It is because the Democratic Party is the party of security, the party of fairness and compassion and equality. It is like the mother in a family, whose role is to question risky enterprise. The Republican Party must play the role of risk-taker, the traditional husband and father role of enterprise. President Clinton and the Democrats of this committee will naturally be skeptical of ideas that increase the levels of risk-taking in our society. It is up to the Republicans of the committee to persuade them that without risk-taking, there can be no economic growth.
All growth is the result of risk-taking, all success is the result of failure.
He is in agreement with Alan Greenspan and Ted Forstmann. I bring up Congressman Armey at this point of my testimony because of his well-known desire to change the method of scoring capital gains taxation by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The reason is not that he would like the computers that do the scoring to be programmed by optimists instead of pessimists. All the computers in the legislative and executive branches at the present moment are programmed in the consumption mode, which assumes production is automatic. The fact is, risk-taking cannot be converted into mathematical notation.