The Budget
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, the last 2 weeks have been very good weeks for this country and this Congress. We are passing a continuing resolution and funding the Government and not letting the government close makes a great deal of sense. I think that was very much to the better. Even more important, we now will have a significant debate, over the next few months, about what this country should be like over the next several decades. That is very important for our country. It is what we should be doing. I salute Congressman Ryan for laying out on the table a vision and Speaker Boehner for supporting it.
I disagree with that vision, but they did have the forthrightness and the directness to put their views on the floor. It is a different vision than what America is today.
I also salute President Obama. He joined the issue yesterday, clearly, without obfuscation, directly, and showed the many places where he differed with Congressman Ryan. He laid out a different vision as to where America should go. In a minute, I will discuss my views of those visions, but I wish to say this at the outset: It is very good to have this debate. I hope this will be a month or two in which there will be invective and there will be clashes, but I hope, at the end of the day, the debate between the Republican vision of where America should go and the Democratic vision--between Congressman Ryan and President Obama--will be one of those times when historians will look back and say this is a place where America, through its Congress and its President, chose a direction. That is, after all, why we are here.
We have many different issues to consider, but the role of government, what it should do and what it should not, is probably the most important for the next several decades. The fact that the issue has been joined by Congressman Ryan on the one hand and President Obama on the other can only be good for America. What we will do is come to a conclusion, hopefully, in the next month or two. Let me give my views of those two visions.
Yesterday, President Obama delivered a thoughtful, inspired speech about the need to rein in our out-of-control deficit. He called for a comprehensive approach, including cuts to defense and mandatory spending, and he rightfully put revenue on the table. His is a serious plan, one that would reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years. As only a President can do, he powerfully framed the debate that will likely continue to rage, certainly for the next several months and probably over the next year and a half--long after we resolve the debt ceiling. This is a debate the American people want to have. It is a debate Democrats are ready and eager to engage in. It is a debate we believe we will win. We have the high ground.
The House Republican plan puts the middle class last instead of first. It will never ever pass the Senate, and we know the American people will reject it as well. The debate we just concluded, the debate about the CR, was about spending levels. The debate ahead of us is about more than spending levels, it is about the role of government itself.
House Republicans are not trying to balance the budget--no. They are trying to fundamentally alter Americans' relationship with their government. They believe the message of the last election was that Americans wanted a dramatic change, a great limitation in how much the Government should do. It is our view, as Democrats, that the American people gave us two messages. First, deal with the deficit. There is too much spending. I say, as a party, we ignore that message at our peril, but we have not ignored that message, neither in the CR nor in the President's proposals.
The American people sent a second message as loudly and as strongly as the first; that is, grow the economy, help the middle class continue to have better lives, as they have over the last five decades, make sure there are meaningful jobs in America. I believe a budget that reflects the American people's view has to do both these things: reduce the deficit but keep that American dream brightly burning, the American dream that the American middle class holds, which says the odds are quite good that we will be doing better 10 years from today than we are doing now and the odds are better still that our children will do better than we. That is what we believe American people told us to do.
We believe the budget revealed by Congressman Ryan and supported by Republicans is not what the American people want. It is a negative, pessimistic message. It is a message that says the great days of America are over and we do not believe it is what the people want. As we go through this debate, we shall see how that comes out. I believe we will prevail.
The Republican budget unveiled last week by Chairman Ryan is, on closer inspection, not a serious document. The pundits and political handicappers may have hailed it as a bold, daring approach to the fiscal challenges facing our country, but a closer examination reveals that Ryan's budget hews exactly to his parties' orthodoxy. It does not gore a single Republican ox. The House Republican budget puts the entire burden of reducing the deficit on seniors, students, and middle-class families. At the same time, it protects corporate welfare for oil companies, gives giant new tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires, and leaves Pentagon spending almost completely untouched.
Consider what Paul Ryan wants to do to Medicare. His plan ends Medicare as we know it and replaces it with a private voucher system that will cut benefits. Seniors would be left to fend for themselves with no guarantee of affordable coverage. They would have to pay thousands of dollars more out of their pockets.
As this chart shows, under the current Medicare system, the average senior on Medicare in 2022 will contribute about 25 percent of the cost of their health care. But under the Ryan plan, seniors would have to pay 68 percent of the cost of coverage themselves according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
That is an outrageous burden. Simply put, it would drive many seniors into poverty. This generation of seniors, the first generation who was able to say they could retire and not go to bed every night sweating about how they were going to pay for health care if they or their spouse got an illness, would be the last generation to do so under Paul Ryan's vision.
