Jeff Merkley

The fiscal year 2018 budget proposal... includes $3.6 trillion in tax cuts with three-quarters of that going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

So just to be very clear, you are very comfortable with the notion of giving $50,000 on average to the richest Americans while slashing health care from 23 million Americans.

Doesn't the health care bill itself violate this Mnuchin rule?

That health care plan, which is estimated to strip health care from 23 million Americans, delivers to Americans making more than $1 million an average $50,000 tax cut.

I would suggest you know very little about housing in Oregon.

Why make a housing emergency worse?

Well, clearly what you are doing in this budget is going to do a lot of damage to those individuals.

It is so easy to sit in your chair and talk about efficiencies when you have never worked with low-income incentives who are going hungry.

Then you feel very comfortable cutting the basic program that ensures our children have food in Oregon?

OK. So we do not have time to go through all these pieces. I have listed them out, the essential damage that this budget does to rural America.

So to the five airports that have contract tower support to keep rural air service, which is essential, you are saying that they will still have that support in the budget?

Are you contending rural America will get the same amount of resources it has after you savage all these programs?

This budget cuts rural business loans, rural development, rural transportation, rural water, essential service to rural airports.

Using the churn as a strategy to simply eliminate Medicaid expansion means roughly 400,000 fewer Oregonians will be covered.

Under the H.R. 1628 Trumpcare 2.0, Medicaid expansion is essentially wiped out.

I think that reinforces the point Senator Cardin was making in the beginning about a coherent strategy.

Because Libya had voluntarily retired its nuclear program under international assurances of non-aggression, and, in fact, those assurances fell apart?

I would love to follow up and get a better understanding of that because I think it is relevant to what we consider doing in the future.

The President said he campaigned on fighting for working people, and this is working for working people, and it sounds like you are going to go in and say, 'No, do not help working people. Help big banks.'

But it actually was designed this way, in fact, so it would be accountable, and you have to understand that the reason why is because ordinary citizens have very little power compared to the fabulous power concentrated in Wall Street.

I would love to have this Committee have a full examination, including inviting the public to come in and testify about the many times that this has been the only way that they have gained justice.

We finally have that consumer watchdog. We know what would happen if we had structured the funding differently.

Did President Reagan's 1981 tax cut increase or decrease revenue?

One of the false facts that has been repeated in previous budgets is to say that tax cuts for corporations and tax cuts for the rich in America will increase revenue.

So if you review the numbers and you see that this is a falsehood, this argument, this kind of magic gift, if we can cut taxes for the rich and powerful but somehow it will increase revenue, if you find that that is false, will you take…