[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 119 (Monday, August 1, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H5815-H5816]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE REPUBLICAN SOLUTION TO THE DEBT CRISIS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Reed). The Chair recognizes the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, here we are, after a long weekend of hyperbole and 
backroom deal cutting at the White House, and here's the product right 
here.
  If you look through it, it's pretty interesting. There's no balance. 
There are no revenues. God forbid we would ask, as the Republicans call 
them, ``the job creators,'' the millionaires and billionaires, to pay 
anything toward further supporting our country, to close some of the 
tax loopholes that allow hedge fund managers to pay taxes at half the 
rate of their clerks, you know, things like that. No, that would be a 
reach too far to ask them to share in the sacrifice.
  What we do see here is that there will be cuts, and very few are 
specified. But strangely enough, there's one that the Republicans 
always go after because, you know, they hang out at the country club, 
and at the country club, nobody's worried about putting their kid 
through college. But the one specified cut in here is in graduate 
school financial assistance.
  Now, that's kind of peculiar. We have a doctor shortage looming, and 
medical school is phenomenally expensive. But I guess it's just going 
to be the rich kids who are going to go to medical school in the 
future, not the middle-class kids, not the struggling kids. Just the 
rich kids. So that's the one specified cut, the ``one'' specified cut. 
The rest, we don't even know.
  Talking about a pig in a poke, this is a pig in a poke. Where's that 
$1 trillion of cuts going to come from? First round, second round, 
another $1.5 trillion, and not one penny in revenues. And the grand 
result is about $2.5 trillion of deficit reduction.

[[Page H5816]]

  If we just let all the Bush tax cuts expire--all of them--if we went 
back to the bad old days of the Clinton tax rates that the Republicans 
claimed would destroy the economy--except actually what happened was, 
we had 3.8 percent unemployment, and we paid down debt with the Clinton 
tax rates. But, yes, ``the job creators'' had to pay a little bit more. 
Those were really bad times, the Republicans would have us believe. So 
we don't want to go back there. We want to stay in the current day.
  We have been cutting taxes now for 11 years of Bush tax cuts, 3 years 
with Obama as a coconspirator on the Bush tax cuts. Where are the jobs? 
Well, let's just keep doing it, and maybe it will create jobs.
  It's not going to create jobs. There are no jobs. There are no jobs 
in this package.
  At the least, at the least, they could have extended the Federal 
Aviation Administration authority. Now, most people think, what does 
that mean? Well, a week ago last Friday, authority to run the Federal 
Aviation Administration expired. The air traffic controllers are 
working under emergency provisions, and they're being paid out of the 
trust fund, which is being drawn down. But all of the taxes went away. 
So we're walking away from $200 million a week--that is in taxes that 
would come from users of the system. Most of the airlines have raised 
their ticket prices to capture that money.
  Four thousand Federal employees have lost their jobs or are laid off, 
are collecting unemployment. Republicans don't care about Federal 
employees; so let's put that aside.

                              {time}  1010

  But 90,000 private sector construction workers and small businesses 
are also unemployed because we have brought all the safety and security 
improvements across the entire system to a screeching halt because we 
are not collecting taxes, which the airlines are now capturing for 
profits. Could that be in here? That would put 94,000 people back to 
work. No, that's not in here. That's too much to ask.
  There isn't a single job in this package. The biggest problem in 
America, the greatest deficit we have is in job creation. If we could 
get back down around 5 percent unemployment, guess what: Those people 
are working, they are not drawing unemployment benefits, they are not 
drawing food stamps because they are desperate to put food on the table 
and the unemployment isn't enough, and a quarter of the deficit would 
go away with people working.
  How about transportation infrastructure? One hundred and fifty 
thousand bridges are crumbling, need to be replaced or rehabilitated; a 
$70 billion backlog in critical investment in our transit systems 
across the country, all made in America, manufacturing jobs, 
engineering jobs. No, can't do those sorts of things in this bill.
  We can't make investments because the Republicans say everything 
government does is bad. So we can't even make investments. We can't 
discriminate between wasteful spending, consumptive spending, and 
investments that will put people back to work, as they claim government 
can't put people back to work.
  That's funny. I wonder who built our national highway system. I don't 
think it was the private sector. I don't think it was the financiers on 
Wall Street. The billionaires and the millionaires are escaping any 
meaningful taxation at this point, seeing the lowest level of taxation 
on their incomes since, you know, forever, basically.
  We can't ask them to do anything. We can't invest, we can't create 
jobs, and we are going to cut student financial aid for sure and a few 
other things.

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