Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct conferees.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, but for one vote, the budget resolution that we now seem to send to conference would have gone down. Fortunately, there is still a way out for this budget with its massive deficits and its misguided priorities: we can rewrite it in conference. If we cut through all the words, all the legislative language and the motion that was just read, that is what the motion to instruct calls for.

Now, we do not cover the waterfront and take out every change that we find objectionable and make every change that we feel needs to be made, but we do send the conferees a strong message, and that is to get rid of the worst of the entitlement reconciliation directives in this budget resolution.

First of all, Medicare. Originally, our Republican colleagues on the Committee on the Budget sought to cut Medicare by $262 billion and Medicaid by $110 billion. That was to offset the cost of their prescription drug benefit under Medicare. We tried to knock out these cuts in markup, but failed. The chairman, however, did change his mark twice. After these modifications were made, however, the Committee on Ways and Means is still directed to cut $62 billion out of entitlement programs in its jurisdiction. This sort of saving can only come from two sources under the Committee on Ways and Means jurisdiction: Medicare or programs for the poor, the earned income tax credit, temporary assistance to needy families, or supplemental security income. It will have to come out of these programs, $62 billion; and these could be critical cuts in critically important programs.

The chairman's amendment, the manager's amendment also shaved the reconciliation directions just slightly to the Committee on Energy and Commerce from $110 billion to $107 billion.

But of this amount, $94 billion must still come from Medicaid, or SCHIP, the children's health insurance program. Contrast that, Mr. Speaker, to what we do in our budget resolution, or would have done had it passed. Given the struggle that all the States are having with Medicaid, we sought to increase the Federal share and lighten the States' burden by adding $10 billion at the Federal level to the cost of Medicaid this year.

If the rule had allowed during consideration of the budget, we would have offered amendments when the budget was on the floor to strike all of these cuts. Since everyone knows that they would have emasculated Medicare and Medicaid, I think they would have passed; but we were not allowed to make such an amendment.

Next, veterans. Originally, the Republicans on the Committee on the Budget set out to cut $30 billion from the budget for the veterans. They say that veterans benefits actually increase in their budget, and they may in nominal dollars. But this is the fact of the matter: Their budget resolution, as brought to the floor, provided $15 billion less for veterans health care than the President requested, and it still provides less for veterans disability benefits.

Next, education. The Republican resolution not only cuts appropriations for education below the President's already-low level, it saves none of the 47 programs that the President wiped out or would kill. It goes a step further: It whacks $9.4 billion out of mandatory spending. What does the Committee on Education and the Workforce have in its jurisdiction? Student loans and school lunches. Do we really want to cut student loans and school lunches to pay for a dividend tax exclusion?

Next, railroad retirees. Looking everywhere for programs they could cut to offset a big tax cut of another $1.35 trillion, our colleagues on the Committee on the Budget even called on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure to come up with some reconciliation savings, namely, $3.7 billion out of its mandatory or entitlement programs.

The only source that can produce such a cut under the jurisdiction of that committee is railroad retirement, a vested benefit on which 700,000 retirees depend. Surely we are not going to cut $3.7 billion out of that.

Finally, in the same vein, is agriculture. The budget, as it now stands, requires the Committee on Agriculture to cut $18.6 billion of direct spending over the next 10 years, but as in all of the other cases, it fails to mention which programs and fails to say how much.

Where does the Committee on Agriculture go? It can turn to the conservation reserve program, $18.6 billion, roughly what it costs to run that program for 10 years; or the Committee on Agriculture could turn to food stamps and take 12 percent out of food stamps for the next 10 years to produce $18.6 billion. But do we want to take 34 million acres of environmentally sensitive

land out of reserves? Do we want to cut food stamps when unemployment is 6 percent nationwide, in double digits in places like my district?

These are a few of the reasons, Mr. Speaker, that we should tell the conferees and tell them emphatically to recede to the Senate and drop these reconciliation directives. They should not be in here. First of all, these cuts are not in the President's budget, they are not in the Senate's budget, and except for the House budget, they are not on anybody's agenda.

Second, they are wrapped up in ambiguity, written in language so evasive that no one can know where the cuts may fall. They were clouded further by colloquies here on the House floor when we had the budget on the floor, in which the chairman of the committee, the Committee on the Budget, assured chairman after chairman of committees of jurisdiction that, no, they would not have to do what the black letter provisions of this resolution plainly say they must do, and that is cut Medicare, cut Medicaid and cut veterans benefits.

All, in effect, that this motion does is say to the conferees, conform the budget resolution to legislative history as recorded right here on the House floor the night we had the budget up.

Finally, these cuts, Mr. Speaker, would be questionable at any time, but cutting veterans when we are at war and Medicaid when the States are struggling just to sustain it and student loans for no good reason it is just wrong, callous and wrong.

In the end, I will be frank to say that I do not think most of these cuts will ever come to pass, not this year, anyway. But another huge tax cut may be passed. Its impact on the deficit may be obscured by pretending that these spending cuts will be enacted later as offsets. Most of these cuts may not be enacted later for the same political reasons, but as deficits swell, as they surely will if these tax cuts proposed are passed, the cuts will come in time, and this budget resolution is our forewarning of where they will have to fall.

We can ask fairly, what would happen to the budget's bottom line if these spending cuts we are calling for deletion are not enacted? The answer is that these proposed spending cuts are made necessary by the proposed tax cuts. If we forgo the tax cuts, we can forgo the deep cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits, student loans, agriculture, and railroad retirees.

As for the bottom line, if we just leave spending and revenues at current service levels, the Congressional Budget Office tells us the budget will be in balance by the year 2008. That is 4 years sooner and a couple of trillion less debt than this resolution promises. So if Members are for a budget that balances priorities as well as the bottom line, they should vote for this motion to instruct.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the minority whip.

Mr. Speaker, we are as concerned as any Member of this Congress about squeezing out waste, fraud and abuse. But we sincerely doubt that you can squeeze, ferret out $265 billion in waste, fraud and abuse. If you can, I would say to my colleague, where has the Republican majority been for the last 8 years during which you have controlled the House. Instead of having oversight, we have had overlook, if there is that much waste being accumulated in the Federal operation at this time.

Here are the cuts that are entailed by this resolution as it goes to conference: Agriculture, $18 billion. Waste, fraud and abuse, where is it? Education and the Workforce, Energy and Commerce, 107; most of that is Medicaid. Medicare, $62 billion. The total amount, $265 billion.

If you required these reconciliation savings to be accomplished and laid on the table before you passed your budget resolution, before you passed your tax cuts, they would have more credibility. But they lack credibility with me because if you are going to go ahead and have the tax cuts premised on adopting all of these $265 billion in savings just a few months afterwards, I do not think they will ever come to pass.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes to make a few things clear before I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps).

First of all, as to the tax cut level sought by the resolution that is now going to conference, this resolution has two different provisions with respect to tax cuts.

First, they say, reconcile the passage by a date certain of the President's request for $726 billion of additional tax cuts. Second, in their revenue assumptions and elsewhere, they assume that we will pass and permanently enact the tax cuts that were enacted by the House in June of 2001. When we add those two together, the total amount of tax reduction called for by this resolution is $1.35 trillion, not $726 billion. That should be made clear.

Secondly, we have proposed tax cuts. We would like to have some tax cuts to go to the pockets and hands of people who are likely to spend it and give this economy a boost. On January 6, we proposed just such a rebate, along with some business tax cuts, accelerated appreciation, immediate expensing in order to give this economy a kick.

Thirdly, let me say with respect to these spending levels, Agriculture, Education, Energy and Commerce, which is Medicaid, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Ways and Means, which is Medicare, as with respect to all of those, Mr. Speaker, we simply seek to restore the level of spending in these programs to the level sought by the President for the veterans and for Medicare beneficiaries.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps).

Mr. Speaker, once again, I yield myself 30 seconds just to make it clear.

We do not propose and would not have our motion construed to say that we are adopting a $514 billion tax cut or any level of tax reduction. We are saying that the tax cut ought to be adjusted accordingly after restoring these entitlement cuts that we have proposed in the motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Dakota (Mr. Pomeroy).

Mr. Speaker, once again, I yield 30 seconds to myself to say that in no way can this resolution be construed to support a tax cut of $514 billion. If the gentleman wishes to put that construction upon it, I am here to say, as the author of it, it does not apply. We do not support such a tax cut. We have supported tax cuts to boost the economy, but not the tax cuts that this budget resolution proposes because it would drive a deficit deeper and deeper into debt.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 45 seconds to say the gentleman is willfully misconstruing this resolution, and if he will simply read his black letter language, he will find out not only do we restore $214 billion of programs like Medicare and Medicaid to be at the level the President requested, we also provide for the Breaux amendment to be adopted and incorporated so that $396 billion can be taken out of the tax cuts and assigned to the solvency of Social Security. That is Section 319 of the Senate budget resolution which we are asking the House to accede to.

