Mark Pocan: “Again, thank you, Mr. Lowenthal, for your service, for your hard work on this budget, and for all you do for the people…”

“Again, thank you, Mr. Lowenthal, for your service, for your hard work on this budget, and for all you do for the people of California. When we talk about those discretionary funds, it is interesting because, when we had the sequester that made a huge cut to these programs and that affected people in all of our States, the Paul Ryan Republican budget doubles down on these sequester cuts, and it makes even deeper cuts in a number of areas. I just want to go through a little bit of a chart. Unfortunately, I found out that I can't use a marker on the House floor because that is against the rules, so we are going to use this in a little bit of a different way, to try to have you take a look at this and decide where the difference is and who winds up winning on the side of the GOP Paul Ryan budget and the Congressional Progressive Caucus Better Off Budget. I just want to go through a few examples of programs that would matter. Let's start with unemployed workers. Let's take a look at the two budgets. When you look at the Better Off Budget, as I showed before, 8.8 million jobs are created by the Better Off Budget. In the Republican budget, according to the Economic Policy Institute, it would cut 3 million jobs by the year 2016. If you are someone who is unemployed, the Better Off Budget would make sure we extend emergency unemployment benefits. The GOP budget is silent--crickets.…”