John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Mrs. Kennelly].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Davis].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, in order to complete the colloquy, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Oregon [Ms. Furse]).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Minge].

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Olver].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, as we close this debate, I think it is well to remember that deficits have come down. The promises we made in 1993 have been kept. We adopted that budget in a year when the deficit the prior year had been $290 billion. The Bush administration projected the deficit that year would be $332 billion. It was not. It was $255 billion. The next year it was $203 billion. In 1995, it was $164 billion. In 1996, last year, it was $107.8, and this year in a few weeks we will find that it is less than $40 billion. So in the face of those facts, we are now looking at a hugely complex process to deal with a problem that has not presented itself for the last 5 years. We are imposing enormous complexity on the process. Let me give just one practical problem. This bill dictates that the President and OMB within 30 days of the close of the fiscal year, when the numbers are just coming in, must analyze every entitlement program and propose spending cuts that will not only rectify any past year overrun but also eliminate any excess in the year to come. Then it requires Congress to act on this hastily submitted proposal within less than 45 days, and that 45 days falls in a period when Congress is rarely in session. Indeed, every other year the House will be in a lame duck session. So the Congress can act within this tight time frame, this bill dispenses with the jurisdiction of the authorizing committees and the appropriations committees and vests extraordinary jurisdiction in the Committee on the Budget. When the Committee on the Budget bring its bill to the floor, it dispenses with the Committee on Rules and allows any Member under the 5-minute rule to present any amendment that is germane to tax or spending measures in the bill before us. Added to these extraordinary procedures is something else buried in the bill, one other example which deals with disaster relief. It sets up a reserve fund for disaster relief each year and pulls $5.5 billion out of discretionary spending. Now in the budget agreement, we have cut discretionary spending to the bone. This would take it down another $27 billion over the next 5 years. It is too much, it is not needed, it is well intentioned, but it should not be passed and is not required.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California [Mr. Filner].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Dakota [Mr. Pomeroy].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Sabo], distinguished former chairman of the Committee on the Budget. (Mr. SABO asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Speaker, this debate is not about ends, it is about means, because I emphatically share the same ends as the sponsor of this bill, which is to balance the budget and balance it for good by no later than 2002. I will be the first to admit that their bill springs from a valid concern. It is concern that the budget we may soon pass could fall short of its goal. That concerns us because it has happened before. It happened with Gramm-Rudman-Hollings in 1986, for which I voted, and it happened with the budget summit in 1990. In each case the spending cuts we passed did not cut spending in fact by as much as we figured. As a result, the deficit did not drop as much as we hoped. This bill is to ensure that that will not happen again. That is a valid concern, but for one very basic fact: We have a solution. It is in place and it is working. When we adopted the Deficit Reduction Act back in 1993, we carried forth the discretionary spending caps and the pay-as-you-go rules that were first adopted in the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990. In a word, they work. Since 1993, discretionary spending has been held at or below the statutory caps and new entitlement spending has been checked by the pay-as-you-go rule. In addition, we included in that Deficit Reduction Act back in 1993 an enforcement procedure which I recall well because it was my amendment. That procedure was dropped from the bill in the other body because of the Byrd rule, but the President imposed it by Executive order and the House has adopted it as a rule of procedure. Basically, this rule says that whenever entitlement spending exceeds a given year's baseline, the President with his budget has to report that variance to the Congress, and also recommend to the Congress how the overrun should be rectified. Congress has to take a record vote on the President's recommended action or our alternative before we can take the first step in the budget process. We can vote to do nothing, but we have to vote. We cannot duck the problem. That is a rule of the House. That is an Executive order of the Government. This procedure has never been invoked because it has never been needed. That is the irony of our situation today. This bill deals with a problem that has not presented itself for the last 5 years, because unlike Gramm-Rudman in 1986 and the budget summit in 1990, the deficit since 1993 has followed the downward, declining path that was plotted in the 1993 budget. In fact, it is running well below that path and headed to a deficit this year of less than $40 billion. So all of this concern about the need for enforcement because we may not attain our balanced budget flies in the face of the facts of the last 5 years. What is more, what this bill offers is a solution or solutions that are unwieldy and extremely cumbersome and extremely complex. Let me give a few of the problems that I have with the complex processes that this bill would impose. First of all, it does not address what in my opinion is the largest problem. The largest problem of risk, looking down the next 5 to 10 years, if we adopt the budget bill and the tax reconciliation bill that we have under consideration, is exploding outyear revenues. While this bill comes down hard on spending, it says, as to tax cuts, we will defer or postpone only those that have not been implemented for 1 year. There is a disparity of treatment here that means that we will come down a lot harder on spending than on tax cuts, and it leaves an imbalance in this bill. I will return to this subject again as the debate goes on and deal with other practical problems that I have with this bill. It is well- intentioned but we do not need it at this particular time. The SPEAKER pro tempore [Mr. Bonilla]. Does the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Barton] seek to control the time originally designated to the gentleman from Delaware [Mr. Castle]?