Add those two together, it is about $700 billion. That is about the size of the tax cut. This is not an endorsement of that tax cut in any way, shape or form.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, it means it is to remove, in the case of agriculture, a reduction of $18 billion.

If the gentleman would be so kind as to let me finish answering his question.

We are seeking to restore to the level the President requested Medicare, Medicaid, education.

In the amount of $396 billion, which would be deducted from the gentleman's tax cut. We would instead invest it in the insolvency of Social Security.

If the gentleman will continue to yield, section 319 reads, ``If legislation is reported by the Senate Committee on Finance, or if an amendment is offered or conference report is submitted to extend the solvency of the Social Security trust funds, the chairman of the sitting Committee on the Budget may revise the aggregates, the functional totals, the allocations and limits by up to $396 billion in budget authority.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute to correct the gross misstatement the gentleman just made as to the construction of this motion.

If he will read on, the last sentence says, ``and that such managers be instructed to address the revenue levels by the amounts needed.'' ``To adjust the revenue levels by the amounts needed to offset the cost of the instructions in paragraphs 1.'' Those are the entitlement reclamations. ``The restoration of the entitlement expenditures.'' And two, that is the Breaux reserve fund. To adjust the levels of revenues in this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from North Dakota (Mr. Pomeroy).

Mr. Speaker, I believe we have the right to close.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, how much time remains on this side?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez), the chairman of our caucus.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I intend to ask for a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, this restores spending to the present levels for Medicaid, Medicare, school lunches. In addition, this does not endorse any particular level of tax cut. It simply says it adjusts the revenues accordingly after restoring these amounts to the budgets.

It is a good motion. Members should vote for it if they want to vote for Medicaid, Medicare, student loans and other programs which are so vitally important to our country.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to correct the Record. It was said here that we raise taxes in our budget proposal. The truth of the matter is we open the proposal to reduce taxes to give hard-working Americans a tax rebate of about $60 billion. This time it will go to the millions who did not get it the last time and who are likely to spend it and give this economy a boost.

We also provide for expensing of purchases made by small businesses in the year of purchase, and we provide a 50 percent bonus to larger firms. Corporations who make investments in plant equipment this year, 50 percent of it can be written off. That is in our bill.

Furthermore, we take, instead of repealing the estate tax in 2011, we provide for the Pomeroy estate tax provision, which gives Americans immediate estate tax relief. That is a $33 billion reduction, too.

The only thing we do is freeze the top two brackets, the very highest top brackets. We do not raise them. We simply freeze them in place. They can get the cuts they have gotten today, but until we get the budget back in balance, we would suspend those, but the tax effects, at best, are a wash. We are not raising taxes in our budget resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that during consideration of H. Con. Res. 95 pursuant to House Resolution 151, the amendment numbered 4 in House Report 108-44 may be considered as modified by the form that I have placed at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 7 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, my colleague calls this a wartime budget, but everyone should understand there is nothing in this budget to pay for the war in Iraq that is now underway. There is not even anything in this budget to pay for the war against global terrorism which is being waged in places like Afghanistan.

The administration deliberately omitted any provision for those costs in this budget for various reasons. They claim that they could not estimate accurately what those costs are likely to be, but we all know that there will be what we call in this House a supplemental appropriation coming,

and it will run into billions of dollars, maybe 50- to $100 billion for the war in Iraq itself, and after that the postwar occupation will cost, the CBO says, between $1.8 billion a month and $3.8 billion a month.

We have a huge, huge cost item that is not included here. I say that because everyone should understand that there is no surplus left in this budget. My friends, proposing a tax cut now that is as large as the last tax cut we undertook in 2001 will only drive the bottom line of the budget deeper and deeper by the proposals they have made here.

Two years ago, we had the happy circumstance of a budget that was $5.6 trillion in surplus, or so we were told by our forecasters at the Office of Management and Budget in the Bush administration. Two years later, we open this budget season on a somber note, not just being at war, that is a grave situation, but that $5.6 trillion surplus, according to the Office of Management and Budget, is gone.

First of all, they said we overstated the surplus by at least $3.2 billion. The real surplus was not $5.6. We are now told it is about $2.4 trillion over the time period 2002 through 2011. Of that $2.4 trillion, OMB tells us $2.5 trillion has already been committed, mostly to tax cuts undertaken in 2001, and, to some extent, to defense spending increases and other spending increases. But, in any event, the surplus is gone.

We are actually in deficit as we stand here, and everybody is on notice that every dollar of additional tax reduction that you decree in this budget resolution will go straight to the bottom line. It will go straight into the deficit and add to the deficit, dollar for dollar. Knowing this, there is no way around it. What our Republican colleagues propose is they propose another $1.35 trillion in tax reductions, tax cuts, which will go straight to the bottom line and add to the deficit.

Here is the situation: This is the first table in CBO's analysis of a couple of weeks ago of the President's budget, which was sent to us about a month ago. Strikingly, if you add from 2002, the first fiscal year that the Bush administration was in office, through 2013, which is the last year in our 10-year budget time frame, the total amount of deficits that the Bush administration's fiscal policies will yield is $5.158 trillion. That is what they propose to add to this national debt under the Bush administration.

Now, my Republican colleagues, and I will give them part credit, saw this number, and I think they could not stomach it themselves, $5.158 billion under the Bush administration's fiscal policies. They undertook to provide some offsets. They did not give up the tax cut. No, they went with the full tax cut, or slightly less, but they undertook to come up with some offsets.

The first thing they proposed to do was to tell the Committee on Ways and Means, which has jurisdiction over Medicare, and the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, cut $372 billion out of those two programs.

They have now relented and backed off their own proposal. They reduced the instruction to the Committee on Ways and Means from $262 billion to about $62 billion, and they have reduced the instruction to the Committee on Energy and Commerce from $110 billion to $107 billion. But both of those cuts could come out of the two health care entitlements that we have in this country that so many people, maybe from 50- to 60 million to 80- to 90 million people, are dependent on. That is what they propose to do.

This budget says a lot about priorities. What happens with the rest of the budget in order to make room for this tax cut?

In saying it is a wartime budget, they attempt to make room in the rest of the budget, at least partially, to offset this enormous tax cut of $1.350 trillion. What does that mean? That means they cut with abandon, left and right. They cut our young, our children, in terms of education; they cut our seniors in terms of Medicare and Medicaid; and they cut some of the most worthy citizens in our society, the sick and disabled veterans. They put an instruction in this budget, which I cannot believe, and neither can any veterans' organization in America, to cut $15 billion out of veterans' disability compensation and some $12 billion to $13 billion out of veterans' health care facilities. They cut education by $40 billion below what is necessary just to keep it level with inflation. They cut Medicaid, as I said.

All of this is necessary to accommodate their tax cut. It is not necessary because of the budget circumstances we find ourselves in. This is self-inflicted pain. Yes, it will be painful if these cults are made, you had better believe it, but they are not necessary. You do not have to make them.

To prove it we have come up with a budget resolution about a better bottom line. We get to a surplus in the year 2010. It takes them until 2012 to get to a surplus. In the process of getting there, we have a lower deficit every year than they do, we accumulate $851 billion over 10 years less in national debt than they do, and we adequately provide for education. We do not eviscerate Medicare, we do not cut Medicaid, because it is already strained as it is, and we certainly do not cut our veterans in a time of war, or any time, for that matter, by $30 billion in just mindless cuts.

So there is an alternate way. There is a better budget. It is a fiscally more responsible budget, and it meets the obligations we have. Members of this House today have a stark choice, a clear choice, in terms of values, in terms of fiscal responsibility. The right vote is our budget resolution.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Wisconsin (Ms. Baldwin).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, we, too, fully fund homeland security. By the best of our reckoning, we are providing at least $24 billion over and above the increase that the President is providing. It is allocated among lots of different functions: community and regional development, the Justice Department. We have identified and also specified in a sense of the Congress that we have $24 billion there.

In addition, we have put into our budget resolution the stimulus proposal that we made on January 6 of this year. If it were adopted, there would be $10 billion for the States to undertake homeland security projects in places like seaports, which were woefully underprovided for.

In addition, Mr. Chairman, I would point out to everyone that in doing our budget, we have left a contingency reserve of $54 billion. It could be used for lots of things; but it could be used, among other things, for homeland defense and for national defense generally, if and when a supplemental comes.

