John Spratt: “just 18 short months ago, OMB and Treasury both told us that there would be no need to raise the debt ceiling for at…”

“just 18 short months ago, OMB and Treasury both told us that there would be no need to raise the debt ceiling for at least 7 years, not until 2008. OMB told us that they foresaw surpluses coming that would total $5.6 trillion over the next 10 years. A year later, when OMB sent up its budget, the budget that we are now working upon, it contained a simple pie chart. Look at page S-415. According to OMB's own pie chart, 40 percent of the surplus was a massive miscalculation. It did not take sufficient account of the economy; it technically was deficient. Seventeen percent of the surplus was wiped out by spending increases, much of it for defense, and 43 percent, 43 percent of the projected $5.6 billion surplus, according to OMB's calculation, had been wiped out by the tax cuts, or would be wiped out by the tax cuts enacted last June. Mr. Speaker, this is the chart, this is the line on this chart right here, this blue line at the bottom, that we would have followed had we followed the budget resolution that we proposed, had we not taken the proposal that the Republicans made and that the President made. This, instead, is the chart that, the line that we are on, the red chart, that is additional debt. That is the bottom line. This is a bar chart that shows us where we might have been with the publicly-held debt. We could have retired all of the publicly-held debt if we had husbanded our resources and earnestly tried to do it. We had that opportunity.…”