John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hinojosa). (Mr. HINOJOSA asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Berkley).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Ford).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 6 minutes. Mr. Chairman, here is the dilemma we are faced with. If this budget passes and becomes real, which I doubt, it will be devastating to our children and their education, to our seniors and their security, and to some of the most worthy citizens we know, sick and disabled veterans. On the other hand, if it passes and does not become real, if those cuts are not actually made, then it will devastate the bottom line of our budget. Those of us who have been here a long time can tell you how intractable deep deficits can become. For 15 years we struggled to get ourselves in surplus, and in 2 years we have blown it. That is why we are out here intensely tonight fighting. Important principles are at stake. I have to say to my colleague and wonderful friend, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays), when I first saw this budget on the day of markup, I said, ``It ain't on the level. I can't take it at face value.'' The better I understand it, the less credence I give it. I honestly think it is just a clever device for passing another round of tax cuts as large as the last, $1.35 trillion, despite the fact that this time there is no surplus. It goes straight to the bottom line and increases the deficit. Here the numbers are displayed on this chart. If you want a choice between us and them, here it is, Mr. Chairman. Here it is, colleagues. Our budget every year has a lower and lower deficit until the year 2010 when it is no longer in deficit, it is in surplus. We put the budget back in surplus. That is our driving purpose. The first parameter we set for ourselves was we are going to get to balance in a reasonable period of time, and that date turned out to be 2010. If you compare the Republican chart, you will see they do not get to balance until the year 2012, 2 years later, and that depends, Mr. Chairman, on some stupendous cost-cutting around here. I have been here 20 years. I just do not think that they are going to be able to accomplish it. I heard these colloquies over here on the House floor. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Tom Davis), one of the ablest Members of this House, chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, he had a colloquy that, in effect, said, you don't expect me really to get $40 billion out of government retirement pensions, do you? The answer was basically, no, you've got other mandatory programs. You can reform procurement, for example, and save $40 billion. Give me a break. That is not going to happen. This is a serious, serious effort and exercise, because if we are wrong here, we will live with the consequences for a long, long time. We have before us a real choice to this budget which we have brought to the House floor from the House Budget Committee. We have got a choice that is a far better choice, the Democratic substitute. It is a fiscally sound choice because our budget balances in 2010; theirs balances in 2012. Our budget racks up less debt during that 10-year time frame, $913 billion less debt, and, listen to this, $1.647 trillion less debt than the President's budget. Our budget is fair and sensible. The Democratic budget weighs priorities. The Republican budget wreaks havoc. Indeed, much of our budget is devoted to restoring the damage the Republican budget does. The Republican budget cuts education and training by $60 billion. It flat-funds Leave No Child Behind, even though the authorizing act calls for $9 billion next year. We restore that cut and add to the education function. The Republican resolution wipes out Justice Department programs like community policing. We can all attest to its effectiveness. It drops and cuts out Byrne grants. It drops level funding for these Justice Department programs by $35 billion. Do you know who you are cutting when you are doing that? The famous first responders. These people that we talk about, but do so little for, they are the victims. We do not stand for that in our budget. We restore those programs because we think this is the first line of homeland defense, and we put $24 billion more in our budget than they do for homeland security. We have heard it charged on the floor today that our budget increases spending. Let me just lay that argument to rest once and for all with a chart that is taken straight from the numbers in our budget. As you can see, this year we are spending about 20.4 percent total spending of GDP. Following the path laid down by our budget, that will decline to 19.1 percent of GDP in 2013. In the years 2004 through 2013, the 10- year time frame of this budget, our spending will grow by 4.6 percent over that 10-year period of time. That will be the annual rate of growth. That is less than the GDP nominal growth rate. Let me finally say that our bill also has in it something that is critically important. We have got a weak, wobbly economy. We have got in our bill the stimulus package, which we think is an excellent package. It was offered by us on January 6 of this year. We say, let us enact it. Let us help those who are unemployed, let us give this economy a kick, let us give those who are likely to spend it a rebate straight to their pockets. It will be spent on the economy. Let us give small businesses extra expensing. Let us help large businesses by saying, if you will do something in 2003, we will give you a 50 percent depreciation. It is dramatic, it is bold, and when you compare it by any of the established economic models, we get two to three times the results in GDP growth and job creation that the Republicans get for spending six times as much money in their jobs and growth package. We have a real choice, a stark choice today, and far better the choice is our Democratic substitute. Vote for the Spratt substitute. Vote for the Democratic substitute. It is the best choice by far.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the distinguished Democratic leader.

