“Have any of you all met Paul Ryan?” Bowles asked. “We should get him to come to the university. I’m telling you this guy is amazing.
“I always thought that I was okay with arithmetic, but this guy can run circles around me.
“And 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 and the President 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, he came out with a new budget framework and, in that new budget framework, he cut the budget deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years. And, to be candid, this $4 trillion 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 two and a half trillion dollar cut.”
