[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 2]
[House]
[Page 1777]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             SEQUESTRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. The sequester drama that we are watching play out 
this week is exactly why I voted against the New Year's Day budget 
package.
  Two months ago, all of the forces were aligned to force a bigger 
agreement, but we set our sights too low. It generated too little 
revenue, and, most importantly, there was not a fundamental reform in 
the way that we do business.
  We merely put off the fiscal cliff in order to have not one, not two, 
but three such dramas between now and next summer. Friday is the 
sequestration; March 27, the continuing resolution runs out; and 
sometime this summer, the Treasury Department is going to run out of 
capacity to keep juggling the national debt, and we face that drama all 
over again.
  Actually, there's a fourth cliff if you count the so-called ``dairy 
cliff'' which will potentially double milk prices in September.
  The path forward is to focus on areas of potential agreement between 
the right and the left. A great place to start is health care. Reform 
is taking place around the country. And, in fact, nowhere is it more 
exciting and promising than what is happening in Oregon where we are 
working in concert with the implementation of the Health Care Reform 
Act to squeeze out waste and inefficiency. We are working to reward 
value instead of volume, and the Federal Government has bet $1.9 
billion that we will be able to reduce health care inflation at least 2 
percent a year and maintain quality.

                              {time}  1110

  Helping people stay well rather than paying people for disease and 
illness is a logical way to go. After all, the Affordable Care Act 
embedded every one of these major reforms that used to be bipartisan, 
that had been implemented by business, health care plans in red States 
and blue States, that had been advocated by Democratic and Republican 
Governors alike, and, indeed, supported by Members of the House and 
Senate in both parties. Instead of fighting health care reform, we 
ought to accelerate it. If we can deliver on the Oregon promise, it in 
and of itself will save more money nationally over the next 10 years 
than we're arguing about with the sequestration.
  We also must address the huge budget challenges that are facing the 
Pentagon, in large measure because neither it nor Congress has insisted 
on change and, indeed, in some cases, has institutionalized bad 
decisions.
  We haven't scaled back our horribly expensive, outmoded, inefficient 
nuclear deterrent program, maintaining perhaps 8-10 times the warheads 
for what we need for actual deterrence today with three massive, 
expensive, redundant delivery systems that are out of sync with today's 
threats. We haven't used nuclear weapons for the last 68 years. We 
probably won't use them for the next 68 years, and there is no 
imaginable circumstance when we would use even a fraction of the 
weapons we have. And the cost for that conservatively is in excess of 
two-thirds of $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
  We've never come to grips with the cost of an all-volunteer Army. Our 
forces are significantly above what we had a decade earlier when we 
were supposedly staffed to fight two wars simultaneously. We need to 
scale that down, to refocus it, to supplement reductions in troop 
levels with beefed-up support to the National Guard, which is far more 
cost-effective and easier on our troops.
  We need to reform our bloated, fossilized, outdated farm bill to 
spend less, help more farmers and the environment, and show that we can 
rise above politics and habits to have a farm program for this century, 
not 1949. The majority of farmers and ranchers in the United States get 
nothing. The majority of the support flows to the top 10 percent, who 
don't need it at all, and it distorts our international trade posture.
  The final looming threat is the dysfunction, unfairness, and 
inefficiency of our tax system. It costs us huge sums to administer. It 
leaks hundreds of billions of dollars in tax avoidance, evasion, and 
mistakes, to say nothing of misplaced incentives, and it costs over 
$160 billion a year to administer.
  Now, clearly there's a need for more revenue in a growing and aging 
population, but fundamentally, we need a new broad base of support that 
will help us pay the transition necessary for a reformed system.
  Madam Speaker, this is not rocket science. This is within our 
capacity. We ought to get started on it now.

                          ____________________