I want to make it clear there is very, very little difference between us when it comes to national security, not at a time like this. We are fully providing for homeland security, and then some, in particular.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Davis).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, let me say to my friend, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Brown), that this resolution on the floor calls for $15 billion in cost reduction of the veterans health care system. It also calls for a $15 billion decrease in mandatory programs, which means veterans' disability compensation.

We can argue over what is an increase or decrease, but every veterans organization in this town thinks that they are being hit and hit hard by this budget resolution. There is no doubt about it; it is still about a $28 billion or $29 billion hit after the minor modification the gentleman made to make this resolution presentable.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 15 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Thompson), and I ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to yield blocks of time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price).

(Mr. PRICE of North Carolina asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute, before yielding to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Ford), to respond to our distinguished chairman, who wants to know where all these cuts we are alleging come from.

They come from the budget documents. His budget calls on the Committee on Energy and Commerce, for example, to reduce spending by $107,359,000,000. The only thing they can take that out of is the Medicaid program.

He calls on the Committee on Government Reform, which has jurisdiction over the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan and the Civil Service Retirement Plan, to effect cuts in those programs of $38,319,000,000 to achieve savings.

They are there. If you look at function 550 in this budget, which is the health function, if you look at the level of funding, it is $2.4 billion below what is necessary to maintain purchasing power. We say ``current services.'' That has got to come out of some of the organizations like NIH who get their funding from this particular function of the budget. It is there. No question about it.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Ford).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, let us just go to the bottom line and look at the differences between the two proposals that will be the chief proposals before the House when we vote tonight on the budget resolutions, the Democratic proposal and the Republican proposal.

As anyone who can see this chart can easily see, under our budget in every year from 2004, next year, through 2013, the Democratic budget has a lower deficit than the Republican budget, and by a significant margin.

What is more, every year our bottom line gets better and better and better, until in the year 2010 we are in unified balance. All accounts included, we have no more deficit by the year 2010. And we do not get there with improbable, unlikely spending cuts of the kind you have heard mentioned on the floor today. We get there with good, solid economics and with complete fairness to things that are important to us. It is a huge difference.

But this tells it all: Over that 10-year period of time, the cumulative difference between us and them, between Republicans and Democrats, between our resolution and their resolution, is $913 billion less public debt. So as we move from a deficit to a surplus, we accumulate $913 billion less debt than do the Republicans in their resolution. That is an enormous difference, particularly for anybody who says that deficits matter.

We insist that deficits do matter. This administration has taken a different attitude. The Director of Management and Budget says we should not start hyperventilating over all these deficits. We think they matter. We think in the long run they affect the growth of our economy, they affect jobs and things that matter to people, they affect the interest we have to pay on our national debt.

This is the difference between us and them. By 2010, we are in balance. It takes them until 2012 to get there. Along the way we accumulate $913 billion less debt. But what is most important is ours is feasible and credible and probable; theirs is infeasible, unlikely, and, to my way of thinking, unbelievable.

The Republican budget presents us with two choices: We will either have devastating cuts, in which event they may get to balance in 2012, or those cuts will not be achieved, in which event the deficit itself will have done devastating damage.

That is the choice before us, and that is why the Democratic balanced budget resolution is far and away the better choice for everybody in this House.

Mr. Chairman, quickly let me commend to the gentleman's reading an excellent piece of work done by the Joint Economic Committee staff called an Economic Policy Brief, and in particular to page 8, because if you will turn here, we will see that the JEC staff have run these same numbers through several established mathematical economic models, including two that are used prominently by the White House.

According to these models, the Democratic alternative will add 1.6 percentage points to GDP growth in 2003. The Bush alternative, at six times the cost, would yield 1.1 percent growth.

Our proposal would yield or generate 1,122,000 jobs. Theirs, at six times the cost, would generate 600,000 jobs.

If you go down to economy.com, you will find the same results. Our proposal generates, according to their model, 1,150,000 jobs for a $138 billion impact this year; theirs, for $726 billion, generates 640,000 jobs.

Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, and I will not object, I am completely agreeable. That procedure has been our custom and practice in the past.

Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would simply say that these colloquies we are hearing on the House floor indicate how difficult it is going to be to achieve the kind of reconciliation cuts that have been directed to various committees. We see the committee people coming out here and saying, You are not going to cut this, are you? You are not going to cut that, are you? You are not going to cut government pensions, for goodness sakes. We will correct the procurement system and save $43 billion.

That is why I find it hard to take this budget at face value. I am sorry, but that is way I approach it.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Before yielding to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge), let me quote from a letter that was written to Speaker Hastert by the head of the Paralyzed Veterans of America. He said, ``We do not consider payments toward disabled veterans, pensions for the poorest disabled veterans, and GI benefits for soldiers returning from Afghanistan to be waste, fraud, and abuse.''

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge).

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

(Mr. SHERMAN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, I have no further requests for time, and I yield myself the remaining time.

I would just say in conclusion that if the Members of this House want to vote for a budget that gets us back in balance without balancing the budget on the backs of our children, our elderly, or our most worthy citizens, and our sick and disabled veterans; if they want to get back into balance by the year 2010, we present a budget, our own alternative, which takes us there steadily every year with a lower and lower deficit and accumulates $931 billion less in new public debt than the Republican budget.

So I would say that those who are conservative, those who want to vote for a fiscally responsible and conservative fiscal policy will have that opportunity, and I encourage my colleagues to vote for the House democratic alternative as something that achieves my colleagues' objectives.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, he is incorrect on all accounts, including the assignment to me to North Carolina. I am from South Carolina.

Mr. Chairman, I offer amendment No. 4 in the nature of a substitute, as modified.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would like to say that in 1993 we passed a budget. We took the deficit then in the budget, $290 billion, down every year for the next 7 years until it reached a surplus in the year 2000 of $236 billion, an exact polar opposite of what is happening right now.

Nobody in this House stands in greater admiration of the gentleman from California's (Mr. Cunningham) record in the military than I do and my personal like for the man, but I think we have to acknowledge that these fellow veterans, four different groups, have all come out in unmitigated condemnation of this budget because of what it does to veterans' benefits, and nobody shows greater indignation than the Paralyzed Veterans of America who wrote the Speaker saying, we do not consider payments to war-disabled veterans, pensions for the poorest disabled veterans and GI benefits for soldiers returning from Afghanistan to be waste, fraud and abuse.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez), the distinguished chair of our caucus.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, just to walk down memory lane, during the Clinton years, we created 21 million jobs. So far, during the Bush years, we have seen 2.5 million private sector jobs disappear. In December 2000 before President Clinton left office and President Bush took office, there were 5.17 million people unemployed. This year in January 2003, it is 8.4 million unemployed.

We can go down the list. Real GDP during the Clinton years increased at a rate of 6.3 percent from 1993 through 2000. So far it has increased at a rate of 1.5 percent, and the budget every year from 1993 onward, the bottom line of the budget, the so-called deficit got better and better and better under that budget that we adopted in 1993. It went from a record deficit of $290 billion in 1992 to $255 billion the next year, $203 billion the next year, $164 billion in 1995, $107 billion in 1996, $22 billion in 1997, and balanced for the first time in 30 years in 1998. That was a record of that period of time and the result of that tough budget vote that we took in 1993.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley).

Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

(Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hinojosa).

(Mr. HINOJOSA asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Berkley).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Ford).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 6 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, here is the dilemma we are faced with. If this budget passes and becomes real, which I doubt, it will be devastating to our children and their education, to our seniors and their security, and to some of the most worthy citizens we know, sick and disabled veterans. On the other hand, if it passes and does not become real, if those cuts are not actually made, then it will devastate the bottom line of our budget.

Those of us who have been here a long time can tell you how intractable deep deficits can become. For 15 years we struggled to get ourselves in surplus, and in 2 years we have blown it. That is why we are out here intensely tonight fighting. Important principles are at stake.

I have to say to my colleague and wonderful friend, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays), when I first saw this budget on the day of markup, I said, ``It ain't on the level. I can't take it at face value.'' The better I understand it, the less credence I give it. I honestly think it is just a clever device for passing another round of tax cuts as large as the last, $1.35 trillion, despite the fact that this time there is no surplus. It goes straight to the bottom line and increases the deficit.

Here the numbers are displayed on this chart. If you want a choice between us and them, here it is, Mr. Chairman. Here it is, colleagues. Our budget every year has a lower and lower deficit until the year 2010 when it is no longer in deficit, it is in surplus. We put the budget back in surplus. That is our driving purpose. The first parameter we set for ourselves was we are going to get to balance in a reasonable period of time, and that date turned out to be 2010.

If you compare the Republican chart, you will see they do not get to balance until the year 2012, 2 years later, and that depends, Mr. Chairman, on some stupendous cost-cutting around here. I have been here 20 years. I just do not think that they are going to be able to accomplish it.

