Date: 2012-02-02
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. I yield myself such time as I may consume. This is the second budget bill that weve had today. Theres been a lot of talk about what we need to do to help move the economy forward. to help put people back to work. Lets be clear: as was acknowledged earlier. these bills do none of that. This will not help create one job. this is not going to help grow the economy. Weve got a lot of work that we should be doing. including taking up the Presidents jobs bill. which has been sitting in the House since last October. The economy remains very fragile. Those infrastructure investments and helping rebuild and repair our roads. our bridges. transit ways could be put to good use right now. With respect to this bill. the concern is that this creates actually a very misleading picture of what we can purchase in terms of goods and services with our dollars. and it gets more misleading over time. Why do I say that? Every American knows that when youre comparing the amount something costs between different periods of time. you have got to take into account inflation. You know what. $10 back 40 years ago bought a lot more than $10 today. What this bill does is it tries to kind of wish away inflation and. in that sense. it creates. as I say. a misleading sense of what we can expect in terms of goods and services purchased for taxpayer dollars going forward. I think every taxpayer would say that if we did not. we did not index their taxes for inflation. that would be a tax increase. Thats why we index taxes. If we decided to pass a law saying no more indexation of taxes. it would be a hidden tax increase. Now. here I want to give a very clear example. In fiscal year 2013. were going to spend $61 billion to help support our veterans. to help support our veterans. provide for veterans health care and other services. This is part of the discretionary budget. We also provide help in some of the mandatory budget. Now. this bill would have you believe that 10 years from now. that $61 billion is somehow going to provide you the same amount of goods and services to take care of our veterans. We know thats not true. We know that $61 billion 10 years from now is going to provide a lot less health care for people who served this country. And so lets not play makebelieve. and thats what this bill does. What the Congressional Budget Office does right now is they make the assumptions that reasonable forecasters would make. As the author of the bill has said. theres no law right now that tells CBO how to do it. We leave it to the independent. nonpartisan body. the Congressional Budget Office. to figure out whats the best way. what makes the most sense for budgeting purposes. And they say. you know what. we should do what every American does when theyre comparing dollars spent in the past or in the future. We need to normalize that. We need to index that to get a real sense of what taxpayer dollars will be able to purchase. otherwise. it creates a misleading impression. And so CBO. the independent group. said we need to take an account of inflation. What this bill does is says as a matter of law. ignore that. As a matter of law. were not going to wish away inflation. Were going to pass a law that says for these purposes. dont take it into account. And as I say. it will create a very misleading picture of what it will take to support investments like veterans health. With that. I reserve the balance of my time.