John Spratt: “I rise today as the ranking Democrat on the Committee on the Budget to say, this is no way to make a budget. I regret…”

“I rise today as the ranking Democrat on the Committee on the Budget to say, this is no way to make a budget. I regret that we have been brought by the majority to this juncture, but I have to say it has been clear since last April that this is where we were headed. The resolution that we passed, the House budget resolution, was always unrealistic. We tried to make that point in earnest in the well of the House when we took it up last March. We did not succeed. We reiterated the same arguments when the tax bill came before us. And we said, to accomplish this tax bill, $792 billion, we will have to make cuts in discretionary spending that exceeds anything Congress has ever done before. It is not realistic. These cuts in the 10th year could reach as much as 30 percent across the board in nondefense discretionary spending, as much as 50 percent in discretionary spending nondefense in the items that could actually be cut. We have never done anything like that before.”