Chris Van Hollen: “We actually have a kind of a yardstick that we can use to measure whether these budget approaches have a balanced…”

“We actually have a kind of a yardstick that we can use to measure whether these budget approaches have a balanced approach, meaning that they ask for shared responsibility. You have the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission report, and they said we should reduce our deficits in a steady way through a combination of revenue, but also targeted cuts. This Republican budget is totally lopsided. It provides tax windfalls to folks at the very top, and balances the budget at the expense of everybody else. What we've proposed, actually, when you take into account the $1.5 trillion in cuts we made over the last couple of years and the $700 billion in revenue from January, and what we have in this budget, we actually have a higher ratio of cuts to revenue than that bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan when you look at everything that's embedded in it. So that's measured against a bipartisan approach, and that gets us to where we need to be without hitting all the other priorities we have in our country. With that, let me yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin), the distinguished ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, who has looked at these numbers backwards and forwards, and I look forward to his comments. (Mr. LEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)”