At Tuesday’s Republican Leadership press conference, I said the following:

“When I hear the President and Speaker Pelosi talking about budgets, it reminds me of a character from Popeye’s cartoon, Wimpy. He always said, ‘I’ll gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today’…. The ‘Wimpy philosophy’ toward budgeting has resulted in a wimpy economic recovery.”

You can watch the full video and read a transcript of my extended remarks below.

“Coming out of the G20 summit, there was some good news and some bad news. I would say the good news was that our allies were able to convince our administration that we need to cut our deficit in half by 2013 after it was tripled in the first year of this administration. The bad news is that we see little intention by the Obama Administration to really follow through when we continue to see more and more requests for stimulus funding. This is on top of $787 billion in stimulus last year that resulted in 4 million private sector jobs being lost. Now the Democrats aren’t even drafting a budget. According to the president’s own budget director, he said that asking the Democrats to cut spending this year would be a ‘fruitless exercise’ that would probably ‘go nowhere.’ Yet, the American people all across this country are demanding better. They would like to see some leadership from Congress to get our fiscal house in order.

“When I hear the president and Speaker Pelosi talking about budgets, it reminds me of a character from Popeye’s cartoon, Wimpy. He always said ‘I’ll gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today.’ The ‘Wimpy philosophy’ toward budgeting has resulted in a wimpy economic recovery. America doesn’t need more stimulus. It needs leadership. To quote Paul Willen, the economics professor at MIT, he said ‘to create jobs, the private sector needs to know that Washington can make tough choices, that our leaders are willing to do things that are unpopular, and more than anything the people need to feel that the government is not out of control.’ The G20 summit was a wonderful opportunity for our president to exercise some leadership in taking control of where we’re headed with the global economy. Unfortunately, that opportunity was missed because we’re continuing to add $5 billion a day in debt that is going to be carried by our children and grandchildren.”