Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, as we continue to hope that a spirit of consensus will come forth to avoid this self-inflicted wound, I think it's well to think of a general principle on how we should approach our fiscal challenges, and that is that a nation that does not learn from its clear, unambiguous mistakes is bound to repeat them. And, in fact, the problem with the Republican plan that will be on the floor today is that it not only repeats the mistakes that occurred during the Bush administration, it enshrines them into permanent law.

Now, I remember very well where Alan Greenspan came before us years ago during the last President's administration and said that we needed to have massive cuts for multimillionaires and further cuts for the oil industries, because if we didn't do that the United States Government would just have too much money in the kitty.

That didn't work out too well. In fact, because of those giant mistakes, it blew a hole in the deficit.

Do not repeat them. Let's go back and solve this problem the real way.