John Spratt: “Mr. Speaker, we are now in the eighth of 13 appropriations bills, and, as we drive this process to conclusion, I think…”

“Mr. Speaker, we are now in the eighth of 13 appropriations bills, and, as we drive this process to conclusion, I think it would be smart to stop and look at the fuel gauge. That is what we have here, a gas gauge. We started out with a full tank, flush with surpluses, $95 billion this year. We did our resolution, 302(a), and gave $4 billion more than the baseline, so you take that out. We did a budget resolution with a placeholder number for defense. Now we are having to come back and put in a real number for defense, and, in outlay terms, it is $12 billion. Because we did not adequately provide for defense and because we did not provide at all for emergencies, even though the chairman of our committee wanted to institutionalize that, it appeared that a bigger tax cut was feasible. So the tax cut for this year takes out $75 billion, but for a gimmick I will mention in just a minute. So when you factor in those changes you get down to $3 billion. That is how close we are to being empty. Now, one thing saves us, and that is we did an artificial one-time transfer of funds from September 15 to October 1. The problem is, when we go home in August, that money may disappear when CBO does its update of the budget and economy. If that is true, we will really be running right on empty.”