Hearing of the House Budget Committee - Lifting the Crushing Burden of Debt

Statement

Today Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, made opening remarks at the House Budget Committee hearing on "Lifting the Crushing Burden of Debt." Below are his remarks as prepared for delivery, and you can watch a live stream of the hearing here:

"I join Chairman Ryan in welcoming our witnesses today. I am pleased we are having a hearing on this important subject. We all agree that our current long term debt trajectory in unsustainable and unacceptable. And I believe we all agree that it is important to come together now to develop and enact a sensible plan to reduce that debt in a steady and predictable manner. We should have a healthy discussion on what such a plan would look like."

"What we should not do is take actions that would hamper our fragile economy recovery. While last month's jobs numbers were promising, millions of Americans remain out of work. Enacting measures that would slow down job growth will not only impose additional and unnecessary economic pain on American families; it will harm the goal of deficit reduction."

"That is why the House Republican plan to make additional deep and immediate cuts in various investments in order to hit an arbitrary number is such a mistake. Say what you will about Goldman Sachs, they know a little bit about the impact of investments, and their analysts predict the House Republican plan will cost 700,000 Americans their jobs. Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, who like Dr. Holtz-Eakin was an advisor to the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain, reached a similar conclusion, as did the Economic Policy Institute. Now I see that Dr. Holtz-Eakin disputes these figures in his testimony. But the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, testified last week that slashing the budget that way "would translate into a couple hundred thousand jobs. So, it's not trivial." That would wipe out all the job gains from last month. So the question is this: Whether the number of jobs lost is 200,000 or 700,000, why in the world would we be doing anything now that would cost Americans their jobs? That is a reckless and senseless approach that does virtually nothing to address the long term debt. And that is why the bipartisan Fiscal Commission that was charged with reducing our deficits specifically warned against such action. Yesterday, members of this Committee met with the co-chairs of the Commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Here is what the bi-partisan Commission wrote in its report: "In order to avoid shocking the fragile economy, the Commission recommends waiting until 2012 to begin enacting programmatic spending cuts, and waiting until fiscal year 2013 before making large nominal cuts." That is also what Bowles and Simpson said in their testimony before the Senate Budget Committee last week. The bipartisan Rivlin-Dominici commission issued a similar warning."

"So I am glad that today we will take a more comprehensive look at what it will take to seriously tackle deficits and the debt rather than focus only on the 12% sliver of the budget that includes critical investments in education, scientific research and innovation, and transportation and energy infrastructure -- investments that are critical to growing jobs in America and winning in the competitive global marketplace. As the bi-partisan Fiscal Commission observed, a serious debt reduction plan will require a combination of spending cuts in discretionary and mandatory programs as well as revenue increases."

"I will close with this observation. In his recent testimony here, Jack Lew, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, pointed out that when he had last appeared before this Committee as President Clinton's Budget Director, we were projecting a $5.6 trillion surplus. Today, we have with us John Podesta, who was Chief of Staff to President Clinton at that time. When President Obama was sworn in 8 years after Bill Clinton left office, he inherited a record annual deficit of $1.3 trillion and an economy in total freefall with more than 700,000 Americans losing their jobs every month. I make this observation to make this point -- during the intervening eight years of the Bush Administration, some terrible decisions were made that wreaked havoc on the fiscal stability of our nation. If we are going to chart a fiscally responsible course, we are going to have to do many things, including reversing some of those fiscally reckless actions."

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