David Price: “this chart tells an important story about pay-as-you-go rules, about the importance of the real pay-as-you-go rule that…”

“this chart tells an important story about pay-as-you-go rules, about the importance of the real pay-as-you-go rule that was adopted as part of the bipartisan budget agreement in 1990 and the folly, as our budget goes back into deep deficits, of adopting a phony pay-as-you-go rule going forward. Members who were here in the 1980s remember the well-intentioned, but ineffectual, Gramm-Rudman-Hollings procedures, where there was rampant gaming of the budget process, all kinds of rosy scenarios that ultimately failed to mask rising deficits. Finally, in 1990, the first President Bush--who, unlike the present President Bush, understood the first rule of holes, which is if you are in one, stop digging--the first President Bush joined with the then- Democratic congressional leadership to conclude a courageous 1990 budget agreement which put the pay-as-you-go rule in effect. That proved to be very hard to game. It proved to be effective, along with the statutory caps on discretionary spending. And so, along with the 1993 Clinton budget plan passed with Democratic votes alone, the two budget plans, 1990 and 1993, with tough pay-as-you-go rules, produced the reduced deficits throughout the 1990s and actually took us into surpluses, now only a fond memory, surpluses that enabled us to pay off almost $500 billion of the national debt.”