Conference Report of H.Con.Res. 95, Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2006

CONFERENCE REPORT ON H. CON. RES. 95, CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2006 -- (House of Representatives - April 28, 2005)

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Mr. WICKER. Mr. Speaker, I support this budget because it represents at least a small step in coming to grips with mandatory spending. As a member of the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee, I have seen firsthand that we spend the vast majority of our time fighting over discretionary spending, those 11 appropriations bills which we must pass each year. But that type of spending makes up only one-third of our total spending.

Entitlement spending continues to grow with no restraint. We have allowed mandatory spending to be on autopilot, and now it consumes 55 percent of our total budget. It is time we wake up and take control of this spending.

Today our mandatory spending not only is growing at a rate far beyond what any of us could have imagined, it is also growing at a rate far beyond our means to sustain it.

Left unchecked, over 62 percent of our total budget will be mandatory spending by the year 2015 as this chart explains. This will place an unsustainable burden on our economy and eventually crowd out other priorities like education, transportation, and veterans programs.

This trend can easily be seen in some of our larger mandatory programs. Student loan growth is more than 10 percent a year. During the past decade, Medicare has grown by 88 percent. Medicaid has more than doubled.

These are popular and valuable programs, Mr. Speaker, but these growth rates cannot be sustained. We need to slow the growth rate so that we can save the programs.

Despite what Members have said tonight, this budget does not contain cuts in mandatory spending. We are enacting commonsense reforms that slow the growth rate and improve care. Mandatory spending will continue to grow every year of this budget.

We cannot put off this program any longer. It is becoming more serious and difficult to control with each passing year. There is nothing more irresponsible than doing nothing.

Our budget makes the tough choice to begin dealing with this problem now. It takes the critical step in slowing the growth of spending by including reconciliation instructions to the authorizing committees to find a specified amount of savings in the mandatory programs under their jurisdiction. In total, these savings would slow the growth of our mandatory spending by about one-tenth of 1 percent over 5 years. That is all. And while that may not sound like much, it is a critical first step.

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