John Spratt Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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,

The president blames the disappearance of the surplus on excessive spending, but all of the extra spending since he came to office is spending that he either initiated or approved,

We are pushing the envelope. We are using our troops pretty much to their maximum utility.

What we've got now is a situation where none of this is easily possible,

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.

What we've done is design a package that is front-loaded and fast-acting deliberately.

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

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.

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.

could easily add $50 to $100 billion more.

Even after the economy is back on its feet and grows -- upon their assumption of the rate of 3.2 percent a year -- even then, we still have a negative bottom line after you back out Social Security and Medicare, as we think he should,

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

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

These additional tax cuts can only have one affect; they will add dollar to dollar to the deficit which (is) already enormous, $521 billion this year,

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

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

any kind of significant downturn in the economy is going to put the budget back in the red.

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

This budget is not going to put us on a path to balancing the budget. Not in five years, not in 10 years, not in 20 years. It would put us on a path to endless deficits and a Mount Everest of mountainous debt.

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.

There were no hearings, there was no testimony,

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

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.

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

tax cuts so large they left no room for error.

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

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.

Democrats and Republicans alike support our military personnel.

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.

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.

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

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.

Our country, the United States of America, may be the worlds largest economy and the worlds 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?