[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 1817-1818]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              BLOWING SMOKE AMIDST DIRE FINANCIAL STRAITS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, our Nation is in dire financial straits, 
and, unfortunately, many on both sides of the aisle are blowing smoke 
about how serious they are in dealing with this problem.
  The fact is we are looking at a record $1.6 trillion deficit. Now, it 
wouldn't have been a record and it wouldn't have been $1.6 trillion but 
for one vote: the Obama-McConnell tax compromise, the Republicans 
insisting that all of the Bush tax cuts passed in a time of surplus 
should be continued in a time of record deficits. That means, with 
borrowed money, there will be tax cuts for millionaires and 
billionaires and other special interests, or we will forgo the revenue 
of having them pay their fair share of taxes, say the rate they paid in 
the Clinton era when the economy did very well and they did very well.
  So with that one single vote, suddenly we jumped up to a $1.6 
trillion deficit. Now, the Republican majority says, oh, no, no, no, 
that cutting taxes doesn't count. Their rules deem that cutting taxes 
doesn't count. We can cut taxes without reducing spending; we can 
borrow the money and increase the deficit and the debt, but they say it 
doesn't count. They have deemed that in their rules. So they're really 
blowing smoke here. You cannot pretend that you're serious about the 
deficit if you say we can continue to reduce income. Here is what this 
year's Federal budget looks like.
  This is the total budget. Look, we are borrowing from China and other 
places around the world almost half of what we're spending. We are 
borrowing $1.6 trillion, and the Federal tax revenue is $2.2 billion. 
Those are just extraordinary numbers. Now, they say they'll fix that by 
cutting. Well, here we go. Here we go again with the budget at $3.8 
trillion and the deficit at $1.6 trillion.
  They said, Well, wait a minute. You can't increase revenues. No. You 
could decrease revenues. They say that wouldn't count. Then, Oh, well. 
The Department of Defense is off limits. Entitlements are all off 
limits. Mandatory spending, meaning agriculture subsidies and other 
egregious things, are all off limits. We will balance the budget by 
going after non-defense discretionary spending.
  There seems to be a little bit of a problem here.
  Here is the deficit of $1.6 trillion. Now, if we eliminated all non-
defense discretionary spending, which would mean basically the daily 
operations of the Government of the United States outside the Defense 
Department, it would be all gone; close the door; open

[[Page 1818]]

the Federal prisons, and let the prisoners out. There would be no more 
Justice Department, no more FBI, no more Border Patrol, none of those 
things. Just get rid of all that stuff--the IRS, the Environmental 
Protection Agency, the Department of Education, health education, the 
Centers for Disease Control. All gone.
  Well, you would still have a $1 trillion deficit. But don't worry, 
they're going to get us there by cutting.
  You can't get there simply by cutting. Yes, you need to cut. You need 
to reduce and eliminate wasteful programs, but you can't pretend that 
you can cut revenues or that you can maintain tax loopholes for 
companies that move their headquarters to post office boxes in the 
Bahamas, like Carnival Cruise Lines--excuse me, their post office box 
is in Panama--which operate out of the U.S., get their customers in the 
U.S., use the ports of the U.S., use the U.S. Coast Guard, and whose 
executives live in the U.S. but they don't pay taxes here.
  There is ExxonMobil, which doesn't pay taxes in the United States, 
but pays in other places around the world. We borrow money to give a 
subsidy to ExxonMobil. Yet in the last quarter of last year, they had 
the largest single corporate profit in the history of the world, and 
we're going to borrow money to give them tax rebates for taxes they 
didn't pay in the United States of America but that they paid 
elsewhere.
  That system can't be fixed, the Republicans say. Those will be tax 
increases. You can't plug those tax loopholes. The agriculture 
subsidies pay people $20 billion not to grow things. No, can't go 
there. We're going to balance the budget by hacking away at non-defense 
discretionary spending. Unfortunately, physics and reality don't work 
for them here, nor does the math because it's a tiny fraction of the 
deficit if we totally eliminate those programs instead of just hack 
away at them.
  So let's get real. Let's get together here. The country is confronted 
with a serious long-term debt problem. As everybody said yesterday, 
everything is on the table. Well, it's not, but everything should be on 
the table.

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