[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5546-5550]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           THE BUDGET CRISIS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from California may proceed.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I would love to see what that message is. 
I think we got some sense of it earlier in the day. And I suspect it 
speaks to the issue of the continuing resolution, and it is the 
effectuation of the promise he made earlier in the day that should the 
legislation that passed here about an hour-and-a-half ago, 2 hours ago, 
that is the continuing resolution, should it arrive on his desk, he 
will veto it. I haven't seen it, but I will bet that's what's in that 
envelope.
  Ms. JACKSON LEE of Texas. If you could yield for a moment, I want to 
thank the gentleman for the clarification, for separating out. I want 
to add something. Medicare is a program that is going to be wholly 
privatized and income driven without any basis in substance; meaning, 
plainly, if you are more wealthy, this has nothing do with how you 
would do Medicare today, as someone suggested that you staggered the 
amounts on income. This has to do with, if you can even get Medicare, 
it will be because you have enough money to get Medicare because it 
will be in that system.
  Then, of course, there is some little secret backroom corner where 
they throw something out about a public system that is not even 
defined.
  But you make a very good point about nursing homes, which I have a 
lot in my district. In fact, we are always hearing from them regarding 
maintaining their status. And certainly we are very keen to make sure 
that these nursing homes meet their own standards. But they provide 
refuge and rest, if you will, for not only the seniors, but the frail 
and the disabled.
  And I just want to paint this picture for you, Mr. Garamendi. I just 
want to paint the picture for you of no room at the inn, lights out, 
doors wide open, and the drumbeat playing as people are being rolled 
out of nursing homes in wheelchairs, with crutches, some on beds. Maybe 
we can just imagine the tragic scenes of Hurricane Katrina, when 
nursing home residents were pouring out of nursing homes in the wake of 
the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Well, let me tell you, we've got 
Hurricane Ryan, and there is a disaster coming. And, frankly, with all 
good intentions of our good friends on the other side of the aisle, if 
we had sat down at the table of compromise and projected how we can 
best serve America by reducing the deficit, the debt, and recognizing 
that we have morality and we have values that will help this country.

