Hearing of the Senate Budget Committee - Opening Statement of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Hearing on Budget Resolution
Hearing
Mr. Chairman, and because the coverage of this won't show it, let me just say for the record that every single Republican Senator has left except for the Chairman, like folks running away from the scene of a crime.
Mr. Chairman, back in 2009, before you voted against the Senate passage of the Recovery Act, as the economy was teetering into disaster and we tried to hold things together, you said then, "The American people are telling me and my colleagues to stop spending money we don't have for programs we don't need. . . . The U.S. government, the big credit card in the sky, has already maxed out its credit card, but the bank hasn't noticed and the government is now applying for another card with a higher spending limit."
That was then. This is now.
Here we are eight years later and the national debt has fully doubled since the Chairman declared that our national credit card was then "maxed out." Instead of doing our job as the Budget Committee and recommending policies to address the $20 trillion national debt, today's exercise was to rubber-stamp partisan legislation that the CBO has warned would grow our national debt by $2 trillion in the first decade alone, including borrowing costs.
And after years of advocating for Congress to change budget rules to require so-called "dynamic scoring," Republicans aren't even waiting for the Joint Committee on Taxation to produce such an analysis. I suspect that's because the outside groups that have done this modelling confirm what we already knew: even with rosy growth assumptions, the Republican bill will explode the national debt.
It's clear Republicans want to ram through this tax bill, but why? While Congress passed the Recovery Act during the low point of the recession, there's no pressing reason to pass corporate tax cuts today. The current economic expansion--at over 100 months--is on track to be the longest in U.S. history, and corporate profits are near record highs. Many major corporations pay little or no tax at all.
If Republicans are looking to cause another recession, this bill might do the trick. It would raise taxes on millions of middle-class families, and by reducing incentives for homeownership, could cause housing prices to fall 10 percent, according to analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers. It would also hurt state budgets, by reducing state tax revenues to many states, repealing the deduction for state and local taxes, reducing the value of credits that fund local affordable housing, and raising costs for our states' universities.
The American people are squarely against this bill, according to one recent poll by a 52-to-25 margin, with 61 percent saying that the "Republican tax plan favors the rich at the expense of the middle class." The public gets what is going on here. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said this bill is "fundamentally flawed" and will "raise income taxes on the working poor while simultaneously providing a large tax cut for the wealthy."
So why again are we meeting today in this bizarre procedure to ram through this terrible bill? As one Republican Member of the House put it, and I'm quoting here, "My donors are basically saying, "Get it done or don't ever call me again.'" It's as simple as that. Republicans are pushing a tax bill that will hurt our economy and explode the national debt for the sake of big donors.
We're technically here today for the ministerial purpose of combining the tax bill with a provision to allow drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which has nothing to do with taxes or the budget, but will help round up a Republican Senate vote.
This whole process confirms once again that our budget process is completely broken and has become a vehicle for donor-driven partisan attacks. I urge my colleagues to reject this bill, and I urge that this committee find a way to work instead on the bipartisan budget solutions our country actually needs.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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