On the recordMay 10, 2012
I would just point out that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has stated that as a result of the economic recovery bill and the extraordinary actions that were taken, over 4 million jobs were created or saved. That means a lot to the people who didn't lose their jobs and to the people who were losing their jobs at the rate of 800,000 per month when the President was sworn in. Are we where we want to be? Of course not. Are we a lot better off than we were? We're pulling ourselves up. The last thing we want to do is go back to where we were. Nobody on the Democratic side has said we can deal with this on the tax side alone. I keep hearing that. It's just not true. We just voted on a bipartisan basis in August for a trillion dollars in cuts. What we propose is what every bipartisan group that has looked at this challenge has said: you have to do this through a combination of cuts, but you also have to get rid of all that pork-barrel stuff in the Tax Code and use some of that to reduce our deficit. Ask the folks who have been making over a million dollars a year to help pay more for our common defense. That is just common sense. With that, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).