                              {time}  1540

  Might I just say that we are talking about seniors, but don't forget 
there are many, many families that take their children to pediatricians 
on Medicaid, and that's their primary care provider just like Medicare.
  So I would just simply add this word that I am not ready to bury 
Medicare now; and I believe there is a rejuvenation, there is a rebirth 
coming, and that is the American people saying, no, not on my watch. 
This is a non-starter, and I am glad to be standing with you today.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, do you think this particular gravestone here 
doesn't have to happen?
  Ms. JACKSON LEE of Texas. I believe if we stand committed to 
educating the American public, it should not happen.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. I am going to take this down because I know that the 
American public, whether they are seniors now or will be seniors in the 
future, understand the incredible importance of Medicare to the 
American society. Whether you are young or old, you know that Medicare 
has always been there since 1964 to provide medical services to those 
people 65 and over and some who are younger than 65 that have gone 
through terrible medical circumstances and unable to care for 
themselves.
  So we are going to take this tombstone, and we are going to bury it, 
along with Mr. Ryan's proposal to terminate Medicare as we know it. So 
let's be aware, American public, what's at stake here with the proposal 
that's coming down from the Republican caucus and from Mr. Ryan.
  I want to take up another subject and cover it briefly, or maybe not 
so briefly, and this has to do with the subject matter at hand, which 
is the deficit. We need to understand where the deficit came from.
  The deficit didn't just get created in the last couple of years. 
Certainly, the Great Recession had a lot to do with it, the stimulus 
package, made up of two parts, one part was the bank bailout, $700 
million or more, almost all of that has now been repaid to the 
Treasury, so we don't have to worry about that being the a big part of 
the deficit. A little bit remains, but most of it has been repaid.
  The second part was the stimulus, some $750 million. That was 
borrowed money that is part of the deficit. But that also created, or 
it maintained, well over 2 million jobs here in the United States. 
Those people that stayed at work were continuing to be employed and to 
pay taxes.
  You can imagine what would have happened had the stimulus not been 
there; but, nonetheless, it is part of the deficit. But that doesn't 
account for all of the deficit.
  Let's go back to where Ronald Reagan was President. At the end of 
each year, the Congressional Budget Office takes a look at status of 
the budget of the United States and says here's what's happening today 
and here's the projection for the future. They do a 10-year projection.
  At the end of Ronald Reagan's term, the Congressional Budget Office, 
nonpartisan, not Democrat, not Republican, looked at the budget, looked 
at the economy and said, well, the way things are, we can project for 
the next 10 years that the budget will have a deficit of $1.3 trillion.
  So Ronald Reagan left office with a deficit. He was followed by 
George H.W. Bush. And the same projection was made every year, and 
every year the deficit grew so that at the end of the George H.W. Bush 
administration, before Bill Clinton took office, there was a projected 
additional deficit of about 3 trillion additional dollars.
  Bill Clinton came into office, changes were made, Balanced Budget Act 
went into effect, PAYGO which required laws to be paid for with new 
taxes or with cuts--no more deficit financing for new laws--came into 
effect; and at the end of the Clinton administration, the normal 
process took place at the end of that year. What will be the deficit 
going forward?
  Whoa. You mean, there is no deficit? Yes, the Congressional Budget 
Office estimated at the end of the Clinton period that there would be a 
$5 trillion surplus, literally paying off the entire debt of the United 
States. Policies were put in place during that Presidency, Democrat, 
Republican votes on both sides that would, in the 10 years, 2001 to 
2010, terminate the American debt.
  However, in 2001, George W. Bush and the Republicans in control of 
the Congress and the Senate passed a massive tax cut that immediately 
turned that projected surplus into a projected deficit of well over a 
trillion dollars. The next year, the Afghan war was under way and the 
Iraq war was begun, two wars, the first time ever in America's history 
that a war was under way for which there was no way to pay for it 
except to borrow money.
  In previous wars, World War II, World War I, the Civil War, the 
government raised taxes to pay for the war; but not

[[Page 5547]]

these two wars. This was entirely borrowed, all of the cost of it. And 
right now the Afghanistan war is costing $100 billion to $120 billion a 
year and we just voted today, not more than an hour and a half ago, for 
$157 billion for the Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq wars, $157 billion.
  Now, again, this is all on borrowed money. Despite efforts by the 
Democratic Caucus to raise money, raise taxes for those wars, taxes on 
the highest, wealthiest Americans, those votes failed.
  Now, the rest of the story is this. My friend, Mr. DeFazio, talked 
about the Medicare drug doughnut hole. The Medicare drug doughnut hole 
was added during the Bush administration, well over $600 million a 
year, again, not paid for but rather borrowed money.
  And then the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, that Great Recession 
added to the deficit because employment plummeted along with tax 
revenues, so that at the end of the George W. Bush administration, this 
Congressional Budget Office did what it had done every year in the past 
50 years, did a projection, in the next 10 years, what will be the 
deficit.
  Guess what the number was? $11 trillion-plus dollars.
  And so during the 2001--2010 period, an enormous growth in the 
American deficit, Barack Obama came into office in January of 2009. And 
the day he took office, he had an annual budget deficit handed to him 
of over $1.3 trillion. The George W. Bush legacy was handed directly to 
Barack Obama the day he took office, over a trillion dollars. We have 
to work ourselves out of this hole.
  This is a deep, dangerous hole and we have got to work our way out of 
it. We have to do it with wisdom, we have to do it with intelligence, 
and we have to always keep in mind where we need to go. Two paths: one, 
bring the deficit down; and, two, provide those services that are 
desperately needed by Americans: Medicare, Medicaid, education, 
services that provide people the opportunity to get jobs. Those are 
fundamental investments that we must make, research and the like also 
included.
  Simultaneously, we must always achieve efficiency and effectiveness 
in every governmental program, wherever it happens to be. We know that 
the medical systems in the United States are inefficient, so the 
proposal put forth by our Republican colleagues to privatize, destroy 
Medicare, does nothing to deal with the inefficiencies of the medical 
system.
  There are three parts to the medical system: the collection of money, 
the payment of claims, and the provision of services. Medicare happens 
to be the most efficient delivery in the collection of money, the 
payment of claims and the delivery of services of any of the medical 
services and medical systems out there.

