John Spratt

early last Friday, the House passed the Republican budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2001 by all of 4 votes. Today, the Republican leadership overrides it. If this rule passes, the House will take up a supplemental appropriations bill…

Mr. Chairman, no challenge faces our country like the challenge of education. We, in our budget resolution, rise to that challenge. We pay down the debt, we provide for tax cuts, but we also provide for priority spending on things like…

I would advise the gentleman simply to look at page 33 and the gentleman will see there is an on-budget provision and an off-budget provision, and the off-budget provision is the Social Security benefit spending provision. It is $20…

this budget resolution, the Republican resolution, sets up a so-called reserve fund. It basically says if and when the Committee on Ways and Means reports a prescription drug benefit for Medicare, along with, coupled to, Medicare reform…

Our resolution contains $16.3 billion over the next 10 years specifically earmarked for health care initiatives for military retirees over the age of 65. Our alternative includes the funding that would be necessary to cover the major…

For the $50 billion tax cut that is additional to that, the gentleman has no year-by-year break out. That is all I am asking for, if we could see the year-by-year breakout of the $50 billion tax cut, too.

Mr. Chairman, one more time let me put our chart up. The reason we had zero in allocating the $50 billion tax cut to 2001 is that is what your resolution provided, until last night at 1 o'clock. Your resolution now provides $5 billion, no…

Well, we know that because the chart was changed last night at 1:00 a.m., and we received that information then. We have adjusted the numbers, added the $50 billion to the $150 billion, and increased it at the same rate that the $150…

I think that is a good presentation of exactly the point we have been trying to make all day long. We have called it risky and dangerous. What we are talking about is skating on thin ice. For the first 5 years, this resolution, which has…

just about a month ago, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry Shelton, testified that guaranteeing life-time health care is not only important to keeping the promises made to those who have dedicated their careers to…

I think it probably forgets an essential element. There is something in the Democratic resolution that we will bring up shortly that distinguishes it sharply from what is being proposed here and, that is, we have specifically included in…

I thought the gentleman in the well, who is one of the strongest proponents and advocates of defense in this House, and I sit on the same committee with him, week after week he has bemoaned how much the President had sought in defense for…

Mr. Chairman, we have considered a number of budget resolutions today. Naturally I think the one we are now presenting is the best of the lot. I want to give the Members of the House five strong reasons that this resolution is the best of…

this is the last budget resolution that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) will bring to the House floor after many years. As he leaves the House, he leaves a large void. I came here with him in 1983. I can speak from personal experience…

This budget, the base budget, cuts FEMA, the account in which FEMA is included, function 450, by $2.8 billion between this year and next year, and over 5 years by $18.3 billion.

Mr. Chairman, the fifth point that we would make about our budget as opposed to the base budget deals with Social Security and Medicare. There is a distinct difference, indeed there is a chronic difference, between the way we deal with…

Mr. Speaker, Members should know that if they vote for this rule, they vote to violate the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. They vote to discard the discipline that has brought us from $290 billion deficits to $125 billion surpluses. For…

I think it is in order just to take a minute to say we have every reason to be celebrating our success. Three times in the 1990s we stood up to the problem of the deficit which had plagued fiscally the 1980s: In 1990, when we passed the…

Dr. Crippen sent me two tables in response to my request. Under his letter of October 28, he said, CBO has also calculated the across-the-board cut that would be necessary to eliminate the estimated on-budget deficit, the deficit without…

We have come a long way from 1992 when the deficit, even with a large surplus in Social Security, was $290 billion and headed up. We passed three budgets to reverse that course... But how can you help but denigrate what this budget before…

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…

a continuing resolution is a confession of failure on the part of Congress. It is a confession by Congress that it has not done its job, so is the appropriation bill that follows this continuing resolution. We were elected to use our…

fiscal year 2000 begins in 2 days, and we have no budget, no prospect of one. What we have instead is a red herring, this resolution, one House resolution hastily filed less than an hour ago which makes a promise that the majority has…

I rise today as the ranking Democrat on the Committee on the Budget to say, this is no way to make a budget. I regret that we have been brought by the majority to this juncture, but I have to say it has been clear since last April that…

I strongly support the vast majority of this bill, particularly the pay and retirement provisions. But this good bill is marred by some of the text, some of the provisions that set up the National Nuclear Security Administration as a…