Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Last fall throughout this country, we had a vigorous debate. President Obama laid out his vision of how we deal with some of our big challenges with respect to the economy and the budget, and Governor Romney did the same thing. Both of them said the American people face a very important and fundamental choice, and the American people chose.

They chose to support President Obama's vision of accelerating economic growth, putting more people to work, taking a shared-responsibility approach to our long-term deficits so we bring them down in a balanced and smart way, and they rejected the idea that we're going to move the economy forward by giving windfall tax cuts to the very wealthiest in the country and that somehow the benefits of that would trickle down and lift everybody up. They rejected that lopsided approach that balanced the budgets on the backs of everybody but the folks at the very top. It balanced the budget on the backs of our kids' education by slashing important investments.

In that category of spending that we make these important investments for our country and our future, they doubled the cut from the sequester. Those are investments in our kids' education. Those are investments in science and research to help power our economy. Those are investments to help modernize our infrastructure. They cut transportation by 15 percent when we have 15 percent unemployment in the construction industry.

Mr. Chairman, the American people rejected the kind of uncompromising, lopsided approach that we see once again presented here in the House. It is the same thing we've seen for the last 3 years, as if we hadn't even had a debate last fall.

In the Democratic alternative, we focus on the main issue right now and in the future. We don't only want strong economic growth in the future; we want to see accelerated job growth right now. We've seen some momentum in the jobs market in the last couple of months, but the Republican budget will put the brakes on that growth.

The chairman of the Budget Committee can quote economists all he wants. There are economists that say it will do this or it won't do this or it will do that. But we have an umpire here in the Congress. We have a referee. It's called the Congressional Budget Office. They're nonpartisan. They're independent.

They tell us if you follow the approach of the

Republican budget and keep the sequester in place through the end of this year, that by the end of this year we will have 750,000 fewer Americans working than otherwise. Why would we want to do that?

They tell us that if you take the approach followed by the Republican budget, that economic growth this calendar year will be cut by one-third. Why would we want to do that?

The Congressional Budget Office also tell us that a full half of our deficit this year is as a result of the fact that there are still lots of people looking for work who haven't found a job, and they project that three-quarters of the deficit next year in 2014 is as a result of the fact that you have too many people who are unemployed. So let's attack the root of the problem right now and help put people back to work rather than put the brakes on the economy. That's what our budget will do.

This calendar year, in addition to preventing the 750,000 lost, we will generate another 450,000 jobs by investing in the economy. Next year, the difference between our plan and our colleagues' plan is 2 million more jobs under our budget proposal.

We believe that you've got to deal with the budget deficit, and at the same time you also need to focus on the jobs deficit to help deal with the budget deficit.

We also reduce the deficit in a steady, sustained way. We do it with balance. We do it with targeted cuts. But we also do it, Mr. Chairman, by eliminating some of the tax breaks and tax expenditures for very high-income individuals.

We heard from Governor Romney and we heard from the chairman of the Budget Committee last fall and this year that there are trillions of dollars of tax expenditures that disproportionately benefit very wealthy people. Under the Republican plan, they say we're going to get rid of some of your tax expenditures for high-income people, but we're going to bring down your top rate. So in the end, the folks at the very top actually get a big windfall.

We say let's eliminate some of those tax breaks for very wealthy people in order to help reduce our deficit so when you combine that savings with targeted cuts, you can reduce it in a balanced way rather than increasing the tax burden on the middle class, which is what their budget will do.

We also want to make sure we keep our commitments to our seniors and not transfer the risk and cost of rising health care costs onto the backs of seniors as the Republican budget does.

We don't reopen the prescription drug doughnut hole, as the Republican budget does, which means that seniors with high prescription drug costs will end up paying thousands more out of pocket over the period of this budget.

In our budget, we make sure that student loan interest rates, which are set to double in July from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, we make sure they don't double. The Republican budget makes sure that they do. That will make college less affordable to millions of students.

Mr. Chairman, let me conclude by talking about the deficit impacts because the Republican budget does hit this--they say they're going to hit this political target of balance in 10 years. But it's a hoax because they say at the same time that their budget balances, that they're repealing all of ObamaCare, all of the Affordable Care Act.

