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.

Over the last couple days, we've had a spirited debate on the budget. We have deep differences on this issue, but I want to commend Chairman Ryan for the way he conducts the business of the Budget Committee. The debate is lively but always civil, and I thank him for the way he has run the committee.

I also want to thank all the other members of the Budget Committee for their full participation in this debate and to the staffs, both Republican staff and Democratic staff, who work so hard for their service to our country. I want to commend our team who has been working very hard and ask that their names be included in the Record along with the members of the Republican staff.

Mr. Chairman, these budget resolutions are mostly comprised of lots of numbers on lots of pages, but we know that behind these numbers are key decisions about the future direction of our country and our priorities and values as a nation.

I was disappointed that yesterday this House did not pass our Democratic budget alternative that presents a solutions-based approach to address our challenges instead of an ideological approach. Today, I'm going to ask the House to vote against the Republican budget because of its uncompromising ideological approach, and I will explain more about that in a moment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I'm going to urge our colleagues to vote against this Republican budget for a variety of reasons.

First of all, this is an uncompromising, ideological approach to our budget issues. We've just been through a major national campaign where both Presidential candidates, President Obama and Governor Romney, agreed on one thing, and that was that the people in this country faced a fundamental choice in the direction we were going to take. The American people voted, and they resoundingly rejected the approach that is now taken once again for the third year in a row in this Republican budget.

This budget, as we've heard over the last couple of days, fails on a number of counts. Number one, it adopts the European-style austerity approach that we've seen slow down economies in many parts of Europe. We should instead be focusing on job growth and putting people back to work rather than a budget, like this budget, which will result in 750,000 fewer Americans working by the end of this year. That's according to the independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It will result in more than 2 million fewer people working next year.

It also fails the test of taking a balanced approach because it is founded on the failed idea that giving another round of tax cuts to people at the very high end of the income scale will somehow trickle down and lift up all the other boats. We know that hasn't worked, and yet it is pursued once again such that everybody in the Republican budget is asked to sacrifice except folks at the very top, everybody else, including middle class Americans who will see their tax burden go up in order to finance tax breaks for people at the very high end.

We Democrats offered an amendment in the Budget Committee to say don't increase taxes on middle class Americans, and all our Republican colleagues voted ``no.'' It is based on the idea that we should dramatically cut investments that are important to help our economy grow.

We know we have an aging infrastructure problem. We know we need to modernize our national infrastructure to compete in the global economy; yet this cuts our infrastructure and transportation budget by over 20 percent when we just got a grade of D-plus from the American Society of Civil Engineers and when we have 15 percent unemployment in the construction industry.

It makes it harder for students to go to college. The Republican budget will double the student loan interest rate in July from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.

In the part of our budget where we make important investments in science and research and education, it more than doubles the sequester cut.

It violates important commitments we've made to our seniors. It reopens the prescription drug doughnut hole so that seniors with high health care costs will pay thousands of dollars more over the period of this budget. It turns Medicare into a voucher program so seniors are faced with the risk of rising health care costs.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, it's based on this false idea that you can claim to balance the budget in 10 years when you claim also to be getting rid of ObamaCare when all they do is get rid of the benefits of ObamaCare, but this budget only reaches its claim of balance because they keep the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare.

I urge my colleagues to reject this approach and to adopt the balanced Democratic approach to dealing with these national challenges.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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