Require Presidential Leadership and No Deficit Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam Chairman, as we debated yesterday, the bill before us is unfortunately nothing more than a political gimmick at a time when we're facing huge issues with respect to jobs and the economy.
It's very unfortunate that we did not have an opportunity to vote on an amendment that we proposed to replace the sequester--which is now less than a month away and which will do grave economic harm--our proposal to replace that sequester with a balanced mix of cuts and revenue from closing loopholes. But in this body, which says it wants to be transparent in the people's House, we were denied an opportunity to take a vote on something that's very important to the American people, as opposed to playing the political games we've been playing with this bill.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam Chairman, for those Members of this body who were not focused on this debate yesterday, let's make a couple of things clear. The President will introduce a budget, he is going to submit a budget, and he has submitted a budget every year. Our Republican colleagues don't like his budget because he takes a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, meaning that in addition to cuts, he also calls for additional revenue from taking away special tax breaks for special interests. That's number one.
Number two, what this bill does is, number one, require the President to submit his budget in a certain way; and number two, it criticizes the President for submitting his budget late.
Again, for those who weren't part of the debate yesterday, the reason the President's budget is late is because we had to pass the fiscal cliff agreement. We didn't get that done until January 2. And I have to say, Madam Chairman, we got it done despite the overwhelming opposition of House Republicans. We were pleased to get the overwhelming support of Senate Republicans, but House Republicans continue to take the position that they were prepared to go over the fiscal cliff in order to protect tax breaks for very wealthy people.
That's why the President's budget is late, because as any American family knows, if you don't know what revenue is coming in, you can't put together your household budget. We didn't know what kind of revenue was coming in until January 2.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
This bill is entitled the PLAN Act. What we really need is a plan to avoid the sequester, these across-the-board, indiscriminate cuts that are going to take place on March 1, which we all know are going to hurt jobs and the economy.
We just heard from the Republican leader. Last September, he made a very good point on the floor of this House. He said that if you allow those sequester cuts to take place, you're going to see more than 200,000 jobs lost just in the State of Virginia just in the defense sector. The across-the-board cuts are going to hurt jobs in defense, but they're also going to hurt other jobs as well as important national efforts, whether it's the FBI, whether it's border security, or whether it's medical research at the National Institutes of Health. All those things are going to be cut.
Now, the majority leader just made the point that when the American people are asked what their number one priority is, it's jobs and the economy. So why aren't we doing something about jobs and the economy? Why did the Republican leadership deny us an opportunity just to have a vote on a plan, a plan to prevent that sequester from taking place in less than a month, a plan that would replace that sequester with a mix of long-term, targeted cuts as well as revenues from, for example, getting rid of the taxpayer subsidies for the Big Oil companies?
That's the real plan we need, and yet we haven't seen any plan from our Republican colleagues in this 113th Congress. So, let's focus on what really is important to the American people. The deficit is, of course, important to the American people. As the Republican leader said, it ranked number two. There's no debate there.
The issue all along has been not whether we reduce the deficit but how we do it, making sure, number one, we don't do it in a way that hurts the economy, like some of the austerity plans in Europe, which apparently our Republican colleagues would like us to copy. That hurt the economy. We saw it didn't work in the U.K., and we believe we need to reduce the deficit in a balanced way--cuts but also revenue, by asking very wealthy people to contribute a little bit more and by closing those tax breaks that we heard about from the Republican Presidential and Vice Presidential candidate all last fall.
Those tax breaks are still out there. We propose to eliminate some of those for the purpose of reducing the deficit in a balanced way. That's the plan we need. That's the plan we've offered. Unfortunately, that's the plan we haven't had a chance to even get a vote on.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam Chairman, I think it's important to remind our colleagues that as part of the Budget Control Act and other measures we took over the last several years, we have already cut $1.5 trillion over the 10-year budget period by placing a cap on spending. The President has been very clear, as have Democrats in the Congress. We understand we've got to make some important cuts. We did $1.5 trillion. We can do more. In fact, the substitute amendment that I proposed would eliminate these direct payments for agribusinesses, over $29 billion in unnecessary subsidies.