In America, we have said we have bounty. And some of that bounty should go to those in their golden years, to those who worked hard and who built the country and who raised the families and fought the wars. They should not have to worry that they could not afford health care if, God forbid, a serious illness afflicted them. The Ryan budget turns its back on that vision.
Republicans have been patting themselves on the back recently for tackling entitlement reform, but their approach is nothing more than a rigid, ideological quest to unravel the social safety net.
Medicare certainly has cost issues, but a better way to protect and preserve Medicare for future generations is to cut out the waste and inefficiency that everyone knows exists, not to privatize the program. Our plan is simple when it comes to Medicare: Mend it, do not end it. In the health care reform law, we made a good downpayment on this effort. We began to shift Medicare in the larger health care system from an expensive, fee-for-service model toward a system that pays providers for episodes of care. The truth is, when it comes to reining in the cost of Medicare, the President did it first, and he did it better. We Democrats are willing to build off that law. We can make further reforms to the delivery system. It needs further reforms. And we will further drive down the costs. The Ryan budget reverses progress we have already made and in doing so reopens the doughnut hole, further burdening seniors' budgets.
It is bad enough that the Ryan budget ends Medicare as we know it and increases costs for seniors, but just as egregious is what Ryan proposes to do with all the money he takes from seniors on Medicare. As this second chart shows and as the President said yesterday, House Republicans want to give millionaires a new tax cut of $200,000. To pay for it, it would make 33 seniors each pay $6,000 more for health care. What kind of vision is that? The Ryan budget uses Medicare cuts to reduce the tax rate on millionaires and billionaires to 25 percent from 35 percent. That is the lowest level since 1931 when Herbert Hoover was President. The Ryan budget reduces taxes on the rich to the lowest level since 1931, the Hoover era, the era of the Great Depression.
I have nothing against the rich. God bless them. Many of them are living the American dream. They are what many of us aspire to be. But in order to keep that dream alive and get our country on firmer fiscal footing, we need a little shared sacrifice. Democrats want to work with Republicans to get our fiscal house in order, but we believe the best way to do it is to end the millionaires' tax break, not cut Medicare benefits.
Let me be clear. A grand bargain on long-term deficit reduction is next to impossible unless we look at raising revenue. Unfortunately, Republican leaders are already trying to rule out revenue. If the other side refuses to even consider savings in the Tax Code, they will lose credibility with the American people. We simply cannot balance the budget by focusing solely on domestic discretionary spending, a narrow 12 percent slice of the budget. Cancer research and Head Start did not create our current deficit problem, and we will not fix it by going after cancer research and Head Start.
Thankfully, many rank-and-file Republicans seem to agree with the need to put revenue on the table. The Senator from Oklahoma, a true fiscal conservative, said a blanket defense of all tax cuts is profoundly misguided. My Republican friend from Nebraska said Republicans need to keep an open mind and keep everything on the table, including revenue. My Republican friend from Georgia had said that revenue, along with entitlement cuts, should be part of the budget compromise. My friend from Tennessee, with whom I work closely on the Rules Committee, said that tax subsidies for big oil ``may be too expensive.'' As you can see, many of my colleagues are prepared to tackle this challenge with, to use the phrase of the Republican Senator from Nebraska, ``an open mind.''
The bottom line is that any budget that leaves defense and revenue off the table is ultimately untenable. Indeed, a dollar cut from defense spending reduces the deficit just as much as a dollar cut from domestic discretionary spending. While there is certainly waste on the domestic discretionary side of the budget, there is also certainly waste on the defense side.
While we are certainly open to compromise, Democrats will not tolerate the House Republican budget assault on Medicare. It is not fair, it is not right, and it will never, never pass the Senate.
I am hopeful that both parties in both Chambers of Congress will come together to reach a reasonable, responsible deficit deal, but in order to do that, Republican leaders need to take off their ideological straitjackets. They can start by going to the drafting room and coming up with a fairer, more broad-based proposal than the Ryan budget.
In conclusion, Speaker Boehner needed Democrats to pass this year's budget, and he will need Democrats to pass a long-term deficit reduction plan as well. The sooner he abandons the tea party, the sooner we can have a compromise.
We hope the coming debate will yield a sound, serious deal. That is our hope. That is our wish. That is what the next few months are about. If it doesn't, we Democrats will have to take this contrast of priorities into 2012. We know that in that battle, too, we will have the high ground.
I yield the floor.
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