John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, this substitute would extend the so-called PAYGO rule through September 30, 2009, to require that both the cost of all net direct, mandatory or entitlement spending increases and all tax cuts both, this is two-edged, double-edged PAYGO, enacted during a session be fully offset. In other words, this amendment would reinstate the rules that expired two years ago, the rule that is applicable to entitlement increases, the rule that is applicable to tax cuts known as the PAYGO rule. In addition, this amendment would set total discretionary spending limits for 2005 and 2006 equal to the levels in the Democratic budget resolution which we offered on the House floor a few months ago. There are no total funding caps for other years. Like H.R. 4663, it specifies that annual mass transit and highway funding for each year through 2009 will be set at the levels also included in the House-passed transportation reauthorization bill, known as TEA-LU. Mr. Chairman, in the 1980s and 1990s, as we have struggled with deficits and as the effects of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings fizzled out, various rules, some of which have been surfaced on the House floor tonight, were proposed and tried. Two, however, emerged as meritorious and were included in what became the Budget Enforcement Act of 1991. It was a spin-off from the Bush Budget Summit in the year 1990. These were the disciplinary tools to implement the Bush Budget Summit Agreement, which really has not gotten the credit it is due for laying the foundation for what we accomplished in the 1990s. Neither have these rules gotten the full credit of their due, but they got a nice accolade from a source who admitted that he was a cynic, if not a skeptic, at that time, Chairman Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve. He told our committee, the Committee on the Budget, just a few weeks ago when we asked him about the renewal of these rules, if he thought from his observation as an outside observer of the budget that these were worthwhile tools. He said, you know, I was a skeptic. I did not think they would work. I thought they were diversionary tactic, but I have been proven wrong. They were remarkably effective. And when we questioned him and asked him, he said, I would reinstate both rules, both the discretionary spending caps, and I would reinstate the pay-as-you-go rule, which provides that if you want to have a tax cut when you have got a deficit, then you have to make it deficit neutral; you have to have an offset. You either cut entitlement spending one place in the budget, or you increase revenues as an offset in another place. And by the same token, if you want to enhance an entitlement, you have got to identify a revenue stream to pay for it, or you have to have a commensurate cut and another entitlement program elsewhere in the budget so that in all respects, they are deficit neutral at the end of the session. These two rules, the PAYGO rule, the double-edged PAYGO rule and the statutory spending caps on discretionary spending, are the heart and soul of this particular substitute that I am offering here. This cuts to the very core. Rather than go through all of these convoluted rules, let us go back to two rules that work. Let us be pragmatic. Let us pick from the past experience that we have had those rules that contributed the most to our success in the 1990s, and after all, we moved the budget from a $290 deficit to a $236 surplus in six fiscal years, and these two rules helped us do it. They have both expired now. We could do a world of good for the budget process, for the budget, for the deficit, by reinstating these two rules, and really, it is all we need to do that and fixing realistically discretionary spending caps. Let me say, we proposed 5 years of spending caps. The chairman has reduced his effort to just 2 years. In an effort to get something that he could possibly pass over there, he went with two years. I really do not think we have effective discretionary spending limits unless we have longer terms than that. So we have a 5-year spending limitation on discretionary spending, and I should acknowledge that we have set this a bit above current service, a bit above the CBO baseline. Why did we do that? Because we fully accommodated the President's defense request, nondefense discretionary, and our cap is pretty close to baseline, pretty close to current services, just a bit over. Total discretionary is somewhat more in excess of the CBO baseline because we followed the President's defense members. We put in the $50 billion this year for the Iraq and Afghanistan and supplemental expenses. That is realistic, and there is one rule that we learned in the 1990s we should apply here, too. It applies to the 1997 budget which was uniquely successful when we set the statutory caps on discretionary spending at a very, very tight and unrealistic level. When we got to the ideas, we fudged on them substantially and that is primarily because partly because we set them too tight to start with. Here, we have set them realistically. We have got two rules that work. They have proved their worth. The chairman of the Federal Reserve says I do not see why you would not reinstate them and make the PAYGO rule in particular applicable to tax cuts as well as entitlement increases. I submit to the House, if we want to do something tonight, if we want some concrete, valuable outcome for all of our efforts, these two things would do a world of good, and we could leave here feeling that we had done something good for the budget and something successful tonight. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I have actually sponsored legislation like this in the past. I have voted for it and argued for it on the House floor. When we had the vote on the line item veto, I came over here and tried to offer an alternate amendment to it and argued to the House, the other side principally, that if they would adopt this, and the Supreme Court did what I predicted they would do and held it unconstitutional, then this would be in place as the alternative. We would have it by now if that had been attempted, the bill passed. And that was not put in it. There was a strong suspicion on my colleagues' side that if we put that in, the Senate would take out the line item veto and pass the rescission provisions. In truth, there are certain Senators who are probably laying in wait for this rescission provision already. We did add some features to it that I would recommend for your consideration. One is when it came through the Committee on Government Reform we added a provision that would not only allow spending to be treated this way, but also targeted tax cuts. Because these targeted tax cuts are often tax expenditures and they were defined as tax cuts which had a beneficiary class, a few of them. I thought it was a good idea and a good improvement on the bill. We bring these tax bills over here to the floor, they are not amendable. We vote on them up or down. At least on the appropriations bill, if one wants to, they have an opportunity to go after individual items. Instead, the tax bills have all kinds of provisions. We also had some provisions in it about how you could break out for separate treatment all or certain parts of the package if one could get a petition with so many Members. This is an idea that has been around and around the track, and it is actually an idea that has been embellished and improved as it went around the track. I am not quite sure how many of those ideas there are in this particular version of it, but I recommend those for my colleagues' consideration. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition, but I may not oppose the bill. I simply claim the time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, to close I yield the remaining time to the gentleman from North Dakota (Mr. Pomeroy).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, the core idea is basically an appealing idea and lots of Members around here have had the experience where they have found something that they thought could be a legitimate saving, they have offered the amendment and prevailed, only to see the money is spent somewhere else. I disagree with the gentleman when he said a little while ago, and I think it was in a moment of zealousness, that if the savings were taken out of, say, the Cleveland Rock and Roll Museum, it would have to be spent somewhere else. It does not have to be spent somewhere else; it can be saved, and this mechanism was a way on to sort of lock box money, so that it could not be used again. But there are so many moving pieces. We have an authorization bill, an appropriation bill; a House and a Senate conference committee, and any time anybody makes any kind of change or different entry, there has to be an adjustment. This is a $2.2 trillion budget, and I think the bookkeepers, their minds would be boggled trying to keep account of this, as mine was when I was trying to read the gentleman's bill. So I do not discredit the idea, it is just the mechanism for enforcing it and truly making it work is so complicated, I think it collapses upon itself. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, if one could keep the trail of it, and that is the problem.

