Appointment of Conferees on S. 1932, Deficit Reduction Act of 2005

APPOINTMENT OF CONFEREES ON S. 1932, DEFICIT REDUCTION ACT OF 2005 -- (House of Representatives - December 16, 2005)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, there certainly was a lot of emotion in the speech given by the chairman; but I suspect in this time of the year where so many people are concerned about our sick, our poor and our disabled, that rather than being moved by the rhetoric of the Republicans, we might take a deep breath and find out who is on our side as Democrats.

I know that the poor and the aged and disabled do not have much of a political voice, but somehow in this holiday season the spiritual leaders probably understand this a little better than some of us. These are the charitable organizations that reach out, Catholic Charities, the Jewish Council Against Poverty, the Protestant Council. Each and every day they run soup kitchens and try to assist people, especially mothers that have no one in the household to assist them in raising their children.

Any specialist will tell you, if you do not give a kid the right start, you do not give them a chance to get to school, and cut the resources from under him to get an education, it is not just why can they not do it my way or why did he not get an inheritance. It is a question of where do these kids end up.

They first end up not paying much taxes since they do not have the talents to get a job; but worse than that, in New York we spend $84,000 for every kid who gets in trouble who finds himself on Ryker's Island, and I do not think you have to be a health specialist to know that when you cut the ability of people to get access to health care, they do not necessarily die right away. More often than not, they end up at the most expensive of expenditures, and that is in our hospitals.

I do not know what the poor and the disabled have ever done to the majority or, indeed, what the moral majority, why they would wait until Christmastime to show just how mean they can get. Even if they cannot control this meanness, why would they do it at a time when they have given hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts to the very wealthy?

I am not that good spiritually, but know my friends on the other side of the aisle that are so concerned with the Bible and biblical phrases, there is one thing somewhere, and I do not know all of the facts as is properly recorded, but it deals with a bunch of rich people that could not get in heaven because they had not treated the lesser of Jesus' brothers and sisters the way he would want. I have never seen a more classic example of the violation of that spirit than what I have seen in the last couple of weeks on this floor.

So you can raise your voice all you want, you can scream about spending, but it just seems to me that there are no religious leaders that I can think of that feel they have an obligation to take care of those people who are in the hospital, who are hungry, who are without clothes, who are without food, and certainly the children who are really the least powerful of all, if you had to do it, why do you not just do what you do in conference and come out and say that we authorized it? But to have this heavy blow at a time when you are reducing the taxes on the very rich is not only wrong, but it smacks of being immoral.

This is the wrong thing to do. This is the wrong time to do it, and it is something that I am confident is not in accord with the moral teachings or the spiritual beliefs of anyone in this body.

What you are doing is saying that you have to cut spending. Why can Iraq not get on that list of not wanting to spend? Why can we not just slow down the rebuilding of Baghdad and rebuild the health of some of our people and the schools of some of our people? Why can we not invest in Americans and make them the most productive people that we can make? Why do you pick on the most vulnerable in Medicare, which the other side is probably going to hit as badly as we hit Medicaid?

What are these programs? The programs are listed as SSI. What does it mean, you have to be blind, disabled or aged? Medicare, you have to be old and sick? Medicaid, you have to be poor and sick? The programs are designed to bring the moneys to the mothers who have been abandoned or just for children, and the other one is education.

Is there anyone that you missed, the sick, the poor, the young? Is there anyone else that you want to include that programs should be cut? I might also add, with capital gains tax cuts and corporate dividend tax cuts, is there anyone that is rich that you missed in terms of not giving a tax cut?

What a combination package you have given to the American people and what a time to do it. So whether you call it Christmas or holiday seasons or Chanukah or whether you call it Kwanzaa, you sure picked the right time to hit the wrong people at this time of the year.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

http://thomas.loc.gov