Charles W. Stenholm: “an earlier speaker tonight said the economy is showing signs of some considerable improvement. Jobs are being created…”

“an earlier speaker tonight said the economy is showing signs of some considerable improvement. Jobs are being created, GDP is increasing. Well, it should. We have borrowed $2.5 trillion in the last 3 rac{1}{2} years and spent it. We should get the kind of results with that amount of borrowing. Last week, the administration failed to meet the deadline to release the mid-session review of the budget. If the administration had released the mid-session review, it would have shown that our budget is in a deep hole. As my colleagues have heard me say many times, when you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to quit digging. Soon we will have an announcement of another record deficit, somewhere between $425 billion and $500 billion. Under the simple concept of pay-as-you-go, if we want to pass a tax cut or spending increase, we need to say how we would pay for it. We need to take two shovels away from Congress and the President to stop us from digging the hole deeper. The original PAYGO legislation was part of the bipartisan 1990 budget agreement between President George Herbert Walker Bush and the Democratic Congress. It was subsequently extended in 1993 and 1997, but was allowed to expire in 2002 by President Bush and the Republican Congress. We should be spending our time trying to find a bipartisan solution to balance our budget, but that may be too much to expect from this do-nothing 108th Congress.”