The reality, Mr. Chairman, is they get rid of all the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. So the millions of Americans who would have had more affordable coverage, they won't get it; and the people who will no longer be excluded from getting coverage because of preexisting conditions, they'll make sure that they're denied coverage because of preexisting conditions because they take away the benefits.

But the dirty little secret, Mr. Chairman, is they keep the savings from the Affordable Care Act, from ObamaCare. Without those savings, that budget doesn't balance.

So if we did what our Republican colleagues here say they want to do, which is this instant--repeal ObamaCare--they wouldn't have a budget that was in balance. You don't have to take my word for it. The Heritage Foundation, a very conservative think tank, just issued this statement: ``Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of this budget''--meaning the Republican budget--``is that it keeps the tax increases associated with ObamaCare.'' It keeps those.

It keeps all the savings in Medicare that were achieved as part of the Affordable Care Act where we achieved them by reducing the overpayments to the private insurance companies by changing the incentive structure to focus more on the quality of care rather than the quantity of care.

Do you remember all those Medicare savings that we heard our colleagues demagog in the last election last fall? They keep all those savings, and their balance wouldn't balance without them.

Our budget dramatically cuts the deficit and makes sure that our deficits are not growing faster than the economy, down to 2.4 percent by the end of the window. We stabilize the debt below where the CBO projects today, we stabilize 70 percent GDP. And, yes, we also will balance our budget in the same year that the Republican budget from last year balanced.

If this were just a race to balance the budget first, then people should vote for the Republican study group proposal--4 years. But if your priority is jobs and economic growth, as it should be as part of a measured and balanced approach to reducing the deficit, then you need to support the Democratic alternative.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, actually the Republican budget does follow some of our European friends, but follows them in the wrong way.

The strategy places like the U.K. have followed is an austerity approach--immediate deep cuts. And guess what that did? That sent them back into a recession. And again, the umpire around this place, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said that if you take the approach in our Republican colleagues' budget, you'll have 750,000 fewer jobs by the end of this year. That is not a growth strategy. We cannot afford, here in the United States, the European-style austerity plan that is hurting those economies.

With that, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlelady from California (Ms. Waters), the ranking member on the Financial Services Committee.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

First, I want to point out again that our Republican colleagues cannot have it both ways. You can't claim you're going to balance in 10 years and claim that you got rid of all of the ObamaCare provisions, because if you look at this chart, you'll see in the year 2023, 10 years from now, they claim a balance of about $7 billion, right there. And yet if you look at this blue section here and the red section, you've got the revenues from the Affordable Care Act, from ObamaCare, and the savings from Medicare that our colleagues campaigned against last fall, but they kept them right in their budget. Without those items, they don't come close to balance. In fact, they're about $400 billion short, in the 10th year, from balance.

We believe you've got to focus on getting the economy moving right now. That's why we call in our budget for getting rid of and replacing the sequester now, so you achieve the same deficit reduction over a longer, more measured, targeted period of time and don't do damage to the economy. And we reduce the deficit in a steady way so that it's way down below the growth in the economy by the 10-year window; and we do it in a way that is balanced, meaning we ask for shared responsibility. So we do it through a combination of cuts, but also we do say, for folks at the very high end of the income ladder, we can get rid of some of those tax expenditures, tax expenditures that our Republican colleagues have talked about, but not simply to reduce the rates for high-income individuals, but to help reduce the deficit as part of a balanced approach.

Now, if you look at the math on the Republicans' tax reform plan, it drops the top rate for folks at the very top from 39 percent all the way to 25 percent. We know that's going to cost about $4 trillion. They say they're going to make all that money up by taking tax expenditures away just from high-income people. The math doesn't work that way. You're going to have to increase taxes on middle-income taxpayers, or you're not going to hit your deficit target, one or the other.

So in the Budget Committee, we Democrats said, look, let's say to the Ways and Means Committee, when you do tax reform, don't raise taxes on middle-income taxpayers. And we had an amendment--I've got it right here--Protect the American Middle Class from Tax Increase. We said, if you're going to do tax reform, at least make the commitment that you're not going to increase taxes on middle-income families in order to finance tax breaks for the folks at the very top. Every one of our Republican colleagues on the committee voted ``no'' on that amendment. The committee's got lots of policy instructions on other stuff, but a policy request statement about not increasing taxes on the middle class, they all voted ``no.''

