John Spratt: “Well, as I acknowledged, terrorists and war and recession have all taken a toll on the budget. But the President has…”

“Well, as I acknowledged, terrorists and war and recession have all taken a toll on the budget. But the President has basically taken the attitude that we can have guns, butter, and tax cuts too, and never mind the deficits. The tax cuts keep coming every year. The President has an unfinished tax agenda of at least 1 trillion 400 billion, and that does not include everything, because he does not put on his agenda anything, anything to fix the alternative minimum tax. I paid it this year, I paid it last year, more and more Americans are going to be paying the AMT until it rises, Treasury tells us, to 30 million tax filers in the year 2010, not far away. The political truth of the matter is, we will have to do something about that. That means that the President's tax agenda, tax cut agenda calls for another $2 trillion beginning in 2011. They conveniently stop their budget projections in 2010, so we miss the outyears, but here is what happens in the outyears when you add AMT to the President's other requests, principally to make permanent the tax cuts adopted in 01, 02 and 03. This is what happens to the baseline projections of the deficit; it gets worse and worse and worse. There is no end in sight, and it is aggravated by this fact, the tax cut agenda. {time} 2300”