Washington, Wednesday, February 16, 2011
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Mr. NADLER. I won't speak for 5 minutes. I've been sitting here waiting for my amendment to come up, which it will in a couple of hours probably. But I have to make one comment on everything I'm hearing on the floor.
We hear amendment after amendment to extend unemployment benefits to the unemployed in a time when we have 9 percent unemployment, and they're struck down because there's no pay-for. The amendment provides no other means of paying for the unemployment insurance.
For the last 50 or 60 years it was never considered necessary, in a time of recession and high unemployment, that in order to extend unemployment benefits you had to find someplace else to pay for it. It was automatic emergency spending until this Republican Congress.
I hear amendment after amendment that's denied. We can't even formulate certain amendments because we can only increase, not even increase spending, we can only restore draconian spending cuts on human services that are necessary for our people if we reduce other human services.
But the tax cuts that we've seen, the huge tax cuts of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars for our wealthiest citizens at a time when the top 1 percent of our people, the richest 1 percent of our people have
24 percent of the income and almost half of the wealth in the country, we can't talk about increasing or restoring those tax cuts. Those tax cuts are a given.
Madam Chairman, this is the culmination when we see $100 billion of cuts in spending, in non-defense discretionary spending, spending on transportation that is necessary if our economy is to be competitive, spending on research and development that is necessary if we're going to be able to create jobs, spending on schools and education and housing that is necessary for our people, spending on job training so our people can work, spending on unemployment insurance so they can eat. All of these things must be cut in order that the wealthiest people have tax cuts, in order that the tax cuts for the oil companies not be disturbed.
All of this is the culmination of a 30-year campaign by the Republican Party to starve the beast. Ronald Reagan's Budget Director, David Stockman, I believe coined the phrase ``starve the beast.'' He said, he pointed out that if you come to the American people and you say, We want to reduce certain services, we want less money for transportation, the voters don't go along with that. If you say, We want less money for education, the voters don't go along with that. And if you say, We want less money for most things that are necessary, the voters won't say yes.
But if you deliberately create a crisis, if you deliberately create a situation where there is no money, by cutting taxes of the rich so that they don't pay their fair share, you can create a crisis, and then you come and say we can't afford this. We've got a budget deficit. We must reduce unemployment insurance. We must reduce schools and housing and transportation and the competitiveness of our economy and the jobs available for our people. We must reduce them because there is no money. Then you can get away with it. And that is the plot that the Republican Party has been advancing for 30 years, and today we are seeing the culmination of that. Today and in this Congress.
But remember what creates this necessity for these drastic cuts: The fact that we are unwilling to restore the tax cuts for the richest portion of our population. We are unwilling to take away the tax breaks for the oil companies. We are unwilling to tax the large corporations as we used to. We are unwilling to have the rich pay as high a percentage of their income in taxes as their secretaries. That's what's really at stake here.
But this debate is structured by the rules which have been imposed on this House that prevent us from bringing this all together in one debate. Unfortunately, it is not in order. The chairman ruled it's out of order if someone proposes to pay for a restoration of unemployment insurance by increasing a tax or by cutting war funding because it's not in the same bill. It's not in the same section of the bill.
So the American people's representatives have our hands tied because we are prisoners of the construct constructed by the Republican Party that says, let the rich have their tax cuts, let the oil companies have their tax breaks, let the multinational companies export the jobs overseas and pay no taxes. We'll pay for it by robbing the American people of transportation, of highways, of bridges, of unemployment insurance, of job creation, of education. That's what we're dealing with here, and the debate should be looked on in the context of the culmination of that 30-year plot by the Republicans which we're seeing, which was freely admitted by a lot of people, starting with Ronald Reagan's budget director who started it.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Chairman, the continuing resolution under consideration today includes very dangerous cuts to key transportation programs. This is exactly the wrong thing to do if we want to reduce unemployment, create jobs, and grow the economy.
In a survey released by the American Public Transportation Association, 80 percent of private sector businesses surveyed indicated that the level of Federal investment in public transportation has a large influence on their business revenue. For example, every $10 million in capital investment in public transportation yields $30 million, three times, in increased business sales. The Texas Transportation Institute's ``2010 Urban Mobility Report'' shows that worsening road congestion across the Nation, $134 billion, $134 billion a year costs in loss productivity. And when it comes to transit alone, every $1 billion invested creates or supports 36,000 jobs.