So we believe we have to reduce our deficits in a smart and vigorous but also balanced way, asking for shared responsibility going forward, not violating our commitments to seniors by reopening the doughnut hole, not by shredding Medicaid, which they cut by over $810 billion, and which would be one-third less in 2023 than it would otherwise be.

And, by the way, Mr. Chairman, I just want to remind people that two-thirds of Medicaid spending goes to seniors and individuals with disabilities.

So it's not a question of whether we reduce our long-term deficits, it's how we do it, and we do it in a balanced way. If this was just a race to be the first to balance, then you should support not the chairman's budget. Support the Republican Study Group, that other budget. But if your priority is to grow jobs and the economy, then you should support the Democratic alternative budget.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, we actually have a kind of a yardstick that we can use to measure whether these budget approaches have a balanced approach, meaning that they ask for shared responsibility. You have the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission report, and they said we should reduce our deficits in a steady way through a combination of revenue, but also targeted cuts.

This Republican budget is totally lopsided. It provides tax windfalls to folks at the very top, and balances the budget at the expense of everybody else.

What we've proposed, actually, when you take into account the $1.5 trillion in cuts we made over the last couple of years and the $700 billion in revenue from January, and what we have in this budget, we actually have a higher ratio of cuts to revenue than that bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan when you look at everything that's embedded in it. So that's measured against a bipartisan approach, and that gets us to where we need to be without hitting all the other priorities we have in our country.

With that, let me yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin), the distinguished ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, who has looked at these numbers backwards and forwards, and I look forward to his comments.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Do you know what's wrong, Mr. Chairman? What's wrong is to pretend to the American people that you can have it all ways. What's wrong is to pretend that you've got a budget that's in balance in 10 years and pretend that you're getting rid of all of the Affordable Care Act, all of ObamaCare. What's wrong is going around the country demagoguing $715 billion in Medicare savings, which we achieve by ending overpayments to private insurance companies and Medicare, and then using it to balance your budget and then saying, We didn't use it to balance our budget. That's what people don't like, is people trying to have it all ways.

We have taken an approach to steadily and rapidly reduce our deficits in a way that doesn't interfere and hurt economic and job growth right now. And we do it in a balanced way. And what I find astounding is to hear our Republican colleagues talk about the deficit and debt in one breath and then talk about all those tax breaks and expenditures that disproportionately benefit very wealthy people in the other breath and then say they won't close one single tax loophole for wealthy people for the purpose of reducing the deficit--not one dime in their budget for that purpose. And yet they're willing to hit Medicaid to the tune of $110 billion. They're willing to hit the food and nutrition program by over $100 billion. They're ready to hit transportation funding by over 15 percent in this budget window. And yet they're not willing to close one of those more than $4 trillion in tax loopholes to reduce the deficit. I think that's wrong.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentlelady from Pennsylvania, a member of the Budget Committee (Ms. Schwartz).

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I would just point out to my colleagues that the Affordable Care Act, with the reforms it made to Medicare, we extended the life of the Medicare trust fund as part of that effort going forward.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Does that mean that money is not going to fund ObamaCare, and does that mean there's a $716 billion hole in the funding of ObamaCare?

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. That means, as in your budget, that we will help reduce the deficit by whatever amount it was. But what we do not do in our budget is fund tax breaks for folks at the very top by raising them on folks in the middle.

Listen, let me say just one other thing here, Mr. Chairman. We've had four balanced budgets in this country in the last 40 years. It wasn't under President Reagan. It wasn't under the first President Bush. It wasn't under the second President Bush. It was 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001. It was under President Clinton. And then President Bush came in and did a big tax cut in 2001, putting us out of balance for a long period of time.

During the period of time when the budget was in balance the last four times out of 40 years, the revenue that was coming in was higher than it is in any year in the Republican budget that's before us now. What that tells you is that their budget approach is trying to seek balance on the backs of everybody else by really cutting into those important investments that have helped power our economy by violating important commitments to seniors and, in the end, by raising taxes on middle-income people. Why else would they not have joined Democrats in sending a policy statement to the Ways and Means Committee that says: When you go about eliminating tax preferences, don't hit middle-income taxpayers in the process.