I heard these colloquies over here on the House floor. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Tom Davis), one of the ablest Members of this House, chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, he had a colloquy that, in effect, said, you don't expect me really to get $40 billion out of government retirement pensions, do you? The answer was basically, no, you've got other mandatory programs. You can reform procurement, for example, and save $40 billion.

Give me a break. That is not going to happen. This is a serious, serious effort and exercise, because if we are wrong here, we will live with the consequences for a long, long time.

We have before us a real choice to this budget which we have brought to the House floor from the House Budget Committee. We have got a choice that is a far better choice, the Democratic substitute. It is a fiscally sound choice because our budget balances in 2010; theirs balances in 2012. Our budget racks up less debt during that 10-year time frame, $913 billion less debt, and, listen to this, $1.647 trillion less debt than the President's budget.

Our budget is fair and sensible. The Democratic budget weighs priorities. The Republican budget wreaks havoc. Indeed, much of our budget is devoted to restoring the damage the Republican budget does.

The Republican budget cuts education and training by $60 billion. It flat-funds Leave No Child Behind, even though the authorizing act calls for $9 billion next year. We restore that cut and add to the education function.

The Republican resolution wipes out Justice Department programs like community policing. We can all attest to its effectiveness. It drops and cuts out Byrne grants. It drops level funding for these Justice Department programs by $35 billion. Do you know who you are cutting when you are doing that? The famous first responders. These people that we talk about, but do so little for, they are the victims. We do not stand for that in our budget. We restore those programs because we think this is the first line of homeland defense, and we put $24 billion more in our budget than they do for homeland security.

We have heard it charged on the floor today that our budget increases spending. Let me just lay that argument to rest once and for all with a chart that is taken straight from the numbers in our budget. As you can see, this year we are spending about 20.4 percent total spending of GDP. Following the path laid down by our budget, that will decline to 19.1 percent of GDP in 2013. In the years 2004 through 2013, the 10- year time frame of this budget, our spending will grow by 4.6 percent over that 10-year period of time. That will be the annual rate of growth. That is less than the GDP nominal growth rate.

Let me finally say that our bill also has in it something that is critically important. We have got a weak, wobbly economy. We have got in our bill the stimulus package, which we think is an excellent package. It was offered by us on January 6 of this year. We say, let us enact it. Let us help those who are unemployed, let us give this economy a kick, let us give those who are likely to spend it a rebate straight to their pockets. It will be spent on the economy. Let us give small businesses extra expensing. Let us help large businesses by saying, if you will do something in 2003, we will give you a 50 percent depreciation.

It is dramatic, it is bold, and when you compare it by any of the established economic models, we get two to three times the results in GDP growth and job creation that the Republicans get for spending six times as much money in their jobs and growth package.

We have a real choice, a stark choice today, and far better the choice is our Democratic substitute. Vote for the

Spratt substitute. Vote for the Democratic substitute. It is the best choice by far.

Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the distinguished Democratic leader.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise to claim my time and make a closing statement.

Mr. Chairman, this is not just another partisan vote. This is a pivotal vote with long-lasting consequences, and I urge everybody to ponder those consequences and beg everyone's indulgence at this hour to make just a few comments. When I came to this House 20 years ago, the Government was deep in debt. Over the 1980s the national debt tripled. It took us almost 20 years to rid the Government's budget of deficits. It took Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, which passed in 1985, the Budget Summit Agreement in 1990, the Clinton Budget of 1993, and the Balanced Budget Agreement of 1997.

These efforts finally bore fruit. After we passed the Clinton act in 1993, each year thereafter for 7 straight years, the bottom line of the budget got better to the point where in 1993 for the first time in 30 years the budget was in balance.

Mr. Bush took office with an advantage few Presidents in recent times have enjoyed. He had a surplus, a big-time surplus. The Office of Management and Budget, OMB, estimated from 2002 through 2011, the surplus would be $5.6 trillion.

Based on that projection and over the admonitions of many of us, Mr. Bush requested and Congress passed $1.35 trillion in tax cuts. Now, just 2 years later, that $5.6 trillion surplus is gone. That is what CBO and OMB told us when we opened the budget season in January of this year.

OMB told us that it had overstated the surplus. Adjusting it for what we now know about the economy, they said the adjusted surplus is not $5.6 trillion from 2002 through 2011, it is more like $2.4 trillion, and, more than that, about $2.5 trillion has already been committed in new tax cuts and newly legislated spending, much of it for national defense. This means that any new tax cuts we pass will go straight to the bottom line. They will add dollar for dollar to the deficit.

In 2001, you could rationalize an enormous tax cut on the grounds that we had an enormous surplus, but you cannot do that anymore. Nevertheless, the President sent us a budget this year requesting another $1.6 trillion in tax cuts, another round of tax reduction, as large as the last, with only a few modest offsets in it. All of it goes to the bottom line. When CBO did its analysis of the President's budget, it saw nothing but deficits, on-budget deficits, totaling over $5 trillion between now and 2013.

The chairman of the Committee on the Budget and his colleagues embraced the President's tax cuts. They totaled some $1.6 trillion, but they pared them down a bit, and then they went looking for offsets. They weren't able to identify specific spending offsets, so they settled on just across-the-board percentage cuts to entitlement spending under the jurisdiction of 14 different committees. Initially they asked for $470 billion in entitlement spending. They settled later for less because they needed the votes to get it passed on their side of the aisle.

Today we have some $262 billion in entitlement cuts entailed by this budget resolution. These will come out of programs within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means, that is Medicare; and the Committee on Energy and Commerce, that is Medicaid, $107 billion.

So if you vote for this resolution, you should know that you are still voting very possibly to cut Medicare by $62 billion, Medicaid by $107 billion, government pensions and railroad retirement by over $40 billion, veterans' disability benefits by $15 billion, school

lunches and student loans by nearly $10 billion, and all of this is occasioned by the fact that you want to go forward with this tax cut of $1.3 trillion to $1.4 trillion. Because without it, the budget will be in balance between 2008 and 2010, if you just let the spending increase each year at the level of current service.

You should also know that this resolution calls for limits on domestic discretionary spending that will make it lower than inflation or current services by $244 billion over the next 10 years. It has been claimed on this House floor that these were just cuts of 1 percent, but when you provide for a big increase in international affairs, $51 billion is what the President sought over 10 years, and another big increase in homeland security, the rest of the accounts in discretionary spending have to be squeezed, and by our calculations they are squeezed easily by 6 percent.

That may not seem crippling, but look what is happening to education in this budget. Education is brought in $50 billion below inflation. At this level we will never fully fund Leave No Child Behind; we will never get close to sharing our fair share of IDEA. That is true for other programs throughout the discretionary accounts. Veterans' health care, for example, it is cut by $13 billion to $15 billion, although today right now it has more veterans than it can say grace over to care for.

Mr. Chairman, I deeply doubt that these cuts will ever be achieved. Let us not forget what happened last year. We only passed 2 of 13 appropriations bills in 2002, did not finish the last 11 until a few weeks ago, and those were hard to pass because they had spending restraints on them that are a lot less challenging than what this bill will call for.

So what happens if the cuts are not achieved? The deficit goes higher, we stack up a mountain of debt. But, unlike the 1980s, we are right now on the eve of the retirement of the baby-boomers, and that will make the task of turning these deficits around more intractable and difficult than ever, believe me.

So, before you vote for this resolution, you should ask yourself if you want to take this gamble. You should know that even if all the mandatory and discretionary spending cuts are achieved, which is very, very unlikely, this budget will not be in balance until 2012, a long time from now, and between now and then this budget will accumulate more than $1 trillion of additional debt. And in voting for this resolution, keep in mind, you are voting to raise the ceiling on the national debt.

So, what happens if we do not vote for this resolution? What happens if we vote it down tonight? Well, the default option is not really that bad. If you forego the tax cuts and you can also forego the spending cuts, you can put the budget back in balance by 2008. If you believe in balanced budget, if you think deficits are a menace, that is not a bad outcome. I suggest to you it is a lot better outcome than the budget resolution before us.

Vote no on the budget resolution. Let us go back to the drawing board.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel).

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his presentation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind).

Mr. Speaker, as our previous speakers have said, we stand tonight on the brink of war, the very precipice of war. It may seem untimely to talk about the budget, but it so happens that the budget is the order of business.

We are about to go through the annual process of approving the budget resolution, which is the outline of a budget, an exercise that Congress undertakes about this time every year. But to make our position clear with respect to what is happening elsewhere in the world, let me say when it comes to supporting our troops in the field, our men and women in service, we will be unstinting. We will provide them every dime that they need to do their duty and to see that they are fairly compensated, their families are well provided for.

