Don Nickles: “I have heard two or three of our speakers say this budget shortchanges veterans and education. I will throw out a few…”

“I have heard two or three of our speakers say this budget shortchanges veterans and education. I will throw out a few facts about what this resolution does. The total amount of money we anticipate spending in education, mandatory and discretionary, is $68 billion. That is a 9-percent increase over last year, mandatory and discretionary combined. People are acting as if there were significant cuts. I also refer back to what we were spending in the year 2000. Today, it is at $97 billion. So it has almost doubled since the year 2000, and yet we hear a lot of people saying we are cutting education like crazy. Education has grown, and grown dramatically in the last few years. On the discretionary side, we are anticipating a little over $3 billion increase between 2004 and 2005. I have also heard some comments on veterans. I will restate the facts. What we are assuming in our resolution is an increase of 14.3 percent for veterans, mandatory and discretionary, between 2004 and 2005.”