In fact, Mr. Chairman, if you look at the mortgage interest deduction, for example, the mortgage interest deduction really helps middle-income people--homeowners. So in addition to saying: Ways and Means Committee, when you do tax reform, don't hit middle-income taxpayers, we specifically said: Don't take away the mortgage interest deduction for middle-income taxpayers. Again, all our Republican colleagues voted against that.

They've been talking about tax reform for 3 years now. We've never seen a piece of paper from them as to how they would do it, which is why we wanted to make sure that they don't do it in certain ways that help middle-income people. But no, can't do that.

So let's make sure that as we address our deficit issues, we do it in a way that calls for shared responsibilities, not another round of tax breaks for the wealthy on the backs of everybody else.

I now yield 2 minutes to the gentlelady from Wisconsin (Ms. Moore), one of our distinguished members of the Budget Committee.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, just to be very clear on what the Senate Democratic plan does and what the House Democratic plan does with respect to revenue, again, we heard from Governor Romney and others last year that there are about $4 trillion in these distortions and preferences in the Tax Code that help very wealthy people. What we say is, we should get out some of that clutter, some of those preferences, and use some of that to help reduce the deficit. And we say at the same time when you do tax reform, don't touch middle-income taxpayers, and when we asked our Republican colleagues to give us that assurance in the form of an amendment in the Budget Committee, they all voted ``no.''

So, yes, we think that you can eliminate some of the tax breaks and preferences that Mr. McClintock just talked about, and you can use some of them to reduce the deficit. But the Republican budget won't use one dime of those to help reduce the deficit.

I now yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington State who is both on the Budget Committee and on the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. McDermott.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

We heard earlier about the United States becoming Spain and others have compared it to Greece. The reality is that right now the danger is that we follow the European austerity measures that we've seen do damage to economies like that in the U.K., and that's what our Republican colleagues are calling for in their budget.

Yes, we need to reduce our long-term deficits, but we also need to make sure we keep the facts straight. And in the Republican budget pamphlet this year, they show this big tidal wave of red ink, which I believe the chairman showed earlier today, that's based on an outdated Congressional Budget Office analysis that doesn't take into account much of the deficit reduction we've done over the last couple of years, including the revenue in the fiscal cliff agreement. That's why the organization FactCheck.org said that the Republican budget proposal exaggerates future growth of the Federal debt in a chart contained in their newly released budget plan.

So we need to keep this in perspective, and that's what we do in our budget: we focus on economic growth now and economic growth in the future. And, yes, because of the reduction in the rate of increase in health care costs and using, actually, an assumption that the discretionary parts of our budget and mandatory we assume grow faster than the chairman asked the CBO to project, our budget comes into balance the same year as the Republican budget last year came into balance, but we do it without balancing it on the backs of other essential priorities that are important to the American people.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let's start with taxes. What the Republican budget does is provide a windfall tax break for folks at the very top. People listening can do the math. You're dropping the top tax rate from 39 percent to 25 percent right off the bat. That's about a cut of one-third in the top rate for millionaires. That's a huge loss of revenue.

How do they make up that revenue? Well, if you're going to really make sure you don't increase the deficit, math tells you you're going to increase taxes on middle-income people to help pay for those tax breaks, which is exactly why we offered an amendment in committee saying, okay, Ways and Means Committee, when you do tax reform, don't raise taxes on middle income folks. They voted against that. There are lots of other provisions in the Republican budget that provide guidance to other committees, but they didn't want to provide them that guidance.

So the point is that they provide tax breaks to the folks at the very top while leaving middle-income folks vulnerable; but on net, they do not close one tax loophole out of those four trillions to reduce the deficit. Do you know how we know that, Mr. Chairman? Because their revenue line is constant with the baseline. So Mr. Price is just dead wrong when he says they close tax loopholes to increase revenue for the purpose of reducing the deficit. It's not in there. It's just dead wrong.
Now let's get the record straight about what the Republican budget does to different groups that Mr. Price referenced:

Seniors. Here is what the AARP, the largest organization representing seniors, says about what the Republican plan will do:

The chairman's proposal fails to address the high costs of health care and, instead, shifts costs on to seniors and future retirees. Removing the Medicare guarantee of affordable coverage seniors have contributed to through a lifetime of hard work is not the answer.

