David Obey: “it takes no courage to vote for this bill today. All it takes is a capacity to ignore the greatest opportunity we have…”

“it takes no courage to vote for this bill today. All it takes is a capacity to ignore the greatest opportunity we have had in a generation to really fundamentally improve the quality of public services for every American family. It is incredibly short-sighted. We have two choices here today. We can either take every dollar of available surpluses available for the next 10 years, or close to it, and use that money to provide individual gratification through the Tax Code primarily for high income people, or we can make that tax cut modest enough in size so that we leave enough money on the table to fundamentally fix long-term our preexisting obligations in the area of Social Security, in Medicare, and in education. It is incredibly short-sighted and we will regret this moment more than any action that we have taken in the last 17 years. As far as the appropriations are concerned which will follow, we will probably be able to put enough patches on the innertube to get the car down the road for 2 or 3 miles for one year but in the outyears this package also destroys our ability to rebuild our science base. It destroys our ability to put our dollars where our mouths were just a few days ago on the education bill. It destroys our ability to really do something to deal with the fact that 40 million people in this country have no health insurance.”