Mark Pocan: “Thank you to the gentleman from Florida. Thank you for so eloquently talking about the problems of austerity and this…”

“Thank you to the gentleman from Florida. Thank you for so eloquently talking about the problems of austerity and this budget that is the path to austerity, to continued austerity in this country. One of the statistics I think that's really worth mentioning, and this is from the Congressional Budget Office, is that from 1979 to 2007, the top 1 percent of income earners grew 278 percent, or about $973,000 per household. In contrast, the middle 20 percent grew 25 percent, and the poorest 20 percent grew 16 percent. So the very things that we just heard the gentleman from Florida talking about are very real; and that's why the Democrats on the committee, when we had a chance to try to amend the Republican path to austerity, instead we put out a budget amendment that said we would cap no family making $250,000 or less, covering the vast, vast majority of Americans, would be held harmless under the proposals presented by the Republican budget. They would not go along with that amendment because they had to protect the tax breaks for corporate jets, and they had to protect the tax breaks for oil companies, and they had to protect the other tax breaks that they had. Now, we brought up that during the Clinton administration the top tax rate was at 39 percent, but the economy added 20 million jobs. So at 39 percent top tax rate, we added 20 million jobs. During the Bush administration, we reduced that top rate down to 35 percent, and yet we lost a half a million jobs.…”