On the recordFebruary 6, 2013
The Republican mantra is no revenues, cuts at any price, whether it damages health research, our kids' education, our national defense, or our national economy. So beneath their new talk of softening their image remains their hard edge. Now we're less than a month away from a sequester--$85 billion in arbitrary, across-the-board cuts just in 2013. Just yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned us that allowing the sequester budget cuts to take effect would reduce GDP growth by more than 25 percent this year, wiping out hundreds of thousands of jobs-- hundreds of thousands of jobs--and pushing the unemployment rate back up to 8 percent. So I say to the Republicans, instead of opening your arms to the sequester and risking our Nation's economic recovery, Republicans should be opening their minds to a balanced, bipartisan solution.
