[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 7586-7587]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        STOP THE FISCAL MADNESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 20, 2004, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) is recognized 
for 5 minutes during morning hour debates.
  Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, this week the American people will see that 
what our Republican friends lack in policy candor they more than make 
up for in chutzpah. Why do I say that? This week, as we have just 
heard, the Republican majority is expected to take up legislation that 
would permanently eliminate the marriage penalty. Everybody on this 
House floor is for that objective.
  But do not be fooled. Democrats and Republicans both agree that 
married couples should not have to pay more in taxes than they would as 
unmarried individuals filing separately. That makes sense. That is 
fair. We are for it. Members in both parties agree that the so-called 
marriage penalty should be remedied.
  However, here is the crucial difference between the Republican bill 
and our Democratic substitute. Our bill is paid for, theirs is not. 
What is the difference? The difference is that the penalty that we are 
eliminating in terms of marriages will be passed along to every young 
family in America, every young person in America. All of my children 
and my grandchildren will pay an additional penalty in the interest 
they will have to pay because of the irresponsible policies being 
pursued by the majority.
  That is right. With a record budget deficit this year of more than 
half a trillion dollars, and with a projected 10-year budget surplus of 
$5.6 trillion inherited by this administration turned into a projected 
deficit of more than $4 trillion, an almost $10 trillion turnaround to 
the negative, our friends on the Republican side of the aisle plan to 
drive us even deeper into debt.
  The chairman of the House Committee on the Budget, the gentleman from 
Iowa (Mr. Nussle), perhaps summed up the Republican fiscal policy best 
on March 17 when he said, and I am quoting, ``We don't believe that you 
should have to pay for tax cuts, period.'' Well, Mr. Nussle and my 
Republican friends, of course you do not; but our children and 
grandchildren will have to pay that bill. Somebody, sometime, sometime 
in the future will have to pay the piper.
  According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, this Republican 
marriage penalty bill will cost $96 billion over the next 10 years. 
None of it is paid for. And to make matters worse, House Republicans 
intend to bring up bills in the next 3 weeks to make the 10 percent tax 
bracket and child tax credit permanent. We are for that. It ought to be 
paid for. And to temporarily fix the alternative minimum tax. We are 
for that. It ought to be paid for.
  Again, Democrats support such legislation, but it must be paid for so 
that we do not simply say to our children, ``You pay for it''; to our 
grandchildren, ``you pay for it, we don't want to.''
  Democrats believe it is a serious failure to pay for these tax cuts, 
which not only threatens our economic future as these deficits grow and 
the American people become more concerned about rising interest rates, 
as Alan Greenspan last week said was a definite possibility, but we 
also have a responsibility.
  We talk a lot about personal responsibility. We passed a bankruptcy 
bill, and we made it tougher for people to go into bankruptcy because 
we said they needed to be responsible. I voted for that bill. It was a 
bipartisanly supported bill. We need to be responsible on behalf of the 
public that sent us here and on behalf of future generations.
  Meanwhile, as we debate this tax bill, Republicans on both sides of 
Capitol Hill are riven by internal conflict. They still have not 
produced a budget conference report for fiscal 2005 because of the 
intransigence of House Republicans to accept pay-as-you-go rules. That 
sounds very common sense. You pay as you go. You pay your bills. We 
talk about every American family having to do that. That may be the 
case; but we do not have to do it, and we are not doing it.
  Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said applying 
pay-as-you-go to both expenditures and revenues is essential if we are 
to have fiscal

[[Page 7587]]

responsibility. Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle sent us a 
budget which says we are going to do that; but on this side of the 
Congress we have overwhelming, almost unanimous, support, if not 
unanimous support, for that proposition. It was in place from 1990 to 
2002. But it was changed. Why? Because it would make us be responsible, 
and being responsible would not allow us to do some of the things the 
Republican majority wants to do.
  Here is what the Bipartisan Concord Coalition said, headed up by, 
among others, Senator Warren Rudman, a Republican from New Hampshire, 
and three other budget watchdog groups have said about such pay-as-you-
go rules: ``If Congress wants to pass particular tax cuts, it should 
either reduce mandatory programs or raise other revenues to offset the 
tax reduction measures, not simply give itself a free pass to enact tax 
cuts without financing them.''
  It feels good for us to say, Hah-hah, we have cut your taxes. Hooray. 
But unless we cut spending at the same time, which is what pay-as-you-
go says we need to do, then do not pass that debt along to future 
generations. That is all it says. Every responsible American with 
common sense would say, yes, that is what we ought to do.
  They have turned the foreign sales corporation bill, another bill 
which requires that some $5 billion in export subsidies be repealed and 
replaced by modest tax breaks, into a $170 billion special-interest 
giveaway.

                              {time}  1245

  Not only are we creating greater tax liability by passing these tax 
bills without paying for them, we want to see them pass, we want to pay 
for them, but now they are talking about this Foreign Service 
Corporation bill which could cost us and we could fix for less than $10 
billion, now they want to make it into a $170 billion tax giveaway. One 
business lobbyist even told the Washington Post that this bill ``has 
risen to new levels of sleaze.''
  Is it any wonder pursuing those kinds of policies that we have now 
gone into a $10 trillion turnaround in terms of from black to red? We 
talk about blue States and red States. We have gone from black, having 
surpluses, $5.6 trillion, four surpluses in a row from 1997 to 2001, 
the first time that had happened in 80 years. In just months, that was 
turned into escalating deficits.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge my Republican colleagues to come to their senses, 
to do what makes sense to the American families, to the American 
public. No married couple wants to have a marriage penalty but I do not 
think there is any married couple who wants to have their children 
saddled with the escalating debts incurred in their generation and 
passed to future generations.
  For years, House Republicans preened as deficit hawks. Some even 
suggested that tax cuts are not, in fact, sacrosanct. My friend the 
majority leader spoke a little earlier. In 1997, the majority leader, 
Mr. DeLay, who just spoke, said of Jack Kemp, another Republican who 
ran for Vice President, a former Member of this body, an ardent 
proponent of supply-side tax cuts: ``Jack Kemp worships at the altar of 
tax cuts. Jack has always said that deficits don't matter. We think 
that deficits do matter.'' So said Tom DeLay with reference to Jack 
Kemp. If they matter, Mr. Leader, why are we not addressing them? Why 
do we make them worse? Why are we escalating the debt that our children 
will be confronted with?
  With this vote on the marriage penalty relief this week, we will see 
whether Republicans still believe that deficits matter.

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