Chris Van Hollen: “Again, just for people who are trying to get educated about the budget process who may be watching, and among our…”

“Again, just for people who are trying to get educated about the budget process who may be watching, and among our colleagues, we put together a 10-year projection of the budget in a lot of different categories. The appropriators on a year-to-year basis can decide how much or how little to give any program, and every Member of this body gets a chance to vote up or down on that. So that's not what this is about. This is not about saving money. I hope we will all save money and get the deficit down. This is about what information is presented in terms of giving an accurate picture of what the cost is of providing goods and services. So I'm going to give the same example very clearly. Again, it's a very clear example. In fiscal year 2013, we're going to have $61 billion in the budget for discretionary spending for veterans' programs. Now under the current procedure, the Congressional Budget Office tries to figure out 10 years from now, knowing what we do about inflation expectations--and everybody calculates those into their financial decisions--what would it take to provide the same services for our veterans? Now what they're proposing is to put in $61 billion in year 10. But that's misleading because you're not going to be able to provide the services to our veterans at the same level for that amount. In fact, that will represent a 23 percent cut.…”