But if our nation goes over a financial Niagara we won't have much strength and eventually we won't have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not as our military friends say a 'robust strategy.'

But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot what movies are not hot what the budget of this movie might be.

The long and short of it is that I am now in a position in England to green light movies and that's really excellent - not high-budget movies but movies none the less.

I hadn't made a big-budget film and in Hollywood there's a sort of man and boys situation. You're a man you make $80 million movies! As if it's harder to make an $80 million movie. Well I guess businesswise it is because you have more executives to argue with.

When newspapers started to publish the box office scores of movies I was horrified. Those results are totally fake because they never include the promotion budget.

It can have an enormous effect because big budget movies can have big budget perks and small budget movies have no perks but what is the driving force of course is the script and your part in it.

The GAO just released a report that said 22 percent of federal programs fail to meet their objectives. The truth is we don't know how taxpayer money is spent in Washington D.C. which is why I think we ought to put every agency budget up on the Internet for everyone to see.

I tend to make low-budget movies but yeah I make more money than I ever thought I would make.

As I have traveled throughout my Congressional district the one thing I heard loud and clear was simply please stop spending money you do not have rein in spending live within a budget.

And we have no such thing as a budget anymore. Our manager freaks when we show him the bill. We're lavish to the bone but all our money goes back into the product.

Growing up my sisters and I would always talk stories. One of my frustrations was I didn't know anything about cameras. I didn't know how to make a film and I obviously didn't have a special effects budget. I was a kid. So I was learning to draw to get down the stuff that was in my head that I couldn't afford to actually do.

I think that all areas of the budget have to be scrubbed. Clearly the entitlement issues have to be reformed and that's an issue that's going to require I think some strong bipartisan cooperation and leadership.

The National Intelligence Director needs the authority to do the job we are asking him to do. That means power over the intelligence budget. And to be effective to be allowed to do his or her job they must have authority over the budget.

The 9/11 Commission strongly recommends that the National Intelligence Director be fully in control of the budget from developing it to implementing it to ensuring that the National Intelligence Director has the clout to make decisions.

Since September 11th Congress has created the Department of Homeland Security more than doubled the homeland security budget and implemented a bipartisan overhaul of our intelligence systems.

Increased revenues meaning higher taxes will be a central element of any successful long-term budget plan and President Obama is right to insist that the wealthy - the slice of America that has come through the recession in by far the best financial health - should provide those funds.

Domestic discretionary spending on education and health care and the environment has been growing at 2 to 3 percent a year. He says we have to rein it in but he ignores the spending category that is the big spike in the budget.