Date: 2012-05-10
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker. theres agreement here on two things: one. we need to reduce our longterm deficitsthe question is not whether we need to do that. but how. second. we agree that the automatic. indiscriminate. meatax cuts scheduled to begin next January are the wrong way to reduce the deficit. We need a responsible alternative. Now. the House Democrats put forward a budget. as did the President. that deals with this issue over 10 years in a balanced way. building on the more than $1 trillion of cuts we already made on a bipartisan basis last August. and including additional cuts. but also cutting tax loopholes that benefit special interests. and asking people who make more than $1 million per year to help a little bit more toward deficit reduction. That is the kind of bipartisan approach thats been recommended by bipartisan groups like SimpsonBowles and RivlinDomenici. Unfortunately. the Republican approach to the budgetand now to the sequester issuetakes this lopsided approach. Now. lets remember. 98 percent of our House Republican colleagues. while they come down here and talk about how we have this big deficit and debt problem. they have signed a pledge that says were not going to ask for one penny of additional contribution from people making more than $1 million a year to help reduce our deficit. not one penny. We wont take one penny of taxpayer subsidies away from the big oil companies to help reduce the deficit. And the math is pretty simple after that. If you say from the beginning youre not going to ask people making $1 million a year to help do a little more to reduce our common deficit. if you say youre not going to ask companies that have these tax loopholes that actually incentivize them to ship jobs overseas to pay a little bit more. what do you do? Your budget has to whack everyone else. and thats what it did. Thats why their budget ended the Medicare guarantee. Thats why they cut $800 billion from Medicaidtwothirds of Medicaid spending goes to help seniors and disabled people in nursing homes. Thats why they slash vital investments in education. research. infrastructure. things that had been bipartisan investments to help our economy grow. Thats what they did then. And now on this sequester proposal. what do they do? The chairman talks about eligibility. These are people who are eligible to get food and nutrition assistance because theyre struggling. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. which is our referee around here. has told us what the realworld consequences of their proposal before us today would be. Over 22 million households with kids would see their food and nutrition support reduced. 300.000 kids knocked off the school lunch program. 300.000 kids knocked off the Childrens Health Insurance Program. Those are the kinds of choices they make because they refuse to take a balanced approach to this deficit issue. Now. I want to say one word about defense spending. Last August. as part of the bipartisan Budget Control Act. our Republican colleagues deliberately chose to expose defense spending to deep additional cuts rather than ask millionaires and big corporations to share a greater responsibility for paying for our national security. Now our Republican colleagues are on the floor today saying these defense cuts would devastate our national security. but they still. even today. apparently arent concerned enough about the impact of those cuts on national security to ask millionaires to pay a little bit more for our common defense. Thats the same kind of mentality that led us to put two warsIraq and Afghanistanon our national credit card. Even as we asked our soldiers to sacrifice. we said were just going to put that on our national credit card. So theres a fundamental question here: If youre so concerned about those cuts to defense. why is it you wont close one special interest tax loophole to help pay for them? We. the Democrats. had a substitute amendment that we would have been able to debate and vote on right here today. We took an alternative approach. We also prevented those defense cuts. You know how we did it? We said we dont need to make these big agricultural subsidies in direct payments. We also dont think we should have taxpayer subsidies for the big oil companies. We did it in a different way. Apparently. our Republican colleagues are kind of worried about what we were going to propose because they brought a closed rule to the floor. meaning Democrats didnt have an opportunity to get a vote on our alternative. I reserve the balance of my time.