Fox News Network Your World with Neil Cavuto - Transcript

Fox News January 20, 2004
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Fox News Network

SHOW: YOUR WORLD WITH NEIL CAVUTO (16:00)

January 20, 2004 Tuesday

HEADLINE: Interview With Steny Hoyer, Roy Blunt

GUESTS: Steny Hoyer, Roy Blunt

BYLINE: Neil Cavuto

BODY:

NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: Joining us now from both sides of the aisle, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, of Missouri, and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, of Maryland.

Congressman Blunt, I'd like to begin with you. Your party is getting increasingly criticized for not being really very diligent on budget issues. Jim Nussle, your House budget chief, was saying that he's very concerned that the budget already submitted is looking pretty fat. What do you say?

ROY BLUNT (R-MO), HOUSE MAJORITY WHIP: Well, I think if you look at the defense and homeland security challenges we've had and take those out of the budget, the non-defense, non-homeland security budget grew 5 percent in the year before last. Last year-this year we're just in now, if the Senate adopts the omnibus budget, it will grow at 4 percent. I suspect the president will propose a growth of a little less than that.

Clearly, our defense and homeland security needs have been extraordinary and we've had to react to those, but we've also come off some high domestic growth years. I think the first Bush year, which was really the last Clinton budget, domestic expenses grew by 15 percent. So 15, 5, 4, I think we're on the way in the right direction. We're getting back near inflationary growth and hopefully we can hit that goal this year-Neil.

CAVUTO: Congressman Hoyer, if I can switch gears a little bit on policies, if I can be so crass.

STENY HOYER (D-MD), HOUSE MINORITY WHIP: Well, I'd like to comment on that at some point in time, Neil, because.

CAVUTO: I'll let you sir. But I-one thing that some people are taking away from John Kerry doing well in Iowa last night is that maybe some Democrats do not want to see complete repudiation of the president's tax cuts, as Howard Dean, the earlier frontrunner, had advocated. Do you agree with that?

HOYER: I think the Democrats across the board want to see middle class get a tax break, and we've proposed that here in the House. We continue to take that position. So I think that Senator Kerry's position is consistent with the position we've taken here in the House in terms of giving middle class taxpayers a break.

CAVUTO: So that is not to say, Congressman, that the position advocated by Howard Dean, that is to rescind all the tax cuts, is yours.

HOYER: No, it's not mine. As a matter of fact, we voted to continue to make sure that middle class, middle income, working families got some tax breaks. So the answer to your question is yes, that's not consistent with what I understand Mr. Dean has proposed.

CAVUTO: Congressman Blunt, you know the president-I was raising this with Ms. Hughes a little earlier-has to justify how he's going to pay for a lot of the things he wants to pay for-the $400 billion prescription drug benefit, maybe getting to the moon and Mars, this immigration plan. A lot of costly efforts here and so far, from looking at this budget, no real clear way to pay for it.

BLUNT: We haven't seen the budget. I haven't seen the budget yet he's submitting. We had a meeting last week, our leadership did, with some of the president's staff to talk about general terms of the budget. I assume that's what Mr. Nussle was talking to you about.

But I believe, and many others agree with me, that the way to get out of this deficit situation is to grow the economy. We saw significant economic growth last year. We want to see that matched with job growth this year. I think the president will have some comments tonight about how we move the skill level of the American work force up and continue to provide more opportunities and greater competition.

But you don't-I don't think-we didn't balance the budget by taxing the American people to death. We're not going to balance it the second time. We need to grow this economy. We're on the way to doing that, and the way to do that is to give the American people more of their money to invest and create jobs, and they're doing exactly that right now.

HOYER: Neil, I don't want to debate within the Democratic Party. You have Mr. Blunt and I here. I want to discuss the Republican proposals, and in fact Republicans have been saying this for three years. The president has been saying this for three years.

We've got the surplus that he inherited from the Clinton administration. He said it was $5.6 trillion. He's turned that into a $4- plus trillion deficit over the same period of time.

(CROSSTALK)

CAVUTO: Mr. Hoyer, you will admit that there are a couple of things that happened along the way, right? September 11? The battle against terrorism.

(CROSSTALK)

HOYER: Neil, there were a couple of things that happened, and we have made some substantial investments in our national security which, as you know, I supported, and in our homeland security. I don't think we've done enough on homeland security, but the fact is, as the president said, we're going to grow jobs. He said that three years ago.

We created 1,000 jobs last month when the administration said we're going to create 200,000. That's missing your mark by about 99.5 percent.

Discretionary spending is up. It's up substantially. That's what Mr. Nussle was talking about. That's what Paul Wirick (ph) is talking about. There's been no fiscal discipline if fiscal discipline means paying for what you buy. We're sending future generations deeply into debt.

The president in his last State of the Union said we're not going to pass along problems to future Congresses or future generations. Unfortunately, that's no longer credible because we're doing exactly that.

CAVUTO: We will see, gentlemen. I know you'll be there tonight, so we'll obviously be watching for your faces in the crowd, there.

Congressman Hoyer, Congressman Blunt, thank you both, gentlemen. Appreciate it.

END