We speak tonight about the budget deficit because when we get here on the floor, oftentimes we have the debate broken up in so many small pieces it is hard to see the whole. And it has never been more important for everyone to understand the whole, where we are, the situation, the dire situation that we find ourselves in. We are faced with deficits as far out as our forecasts go, and we have a President's budget before us delivered a few weeks ago that offers no solutions. It only makes the problems worse.

This was brought home to me about 10 days ago when I went down to the Congressional Budget Office, which is the neutral nonpartisan budget shop of the Congress. They do good work. And every year by law they are required to give us, within a week or so after the President's budget gets here, their analysis of the President's budget for the forthcoming fiscal year.

Friday a week ago they presented us with an interim analysis. I went down for the briefing, and I picked up the book and turned to the first table in it at the back. I looked across the top line. ``On-budget deficits.'' That means deficits not including Social Security.

This year the expected deficit is $452 billion if we do not include Social Security. Next year, 2004, it is $512 billion. This is the CBO estimate of the President's budget, the CBO estimate of the President's budget, his policies. In 2005 it is $464 billion. Across the line from 2003 to 2013, that is the time frame of this projection, the deficit is no less than $400 billion if you exclude the surplus in Social Security, and by law we have taken Social Security off budget, and I do not think we should include it anymore than any business or any State includes its pension funds in its budget.

I added up everything between 2002, which was the first fiscal year of the Bush administration, and 2013, which was the last year, the last column shown in this budget analysis. The total of the deficits to be incurred in that period comes to $5.138 trillion. Over the next 12 years, over that 12-year period of time, 2002 through 2013, the cumulative sum on budget deficits is $5.138 trillion. I do not know of anybody who thinks we can sustain that course without damaging our economy. When we have huge deficits like this, the government has to go into the capital markets, borrow money, run up the cost of credit. The cost of credit goes up, interest rates go up, stifles growth, costs people who have mortgages and car payments more to make those payments. It will be devastating if we incur deficits of this kind.

That is why we are out here tonight and that is the point we are trying to drive home this week as we take up the budget, because we think we are on a path that we simply cannot sustain or support. With deficits like these that are implied by the President's budget policies, this is, after all, what this summary was, a summary of the President's budget, I can understand why my colleagues on the House Committee on the Budget, the ones across the aisle, the Republicans who chair the committee and run the committee, in effect rejected the President's budget and wrote their own. In fact, they provided $714 billion in additional spending cuts over and above what the President had called for in his budget.

This is a budget of $2.2 trillion. They are adding at least one-third spending cuts that the President did not seek over and above, well, he sought 100 of those. So they are seeking 641 billion additional spending cuts over and above what the President sought, which is effectively rewriting the budget. So I admire them for trying. I admire them for their honesty in saying this budget is not workable; we cannot adopt it. But when I saw the end product, I thought this is in effect the same, will take us to the same destination, maybe by a different route; but their budget will take us down the same route as the President's budget, deeper and deeper into deficits.

Here on this page full of numbers is a summary of their budget, what happens if we adopt the Republican budget, which will be before us tomorrow and the next day and the rest of this week. Reading from their budget documents, the on-budget deficits for 2004 will be $497 billion. That is what happens to the bottom line of the budget if we adopt the budget that the Republicans will present to us this week. The deficit goes to $497.164 billion. The next year is $419 billion. The next year $375 billion. Over this 10-year time frame, and we run our budget numbers out in 10-year time frames so we can see some scope of what we are proposing to do, under their budget policies if they are adopted this week, we will incur over that 10-year period an additional $3.327 trillion in deficits. Here it is. I did not make the numbers up. They are written right here on this piece of paper.

Now, how did we get to this dire situation? Believe it or not, in fiscal year 2000, the Government of the United States had a surplus of $236 billion including Social Security. Now we have got a deficit including Social Security of $287 billion. How did we get here?

Let me take everybody back in time. When the first President Bush left office, he left behind the largest deficit in our Nation's history. And within 3 weeks of arriving at the White House, President Clinton sent Congress a budget that would cut that deficit by more than half over the next 5 years. It was not popular. It was not painless. It passed this House by one vote. Marjorie Mezvinsky cast that vote right there at that voting machine. I can see her doing it now, and it cost her the next election. But it passed the House. It passed the Senate with Vice President Gore's vote alone breaking a tie-breaker and was signed into law by the President.

We were taunted with the charge that this budget would cut the economy off at the knees, mushroom the deficit. Well, within months the economy was up on its feet and running. The deficit was going down every year for 7 straight years, a record; until finally in 1998 for the first time in 30 years, it was in surplus including Social Security and Medicare. The next 2 years we moved all the way to a surplus of $236 billion.

When President Bush came to office this was the context. He inherited an advantage that few Presidents in modern times have enjoyed, a budget that was in surplus. The first year he was in office he inherited the Clinton budget. 2001, he had a surplus of nearly $130 billion. President Bush, when he came to office, was told by his Office of Management and Budget that the surplus over the next 10 years would continue to increase, and he could expect a surplus of $5.6 trillion between 2002 and 2011, $5.6 trillion. A huge advantage. But we warned here that that surplus was based on a blue-sky forecast and there was storm clouds gathering over the economy. And we strongly advised our colleagues on the other side of the aisle not to be reckless with their first round of tax cuts, to have modest tax cuts each year to see if these numbers would truly pan out.

Well, they enacted large tax cuts anyway, tax cuts large enough to take $1.7 trillion out of the surplus. By July of 2001 the economy had taken another $1.6, $1.7 trillion out of the surplus. As a consequence, when the Congressional Budget Office came back to the Hill, as they are required by law to do, and

gave us their mid-session review just before we began to put together, put to bed all the appropriations bills, July 2001, the surplus not including Social Security was down to $575 billion. It was no longer over $3 billion excluding Social Security. It was $575 billion, and that included a surplus in Medicare of around $250 billion. So really we only had a surplus then of $200 to $300 billion.

The President, the administration are apt to tell us that the deficit today stems in part from the tragedy of 9-11. There is no question about it. Terrorism has taken a bite out of the budget.

It has taken its toll on the economy, but most of the surplus, as those numbers in July 2001 show, most of the surplus was gone before the terrorists hit New York.

So this is where we find ourselves as we mark up the budget for fiscal 2004. OMB sent us a chart, I do not have a copy of it here, but I can picture it. It says we began by thinking that we had a surplus of $5.6 trillion. We now acknowledge 2 years later that we overstated that surplus by about $3.2 trillion. The real surplus, they say today, adjusted for the economy as it has turned down, is really over this 10- year period, 2002-2011, about $2.5 trillion, but here is the rub.

Congress has enacted policies committing all of this surplus and then some. In fact, if we did not do anything else, we would have a deficit of $129 billion, and this is where we are, with no surplus, so that any additional tax cuts passed by this Congress will go straight to the bottom line. That will be no surplus to offset them. They will add dollar for dollar to the tax cuts.

So what does the President recommend? What does the President recommend, knowing that everything he proposes in additional spending over and above the rate of inflation will go straight to the bottom line and swell the deficit, every tax cut will swell the deficit? He proposes, these are his numbers, OMB, $1.993 trillion of new policies, actions, of which $1.6 trillion is a new tax cut. That racks up $2.1 trillion in additional deficits. All of these are OMB numbers.

Back in 2001, we could say that one could argue for a tax cut, even a tax cut of $1.6 trillion or $1.7 trillion. They could point to a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion and say there is more than enough here, and we should give some of it back to the American people. The problem is, of course, that surplus never obtained. It has not panned out. But we could excuse, I suppose, that first tax cut on grounds that maybe we were a little too easy, too anxious, too eager to bet the budget and blue sky forecast. Chalk it up to lack of due caution. But today, today, we know there is no surplus, so any additional tax cuts we undertake will add to the deficit directly, and in the long run deficits matter.

The administration has tried to come up with some revisionist economics to suggest that deficits do not matter, after years and years of having mainstream economies tell us that they do matter. They matter for several simple reasons.

First of all, when the government goes into private capital markets or the country's capital markets and borrows, they simply run up the cost of credit. They increase the demand, and so the product costs more. Credit costs more.

When we borrow, we simply say to our children that they pay the bill. We are putting it on our Nation's credit card. When they take over as citizens, they pick up the tab. That is what it comes down to. There is a moral question as well as a fiscal and financial question involved.

Deficits do matter, and above all, they raise interest rates, and they stifle growth in the economy, and that hurts everybody, no question about it; hurts the budget, makes it harder to get the budget back on its feet.

