Sheldon Whitehouse

How do you make this-- how do you try to put a price into this cloud of nonsense that is now the pricing system in health care?

The sequester has indeed been stupid, painful, and damaging.

I do think that although the consumer market is a concept of some utility in health care, it is a long way from being a complete answer.

To masquerade it as a Medicare problem, I think, disserves the problem that we face and disserves the American public.

I do not think that is legitimate. I do not think that is honorable. I do not think that is fair.

A child showing up for Job Corps is in a different set of challenges than their age group peer.

But that would mean following the regular order and--

Should we also be looking at trying to get rid of these folks who are gaming the system and paying no tax whatsoever

There is no economic rationale to having CVS, a prominent drug store chain, pay a 50 times higher tax rate than Carnival Cruise lines, correct?

There is plenty of objective evidence that there really are enormous savings that can come out of our health care system if we treat our health care cost problem as a health care system problem.

If you have big oil companies that I think have made $1 trillion in profits in the last--I think it is 5 years, if I am not mistaken, maybe it is 10--$1 trillion in profits, and they are still coming to the American taxpayers' pockets for…

The idea that a hedge fund billionaire pays a lower tax rate than a hospital orderly or a firefighter or a bricklayer, that is just--I mean, you do not need to be looking for revenue to find out that that is wrong.

As we try to solve a $4 trillion deficit problem, we have looked at the spending side, and we have already agreed to spending cuts of $1.7 trillion.

The one place we have not looked at is tax expenditures.

The history is that the Republican party fought through the fiscal meltdown for an austerity solution.

All the incentives for American businesses to offshore all the tax incentives they get when they move jobs overseas or hide revenue overseas, all of that, that is just wrong.

I will stand by that. Thank you very much, Madam Secretary.

I have been a supporter of the high-skilled worker legislation.

If it is too high, then it is a waste of effort and it is taking away from kids.

We have just been through the education bill on the HELP Committee and there was a considerable discussion about the burden that the Department of Education imposes on State and local communities.

The waivers that you have granted have allowed more flexibility, have allowed them to escape the handcuffs

The President identifies $230 billion in savings from the so-called chained CPI benefit cut.

I honestly do not think that there is a State that is further ahead than Rhode Island in terms of developing an interoperable electronic health record.

Zero cases had been referred by the IRS to the Department of Justice, not over complicated tax matters, but over whether these statements were false or not.

As you are considering lowering the corporate tax rate for the folks at the top, we might want to consider figuring out ways to raise the corporate tax rate for the folks at the bottom.