Date: 2006-03-02
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

lend your eloquence on these issues. Let me make a couple of points. You touched on something enormously important About the Presidents commitment to more competitiveness in the economy and the strengthening of our workforce. Ybu -and I remember. we both came one Congress ago. We came here in January. 2003. and I remember the Presidents first State of the Union. He was standing not far from where we stand now. And the only line. frankly. I recall from that speech was a rather memorable one. He said that this Congress should not put off what future Congresses would do and this generation should not put off for future generations what it could do for itself. That sounded good. It sounded like a bold President saying that we have real opportunities today if we are daring. Well. you look several budgets later. You have a verbal commitment to make the economy stronger. You have a pattern of cutting student loans and making them harder to g6t. and by the way. changing the eligibility outside the budget process in the dead of night in a way that it is not even debated by this Congress. You have a promise of more effort to make the country competitive. You see reductions every year in workforce development programs. You see promises every year to strengthen our schools. and you see continued cuts in all of the educational programs in this country or so many of them. and the outright elimination of many of those programs. In fact. almost half of the title items in No Child Left Behind are gone with the wind now as we approach reauthorization. And you see a promise by this President to make America stronger. but it appears. Mr. MEEK. that making America stronger does not include making our workers stronger and creating H556 CC more fair. stronger conditions for them. As I said in the last hour. that is what this debate is about. It is not about cutting spending. You are not serious about cutting spending when you say. I am going to cut $45 billion and then cut taxes another $70 billion. The math works against you on that. You are not serious about cutting spending when you have had the greatest level of discretionary spending increase in the last 10 years. in the last several budgets. You are not serious about those things. What we have is an administration and a Congress that. frankly. is not somewhat serious about cutting spending. They are very serious about changing the definition of what we owe each other as Americans. They want to move us away from a world where we feel connected and obligated to each other across all kinds of lines. and they want to more or less move us to a place where you have got to take care of yourself. These 13 million families on Medicaid who have got to dig deeper in their pocket now to go to the doctor. well. we have decided that it is such an important proposition that poor people pay more for health care that we rammed that into the budget reconciliation several weeks ago. or they rammed it in. .They think it is so important to spend less money on child support that they rammed that into the reconciliation package several months ago. It goes on and on. But the question is what exactly do we think we owe each other as Americans. There are some people and some of them sit on the other side of the aisle who believe that we owe each other very little. There are some of us who believe that we can be no stronger than some of our people who areweak and who are hurting through no fault of their own. D 1630 There are a lot of kids in this country who will be pushed off Medicaid because of this reconciliation bill a few weeks ago. There are a lot of kids in this country who will not get the doctor visits they need because the Federal Government changed them the Medicare rules a few weeks ago. Those kids are blameless. They did not ask to be born into families under Medicaid or the distressed communities they live in. So it is very much a matter of priorities and values and choices. but -as I close out. I want to make one other .point. You talked about the importance of candor with the American people and the �importance of leveling with the American people. not promising you are cutting and spending when you are actually causing the deficit to go up. You talked. about the importance of not pretending that you are not taking people off programs. but in fact. you are moving them off programs.