Date: 2014-06-12
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. I thank my colleague. the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee. for all his work on this. The bills that we are seeing today on the floor of the House are part of a series of bills that have come out of the Ways and Means Committee from our Republican colleagues that run up our national debt by putting hundreds of billions of dollars on a credit card by permanently extending a number of business tax credits. In the process. they are actually violating their own budget that they had on the floor just a few months ago. That is why. Mr. Speaker. this is not a serious attempt to help small businesses. By bringing these measures up one at a time in a rifleshot fashion. our Republican colleagues are abandloning what they said we should do. which we agree we should do on a bipartisan basis. which is to tackle tax reform in a fiscally responsible way. After all. Mr. Speaker. we are not helping small businesses by running up our national debt. It was just about a month ago when our Republican colleagues told us that the biggest threat to future economic growth in this country was projected deficits in the out years. We have said to our Republican colleagues we need to work together to reduce that longterm deficit. It is not a question about whether we should do it. it is a question of how we should do it. But this bill. and these bills on the floor today. take us in the opposite direction. Together. they are going to add over $614 billion to our credit card if you add up all these rifleshot bills that have come out of the Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Speaker. what happened to all the rhetoric about fiscal discipline. about getting our deficits in order? Out the window. Just to put these numbers in perspective. that $640 billion on the credit card is 30 times what it would cost to extend emergency unemployment compensation to 3 million Americans who are out of work today through no fault of their own. So contrasting these bills with the budget rhetoric we heard a few months ago about reducing our deficits is total doublespeak. Our Republican colleagues know it doesnt meet the laugh test. When we had the debate on this very floor about the Republican budget. we pointed out that the claim that it balanced in 10 years was based on all sorts of Enronlike accounting gimmicks. For example. they assumed all the revenues that would come in over the next 10 years from the Affordable Care Act at the same time they said they were repealing the Affordable Care Act. Both things cant happen at the same time. Yet today. even if you take the Republican budget gimmicks. as they would have us do. even if you do that. their budget no longer balances in 10 years. it no longer balances in 10 years. In fact. if you look carefully at the rules governing this debate. our Republican colleagues had to change their own rules to allow this bill to be on the floor today because otherwise it would have violated their claim of a balanced budget. So. that is the kind of gimmickry we have going on here. If our Republican colleagues were really serious about reducing the longterm deficit. as they claimed to be a month ago. they would be willing to close some of those special interest tax breaks in order to help reduce the deficit. and yet their budget doesnt close a single special interest tax break. It keeps the big subsidies for Big Oil companies. it keeps tax breaks for hedge fund owners. The bills before us today are under a rule that doesnt allow us to pay for them by closing some of those tax breaks. Mr. LEVIN and I would have loved to have the opportunity to say: lets pay for this business expensing provision by shutting down some of the unproductive tax breaks. tax breaks that are there not because they have economic value but because a powerful political interest got that tax break in the Code. Yet our Republican colleagues have a rule that says we cant touch those.