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“GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT BALANCING THE FEDERAL BUDGET” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H4731-H4732 on June 22, 2004.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT BALANCING THE FEDERAL BUDGET
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, first I would like to submit a statement for the Record concerning a tremendous accomplishment announced today by the Department of Agriculture. For the first time now in 20 years, all paper food stamps are being replaced with electronic benefits.
Mr. Speaker, today, I joined Secretary Veneman at a ceremony to announce the completion of a decades-old project. Thanks to the commitment of Congress, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service, financial institutions, retail outlets, and State and local agencies, our Nation's Food Stamp Program now issues benefits completely electronically. Through Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT), the program moves into the 21st century, allowing over 20 million food stamp recipients to shop at over 145,000 businesses more efficiently than ever.
The Food Stamp Program now runs completely on an electronic-based system. Using the same technology as most debit card systems, recipients carry a plastic card secured with a Personal Identification Number. Service is improved for clients and accountability for purchases is ensured. In addition, it reduces administrative costs allowing more funds to be channeled into food purchases rather than printing, shipping, counting, endorsing, and destroying coupons.
EBT began as a demonstration project in 1984 in Reading, PA. However, it wasn't until the early 90s that the project expanded into Maryland, Ohio, New Mexico, and my home State of Minnesota. Due to high demand by the States, an EBT Task Force was established in 1993 and published an article in 1994 demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of the program modification. This article proved pivotal, and in 1996 Congress passed the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which mandated that all States implement EBT by October of 2002.
This month marks a tremendous achievement. As of June 15, every State in the Nation has finally implemented EBT. It took the work of thousands of Federal, State, and local staff along with numerous contractors, financial institutions, retailers, and the advocacy community.
Thanks to the new electronic system, the Food Stamp Program error rate is the lowest in the history of the program. It has already helped to eliminate much of the theft, fraud and abuse related to paper coupons. EBT brings the program into the 21st century with new mainstream technology. Now, eligible recipients can readily patronize authorized stores for nutritional purposes.
None of this could have been done without teamwork and the genuine care of so many individual and organizations. Today our Nation's hungry can more efficiently receive the nutrition assistance. I am proud to recognize and congratulate not only the USDA and Food and Nutrition Service, but all of the people, agencies, and businesses as well that have brought the Food Stamp Program into a new era.
Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk about the Federal budget and what has happened over the last several years in terms of Federal spending.
I know that there are others of my colleagues that are here tonight that came in the election of 1994. When we first came here, we were told by the Congressional Budget Office and others that if we did not get serious about balancing this Federal budget that by the time my children got to be my age, my children could be facing a Federal tax rate of over 80 percent just to pay the interest on the national debt.
I am happy to report that during the first 5 years of the Republican-
led Congress, we dramatically reduced the rate of growth of spending here in Washington. From 1995 until the year 2000, overall spending here at the Federal level increased at an average rate of only 3.2 percent. That is at a time when the average family budget was going up about 3.5 percent. So the good news is we literally controlled the Federal budget so it was growing at a slower rate than the average family budget. The net result is we went from roughly $250 billion deficits to $250 billion surpluses.
That is the good news. Starting in about the year 2000, and certainly accelerating in 2001, for a whole lot of reasons, and I will talk about those in a minute, Federal spending began to explode. We started to return to some of the old bad habits. I think in some respects it happened in part because we had the surpluses.
It is much easier to say ``no'' to new spending when you have a deficit. When you have extra money in the bank, everybody comes in and says, now we can finally afford to pay for this program or to fully fund that program. So spending began to increase.
As I mentioned, from 1995 until 2000, Federal spending grew at a rate of about 3.2 percent. Since 2001, as you can see in this chart, things began to accelerate. Assuming that we can live with the budget numbers that we have passed here in the House with our blueprint, Federal spending between 2001 and today will grow at a rate of 6.4 percent: 3.2 percent, 6.4 percent.
I do not want to bore people with statistics; but in simple terms, we have allowed Federal spending to grow at double the rate it grew through much of the 1990s, and it really is time for us to get serious; to get back on a plan not only to balance the budget, but ultimately to pay down additional parts of that huge Federal debt.
Back in the Midwest, we know that, generally speaking, there is almost an ethic among farmers that you pay off the mortgage and you leave the kids the farm. Well, unfortunately, we are back to the business of selling the farm and leaving our kids the mortgage.
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One of the answers is to go back to what we did back in the 1990s, and that is something we call PAYGO and spending caps. A lot of people were skeptical in terms of whether they would work. Even Chairman Alan Greenspan was skeptical in terms of whether or not long-term spending caps and PAYGO would work. But I would like to read some quotes from Chairman Greenspan, the first of which was from the House Committee on the Budget testimony, September of 2002. He said, ``Restoring fiscal discipline must be a high priority. The progress of the 1990s in reducing budget deficits might have been elusive were it not for the budget rules that worked far better than many skeptics, myself included, had expected.
``Now is not the time to abandon the discipline and the structure that worked so well for so long. The framework enacted in the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 must be preserved.''
Those are pretty strong words for Chairman Greenspan.
He went on to say even more. In fact, in response to a question that I made in the House Committee on the Budget about spending caps and PAYGO, he said, specifically in July of 2003, ``I would like to see the restoration of PAYGO and the discretionary caps which essentially will restrain the expansion of the deficit and, indeed, ultimately contain it. It did that back in the early 1990s, and I thought it was quite surprisingly successful in restraining what had been a budget which had gotten out of kilter. I would like to see those restraints reimposed; and by their very nature, they will bring back fiscal balance.''
Mr. Speaker, it is time that we bring back fiscal balance. Chairman Greenspan is exactly right. We thought that we could allow spending caps and PAYGO to expire, and it would have no consequence. We were wrong.
We will get a chance later this week to vote on spending caps and PAYGO. I hope all Members on both sides of the aisle will join me in supporting that measure.
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