That's the AARP.

The Medicaid cuts. There are $810 billion in cuts. Again, I'll remind people that two-thirds of that goes to seniors and people with disabilities. Here is what the nonpartisan, independent Congressional Budget Office said would be the impact of those kinds of cuts:

It means, because they block-grant the program to States with a lot less money, States would need to increase their spending on these programs, make considerable cutbacks in them or both. Cutbacks might involve the reduced eligibility for Medicaid and CHIP--that's children's health--the coverage of fewer services, lower payments to providers, or increased cost sharing by beneficiaries, all of which would reduce access to care.

So whether it's in Medicare or in Medicaid, we violate commitments to seniors in this budget.

He talked about kids and education. Their budget would allow in July the doubling of the student loan interest rate from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, making college less affordable. Our budget makes sure there is not that doubling.

Also, we had an earlier conversation with Ms. Moore about the impact of people in poverty. I'll just give you one example:

In the category of the budget that helps with the Women, Infants, and Children program--this is the program that helps pregnant women and women with very young children get nutrition assistance--they double the sequester cut. Then they tell us it's not going to have any impact--not on that and not on doubling the sequester cut on the National Institutes of Health and the research they do. Somehow, magically, all that will be funded even though you double the sequester cut--more than double it--in that category of the budget.

So their budget, while providing these windfall tax breaks to the folks at the very top, and their budget, while slowing down economic growth in the economy right now, also means we undermine other important priorities in our country.

I would now like to yield 2 minutes to a new, distinguished member of the Budget Committee, the gentleman from California (Mr. Huffman).

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, just to be clear in terms of the Democratic proposals, if you take our budget proposal here together with the work that we have done over the last couple of years, which reduces spending by over $1.5 trillion, $700 billion in revenue, take that all together, means $4 trillion in deficit reduction over that amount, over the period of the window, and we do it in a balanced way. We don't do it the same time we are providing windfall tax breaks to folks at the very top. We don't do it on the backs of other important priorities. We do it by growing the economy and asking for shared responsibility, so we have shared prosperity in this country.

I now yield 1 1/2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia, a member of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Johnson.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I think Mr. Ribble made some very, very important points for all of us in this debate, and that is: the reason you see spending rising in both budgets is primarily because we have so many more baby boomers becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security. In fact, what this chart shows is that, over the 10-year window, you are going to see about a 33 percent increase in the number of people eligible for Medicare and about a 30 percent increase in the number of people who are eligible for Social Security.

So what we say in our budget is that, if we are going to meet our commitments to these seniors but also reduce our budget deficit, we have to do it in a balanced way. Because if we meet these commitments and at the same time are trying to reduce our deficit, one way to do it is the way the Republican budget does: to more than double the sequester cut in all the areas that are important to growing our economy, our infrastructure investment, our kids' education, science and research. They also cut Medicaid, which affects a lot of those seniors on Medicare. About 20 percent of those seniors are also on Medicaid.

But it is at the end of that 10-year window that our Republican colleagues then move to their voucher plan, premium support--I don't care what you call it. The only way you are going to achieve any savings compared to the baseline number, CBO baseline that the chairman showed you, the only way you are going to do it is if you are capping the amount you are going to get so that seniors have to eat the costs and take the risks of rising health care.

There is a better way to address that issue, and that is the way we approach it in our budget. And that is to build on the kind of reforms that we made in the Affordable Care Act in ObamaCare, which have helped and contributed to reducing the rapid rise in per capita health care costs and which, as I pointed out earlier, our Republican colleagues included in their own budget.

So, yes, we have to deal with these drivers of costs, including health care. But the way we propose to do it is not by transferring or offloading those rising health care costs on the backs of the seniors, but by moving Medicare away from a strictly fee-for-service system toward one where we reward the value of care over the volume of care. And that has achieved significant savings, and it has done so without any negative impact to Medicare beneficiaries. So very different approaches to this issue.

