John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank the gentleman for his kind remarks. Mr. Chairman, I yielded to myself to clarify what is in the budget proposal we are proposing versus the budget resolution reported by the committee and sponsored by the Republicans. Our budget, let me make this clear, matches dollar for dollar their budget on national defense and international affairs, there is not a dime's worth of difference over a 5-year period of time. But our budget does single out veterans as one group deserving of more spending, more than just a current services budget, because the demands are clearly there. So our budget provides $1.6 billion more than theirs, than the Republican resolution, for veterans health care in 2006. And between 2006 and 2010 we provide $17 billion more for veterans health care. Our budget resolution contains no reconciliation instructions to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. What does that mean? Their resolution calls upon the Committee on Veterans' Affairs to report savings out of mandatory programs that will save $798 million. There are only two places those savings can come from: either cutting disability benefits or raising the fees that veterans must pay to use veterans facilities. Our budget resolution contains special provisions for our troops to make sure that the increases in life insurance to $400,000 for combat fatalities voted up in the supplemental for 1 year will be extended for future years, and that the death gratuity raised to $100,000 will also be continued for future years. And we will provide more funding for family separation centers, for deployed troops, and more community- based health care for returning troops and their families, two things that have been critically noted. Our resolution recommends that the funds be taken from the Missile Defense Agency and advanced satellite programs to pay for these personnel benefits. We think it is a good trade-off. Our resolution also contains more in the four functions that fund homeland security and make special provisions for increasing the budget for cooperative threat reduction, so-called nonproliferation, by $200 million. So in summary, for our veterans, for our troops and for the emerging threats facing us, terrorists armed with WMDs, our budget is not only better funded, but better focused than theirs. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards) for a response.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton), the ranking member of the Committee on Armed Services.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Corrine Brown). (Ms. CORRINE BROWN of Florida asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez), the House Democratic Caucus Chairman. (Mr. MENENDEZ asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott). (Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Kilpatrick).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume to respond to the gentleman. I would point out that when the Bush budget summit agreement came to the floor of this House in the fall of 1990, after many arduous months of negotiation with the Bush administration and the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership in the House, only 88 Republicans supported the passage of that bill, which had the President's support behind it. In 1993, when we passed the Clinton Budget Act and began the unprecedented march towards lower and lower deficits, eventuating in a surplus of $236 billion in the year 2000, not a single Republican in either House voted for that deficit reduction effort. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gene Green).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield a minute to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee). (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. To respond to the gentleman, I would say that Mr. Greenspan has told our committee three times that we should borrow from the experience of the 1990s, reinstate the so-called pay-as-you-go rule, and apply it both to entitlement spending increases and additional tax cuts, including renewal of expiring tax cuts as a means of diminishing the deficit and improving the bottom line. In the interest of full disclosure, we ought to acknowledge that advice was given to us three times, and it is in our budget resolution. We recommend it in two places in our budget resolution. The one discipline proven to work that we ought to institute at the very least is PAYGO and apply it both to entitlement spending increases and to additional tax cuts, per the recommendation of Chairman Greenspan. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Ford).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the minority leader.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moore).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Cardoza).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Tanner).