John Yarmuth: “I thank my friend from Maryland. Mr. Chairman, a recent analysis of American tax returns showed that in 2010, the top 1…”

“I thank my friend from Maryland. Mr. Chairman, a recent analysis of American tax returns showed that in 2010, the top 1 percent of earners in the United States earned $288 billion more than they had in 2009--$288 billion more, the top 1 percent. In fact, that was 93 percent of all the additional income earned in the entire United States from year to year, 2009 to 2010. Now, apparently, my friends on the Republican side were outraged that 7 percent of the additional income could slip away to the other 99 percent of American families because they came up with a budget that tried to rectify that immediately. I call it the ``Republican 1 percent budget.'' It's a gift basket for billionaires and millionaires. It contains a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts, which have created an income gap in this country on par with Cameroon and Rwanda. But the ``Republican 1 percent budget'' doesn't stop there. It gives an additional tax break of $150,000 a year for everyone making more than $1 million a year. And it does that by dismantling Medicare, slashing education funding, transportation, and things like the SNAP program which help so many needy families in this country. Mr. Chairman, income inequality has become the central tenet of Republican ideology. The budget we will probably vote on later makes their commitment to widening the income gap abundantly clear.…”