David Obey: “we have heard a lot of rewriting of history in the last hour or so. I want to make one thing clear, if House Republicans…”

“we have heard a lot of rewriting of history in the last hour or so. I want to make one thing clear, if House Republicans had their way and if we had passed the bills which originally passed the House under Republican leadership the last 5 years, instead of increasing education funding by $19 billion over that 6-year period, we would have decreased it by $15 billion. That is the bottom line summary of the facts. Now, let me get to the problem with this rule. Over the last 2 years, Congress has provided more than $2 trillion in tax cuts; a huge percentage of those tax cuts have been targeted to the top 1 percent of earners in this country. The majority party has pretended that there are no consequences and no cost to those tax cuts. Well, there are. First of all, every single dollar is paid for with borrowed money. That means that for the fiscal year in which this bill is going to be effective, we will pay $26 billion more in interest. That makes no sense. For less than half of that, you could fix every appropriations bill that we are going to pass. Consequence number two of the trillions of dollars in tax cuts is that there is no money left on the table except table scraps to deal with the problems of Medicare, to deal with the problems of prescription drugs, and to deal with other needed investments. Of the 13 appropriations bills that will come before the House this year, this is the bill that contains most of the funds for those needed investments.”