| “Have any of you all met Paul Ryan? We should get him to come to the university. I’m telling you this guy is amazing. ... He is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did, by $4 trillion. … The president came out with his own plan ... as you remember, came out with a budget and I don’t think anybody took that budget very seriously. The Senate voted against it 97 to nothing. He therefore after a lot of pressure from folks like me, uh, he came out with a new budget framework, and in that new budget framework, he cut, he cut the budget deficit by $4 trillion dollars over 12 years, and to, be candid, this, this $4 trillion dollars cut was very heavily back-end loaded, so if you looked at it on a 10-year basis, and compared apples to apples, it really was about a $2 1/2 trillion dollar cut." -- Erskine Bowles, fmr. Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton |