David Obey: “this is the first of 160 amendments that we intend to offer to this bill. This amendment adds $1,000 to the Child Care…”

“this is the first of 160 amendments that we intend to offer to this bill. This amendment adds $1,000 to the Child Care and Development Block Grant. I am offering this amendment because it is the only way under the rule under which this bill is being considered that we can have a discussion about the effect of the majority party's tax cuts on each and every individual program that delivers services to the people that we represent. The majority party has decided in the last 2 months to do the following: They have passed a minimum wage bill that provided $11 billion worth of benefits to minimum wage workers but they required, as the price for passage, that we also add $90 billion worth of tax benefits to people who make over $300,000 a year. They took a tax bill which they called the marriage penalty and under the guise of providing relief for the so-called marriage penalty they produced a tax bill which gave 73 percent of those benefits to people who made over $100,000 a year. Then last week, the majority passed through this House an inheritance tax package that gave over $200 billion in potential tax relief to the wealthiest 400 people in this country. Yet we are prevented, because of the budget resolution and the limits imposed by that resolution, we are prevented in the appropriations process from trying to make our case by demonstrating on a program by program basis what they have had to squeeze in order to do that.”