New Taxes

Floor Speech

Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, it is now official. Top Democrats on Capitol Hill are starting to signal their intention to raise taxes on the middle class. The House majority leader in a speech today warned that in order to do anything about the debt crisis Republicans have been speaking about on the Senate floor in recent weeks, President Obama will have no choice, no choice, but to break his campaign pledge of ``no new taxes'' for millions of American families.

That is the majority leader in the House of Representatives in a speech today, saying that the President will have no choice but to break his promise of no new taxes for millions of American families.

Respectfully, I think this is a tough argument for the Democratic leadership in the House that will not even take up the Senate's version of the so-called doc fix legislation for no apparent reason other than the fact that it does not increase the debt.

It is hard to imagine anyone taking advice on fiscal discipline from a party that has spent the last 2 1/2 weeks arguing not about how to pay for the extenders bill that is on the floor or how to use this bill to cut the debt but about how much money to add to the debt in the process of passing it.

Here is another idea Democrats should consider, one that Americans have been proposing loudly and clearly: Stop spending money you do not have. Stop spending money you do not have. The American people do not think our problem is that the government taxes too little. Our problem is that the government taxes too much and that it spends too much and borrows too much. Until Democrats demonstrate even the slightest ability to restrain the recklessness with which they spend America's hard-earned tax dollars, the job creators and the workers of this country are not about to take them seriously on how to lower the national debt.

The American people should not be asked to pay the price for Democrats' recklessness through higher taxes. America faces a debt crisis. Democrats have done nothing whatsoever to show they understand that. Breaking a campaign pledge now will not help; cutting spending will.

I yield the floor.

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