands by his country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the same degree that he by inefficiency or otherwise fails to stand by his country.

So we have a President who stands up and he passes these things. The first one we cannot hang on him. That was 1990. George Bush was President of the United States at that time. Several of us watched as he tried to accommodate the Democrats out at Andrews Air Force Base, when he had the Budget Committees from the House and the Senate out there saying, if you do not do this, we are not going to go along with any of your programs. And, finally, President Bush decided that he would agree to a tax increase, right after he had said in the campaign `Read my lips.' Look what happened. That was the cause of his demise. Everybody knows that. He knows it himself. He knows he should not have done that. But it was a judgment call made in good faith, trying to get along, trying to reach a bipartisan agreement on a budget. And he agreed to a tax increase when he did not need to do a tax increase.

I do not like all of this talk about what they talk about when they say that we cut the deficit. There is an article by the way, Mr. President. You ought to read it. I bet you have not read it yet. I believe it was in the December 1993 Reader's Digest, and the name of the article was `Budget Baloney.' Then in this article he describes, in a better way than I have ever seen it described before, just how we are able to tell it to the people at home that we are doing something and not let them really know what we are doing.