[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16151-16152]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              FISCAL CLIFF

  (Mr. FLEMING asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mr. FLEMING. For 2 years, President Obama and Democrats have clamored 
for a so-called ``balanced approach'' to fix the budget deficit by 
raising taxes in exchange for entitlement reform. We must reform 
entitlements. We know that, without reform, Medicare becomes insolvent 
in just 10 years. Then there's welfare. For the first year ever, we 
spent over $1 trillion on welfare, and food stamp usage is up now to 15 
percent of the population. All of this is creating annual trillion-
dollar deficits, which, along with anemic economic growth and 
stubbornly high unemployment, means 23 million Americans still have no 
jobs.
  Now some Republicans say they'd consider a balanced approach, but how 
much revenue is gathered from the tax increases proposed by Democrats? 
About $80 billion a year. That's barely enough to run Washington for 8 
days.
  Mr. Speaker, we are less than 4 weeks from falling off the fiscal 
cliff. It's time for Democrats to come to the table with something more 
than job-killing taxes. If they have serious ideas for entitlement 
reform, the American

[[Page 16152]]

people deserve to hear them. Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, the reason we 
haven't heard Democrat ideas for entitlement reform may be because they 
have no plans to cut or to reform entitlement spending at all. This is 
just another game from their playbook--raise taxes and increase 
spending, as always.

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