mr. chairman , the question before us today , i believe , is how now shall we live within the confines of the budget that we have to deal with ? 
shall we live within the boundaries that we have set for ourselves and set an example for our generation today and the future , or should we ignore those boundaries that we have imposed upon ourselves and spend in excess ? 
right now we are in the process , as we know , of doing the budget for next year , the 2006 budget . 
we are setting up the framework of what we will be spending for next year . 
and so i think it is fitting and appropriate that we look at the supplemental today and the amendment that i have presented to see whether or not we will fit within that budget confines , whether or not we will fit within that area or , instead , will we exceed it and say that a budget really is nothing more than a charade and not explain exactly what we will be spending for any point in time . 
let me just say that i applaud the chairman , and i applaud the members of the committee for doing what they said they would do as has been reported in the paper . 
to use the chairman 's own words , they have taken the president 's proposal and scrubbed it thoroughly for many points that they thought appropriate to remove from that spending proposal . 
my question , though , is , can we do a little bit better ? 
can we go a little bit further ? 
can we do exactly what we ask families to do back at home ? 
think for a moment . 
what would a family do today if they faced emergency expenditures like we are looking at in the supplemental right now , families who maybe have to see extra car payments or medical expenses ? 
what would a family do ? 
a family would probably have to do what we should be doing right here , and that is limit our spending elsewhere , reduce some other unnecessary spending so that we have that money for the emergency spending . 
if we look in the supplemental , there are a number of points in there that have already been raised by others . 
i will just point to one of them , the aid for tsunami victims . 
that started at $ 35 million , went up to $ 150 million , then $ 350 million , and now we are looking at $ 950 million . 
some would question whether we can even spend all that before the end of this fiscal year . 
as a matter of fact , i spoke with people from the world bank and they said that they are not even sure where the money would all be going to . 
they do not have an exact figure as to what we should be spending on long-term needs , so we can question whether or not we should be spending that money . 
but given that we can argue that back and forth , let us take that as a given that we should spend the entire $ 950 million for tsunami relief . 
i would ask this , as we stand here before the world as a body saying that we are going to do the charitable thing and give money to the tsunami victims , are we really exercising any charity there when we , in fact , say , we 're not going to be paying for it , we 're asking our kids and our grandkids to pay for it in excessive spending and deficit spending in future generations ? 
again , i applaud the chairman for the good start that they have done in this committee by scrubbing the budget and trying to find some offsets . 
i would simply say , can we not do a little bit better and find completely all offsets for all of the spending that we are doing , aside from the military defense spending , for all the excessive spending in the bill ? 
it is around $ 4 billion . 
how much would it really come out to be ? 
if you are looking at the budget that we have right now that we are living under , $ 2.5 trillion , and you are trying to find savings or offsets of around $ 4 billion , that is only two- tenths of 1 percent . 
i would ask , can we not find two-tenths of 1 percent of waste , fraud and abuse in the entire fiscal budget that we are operating under right now ? 
i think we can . 
we ask families to do it for their budgets , we ask businesses to do it for their budgets , i think we can find that entire amount of approximately $ 4 billion of waste , fraud , and abuse in the entire budget , offset it , and then we can truly stand before the world and say that when we are making charitable contributions to the tsunami relief victims , that it is truly coming from this generation and not being passed on to future generations . 
i shall end where i began . 
how now shall we live ? 
we shall live within the means , by the parameters that we have set down upon ourselves . 
we shall live within the budget that we have set for ourselves and not outside that budget . 
