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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Ms. DeLAURO. This substitute budget is a shortsighted attempt to short-circuit essential investments in our economic recovery and long-term growth. It takes back resources for long overdue investments in education and health care and in energy.
A $29 billion cut to income security programs over 10 years, $25 billion of which comes from critical nutrition program increases. The kind of investments that conservative economists tell us have the most powerful stimulative impact, $1.73 in economic growth created for every dollar spent, if only it were allowed to reach families in need.
But it does not end there. This Republican substitute budget creates even more dramatic reductions in nutrition programs by requiring the Agriculture Committee to cut $38 billion over 10 years. This is cutting food programs for hungry kids. We know what the devastating effects of unemployment, the cutoff of benefits for health care, that people today are going to food pantries who never thought in their lives they would have to do that.
A gentleman who says I have to take care of my kids, I never thought I would go to a food pantry, I was humiliated, and I felt like a lowlife, but my kids need to eat. That's what this budget would cut, nutrition programs.
To be sure, the committee could reach a target here by reducing farm price supports, but the gentleman from Wisconsin has said that he will not open the farm bill. That means that the nutrition programs are the only place to do their cutting, leaving millions of families, seniors, women, and children to pay the price.
Our opponents have just trotted out the failed programs of the past, and they are dealing with $3.3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.
The CHAIR. The time of the gentlewoman has expired.
Mr. SPRATT. I yield the gen tle lady 30 additional seconds.
Ms. DeLAURO. They simply ignore urgent challenges that we face as a Nation. They pour $3.3 trillion into tax cuts over 10 years, most of it going to the wealthiest Americans.
This budget is the last thing our economy needs now or down the road: the kind of drastic cuts to essential services that will raise costs, which will destroy our ability to compete and to grow. It's a relic of 8 long years of a failed economic policy of the Bush administration. The American public rejected it. I urge my colleagues to think realistically about our national challenge and to oppose this substitute budget.
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