Despite the clear link between transportation funding and economic recovery, this continuing resolution cuts billions for transit, high-speed railroads, and other key infrastructure projects. The CR cuts over $8 billion from current infrastructure formula programs and already-awarded projects, resulting in the loss of over 280,000 jobs from the current budget funding levels.
These proposed cuts to transportation include $4.975 billion in high-speed and intercity passenger rail grants; $710 million in transit capital investment grants; $292 million in FHWA surface transportation priorities; $150 million in grants to Amtrak; and $100 million in Federal Rail Administration rail safety technology grants.
This amendment would eliminate these cuts and restore transportation funding to their current levels, not any increase for inflation, no increase for increased population, no increase for increased work, but simply to restore the current levels. We must restore these current levels because every dollar we cut reduces $3 in business activity, and every $1 billion we cut costs 36,000 jobs in an economy which cannot afford to lose tens of thousands of jobs.
Unfortunately, the underlying bill cuts transportation funding so dramatically and other funding so dramatically that it is virtually impossible to write an amendment to restore transportation funding to current levels even that would be in order under the rules the House has adopted without causing great harm to other critical programs. This is particularly true since all the transportation funding programs and all the Housing and Urban Development programs which are in this title are underfunded. So it's almost impossible to say let's restore these transportation funds but eliminate other transportation or housing funds.
In fact, this CR is such an irresponsible and reckless document that it is almost not worth trying to fix it. The Republicans have seized on this idea to cut $100 billion from the current budget, pulling that figure arbitrarily out of thin air and without any regard to what it could mean for our economy or the services that it prevents. It is a dangerous overreach that would be devastating for middle- and working class Americans. It would destroy tens, in fact, hundreds of thousands of jobs without replacing them and would threaten national security.
The transportation cuts are a small part of these irresponsible cuts. This amendment is a small part of opposing this dangerous continuing resolution, and I anticipate unfortunately that my amendment is going to be ruled out of order. I hope that's not the case. In a rational House, it would not be the case, but I urge my colleagues to support the amendment if they have the opportunity to do so, and in order to support reasonable transportation funding so as not to decimate this economy. If necessary, I urge them to vote against the entire CR.
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Mr. NADLER. I won't take the 5 minutes, but I just wanted to complete a couple of comments on Amtrak from the discussion of the last amendment.
That amendment, which has now been passed--I thought it wasn't--on a voice vote, but which has been passed subject to a vote on the floor presumably tomorrow, if adopted, will, as Mr. Olver said, essentially eliminate all capital funding for Amtrak after debt service is taken care of, all capital funding.
Now, the question is raised: Why should we spend money on Amtrak for capital funding when it loses money? The gentleman asked that. Well, the answer is almost no transportation modality in this country makes money. That's why we had to form Amtrak in the first place.
You look at trucking, for instance. You look at trucking. We support the interstate highway system without which the trucks couldn't operate. Someone may say, well, the trucks pay diesel fuel taxes; they support the highway system. Not really. One 18-wheeler of 70,000 pounds does 10,000 times the damage, the wear and tear, the vibration damage to a highway as an automobile, yet the trucks don't pay 10,000 times the gasoline tax as the automobile driver does. If we asked them to do so, trucking would be uneconomic. I'm not suggesting we should, obviously, because we need a trucking industry.
By the same token, we need rail transportation because rail is three times as energy efficient per ton mile for freight. It's far more energy efficient. I don't have the figure, per passenger. We want to decrease our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. We want to have less of borrowing money from China to give it to Middle Eastern potentates who help fund the other side on the war on terror. So we need more rail. The only way we do that is by funding Amtrak, and Amtrak has to put money into capital improvements, to a large extent, because for 50 years there were no capital improvements on the passenger rail system.
So an amendment like this is totally destructive, because we must have in this country a choice, a choice for shippers, a choice for people of the modalities of transportation, to make our economy more efficient and to make people's lives better so they don't sit on the highways in congestion all the time.
So Amtrak is cheap enough. And for $850 million for the entire country, which is much too small, it should have been the $1.3 billion, which was the authorized level, we should maintain that level and certainly not go--well, we shouldn't have that level. We should have $1.3 billion, but the CR is bad enough taking it to 850, which only
allows a couple hundred million for capital for the balance of the year. We certainly shouldn't bring it down essentially to zero by adopting the amendment that we just voice voted which will come up to a vote on the floor tomorrow.
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