Sheldon Whitehouse

The program's financing gap can be more than fully addressed without cutting benefits.

I would just like to ask you if you would be willing to work with me, and I know Senator Wyden is interested in this on the Finance Committee as well, in a general look at how to do cliff smoothing.

As most viewers will understand, the Budget Committee has very specific responsibilities related to the actual budget process.

These cliffs, I think, are really hard for people that get caught by surprise by them, and they are also, it seems to me, pretty terrible just public policy.

I appreciate your advocacy for it and your call for further support for it.

I assert that our Tax Code has been corrupted by special interests, that powerful interests rich enough to pay for lobbyists and fund Super PACs have looted our tax system to make themselves even richer.

Reforming Social Security's payroll tax cap and treating investment income like wages could close more than 100 percent of the long-term financing gap.

I am particularly grateful to them with their work.

Thank you for talking.

There is no mandate.

I take a moment to offer my condolences to Senator Inhofe's family and friends. ____________________

Do we really want to leave Ukraine high and dry to the tender mercies of the pediatric hospital bombing monster Putin? I kind of doubt it.

The prospect of that creating a shock to the economy along the lines of the 2008 shock or worse, have been repeatedly raised in this Committee.

The growth in healthcare spending has been one of the primary drivers on the spending side.

CBO's long-term budget projections back in 2012 were the last time that CBO showed debt declining as a share of GDP.

Yes. And then here's defense discretionary spending, and then this is non-defense discretionary spending, which as you can see has been fairly constant over all of those years.

Helping the wealthy avoid taxes is such an infatuation that House Republicans even brought the United States to the brink of default trying to prevent the IRS from cracking down on wealthy tax cheats.

Indeed, CBO found that actual and projected federal health spending over the 2010 to 2033 period was $6.3 trillion, $6.3 trillion lower than predicted, which I attribute to improving quality, and moving to value-based care.

Democrats have always pledged to protect and preserve Social Security and Medicare.

Our national debt is not only the result of those two economic shocks, of course. It is also the result of repeated rounds of Republican tax cuts that primarily benefited giant corporations and very, very wealthy individuals.

My Republican colleagues complain that I, and my Democratic colleagues, aren't concerned about our nation's fiscal situation...

Do we really want to leave Ukraine high and dry to the tender mercies of the pediatric hospital bombing monster Putin? I kind of doubt it.

The prospect of that creating a shock to the economy along the lines of the 2008 shock or worse, have been repeatedly raised in this Committee.

The growth in healthcare spending has been one of the primary drivers on the spending side.

So, let me just to put this into context, take a look at this graphic here, which shows from 1994 to 2054, how revenue and spending have worked.