Hearing of the House Budget Committee - "Budget Enforcement" Van Hollen Opening Remarks

Hearing

Today Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, made opening remarks at a House Budget Committee hearing on budget enforcement. Below are his remarks:

"Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding these hearings. I would say that I think the consensus of most people who follow these budget issues closely is that while there may be some changes that could be made to the process, the budget process is not what is preventing the United State Congress from moving forward on fundamental budget questions. We have agreement in this Committee that we have long-term budget challenges. But the budget process is not what is going to get us there.

"It is not the budget process that prevented our Republican colleagues from getting a budget this year. It was the fact that a number of members, Mr. Chairman, of your caucus did not want to abide by the discretionary caps that were agreed to just last November by Speaker Boehner and embraced by the current Speaker, Paul Ryan. This Committee was able to get the budget out of here, but the reason it has not come to the floor has nothing to do with budget process. It has to do with the fact that the votes weren't there to uphold the agreement that was put in place just last fall.

"We've also seen through the appropriations bills a misuse of the OCO [Overseas Contingency Operations] Account, something this Committee and the previous Chairman of this Committee said in numerous Committee reports was simply a back door way to undermine the budget process. And that reflected an unwillingness of Members to stick with the defense caps -- but a desire to spend more in other areas.

"So those are just a couple of examples of this year. So I do think it is putting the cart before the horse a little bit to talk about enforcing budgets when the major impediment to achieving budgets has been the lack of political will.

"I also, Mr. Chairman, would just caution against talking about this hearing in terms of budget process when in fact there really are some substantive issues that are on the table, like putting in place a cap on mandatory spending. That is really a fundamental, substantive issue. It can be put under the guise of process, but I would just point out that we have in place right now, or did, a number of provisions to prevent the deficit increasing by reducing revenues coming in.

"The chairman mentioned the PAYGO rule. We have a statutory PAYGO rule. The Chairman described that as being somehow wrong because it accepts the "status quo' of current deficits. The PAYGO rule was put in place to prevent deficits from getting worse. And we have another very recent example of just blowing through that statute last year when the Congress passed $600 billion in additional tax cuts. $600 billion added to the deficit over 10 years. And if you look at that bill, it waived the statutory PAYGO -- not a rule of the House, it was in statute. Said don't add these costs to the statutory PAYGO card.

"So I think really what we're seeing here is the desire to get rid of rules that were designed to prevent increases in the deficit through tax cuts, even though the Congressional Budget Office tells us that the single biggest annual category of expenditures are tax expenditures. And in each of those cases, we could have offset the increase in the deficit from those tax cuts by getting rid of some of those tax expenditures. But the decision made was to get rid of that rule that would have prevented deficit increases.

"So it just goes back to the fact, Mr. Chairman, that if we're really going to reduce our deficits, we have to do it in a balanced way. You're not going to be able to sort of tip the playing field by saying we're going to cap Social Security or cap Medicare, but we're not going to deal with the revenue side of the equation. And that has been one of the major impediments to achieving progress in this area for a very, very long time. So I hope we get in to some of these issues, and again I welcome the witnesses here today.

"Thank you."

Source