Mr. Ribble pointed out there is spending going up that is to meet these commitments. But if you don't take a balanced approach like we do, you can only address those issues by undermining other very important national priorities, priorities that have always had bipartisan support in the past.

I now yield 1 1/2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas, a member of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Green.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I just want to respond to a few of the comments from the chairman with respect to Medicare and health care costs.

As we indicated earlier, we've seen a dramatic slowing in the per capita interest in health care cost. That's a good thing. That's, in part, we believe, a result of changes in the Affordable Care Act and, as a result of that, the so-called Independent Advisory Board that our colleagues misleadingly refer to as a bunch of bureaucrats won't even have any job to do for at least 10 years, probably longer.

Now, if health care costs per capita start rising more quickly, then their task--and this is a group of health experts and others--their task is to propose a way to reduce those health care costs, and they're specifically instructed not to have a negative impact on beneficiaries.

And by the way, it specifically says, if Congress has a better way to do it, go for it. That's what the law says. We think that that's a better approach than handing everything over to insurance companies.

And the Republican plan to give seniors a voucher, premium support--I don't care what you call it, it's bad news because seniors will be getting this thing, but the value of that thing doesn't keep up with the rising health care costs.

Now, the chairman mentioned prescription drug part D. It came in under projected cost. One reason was you had more generic drugs on the entire market, not just the Medicare market. But the other, major reason was, guess what? There were 25 percent fewer people enrolled in part D. So you had fewer participants and so, obviously, it costs less. Twenty-five percent.

Now, it's simply wrong to say that the Republican voucher plan for Medicare is like part D prescription drug, or like the Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan, which we've heard about many times before, because the difference is, and it goes to the core of this issue, both those plans, part D and the Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan, have provisions that ensure that the premium that is provided by the government, or Medicare, keeps up on a percentage basis with rising health care costs. That's why it's called premium support, and that's why the Republican plan is not premium support because it does not keep up with rising health care costs, if they're going to claim the savings it makes.

And here's a chart that illustrates this. This is current Medicare. Seniors are putting in a certain amount, and they're guaranteed a certain percentage of support from Medicare.

Here's the plan for Federal employees and Members of Congress: Members of Congress and Federal employees put in around 25 percent and the program picks up the other 75 percent. And as costs go up, the Federal Government still picks up 75 percent. Here's what happens with a voucher program where the value of what you get doesn't keep up with the percentage rise in health care costs. You, the beneficiary, the senior, pay more and more. And that's the only way it can work if you're at the same time going to show that congressional budget chart that shows all that spending out into the future. The only way you can bring that down under the plan is to cap the value of premiums. And that's not premium support; that's a voucher. And that's the end of the Medicare guarantee.

I now yield 2 minutes to a great new member of the Budget Committee, the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline).

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

It's extraordinary how many times we have to point out that the Republican budget before us today contains the Medicare savings that were first demagogued last fall during the Presidential campaign. We hear them attacked here on the floor of the House by our Republican colleagues, and yet they're in the Republican budget. In fact, they're in this Republican budget. And what's more, their budget wouldn't balance without them, which is why they cannot have it both ways and claim their budget is in balance and they're getting rid of ObamaCare.

Now, while they're keeping the savings, they are getting rid of all the important benefits in the Affordable Care Act that will provide more affordable health care, which will make sure people can't be denied coverage because of preexisting conditions, will make sure that kids can stay on their parents' insurance policy until they're age 26.

For 3 years in a row, we've had a bill from our Republican colleagues called Repeal and Replace: repeal ObamaCare, but replace it with something else that provides affordable care. Three years. We've never seen replace. There is no replace. You can look through the Republican budget. There's no replace. Just like for 3 years they tell us they've got a tax reform plan that's going to magically provide these big tax cuts for people and not hit middle-income taxpayers. Not one piece of paper out of the Ways and Means Committee in 3 years.

So, Mr. Chairman, it's a little tiresome to continue to hear people criticize savings that we achieve without touching beneficiaries, which our colleagues include in their budget and which extended the life of the Medicare trust fund by more than 8 years.