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, it is hard to believe that just 5 short years ago we were sitting on a pinnacle of surpluses totaling $236 billion. And it did not come easily. It was not the fallout from some fantastic economy, some serendipitous result. Democrats, beginning in 1992 and 1993, made the hard choices that moved the budget to surplus in unprecedented fashion. $290 billion was the deficit inherited by President Clinton when he came to office, as this chart will show. $290 billion was the largest deficit in our Nation's peacetime history. The President, as his first legislative act, sent us a budget to cut that deficit by more than half over the next 5 fiscal years. I will never forget the day we passed it here on the House floor by one vote, and in the Senate by the Vice President's vote. I will never forget the taunts, the claims that we were cutting the economy off at the knees, buying ourselves a one-way ticket to a recession, and ballooning the deficit instead of resolving it. Well, Mr. Chairman, every year thereafter, after adoption of the Clinton budget in 1993, every year the bottom line of the budget got better, to the point where in the year 2000 we had a surplus of $236 billion. We made the hard choices to make that happen. And that was the surplus inherited by President Bush when he came to office in the year 2001. No President in recent times has enjoyed such an inheritance, and he squandered his inheritance. We warned against it. We warned against going for deep tax cuts and relying upon the projection of surpluses at that point in time, which was $5.6 trillion. We told the President then that while we may seem to be sitting on an island of surpluses, we were surrounded by a sea of red ink, a sea of debt; and we needed, now that we could, to attend to our long-term needs, our obligations to Social Security in particular. He defied and ignored all those priorities and went solely with the budget whose primary thrust and emphasis was the biggest tax cuts we have passed in the history of this Congress. Unfortunately, the prophecies and predictions we made have come to pass. The boost to the economy imparted by those tax cuts did not replenish the revenues to the Treasury of the United States. As a consequence, today we have the largest deficits in our Nation's history. Not just this year. It is not just something episodic. Two years ago we had a deficit of $375 billion. This past year we had a deficit of $412 billion. This year, according to OMB, we can look for a deficit of $427 billion. Each of those deficits, 375, 412, 427, each of those deficits is a record deficit. And now what do we look at for the long-term future? The President tells us he is going to cut the deficit in half. And he sends us a budget which purports roughly to do that. But he conveniently omits from his estimation of what will be incurred in the way of cost over the next 5 years major items such as the cost of the war. We have 140,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. More in Afghanistan. That war cost is not going away or tapering off any time soon. And any budget that is straightforward should include some estimation of the likely cost now that we have been over there for 2 or 3 years and know what the costs should be based upon. Secondly, there is nothing in the President's budget to account for fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax, which we all know is a political inevitability. His own Treasury Department has told us if we do not fix it, it will go from four million tax filers to 30 million tax filers by the year 2010. It will have to be fixed in the near term. There is not a thing in the President's budget that accounts for that. Even though he asks for additional tax cuts, he leaves out that $640 billion item. And then the cost of fixing Social Security, privatizing Social Security. The President says he would like to allow workers to take 4 percentage points off their FICA payments and put it in a private account. Well, if you do that, you are taking money out of public trust funds, putting them in private trust funds; and, therefore, money will have to be borrowed to meet the obligations of Social Security; to wit, $754 billion beginning in the year 2009 and extending to the year 2015. That is not my number. The White House gave us that estimate. And yet they did not put it in their own budget. When you add all of these things together, what you get is not a deficit that is going to be cut in half over the next 5 years, or the next 10 years, for that matter. What you get is a deficit that moves from $427 billion next year to $621 billion in the year 2015. Let me just show you in three simple lines what this means looking backward over the immediate last 3 years. When my Republican colleagues passed the President's budget and his tax cuts in the year 2001, his offices at OMB told us in earnest, we will not be back here hat in hand to ask to increase the debt ceiling of the United States, the legal limit on what we can borrow, again until 2008. So confident are we that these tax cuts will be replenished, we do not think we will be back here until 2008. They were back here in the year 2002, asking for an increase in the debt ceiling of $450 billion. The next year, 2003, they came and asked for a debt ceiling increase of $984 billion. Let me tell my colleagues for reference purposes how big that is. The entire debt of the United States when Ronald Reagan came to office was less than $984 billion. In one year, in one year, the Bush administration asked and the Republicans in the Congress, both Houses, acceded to a debt ceiling increase of $984 billion. That was May 26, 2003. Within 15 months, Secretary Snow from the Department of Treasury was back and said, we need more; we need more. And consequently, before we adjourned last November, the Congress again, with Republican votes, increased the debt ceiling by $800 billion. That means in 3 fiscal years, 3 of the 4 fiscal years represented by the Bush administration's first term, the debt ceiling of the United States had to be raised by $2.234 trillion in order to accommodate the budgets of the Bush administration. Today, we have before us a budget resolution which was crafted by the Republicans