John Spratt: “Mr. Speaker, the country is in revision, businesses are failing, people are hurting, losing their jobs by the thousands…”

“Mr. Speaker, the country is in revision, businesses are failing, people are hurting, losing their jobs by the thousands, and what do we have as a solution? Here in the middle of the night, hours before we adjourn, we are presented with a bill that half of us have never seen, and what we have seen of it we do not like. This is called an economic stimulus bill, but it could easily be called round two of tax reduction because it is full of tax cuts that will have a doubtful impact on the economy as a whole, but will have a clear impact on the budget. It will bring the surplus down by $272 billion. That is the latest estimate just given to us by the Joint Committee on Taxation. It did not have to be this way, Mr. Speaker. Two months ago, the principals on the Committee on the Budget, the Committee on Financial Services, the Committee on Ways and Means met to settle on policies to stimulate this economy. We settled instead for a statement of principles. We agreed that stimulus was needed but we thought that it should be temporary, short-lived to last through the recession but no longer. Why? We wanted to keep a cyclical downswing from becoming a structural deficit. We wanted the budget to recover as the economy recovered. The stimulus bill that was first reported by the Committee on Ways and Means forsook all of these principles.”