Spending Control Act of 2004

SPENDING CONTROL ACT OF 2004 -- (House of Representatives - June 24, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 692 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 4663.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.

We have heard a lot of people say the budget is good. We have heard some people say it is bad. We have heard some people casting blame, and we have heard some people making excuses. I think it is just helpful to start off with what the facts are.

This is a chart showing the deficit back to the Johnson administration, a little bit of deficit, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush deficit, Clinton from deficit to surplus, Bush deficit. The swing from the surplus to the deficit, $750 billion.
Now, let us put that in perspective. If we look at the revenue, individual income tax, what everybody pays in individual income tax, $800 billion; deterioration in the deficit, 750. Now, when we run up that kind of debt, we run up interest in the national debt. This is the chart that showed that by 2009, we would be paying virtually nothing in interest on the national debt because we had enough surplus to pay off the national debt. This chart shows that we are going to be paying $300 billion a year in interest in the national debt, $300 billion. At $30,000 each, that is enough to hire 10 million people, more than the total number of people drawing unemployment today.

We said we got into that mess to create jobs. This is the chart showing the average job growth, Ford administration back to the Hoover administration. Everybody is net plus until we get to this administration. People look at this chart and say the job growth is good, job growth is bad. Make your own decision.

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

This amendment points out the difficulty in the one-way PAYGO. If we have a crunch, we can only deal with it by cutting spending. We cannot deal with it any other kind of way. With the one-way PAYGO, if we want to deal with the problem through tax cuts, if we have health care we want to deliver, we can do it in tax cuts. Just give tax credits. There is no limit to what we can do. But if we have a crunch and the budget is tight, we have got to have this mindless across-the-board cut. If we do it through tax cuts, we could have tax cuts at the same time that we are cutting the spending.

This is what happens when we have a two-way PAYGO, that is, if we are going to cut taxes, we have to cut spending.
If we increase spending, we have got to raise taxes or any combination. The green was with PAYGO; the red is what happens when we have unlimited tax cuts with PAYGO. This just says we have got to cut mindlessly across the board with spending. If we have a crunch and we have a new need, we cannot make it; we cannot meet it. If we want to meet it, the only way we can do it is through some tax plan where we are unlimited. But if we have a new program, if there is a housing need, if there is a health care need, something new we want to do, we cannot do it. This is why we need a two-way PAYGO and a more sensible way to deal with our budget, not mindless across-the-board tax cuts.