David Obey: “I very badly wanted to vote for this budget deal. I had expected I would be able to because I thought that the White…”

“I very badly wanted to vote for this budget deal. I had expected I would be able to because I thought that the White House would hold out long enough to have a package that would truly be fair to average working Americans, and I am sorry that they did not do that. I support three-quarters of this deal. I support the child tax credit. I was one of the original four sponsors of that proposal with Vice President Gore when he was then in the U.S. Senate. I am a sponsor of the education tax breaks because I believe in them deeply. I support the children's health care package. There is much that is going to be good in this deal. But there are certain standards that must be met when we are talking about distributing almost $600 billion of the people's money. First of all, most of that relief should go to middle-income working families, not the economic elite of this country. Second, this bill should be used to close rather than widen the gap in income between the wealthiest 2 percent of the people in this society and everybody else. Third, this should prevent the unraveling of Medicare and, last, it should not cripple the long-term investments necessary for our country to grow in the future. These bills fail those tests.”