John Spratt: “I can return all the compliments that Mr. Ryan paid to me. He's a pleasure to work with, and I have great respect for…”

“I can return all the compliments that Mr. Ryan paid to me. He's a pleasure to work with, and I have great respect for him. But there's one thing he didn't mention at all in his presentation all afternoon and that is his budget substitute. And I think one of the reasons he didn't do it is that it won't bear scrutiny. If you look at the Ryan substitute, the Republican minority substitute, you'll find, if you look very closely and know where to look, something called function 920. Now, function 920 is the catch-all. When you can't assign some expenditure or revenue raiser somewhere else, you put it in function 920. It means really we haven't yet completed the job. When you look at 920 in this case, the minority has assigned $817 billion in undefined savings or at least $405 billion in discretionary spending cuts which are undistributed. They haven't been assigned to the Veterans Administration or to the Defense Department or to the Transportation Department. They are undistributed cuts, $405 billion. I've never seen in all my years in the Budget Committee, anything that has a function 920, this catch-all in cuts of $405 billion. But in addition to that, it calls for $412 billion in mandatory savings. Now, we don't know for sure where mandatory savings are coming from, which programs are in jeopardy.…”