Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2016

Floor Speech

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I want to add my voice to those who congratulate everyone on the Budget Committee, particularly the chair and the ranking member, for their really hard work--and the staff--that we put into this labor.

I can tell you that I was, indeed, shocked. Even though I have been on the Budget Committee for several cycles, I continue to be shocked at how this budget does not reflect what I call democratic values. I mean democratic, not as a Democratic Party, but as our democracy. I believe that our democracy is really at risk when we put forth such a budget.

I think that this budget hollows out the middle class; and, based on the constructs that we have seen in the past, it would raise taxes on middle class families. I am talking about those people earning modest incomes--$50,000 to $75,000 a year--by $2,000 a year.

Of course, it abandons the poor. Of the $5.5 trillion, 69 percent of this is on the backs of those who are the most poor and most vulnerable. A lot of people just don't care that much about poor people; but who do we care about in this budget?

This budget pulls up the ladder of opportunity from our kids, that next generation that is going to make our economy work. They are doing us a favor by trying to go to college; yet we cut Pell grants in this Republican budget by somewhere around $90 billion.

It deconstructs our job-creating infrastructure investment by $187 billion. There used to be a time when the transportation budget was a bipartisan thing; but, in the name of balancing a budget, we even throw these workers under the bus.

It pulls the lifeline from seniors, disabled, and kids by block granting our Medicaid program and cutting $913 billion, that being a portion of the $2 trillion that we cut from health care, a lifeline, by repealing the Affordable Care Act and all this in the name of a phony balancing of the budget.

We are going to see a display here at some point. I don't know if you call it the king of the hill, the queen-of-the-hill budget, the price-is-right budget--I don't know--where we are either going to have $94 billion or $96 billion in a slush fund, the overseas account that is $36 billion, $38 billion above what the generals and the President say
they need for war.

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That is $1.4 trillion of entitlements that we spend through the Tax Code for gas and oil subsidies, jets, hedge fund managers. There is talk in this budget of eliminating the estate tax. Millionaires and billionaires are benefiting tremendously on tax income from CEO pay.

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