Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2006

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2006 -- (House of Representatives - March 16, 2005)

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

Before us today is an excellent budget, the result of an excellent process, and the product of an excellent chairman, the gentleman from Iowa.

Despite some occasional overheated rhetoric, the fiscal year 2006 budget resolution is, in fact, a modest attempt by a reasonable majority to hold down the growth of government spending. This is one of the strongest budgets I have seen since coming to Congress.

True, it makes tough choices. Imagine, it prioritizes spending, and it starts the long process of modernizing the Federal Government while rooting out waste, fraud, and inefficiency. But, Mr. Chairman, American taxpayers deserve no less, especially today. We are at war with an enemy who threatens us here at home and on the other side of the world.

Our security spending must therefore take priority, and in turn we must make difficult but necessary choices about non-security spending.

That is exactly what this budget does. It meets our needs at home and abroad without raising taxes, which would stifle our economy, or wasting money, which undermines the hard work the American people did to earn those tax dollars in the first place.

Of course, for some people, regardless of the fiscal and international circumstances, taxes and spending are never high enough. This year, as every year, they have warned us about the dire consequences of trusting the American people with their own money.

Last year, the same critics made the same criticism of our efforts, which we now know ultimately slowed the growth of non-security discretionary spending to about 1 percent. These critics assured us that our budget would bust a hole in the deficit. And yet last year, the deficit came in $109 billion smaller than experts originally thought it would, specifically because of the increased economic growth directly attributed to Republican tax relief passed since 2001.

Millions of jobs were created last year. Indeed, more than 3 million of them have been created since the House took up President Bush's similarly criticized Jobs and Growth tax relief package 21 months ago.

So, in short, Mr. Chairman, the economic data coming in every month speaks to the wisdom of the fiscal policies of the Republican majority. The critics were just wrong, and they are wrong again this year.

The principal mantra against this budget is that it will explode the deficit, despite the evidence of last year's shrinking deficit projections. What, one wonders, do they think that the $67.1 billion in additional spending that they propose at the Committee on the Budget markup would do?

The balanced budgets of the late 1990s should serve as our model, they say. Well, I agree. And I would remind them that the balanced budgets of the late 1990s were passed by Republican Congresses, without much help from our friends on the other side of the aisle. Hardly any of them voted for it.

How anyone takes credit for policies they opposed is beyond me, but I guess that is politics. But, again, so is the idea that raising $392.4 billion in new taxes, as Committee on the Budget Democrats proposed just last week, would somehow help the economy to create jobs.

Well, Mr. Chairman, the facts are indisputable: Democracy is on the march around the world; the war on terror is being won; the economy is growing; jobs are being created; deficit projections are shrinking; and the looming demographic crises facing Social Security and Medicare are being addressed, all thanks to the courage, the policies and the leadership of President Bush and this Republican Congress.

That the same people who have criticized us all along are criticizing our budget today, Mr. Chairman, only suggests we must be doing something right.

So I urge all my colleagues to give more momentum to our success and support the budget resolution before us.

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