John Spratt Quotes (36 Quotes)

Once we got the budget today, we found out why it was so long coming,

Your tax cut gets bigger and bigger as time goes on and it takes huge cuts out of all of these accounts, including defense.

It's daunting to consider where we were five years ago, as we sat here on a surplus of 236 billion.

We're ready to work with the Bush administration, ... But we're also ready to work against any budget that returns us to never-ending deficits and a mountain of debt.

Without the Guard and Reserve, our active duty troops could hardly deploy.

We can have tax cuts, but when we have tax cuts and do not have a surplus, the amount of the tax cut goes straight to the bottom line, adds to the deficit, and the deficit adds to the national debt, and sooner or later, the debt has to be paid.

It would put us on a path to endless deficits and a Mount Everest of mountainous debt,

Three big assumptions proved wrong: one, that the Iraqi people would welcome us as liberators; two, that oil would soon pay for Iraqi's rebuilding; and, three, that we have plenty of troops, weapons, and equipment for the postwar situation.

We developed during the 1990s a series of budget process rules that helped us bring to heel these deficits, diminishing every year and moving the budget so into surplus.

This hurricane is one more argument, and a strong one, for higher conservation requirements.

This is a watershed budget. It will set a course for us for years to come.

With no other security forces on hand, U.S. military was left to confront, almost alone, an Iraqi insurgency and a crime rate that grew worse throughout the year, waged in part by soldiers of the disbanded army and in part by criminals who were released from prison.

I think what's happened here is the Republicans are smarting under the charge that they've raided the Social Security trust fund. Their proposal now purports to stop ... the so-called raid. If there's any raid, it's one they've conducted,

Domestic discretionary spending on education and health care and the environment has been growing at 2 to 3 percent a year. He says we have to rein it in, but he ignores the spending category that is the big spike in the budget.

More deficits, more debt, and more denial.

The disturbing thing about the Bush forecast is that we are not just looking at the cyclical downturn -- a return to budget deficits because the economy is down, ... Fox News Sunday.

Just a few short years ago in the year 2000, the last full fiscal year of the Clinton administration, this country was running a surplus of $236 billion.

What we are effectively doing, I say this to the young people of America whom my colleagues represent, is leaving our children and grandchildren the tab for fighting a war, letting them pay for the lion's share of it by simply adding it to the national debt.

I am not disputing the need for this money. What I am disputing and calling attention to is the fact that we are taking the tab for defense in our time against terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere and shoving this tab off onto our children.

As costs mount, in lives and dollars, it is natural to second guess, but one lesson I hope we have learned is that the U.S. cannot go it alone in a policy that leaves American troops taking all the risk and American taxpayers paying all of the costs.

Don't begin to think we're going to reach common ground,

This war so far has cost us $125 billion and counting, because largely we decided to do it on our own, with only the United Kingdom as a paying, fully participating partner.

And it raises a fundamental question: How long can we move the world in one direction while we move in another direction, and do we want to backslide into an era that we finally emerged from where we had a nuclear weapon for every tactical mission?

The deficit in 2006 is almost certain to increase, because the bulk of spending for Katrina and Rita will occur in 2006, ... What's worse is that when the Congressional Budget Office factors the Bush agenda into the budget, CBO sees the deficit doubling to 640 billion in 2015.

Since the Pentagon underestimated the number of troops required after the end of hostilities, we were not prepared to prevent looting or to guard hundreds of weapons dumps spread throughout the country.

We have got thousands of nuclear weapons in order to achieve deterrence.

If Republicans want to make the case that this is about Katrina, they're going to have to take tax cuts out of the package.

We would take a little bit of money out of a huge increase in ballistic missile defense and put it in a place where it will do a lot of good, namely, in targeted pay increases to our enlisted personnel, particularly our NCOs and our junior warrant officers.

The situation in Iraq, unfortunately, differs dramatically from the rosy picture that was painted for us by expatriates before the war.

We can set aside a surplus to save Social Security or Medicare, or we can pass the burden of the baby boomers retirement off on to our children,

Democrats and Republicans alike support our military personnel.

Our country, the United States of America, may be the world's largest economy and the world's only superpower, but we stretch ourselves dangerously thin by taking on commitments like Iraq with only a motley band of allies to share the burden.

They agreed on one thing for sure, that the gravest threat facing the United States is that of terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

The young in this country, and you fellows are young by my reckoning, have a right to be concerned about the course that our government, the Federal Government, is taking under President Bush.

It's hard to get a clear picture of exactly where we stand. We've made progress with the training of Iraqi security forces, but it's taken a lot longer to get there than we anticipated.

It is bad news for taxpayers, who might have to cover part of the unfunded pension costs for Northwest and Delta employees,