Van Hollen: We are Not Helping Small Businesses by Running Up Our National Debt

Floor Speech

Van Hollen: I thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I thank my colleague, the Ranking Member of the Ways and Means Committee, for all his work on this.

The bills we are seeing today on the floor of the House are part of a series of bills that have come out of the Ways and Means Committee from our Republican colleagues that run up our national debt by putting hundreds of billions of dollars on a credit card by permanently extending a number of business tax credits. And in the process they are actually violating their own budget that they had on the floor just a few months ago. And that's why, Mr. Speaker, this is not a serious attempt to help small businesses by bringing these measures up one at a time.

Mr. Speaker, if I could ask for order in the House.

The Speaker Pro Tempore: The House will be in order. The gentleman may resume.

Van Hollen: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

By bringing these up one at a time in a rifle shot fashion, our Republican colleagues are abandoning what they said we should do, which we agree we should do on a bipartisan basis, which is to tackle tax reform in a fiscally responsible way. After all, Mr. Speaker, we are not helping small businesses by running up our national debt. It was just about a month ago when our Republican colleagues told us that the biggest threat to future economic growth in this country was projected deficits in the out years. And we have said to our Republican colleagues we need to work together to reduce that long-term deficit. It's not a question about whether we should do it, it's a question of how we should do it.

But this bill and these bills on the floor today take us in the opposite direction. Together they are going to add over $614 billion to our credit card, if you add up all these rifle shot bills that have come out of the Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Speaker, what happened to all the rhetoric about fiscal discipline? About getting our deficits in order? Out the window. And just to put these numbers in perspective, that [$614] billion on the credit card is 30 times what it would cost to extend emergency unemployment compensation to 3 million Americans who are out of work today through no fault of their own.

So, contrasting these bills with the budget rhetoric we heard a few months ago about reducing our deficits is total doublespeak. Our Republican colleagues know it doesn't meet the laugh test. And when we had our debate on this very floor about the Republican budget, we pointed out that the claim that it balanced in 10 years was based on all sorts of Enron-like accounting gimmicks. So, for example, they assumed all the revenues that would come in over the next 10 years from the Affordable Care Act, at the same time they said they were repealing Affordable Care Act. Both things can't happen at the same time. Yet today, even if you take the Republican budget gimmicks, as they would have us do -- even if you do that, their budget no longer balances in 10 years. It no longer balances in 10 years. In fact, if you look carefully at the rules governing this debate, our Republican colleagues had to change their own rules to allow this bill to be on the floor today because otherwise it would have violated their claim of a balanced budget. That's the kind of gimmickry we have going on here.

Now, if our Republican colleagues are really serious about reducing the long-term deficit, as they claimed to be a month ago, they would be willing to close some of those special interest tax breaks in order to help reduce the deficit. And yet their budget doesn't close a single special interest tax break. It keeps the big subsidies for big oil companies. It keeps tax breaks for hedge fund owners. And the bills before us today are under a rule that doesn't allow us to pay for them by closing some of those tax breaks. Mr. Levin and I would have loved to have the opportunity to say let's pay for this business expensing provision by shutting down some of the unproductive tax breaks, tax breaks that are there not because they have economic value, but because a powerful political interest got that tax break in the code. And yet our Republican colleagues have a rule that says we can't touch those.

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