                              {time}  1550

  The private insurance companies, however, are the least efficient, 
the least efficient created because of the numerous policies that they 
offer, confusion to the purchaser of the policy, whether it is an 
individual or business, and to the provider of services. Go into any 
hospital, and one of the biggest sections in the hospital is not the 
emergency room, not the operating room, not the intensive care unit. It 
is the administrative unit. Why? Because they have to deal with 
thousands of different policies, different deductibles, different 
copays and different policies from different companies. ``Is this going 
to be paid?'' ``Who is going to pay that?'' and so forth, creating the 
least efficient medical delivery system in the world. A full 40 percent 
of all of the medical costs are in administration.
  Keep in mind that Medicare, on the other hand, is the most efficient, 
spending no more than 3 percent in collecting the money and paying the 
bills.
  So the proposal that we have before us by the Republicans to 
terminate Medicare and hand it over to the insurance companies will 
create even additional costs and more inefficiency in the system, less 
effectiveness. That is not the way to go.
  We talked earlier about the dreaded doughnut hole for Medicare 
seniors. Why was it that the Republicans refused to allow the Federal 
Government to negotiate prices with the pharmaceutical companies? It is 
the most ineffective, inefficient and stupid thing in the world to 
spend tens and hundreds of billions of dollars a year on drugs and not 
be able to negotiate but simply to be a price taker, not a negotiator, 
not to use your purchasing power to negotiate.
  I don't understand--well, I do understand. I know exactly what it is. 
It has to do with the effective lobby and contributions of the 
pharmaceutical industry. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We can and we must go to 
the medical system and seek efficiencies, and it can be done.
  I have spent a lot of my time as insurance commissioner looking at 
how it can be done, and we will go into that at another time, but I 
will give you a couple of items along the way.
  A doctor goes into a hospital and scribbles on a piece of paper what 
he believes to be wrong with the person. He writes on a piece of paper 
in illegible handwriting what the pharmaceutical will be. Medical 
errors abound. We know that, in fact, infections occur in hospitals. We 
know that readmissions occur in hospitals. All of those things need not 
exist in America. We can significantly reduce the costs of medical 
services by instituting electronic medical records. That can be done, 
and, in fact, in the health care reform bill, the Affordable Care Act, 
it is done. Republicans want to repeal that. Somehow they think that 
that is going to reduce costs. I don't think so. Nonetheless, that is 
what they want to do.
  There are many other things that can be done. Infectious rate, 
readmissions, we need to be in front of illnesses. We need to have 
public health services. But yet in the CR, the continuing resolution 
that passed this House just this day not more than 2 hours ago, the 
clinics in America are reduced and people will be lined up in the 
emergency rooms. We know that is the most expensive place in this 
Nation to get medical care. Yet we get this kind of CR that comes 
through here, this continuing resolution to fund the government that 
reduces clinics all across this Nation.
  Well, I think I need a glass of water, and I notice that my colleague 
from Colorado (Mr. Perlmutter) has arrived to join us in this moment.
  Thank you for coming here.
  Mr. PERLMUTTER. I thank my friend from California. I hope you don't 
go too far for that water, because I want to express my concern about 
the way the Republican Party, the majority in the House, is providing 
for running this country. It is a pretty frightening set of 
circumstances that we have when this country is run on a week-to-week 
basis; the funding for our troops, the funding for our transportation, 
the funding for Medicare, for Social Security and for health care of 
all kinds is on a week-to-week basis. It is very difficult for a family 
to operate on a week-to-week basis. It is nearly impossible for a 
business to operate on a week-to-week basis. But apparently for my 
friends on the Republican side, it is okay for the Nation to run on a 
week-to-week basis.
  So today, in what they, I think, believe was a great accomplishment, 
provide for another week of funding so that the various parts of our 
government, whether it is education, transportation, homeland security, 
the military or Veterans Affairs, all those kinds of things are just 
operating on a one-week basis. That is no way to run a railroad or a 
country.
  We have got to do much better than this. And there is no question 
that we have budgetary issues that this Nation has to confront. My 
friends on the Republican side of the aisle would like to take it all 
out, deal with the whole budget, but only in a very slim part, in 
effect, punish a very tiny part of the budget for the ills that I would 
say occurred under the Bush administration: big tax cuts for 
millionaires and billionaires, prosecute a couple wars without paying 
for them, and then allow Wall Street to run amok without any police. 
That's what caused the debt.
  Energy efficiency didn't cause the debt in America. Preschool 
programs didn't cause the debt in America. The National Institutes of 
Health didn't

