[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 1]
[House]
[Page 460]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                         NEW DEMOCRATIC BUDGET

  (Mr. CROWLEY asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. CROWLEY. Mr. Speaker, last week the Congressional Budget Office 
released its latest estimates for the budget surplus. The CBO laid out 
three different on-budget surplus estimates ranging from $800 billion 
to $1.9 trillion.
  Depending on the actions of this Congress, we can use the surplus 
wisely or it can be unwisely spent, without paying off the debt, 
shoring up Social Security, or funding desperately needed programs, 
such as providing prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients 
and school construction and modernization of our schools.
  Mr. Speaker, it is imperative that we pay down the national debt. I 
fully support the President's goals stated in his State of the Union 
Address to eliminate public debt by 2013.
  As has been indicated, this Congress, and implied by my colleagues on 
the other side of the aisle, the Republican leadership will not adhere 
to the spending caps in the fiscal year 2001 budget. For this reason, 
it is imperative that we use the surplus to ensure the long- term 
solvency of Social Security and pay off the national debt.
  Once we have done this, we can then use the remaining surplus and the 
money saved in interest payments on our debt to enact a voluntary 
prescription drug plan so that seniors do not have to choose between 
food and medication. We can help our crumbling schools and build new 
classrooms to relieve a system bursting at its systems. And, yes, we 
can even give targeted tax cuts to help hard working American families 
make ends meet.

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