Dale Bumpers: “this amendment deals with a change the Republican majority made to the budget rules last year which permitted the use of…”

“this amendment deals with a change the Republican majority made to the budget rules last year which permitted the use of revenue from asset sales to be scored against the budget. The last two CBO Directors, Mr. Reischauer and Mr. Penner, have criticized this change to the budget rules as being bad public and fiscal policy. From 1987 to 1995, we had a firm policy that you could not sell assets and use the revenues derived from those sales to count against the deficit. Nobody quarrels with the occasional selling of an asset. At times it makes perfectly good sense. But when you score the asset sales against the deficit, you have to ask yourself, next year, what do you do for an encore? When I was Governor, I received a revenue sharing check from the Federal Government for $21 million. I did not put the money in the State operating budget because I knew then, even as a freshman Governor of Arkansas, it was bad policy. I did not have to come to the Senate to find that out. It was bad policy because if I had put it in the operating budget, revenue sharing could have came to an end the next year, which it did after I came to the Senate. We received revenue sharing for several years and were glad to get it, but it was eventually discontinued.”