[[Page 5548]]

cause this debt in America that we really do have to deal with today, 
there is no question about it. But those are the people, those are the 
things that they would like to blame for the debt. It is across the 
board. And there has got to be a shared sacrifice. Both millionaires 
and billionaires have to put up as part of their approach to all this. 
There has to be a revenue component to this as well as an expense.
  And so I would say to my friend from California that this 1-week 
approach to managing something as big as America is crazy, and it has 
got to stop. We need to have a real budget and real appropriations so 
that people that do business with the government can have solid 
expectations for their contracts and people that work in the government 
know that they are going to get paid, people that receive benefits in 
one fashion or another know that next week things will keep going. 
Because this country is great and it is strong and it will be here a 
long time after any of us. But this month-to-month, day-to-day, week-
to-week approach to management is just bad news for America. I hope it 
changes very soon.
  I would return the mic to my friend from California.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Two hours ago, the Republicans in this House passed, 
without Democratic support, a continuing resolution for a while, and 
there were cuts in those. For the most part, there was no debate here 
on the floor about specific cuts, but you raised these issues. I'm 
going to put some numbers to what you talked about. The Women, Infants, 
and Children program, the WIC program, is for pregnant mothers at risk 
during their pregnancy and then after their pregnancy so they have 
adequate nutrition and health care so they have a healthy baby. It 
saves us money. If that baby is not healthy, it is going to cost a lot 
of money. The Women, Infants, and Children program, the WIC program, 
there is a $200 million reduction in it.
  We like to fight crime; right? Well, $149 million out of the 
construction account so that there can be police stations and other 
facilities for the police across the Nation.
  You mentioned environmental issues. $192 million from the Department 
of Energy's environmental cleanup. What are they cleaning up? They are 
cleaning up the nuclear waste material from the previous Cold War 
nuclear programs. We know a lot all of a sudden about nuclear 
contamination. Oh, good, we are going to take $192 million out and just 
leave that nuclear waste out there to do what it is going to do, and it 
won't be good.
  And also, there is another. You mentioned the banking industry. We 
know that between 2001 and 2008 the Bush administration and the Federal 
Reserve just said they will regulate themselves; we don't need to 
police the banks. And so we wound up with the great crash.

