Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Chairman, this country is in the middle of a great crisis, entirely an artificial crisis created by an attempt by one political party to blackmail the entire country into adopting its program of destroying Medicare and Social Security and food stamps and unemployment and all of the things that many of our people depend on.

But why do I say it's an artificial crisis? Because the debt ceiling increase is something we normally do--seven times during President Bush's administration.

Some people think to raise the debt ceiling is to say we're going to borrow and spend more. No, it's not. You raise the debt ceiling in order to pay for bills you already incurred because of decisions made 2 and 3 and 5 years ago, mostly during the Bush administration.

Not to raise the debt ceiling is like going into an expensive restaurant, having an expensive meal, and then getting the bill and saying, Oh, my God. I've got too much money on my credit card. I don't think I'll pay the bill. Well, if that's the case, you shouldn't have had the meal.

If you don't want to pay the bill, you shouldn't have made those budget decisions. You shouldn't have cut those taxes 10 years ago and gotten into those wars 7 and 8 years ago and made the other decisions that piled up the deficit.

If you want to have a debate, which we should, on how to change our policies in the future, that's for the budget debate. We're going to pass the budget at some point. We're going to debate tax levels, expenditure levels.

But instead, what are they doing? They're saying, That's a nice economy you've got there; pity if something should happen to it. And if you don't do exactly what we want, we're going to destroy it by not raising the debt ceiling and causing a collapse in credit so that everybody's interest rates go up and that people have to pay a thousand dollars more a month on their mortgage or whatever, because it's a ripple right throughout the economy.

A default would be a real crisis for the economy, and it will cost the economy probably a trillion dollars in extra deficit spending over the next 10 years just in higher interest costs. But if we don't do exactly what they want, to destroy Medicare and Social Security and the other things they never liked in the first place, they will wreck the economy by not raising the debt ceiling in order not to pay the bills that they incurred.

Then we hear that we have a deficit crisis, that, after all, the country is broke. We've got to cut the budget. Even the President says the country is broke. We've got to cut the budget--a little less savagely, but we've still got to cut.

Wrong.

The country is not broke. It is just that we are not taxing the millionaires and the billionaires and the corporations the way we used to.

In 1950, the corporations paid 6 percent of the entire economy of the GDP in corporate taxes. Today, it's under 1 percent. Twenty years ago, 30 percent of all income taxes came from corporations; today, it's under 6 percent. And that's why the middle class feels overtaxed, because they are, because we don't tax the millionaires and the billionaires the way we used to. We don't tax the corporations the way we used to--the big multinationals, I'm talking about, not the small businesses. Instead, we've shifted the tax burden to the middle class, and we don't get enough tax revenue.

And the fact of the matter is, if you look at the budget of 2001 and if you look at the budget of 2011, in 2001, the budget was $258 billion in surplus. It was the last Clinton budget. How has it changed? Why is this budget $1.2 trillion in deficit and that was a quarter trillion in balance? What's changed?

Well, adjusted for inflation and for population growth, nondefense discretionary spending, everything they want to cut now, hasn't changed at all. It was $369 billion then; it's $369 billion now.

What's changed? Well, defense spending and homeland security spending have gone up 74 percent because of two wars and a lot of bloat, a 74 percent increase in defense spending. Mandatory programs, that is to say, Medicare, Social Security, veterans, up 32 percent. And it is not only those. There is also unemployment insurance, mostly because we're in a recession, and you have to pay more unemployment insurance and food stamps and so forth. Total revenues are down 24 percent. From a bigger country, we're getting 24 percent less revenue today. Why? Because in 2001, the taxes collected 20 percent of GDP, and today it's 14.5 percent of GDP.

So what should we be doing? Well, first of all, we should raise the debt ceiling to recognize the debts that were already incurred, and we should do it cleanly, so as not to throw the economy into a tailspin. Then we should debate all of these issues in the budget. We should raise taxes on the millionaires, the billionaires, the corporations; cut defense; and try not to tamper with people's Social Security, Medicare, and the things that they depend on.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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