[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 1]
[House]
[Page 496]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            THE BUSH BUDGET

  Mr. DEFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, we have gotten the President's glossified 
2003 budget, complete with color photos, for the first time. What a 
difference a year makes, not only in the format but in the content. A 
year ago, the President and the Office of Management and Budget said, 
there are surpluses as far as the eye can see, at least for the next 10 
years, huge and growing surpluses.
  A few of us were dubious about predicting the economy 10 years out 
and about this rosy scenario, but in any case they persisted. They went 
on to also say, ``We're going to create a lockbox for all of the Social 
Security surplus, $2.5 trillion. We're going to create a lockbox for 
all of the Medicare trust fund surplus.'' And they were concerned that 
we would retire the $6 trillion national debt too quickly. They were 
worried about that.
  Well, here we are a year later and rather than paying down the debt 
too quickly, as was projected last year, the Bush budget will create an 
additional $2 trillion of deficit by 2012, if you do not take the 
Social Security and Medicare trust funds and spend them, which, of 
course, he proposes to do. The President's budget would divert all of 
the Medicare surplus and 60 percent, or $1.5 trillion, that is $1,500 
billion for those who cannot go to the Ts, of the Social Security 
surplus to pay for other government programs.
  What are the causes of this? We would be led to believe there is only 
one cause, the attacks on America. Let us look at the real underlying 
causes. Actually, the disappearance of the surplus is due to, and these 
are figures from the Congressional Budget Office which is headed by a 
Republican, 41 percent are due to the tax cut, 23 percent are due to 
the recession, 10 percent increased military spending, 8 percent 
increased spending for homeland security, and 16 percent technical 
adjustments.
  What is the reaction down at the White House? The reaction at the 
White House is, ``Let's make those tax cuts,'' which are contributing 
41 percent of the increase in deficit, ``let's make them permanent. 
Let's in fact expand them.'' That is what the President's budget 
proposes. So that those who earn over $383,000 a year and those with 
estates over $5 million will be assured that the laughable assumption 
in last year's budget that their tax cuts will be sunseted after 10 
years and everything, all the tax cuts, will be going away; let's make 
those permanent with the strange exception of one that would 
particularly benefit the middle class, which has to do with a 
complicated computation of an alternative tax for individuals, that one 
does not get made permanent.
  But the exemption of estates over $5 million does, and the huge 
reduction in rates for people who earn over $383,000. At what cost? At 
tremendous cost. The cost is a whole host of reductions in worthy 
domestic programs which the President has proposed in this year's 
budget hidden sort of in the appendices and the asterisks and some 
obfuscation here and there; but there are cuts in education, there are 
cuts in needed social programs. There is inadequate funding for a 
prescription drug benefit for people on Medicare, with no cost controls 
on the pharmaceutical industry. Basically, the program would tend to 
very, very few seniors' needs. But all this is being done so that the 
tax cuts can be made permanent.
  Usually, when a country is under attack, Presidents call for 
sacrifice; and many Americans and many in Congress agree with that, 
homeland security, necessary expenditures to arm our young men and 
women serving so valiantly in the military. There is tremendous 
agreement on those. But let us also make our economic future secure. 
Unfortunately, the only security in the President's budget goes to, 
again, those at the very top, those who earn over $383,000 a year, and 
those who have estates worth more than $5 million.
  If you just froze the benefits for those people, the elite of the 
elite, the richest of the rich, those who do not care about Social 
Security, do not care about a prescription drug benefit, do not care 
about education funding because their kids go to private schools, if 
you just froze those people in place so they contributed a little bit 
more in this time of sacrifice and attack on the United States of 
America, then you could reduce substantially the draw on the Social 
Security trust funds and the increase in the deficit.
  But the President and his advisers say, no, absolutely not, those 
people, those $5 million-plus estates, those people who earn over 
$383,000, they need every penny of that tax cut because they will spend 
the money in ways that might put some people to work at a minimum wage 
which could then pay taxes which would help defray the deficit and the 
economy will be growing into the future.
  I would hope that the Congress rejects these assumptions, these 
priorities, and substantially rewrites this budget.

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