As we saw when the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott) was up, we can have tax cuts today, but a few years down the road, the interest on the debt that is created by those tax cuts, if we borrow to make up for the revenues that are cut because we do not have sufficient revenues to run the government, we have got more debt; therefore, we have more debt service, more interest to pay, and as a consequence, pretty soon, as citizens, we are all paying a debt tax. We are all paying additional tax to service the national debt, and that is what is happening right here.

So our Republican colleagues got the President's budget, and they recognize this path that it led to, as outlined here in the CBO study, was not a sustainable path, and I give them credit for that, and they undertook to offset the cost of the tax cut. That is where I think they made their mistake in assuming this, that these circumstances on the brink of a war, deep in deficit already, warrant another tax cut. Tax cut when we have to go into the open market and borrow for the money that we give up by the tax cut itself? Does not make a lot of sense to me.

Nevertheless give them credit. They at least tried to offset part of it, but in trying to offset part of it, they have reached out and hurt more groups and more worthy programs than I have ever seen in any single budget yet.

Veterans, everybody's mentioned veterans tonight. I could not believe it when I saw the Republicans' budget and it called for a $15 billion reduction in mandatory spending; that is, entitlement spending for veterans. What kind of entitlement spending do veterans get? They get entitlement spending for veterans' disability compensation, service- connected wounds and injuries, service-connected disabilities. This reconciliation provision that they put in their budget would require us to cut $15 billion out of veterans' disability compensation, and as the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind) said, what sort of message is that to send those wonderful young men and women who are serving with such pride and such elan in our forces in the Persian Gulf?

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

As large as the deficits are in this budget, I just read them to my colleague, they accumulate $3.2 trillion over the next 10 years. There is nothing in here to pay for the war in Iraq, and there is nothing in here either to pay for our global war against terrorism, the war in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

It is expressly understood that that is a hole that has to be filled later in the year, and probably sooner than later with war just around the corner. Nevertheless, we are moving ahead with the budget, not knowing this enormous item, the size of it, the cost of it, or how it will be paid for and accommodated in this particular budget.

Typically not. That means they will be added to the total amount of spending. It will go straight to the bottom line, because, as I said, there is no surplus anymore to absorb the amount of money that will be needed, $50-, $100 billion, whatever it may be, and that applies also to the cost of an occupation after the war.

The postwar occupation was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at a cost of $1.8 billion per month to $3.8 billion per month, depending upon the difficulty, the size of the force. We could easily have an occupation force there trying to rebuild Iraq after the war of over 100,000 troops.

General Shinsheki, who last commanded the reconstruction forces in Bosnia, has more experience than anybody. He estimated they needed over 100,000 troops, and that would cost us on the upper end of that estimate. All of this has to be added to the budget.

Mr. Speaker, I offer my wholehearted support today for H.J. Res 27, which recognizes and commends the continuing dedication, selfless service, and commitment of members of the Armed Forces and their families in the war on global terrorism and in defense of the United States in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.

This measure is a simple gesture, but I hope it will convey the profound gratitude we feel for the service provided by our men and women in uniform. Since I was elected to Congress 20 years ago, I have represented Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina, which provides nearly 40 percent of the Air Force capability to ``Suppress Enemy Air Defenses.'' Like most Members, I also represent hundreds of men and women in the National Guard and Reserves, who are contributing to this nation's defense now more than ever before. So I know firsthand of the dedication we recognize today.

To all of you I offer this message. Your dedication to the defense of America, your willingness to go in harm's way, our unparalleled capabilities, and your unequaled bravery warrant our highest praise and deepest appreciation. Wherever you are serving, I extend a hearfelt ``thank you.'' Indeed, we should all thank God that there are such Americans willing to go anywhere and pay the price of defending freedom and the security of this country.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend and colleague, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price), for taking charge of this Special Order and making this information available. It is awfully difficult to get all of this detail and all of its complexity out so that everybody can understand why we are so concerned. This is not just political rhetoric we are going through tonight.

I have one chart here which runs the risk of being a little complex, but it tells a great deal about where we are. First of all, it shows the surplus that we thought we had that OMB estimated in January of 2001 as $5.637 trillion. A few weeks ago, OMB came back to us, the Office of Management and Budget, and says, whoops, we were wrong. We have to make economic adjustments to that surplus of $3.174 trillion. What that means is that the adjusted surplus, the real surplus in economic reality now is $2.463, not $5.63 trillion.

Then if we look at these enacted policies, and these are things done today, legislated, which have committed the available surplus, we will find they add up to mostly the tax cuts, $2.6 trillion. As a consequence, we have already committed all of the available surplus still remaining after economic adjustments from the $5.6 trillion surplus last January. In fact, we are $19 billion over and above that surplus if we do not do another thing, just sit still and do not increase any policies.

However, the administration, knowing that, is proposing nearly $2 trillion in additional action, the lion's share of which goes to additional tax cuts, two tax cuts that come to about $1.4 trillion. As a consequence, they are adding

$2.1 trillion to the national debt, which, with cumulative deficits between 2002 and 2011, will come to $2.1 trillion.

Here in one chart, very graphic, is why we are concerned. Now we are living in this sweet spot. Those are the peak years of the baby boomers when they are doing better and paying into the Social Security and building up a surplus, for now. As this chart shows graphically with these red bars here below the line, in 2017 that gravy train comes to a halt. Social Security goes cash negative, and it is that that we should be getting ready for right now. We are doing just the contrary of what we should be doing to prepare for those years when the baby boomers will be retiring.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today to voice grave concerns about this bill. This bill reflects a steady erosion of the federal government's commitment to provide a safety net for low-income working families.

States now face a severe fiscal crisis due to the slack economy. This bill imposes expensive new requirements on states, without providing sufficient funding to help states meet these requirements. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the additional costs to states of meeting the increased work requirements in this bill are between eight billion and eleven billion dollars over five years.

This bill largely mirrors the welfare plan that President Bush first put forth last year and proposed again this year. The President's 2004 budget makes clear that the President's welfare plan is just one part of a larger drive to abandon the Federal government's traditional role of providing a safety net for society's most vulnerable members. The budget also includes plans to recast several other major federal programs for low-income individuals and families as block grants to states. The President offers states increased program flexibility and administrative streamlining, but requires in exchange that states give up the traditional assurance that future federal funding will keep pace with the estimated need for these programs. The programs affected by these policies provide health care and housing to low-income children, elderly, persons with disabilities, and low-wage workers.

If the President's proposal for welfare reform is any indication, these other block grant proposals point the way toward a shrinking federal financial commitment to the poor. States will be left to figure out how to fill the fiscal hole. This raises very serious concerns that I encourage my colleagues to consider long and hard before heading down this path.

The President's block grant proposals are likely to lead to enormous inequities across states as to who gets assistance and who does not. A major role of federal income security policy is to provide a level playing field by offering a safety net to all citizens. Under the president's plan, low-income individuals and families will be the mercy of geography.

Income security programs are sensitive to economic conditions. Need increases disproportionately when the economy is slack and state budgets are tight. Only the federal government has the ability to borrow when times are bad. Block grant funding will give states the incentive to respond to hard times by cutting low-income benefits more than they would choose to do otherwise.

I voted for welfare reform, and I along with Members of both parties have cheered the progress of former AFDC beneficiaries into work during the prosperous 1990s. But that progress requires support in the form of child care and other vital services. Penny-wise but pound-foolish policies now threaten that vital underpinning and they risk all our recent progress against dependence.

Finally, I believe the President's overall priorities deserve serious questioning. At the same time he proposes to shrink the federal commitment to the poor, he proposes $1.5 trillion in new tax cuts that largely benefit our nation's most prosperous, create record deficits, and burden working families with a growing debt tax. The Administration now argues that its tax-cut plan is really an anti-poverty plan because it will stimulate growth and create jobs. This is the old theory of trickle-down economics that has been discredited time and time again. Tax policy does not exist in a vacuum. The point of safety-net programs is to support people when the economy falters, or when circumstances in their own lives make it difficult or impossible for them to participate fully in the economy.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I congratulate the chairman of the Committee on Small Business; the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Velazquez), the ranking member; and my colleague, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), for facilitating the legislation before us. This is not only good, but necessary, legislation. I am glad to see us move it.

S. 141, this bill before us, would allow the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, to change its 2003 technical assumptions regarding the SBA general business program. Without this change, everybody should understand this, SBA will have to reduce the 2003 loan volume supported by this program by about 50 percent, 50 percent below the 2002 level of $9.3 billion.

This legislation was referred to our committee, the Committee on the Budget, because it required an exception to the usual strictures of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act that bind OMB to one set of assumptions throughout a budget year. That is why it is necessary for us to bring it to the floor. I guess we could call this directed scorekeeping, but in this case it is justifiable scorekeeping.

