John Spratt: “let me enlarge upon the point the gentleman is making, and that is, as bad as the Bush administration says, when…”

“let me enlarge upon the point the gentleman is making, and that is, as bad as the Bush administration says, when pressed, where is your solution, what plan do you have? Cut spending, cut spending. In truth, as the gentleman is pointing out with a very specific example, there are plenty of spending cuts built into this budget already. One of them is impact aid, which amounts to the Federal Government saying to military installations, we are not going to pick up the full impact of the children of military dependents in the public schools in that particular locality. We are going to let the local folks pay that and not do what other employers do and continue contributing some of the costs of it. That is one example. The gentleman from North Carolina is going to get up and give another example about the larger education bill that already is cut in this bill. If you took the whole budget for discretionary spending, the 13 appropriation bills that the gentleman's committee reports and we pass, which constitutes the discretionary budget, if you take all of nondefense discretionary spending and cut it all out, it would not replace the $400 billion deficit in the general fund we expect next year.”