                              {time}  1600

  Well, we passed the Wall Street reform. We put in serious policing. 
We are going to police those characters. We are not going to let them 
get away with ``greed is good'' and rip off the public. We need 
policemen. But the Republicans don't believe in this, so they took a 
total of $590 million out of the financial services programs. These are 
the policemen that protect America's financial future.
  We got a call from CalPERS and CalSTRS, the two big California 
pension agencies, which came to Congress and said: Do not do this. Wall 
Street needs to be policed. Don't cut the police.
  I'm going to do a couple more. Let's see, how about clean water and 
drinking water, $700 million out of the clean water fund. This is for 
communities to build water systems so there is clean water. You go 
through this and you say: What are they thinking?
  Okay, your turn. Continue on.
  Mr. PERLMUTTER. And I would say to my friend, look, I wish we were 
not here. I wish that, going back to 2001, 2002, I wish President Bush 
hadn't had the country take a voluntary pay cut. We were on the road to 
a surplus. We were almost done getting rid of the debt. But, no, we are 
just the opposite right now because we took a voluntary pay cut to this 
country.
  Then we prosecute two big wars, to the tune of a trillion dollars. 
And under the Bush administration, they had those wars on a whole set 
of different books. They didn't really account for it as part of the 
debt of this country. Now, under President Obama, we have real 
accounting, so we know how bad the books look. And then we had this 
crash on Wall Street. Now those things all add up to a lot of debt. 
There is no doubt about it. And when the country hit the crash, the 
income to the country dropped and the expenses went up.
  I don't think we should ever forget how we got here, but we are here, 
and we have to deal with it. So I respect people who want to confront 
this, but the values and the priorities that are being expressed by the 
Republican Party in how to deal with this are just so misplaced. They 
want to maintain the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. They 
want to maintain tax cuts that encourage people to send jobs overseas. 
And they want to maintain tax cuts for oil companies when we are at 
$105 or $106 a barrel, for goodness sake. You don't need much 
encouragement to start drilling at that high a price.
  So those kinds of things have to be looked at very closely when all 
of a sudden you are taking it out of a number of those programs and 
people that you talked about: early childhood, health care, education, 
and transportation. We are going to have to share this sacrifice, no 
question about it. And as Democrats, we are prepared to do that. It 
isn't going to be fun. It isn't a lot of excitement when you really 
have to manage those expenses, but you also have to have the revenue to 
deal with the budget that we have in front of us.
  My friends on the Republican side of the aisle would like to say, you 
know what, nobody really has to pay for these tax cuts, nobody really 
has to pay for sending jobs overseas. They are wrong. They are just 
flat wrong.
  We have to change this. And they are in the majority. They are 
running the show here in the House. This one week at a time, that's a 
joke. Nobody can really manage, and people doing business with the 
government, with the country, they need to have some firm confidence in 
what is going on.
  My friends on the Republican side of the aisle just keep undermining 
the confidence of people doing business in this country. So we have a 
lot of work to do. It really is going to take both sides of the aisle. 
I appreciate the President rolling up his sleeves and trying to get 
this done, and the Senate working on it. But there are some on the 
other side of the aisle who don't understand what the word 
``compromise'' means to get to a greater goal, which is to get this 
budget under control.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. You have raised a couple of issues, and I would like 
to carry them a little further. You raised the tax issue, in the 
proposed budget, not the CR today that funded the government for 
another week but rather in the proposal for the next year and beyond. 
The Republicans propose to continue the Bush era tax cuts of 2001 for 
the super wealthy in America. Now that's about $700 billion added to 
the deficit. Not only that, that tax rate is 35 percent. They are 
proposing to lower that tax rate to 25 percent. So for the super 
wealthy in America, we are talking about millionaires, people whose 
annual income is $1 million and people whose annual income is $1 
billion, to give them a lower tax rate. Are we talking shared sacrifice 
here? I think not.
  I want to turn to this chart which was handed to me by one of our 
colleagues who is actually on the President's deficit commission. She 
said the facts are pretty clear. Not pretty clear--they are crystal 
clear. She said between 1974 and 2009, there has been a shift in the 
wealth and the income of Americans. What has happened is that the rich 
have gotten really rich and everybody else has been treading water, not 
really going anywhere. So if you take a look at this, you'll see that 
over that 20-year period for those at the very bottom, they have seen 
their income go up by $200 a year. As you move on up, as you get to the 
top, those in the 80 percentile, they have seen better. They have about 
$100,000. But when

