John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

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

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. Ford).

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

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Case).

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

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.)

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. 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 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards).

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I would ask if my friend from California expects the rule to be on the floor Wednesday of next week?

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, will the deadline for filing proposed substitutes or amendments be 5 o'clock on Monday?

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) and I had an amendment that we filed yesterday to forgive the debt owed by the Pee Dee Regional Transit Authority to the Federal Transit Administration. We are not going to bring this amendment up for a vote, but I would like to engage my colleague, the gentleman from Alaska (Chairman Young) in particular, in a colloquy on this issue if agreeable. Mr. Chairman, the Pee Dee Regional Transit Authority, PDRTA, is responsible for transportation and transit services in an area which encompasses 20 percent of South Carolina, more than 5,300 square miles in some of the most poorest, most rural areas of our State. In the year 2000, the Federal Transit Administration's triennial review found that PDTRA had incorrectly used revenues from contract services as local match for operating assistance grants. The PDRTA finance director at that time determined that PDRTA owed an amount of $895,083 to the FTA, although this number has not been verified by audit by the FTA. PDTRA has completely replaced their management, reformed their business practices, and begun quarterly payments on the debt of around $20,500. With an overall budget of $3.5 million, these quarterly payments have crippled their ability to expand services and to improve access to jobs and medical facilities in this underserved region. For this reason, the regional administrator of the FTA expressed in a January 31, 2001, e-mail to me that he supports PDTRA's efforts to obtain debt forgiveness. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) and I both support the regional PDTRA administrator's position in favor of debt forgiveness. I am just asking the chairman and ranking member for help in trying to resolve this matter in conference.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman would further yield, I thank both gentlemen and look forward to working on this issue as the conference committee begins its deliberations. I thank the gentleman very much for this opportunity.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. There is no other individual in the Congress I could point to who is a better testament to that principle than the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Cuellar), who I believe has four degrees. Am I correct?

Mr. SPRATT. We can balance the budget and also balance our priorities. In 1997 when we did the Balanced Budget Agreement of 1997, we had the biggest plus-up in education in 15 or 20 years. We will have a budget resolution, a Democratic budget resolution on the floor, and it will adequately fund education. That will be the last thing that we will cut. Certainly we will not have 38 educational programs eliminated in our budget. Now, in the time remaining let me recognize the gentlewoman from Georgia.

Mr. SPRATT. The gentlewoman has touched upon major impacts. One of our problems is the President's budget is lacking in detail as to all of the program, project and activity cuts that they would actually propose in the years after 2006. It is hard to tell. We have a chart here that shows what we know about the reduction in what is called nondefense domestic discretionary spending. And we can see here that we expect a reduction below purchasing power of about $180 billion over a 5-year period of time. That is education. That is veterans health care. That is highways. That is the government as we know it. Everything that people tend to identify the government with is included in these accounts. They have only come all together to $350 billion. So you can, of course, out of $350 billion achieve some cost reduction, but there is only so much that can be achieved there. And keep in mind, this is not the source of the problem. These accounts have not increased in the last 3 years, but this is where the administration is going to squeeze as much as they possibly can, but there will never be enough in these accounts to eradicate a deficit of $427 billion next year. Nevertheless, there will be deep pits, student loans, Pell grants, all of these things that matter to American families, kitchen-table issues.

Mr. SPRATT. This is before the private accounts. When the private accounts are layered on top of this, they add so much to the deficit it is hard to predict what will be left of the accounts and items and projects that were just referenced.

Mr. SPRATT. The gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Schwartz).

Mr. SPRATT. Exactly.

Mr. SPRATT. No question about it. When you add this on top of it, it becomes almost irreversible. I do not see how you can add this and ever expect to see the budget close to balance again.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order today.