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

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

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I have no further requests for time, and I yield myself the remaining time. I would just say in conclusion that if the Members of this House want to vote for a budget that gets us back in balance without balancing the budget on the backs of our children, our elderly, or our most worthy citizens, and our sick and disabled veterans; if they want to get back into balance by the year 2010, we present a budget, our own alternative, which takes us there steadily every year with a lower and lower deficit and accumulates $931 billion less in new public debt than the Republican budget. So I would say that those who are conservative, those who want to vote for a fiscally responsible and conservative fiscal policy will have that opportunity, and I encourage my colleagues to vote for the House democratic alternative as something that achieves my colleagues' objectives. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, he is incorrect on all accounts, including the assignment to me to North Carolina. I am from South Carolina.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I offer amendment No. 4 in the nature of a substitute, as modified.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would like to say that in 1993 we passed a budget. We took the deficit then in the budget, $290 billion, down every year for the next 7 years until it reached a surplus in the year 2000 of $236 billion, an exact polar opposite of what is happening right now. Nobody in this House stands in greater admiration of the gentleman from California's (Mr. Cunningham) record in the military than I do and my personal like for the man, but I think we have to acknowledge that these fellow veterans, four different groups, have all come out in unmitigated condemnation of this budget because of what it does to veterans' benefits, and nobody shows greater indignation than the Paralyzed Veterans of America who wrote the Speaker saying, we do not consider payments to war-disabled veterans, pensions for the poorest disabled veterans and GI benefits for soldiers returning from Afghanistan to be waste, fraud and abuse. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel).

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

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez), the distinguished chair of our caucus.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, just to walk down memory lane, during the Clinton years, we created 21 million jobs. So far, during the Bush years, we have seen 2.5 million private sector jobs disappear. In December 2000 before President Clinton left office and President Bush took office, there were 5.17 million people unemployed. This year in January 2003, it is 8.4 million unemployed. We can go down the list. Real GDP during the Clinton years increased at a rate of 6.3 percent from 1993 through 2000. So far it has increased at a rate of 1.5 percent, and the budget every year from 1993 onward, the bottom line of the budget, the so-called deficit got better and better and better under that budget that we adopted in 1993. It went from a record deficit of $290 billion in 1992 to $255 billion the next year, $203 billion the next year, $164 billion in 1995, $107 billion in 1996, $22 billion in 1997, and balanced for the first time in 30 years in 1998. That was a record of that period of time and the result of that tough budget vote that we took in 1993. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley).

