Van Hollen on CBS: President’s jobs speech had the right mix of ingredients, Joint Committee can do two things at once

Washington, DC – Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, today appeared on the CBS Early Show to discuss the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction and President Obama’s address to Congress last night. Video of the interview is available here and the transcript is below.

ERICA HILL, CBS: Joining us now, Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, a leading Democrat on the House Budget Committee, also a member of the so-called supercommittee on cutting the deficit, which met for the first time Thursday. Good to have you with us. You met for the first time Thursday, and then you get a little bit of a new task from the President last night where he essentially said, look, I know you are tasked with coming up with $1.5 trillion in reducing the deficit, but could you throw in another $400 billion or so?

REP. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Right. 

HILL: And your fellow committee members said, “This makes our jobs really difficult.”

VAN HOLLEN: Well, the President is making a very important point here, which is that the fastest and most effective way to reduce the deficit is to get people back to work and to get the economy moving again. Because every day that the economy is stalled, is another day that not only are American families hurting, but it’s another day that the deficit gets bigger, and bigger. So we can do two things at once. We can walk and chew gum. We can move to get the economy going – that will reduce the deficit- and come up with a long-term deficit plan that gets above $1.5 trillion. 

HILL: And are you confident that you can find this money, that the 12 members of the supercommittee are able to do this? Because Senator Kyl is speaking out afterwards and saying, look, if there are deep cuts in defense spending, I’m out.

VAN HOLLEN: Yeah, that was a little bit of a curious statement, because if we don’t reach an agreement, defense spending gets really badly cut. So we have to talk to Senator Kyl about how we work that out. But I was pleased that, on a bipartisan basis, members of the committee said they wanted to be ambitious, meaning they wanted more than $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. After all, Simpson-Bowles, they did about $4 trillion over ten years. 

HILL: Did you think there is enough in this plan to get the economy started, to be able to do these two things at once? 

VAN HOLLEN: I do think it has the right mix of ingredients. It has proposals that, as the President said, a lot of our Republican colleagues have either proposed or supported in the past – tax credits for small businesses, more money in consumers’ pockets so they’ll go out and buy more goods and services so businesses then have the money to hire people. And then there’s infrastructure component. I think every American knows we’ve got bridges that need repair, schools that need renovation. We have 14% unemployment in the construction area. Why not match these things up and have a win-win? 

HILL: Is there anything in here that you see causing a problem for the President?

VAN HOLLEN: I don’t think there’s anything in the plan that will be a problem for the President. Now, if what you mean by that is that it may not get through the Congress, we’ve heard some positive response from the Republican leadership in the House. But I’m really hoping they’ll also support the infrastructure part and the part that will help prevent layoffs for teachers. 

HILL: And you bring up an important point. We’ve heard some of that positivity from the leadership. Representative Cantor was here with us this morning. But we’re not hearing that from all of the Republicans. What was your sense last night in terms of how the rest of the party may work along with their leaders?

VAN HOLLEN: That’s a very good question. And only time will tell. Because there are points in time when the leaders responded positively, but everybody else seemed to sit on their hands. Of course, other times everybody sat on their hands on the Republican side. Look, we are approaching the ten-year mark of September 11th, that terrible day when the country was able to come together and rally to meet a challenge. We face a big challenge now with the economy, with people out of work, with long-term deficits. I hope we can recapture a little bit of that spirit in the days ahead.

HILL: All right. We’ll be watching. Appreciate your time this morning. Thank you for coming by.