On the recordAugust 2, 2012
I thank the gentleman for yielding. I rise in opposition to this bill. It's interesting. Today's the 1-year anniversary of the enactment of the Budget Control Act, and that came about and left us with this impending sequestration. So let's remember why we passed the Budget Control Act. We passed it because it was a compromise reached in order to raise the debt ceiling, which the House majority was refusing to allow to be raised. They were refusing to raise the debt ceiling because they said that they were concerned and they cared about our Nation's debt. But just yesterday, that same House majority passed a bill that will add over $400 billion to our national debt in just 1 year, a bill that continues tax cuts that added $3 trillion to our debt over the last decade and that history has shown didn't help economic growth. Now we have this bill on the floor to mandate strict parameters of tax reform. I want to do tax reform, Mr. Speaker. There isn't any one of us who doesn't want to do tax reform, but this is the wrong way to go about it. Locking in certain rates and certain rules is not how tax reform is done and can lead to very serious unintended consequences, like exploding our national debt. Yesterday, the Tax Policy Center released a review of Mitt Romney's tax plan, which is not dissimilar to the principles in this underlying bill.…