I now yield 1 1/2 minutes to somebody who knows a lot about the importance of Medicare and Social Security, the gentlelady from Illinois, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Ms. Schakowsky.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, under our budget proposal, the deficit is dropping rapidly, but we also address the jobs deficit so that we make sure more people get back to work. With respect to the Medicare trust fund, I would just point out the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, extended the life of the hospital trust fund by 8 years. And if Republicans did what they said they want to do, which is repeal it, they would shorten the life of the trust fund to 2016. But even though they don't want to tell us, they apparently have kept that in.

I now yield 1 1/2 minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut who has worked so hard to make sure that college is affordable to students in this country, Mr. Courtney.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume to respond to a couple of things that were just said.

The first is that when President Obama was sworn in--in fact, before he even put his hand on the Bible a little more than 4 years ago, we were losing over 700,000 jobs every month. The economy was actually spiraling downward at a faster rate than it was at the time of the Great Depression. And thanks to the resilience of the American people and the emergency actions taken by the President and others, we stopped the free fall, we turned the corner and there have been 36 consecutive months of private sector job growth, more than 6.4 million jobs created.

We didn't get any help from our Republican colleagues when we had to make tough decisions to prevent the total collapse of the economy. Now that we've seen some momentum in the job market, we have a Republican budget that's going to put the brakes on that growth. That's according to the Congressional Budget Office. By the way, their budget includes the assumption of those continued sequestration levels into the next year.

Let's talk about China for a minute. I got a letter the other day from the CEO of a major biotech company. Here's what he said. He said that over
the last couple of years because of the reduction in our national investment in science and research, he laid off 1,000 people. And because of the continuing sequester, they've imposed a hiring freeze right now. Those are jobs that now will not be created that would have been otherwise if we hadn't had the Republican approach to the sequester.

You know the real kick? I heard Mr. Duffy talking about China. They're hiring people in China. Not because of lower Chinese wages, but because China has decided to make science and health care funding a national priority. In other words, the Chinese are copying the secrets to our success, things that help our economy grow, things that are slashed in the Republican budget. Did I say ``slashed''? Yeah. Because they cut that portion of the budget by more than two times the sequester. That's a fact.

If we're talking about competing with the Chinese or the Indians or the Europeans or anybody else who is out there, one of our global competitors, let's not allow them to borrow the secrets of our success while we're ignoring them here at home.

I now yield 2 minutes to a terrific new Member of the Budget Committee, someone who has been focused on and leading a lot of our anti-poverty efforts, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee).

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The President has been crystal clear. His top priority is to grow the economy, to put more Americans back to work, to strengthen the middle class, to have rising middle class wages and upward mobility in this country. By attacking the jobs deficit, we can also bring down the budget deficit because we know from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that more than half of our deficit this year is due to the fact that you still have a lot of people out of work who are looking for work, which is why it's so counterproductive to adopt the approach that our Republican colleagues do.

By not replacing the sequester, the Congressional Budget Office tells us we will lose hundreds of thousands of jobs just by the end of this calendar year, and those jobs are the most important things to be available to help strengthen the middle class and lift people out of poverty. But in lifting people out of poverty, it's also important to provide a little bit of support that they can stand on as they climb that ladder of opportunity. Unfortunately, this budget cuts into a lot of those legs on that stool of support, and nobody understands this issue better than our colleague.

So she may respond, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlelady from California (Ms. Lee).

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, let's be very clear. If you give States one-third of the amount of money that they are currently getting from Medicaid and ask them to do the same job, which is what this budget would do just 10 years from now, and increasingly down that path, you will, as the nonpartisan, independent Congressional Budget Office said ``reduce access to care.'' That's the bottom line.

With respect to the voucher program, premium support, again, I don't really care what label you attach to it; the impact is the same. If you want to achieve the out-year budget savings that our colleagues claim to achieve, you've got to put a cap on that amount, which is what their plan would do and which makes it entirely different than the plan we have for Members of Congress and Federal employees, and the plan that most people in the private sector have as well.

As this red line shows, the amount of support you would get would drop dramatically relative to rising health care costs, and that's why we don't call it premium support because it doesn't provide support.