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, keep in mind that other body called the Senate moves in a separate orbit from this body, and somebody over there is going to have a different idea, and there is going to be an entry under a different program. When we go to conference, the conferees are going to have a different idea, and the bookkeepers around here are going to be switching credits from account to account, taking back credits as the money that was saved is now spent. The project that was going to be killed or cut is now restored, and it becomes a nightmare. That is why this idea has had all of the longevity of a lead balloon. It has never gotten off the ground.

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, like many of the amendments that were offered to this base bill, I have only had the chance to peruse quickly this one. This is an idea that has been around the track before. In the late 1980s, early 1990s, we were searching for ways to get our hands around the problem. This is one of the things that was proposed by several different people in several different variations. Anyone who tried to implement this and have legislative counsel draw it in a form that would be truly enforceable ran into multiple complications. It is maddeningly complicated, as the gentleman can tell from reading the bill. The bill takes it a step further than any version of this idea I have ever read before, and it taxed all my concentration here on the House Floor to make it from the first page to the last page, and I am in a maze. I do not really know how it works.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. SPRATT. Well, I am convinced it will prolong the process, complicate the process, and lead to less results rather than better results. It is something we can long argue about.

Mr. SPRATT. Sure. We would waive them again, put it in a bill, send it to the White House, the President would sign it.

Mr. SPRATT. But that is done already under existing law.

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I honestly fail to see what we will accomplish, except protracting the process; what we will accomplish positively by making this concurrent resolution a joint resolution that has the effect of law. I really do not know what will be different from what we have right now, except we would have to come to some agreement with the White House much, much sooner in the year than we otherwise have to. What is going to be different? The statutory? What would be different about it?

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from North Dakota (Mr. Pomeroy).

