Chris Van Hollen: “I thank my colleague, Mr. McGovern, and thank my colleague, Mr. Cole, for his efforts, but this bill falls short in a…”

“I thank my colleague, Mr. McGovern, and thank my colleague, Mr. Cole, for his efforts, but this bill falls short in a number of areas. But most of all, it falls short because it does nothing to prevent the loss of 750,000 American jobs that will result because of the sequester. ``Sequester'' is just a fancy Washington name for hundreds of thousands of American jobs lost. That's going to squeeze middle class families; it's going to squeeze small businesses. And that 750,000 jobs lost number, that's not the President's number, Mr. Speaker. That's not my number. That's the number from the nonpartisan, independent Congressional Budget Office, who have told us that if the sequester stays in place till the end of this calendar year, you'll have 750,000 less Americans working at a time when we have a very fragile recovery going on. Just last week, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve said that it would reduce economic growth this year by one-third. Why would we want to do that when we have an alternative? And, as Mr. McGovern said, we have now tried four times to have an up-or-down vote on the floor of this House on a plan that would replace the sequester in a balanced way. So it would achieve the same amount of deficit reduction as the across-the-board sequester, but without the massive job loss that comes with the sequester because we do it in a targeted way over a period of time.…”