Small Business Tax Relief Act of 2007 --Motion To Proceed
Floor Speech
SMALL BUSINESS TAX RELIEF ACT OF 2007--MOTION TO PROCEED -- (Senate - July 30, 2007)
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I thank Chairman Baucus and Ranking Member Grassley and the distinguished Senator from Utah, Mr. Hatch, who have been so energetic in preserving, enhancing, and protecting this plan. Rhode Island has a significant role, going back to the days of John Chafee, whose name has been mentioned by Senator Hatch, and, of course, through Senator Jack Reed, whose relentless advocacy for this program is a legend on this floor.
My time is very short, so I will speak to a very simple point and come back and speak more to the children's health issue later in the debate.
It strikes me, as a new legislator, that legislating is about choices. The distinguished Senator from Utah said this bill is expensive, but it is the right thing to do. I would like to show two charts to help illustrate the expense in some context.
This is a chart which illustrates the additional cost we are talking about for children's health care in America, the subject we are debating in these increments, the increase over the next 3 years. The chart compares it to the cost to all of us of the Bush tax cuts going to the 1 percent of the richest Americans. So is it expensive to spend $2.1 billion on children's health care in 2008? It probably is. And is it expensive to spend $5 billion on children's health care, increasing it in 2009? Is it expensive to spend $7.9 billion? It probably is. But this is an administration which is happy to spend $70 billion on the richest 1 percent of America in the same year that they are fighting about $2.1 billion to improve health care for children. They are willing to spend $72 billion in the following year and $82 billion after that. So in the context of comparing expense to doing the right thing, it is a little bit expensive, but is it ever the right thing, particularly in a world where we are judged by our choices.
Here is another demonstration of really the same principle. We are talking about a cost spread over 5 years to help America's children have health insurance. By comparison, the interest alone on the Federal debt George Bush ran up with his tax cuts to the rich, just the interest expense in the fiscal year 2007, is more than that. It is $46 billion. This administration is fighting about whether we should spend $35.2 billion over 5 years for children's health insurance, poor children's health insurance, versus the Gulf Stream gazillionaires' tax breaks.
If you look to the President for leadership, you don't find it. What you find in his budget is $5 billion across the whole period instead of 35, which, because of the increase in medical costs over that period, it has been estimated would throw a million American children off of health insurance.
What Chairman Baucus has done, what Ranking Member Grassley has done, is work out a bipartisan compromise in the Senate that is the right thing to do and not all that expensive.
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