John Spratt: “this is called the Spending Control Act of 2004. The last time I looked, the Republicans control the House, Republicans…”

“this is called the Spending Control Act of 2004. The last time I looked, the Republicans control the House, Republicans control the Senate, and Republicans control the White House. So it begs the question, why can they not control spending? Why do we need this piece of legislation to control spending? As one looks at the bill and asks that question, another question arises: Why does this bill have nothing to do with revenues? Basically what this bill would do is affect discretionary spending for 2 years, not 5, and put in place a PAYGO rule, a pay as you go rule which applied to mandatory spending, entitlement spending increases but not to tax reductions. Do we disagree on the problem before us? Absolutely not. We have got a problem. The best evidence of the problem was signaled this week when we had a defense appropriations bill in which was buried a provision that will increase the debt ceiling over the next several years by a substantial sum of money. Let us look first at what has happened over the last several years on the watch of the Bush administration with respect to the debt that we have accumulated, the mountainous debt that we are building up now. The best indicator of that is where does the debt ceiling stand? There is a statutory ceiling on the amount of debt we can incur. When President Bush came to office, it was $5.95 trillion. Within a year, he had to increase that by $450 billion. Last year he had to increase it by, get this, $984 billion.”