John Spratt: “a lot of people say it is necessary for fiscal reasons. We have to balance the budget. They say to us as Democrats, What…”

“a lot of people say it is necessary for fiscal reasons. We have to balance the budget. They say to us as Democrats, What would you do? And that is fair enough. Whenever anyone raises this issue, I think it is pertinent for us to point out this is what we did. Beginning in 1992, after President Clinton came to office, January 20, 1993, on February 17, 1993, the first piece of legislation he sent to the Congress was a 5-year budget to cut a deficit of $290 billion, he inherited that deficit, to cut it in half over the next 5 years. This is what happened. Every year thereafter, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, every year thereafter, the bottom line of the budget got better and better and better, to the point where in 1996 we had a deficit of about $120 billion. We convened again under his auspices, the President's auspices, and we passed the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. As a consequence of that, in 2 years the budget was not just in surplus, it was in a surplus of $236 billion. So all of this is history. This is where we took the budget, and this is where we handed it off, at that point, with a surplus just below $200 billion. We handed the budget over to President Bush, and every year thereafter, except this year, the bottom line is that the budget got worse. It got marginally better this year, but as this chart shows, it is still $320 billion.…”