[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 1495-1496]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         PAYING THE PRICE FOR THE PRESIDENT'S FLAWED PRIORITIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Bishop) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BISHOP of New York. Madam Speaker, at least President Bush is 
consistent. Like the other seven budgets that he has submitted to this 
Congress, it is no surprise that his eighth and final request continues 
to reflect spectacularly flawed priorities. There was some debate 
earlier this week about whether the budget should be printed and 
distributed to congressional offices. Perhaps the best decision would 
have been to spare us the books and save the trees.
  For the eighth year in a row, the administration has degraded the 
budget process. This budget barely goes through the motions. Instead of 
formulating a blueprint to guide this Nation toward what should be our 
fiscal priorities, the budget continues the flawed policies of the past 
7 years.
  Without putting forth an honest or straightforward budget, the 
President has yet to attempt seriously to meet our goals, goals that we 
should all share of budgetary accountability, enforcement, and fiscal 
responsibility. This is why so many of our colleagues, Madam Speaker, 
have already accurately described the President's budget request has a 
pro forma document with little meaning or relevance, that has also been 
described as arriving on Capitol Hill ``dead on arrival,'' and that is 
perhaps a very, very good thing. Perhaps the lack of truth in budgeting 
represents the best example of why ``change'' has become the overriding 
theme of this coming election.
  This Congress should refuse to be misled again by a budget that hides 
the true costs of the devastating fiscal policies of this 
administration. For example, omitting total war costs gives

[[Page 1496]]

an artificially deflated notion of what the deficit will be, and we now 
have the Secretary of Defense estimating that the true cost of the war 
in fiscal 2009 will be $170 billion, as opposed to the $70 billion that 
is put in the budget as a placeholder. That number alone will drive the 
deficit up to over half a trillion dollars. The President's budget also 
omits the cost of extending the tax cuts, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, 
which disproportionately favor those who need those tax cuts the least.
  Let me just cite two very troubling aspects of a budget that is shot 
through with scores of troubling aspects. The first is one that is of 
particular importance to my home State of New York. We have been 
fighting, those of us in New York, and this fight has been led 
primarily by Carolyn Maloney and also Vito Fossella and Jerry Nadler, 
to see to it that the brave Americans who responded to the site of the 
World Trade Center, first to try to rescue people, then to recover 
bodies and then to clean up what came to be known as ``the pile,'' some 
70 percent of them are suffering from various health ailments relating 
to the toxins that they were exposed to in the days immediately 
following those attacks on the Twin Towers.
  In the current year, the Congress committed to spend $150 million to 
provide for the ongoing health care needs and monitoring of those very 
brave first responders and rescue workers. The President's budget cuts 
that number to $25 million.
  My question for the President is: Have all of these people all of a 
sudden become well? Have they been miraculously cured? Or, more likely, 
has the President simply decided that providing health care for these 
very brave Americans is simply not a Federal responsibility? In either 
case, I certainly hope that this Congress will do the right thing and 
restore that funding.
  The second has to do with education, particularly access to higher 
education. In his State of the Union message, the President chided the 
Congress for not having fully funded his American Competitiveness 
Initiative. Yet we are now presented with a budget that eliminates two 
programs for student financial aid that are absolutely crucial for 
needed students to attend college. One is called Supplemental 
Educational Opportunity Grants, approximately $750 million a year, and 
the other is Perkins loans, approximately $670 million a year. For 
those two programs, the President advocates taking approximately $1.4 
billion out of the student loan program, and does so while costs are 
rising and the ability of students to pay is declining.
  How can we have a competitive workforce, how can we have a 
competitive Nation, if we don't even provide our young men and women 
with access to college?
  Future generations of Americans will pay the price for the 
President's flawed priorities and more debt as a consequence of his 
actions. In fact, the debt that will be accrued over the 8 years of the 
Bush Presidency will amount to some $3.5 trillion. That is an amount 
that exceeds the combined debt of all of the Presidents from George 
Washington through the first President Bush.
  Madam Speaker, I encourage my colleagues, I implore my colleagues, to 
resolve one last time to defeat this budget request from the President 
and to restore middle-class, mainstream priorities, the very priorities 
that our new majority has been working on now for the last year.

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