[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 18424]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            THE FISCAL CLIFF

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, Congress is here on New Year's Eve with 
the people they love: themselves, the special interests, and the 
policies of the past.
  The overhyped fiscal cliff may well be upon us, and we will find $600 
billion of deficit reduction with tax increases and spending cuts, and 
then there will be the howls that we are doing it too abruptly from 
some of the same people who demanded this system of expiring cuts and 
sequestration in the first place.
  Make no mistake. There will be some real damage. We will be squeezing 
some people who deserve far better, and then we'll be scrambling to 
refine the budget reductions in a way that makes sense. And some time 
in the hours, days, and weeks ahead, we will get a semibalanced small 
agreement, very likely, struggling throughout the new Congress with 
budget bluster, especially in the House, moving from crisis to deadline 
to showdown.
  It's ironic because it doesn't need to be this hard. We could use the 
pressure and revenue from expiring temporary tax cuts to enact tax 
reform to provide the money that a growing and aging American 
population needs, but do it in a simpler, fairer way. We could actually 
reduce entitlement spending on Medicare by accelerating the health care 
reform, which is what, in Oregon, we've committed to do in exchange for 
some flexibility and some upfront funding. We have in place a program 
going forward that, if done on a national level, would save over $1 
trillion over the next 10 years.
  We shouldn't be fooling around with patching an outmoded, unfair farm 
bill. Let's reform it to support family farmers and ranchers, beginning 
farmers, especially those who grow food, not large agribusiness 
producing heavily subsidized commodities. We can save money, protect 
the environment, enhance wildlife, the experience for hunters and 
fishermen, and have a healthier America.
  The military is the greatest source of money. We can start with 
135,000 soldiers scattered in over 1,000 bases across the globe. We 
have a nuclear arsenal where we are spending several hundred billion 
dollars on weapons we can't use, we don't need and can't afford.
  Mr. Speaker, the good news is that the public would support us in 
these steps. The good news is that, if we ever got the chance to 
consider them in a fair and open debate on the floor of the House, we 
would find bipartisan support for each of these real saving options. 
The good news is that, ultimately, we are going to take these steps, 
proving, once again, the wisdom of Winston Churchill when he observed 
that you could always count on the Americans to do the right thing 
after they have exhausted every other possibility.

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