Date: 2013-03-19
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Weve had a good and healthy debate today. I want to go back to the question that was posed by the Republican leader. Mr. CANTOR: Which of these budgets does more to help the economy? Which budget helps put more people back to work? Well. we know that the austerity approach taken in the Republican budget will result in 750.000 fewer Americans working by the end of this year and 2 million fewer Americans working next year. compared to the alternative that the Democrats are proposing. which would replace the sequester. So you achieve the same amount of deficit reduction. but you dont do it in a way that results in slowing down economic growth in this country this year. next year. or the year beyond. We tackle the budget deficit by dealing with the jobs deficit right now and then taking a balanced approach into the future. Lets talk about taxes. The Republican budget will give another windfall tax break to the very wealthiest people in this country. In order to make up the revenue lost. they will inevitably have to increase the tax burden on middleincome taxpayers unless theyre going to put their budget out of balance. Now. just to safeguard against that. we offered an amendment that said. when you do tax reform. dont raise taxes on middleincome families. Every Republican on the Budget Committee voted against that. We can address our priorities and reduce the deficit in a smart. consistent way without violating our commitments to seniors. without reopening the prescription drug doughnut hole so people with high drug costs will have to shell out lots morethousands over the period of this budget. We can do it without making the interest rate on student loans double this July. We can do it without cutting our investment in transportation by 15 percent when we have all these unmet needs and 15 percent employment in the construction industry. We know we can do all those things and reduce our deficit the smart way because we do it in the House Democratic budget. which dramatically drops the deficit so that its growing much slower than the economy. stabilizes the debt at 70 percent of GDP. and. yes. balances the budget the same time the Republican budget last year balanced. What a conversion to hit this political target this year after all the talk last year. And the reasonand the fundamental difference hereis that. by trying to drive to that political target. they end up balancing the budget on the backs of everybody elsecommitments to seniors. investment in our economy. investment in the future. At the end of the dayand we showed the numbers earlier. Mr. Chairman. They cant have it both ways. They cant say their budget balances in 10 years and at the same time they repeal ObamaCare. because the $715 million in savings from the Affordable Care Act. from ObamaCare. is embedded right in their budget. The trillion dollars in revenue from that they say theyre going to pull out of the air. But if we repealed ObamaCare today. it would be out of balance by over $500 billion. So lets focus on the task at hand. put people back to work. Lets have a Tax Code that makes sense for the middle class. And lets keep our commitment to seniors and grow this economy. Mr. Chairman. I ask that people reject the lopsided Republican plan and adopt the balanced approach presented by the Democratic Caucus. I yield back the balance of my time.