John Spratt: “we are here because the Secretary of the Treasury has warned us that he has run out of tricks. Five times he has written…”

“we are here because the Secretary of the Treasury has warned us that he has run out of tricks. Five times he has written the leadership of the Congress and told us that he was approaching the legal limit which Congress has imposed by law on how much debt the United States can incur. We call it the debt ceiling. Now he has told us that he is out of tricks and he is having to do things he does not regard as prudent unless we increase the debt ceiling. So it is right that we are here to do just that. But it is also right that we take an hour or two to ponder what brings us to this juncture, to raise the debt ceiling again by $800 billion, when we have already raised it twice in the last 3 years. Let us go back to January 1, 2001. The Bush administration takes office, and the fruits of our labor in the last two administrations of the Clinton years are laid before him. They look out and see surpluses of $5.6 trillion and decide that this warrants huge tax cuts. We warned them against buying into a blue-sky projection which might not be obtained, and surely enough, that happened. They told us, nevertheless, that even if we adopted their tax cuts, they would not have to be back to request an increase in the debt ceiling due to the fantastic surpluses they foresaw, until the year 2008. In truth, they were back in 2002 asking for $450 billion.”