The Public Record
I yield 12 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell), the dean of the House, and I ask unanimous consent that he be allowed to control that time. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Thornberry). Is there objection to the request of the…
I yield myself 20 seconds. To respond to the gentleman, he may be too young to remember, but 5 years ago, we bequeathed the Bush administration a surplus of $236 billion. This is what has happened in the last 4 fiscal years. The statutory…
The gentlewoman is not only right. She is forcefully correct. She is absolutely right, no question about it.
That is what we are doing now is alerting everyone to the contents of this reconciliation bill which is hanging in the wings, pretending under the name of ``deficit reduction'' to be about fiscal responsibility when it is anything but that.
as we speak, there is a bill in the wings called the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, its fate yet to be determined because it is not at all clear that there are enough votes in this body to pass it. Basically, this bill is part of the…
let me return to student loans and yield back to the gentleman because he is far more conversant in student loans than I am. It is curious that you would turn to student loans, to kids who are accumulating more debt than any generation in…
But it has to be paid. It is obligatory. There is no way around it. You have got to pay it, otherwise the bonds default and the country is in bankruptcy. We cannot let that happen. Let me touch on the package that we expect to come to the…
last week I came to the well of this House to express my concern along with the concern of others in the Committee on the Budget who joined us that night about the direction that a process we call reconciliation was taking. This week my…
a lot of people say it is necessary for fiscal reasons. We have to balance the budget. They say to us as Democrats, What would you do? And that is fair enough. Whenever anyone raises this issue, I think it is pertinent for us to point out…
in 2001, 2002, PAYGO, the multiyear spending caps and the sequestration provision, all of the budget enforcement rules that we put in specially in 1991 that served us so well in the 1990s, were allowed to expire. Why? Because the PAYGO…
Already in the bill you have reported, which is $2 billion short of your targeted amount, and now it is going to be $5.5 billion more than either targeted amount, already you have reversed the decision to lower origination rates. Your…
Let us look at the Committee on Ways and Means. In the original budget resolution, the Committee on Ways and Means was largely spared, mainly because the cuts in Ways and Means would mostly fall on Medicare. It is the biggest entitlement…
It is a reaction to this curve right here, a recognition that the chickens are coming home to roost. All of the bad budget decisions and fiscal policy risks that have been taken are not breaking favorably, are beginning to accumulate, and…
Here is a good account. Defense, for reasons we all understand, has gone up substantially from the year 2000 to the year 2011. This is a projection. It will increase from about $300 billion to $600 billion over that period of time. When…
this was not just serendipity or good luck. We had a good economy, but we also had a good set of budget policies and a good budget converging with a good economy. One of the things that we did in 1991 under the first President Bush, we…
The year before it was 412, and the year before that it was 375. Those are the three worst over the last 3 years, three record deficits in a row. Here is the hard part. It would be bad enough if that were behind us and we are now having to…
These two tax provisions, called PEP and Pease, phase-out of the personal exemption and the phase-in limitation on itemized deductions, these two provisions were signed into law by the first President Bush. When the second President Bush…
Because they are so devilishly difficult to understand all the fine details that go into the pricing of student loans and the renewability and consolidation. A lot of the details about the changes being proposed are not yet widely…
I looked the numbers up, and that is why I have got them available, but let me show you how the reconciliation process works so that the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott) can pick up from there. Originally, when the Republicans decided…
reclaiming my time, I made the point earlier that the cost of catastrophes like Katrina and Rita should be spread over the whole country, the whole population, but spread equitably. And it is not right to saddle that heavy burden on those…
They are becoming so abundantly evidenced that they cannot be overlooked or denied any longer. That is the point I am trying to make.
as we gather here tonight to talk over the problems of the budget, our colleagues on this side of the aisle, the Republicans, are locked in a dispute over how to pay for Hurricane Katrina, the cost of which could fall between $100 and $200…
I think the gentlewoman will agree that the essence of America's opportunity and the essence of opportunity is a good education, and what we are seeing in this budget is diminishing money every year for education. For example, the…
Let me make two points before I yield again. First of all, we all believe that disaster relief should be a program of shared sacrifice. We should all want to pitch in and help the people of New Orleans and Bay St. Louis and the gulf coast…
That is essentially on a linear graph, what we have here in a simple table. It shows a blip for Katrina but basically it adds very little to the outyear deficit.
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