Health Care And Education Reconciliation Act Of 2010
Floor Speech
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Mr. CRAPO. Mr. President, I would like to respond to a couple comments just made and then at the first available option, I will file a motion to recommit the bill. Before I get into a discussion of this motion, I would like to respond to the argument that is consistently made that the health care legislation that was signed by the President today and is supplemented by this reconciliation bill is going to actually result in deficit reduction.
What we need to understand is that among the many other pieces of this bill, ultimately it will result in growing the Federal Government by about $2.6 trillion over the next 10 years. This chart shows graphically or pictorially what will happen.
You will notice I have had to mark out the numbers there and change the 2.5 to 2.6. That is because under the original bill it was 2.5. Now with the bill before us today it is going up, not down, to $2.6 trillion of new spending.
There are only a few ways you can claim that is going to result in a reduction of our deficit. Nobody denies it is going to result in a massive increase in the size of the Federal Government, regardless of the other portions of this bill.
How does a $2.6 trillion increase in spending result in deficit reduction? First, because there are massive new taxes in this bill that go along with this increase in spending that are offset against it. Secondly, because there are massive cuts in Medicare, over $500 billion, $610 billion of new taxes, $529 billion of new Medicare cuts, which results in about a $1 trillion offset, about $1.1 trillion of offset. How do you get to the rest of the offset to claim that this bill is deficit neutral or reduces the deficit?
That is what I call the gimmicks. For example, $29 billion of Social Security revenue is raided from the Social Security trust fund and allocated to this bill. The CLASS Act, which has been called a Ponzi scheme by Members of the other side of the aisle, is adding another $70 billion of revenue. The Medicare cuts are actually counted twice because they are not used to sustain the Medicare system. They are used to finance a brandnew entitlement system in this bill.
When you sort through it all, if you stop the gimmicks, and if you do the math with the gimmicks taken out, we don't have deficit reduction. We actually have a deficit increase, about $619 billion of increased deficit under this bill.
I think we need to get the facts all out in front of us and discuss them. But I want to talk specifically for just a moment now about the motion I am going to make. The motion I am going to make is the same motion I made when we debated the main health care bill last December. It is a motion that simply helps us make sure this bill complies with the President's promise.
What did the President promise? The President has said multiple times--and here is one of his quotes:
I can make a firm pledge ..... no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase--not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes ..... you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.
That was the President's pledge.
When I brought this motion--when we debated the original health care bill that was signed into law by the President today--it was attacked and actually defeated on the floor on the grounds that to do so, to adopt my motion, would result in killing the bill. It would destroy the bill. All my motion did was say, let's temporarily send this bill back to the committee, have them strip out all of the taxes that hit the middle class--families making less than $250,000--and bring the bill right back to the floor. I was told that would kill the bill, that would gut the bill.
Well, first of all, if that was going to gut the bill, then that is a concession that the bill is full of taxes on families who make less than 250,000. As a matter of fact, that is true. Again, the bill before this reconciliation bill was analyzed by the Joint Committee on Taxation, and their conclusion--not mine--was that by 2019 at least 73 million American households earning below $200,000 will be paying more taxes because of the taxes imposed by this bill--that $610 billion of taxes that is used to help claim that this bill does not increase the deficit.
Well, what happened last time when we debated it? It was attacked because it would gut the bill if we took these taxes out of it, and my motion was defeated.
There was another argument made against the motion at that time; that is, the bill we were debating was not actually a tax increase, it was a tax cut. The way that argument went was: We have more tax cuts in the bill than we have tax increases. The only way that argument could be made is by saying the subsidies that are provided to low-income individuals in our country are tax cuts, even though they do not pay any taxes. Yet, all of the subsidies in the new entitlement program were counted as tax cuts, and they were offset against the true tax increases that are going to be paid by the middle class in America; and the argument was made it was a tax cut.
Well, first of all, it is not a valid argument. There are $610 billion of new taxes in this bill. Secondly, I do not think that is what President Obama was talking about. He did not say: I will not raise your taxes more for some people than I will cut them for someone else. He was saying he would not raise taxes, and that this bill would not be allowed to be used as a vehicle to do so.
Let's get back to the main argument that was made against my motion before; that is, it would gut the bill. Well, that cannot be true anymore. The bill was signed into law by the President today, so it is law today. And now I think it is time for this Congress to simply fix the problem. All we have to do with my motion--when I am allowed to have an opportunity to propose it--is to commit this bill to the committee and have the committee take out all the taxes that apply to individuals who make less than 200,000 and families who make less than $250,000.
