Jeff Merkley

Well, outside observers are finding the opposite. So I do hope that we will get details from you showing that in fact you are working hard.

I encourage you also to look at Canada and to look at Brazil, which have reached the logical conclusion, where we started from, that asbestos is hazardous, and they have banned it.

During the time that you have now been Director, the agency has taken 15 actions related to air quality. Fifteen of those diminish air quality, and zero of them improve air quality.

107 percent of the benefits goes to the top 1 percent by 2017.

And if you do not have it, how did you possibly get to an overall score if you did not cost out the individual provisions, right?

But my point is that initial analysis, be it $1.4 trillion or $1.8 trillion, to get to that analysis CBO had to look at each individual tax provision and what it would cost.

So here is my frustration.

I had difficulty getting the numbers on the individual tax provisions, what they would have costed, to better understand individual policies.

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated $1 trillion of cost added to the deficit. Penn Wharton estimated $1.4 trillion.

I will just close by saying that our children are now financing the biggest theft of money delivered to the wealthy in America, and this is what you normally see in corrupt, irresponsible, Third World governments, not the United States of…

I do think it is an important point to make because what we have seen for a pattern that has increased our debt vastly has been Republican leadership has repeatedly taken us deep into the red, Democratic leadership has reduced that damage…

We have a bill that has borrowed from our children, because they are the ones that inherit the debt, to deliver the vast bulk of the benefits to the richest Americans.

$17 out of every $20 in the benefits from the tax reductions goes to richer Americans.

I think most Americans would feel that if you have a plan designed for working America, the vast bulk of the benefits would go to working America, not to the richest Americans.

How about accountability? How about that concept being embedded in the work of what was our consumer watchdog that now is our consumer 'roll over and let the big companies scratch its belly' organization?

I am really disappointed to see that the philosophy of this administration ran on of fighting for ordinary Americans became just this is an administration by and for the powerful.

Everything we see in this budget is about help to the powerful and an assault on working Americans.

Which is more important: educating our children or more money for the Koch brothers?

Which is more important to you: people having housing or $6 billion to Exxon Mobil?

Which one is more important to you: the heating program or the tax cut to Wells Fargo, which has defrauded so many people?

Let us give $1.5 trillion in the tax bill to the wealthiest Americans and proceed to cut our health...

But you acknowledge that the budget has a decrease of $240 billion in infrastructure?

Isn't that kind of a shameful thing to do to the next generation of Americans?

So that really is a significant problem when you design a plan for the richest Americans, try to sell it for workers.

Wouldn't working America be better off if you design a tax decrease that actually helped working Americans?