Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

There is a reason that this institution of Congress is so discredited among the American people. The reason is quite simple. Instead of facing the problem, we come up with ways to avoid it. These two bills--dynamic scoring, which basically has as a premise that any tax cut is going to increase revenues, and baseline reform, which essentially says that inflation is not a factor in depleting resources to meet a need, whether it's the Pentagon or it's health care--we think that somehow that is going to solve the problem with the debt, which is a serious problem in this country.

Do you know what? It's time for Congress to acknowledge the obvious, which is that the problem is the problem. These runaround reforms about the process avoids the direct, head-on confrontation that is the debt, and the debt is a function of too much spending and too little revenue.

Bottom line, if you are a household, if you're a local government, if you're someone who is responsible, when you have a debt problem, you're going to look at everything; you're going to put it all on the table. There are 100 Members of the House of Representatives who signed a letter and said, Hey, let's put everything on the table--revenues and spending. It's the only way we're going to get a solution.
This approach is avoiding that. It's locking down on the notion that any tax cut is going to increase revenues. It's locking down on the notion that revenues cannot be part of the solution, and it's locking down on this notion that if you wipe away inflation as a factor in what we need to do to maintain level funding that somehow we'll still meet the needs.

We had a war in Iraq and Afghanistan--two wars that weren't paid for, both on the credit card. We had the Medicare prescription drug program on the credit card. Whether you supported those as a Democrat or as a Republican--and we had people on both sides of the aisle who did--you've got to pay for it. We didn't pay for it. We're paying now the consequences of it.

As to the so-called ``reforms'' about the process, it's always legitimate to figure out the process--how can we do it better? How can we get better information?--but not when it means we avoid the problem.

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