Budget/Discretionary Spending

Floor Speech

Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the gentleman from Washington State for focusing America on what the issues are before us.

In recent weeks I have come to the floor to argue that the Republican spending plan does two extremely harmful things: It weakens our economy and fails to seriously reduce our debt.

Democrats agree that cutting spending is part of the solution to our difficult problems that confront us. But we also believe that cuts should be smart and targeted, not reckless.

Rather than cutting investments in growth--at the same time our international competitors are ramping up theirs--Democrats support the Make It In America agenda, a plan to invest in innovation, manufacturing jobs, and middle class opportunity. That's what the President talked about in his State of the Union, and he was right.

Unfortunately, the consensus that the Republican spending plan will halt our economic recovery and cost jobs is widespread and nonpartisan.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, appointed by President Bush, tells us that the plan will cost ``a couple of hundred thousand'' jobs. Macroeconomic advisers tell us that the Republican plan will wipe out approximately 450,000 jobs. Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, who advised Senator McCain in his Presidential campaign, tells us that it will cost up to 700,000 jobs. The Economic Policy Institute puts the number at 800,000 jobs. Whatever the precise number, it is a large number of jobs that will be lost if we pass the Republicans' budget solutions.

What they want to do, as the gentleman from Washington State said, this is all exempt. This is security. These are all mandatory expenditures. This small slice of the budget, about $460 billion, the Republicans want to cut by 22 percent, give or take a percentage point. So they are holding harmless almost all of 85 to 86 percent of the money that we spent and say we're simply going to cut from education, from health care, from children, from community development--projects--the guts of what makes our communities have a better quality. At the same time, I have argued the Republican spending plan barely puts a dent in our budget deficit.

It's reasonable to ask how can this plan have such severe consequences for our economy, yet so little impact on our fiscal predicament? This chart helps us answer the question. All of the proposed cuts, all of the cuts, come from this small slice of the budget, the category of our budget called ``non-security discretionary spending.''

But non-security discretionary spending, the gentleman from Washington State said 12 percent. We have here 14 percent. It's in that neighborhood depending upon exactly what you include as security or non-security. When you attempt to find $100 billion in savings and when you insist on getting these savings from 14 percent of the budget, you have to cut very deeply into absolutely essential projects and programs for our people.

You have to cut billions in funding into new medical cures and energy technologies. You have to kick 200,000-plus children off of Head Start. You even have to cut port and transit security by two-thirds. Hear that again. They're cutting port and transit security by two-thirds while they're holding terrorism hearings.

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, a Republican, said those cuts were ``too dangerous.'' As David Brooks recently argued, Congress should ``never cut without an evaluation process.'' But instead, legislators--he referred to the Republican initiatives--``are simply cutting on the basis of what's politically easy and what vaguely seems expendable.''

It may be possible to portray taking on 14 percent of the budget as fiscally responsible, but only because doing so exploits Americans' misunderstanding of the budget. A recent poll shows that 63 percent of Americans think we spend more on defense and foreign aid than we do on Medicare and Social Security--all the blue, all the green, and then the yellow, that small sliver--which, by the way, includes discretionary foreign policy expenditures.

Mr. Speaker, I urge our citizens to look at the consequences of these cuts and look at the small sliver that the Republicans are focusing themselves on and you and me on. We need to see the whole picture if we're going to come to grips with the challenge that confronts us.

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