Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2010
Floor Speech
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2010 -- (House of Representatives - April 02, 2009)
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Ryan gave my quote. I believed that then and I believe it now. I believe we've pursued for too long policies of fiscal irresponsibility, a concept that we need not pay for what we bought. I believe it was called supply side economics, which to me meant that if you do less, you get more. Nothing I have done in my life instructs me that if I do less, I get more.
But because the gentleman used a quote of mine, I thought it might be nice to use a quote of his. May 4, 2003, the Journal Sentinel:
``Is the deficit a concern?'' This is a quote. ``Absolutely. But Congress should not constrain economic growth and keep people out of work to pay down the deficit. Coping with the deficit requires getting the economy growing at a more robust rate and getting people back to work. More people with jobs means more tax revenue being generated. This will help us pay down the deficit more quickly and address the financial challenges facing
Social Security and Medicare as the baby boom generation retires.'' My, my, my.
Mr. Ryan, you don't seem to feel that way now. The fact of the matter is the Obama administration handed us an inheritance.
Mr. HOYER. Reclaiming my time, I am glad the gentleman went there.
The gentleman knows that under President Clinton we had a $5.6 trillion surplus projected. Not by Clinton, but by George Bush. When he took office in March of 2001, he said, ``I have inherited a $5.6 trillion surplus.'' And, indeed, in the year before the Bush administration came to office, I tell my friend from Wisconsin, we created in that last year 1.9 million new jobs.
Mr. Spratt spoke of the average 217,000 jobs per month. You need about 100,000 new jobs per month to stay even. Two hundred thirty thousand jobs per month were created, on average. Some months were a lot higher.
Two million new jobs in the last year of the Clinton administration. And what happened in the last year of the Bush administration? After 8 years of the economic policies that you pursued and for 6 years had total hegemony, total control, what happened? You heard the figures of unemployment, but you doubled the deficit from $5 trillion to $10 trillion--the debt, not the deficit. That was the result of your economic policy.
I heard the former chairman of the RSC--I was constrained to come to the floor, but my staff tied me down--who said, ladies and gentlemen, that we have been in office for 50 days and look what has happened to the country. Nobody in America thought that was a credible statement. Nobody.
The policies of the last 8 years have led to the worst economy that we have seen in this country in over a half a century. Some of us stood on this floor and said that is what would happen. We did it because we were fiscally irresponsible and because we were regulatorily negligent. We took the referees off the field. We pretended that the private sector would referee itself, that they would manage risk responsibly. They did not.
And the gentleman from Texas to whom I am referring said we didn't care about his children. That is not right. If he loses his job, we provided as our first bill that his children will have the availability of health care. But we want to provide his children, my children, my grandchildren, and, yes, my great granddaughter, with a fiscally sound Nation. It is not there now, and it will not be next year, and it won't be the year after, because the hole we have dug is so extraordinarily deep that it will take years and years of discipline to get us back to where we were on January 19, 2001. I think everybody in this House wants to do that, but we have different views of how you do that.
I have served in this House, as the gentleman has heard me say before, now 29 years. Eight of those years have been under a Democratic President, Bill Clinton; 20 of those years under Republicans. Every single year of a Republican Presidency since 1981 has run deep deficits, every one, without failure.
Now what is the significance of that, you might say? It is that a President alone can stop spending. The only one that can stop spending. I can vote against spending, my friend Mr. Ryan can vote against spending, but we need 217 other people to do the same. Only the President of the United States by vetoing spending can say ``no.'' President Bush signed bills and presided over an economy that resulted in the doubling of the national debt.
And so, my friends, we come to a responsible budget, but not the budget any of us would like. Why? Because, as they lament on the Republican side of the aisle, the deficits are too high. They are right. I agree with that. I don't like these deficits. I prefer to vote for balanced budgets. I voted for a balanced budget amendment. And, very frankly, had we had a balanced budget amendment, we would be in much better shape today, because you couldn't have enacted your tax cuts because you would have had to have paid for them.
Because you would have had to pay for them, and while you were very prepared to give the wealthiest in America big tax cuts, you were not prepared to pay for them, perhaps because of the logic that you expressed in that article of 2003.
My friends, we have an important decision to make. That decision is whether or not our investments in the future will continue by the adoption of this budget. We adopted, under the Bush administration, the Troubled Assets Relief Program. There was disagreement on that, not between Mr. Ryan and myself. We believed that was necessary. We didn't like it, too much money, too much debt and too much borrowing. But we thought it essential to bring this economy back and to stabilize it and to try to keep jobs. It hasn't yet succeeded. And we have lost far too many jobs. Too much pain in America, too many people without a job, too many families who aren't sure where their next meal is coming from or how they are going to pay their mortgage payment or how they are going to send their kids to school. There are too many Americans in pain.
Now we can, in my view, deeply cut those items which are there to help people in pain and trouble, as I believe your budget does. Or we can do what Mr. Spratt has recommended, bring the deficit down, not to where we would like it, but bring it down substantially, about 3.5 percent of the gross domestic product by 2015 as opposed to 10.5 now. Is that too high? It is. Would I like it lower? I would.
But I tell my friends that this is a responsible budget, not just for today but for the long term, because although we had a Recovery and Reinvestment Act, that was to staunch the decline, the fiscal crisis and the economic crisis and the job crisis and the health care crisis that we inherited from the Bush administration.
