Family and Business Tax Cut Certainty Act of 2012--Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, it is nice to see Paul Ryan back in Congress. It will be even nicer to see him back as a full-time Member in January.
There has been a lot of controversy about Mr. Ryan and some of the things he states, why he states them, and the contrast with what he says and what he has done. Perhaps the least credible claim of all about Congressman Ryan is the idea that he is a serious deficit hawk and that his budget is a serious attempt at deficit reduction. He is not and it is not.
The Paul Ryan budget is about ideology rather than commonsense solutions to the country's economic and fiscal problems. As more and more people are learning, it certainly is not about, as Bill Clinton said, arithmetic.
In RYAN's budget, any savings achieved by his plan to privatize Medicare and gut investments in the middle-class do not go to reducing the deficit. He is saying he is creating that pain because we need the pain for deficit reduction. He uses all those savings to pay for further tax cuts to the wealthy.
This chart explains it pretty well. Independent studies have found that the Ryan budget would raise taxes on the middle class up to $2,600. People earning between $50,000 and $100,000 pay $1,300 more a year, people earning between $100,000 and $200,000 pay $2,600 more a year, and then there is a whopping savings to people whose income is over $200,000.
As a result of the massive giveaways to the wealthiest Americans, the Congressional Budget Office found that RYAN's plan failed to balance the budget until 2040. But even this conclusion relies on rosy assumptions supplied to CBO by RYAN himself.
Ryan's plan could take longer to improve the fiscal outlook under a more realistic set of assumptions, even taking the unrealistically rosy assumptions that RYAN stipulates in his budget, for instance, that revenue levels would be 19 percent of GDP. That is almost certainly not true. His plan would not balance the budget until 2040.
Independent experts, such as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, challenged these assumptions. Under more realistic assumptions, RYAN's plan would take far longer to balance the budget and cause the Federal debt to rise even further.
Moreover, RYAN's spending cuts are totally unrealistic. Outside of Medicare and Medicaid, Mr. Ryan would slash the government, including defense, to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. Defense alone is 4.6 percent today. According to CBO the total has never been below 8 percent since World War II and defense has never been below 3 percent. Mr. Ryan would either have to make massive defense cuts--the very same defense cuts he decried on the campaign trail yesterday--or he would need to virtually eliminate the rest of the government, such as transportation, security, education, FBI, scientific research, and food testing.
We know that is not going to happen.
The larger point is this: In terms of deficit reduction, the Ryan plan is--there is no other way to state it--a fraud.
This should come as no surprise. After all, Congressman Ryan supported the Bush policies that got us into this deep fiscal hole in the first place. From the Bush tax cuts to two unfunded wars to the unpaid-for creation of Medicare Part D, Congressman Ryan's fingerprints are all over the big-spending Bush policies that turned Bill Clinton's surpluses into the record deficits inherited by Barack Obama.
Ryan voted against the Simpson-Bowles framework. When Paul Ryan had a chance to walk the walk on deficit reduction, he joined all the other House Republicans on the Commission in voting down the report. He urged Speaker Boehner to abandon the grand bargain talks with President Obama.
The New York Times reported that during the summer of 2011, Ryan appealed to Representative Cantor to cut off negotiations between the Speaker and the White House because he didn't feel the terms of the emerging agreement adhered strictly enough to his conservative principles and the deal might politically benefit President Obama.
It is not a secret the Ryan budget both hurts the middle class and does nothing for deficit reduction. The only people who would benefit are the very wealthy and, God bless them, they are doing well in America, but as recent statistics just showed, they are the only people gaining in income.
One other thing I wish to add about Mr. Ryan, he seems like a nice man, a nice family, but his recent speeches have been so revealing. He did the same thing yesterday, once again showing he has learned nothing from the mistakes he has made in the last few weeks. When it comes to the big debates facing our country, Paul Ryan either has an extremely poor memory or he has a tendency to play fast and loose with the facts. In one speech, Congressman Ryan falsely blamed President Obama for shuttering the GM plant that actually announced it was closing during President Bush's term; for $716 million in Medicare savings that Congressman Ryan included in his own budget; and, third, for the Simpson-Bowles blueprint that Congressman Ryan himself voted against. That is just a sampling.
Just yesterday he did it again. There you go again, Paul Ryan. He was giving a speech back in Wisconsin when he blamed the President--solely the President--for the year-end trigger, the sequestration, that was part of the Budget Control Act. Never mind that Congressman Ryan voted for the very same sequestration himself. Never mind it was his side's idea, in fact, to hold our credit rating hostage in the first place and insist on these dollar-for-dollar cuts he now decries. Never mind the fact that we all know that if Paul Ryan had opposed the sequestration proposal--the chairman of the Budget Committee in the House--it certainly would have failed. Now he goes to Wisconsin and said the President is to blame for sequestration. It is the same thing he did with Simpson-Bowles. It is not fair. It is not right. All we can do is shake our heads at this ``what is good for me is not good for you'' kind of double standard.
I would say to Paul Ryan: You haven't learned much from your mistakes in the past few weeks. There you go again. Your budget proves it, and even your speeches, including the one yesterday, prove it again.
I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.
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