[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16949-16950]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            THE FISCAL CLIFF

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, to understand the Federal budget mess 
and the so-called fiscal cliff, it's important to know three numbers: 
39, 37, and 64.
  Thirty-nine percent is the combined growth of inflation and 
population over the last 10 years. Thirty-seven percent is the increase 
in revenues in the same period. That's despite the recession and the 
tax cuts. It's not quite keeping pace, but it's pretty close. Sixty-
four percent is the number that is killing us. Sixty-four percent is 
the increase in Federal spending in that period. That's nearly twice 
the rate of inflation and population growth over the last 10 years.
  The spending side of the fiscal cliff is the so-called ``sequester,'' 
automatic cuts in Federal spending. To hear some tell it, it is the end 
of Western civilization as we know it. That's hardly the case. After a 
64 percent increase in expenditures during this decade, the sequester 
doesn't actually cut spending at all. It simply limits spending growth 
next year to about a half of a percent. I opposed the budget deal that 
created the sequester last year because it fell woefully short of what 
Standard & Poor's clearly warned was necessary to preserve the Nation's 
AAA credit rating. Sadly, that fear was borne out, but now the 
sequester is all we have.
  It's true defense takes the brunt of it, but does our defense 
spending really need to be higher--inflation adjusted-- than it was at 
the height of the Vietnam War, when we faced down the Soviet Union and 
had 500,000 combat troops in the field? The sequester isn't stepping 
off a cliff; it is taking one step back from the cliff.
  The tax increases, however, are a very different matter. Without 
intervention, the Federal tax burden will balloon 21 percent at the 
stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, taking somewhere between $2,000 
and $3,000 from an average family. This summer, the House passed 
legislation to protect our Nation from such a calamity, but Mr. Obama 
vowed to veto it, and the Senate killed it. Instead, Mr. Obama tells us 
that he'll veto any plan that stops taxes from going up on all of those 
very wealthy folks making over $200,000, who he says need to pay their 
fair share. I suppose fairness is in the eye of the beholder. The top 1 
percent earns 17 percent of all income and pays 37 percent of all 
income taxes, but that's beside the point. The fine point of it is that 
a lot of these very wealthy folks making over $200,000 aren't very

[[Page 16950]]

wealthy, and they aren't even folks. They're 1.3 million struggling 
small businesses filing under subchapter S. Our small businesses 
produce two-thirds of the new jobs in our economy. So this battle is 
very much for the middle class.
  The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Mr. Obama's tax 
increase on the so-called ``wealthy'' will actually throw 200,000 
middle and working class families into unemployment. That's 200,000 
lost jobs. By the way, that is the optimistic estimate. An independent 
analysis by Ernst & Young puts that figure closer to 700,000 lost jobs. 
That's because the President's taxes would slam 84 percent of the net 
small business income in the country. That's precisely the income that 
is used to support and expand our labor force.
  In their blind pursuit of an eat-the-rich ideology, Mr. Obama and his 
acolytes are imposing a policy that would utterly devastate hundreds of 
thousands of middle class families who depend upon the jobs that these 
small businesses provide. And for what? To wring enough money to fund 
Mr. Obama's spending spree for a grand total of 8 days. It's telling 
that three-fourths of the new taxes he's proposed would be used to 
finance the new spending that he's also proposed.
  We Republicans don't want to see taxes go up on anyone, period. We 
don't want to see this government willfully throw hundreds of thousands 
of Americans out of work by this policy. The President obviously 
believes that in the eleventh hour Republicans will have no choice but 
ultimately to protect as many taxpayers as we possibly can since the 
only alternative would be tax increases on everyone, including those 
job creators. He may be right, but that would mean a bleak and bitter 
New Year for all of those families who will watch helplessly as their 
jobs evaporate before their eyes. Let us pray that this President has a 
change of heart before setting this calamity in motion.

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