Rob Andrews: “Mr. Speaker, if you had a leaky faucet and your plumber told you it was going to cost $150 to fix the leak, you would…”

“Mr. Speaker, if you had a leaky faucet and your plumber told you it was going to cost $150 to fix the leak, you would not go out and put a $100,000 second mortgage on your house. That is what this bill does. We had a $4 billion problem, a very real and serious problem with respect to trade with our European allies and trading partners. What we now have to fix that $4 billion problem is a $140 billion raid on the Treasury. I know we are going to be told that this bill is paid for. That is an incredible fiction, it is a delusion, because most of the way this bill is paid for is to assume that the tax breaks that are enacted in this bill will be repealed in a couple of years when they expire. You could make a fair amount of money if gambling were legal betting that that would not happen and it will not happen. It is bad enough that we are going to reach into the Social Security trust fund again and we are going to reach out to foreign creditors again to borrow the money for these tax breaks; but when you look at what they are for and what they are not for, the bill becomes even more odious. What they are for in large part, $42 billion worth of tax breaks for American firms to support their overseas operations.”