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise to claim my time and make a closing statement. Mr. Chairman, this is not just another partisan vote. This is a pivotal vote with long-lasting consequences, and I urge everybody to ponder those consequences and beg everyone's indulgence at this hour to make just a few comments. When I came to this House 20 years ago, the Government was deep in debt. Over the 1980s the national debt tripled. It took us almost 20 years to rid the Government's budget of deficits. It took Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, which passed in 1985, the Budget Summit Agreement in 1990, the Clinton Budget of 1993, and the Balanced Budget Agreement of 1997. These efforts finally bore fruit. After we passed the Clinton act in 1993, each year thereafter for 7 straight years, the bottom line of the budget got better to the point where in 1993 for the first time in 30 years the budget was in balance. Mr. Bush took office with an advantage few Presidents in recent times have enjoyed. He had a surplus, a big-time surplus. The Office of Management and Budget, OMB, estimated from 2002 through 2011, the surplus would be $5.6 trillion. Based on that projection and over the admonitions of many of us, Mr. Bush requested and Congress passed $1.35 trillion in tax cuts. Now, just 2 years later, that $5.6 trillion surplus is gone. That is what CBO and OMB told us when we opened the budget season in January of this year. OMB told us that it had overstated the surplus. Adjusting it for what we now know about the economy, they said the adjusted surplus is not $5.6 trillion from 2002 through 2011, it is more like $2.4 trillion, and, more than that, about $2.5 trillion has already been committed in new tax cuts and newly legislated spending, much of it for national defense. This means that any new tax cuts we pass will go straight to the bottom line. They will add dollar for dollar to the deficit. In 2001, you could rationalize an enormous tax cut on the grounds that we had an enormous surplus, but you cannot do that anymore. Nevertheless, the President sent us a budget this year requesting another $1.6 trillion in tax cuts, another round of tax reduction, as large as the last, with only a few modest offsets in it. All of it goes to the bottom line. When CBO did its analysis of the President's budget, it saw nothing but deficits, on-budget deficits, totaling over $5 trillion between now and 2013. The chairman of the Committee on the Budget and his colleagues embraced the President's tax cuts. They totaled some $1.6 trillion, but they pared them down a bit, and then they went looking for offsets. They weren't able to identify specific spending offsets, so they settled on just across-the-board percentage cuts to entitlement spending under the jurisdiction of 14 different committees. Initially they asked for $470 billion in entitlement spending. They settled later for less because they needed the votes to get it passed on their side of the aisle. Today we have some $262 billion in entitlement cuts entailed by this budget resolution. These will come out of programs within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means, that is Medicare; and the Committee on Energy and Commerce, that is Medicaid, $107 billion. So if you vote for this resolution, you should know that you are still voting very possibly to cut Medicare by $62 billion, Medicaid by $107 billion, government pensions and railroad retirement by over $40 billion, veterans' disability benefits by $15 billion, school lunches and student loans by nearly $10 billion, and all of this is occasioned by the fact that you want to go forward with this tax cut of $1.3 trillion to $1.4 trillion. Because without it, the budget will be in balance between 2008 and 2010, if you just let the spending increase each year at the level of current service. You should also know that this resolution calls for limits on domestic discretionary spending that will make it lower than inflation or current services by $244 billion over the next 10 years. It has been claimed on this House floor that these were just cuts of 1 percent, but when you provide for a big increase in international affairs, $51 billion is what the President sought over 10 years, and another big increase in homeland security, the rest of the accounts in discretionary spending have to be squeezed, and by our calculations they are squeezed easily by 6 percent. That may not seem crippling, but look what is happening to education in this budget. Education is brought in $50 billion below inflation. At this level we will never fully fund Leave No Child Behind; we will never get close to sharing our fair share of IDEA. That is true for other programs throughout the discretionary accounts. Veterans' health care, for example, it is cut by $13 billion to $15 billion, although today right now it has more veterans than it can say grace over to care for. Mr. Chairman, I deeply doubt that these cuts will ever be achieved. Let us not forget what happened last year. We only passed 2 of 13 appropriations bills in 2002, did not finish the last 11 until a few weeks ago, and those were hard to pass because they had spending restraints on them that are a lot less challenging than what this bill will call for. So what happens if the cuts are not achieved? The deficit goes higher, we stack up a mountain of debt. But, unlike the 1980s, we are right now on the eve of the retirement of the baby-boomers, and that will make the task of turning these deficits around more intractable and difficult than ever, believe me. So, before you vote for this resolution, you should ask yourself if you want to take this gamble. You should know that even if all the mandatory and discretionary spending cuts are achieved, which is very, very unlikely, this budget will not be in balance until 2012, a long time from now, and between now and then this budget will accumulate more than $1 trillion of additional debt. And in voting for this resolution, keep in mind, you are voting to raise the ceiling on the national debt. So, what happens if we do not vote for this resolution? What happens if we vote it down tonight? Well, the default option is not really that bad. If you forego the tax cuts and you can also forego the spending cuts, you can put the budget back in balance by 2008. If you believe in balanced budget, if you think deficits are a menace, that is not a bad outcome. I suggest to you it is a lot better outcome than the budget resolution before us. Vote no on the budget resolution. Let us go back to the drawing board. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 15 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Thompson), and I ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to yield blocks of time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, let me say to my friend, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Brown), that this resolution on the floor calls for $15 billion in cost reduction of the veterans health care system. It also calls for a $15 billion decrease in mandatory programs, which means veterans' disability compensation. We can argue over what is an increase or decrease, but every veterans organization in this town thinks that they are being hit and hit hard by this budget resolution. There is no doubt about it; it is still about a $28 billion or $29 billion hit after the minor modification the gentleman made to make this resolution presentable. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, we, too, fully fund homeland security. By the best of our reckoning, we are providing at least $24 billion over and above the increase that the President is providing. It is allocated among lots of different functions: community and regional development, the Justice Department. We have identified and also specified in a sense of the Congress that we have $24 billion there. In addition, we have put into our budget resolution the stimulus proposal that we made on January 6 of this year. If it were adopted, there would be $10 billion for the States to undertake homeland security projects in places like seaports, which were woefully underprovided for. In addition, Mr. Chairman, I would point out to everyone that in doing our budget, we have left a contingency reserve of $54 billion. It could be used for lots of things; but it could be used, among other things, for homeland defense and for national defense generally, if and when a supplemental comes. I want to make it clear there is very, very little difference between us when it comes to national security, not at a time like this. We are fully providing for homeland security, and then some, in particular. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Davis).

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