The question isn't whether we should do cuts. Yes, we should do them. We should do them in a smart way and not in an across-the-board way. But we should also generate revenue by closing the tax loopholes to reduce the deficit.
We heard again from our Republican colleagues throughout the last Presidential campaign about all these tax breaks that benefit very wealthy people. Let's close them to help reduce the deficit, and that's exactly what our substitute would do to help replace the sequester.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Madam Chairman, we've heard a number of the last speakers complain about the fact that the President's budget will be a little late this year.
Again, for the new Members joining us--and we welcome all of the new Members, those being Republicans and Democrats--in the last session of Congress, we were here until January 2 trying to put together an agreement to avoid the fiscal cliff. That was the President's priority--to make sure that we didn't hurt jobs and the economy by going over the fiscal cliff.
The overwhelming majority of our Republican colleagues in this House voted against that plan because they were more focused on protecting tax breaks for very wealthy individuals than about protecting jobs and the economy. That's their choice. Their Senate Republican colleagues made a different choice, but our House Republican colleagues can make the choice that they want.
Now, with respect to the budget, the President will submit a budget, and our House Republican colleagues can reject it or do what they want with it. The issue is not whether he'll submit a budget. He will. The issue is whether or not we would dictate to the President what the form of his budget should take, and that is wrong.
It is also a little curious to hear this newfound support for these sort of balanced budgets from our Republican colleagues. I would just remind everybody that the last time we had a balanced budget was at the end of the Clinton administration. Why? Because, in addition to economic growth, they asked the American people to contribute a little bit more in terms of tax revenue. The Bush administration came in and immediately squandered those surpluses. I think it's important to know that, since 1950, we've had a balanced budget on only eight occasions, unfortunately. The last time we had a Republican President who balanced his budget without inheriting it from a Democratic President was Dwight Eisenhower.
So we are pleased that our Republican colleagues are joining us in trying to get back to fiscal responsibility. We see reducing the deficit as a very important part of that, but we disagree that we should do it by cutting important commitments we've made to seniors, by slashing our investment in our kids' educations, by cutting science and research and things that help power our economy and make us competitive. We think that's the wrong approach. We need a balanced approach that combines cuts with revenues from closing these tax breaks for the purpose of reducing the deficit. That's the kind of plan we need.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I yield myself the balance of my time.
Madam Chairman, again, just to put all this into perspective, I appreciate the sort of newfound vigor with which our Republican colleagues are approaching this issue. I would just remind them that, in the budget they brought to the floor in the last 2 years, it did not balance, according to the CBO, until 2040. Even then, if you read what the Congressional Budget Office said, it wasn't as a result of the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of their policies; it was simply based on assumptions that our Republican colleagues provided to the CBO.
So the real question here is: How do we reduce our deficits in a way that does not hurt the economy right now but does make sure that, as the economy improves, public spending and deficit spending does not squeeze out private investment? Actually, for the last couple of years, the problem has been the opposite. We have seen less private investment, and so the moneys the Federal Government has spent have been very important to helping the economy from going into free fall. But there's no doubt that we have to come up with a balanced approach to dealing with this issue in the outyears, and that's where the debate lies, in how we should do that.
And again, our Republican colleagues have said ``no'' to the balanced approach; they've said ``no'' to the plan that we offered to prevent the sequester; and they didn't say ``no,'' they wouldn't even allow a vote on the plan we offered to prevent the sequester that's going to hit on March 1 and which our Republican colleagues in statement after statement on this floor have said is going to hurt the economy, and which we know from the last quarter's economic report is already hurting the economy just because businesses are anticipating the possibility of these across-the-board cuts.