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I have seen it all. When it comes to the deficit, I have seen this House duck, and I have seen this House dodge; but this rule takes the cake. They pull out at a must-pass bill, Defense appropriations, and deep within the rule they bury some vague language on our national debt. Later, when the doors are shut, the conference is started, the cigars are lit, this language will be transformed into a $690 billion increase in the ceiling of our national debt. No audit trail, no fingerprints, no responsibility. Our Republican friends cut taxes, they raise spending, they run up the debt; and if that were not bad enough, now they want to escape responsibility for the actions they have taken. Let me say to our children and grandchildren, when they ask who left us with this mountainous debt, on President Clinton's watch in the years 1998, 1999 and 2000, we ran a surplus in 1998 of $236 billion, a surplus in each of those years and we paid off debt. We paid off $362 billion of debt on his watch. In 2001, when President Bush came to office, he inherited a budget in surplus; and he predicted that under his policies there would be no need for a debt ceiling increase, that was the President's prediction, until 2008. That was a prediction of what the debt would be in 2008. He also predicted in this book called a ``Blueprint For New Beginnings,'' page 201, Table S-16, that in the year 2011 there would be no statutory debt of the United States left. It would all be paid off. Well, here we are in 2004, and the Bush administration has had to raise the debt ceiling two times already. One to go. Three increases in 4 years that total $2.124. Three increases in 4 years that total $2.124 trillion. And if you take the Congressional Budget Office's projection of the President's budget, done last March, you will see this is another in a series of debt ceiling increases; not by any means the last. In fact, CBO projects that the President's budgets will require the Federal Government to incur, get this, $5.571 trillion of additional debt between now and 2014. As a result, this will bring our total debt, these numbers are too hard to even imagine, to $13.645 trillion. That is the course this administration has put us on. This is some legacy to leave our children. And it is a cruel irony that it comes to us wrapped in the flag, buried inside a defense bill, to which it has no relation, provided we pass this rule and put it there. And we should not pass this rule. This rule is a travesty. We should not pass it. There is no difference between this rule and the off-balance sheet financing that Enron did to hide its liabilities. If we want to stand up for the House, stand up for the process, stand up for self-respect in this institution, we should start by voting down this rule. Be on notice, however, if you vote for this rule, this rule, make no mistake about it, will raise the debt ceiling of the United States to $8.074 trillion. Remove the smoke, remove the mirrors, and that is what this rule will do. It will increase the statutory debt ceiling by $690 billion. Vote against the rule.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I rise in favor of H. Con. Res. 417, the Tuskegee Airmen Recognition Resolution. Books and movies both document the historic achievements of the Tuskegee Airmen. Today, I urge my colleagues to pass this resolution confirming the renown of these World War II heroes. Despite racial segregation and discrimination, the Tuskegee Airmen lived up to the words of General MacArthur, years before he spoke them: ``Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory . . . the very obsession of your public service must be duty, honor, country.'' The Tuskegee Airmen were dedicated young men who became America's first African-American airmen, defying the many people who thought they lacked the intelligence, skill, courage, and patriotism to fly. Training for the first aviation class began in July 1941 and ended 9 months later in May 1942 with the successful graduation of five of the 13 original cadets. From 1942 until 1946, the Tuskegee Experiment produced nearly 1,000 pilots, with 450 serving overseas in the 99th Fighter Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group. The 332nd flew 1,578 missions which involved nearly 16,000 sorties and accumulated 111 kills (plus one destroyer sunk using a plane's machine gun). The feats of the Tuskegee Airmen weren't limited to its aviators. For every mission flown, there were scores of men and women who performed ground-support duty as aircraft and engine mechanics, armament specialists, radio repairmen, parachute riggers, control tower operators, military policemen, and administrative clerks. Their achievements represented a true team effort. The unit was highly decorated, earning 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 744 Air Medals, 8 Purple Hearts and 14 Bronze Stars. But their most important achievement was never losing a single bomber to enemy aircraft--the only escort unit to earn that record. The impact of the Tuskegee Airmen was felt well beyond the skies of Europe and North Africa. Their actions spearheaded and influenced social changes back home, and resulted in the integration of our Armed Forces. In 1948, President Harry Truman enacted Executive Order Number 9981 which directed equality of treatment and opportunity in all of the United States Armed Services. This order not only led to the end of racial segregation in the military; it was also a long step towards racial integration in the United States. I proudly salute the Tuskegee Airmen and ask my colleagues to support this resolution.