John Tierney: “Mr. Speaker, the original IDEA bill authorized this Congress to give up the 40 percent of the additional cost of…”

“Mr. Speaker, the original IDEA bill authorized this Congress to give up the 40 percent of the additional cost of educating a child with special needs so that communities would have some help with that burden even though it was their constitutional obligation to educate every child to 100 percent of that. For years Congress did not fulfill that commitment. They were at 9, 10, 11, or 12 percent. What were those years? Those years were the Reagan-Bush years. We were running deficits of incredible amounts, building up on our debt in this Nation; $295 billion of deficit in 1992 accumulated since 1980 to a point where we had a debt of almost $5 trillion. Congress could not do more. They were busy trying to pay off those bills. From 1993 to 2000 with a Democrat in the White House, Congress started to pay down those deficits, started to pay those bills; and around 1997 where the yellow number is upticking on that chart that the gentleman from Ohio was showing, that was when we finally got a grip on the deficit, and we finally were able to start putting some money towards the obligations of IDEA.”