[[Page 5549]]

you get to the one-tenth of 1 percent of the population, their average 
annual income has gone up by just under $6 million a year, a $5,978,870 
annual increase for the top one-tenth of 1 percent.
  Another chart, I don't have it with me right now, would show that for 
these people, the top 1 percent, they now have 25 percent of all of the 
wealth of America. Go back, go back to 1974, they had 7 percent of the 
wealth in America; 1974, the top 1 percent had 7 percent. And 2009, the 
top 1 percent controlled 24 percent of all of the wealth in America. An 
enormous shift has taken place here. The middle class has been left 
behind, basically stagnant, basically treading water.
  Now, understanding that reality of America, the stagnation of the 
middle class, the struggle for not one family earner but two, wife and 
husband, out working, trying to keep the family together in the home 
with health care, the kids going off to school, that is the struggle of 
middle America. So what have the Republicans proposed? Their proposal 
will shift the tax burden away from the super rich to the middle class 
because they want to reduce the taxes on the super rich from 35 percent 
to 25 percent. And inevitably, that is going to raise the taxes for the 
middle class to make up the difference. We will not let that happen.
  I notice that my colleague from the great Midwest has joined us. 
Thank you very much. I suspect you may have something to say about 
this.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I am watching you go through this, and I wanted to 
come down and take part. Last night we did the budget for next year. 
Democrats consistently, all day and all night, offered amendments to 
try to correct this idea of there not being any shared sacrifice. So as 
we sift through, we go through the budget line item by line item, and 
there are millions being cut, if not billions being cut, from Head 
Start, early childhood programs, the Pell Grant, veterans health, all 
of these things that get reinvested back into our people, and the RAND 
Corporation and all of these studies that are done, for every dollar we 
invest in early childhood, we get about $17 back into society. For ever 
$1 we invest in Head Start, we get $7 to $9 back. And all of our 
friends on the other side who say we ought to run government like a 
business should look at some of these statistics. These are critical 
investments that we need to make in the United States if we are going 
to be competitive.
  We have only 300-plus million people in the United States. We are now 
competing against 1.3 billion in China. We are now competing against 
over 1 billion people in India. So we have to have all 300 million of 
our people on the field playing for the United States of America.

