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Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2013

Floor Speech

Date: March 28, 2012
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Senior Citizens Entitlements and the Safety Net Health Insurance Government Budget and Spending

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Ms. MOORE. I thank you so much, Mr. Cleaver.

Mr. Chairman, prior to 1994, Congress acted to ensure that Americans had guaranteed support under the Social Security Act. It was a three-legged stool. The American social contract provided retirement security for retirees through Social Security, health coverage for elders with Medicare, dignified care for the infirm and disabled under Medicaid and sustenance for low-income families with children.

Now, in 1994, on a bipartisan basis, this body breached the Social Security Act's contract with the people and ``ended welfare as we know it.''

Now, this Republican budget says that that is a model for what this budget should do. It recalls that victory, and I quote from the narrative under the Path to Prosperity, a blueprint for American Renewal:

This budget completes the successful work of transforming welfare by reforming other areas of America's safety net to ensure that welfare does not entrap able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.

We've heard on this floor that we're going to make sure that the safety net does not become a hammock. So, in other words, Medicare and Medicare recipients are now welfare recipients.

So what this budget does is it ends the guarantee of health care for retirees, turning it into a voucher program, and cuts $30 billion over the next decade.

The program, Medicaid, it is now a welfare program, and Grandma, who is in the nursing home, is now a welfare recipient who is lying in a hammock instead of living out her life in dignity, and you cut $810 billion out of that fund over the next decade.

Another entitlement program, food stamps, which served 45 million people during this recession, half of all Americans are now poor. You're going to amend that entitlement program by cutting $134 billion out over the next decade.

The CBC budget rejects the breach of the Social Security Act and renews that contract with Americans. It rejects the 62 percent of the Republican budget that cuts $5.3 trillion--62 percent of it taken from those Americans who are most vulnerable--yet it provides deficit reduction of $3.4 trillion over a 10-year period of time.

Yes, we do have different priorities. We prioritize retirees, elders, the disabled, and infirm over millionaires.

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