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Evans], the ranking member of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Rangel], ranking member of the Committee on Ways and Means. (Mr. RANGEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I offer a preferential motion.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Briefly, as a matter of introduction to what this motion to instruct pertains, it is a double-barrel motion. On the one hand we say the Senate provisions that would raise the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 67 were not part of our bipartisan budget agreement, were not essential to achieving the objectives we set for ourselves. Indeed we were able to do the $115 billion in Medicare cost reduction over a 5-year period of time with substantial consensus. This particular portion of the bill was reported by the Committee on Ways and Means with a near unanimity, with as close to consensus as we can get in this House. It was unnecessary to do it and, furthermore, it raises more questions than it answers: What will this coverage cost for people from 65 to 67; will it be available; how much lead time should we give people to get ready for this unexpected adjustment? So we would instruct the conferees to reject those Senate provisions. Second, the House and the Senate both added other provisions outside the budget agreement unnecessary to it that would deny the basic protections of one of the fundamental laws of the land, the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act, to individuals coming off TANF, coming out of welfare into workfare, or participating in the welfare to work program. We think that is unwarranted and unnecessary, and we would say to the conferees excise, take out, those provisions as well and reject them as part of this bipartisan agreement so it can truly be called a bipartisan agreement. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Let me simply say there is nothing unreal, nothing gimmicky about the age eligibility for Medicare. It is a vital issue for millions of Americans. And there is nothing gimmicky, either, about whether or not those coming off welfare into the work force will have the protection of the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act which has been the fundamental law of the land for the better part of this century. Mr. Speaker I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California [Mr. Fazio].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Ms. DeLauro].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 11 minutes to the gentleman from California [Mr. Stark] and ask unanimous consent that he be allowed to yield portions of that time to other Members.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to allocate 12 minutes, 6 minutes to the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Clay] and 6 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Levin], and ask that they be able to allocate and yield portions of their time to other Members.

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

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. We bring this motion to instruct conferees because we are in the minority. This is a way we have, one of the few devices we have to register our views on things that are important. There is no question about it. Medicare age eligibility is fundamentally important. We want to register the House position on that. Second, it is fundamentally important to us also to say that everybody, every American, because of his status as an American, is entitled to the fundamental protection of the laws of the land, which is what the Federal Labor Standards Act is. The simple way to accomplish that is to say that you are a worker within the definition of the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act, except to the extent that this protection does not apply. That is what we are seeking here, to give them the broad protection of the law that has been the law of the land for more than 50 years. I was pleased to hear that my colleagues, the other side of the aisle, will be supporting this motion to instruct, and I assure the Chair that when the time comes we will be asking for a record vote because this is a matter of importance, both of these issues, on which we want to register the views of the House as we go into this conference.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from New York [Mr. Rangel] for yielding me the time. Mr. Chairman, I have been in this House for 15 years, and it has taken all of those years for us to get to this point, a day when we can honestly say a balanced budget is within our reach. Over the last 5 years, we have lowered the deficit by 65 percent, brought it from a projected $332 billion in fiscal 1993 to $10 billion last year. This year, it is projected to be $65 billion, the lowest level in 20 years. We have succeeded, in part, because we finally restored the revenue base of the Federal Government, due in part, large part, to the tax bill that we Democrats passed in 1993. Corporate income tax revenues this year are up by $72 billion, more than 70 percent over 1992. And, indeed, the only reason we are standing here debating a tax bill, or debating a balanced budget bill yesterday, is that CBO came up with $225 billion in additional revenues. Now having come this far, our object is clear. We want to balance the budget, we want to finish the job, we want to get there by 2002. But we do not want to blow this opportunity, having come so close to the target. To move a 5-year budget in a divided government, we have got to have bipartisan consensus; and to have that consensus, we had to agree to tax cuts. Both sides, in truth, want them. But since the overriding objective is a balanced budget, we had to agree that the tax cuts stay within strict limits: $85 billion in net revenue losses over the first 5 years, $250 billion over the full 10. We fixed those limits, once again, because we have come so far and we did not want to lose the ground we gained, to put our objective back any further or risk the objective. But it is so far out that it would be beyond resolution. The first fault I have with their tax bill is it does not meet our objective. Specifically, it goes beyond limits laid down by our budget agreement. It breaks the letter of the agreement because the revenue losses in it add up to $4 billion too much over 10 years in the amount we specified. That is because the Committee on Rules yesterday removed the cutbacks in ethanol tax preferences without replacing them with anything. This is not my back-of-the-envelope estimate, it is a ruling rendered yesterday by our official scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO refused the attempt to score this bill as though the ethanol bill will expire in time. Four billion dollars is not a lot of money in a budget that runs into the trillions, but it is the spirit. It is sort of a manipulative spirit that gives me the most problem, and it runs throughout this particular tax bill. Look what happens to capital gains. Let me say something: I am for capital gains tax cuts, and I am one of the Members who are in this House that will benefit from tax cuts, I should be frank to say, that we are going to get. But let me say I do not want a double-barreled tax cut, low preferential rate coupled with indexation, if it has to come at the expense of millions of children who will not get the tax credit, if it has to come at the expense of families on the EITC. This is a bill that should be rejected because it did not keep the budget agreement, it is not fair, and it included the extraneous provisions in the first place. Vote against this bill. Vote for the Democratic substitute.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Rangel], the ranking member of the Committee on Ways and Means. (Mr. RANGEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)