OMB has had chronic problems with overestimating the credit subsidy rate for general business loans, the so-called 7(a) program and related programs. As a result, SBA has historically underestimated the volume of loans that can be supported by a given level of appropriations. Starting with the 2004 budget, this problem should be corrected because OMB has developed a much more sophisticated and accurate model for estimating the subsidy rates. For this fiscal year, 2003, however, the President declined to request sufficient appropriations to maintain the program level for general business loans, given this existing estimate of the subsidy rate.

Consequently, SBA is now on the horns of a dilemma. It can either reduce the maximum size of loans made to individuals or it can suspend the program once it runs out of authority before the end of this fiscal year. Neither of those is an attractive option, especially not now, in the midst of a very, very slack economy. We are struggling to get back on our feet and get people back to work. This legislation is proemployment legislation because, with the adjustment we make by this legislation, SBA will be able to support a 2003 loan volume of about $8.2 billion, which is close to its historic standard of $9 to $10 billion.

I enthusiastically support this legislation and I urge everyone to give it their support. It could create and should create additional jobs. It will certainly iron out a problem for small business borrowers and the SBA for the balance of this fiscal year, something we need to do and should do, and it is good legislation to boot. I urge everyone to support it.

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Velazquez), the distinguished ranking member of the Committee on Small Business, and I ask unanimous consent that she be given the ability to allocate that time.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to address a very grave matter that affects our country, and that is the status of our budget. It is hard to believe that just 2 years ago when we began the budget process as we do now this country looked forward to a surplus of $5.6 trillion. That was the projection of the Office of Management and Budget of the Bush administration in January of 2001. We have come a long, long way since January of 2002, since that fiscal year was concluded.

In the last fiscal year of the first Bush administration, there was a deficit of $290 billion. That was the deficit that President Clinton found on the doorstep waiting for him when he came to the White House on January 20, 1993. On February 17 he sent us a budget that would deal with that deficit, and over the next 8 years every year, every year, the bottom line of the budget got better, better to the point that in 1999 for the first time in 30 years, we balanced the budget.

In the year 2000, we had a surplus of $236 billion. So from 1992 until the year 2000, we took the budget from $290 billion in the red, in deficit, to $236 billion in surplus, a phenomenal record. President Bush the Second came to office, and we gave him an advantage that no President in recent times has ever enjoyed, a balanced budget, a budget that had a surplus the first year he was in office of 126, $127 billion.

Today, 2 years later, this is what has happened. That surplus cumulative over 10 years, the years 2002 through 2011, has declined from $5.644 trillion as projected by the Bush Office of Management and Budget to $2.122 trillion in the red, in deficit. From $5.6 trillion dollars in the black to $2.1 trillion in the red, that is a swing in the wrong direction of $7.2 trillion over a period of 2 years. We have never seen that at least since the Great Depression, such a dramatic fiscal reversal in our account.

That is what we want to address to you tonight because as this next chart will show, we face some decisions in the next couple of months that will determine the fiscal fate of this country for years to come. This is where the Bush administration began 2 years ago. This was a 10- year surplus, $5.6 trillion. They now say, and these are the numbers presented to us just last week by the Office of Management and Budget, that there was an overcalculation, a miscalculation due to the economy of $3.174 trillion so that the real surplus was really $2.463 trillion, $2.4 trillion instead of $5.6 trillion.

That is only part of the bad news. The rest of it is that the Bush administration bet the budget on this blue-sky forecast and over the last 2 years has committed $2.6 trillion in enacting policies, two thirds of which went to tax cuts. We have more than spent the cumulative surplus during that period of time so that this year we start with a cumulative deficit of $129 billion.

But the point to note here is that we are going to decide this year, in the next few months, whether we take that deficit, $129 billion in the red, a bad enough reversal since 2002, and add to it almost $2 trillion so that we add to the national debt $2.1 trillion. If we do that, it will be because we have chosen to do that. We could possibly out of abundance of charity say to those who passed the budget 2 years ago they thought they had a $5.6 trillion surplus, we told them we thought they were overstating it, but we will acknowledge that maybe this was negligence, this was a mistake, this was a miscalculation. Now we have to say if they go forward knowing what they know using their own projection, they will be deliberately, willfully, wantonly, and intentionally adding $2.1 trillion to the national debt.

Notice that this period of time is a critical period of time in our country's fiscal history because this is when the baby boomers, 77 million of them now marching to their retirement, first begin to retire in 2008. In 2010, 2011 they begin to draw not only their Social Security but their Medicare. So this is a period of time when we should be husbanding our resources so we can meet our obligation to the baby boomers who will be retiring in huge numbers and will double in time the number on Social Security and Medicare. Instead, during that very period of time we are incurring, if we follow the budget proposals before us, mostly the tax cuts proposals that have been made, $2.122 trillion in additional debt.

A large part of that additional policy will go to tax cuts. This chart shows the Bush tax cut in 2001, $1.349 trillion in revenues committed to that tax cut. This shows what we did a couple of years ago when we had a first stimulus package to try to get us out of the recession that we felt ourselves slumping into. Now the Bush administration has come up with an additional tax cut. They want to exclude dividends from taxation. I can understand why that would be appealing to a lot of people, but the revenue cost to us of the latest Bush tax proposal is another $615 billion. Those tax cuts made in June of 2001 were not permanent. In order to shoehorn them into the budget, they artificially terminated or truncated the taxes at the end of 2010.

If we make them permanent, which the Bush administration is proposing, that adds another $692 billion. Then there is another problem we will not even get into tonight, but it is on the tax agenda. Democrats and Republicans, the Congress and the White House will soon have to face the problem of the alternative minimum tax. Pretty soon millions of Americans will be paying more in the alternative minimum tax than they pay under the regular taxation. If we add all of those together and add the debt service that we have to pay additionally because we have used these tax cuts to dispense with our revenues, we have got a tax agenda here of $4.4 trillion. And this is coming at a time when I said we have some critical obligations to meet, we are draining the revenues dry.

Let me just stop on this point and recognize my friend, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards).

Before doing so, look at the next 5 years. These are numbers taken straight from the Bush budget, the Office of Management and Budget. Over the next 5 years, this year, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, they are proposing to spend a deficit of more than $400 billion in every one of those years.

What is distressing is not necessarily the size of these deficits to start with. If we are, after all, in a slumping economy, you would expect to see a deficit then. But there is no abatement, no reduction. There is no diminution of this deficit in any of these years.

These are the numbers you get if you back out Social Security. The total amount of deficits we will incur in the general fund of the budget if we follow this plan over the next 5 years, 2004 through 2008, is $2.14 trillion. As I said earlier, that is not the result of what we did previously; that is the result of decisions we are about to make now. This is where it will take us.

Notice that they stop at the end of 5 years. Last year and in 2001 we had a budget that went out 10 years, because we had found from experience that fiscal discipline was served by projecting the consequences of your fiscal actions out as far as you could, and 10 years was deemed to be a good projection period. But if you run this out 10 years, the situation only gets worse.

Mr. Speaker, I now would like to yield to my friend, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards) to pick up here and talk about some of the consequences in this budget for programs that all Americans support.

Mr. Speaker, on the chart I have just displayed it is clear from the Office of Management and Budget that the real surplus adjusted for the real economy over the last couple of years is not $5.6 trillion, but $2.4 trillion. Out of that $2.4 trillion in real surplus, the Bush administration has already cut $1.349 trillion and $42 billion; add those two together and you get easily $1.4 trillion. Nearly two-thirds of the remaining surplus has been cut, has been diminished, due to tax cuts already passed now in the face of the fact that there is no remaining surplus.

After you factor in these tax cuts and factor in the spending increases, mainly for defense and homeland security, which we all supported, but nevertheless, his budget left no room for contingencies like that, when you factor in those additional spending items, the surplus not only disappears, it goes deep in deficit for as far as the eye can see.

Mr. Speaker, let me enlarge upon the point the gentleman is making, and that is, as bad as the Bush administration says, when pressed, where is your solution, what plan do you have? Cut spending, cut spending.

In truth, as the gentleman is pointing out with a very specific example, there are plenty of spending cuts built into this budget already. One of them is impact aid, which amounts to the Federal Government saying to military installations, we are not going to pick up the full impact of the children of military dependents in the public schools in that particular locality. We are going to let the local folks pay that and not do what other employers do and continue contributing some of the costs of it. That is one example.

The gentleman from North Carolina is going to get up and give another example about the larger education bill that already is cut in this bill. If you took the whole budget for discretionary spending, the 13 appropriation bills that the gentleman's committee reports and we pass, which constitutes the discretionary budget, if you take all of nondefense discretionary spending and cut it all out, it would not replace the $400 billion deficit in the general fund we expect next year.

