[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 119 (Tuesday, September 14, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H8152-H8153]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE SENATE GOP'S PROPOSAL FOR A 13-MONTH FISCAL YEAR
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 19, 1999, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, there are some times when we pick up the
paper and we cannot believe what we are reading. I am looking at the
Washington Post. The article is called: GOP Seeks to Ease Crunch With a
13-month Fiscal Year.
I came over to this floor because I want to put my name on record
right here and now against this. I will tell the Members why. This is
deja vu, for me. I was in the Washington State legislature in 1972 when
they did what we call the light bulb snatch. We took the first month of
the next year and pulled it into this year and said, now we have 13
months of money to spend in 12 months. That is exactly what some
brilliant theorist over in the other body has conceived of as a way of
avoiding being honest about this budget.
What happened in the State of Washington was that ultimately we lost
our bond rating, and when I became chairman of the Committee on Ways
and Means in 1983, I had to raise taxes to pay off this 13-month so we
could get our bond rating back. When I read that they are going to do
it in the United States Senate, that Republicans, the party of fiscal
responsibility, those people who are really close with our money, they
want to give it all back to us, are now going to create a fictitious,
that is the word they use, ``By creating this fictitious 13th month,
the lawmakers would be able to spend $12 to $16 billion more.''
This is Alice in wonder land run by the Republican party. When the
Committee on Ways and Means in the year 2001 is in Democratic hand and
I am sitting there, I do not want to have to clean up a mess created by
people who will not be honest about the budget process.
I just was in my district, like the gentleman from Washington before
me. I went to a liberal church talking about violence, and we talked
about a variety of things in a forum. I asked them, how many of you
want a tax break? Not a single person raised their hand, out of 150
people. They began to talk about it, and what 90 percent of them wanted
to do was to pay down the debt. But no, what we see in the Senate is we
do not want to be honest about doing what the President said, pay what
we need in social security first, then strengthen Medicare, and then
deal with whatever else we have to deal with.
I personally think the American people are ready to pay down the
debt. They all understand that when they get additional money and their
credit card is at $5,000, they do not go out and buy more, they pay
down that credit card debt.
We have an enormous debt, and yet what we are doing here is like the
county fair. There is a guy there with three walnut shells and a pea,
under it
[[Page H8153]]
and we move it around real fast and you are supposed to guess where the
pea is. What this is is a shell game so that the American people will
never understand what is happening here, except for the truth is right
here, by creating this fictitious 13th month.
{time} 0915
The people who thought it up ought to be ashamed of themselves. I do
not know how they can go around and say that they are fiscally
conservative and throw rocks at people like me who they call liberals.
I paid one of these off. I did what I had to do to be fiscally
responsible. It makes me angry to see people starting down this road
and if they lose control in here or lose control in the Senate, then
suddenly it will be the Democrats' problem, we will have to fix it. And
I object to that, and I object very strongly.
I think every Member ought to read this article and ask themselves do
they want to be put in that kind of a box. Because at some point they
have to pay it off. That debt is out there, and it has got to be paid;
and by increasing it by 12 to $16 billion, we do not fix anything; we
just make it worse.
So I urge everyone, Mr. Speaker, to read that article. And I will put
this article in the Record so that we can have it there and everybody
can see it and remember when we decided to start down this stupid path.
There is no excuse for this. There can be an honest budget discussion
in here, but it is going to require that the majority party talk to the
minority party, have conferences, talk about what the issues are.
It can be done, but it is going to have to take both sides working
together. And if it does not happen that way and we start down this
path, they are on their own. I am against it from the very first day I
see it in the paper.
Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the article to which I
referred.
[From the Washington Post, Sept. 14, 1999]
GOP Considers 13-Month Fiscal Year
(By Eric Pianin)
As they struggle to live within tough restrictions on how
much they may spend, Senate Republicans have found another
creative way to shoehorn popular domestic programs into next
year's budget: declaring the coming fiscal year 13 months
long instead of the usual 12.
By creating this fictitious 13th month, lawmakers would be
able to spend $12 billion to $16 billion more for labor,
health, education and social programs than they otherwise
would be permitted under budget rules. Because the additional
funds would not be technically released until immediately
after the fiscal year ends, they would not count against the
overall limits on federal spending next year.
