The Budget and the Affordable Care Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TONKO. Thank you, Representative Garamendi. And I compliment Representative Welch for what I believe is a balanced approach to how to solve the deficit situation, the debt situation, and certainly how do we move forward with a sound budget that can invest in America at a time when other nations are investing in a clean-energy, innovation economy. We don't have the luxury to just hone in on deficit, or budget carving here that solely relies on impacts through domestic program cuts on our middle class families, our working families and the poor.

What we have seen here is trillions' worth of cuts to domestic programs, impacting the ability to pay utility bills, impacting the ability to perhaps send your adult child off to college, to dream the American Dream, to own a home and to have an affordable home budget. All of these items are at risk here. We're putting people most vulnerable at risk. We have seen almost a flat curve for the growth in household income across America, just a slight bump upward, while we've seen an exponential rise in corporate executive salaries, in millionaire and billionaire wealth. That's where the growth has been.

The recovery here has seen that happening with a downward spiral, a downward mobile quality to the comeback of our efforts here in this country. So it is important for us to make certain that there is a balance here, that we're calling upon all tools in the toolkit to make it all happen.

And this chart absolutely tells a story. Over the last 40 years, middle class wages have stagnated while millionaires and billionaires have trumped all by 256 percent.

Now, this tells a story. When people are talking about not wanting to visit a fairness in tax policy here, when we have seen the anger in America expressed via the many, many households that the great multitudes of people in this country are portrayed in the middle class, they are the population that have expressed anger, and rightfully so, that anger has got to be addressed through fairness in tax policy, through an across-the-board impact of solution here that will enable us to do what's fair and do what's correct.

I watch the savings that they talk about here with the Republican plan. The Republicans will talk about the huge amounts of savings that they produce all through cuts on the domestic programs, again impacting working families, the poor and the middle class. Well, those aren't savings because in order to be savings, they might be in a locked box or assumed to go after relieving the deficit. But instead, they take these trillions in like amounts and provide tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires and corporations and still continue to hand out mindlessly the subsidies to big oil companies. This is what is so most egregious about this budget.

Instead of working towards a balance that looks at revenues, that looks at the domestic programs that require investment, no, they are going pell-mell into an all-out attack on the middle class. That's wrong. And also in the outcome as they slide programs, assistance and investments to middle class America, as they slide it over to the millionaire, billionaire, corporate and big oil companies crowd, that community, what happens in the interim? With this Republican plan for a budget, we grow debt by $8 trillion.

So where have we gained here? This sounds like a repeat of the pre-recession years where we were not acknowledging fairness in revenues, where we were allowing for a falling apart of the system. At the same time we took the watchdog out of the equation on the financial sector on Wall Street. We allowed for working families' portfolios of investments to go to ruination where we lost $2.8 trillion in accumulated wealth on 401(k)s and various other investment materials. And this is what happened: we destroyed the economy, and now we're going to repeat history, history of the worst kind.

Let's pick up on the history of the best kind. Let's pick up on investing in jobs as we did in the FDR years where we came out of tough economic times and people knew the dignity of work and we saw projects built across America, not the trickle-down theory that didn't work during the Reagan administration and the trickle-down theory that didn't work during the second Bush Presidency. It just didn't happen.

And my question is, I can't help but rhetorically ask, why would we revisit that kind of scenario again knowing that we're just crawling out of the recession and we're growing private sector jobs to the tune of $2 million in just over a year? Why would we disrupt that progress? I ask, why would we disrupt that?

Representative Garamendi, I think it is great that we're bringing this information to the forefront here and allowing it to be exchanged with the people that we serve day in and day out who have expressed, rightfully, the anger about the onus, the burden and the unnecessary pain that has been placed upon households of modest annual income means.

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