and by the gentleman from Iowa (Chairman Nussle). Very little collaboration. A lot of civility. We have a great relationship, but little collaboration. They did their thing; we did our thing. Basically, what they have done is a take-off on the President's budget. It is very similar to the President's budget. So instead of taking my word for what the consequences of this budget are, let me show something that every Member has in his or her office right now. It came yesterday, March 15: an analysis of the President's budgetary proposals for the fiscal year 2006, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office, which, as everybody knows, is neutral and nonpartisan. Members do not have to read the whole thing, although I would commit it to their reading. They just have to read to the second page. Table 1.1 on the second page, if they read there, they will see the implications of what they will be putting in train if they vote for this budget resolution, which is basically the President's budget request. And that is, according to CBO, we will add to the debt of the United States $5.135 trillion over the next 10 years. Another $5 trillion on top of the $2.2 trillion that I have just shown will be added over the next 10 years as a consequence of passing this budget. That is not cutting the deficit in half. That is letting the deficit soar and soar and soar. To mitigate the problem, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) and his colleagues on the Committee on the Budget have prepared some cuts in domestic discretionary spending. The irony here is they and the President both go to one sector in the budget that has not been growing over the last 3 to 4 years, and they take their cuts almost exclusively out of these domestic programs, programs like education and veterans health care and the environment. Yet where the real cost increases, spending increases, are coming is not in those accounts, which constitute about $350 billion and have basically been flat for the last 3 years. As this chart shows, over the last 4 years, 90 to 95 percent of the spending increases have come from defense, understandably, the reaction to 9/11, post-9/11, and to an account in the budget that did not exist 3 years ago, Homeland Security. That is where the growth is coming. But in instead of going to this growth, instead of going to these items in the budget, they are concentrating on domestic discretionary spending, and I tell my colleagues while we can take a hit this year, $150 billion over 5 years, a significant reduction, and maybe some more next year, pretty soon we are going to reach the tolerable limits of what we can do in the way of cutting education, law enforcement, infrastructure improvements, and things like that in the United States. So there are limits to where we can go and the methods they are choosing, and that is why I say this is the path we are taking. Here it is when CBO sends us their report: $5 trillion. And, by the way, that does not include anything for the additional cost of the war past the year 2006, and that is because the President does not have it in his budget. The gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) to his credit said we know we are going to be there in 2006. We know basically what it costs, we should put something in our budget to reflect that cost. And he put $50 billion in his budget. The President did not. If we adjust his budget, as represented here in CBO, for the likely cost of being in Iraq and Afghanistan for some years to come, it adds another 300 to $400 billion to the tally. It pushes it on up even more. So that is what we have before us, a very tough, almost intractable problem. And I wish I could say that for all of this arduous effort I thought that we were beginning to get our hands around the problem. I do not think so. We have offered a substitute that we think is better fiscally and better in terms of our core values, the values that we support and we think the American people share: the education of our children, for which we do more; the health care of our veterans, for which we are committed and do more; the development of our communities; and the quality of our environment. We do that simply by bringing spending in the domestic discretionary accounts back to baseline, that is, to current services, enough to prevent them from being eroded away by inflation, but not by any significant increase. Those changes plus the plan we lay out will bring our budget to balance by the year 2012. We think that ought to be the effort and aim of every budget that is presented here in the well of the House, getting back to balance as soon as possible and will incur less debt than the budget resolutions being offered to us. So we have got plenty to debate here today, but we have got an alternative on our side that protects our core values and priorities, the education of our children, the health care of our veterans, the development of our communities, the quality of our environment, and one also that is fiscally responsible. One also that will move us to balance sooner in time more assuredly than the Republican resolution. We look forward to the debate. We believe that we have the better choice, the better resolution; and we will be presenting in the course of the day the reasons why. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield for the purposes of a unanimous consent request to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran). (Mr. MORAN of Virginia asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. SPRATT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)