Bill Nelson: “I compliment our chairman of the Budget Committee for the leadership he has given us and how steadfast he has been to be…”

“I compliment our chairman of the Budget Committee for the leadership he has given us and how steadfast he has been to be conservative in his outlook and his projections on what we should do with the projected budgetary surplus. It was the Senator from North Dakota, our chairman, who kept saying earlier this year: Watch out. These budget projections are too rosy. The budget, as projected over the next 10 years, is going to be considerably less. Isn't it astounding that before September 11 the debate was over the use of the surplus and whether to pay down or pay off the national debt over a 10-year period. Now we find ourselves in a shrunken surplus with a wartime condition. I also extend my compliments to the ranking member, our dear friend, the Senator from New Mexico. The point I want to make is how quickly the landscape shifts--that before September 11, if the Senate had taken the advice of the chairman of the Budget Committee, what we would have done would have been very conservative in our approach as to how we were going to use the projected surplus. We wouldn't have frittered a lot of it away. As the Senator from North Dakota has pointed out, that surplus was very likely to, if not disappear, be reduced. With the events of September 11, which put us on a wartime footing with new expenditures we had not planned on, combined with the diminished surplus--we were planning back in the summer to use the surplus to pay off the national debt. That is not even in the cards.”