David Obey: “Mr. Speaker, despite the fiction we have just heard, we have a letter from the head of the Congressional Budget Office…”

“Mr. Speaker, despite the fiction we have just heard, we have a letter from the head of the Congressional Budget Office which spells out that the Republican budget so far has eaten into $17 billion of the Social Security surplus. So much for the fiction we just heard. Mr. Speaker, the public has every right to be cynical about a Republican House leadership whose majority leader said several weeks ago that Social Security was a bad retirement and a rotten trick on the American people. This is from the party who today claims that in fact they want to save and preserve Social Security. Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose this irresponsible budget, one that does nothing to extend the life of Social Security, does nothing to add a prescription drug benefit for Medicare, but does a lot of harm and hurt to real families in this country. I oppose this bill because it is chock full of accounting tricks. But the cruelest trick of all is the delay in funding to the National Institutes of Health. This bill would delay $7.5 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health, amounting to 42 percent of their budget, 60 percent of its research grants.”