That is why I'm going to vote for this budget. That is why I urge each and every one of my colleagues to vote for this budget, because it invests in the health care of our people. It invests in the energy independence, and therefore the national security of our people. And yes, it provides for the national security. There are two wars that are going on. This budget provides that we will respond to them and keep our people safe. But it also responds to the need to keep people safe right here at home. That is why I will vote for this budget. That is why I urge each and every one of you to support this budget, not because it does what we would like it to do, as so many of my Republican colleagues have urged us, but those same colleagues indicated to me that their budgets would balance the budget and would cut spending.
Because there has been so much talk of spending on your side of the aisle, Mr. Ryan, I remind you that under the Clinton administration, discretionary spending rose at a rate of 3.5 percent. However, with you totally in control, it rose 7 percent. You doubled spending. So it rings hollow to say that it is spending we ought to cut. You cut taxes, and you increased spending.
This is a tough budget. It is tougher than a lot of people would like. It is tougher than Mr. Berman would like. Because he knows there are children all over this world that we are helping stay healthy, kept alive by feeding. And allies kept on our side when we confront terrorists. This is a tough budget. The Budget Committee made tough decisions, but they were right decisions, right for our country and right for our people.
Support the Spratt budget. Make America better.
Madam Chair, today, with the passage of this budget resolution, the House has the opportunity to set America's priorities for years to come and build a sustainable, widely shared recovery.
Along with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, this budget is a key part of our return to prosperity; it provides the long-term investments that will make prosperity last.
Today we have a chance to begin bringing down the cost of healthcare; breaking our addiction to foreign oil; creating the best-prepared workforce in the world; and returning America to fiscal health.
On healthcare, it is clear that rising costs are straining American families and crippling American businesses.
Family premiums have more than doubled since 2000, and over the past five years, our total healthcare spending has increased at more than twice the rate of inflation, consuming more of our economy and our budget each year.
This budget is the start of efforts to reverse that disastrous trend. It makes a significant down-payment on reform, taking steps to lower healthcare costs, improve quality, and expand access.
Healthcare reform is also key to entitlement reform, because we will never be able to control the growth in Medicare and Medicaid spending as long as healthcare costs continue to increase at more than twice the rate of inflation.
On energy, this budget increases support for energy independence programs by 18 percent. That includes incentives for the development of new technology and clean energy jobs; support for cutting-edge research; funding to start on an energy-efficient, money-saving national smart grid; and programs to help Government from the Federal to the local level save energy and money.
On education, this budget builds upon the investments made in President Obama's recovery plan with additional support for early childhood education, elementary and secondary school students, and efforts to help more Americans obtain a college degree.
It expands access to early childhood programs, makes college more affordable with increased Pell grants, and promotes job-training and significant education reform.
A lasting recovery isn't simply about ending the turmoil in our financial markets--it's about having workers who are prepared to compete in the 21st-century economy with anyone in the world.
Finally, this budget reverses the irresponsible Republican policies that turned record surpluses into record deficits and puts us back on a fiscally sustainable path.
That begins with an honest accounting of where we are--an assessment that takes into account the cost of two wars.
From that honest foundation, the budget cuts the deficit from 10.5 percent of GDP in 2009 to 3.5 percent of GDP in 2013. In other words, we cut the deficit by nearly two-thirds.
We do so by restraining spending, investing in oversight that saves taxpayer money, and, most importantly, reinstating the pay-as-you-go rule in law and requiring that new initiatives be paid for.
Our Government must pay for what it buys.
Republicans, by contrast, would abandon that discipline in favor of a $3.6 trillion tax cut, which the non-partisan tax policy center calls ``by far, the largest tax cut in history''--one that goes almost exclusively to the richest Americans.
Paying for tax breaks like those, as Mr. Ryan proposes to do, would require deep cuts to vital services. So taking the massive tax breaks to their logical conclusion, Republicans support cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other essential programs that are critical to our economic recovery.
As the Washington Post notes today, the Ryan substitute would ``freeze most Government spending for five years, halt spending approved in the economic stimulus package, and slash federal health programs for the poor and elderly.''
When Republicans claim their budget will create jobs, they conveniently ignore the impact that the deep spending cuts in their plan would have on jobs.
Virtually all economists, including conservatives such as Milton Friedman, agree that Government spending during a recession creates jobs.
In fact, when we use the model of the conservative Heritage Foundation and take into account both tax cuts and spending cuts, we find that the Republican plan destroys jobs.
Of course, Republicans have another option to finance their tax breaks--increasing our deficit and piling up our debt even higher. That would be in keeping with the fiscal ideology that has dominated among Republicans as long as I have served in this House, the dogma summed up by Vice President Cheney: ``Reagan proved deficits don't matter.''
Our country has come to see the foolishness of that belief--and I think it has also come to see that only one party has a track record of responsibly reducing deficits. Chairman Spratt put it well: ``Republicans turn surpluses into deficits. Democrats turn deficits into surpluses.''
The Republican case on substance is truly weak--and their argument on process is weaker.
Republicans have repeatedly decried this budget's use of the reconciliation process to provide for a majority, up-or-down vote on health care and education if Congress has not reached agreement on these issues so critical to our economic recovery.
But the truth is that both parties have used reconciliation to implement the policies assumed in budget resolutions.
Under President Bush, it was the Republican option of first resort to pass irresponsible tax cuts; under this budget, it is simply a fallback if partisanship blocks progress.
I urge my colleagues to vote for this budget--one of the most important votes they will take in this Congress.
This is our chance to build the foundation for recovery and plan wisely for the long term. We cannot miss it.
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