James Davis: “If I could inquire further of the ranking Democrat on the Committee on the Budget, the biggest fear I have with what…”

“If I could inquire further of the ranking Democrat on the Committee on the Budget, the biggest fear I have with what happened today is that we have failed to adopt a credible blueprint. The budget resolution is supposed to be our blueprint. For those of us elected to Congress because we extolled the virtues of the balanced budget and paying down the debt because it was the right thing to do for our children and grandchildren and contributed to lower interest rates and helped preserve Medicare and Social Security, we measure every act we take here, whether it is a tax cut or spending proposal, by how it affects our ability to have a balanced budget and pay down the debt. Having adopted a budget resolution today which I think clearly fails the test of being an honest yardstick as we go forward, I would say to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt), I am terribly concerned as we start to debate spending proposals and tax cut proposals over here, we are not going to know where we are in relation to whether it is driving us further into deficit and how we are going to get into it. Does the gentleman have that fear?”