Chris Van Hollen: “Absolutely. I'm glad the gentleman asked the question. Simpson-Bowles, Rivlin-Domenici, they proposed an approach which…”

“Absolutely. I'm glad the gentleman asked the question. Simpson-Bowles, Rivlin-Domenici, they proposed an approach which was about $3 in cuts to $1 in revenue, depending on the accounting rules. We've already enacted $1 trillion in cuts, 100 percent in cuts. You voted for that; I voted for that, 100 percent cuts. What this does is, for the next 1 year, we do another $30 billion in cuts--a little over that, actually--and then we get about $80 billion through closing loopholes. For example, we say that the big oil companies don't need taxpayer subsidies to encourage them to go drill. They've already testified, their chief executives, they don't need that. They're making plenty right now. We also say that millionaires should pay the same effective tax rate as the people who work for them. And if you take that approach, frankly, with the trillion dollars in cuts we've already made, we are still cutting a lot more than the bipartisan groups recommended compared to the revenue. So our ratio of cuts to revenue is much higher because those bipartisan groups, they recommended that trillion dollars in cuts, and we adopted that on a bipartisan basis. What they are not doing, what you're not doing, is taking the other part of their recommendation, frankly, which is to say let's close some of these outrageous tax loopholes for the purpose of deficit reduction.…”