Judd Gregg: “I rise to speak to the pay-go amendment. Pay-go is a term that has sort of taken on a motherhoodlike atmosphere around…”

“I rise to speak to the pay-go amendment. Pay-go is a term that has sort of taken on a motherhoodlike atmosphere around here. There are some terms which occur in the legislative process or in the political arena that become perceptionwise different than what they are in substance. The perception becomes the issue versus the substance. Pay-go has taken on that sort of status because it sounds like something that makes sense. But to be honest, what pay-go is is a tax increase. It is that simple. The way this amendment is structured, it guarantees a tax increase. Rather than saying they are for tax increases, they are saying they are for pay-go. In fact, the last chart the Senator referred to which showed very large numbers in this bill which he didn't call taxes were just that--taxes. If you want to adjust those numbers, you are going to have to raise taxes by the $214 billion he cited in that chart. So pay-go is a stalking horse for a tax increase. It is really that simple. It is also technically not an appropriate approach, and this is why. CBO scores things around here, and CBO basically drives the decisions of the budget process because what the Congressional Budget Office says is what the baseline is; in other words, how much a program will cost in the outyears, how much tax revenue will occur in the outyears as a result of a tax proposal. But CBO uses different standards for different groups of spending and taxes.…”