Steny Hoyer: “do not take it from me, my Republican friends, listen to a respected Member of your own party, the chairman of the…”

“do not take it from me, my Republican friends, listen to a respected Member of your own party, the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young.) In February Chairman Young said, and I quote, ``No one should expect a significant deficit reduction as a result of austere nondefense discretionary spending limits. The numbers simply do not add up.'' So said the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, one of the most respected Members of this body. And why do not the numbers add up? Because nondefense discretionary spending represents only 17 percent of the entire Federal budget. The fact of the matter is we could wipe out all domestic discretionary spending, the funding for this House, the funding for the Senate, FBI, CIA, NIH, NASA, all of that. If you wipe it all out, we would still be running a deficit of more than $100 billion. Yet this week the Republican majority continues its markup of a budget resolution for fiscal year 2005 that utterly ignores mathematical and fiscal reality. By applying pay-go rules to spending only, the Republican budget resolution pretends that making existing tax cuts permanent or enacting new ones are a freebie with no budgetary impact. But, of course, that is false. And if one said it, it might even be a lie.”