Chris Van Hollen: “We've had a good and healthy debate today. I want to go back to the question that was posed by the Republican leader…”

“We've had a good and healthy debate today. I want to go back to the question that was posed by the Republican leader, Mr. Cantor: Which of these budgets does more to help the economy? Which budget helps put more people back to work? Well, we know that the austerity approach taken in the Republican budget will result in 750,000 fewer Americans working by the end of this year and 2 million fewer Americans working next year, compared to the alternative that the Democrats are proposing, which would replace the sequester. So you achieve the same amount of deficit reduction, but you don't do it in a way that results in slowing down economic growth in this country this year, next year, or the year beyond. We tackle the budget deficit by dealing with the jobs deficit right now and then taking a balanced approach into the future. Let's talk about taxes. The Republican budget will give another windfall tax break to the very wealthiest people in this country. In order to make up the revenue lost, they will inevitably have to increase the tax burden on middle-income taxpayers unless they're going to put their budget out of balance. Now, just to safeguard against that, we offered an amendment that said, when you do tax reform, don't raise taxes on middle-income families. Every Republican on the Budget Committee voted against that.…”