It is very straightforward. You can argue that there are not such taxes in the bill, and if there are not, then my motion will not do a thing to the bill. But the reality is, the vast majority of the taxes in this bill are going to be paid by the middle class. By the Joint Tax Committee's analysis, 73 million households in America are going to be paying these taxes, and all this motion does is say let's get back to the President's pledge and do what the President said. Let's take out of the bill the taxes that are going to be slamming the middle class in America as this bill becomes law.
With that, Mr. President, I would be glad to yield to any of my colleagues here on the floor who would like to make comments on this issue. Senator Risch, my colleague from Idaho.
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Mr. CRAPO. Well, I would say to my colleague from Kansas that I have not had any direct response from the White House, although when I made these speeches and when I made the motion when we debated the original bill, there were some responses on the Web that indicated that, in fact, I was not correct in my facts. The argument was made at that time that, in fact, the bill we were debating did not have--was not a tax increase bill, it was a tax cut bill. You probably heard my response to that argument earlier.
The way the defenders of this bill claim it is a tax cut is, they take all the subsidies that are being provided for this new entitlement that is created in the bill, administer those through the IRS, and then claim that those are tax cuts and that they outweigh the tax increases that are included in the bill and that, therefore, the bill is a net tax cut. As I said earlier, first of all, the President was not talking in net terms. He didn't say: We will raise taxes for this group more than we will cut taxes for this group.
Leaving that aside, the fact is, I don't think most Americans fall for that. Most Americans don't think that the subsidy which is scored as spending is a tax cut.
Mr. BAUCUS addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Montana.
Mr. BAUCUS. Might I ask my friend if he wishes to have the pending amendment set aside so his motion can be made in order?
MOTION TO COMMIT
Mr. CRAPO. Mr. President, if that would be allowed, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment to offer a motion to commit with instructions that I have here and which I submit to the desk.
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Mr. CRAPO. Mr. President, I would conclude in the last 7 minutes. If any of my colleagues wish to jump in, please let me know.
I wish to go back to where we started. As I indicated, when I brought this very same motion to commit during the debate on the health care legislation in December in the Senate, the response was not that these taxes aren't in the bill but that to take these taxes out of the bill would kill the bill. Why would those taxes being taken out of the bill kill the bill? Because it would expose the cost of the bill, because the argument that the bill is not a deficit--that it actually reduces the deficit--would evaporate if you take out the massive taxes that are included in the bill. That is why it was considered to be such a dangerous amendment then.
I personally believe that for us to adopt legislation the President has signed into law that grows the Federal Government by $2.6 trillion, dramatically increases the role and control of the Federal Government over our health care economy, cuts Medicare by $500-plus billion, and then engages in gimmicks of trying to adjust the numbers in the budget in order to make it appear that there is no deficit increase is the wrong way to approach this legislation, regardless of one's opinion of the merits otherwise of the substance of the bill.
The bottom line is, this is a massive growth of the Federal Government, massive increase in control by the Federal Government, financed by hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes that are going to be paid by the middle class in America as defined by the President: those who make less than $250,000 as a family or $200,000 as an individual. Again, all this motion would do is to say: Let's take out those taxes. If they don't exist, then it would not do anything to the bill. If they do exist--and, as I said, they do--then they would be taken out of the bill and we would not be putting the massive cost of this phenomenally large growth of the Federal Government on the backs of the middle class in America. Again, the argument that was made in December cannot fly today because today the bill is law. It cannot be argued that to support this motion would kill the bill.
The bill has passed the Senate, passed the House, and has been signed into law by the President. What we need to do now is to make sure the bill does not violate the President's pledge that nobody in America will see their taxes go up.
I wish to again read that pledge: The President's own words were:
I can make a firm pledge ..... No family making less than $50,000 will see their taxes increase ..... Not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes ..... You will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.
Well, that is simply not the case, and it is not the case to the tune of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that this class of people--the middle class as defined by the President--are going to be called upon to pay.
That is only during the first 10 years of this bill. If you start looking further
out, as we get into the second 10 years of this bill, the amount of taxes the American people will pay rises exponentially into the trillions and trillions of dollars as you get further out. Yet we are expecting them to carry the burden of this bill, when they were promised--and I am sure many voted in the last election on the basis of this--they would not see their taxes go up.
Again, it is a very simple motion. The motion simply says: Let's take the bill back to committee and take out any of the taxes that apply to individuals making less than $200,000 and families making less than $250,000. I urge all my colleagues to support this motion.
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