So that's the plan that we should be focused on. That's the plan that helps the economy, that will help save jobs. And it's just unfortunate that we've been denied an opportunity in the people's House to even have a vote on the one plan that's been submitted in this Congress, in this House, to prevent those job losses and prevent harm being done to our economy.
So I would hope, Madam Chairman, that we put aside this political gimmick. The President will submit a budget. Our Republican colleagues can do with it whatever they want, but let's put aside the political games and focus on jobs and the economy and let's have a vote on the plan that we have introduced to prevent that sequester from taking place and prevent the economic damage that it would do.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam Chair, I thank my colleague, Mr. Schrader, and his colleagues for offering this amendment.
I support the overall framework of Simpson-Bowles. I've said that many times. If you look at the balance in Simpson-Bowles between the cuts and the revenue, it's something, I think, that is the model that we should be using in this body. And I do want to submit for the Record an analysis that was done by the Center For Budget Policy Priorities that shows exactly what that breakdown would be.
I don't support every single recommendation within Simpson-Bowles, but I think we have an obligation, if we don't like one of their cuts, to come up with an alternative cut. If we don't like their revenue, we should come up with alternative revenue.
But what the Simpson-Bowles proposal does is it creates a framework saying that we need to take a balanced approach to reducing our deficit.
I was listening to my friend, Mr. Price, explaining his opposition to this. He didn't want to impose requirements on the President; simply ask the President to consider these proposals. And as the President himself has said, he has incorporated many of the proposals from Simpson-Bowles into his own budget, the ones he submitted last year and the one that he will submit this year. So I support the framework, not every recommendation, but the overall framework.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam Chairman, I support this amendment because this is something we all want to see happen and which the President himself has indicated he wants to see happen. In the last fiscal year budget, in fact, the President, through OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, submitted something called Cuts, Consolidations, and Savings to be considered by the Congress and the executive branch; and he also asked that legislation be submitted on his behalf to help give him more authority to reorganize some of these government agencies, which was introduced during the last Congress by Mr. Barrow, who may well intend to reintroduce that.
Madam Chairman, these are things I think we all would like to see, greater efficiencies that help save money in a smart way. The President has indicated not only his intention but specific proposals to do so, and so we do not object. In fact, I support the amendment.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I think it is very useful to let everybody in the country know exactly what the debt and deficit will be on a per capita basis. We in Congress of course can do the math. I think it's no problem asking the President to run that calculation as well.
Again, I want to emphasize the fact that there's agreement on reducing the deficit; the real differences here are over how we do it. But regardless of how you want to do it, I think the gentleman has offered a useful amendment. The more information for the American people, the better, and we will not object and in fact support the amendment.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Again, what this amendment does is ask the President, when he submits the budget, to provide certain information about mandatory spending and means-tested spending. In fact, the President already does this in his budget. I have in my hand, in fact, the budget for fiscal year 2013--that's the current fiscal year that we're in now--historical tables that were submitted by the President as part of that budget submission. The categories include mandatory spending, and within mandatory spending they break it down: Social Security deposit insurance, means-tested entitlements, and others. So this is information that the President already provides as part of the budget process. I'm happy to support him continuing to do that.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam Chairman, I will not use all the time. As I said, what this amendment requests is information that, in fact, the President already provides as part of the budget submission. I indicated I have in my hand that information from the last fiscal year's budget. I do think that in pursuit of transparency it's important to point out that when the President was first sworn in his first term, before he put his hand on the Bible, he faced a projected deficit of well over $1 trillion--a record deficit at that time.
As we saw from the Congressional Budget Office in their report just the other day, that deficit is now coming down. As the economy has improved and as the President's policies have begun to take shape, that deficit is on its way down. Is it far enough down? No. And there's a legitimate debate as to the best way to get there, but as part of that debate, certainly the more information, the better. And as I indicated, this information that is being requested is, in fact, already provided to the Congress. So we will not oppose it. In fact, I would support the amendment.
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