                              {time}  1610

  And you know what? That means we've got to invest in their health 
care to make sure those kids are healthy. We've got to make sure that 
they're educated. This is not the time to make college more expensive 
by cutting the Pell Grant from the top rate that we had, that the 
Democrats put in when we were here. The top Pell Grant would be 5,500 
bucks. Now with the cuts that the Republican budget is going to make, 
if you're sending your kid to college, you're now only going to have 
$2,100 as a maximum Pell Grant. To me, if we're trying to get more 
people into college, more people doing research, more people innovating 
in our economy, more entrepreneurs, we need to invest in these kinds of 
things.
  And yesterday all of our friends on the other side of the aisle had 
the opportunity to come down in public with a vote, one side or the 
other. In each and every instance, they voted against those 
investments.
  In fact, we even offered a few amendments, one saying if you make 
more than a million bucks a year, which, where I come from, is a lot of 
money, let's raise the taxes on those people who make a million dollars 
a year or more and try to offset some of these deep cuts into Head 
Start, into the Pell Grant, into the Medicare program.
  The gentleman from California was talking about wages. We have 
seniors now who over the past 30 years, whether they worked in the 
steel industry in Youngstown, Ohio, or the rubber industry in Akron, 
Ohio, or throughout the industrial Midwest, in many instances they lost 
their pension. I remember when my grandfather retired in 1979, his 
pension was $392; and when he died a few years ago, it was $392.
  So now what the new roadmap for the Republicans does is it says for 
these people who are 55 and in the industrial Midwest who have seen the 
diminishment of their wages over the last 30 years, while the top 1 
percent was going up, they're saying now they want to take the Medicare 
program and just give some support to let the senior go out into the 
free market and buy their own Medicare.
  So Medicare is ``medi-gone.'' You are now going to be on your own. So 
now if you're a senior citizen in the United States under the Ryan 
roadmap--not this Ryan, the Ryan from Wisconsin--under his roadmap, the 
Medicare program will give you money, and it will not increase with the 
level of health care inflation, which is 10 to 15 percent a year. So 
they'll give you some money to support you to go out and get your 
health care. It won't keep up with inflation, and there will be nowhere 
else to go. These same people who over the last 20 or 30 years 
projected into the future, wages have been stagnant. So you're going to 
go into the seniors' pockets so that they have got to pay for your 
health care.
  So we had this----
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Tombstone.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Tombstone made up: ``Medicare 1965-2011, created by 
LBJ, destroyed by the GOP.''
  Now is not the time for us to make these cuts and tell our seniors 
who have paid into this system, who have planned on this system and the 
people under 55 whom this will affect that they're on their own and do 
nothing to try to rein in the health care costs. And that's the real 
issue.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you very much, Mr. Ryan.
  I will first yield to the gentleman from Colorado, and then we are 
going to wrap this thing up, and I want to wrap it up on one of our 
major themes, that's rebuilding the great American manufacturing 
sector.
  Mr. PERLMUTTER. Thank you, Mr. Garamendi.
  The way I would wrap it up is that, yes, we are confronted with a 
budgetary issue that we have got to deal with. We can't run away from 
it.
  We can't forget how we got here: tax cuts for millionaires and 
billionaires, prosecute a couple of wars to the tune of a trillion 
dollars, and then a crash on Wall Street--all under the Bush 
administration. But we're here. We've got to deal with it.
  I ask my friends on the Republican side of the aisle that sacrifice 
has got to be shared, where is that shared sacrifice? It isn't just 
against early childhood education. It isn't just against medical 
research. It isn't just against Medicare and Medicaid or education or 
transportation. You can't just get this budget balanced on a very 
narrow slice of the budget. Let's share the sacrifice. Let's get this 
country back on track. Things are recovering. Let's keep it going.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If the gentleman will yield for a moment.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Because one of the amendments last night in the 
hearing, in the budget markup, was to implement the framework from the 
Debt Commission, the Bowles-Simpson Commission, which said two-thirds 
of the savings should be cuts and one-third should be revenue primarily 
from the top 1 percent of the people who have had all these benefits 
over the last 30 years. Every single Republican on the committee voted 
against implementing that framework, which was Heath Shuler's 
amendment, and it is to be noted that they had an opportunity to vote 
for that and they shirked their responsibility.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. It also speaks to the fact that the Democrats are 
willing to put up shared sacrifice on both sides.
  I want to just wrap up with this, and every time I come to the floor 
I want to make it clear that we need to rebuild the American 
manufacturing

[[Page 5550]]

base. Twenty years ago there were 20 million-plus Americans in 
manufacturing. Today there are 11 million. A lot of reasons for it. But 
these are the kinds of investments you were talking about, Mr. Ryan, 
that we need to make. We really need to make sure that our policies on 
trade are fair, that they don't harm our manufacturing industry.
  We've been talking about taxes here. We need to make those taxes 
encourage growth. A couple of examples on taxes: we put out a tax bill 
without any Republican support last year to end the tax breaks that 
corporations had to offshore jobs. And we gave corporations and 
businesses an immediate write-up of all capital gains. So we're serious 
about tax policy here to encourage manufacturing.
  Energy is a huge issue, and there will be a discussion on another 
day.
  Labor policies: let's understand that it was the labor unions that 
built the base, and you go down through the line--education, 
intellectual property, research, and, again, building the great 
infrastructure. These are things we can do. These are critical 
investments in our budget. We should be doing these things.
  I am going to yield to my friend from Colorado (Mr. Perlmutter). You 
get the last word.
  Mr. PERLMUTTER. I would just reiterate, if we make it in America, we 
will make it in America.

                          ____________________