John Spratt: “In 1990, after years of trying to get our hands around the deficit, we finally had a budget summit with President Bush…”

“In 1990, after years of trying to get our hands around the deficit, we finally had a budget summit with President Bush and we devised not only a 5-year plan for reducing the deficit, but we also passed something called a Budget Enforcement Act and it contained several new rules, budget process controls which have had a significant impact on our ability to get rid of the deficit. In particular, we adopted a set of discretionary spending ceilings, a ceiling on discretionary spending, we adopted it in 1991, we renewed it in 1993, and we extended it in 1997, and that held discretionary spending to substantially lower rates of increase than the 1980s. We also adopted something called the pay-as-you-go rule, which said with respect to entitlement spending, if you want to liberalize the entitlement benefit or add a new one, you have to pay for it or you have to go through the catalog of all of the other entitlements and reduce the entitlement by enough to pay for the new one you are creating or an increase in the benefit that you are providing for. In addition, with respect to tax cuts, we said if you want a tax cut, it will have to be budget neutral.”