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The budget enforcement rules of the 1990s were an important part of getting the budget back into balance. It was done on a bipartisan basis. Those pay-as-you-go rules were tested and they worked. We are now in a one-party system, and we have thrown them out.

The right way to deal with a budget problem that was years in the making is by formulating a credible plan to reduce the deficit over time and as the economy is able to withstand the necessary fiscal belt-tightening. That is what President Obama is doing.

The reason we have such a reform budget is because we've been thinking about these things for a long time.

Traditionally, the way deficits have been cut is you hold expenditures more or less constant in real dollars and then let growth come in to fill it up.

Defense spending as a share of the economy dropped significantly during the early 1990s, and that was one of the things, along with other policy changes, that put us back on the path to a balanced budget.

We cannot win the future, expand the economy and spur job creation if we are saddled with increasingly growing deficits. That is why the president's budget is a comprehensive and responsible plan that will put us on a path toward fiscal sustainability in the next few years - a down payment toward tackling our challenges in the long term.

The Spending Control Act. It would recreate President Reagan's grace commission to have a bipartisan commission on how we reduce spending.

The financial report makes it very clear that if we got into honest budgeting today, that in fact we would find ourselves with a much larger deficit than we have today.

The best way to deal with the deficit is through economic growth.

What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.