John Spratt: “as both sides explained at the outset of this debate, what we have before us tonight in the base bill, House Concurrent…”

“as both sides explained at the outset of this debate, what we have before us tonight in the base bill, House Concurrent Resolution 84, is a compromise, hard fought, hard wrought, carefully balanced compromise. I explained in my earlier comments that the design of this compromise intentionally was to allow each side to have a few victories it could claim as clearly its own. The Republicans would get some in the way of tax reduction; Democrats would get some in the way of children's health care and education and social initiatives, like that. One of the victories allocated to us as Democrats as part of this compromise comes in the area of NDD, nondefense discretionary spending. In this particular budget resolution discretionary spending increases in outlay terms from $538 billion this year, FY 1997, to all of $562 billion 5 years from now. It goes up by $14 billion over a 5-year period of time. Half of the increase goes to defense, half to nondefense. So what we have achieved as a victory is to save discretionary spending from deep devastating cuts. Even so, it goes up by only a half a percent. It is still 9 percent below inflation. We consider this a victory because we at least allowed enough to keep most of the programs that we consider priorities relatively fully funded, but everybody would have to agree that is not amply funded by any means.”