I now yield 1 1/2 minutes to the gentlelady from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), a member of the Judiciary Committee.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, let me just say a word about the health care provided in the Affordable Care Act. That means that you can stay on your parents' policy until you are 26, so if you have a terrible accident the family is not bankrupted. That means that if you have preexisting conditions, you are not denied coverage by the insurance companies.

We keep hearing, ``repeal all those benefits and some day we will get around replacing them.'' We have heard that for 3 years. There is nothing in this budget about replacing.

I think the majority leader asked the right question: Which budget grows the economy? And I would just like to read from what the majority leader said on the floor of this House last year about the sequester. Here is what Mr. Cantor said:

Under the sequester, unemployment would soar from its current level up to 9 percent, setting back any progress the economy has made.

Then he cites a study showing that 200,000 Virginian jobs are on the line.

Well, guess what? The Republican plan leaves in place the deep sequester cuts. That is why by the end of this year we will see 750,000 fewer jobs, including a lot fewer jobs in Virginia, as Mr. Cantor acknowledged.

Why in the world we would want to do that when we have people struggling to find work, I don't know. Because in the Democratic budget, we replace the sequester so that we save those jobs. In fact, we invest more in jobs going forward.

On the tax issue--here is a headline from the other day in The Washington Post--a nonpartisan group did a study: ``GOP Tax Cuts Would Benefit Very Wealthy.'' And that is the bottom line. Tax breaks for the folks at the very top--all those loopholes we talked about closing--not one loophole closure to help reduce the deficit in a balanced way.

I would now like to yield 1 1/2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee, who has been working on these issues and working for working families, Mr. Cohen.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

We've had a good and healthy debate today. I want to go back to the question that was posed by the Republican leader, Mr. Cantor: Which of these budgets does more to help the economy? Which budget helps put more people back to work?

Well, we know that the austerity approach taken in the Republican budget will result in 750,000 fewer Americans working by the end of this year and 2 million fewer Americans working next year, compared to the alternative that the Democrats are proposing, which would replace the sequester. So you achieve the same amount of deficit reduction, but you don't do it in a way that results in slowing down economic growth in this country this year, next year, or the year beyond. We tackle the budget deficit by dealing with the jobs deficit right now and then taking a balanced approach into the future.

Let's talk about taxes. The Republican budget will give another windfall tax break to the very wealthiest people in this country. In order to make up
the revenue lost, they will inevitably have to increase the tax burden on middle-income taxpayers unless they're going to put their budget out of balance. Now, just to safeguard against that, we offered an amendment that said, when you do tax reform, don't raise taxes on middle-income families. Every Republican on the Budget Committee voted against that.

We can address our priorities and reduce the deficit in a smart, consistent way without violating our commitments to seniors, without reopening the prescription drug doughnut hole so people with high drug costs will have to shell out lots more--thousands over the period of this budget. We can do it without making the interest rate on student loans double this July. We can do it without cutting our investment in transportation by 15 percent when we have all these unmet needs and 15 percent employment in the construction industry. We know we can do all those things and reduce our deficit the smart way because we do it in the House Democratic budget, which dramatically drops the deficit so that it's growing much slower than the economy, stabilizes the debt at 70 percent of GDP, and, yes, balances the budget the same time the Republican budget last year balanced. What a conversion to hit this political target this year after all the talk last year. And the reason--and the fundamental difference here--is that, by trying to drive to that political target, they end up balancing the budget on the backs of everybody else--commitments to seniors, investment in our economy, investment in the future.

At the end of the day--and we showed the numbers earlier, Mr. Chairman. They can't have it both ways. They can't say their budget balances in 10 years and at the same time they repeal ObamaCare, because the $715 million in savings from the Affordable Care Act, from ObamaCare, is embedded right in their budget.

The trillion dollars in revenue from that they say they're going to pull out of the air. But if we repealed ObamaCare today, it would be out of balance by over $500 billion. So let's focus on the task at hand, put people back to work. Let's have a Tax Code that makes sense for the middle class. And let's keep our commitment to seniors and grow this economy.

Mr. Chairman, I ask that people reject the lopsided Republican plan and adopt the balanced approach presented by the Democratic Caucus.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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