On the recordFebruary 12, 2015
When you dig another hundreds of billions of dollars--or maybe $1 trillion--into debt, it provides an excuse for many of those who don't believe in those programs to say: Gee, we would love to help you with education for your children, and, yes, it would be good if we had another meat inspector, but we just can't afford to do that. So we get to the point that Mr. Ryan has raised: Why is it we should raise taxes on some in order to maintain and renew some expired tax credits for others? I think there are two reasons. One is that some people are still not paying their fair share. We have got some multinational corporations that don't pay as much as a percent of their income as the people who clean up their offices. The second reason is that it is for the same reason that we say, if we need additional money for our national defense or for our educational and retirement security at home, we have to come up with the revenues to pay for that if we are to maintain any sense of fiscal responsibility. There are some good provisions in this bill, but we need the certainty that we will not be digging ourselves deeper into debt, preventing our ability to meet other vital national needs for our families.
