Chris Van Hollen: “I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chair, as Leader Pelosi just said, this really comes down to what vision you…”

“I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chair, as Leader Pelosi just said, this really comes down to what vision you have for what has helped power our economy. The Republican theory of the case is that our economy is powered by providing tax rate cuts to people at the very high end of the income scale and somehow the benefits of that will trickle down and lift everybody up. The problem with that theory is it already crashed in the real world. Right in the early 2000s, that is what President Bush did. Incomes for folks at the top went up even more, but everybody else was running aground, running in place, or falling behind. That is why we presented a budget based on an economy that accelerates because more Americans are able to make bigger paychecks through harder work, and that is why we proposed to change the Tax Code from one that is currently skewed and tilted in favor of unearned income and simply making money off of money and against people who make money off of hard work. Why is the Tax Code skewed that way today? Probably because a lot of people who could afford to pay a lot of wealthy lobbyists made it that way. Yet the Republican budget doesn't close a single tax break for the purposes of reducing the deficit--not corporate jets, not the tax provisions that perversely encourage American companies to move jobs and capital overseas.…”