Chris Sununu: “I have rarely heard so much time and effort made into making a pretty simple amendment sound so complicated. It is…”

“I have rarely heard so much time and effort made into making a pretty simple amendment sound so complicated. It is simple because if you ask anyone in this country what should be done with the on-budget surpluses, they give you a pretty straightforward response. They say, we should increase education funding, we should strengthen Social Security or Medicare, we should get rid of the marriage penalty, give individuals deductibility for their health insurance cost. But the fact of the matter is under the existing pay-go rule, you cannot get rid of the marriage penalty using the on-budget surplus. You cannot strengthen Medicare using the on-budget surplus. Then how in fact do we do those things? Last year we passed a Medicare update bill. We had to waive the pay-go rule, which is arcane and outdated in an age of on-budget surpluses. How did we eliminate the Social Security earnings limit, which is good bipartisan legislation that everyone in this body supports? We had to waive the pay-go rule. How do we get rid of the marriage penalty? We have to waive the pay-go rule. If you want to do these things, if you want to reduce taxes without cutting entitlements and if you want to strengthen entitlements without cutting other entitlements, you need to waive the existing pay-go rules. That is what this gentleman's amendment does. It updates them in a common sense way.”