Van Hollen Speaks in Opposition to the Republican Reconciliation Bill
Washington,
May 10, 2012 -
Today Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, spoke on the floor of the House in opposition to the Republican reconciliation bill. Below are his remarks as prepared for delivery:
“Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.
“There’s agreement here on two things. One, we need to reduce our long-term deficits. The question is not whether we need to do that, but how. Second, we agree that the automatic, indiscriminant meat-ax cuts scheduled to begin next January are the wrong way to reduce the deficit. We need a responsible alternative.
“Now, the House Democrats put forward a budget, as did the President, that deals with this issue over 10 years in a balanced way – building on the more than $1 trillion of cuts we already made on a bipartisan basis last August, and including additional cuts, but also cutting tax loopholes that benefit special interests and asking people who make more than $1 million per year to help a little bit more toward deficit reduction. That is the kind of bipartisan approach that’s been recommended by bipartisan groups like Simpson-Bowles and Rivlin-Domenici.
“Unfortunately, the Republican approach to the budget, and now to the sequester issue, takes this lopsided approach. Now, let’s remember, 98 percent of our House Republican colleagues – while they come down here and talk about how we have this big deficit and debt problem, they have signed a pledge that says they’re not going to ask for one penny of additional contribution from people making more than $1 million a year to help reduce our deficit. Not one penny. They won’t take one penny of taxpayer subsidies away from the big oil companies to help reduce the deficit.
“And the math is pretty simple after that. If you say from the beginning you’re not going to ask people making a million dollars a year to help do a little more to reduce our common deficit, if you say you’re not going to ask companies that have these tax loopholes that actually incentivize them to ship jobs overseas to pay a little bit more, what do you do? Your budget has to whack everyone else, and that’s what it did. That’s why their budget ended the Medicare guarantee. That’s why they cut over $800 billion from Medicaid; two-thirds of Medicaid spending goes to help seniors and disabled people. That’s why they slashed vital investments in education, research, infrastructure – things that had been bipartisan investments to help our economy grow. That’s what they did then. Now on the sequester proposal, what do they do?
“The Chairman talks about eligibility. These are people who are eligible to get food and nutrition assistance because they’re struggling. And the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which is our referee around here, has told us what the consequences, the real world consequences, of their proposal before us today would be – over 20 million kids would see their food and nutrition support reduced; almost 300,000 kids knocked off the school meals program; at least 300,000 kids knocked off the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Those are the kind of choices they make because they refuse to take a balanced approach to this deficit issue.
“Now, I want to say one word about defense spending. Last August, as part of the bipartisan Budget Control Act, our Republican colleagues deliberately chose to expose defense spending to deep additional cuts, rather than ask millionaires and big corporations to share greater responsibility for paying for our national security. Now our Republican colleagues are on the floor today saying these defense cuts would devastate our national security – but they still, even today, apparently aren’t concerned enough about the impact of those cuts on national security to ask millionaires to pay a little bit more for our common defense. That’s the same kind of mentality that led us to put two wars – one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan – on our national credit card. Even as we asked our soldiers to sacrifice, we said we’re just going to put that on our national credit card.
“So there’s a fundamental question here, a fundamental question. If you’re so concerned about those cuts to defense, why is it you won’t close one special interest tax loophole to help pay for them? We, the Democrats, had a substitute amendment that we would have been able to debate and vote on right here today. We took an alternative approach. We also prevented those defense cuts. You know how we did it? We said, we don’t need to make these big agricultural subsidies and direct payments. We also don’t think we should have taxpayer subsidies for the Big Oil companies. We did it in a different way. And apparently our Republican colleagues are kind of worried about what we were going to propose because they brought a closed rule to the floor, meaning Democrats didn’t have an opportunity to get a vote on our alternative.
“I reserve the balance of my time.”
Congressman Chris Van Hollen
