Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Now, Madam Speaker, here ends the slow, sad, and silly fiscal year 2011 appropriations process. It ends on a day when unemployment claims are going up, not down, when gas prices are rising and when food prices are dramatically on the rise. I say to my colleagues that it is mathematically impossible to balance a $1.5 trillion deficit by only cutting from the 12 percent of total federal discretionary spending and with no tax-breaks' spending on the table.

For the largest accounts, Defense and Homeland Security, they're not even included in the reductions. Yet job-creating accounts like Transportation and Housing are cut by 18 percent, one-fifth. How does this make sense when 40 percent of America's building trades' workers are out work, and when housing is in the doldrums? Agriculture's food programs for the unemployed, seniors, children, and the needy are cut by 13 percent when Wall Street is walking away with billions.

If we are going to be serious in this Congress about balancing the Federal budget, then we need to put everything on the table, all programs, all revenue accounts, entitlement programs, mandatory programs, farm subsidies, and outdated direct federal subsidies to the West.

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We must address tax expenditure spending and nonpayment of taxes by some of the most well-endowed corporations and individuals in our country. Corporate profits are at all-time highs; yet they're not hiring. Shareholders benefit but not workers.

The chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Mr. Rogers, and the ranking member, Mr. Dicks, have tried to do everything they can to get us to this point. They are to be highly commended for holding an open process and for working with both sides of the aisle. It is now time for the other chairmen of this institution to look at their accounts as well as tax spending under their jurisdictions and make the necessary cuts to bring our accounts into balance.

I have been part of a Congress that in the past has balanced budgets year after year; but back in the '90s, what we did was we focused on jobs and job creation, and we used the budget and appropriations bills to aid in the creation of jobs and in the revenue they generate.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentlewoman has expired.

Mr. DICKS. I yield the gentlewoman an additional 15 seconds.

Ms. KAPTUR. For the sake of this institution and our Republic, I hope a final vote on this CR can end the slow, sad, and silly process we have endured. I will not be able to support the bill because it really is a bill that will cost jobs, not create jobs; but at least we will end the budget whiplash we've been through, and have subjected the American public to, in our country for the last several months.

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The American people want to work. This Congress needs to act to that end. A focus on jobs is what is lacking in this legislation before us today. The bill cuts vital transportation projects, like the elimination of High Speed Rail ($2.9 Billion in funding cut), that will cost America new jobs, not create them. Cutting back on food to children and needy families by half a billion dollars ($504 million cut) will not save money--it will result in less healthy citizens, more illnesses and higher medical costs as diabetes, poor health, and hypertension rise. Meanwhile Lloyd Blankfien, the head of Wall Street GS just scooped another $25 million from stock options.

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