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Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012

Floor Speech

Date: Feb. 2, 2012
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Government Budget and Spending

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Ms. MOORE. Thank you so much, and I just want to say at the outset what a pleasure it is to work with the chairman, the ranking member, and the members of the Budget Committee who, I believe, are sincerely committed to try to help deal with the deficit situation.

But what I find rather baffling, I'll have to admit, is that my colleagues in the majority continue to turn a blind eye to the power of investing so that we can create a major dynamic economy in human capital and in our infrastructure. Their only interest, almost to the point of a fetish, is to favor tax cuts as the only ways and means of growing our economy. And this Pro-Growth Budgeting Act, H.R. 3582, is just yet another example of that, Mr. Chairman.

This legislation would allow Republicans to really understate the effect of tax cuts on the deficit--hiding their impact, masking their real cost, and paving the way for extensions and new tax policies that favor tax cuts only. I mean, Republicans are trying to carve--I have to admire their persistence--they want to carve in supply-side economics and ``trickle down,'' no matter how long it's failed, into our body politic forever. As my dad used to say, money doesn't grow on trees. And this is the ``money grows on trees strategy.''

I'm sorry, but my colleagues have such a strong bias against any investments that are not tax cuts; and it shows a lack of interest in the investments, I believe, that really have the power to dig us out of this hole we're in, investments like early childhood education. Why don't we do dynamic scoring on that? Health care, what about scoring the impact of what providing health care would do in terms of decreasing the costs to our companies?

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I hear from all walks of life that a transportation budget, reauthorizing the transportation budget, would be such a boon to our economy, training people for the 21st-century skills. But yet here's another backdoor approach to include the Bush-era tax cuts into the baseline, and we already know that that's $4 trillion worth of debt.

By only allowing for the dynamic effects of tax cuts--not the effect of investments in a better way of life for us all--the Republicans are showing their true colors again.

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