On the recordApril 14, 2011
I thank the ranking member. If my colleague would remember, one of the first amendments that was offered was to say let's be serious about the deficit. Let's have shared sacrifice. Let's ask those folks paying over a million dollars to go back to the same tax rates that they were during the Clinton administration and put some of that money to deficit reduction. We offered other amendments by saying let's let the big oil companies do a little less with the taxpayer subsidies and focus that on higher priorities. The gentleman asked where the figure was that a senior would have to pay $6,000 more in the year 2022 under the Republican proposal. That is from the CBO letter to the chairman of the Budget Committee where they did their analysis of the long-term impact. It was not a Republican outfit. It was not a Democratic outfit. In fact, the chairman of the committee has made it clear that he has used the CBO baseline for the purpose of his own budget. This is out of a CBO report. And I think we need to take it seriously, because we can all have our own arguments and opinions, but there are certain facts that we can't run away from, and that's one of them.
