Mr. Speaker, I was deadly serious. What the people on the other side of the House said was that what they wanted to do was to balance the budget at all costs immediately. What that would mean is that we would have, right now, tens of billions of dollars of cuts, cuts that would increase our unemployment rate, that would reduce our ability to be flexible, that would certainly put us in a very difficult situation.
Our plan is to make an investment to actually improve our rate of growth in this country for the middle class and those most vulnerable.