Congresswoman Corrine Brown made the following statement:
Yesterday, the Veterans Affairs Committee held a hearing, where Deputy Secretary Gould of the Department of Veterans Affairs stated that because of the drastic budget cuts the Republicans are advocating and likely government shutdown, veteran’s pension checks may not go out on time! Believe it or not, this is not an April Fool’s joke: at the same time the veteran’s checks will arrive late, the Republican Party is advocating for extending tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. Just last December, we were forced to vote on extending the Bush Tax Cuts for millionaires, adding $700 billion dollars to our deficit.
The Republican plans for the FY11 budget, as well as the new budget blueprint they released yesterday, is nothing more than reverse Robin Hood: taking from the poor and middle class to give huge tax breaks to the rich.
The Republican Party’s only concern appears to be decimating Medicare and block granting Medicaid, while simultaneously cutting billions of dollars for job training programs, environmental protection, disease control, programs to assist homeless veterans; transportation and infrastructure (including high speed rail and Amtrak), crime protection, education programs and dozens of other critical areas for our country.
If the Republican budget plans are enacted, the pain will fall on the shoulders on the working poor and middle class, while all the benefits will go to the richest 1%. To me, it is obvious that Republican lawmakers in the House remain indifferent to the suffering these cuts could bring to the vast majority of Americans.
The Bush years and Republican Congresses have created huge holes in our budget that cannot be filled by just slashing discretionary domestic spending. In fact, the Bush tax cuts for the rich removed $2.5 trillion from the Treasury over the past 10 years alone. And when the Republicans insisted that Congress extend them last December, it took another $95 billion off the table for the next two years. One other provision they were behind was an estate tax extension, which exclusively benefits an elite group of Americans by allowing exemptions of up to $5 million for an individual and $10 million for a couple (while taxing them at a 35% rate), adding on another $25 billion dollars to our national debt!
And while the Republican Party refuses to ask millionaires and billionaires to make sacrifices, they would instead sacrifice our nation’s veterans, students, senior citizens, children, and our teachers, and the poor.
Clearly, this spending plan is a re-hash of what we saw in 2001 and 2003, which brought about the deepest recession our nation has seen since the Great Depression. And I will not stand by and watch our country go down this route yet again.”