That does not include the war against Iraq. That does not include the war against terror. The Secretary of Defense told us the other day, if and when those costs come, we will send up a supplemental. If you add that to the bottom line, it gets worse.

Let me now yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge), who used to be the Superintendent of Education in North Carolina, to further the effects of some of cuts in education in this budget.

Mr. Speaker, what the gentleman is talking about is the authorization act Mr. Bush signed and signed into law and took credit for.

The authorization act calls for $9 billion more in the fiscal year 2004 than his budget in this year's request.

After-school programs, primarily?

Before-school programs.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman's point, and the point of the gentleman before him, was that even in this budget with big deficits, $400 billion and more every year for the next 5 years, $2.1 trillion in the general fund, additional deficits, additional debt; even with those bottom lines, we have these significant cuts already made in this budget, and we are still running almost a half a trillion dollars in the red every year.

Mr. Speaker, to further explain and clarify other things that are buried in this budget is the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott), to whom I now yield.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, let me just clarify the chart the gentleman has, which is very graphic. The blue bar charts, the blue bars above the horizontal axis show the surplus that is accumulating in Social Security, for now.

But it is for a limited period of time, intended to be used for parents, for the retirement of the baby boomers. The red bars that get deeper and deeper as you approach 2037 show the net cash outflow in the Social Security trust fund beginning in about 2017, which is not that far away, 13, 14 years from now.

I thank the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott).

Now I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper) who was here from 1983 until 1994 when he ran for Senate from Tennessee. But before leaving the House of Representatives he cast one of the hard votes that a number of us mustered the courage to pass and that was a vote for the Clinton budget in 1993, which laid the foundation for a decade of fiscal progress during the 1990s, a period when the bottom line of the budget got better and better and better every year until finally, in 1998-1999 we were in surplus for the first time in 30 years.

Absolutely not.

We warned that this would happen, but we did not see, even in our admonitions, the severity of the problem we have before us now.

If the gentleman will yield, the gentleman was in the investment banking business for a period. He knows the name Goldman Sachs. And I understand one of their economists today said they predict that the unified deficit for this year will be in the $400 billion range. That means that is after netting out, backing out the Social Security surplus. The unified deficit, by their projection, will be in the $400 billion range this year.

That is depressing enough, but the problem is those deficits continue on and on and on without any abatement.

Mr. Speaker, the point I was making at the outset is, 2 years ago OMB projected a surplus of $5.6 trillion. The Bush administration then enacted a massive tax cut taking advantage of that big surplus. They now acknowledge that they overstated, miscalculated by some $3.2 trillion. It really was not $5.6 trillion in surplus. It was more like $2.4 trillion in surplus.

The problem is that tax cuts have largely already committed that amount of money. As we begin this fiscal year, instead of having a cushion fund, a huge surplus of $5.6 trillion, we are in the red. We have fully dissipated that surplus and we are in the red $129 billion.

But they, knowing that, proposed additional tax cuts and additional measures that would drive us deeper in the red over the next 5 years to the tune of $2.1 trillion which is intentional. You could at least excuse what happened before as negligent miscalculation. I do not. I think they should have seen the storm clouds gathering over the economy and understand that the surplus was overstated; but chalk it up to negligence. This is willful, wanton, and intentional.

Mr. Speaker, there is no question about it. A lot of the economic effect was already in place before 9/11. That is a key point to understand.

Furthermore, we now know that the surplus is gone, per OMB. They have acknowledged it. CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, says the same thing. That ought to be an alarm sound calling for us to begin developing plans like the plan we developed with the President's father in 1990, the Budget Summit Agreement, the Clinton budget in 1993, the Balanced Budget Agreement of 1997. Three times in the 1990s we did extra-special exercises on the budget that ratcheted down and helped put us in a surplus for the first time in a generation.

This budget acknowledging the problems it has got now and in the foreseeable future does nothing. The most that they offer is a new disdain for deficits. They basically say deficits do not matter, a trillion here, a trillion there; it is no big deal.

I do.

That is Senator Dole, I think. The point we are trying to make now is that we may have a tax cut today, but if it ends up causing the government to incur more debt, the debt has to be paid. It has to be serviced. Interest on it has to be paid; and eventually, the people that pay taxes will have to service that debt, and there is a debt tax, a stealth tax that will come due, not in the near term, but whenever we do not have a surplus to charge it to anymore, and we do not, then what we do is charge it to the next generation, and that means our children and grandchildren.

So we can have it all in this budget. They pay the tax. They pay the bill, the debt tax.

Let me wrap up and let us bring it to a conclusion because the gentleman has been in investment banking for the last 6 or 7 years, and the gentleman knows that traditional economic theory for as long as we have known anything about it has held that deficits have the same effect that any supply and demand function has. The government goes into the capital markets. In addition to private borrowers, it elbows out the private borrowers. It runs up interest rates, and high interest rates stifle growth in the long run.

So we may get a little bit of kick right now out of running a deficit, but

in the long run we have got the debt to pay; it is a fiscal drag on the economy.

Secondly, it is a form of dissaving. When the government borrows the money it is just like an individual borrowing money. He is dissaving rather than actually saving and that takes away from the savings pool that we have got for capital formation and building the productive assets of this country, and over the long run it means we are not as productive as we otherwise would be.

Then, finally, there is a moral aspect, which I just mentioned. When we charge our excesses to the deficit, we are charging it to the next generation, namely, our children and grandchildren. No way around it. Everybody's recognized that moral aspect in the past. This is an intergenerational thing. They will not only have to pay our Social Security deficit and Medicare deficit, they will also have to pick up the accumulated debts, the other things that we chose not to pay in our time because of this budget.

Mr. Speaker, on that point we conclude. I thank the gentlemen for participating.

Mr. Speaker, this past week in my hometown, York, South Carolina, we made history Ivory Latta, standing all of 5 feet 6 inches in her shoes, set a new state scoring record in high school basketball, breaking the standing record of 3,427 points set by Allison Feaster, now a player for the Charlotte Sting.

Ivory was within reach of the record when York Comprehensive High School went up against East Forsyth High in the Dell Curry Basketball Shoot-Out in Charlotte, and she lost no time going after it. In the first 8 seconds of the game, she stole the ball and went in for a lay- up. She went on to score 52 points. This brought her career total to 3,439 points, more than any other player in our state, boy or girl, has ever scored. Since basketball season is far from over, Ivory will score more, and raise the bar even higher, before her high school career is finished.

Ivory Latta is a star in the classroom as well as on the basketball court. She has a grade point ratio of 3.9, and is headed for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on scholarship next fall.

I bring this young lady's feat to the attention of the House because I think we will be hearing a lot more from Ivory Latta as she takes her extraordinary skills and team-play spirit on to college and possibly into the pro's. As her congressman, I share Ivory Latta's story with you because I am immensely proud of her. So is everyone throughout the Carolinas, and not least in York, which has declared Friday, January 10, ``Ivory Latta Day.''

The following is an editorial tribute to Ivory Latta that appeared in The Herald in Rock Hill, South Carolina on January 8, 2003:

[From the Herald, Jan. 8, 2003]

Latta Deserves Accolades

York's Ivory Latta now stands as the greatest high school

basketball scorer, boy or girl, in South Carolina history,

and the universal sentiment seems to be: It couldn't happen

to a nicer kid.

On Friday, the day Latta reached and then exceed the

scoring record, her biggest concern was her team. While she

may be the spark plug for the York Comprehensive High School

Lady Cougars, she is, first and foremost, a team player.

On this day, the Cougars would fall to East Forsyth in the

Dell Curry High School Basketball Shootout in Charlotte. But

nothing could eclipse the accomplishment of Latta, the 5-

foot-six guard who scored 52 points in the game, bringing her

career total to 3,439.

In reaching this pinnacle, Latta had to break the scoring

title of another formidable local athlete. Until Friday, the

scoring record of 3,427 points had been held by Allison

Feaster, the Sting player, who set that record her senior

year at Chester High School, in 1994.

Latta seems to be following in Feaster's footsteps in other

ways as well. Feaster was an outstanding student who went on

to graduate from Harvard University in 1998. Latta, who

maintains a 3.9 grade-point average, is headed for the

University of North Carolina on a basketball scholarship.

In addition to being tops in scoring, Latta has set

numerous other records, including the number of 3-pointers

made in a season (121), 30-point or more games in a season

(23), 40-point or more games in a season (9), free throws

made in a season (229) and free throws made in a state

championship (17).

Some young player, perhaps one just learning to dribble a

basketball, may someday challenge this amazing record.

Whoever that player may be, he or she could do no better than

emulate Latta as a role model.