John Spratt: “my friend, whom I greatly respect, the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, has just said that I left out a…”

“my friend, whom I greatly respect, the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, has just said that I left out a line. There is a line on Dr. Crippen's chart. It comes at the bottom of the page after CBO has scored this budget and says it is $17 billion into Social Security. That line says ``if you use Congressional scorekeeping.'' Well, CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, is our budget office. We have hired them to do it. Their record for scorekeeping is pretty impeccable. Over the last 10 years they have only been 0.4 percent wrong, plus or minus $2 billion dollars, for the past 15 years in scoring discretionary spending. What they are saying is, ``Do not use their scorekeeping; use our arbitrary scorekeeping. We will borrow this from OMB, and this from CBO, whatever best serves our purposes.'' The best, consistent and proper way to score the budget before us is to use CBO. Their track record is good. We have always used them in the past. If you use CBO, you are $17 billion into Social Security.”