``We all know we engage in a lot of smoke and mirrors,''
said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate
Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the
programs. ``But we have to fund education, NIH, worker safety
and other programs. It's a question of how we do it.''
The proposal--which has been embraced by Senate leaders--
highlights how difficult it is for congressional Republicans
to cut spending and live within tight budgets without
resorting to what many experts describe as fiscal gimmickry.
With the government awash in surpluses, there is certainly
the money to pay for extra programs next year. But to do so
would require breaking existing spending limits and, more
than likely, dipping into extra money generated by the
popular Social Security program--something both parties have
pledged not to touch.
As a result, GOP lawmakers have struggled to find ways of
spending money without technically breaking those limits. For
instance, lawmakers already have classified spending on farms
and the 2000 census as ``emergency'' spending not subject to
existing rules. All told, lawmakers already have exempted
nearly $28 billion in proposed spending next year from the
existing budget limits.
The 13th-month gambit promoted by Specter has been used
before on a smaller scale, but fiscal experts expressed
concern that Congress would simply be putting off its day of
reckoning by employing it on so large a scale.
``It avoids the problem, it doesn't solve the problem,''
said Robert Reischauer, former director of the Congressional
Budget Office. ``We will have spending caps in 2001 and 2002
as well, so all you've done is postponed and magnified the
problem.''
``They're degrading themselves and degrading the budget
process by resorting to these budget gimmicks,'' added Robert
L. Bixby, policy director of the Concord Coalition, a budget
watchdog group.
While it is far from clear whether House Republicans or the
White House will go along with the plan, the Senate's so-
called ``advance funding'' proposal underscores lawmakers'
desperation in trying to pass the largest and traditionally
most contentious spending bill without breaking the budget
deal that President Clinton and Congress agreed to in 1997.
Spending in the Labor-Health-Education bill includes
funding for health and human services programs, the National
Institutes of Health (NIH), job training, Head Start for
disadvantaged youth and Pell grants for college students.
Last year Congress could not come up with a bill that was
acceptable to the administration until the last minute, when
GOP leaders and the president negotiated a giant package that
included nearly $20 billion of additional spending for
domestic programs. GOP leaders felt burned by the arrangement
and have vowed to avoid such a deal this year.
Not counting mandatory entitlement programs, spending for
Labor-Health-Education programs totals roughly $92 billion
this fiscal year. For next year, House leaders have
essentially used the Labor-HHS bill as a piggy bank to
finance other spending bills and have set aside only $73
billion for the bill itself, a cut of roughly $19 billion.
Senate leaders have set aside a little more, $80.4 billion,
for those programs.
If such reductions were sustained, House Democrats have
warned that across-the-board spending cuts of as much as 32
percent would be required on education programs, Head Start,
NIH grants, Job Corps, AIDS research and scores of other
programs. Republicans and Democrats alike agree that the bill
will have to be beefed up substantially--probably to this
year's levels--to win passage and the president's signature.
``The bill as it is set up right now falls impossibly short
of funding levels that are necessary to ensure even basic
services in education, health and labor,'' said Linda Ricci,
a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget.
In the House, Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) is leading
an effort to try to identify $16 billion or so of offsetting
reductions in mandatory programs and other areas to finance
the additional Labor-Health-Education programs, but so far he
has reported little progress.
Rep. John Edward Porter (R-Ill.), Specter's counterpart on
the House Appropriations Committee, has grown frustrated with
the process and contends that Congress and the administration
must face the reality that the 1997 budget agreement is no
longer practical.
``I still believe in the end the caps are going to have to
be raised, and the question is whether you do it honestly or
whether you put into place all kinds of gimmicks, including
emergencies and forward funding and the like,'' Porter said.
But Specter, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted
Stevens (R-Alaska) and other Senate leaders see virtue in a
budgetary maneuver that would ensure adequate funding for
education and other programs next year and that meets the
letter--if not the spirit--of the budget law. Because the
non-Social Security budget surplus is supposed to be even
larger in the following year, such a move could also make it
easier to finance ongoing government programs without dipping
into Social Security reserves.
``If the money can be pushed off to expenditures in 2001,
that would give us the latitude of using that year's surplus
without breaking the caps,'' Specter said.
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