Date: 2012-02-02
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Texas

I yield myself such time as I may consume. I thank the gentleman from Georgia for extending his analysis. but I am saddened by the fact that issues dealing with income inequality. where were simply trying to acknowledge and overtake comments by Presidential candidate. Mitt Romney: Im not concerned about the poormy point about the poor is that youre rich today and poor tomorrow. Catastrophic illness. devastation through a natural disaster. manmade disaster. a terrorist act will put many of us in conditions that we would have never imagined. What Dr. PRICE has failed to acknowledge. and our Republican friends. is that the dynamic scoring is rooted in antitax. It is clear that the bills language and approach is designed to make it easy to enact deficitincreasing tax cuts. Keeping the Bush tax cuts are not going to improve the economy. Small businesses will. And ensuring that we dont have revenue will definitely send this Nation down a periled road of no return. Their own friend. former chairman of the Budget Committee. Jim Nussle. testified it may not be that the budget process is broken. It may not be. in other words. the tools are broken. but it may be that were not using it. He. too. acknowledged the faultiness of dynamic scoring. What Im doing here today is to ask for this amendment to take into consideration hardworking small business owners. assess whether or not they will be impacted negatively. We already know that agencies are going to have a difficult time in scoring this. We already know that this scoring will have no impact on improving the economy. But the increase in taxes that our colleagues want to do. with no balancing increase in revenues to be able to bring down the deficit. is the peril that theyre sending us to. They have had hearings. and there have been those whove acknowledged that dynamic scoring does little. but it may impact negatively those hardworking businesses that need to have the resources that would be provided to them by the Small Business Administration in their time of need or in their time of growth. I ask my colleagues to add one more element of information that will give us guidance as to what dynamic scoring will ultimately mean. There is no doubt that an overwhelming number of Americans agree that we must do revenue. and certainly we must respond to the needs of the American people. None of us are reckless with taxes or increasing taxes. Mr. Chairman. We want to be balanced in what we do. I believe my amendment is a balanced amendment. I ask my colleagues to support it. Mr. Chair. I rise today in support of my amendment #5 to H.R. 3582. "The ProGrowth Budget Act of 2011 ." My amendment requires the Congressional Budget Office to include as part of their macroeconomic analysis estimates of the potential impact. if any. on HUB ZONE areas as defined by the Small Business Act. H.R. 3582. would require the Congressional Budget Office to provide a macroeconomic impact analysis for bills that are estimated to have a large budgetary effect. Under this bill the CBO would be required to provide an analysis of the impact on the economy of any bill that would have an estimated budgetary effect of greater than 0.25 percent of gross domestic product. GDP. in any fiscal year. CBO macroeconomic analysis would include the estimated effect on revenues and outlays of a change in GDP resulting from the legislation being evaluated. Those estimates would have to assume that certain tax policies not currently in CBOs baseline are extended. Furthermore. CBO would be required to publicly provide the assumptions and models underlying those analyses. In all actuality. Mr. Chair. this bill could very well be entitled the. Revenge of Dynamic Scoring Champions Act. because that is in essence what is going on here. Dynamic scoring is an attempt to measure the macroeconomic effects of policy changes before they happen. and continues to pop up everywhere. in fact. even in negotiations of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. also known as the super committee. Dynamic scoring finds its roots in the antitax movement. Dynamic scoring is problematic for the agencies that score and estimate the cost of legislation. and has been soundly rejected. It is clear from the bills language and approach that it is designed to make it easier to enact deficitincreasing tax cuts. The bill requires CBO to produce supplementary estimates of the economic impact of major bills using dynamic scoring. an approach that involves more uncertainty and subjectivity than current scoring rules. None other than Former Republican Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle opposed moving to dynamic scoring. noting that CBO "generally have done a better job than some of the dynamic scorekeeping. That has been part of the challenge of moving to something called dynamic scoring is that we have not found anything that was any more accurate than the current way." Believers in dynamic scoring argue that tax cuts pay for themselves. generally by spurring so much economic growth. to the extent that revenues will actually increase. If I didnt know any better Mr. Chair. Id think they were talking to us about trickledown economics. Mr. Chair. where have we heard that before? I recall that the Bush administration attempted to impose the use of dynamic scoring to estimate the cost of its tax cuts. asserting that tax cuts would increase revenue enough to pay for themselves. sort of a trickledown form of budgeting. Unfortunately Mr. Chair. the Bush tax cuts did no such thing. but instead caused our national debt to explode. My amendment only seeks to look at the affect. should this measure pass. on HUB Zones. as defined in the Small Business Act. The Small Business Administration. SBA. administers several programs to support small businesses. including the Historically Underutilized Business Zone Empowerment Contracting. better known as the HUB Zone program. The HUB Zone program is a small business federal contracting assistance program "whose primary objective is job creation and increasing capital investment in distressed communities." It provides participating small businesses located in areas with low income. high poverty rates. or high unemployment rates with contracting opportunities in the form of "setasides." solesource awards. and priceevaluation preferences. According to the Congressional Research Service. In FY2010. the federal government awarded contracts valued at $12.7 billion to HUBZone certified businesses. with about $3.6 billion of that amount awarded through the HUBZone program. Mr. Chair. thats the gist of my amendmentjob creationbecause thats what we should be talking about on the House Floor today. The Budget Committee has held two hearings on the general topic of budget process reform and the recommendations crossed party lines. Former Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle. a Republican witness. testified that "It may not be that the budget process is broken. It may not be. in other words. that tools are broken. but it may be the fact that the tools are not even being used." Similarly. Dr. Philip Joyce. former Congressional Budget Office. CBO. staff member and a Democratic witness. testified that "My main message is that most of the tools that you need to solve the budget problems faced by the country are already in your toolbox. If the goal is to deal with the larger fiscal imbalance that faces us. the most important thing to do is to make use of them. not search for more tools." And Mr. Chair. dynamic scoring is the wrong tool at the wrong timethoughIn the interest of fairness to the small businesses in distressed communities. I ask my colleagues to support my amendment. even though I have serious reservations about dynamic scoring. [From Center for American Progress. Nov. 23. 2011]