David Price: “The gentleman is absolutely right. This has been in Republican budgets forever, this war on the kind of safety net…”

“The gentleman is absolutely right. This has been in Republican budgets forever, this war on the kind of safety net provisions that so many of our fellow citizens depend on. Fiscal rectitude, indeed. They are willing to go $1.5 trillion in the hole, willing to borrow that money, to take the national debt to dangerous levels. But it is a matter of being able, then, to say: Poor us. Our country is broke. We can't afford to invest in our people. We can't afford to build our infrastructure. We can't even afford to leave intact the safety net that people have spent their lives depending on. It is a travesty. This tax bill is not just about taxes. It is about keeping faith with the American people; and that faith, this very day, has been broken by the Republican Party. Mr. Speaker, I should say this. They had an opportunity to do this the right way. This wasn't inevitable. This wasn't written in stone. They could have worked with Democrats in Congress in a bipartisan way to figure out how to grow the economy and how to simplify our Tax Code. Do you remember that? Simplify the Tax Code and file it on a postcard. This bill makes the Tax Code far, far more complicated. It is a dream bill for tax lawyers and accountants. So no more simplification. That has been forgotten. They were going to lower the tax burden for middle class families. We could have figured out how to do that without exploding the debt. There are many, many things we could have achieved together.…”