On the recordFebruary 3, 2012
This is the final amendment to this bill. It will not kill the bill, and it won't send it back to committee. If adopted, we will then vote on the passage of the bill, as amended. When families in my district and across the country sit around the kitchen table to try to balance their budgets, they know that costs don't stay the same every year. They know the price of milk and gas and college and health care all go up. Yet H.R. 3578, left unamended, holds the budgetary baseline constant instead of allowing it to reflect increases in costs, making simple inflation adjustments look like increases in spending. Ignoring increases in costs will dramatically lower program levels in the baseline. Translated, this means that the priorities we support to help sustain the middle class and those aspiring to it, the programs we pay our taxes to support, will be cut as inflation eats into the accounts set in the budget. The Republican majority argues that America's middle class must make even more sacrifices to address our debt. The majority's mantra is that austerity alone, spending cuts focused only on nondefense discretionary domestic spending with no additional revenue and without closing any special interest tax loopholes, is all they think should be done. Never mind that it's largely their policies enforced under the last administration, aided and abetted by the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, that were largely responsible for the debt situation.…
