[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5706-5707]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               THE BUDGET

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, budgets should be about reality, not 
ideology. The reality of the budget today is that our middle class is 
being pushed to the edge of extinction, and that is the truth, while 
there is an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. As I have 
said--I will continue to say--the rich are getting richer and the poor 
are getting much poorer. But perhaps the most brutal reality is that 
Congress is not doing its job, and the real brutal reality is that 
congressional Republicans don't even seem to care.
  In the very near future, the Senate is expected to consider a 
conference report on the Republican budget resolution. It is a budget 
that is as irresponsible as it is immoral.
  It is a budget based on the failed ideology of a political party out 
of touch with America's middle class, a political party that is out of 
touch with reality. It amounts to an all-out attack on working 
families, an attack designed to protect only the interests of 
millionaires, billionaires, and many special interests.
  The Republican budget would deprive more than 16 million Americans of 
their health insurance. It allows big insurance companies to, once 
again, discriminate against women. It would cause people who have 
disabilities to be unable to get insurance--as it used to be before 
ObamaCare came into being. It threatens the coverage of hard-working 
Americans who lose their jobs or suffer from, as I have indicated, 
preexisting medical conditions.
  The budget that is proposed by my Republican friends would also make 
deep cuts to Medicare at the expense of our Nation's seniors. It would 
raise taxes on working Americans by allowing the expansion of the 
earned-income tax credit and allows the child tax credit to simply 
expire, go out of existence.
  It would end key supports that help young Americans afford college. 
At a time when student debt is higher than credit card debt--we have 
tried to resolve it on the Senate floor, but the Republicans vote 
unanimously no. They are not going to cut parents--these young men and 
women who have debt--any slack.
  The budget they propose would undermine job training--and certainly 
at a time when we need it with the changing technology that creates 
jobs--for Americans who are simply trying to better themselves and get 
a good job or a better job.
  Meanwhile, Republicans refuse to close a single tax loophole to 
reduce the deficit--not one. They will not end tax breaks for companies 
that send jobs overseas. They will not close loopholes for wealthy 
hedge fund managers. They will not do away with wasteful tax breaks for 
the oil and gas industry.
  Once again, Republicans are attacking the middle class, and they are 
attacking it forcefully, while protecting the superwealthy.
  The budget is just wrong. It is also dishonest.
  It claims to be balanced. There is no balance in this budget. That is 
a word. The budget is no more balanced than the earthquakes they have 
had in Nepal. It claims to reach balance, but the claim is laughable, 
based on gimmicks and massive cuts that are left unspecified.
  When you have editorials from magazines such as Forbes, a 
conservative magazine, denigrating the Republican budget, you know it 
is wrong. One of the worst aspects of this budget is it uses 
sequestration to undermine America's middle class, to underfund the 
investments needed for our security and our future.
  Let's talk about sequestration for a minute, these automatic cuts. 
The example is the National Institutes of Health. It becomes very 
personal when you see these issues that face Americans--diabetes, the 
flu. The Presiding Officer is a physician who specializes in eyes. But 
the flu kills tens of thousands of people in America every year, and 
the NIH was on the verge of a universal vaccine for flu, any type of 
flu. As we know, what they do now, they try to find out what the flu is 
going to be, the variety of flu in a given year, and then they try to 
mix and match. Last year, that was effective at less than 50 percent. 
So if you got the flu shot--60 percent of people who got the flu shot 
got the flu anyway. But because of sequestration, they had to drop 
that. They have never gotten that money back--$1.6 billion.
  I mentioned eyes. I have become very concerned about eyes in the last 
couple of months, and there are all kinds of programs at the NIH that 
could be funded much better dealing with problems such as I have.
  So it is simply wrong that they are going to go forward with this 
sequestration. It is wrong.
  Sequestration was never intended to be implemented. It was designed 
with cuts so deep and so stupid that Congress would never let them 
happen. But my Republican colleagues let them happen. Republicans 
recognize that sequestration poses a threat to our national security, 
and their budget uses a gimmick.
  I am not calling it a gimmick--or at least I am not alone. We have 
Republicans--the junior Senator from Tennessee is talking about how he 
won't support the budget because he thinks there are some gimmicks in 
it, and many editorials have been written using that term over and over 
again. Their budget is not balanced, and it uses gimmicks to pretend.
  They do everything in this budget to protect the Pentagon, but it 
doesn't really because it is phony. They use the overseas contingency 
fund, which everybody knows is phony. They want to help the military. I 
want to help the military also. But, sadly, the Republican budget does 
absolutely nothing to provide similar protections for the middle class.
  There is, however, some good news about the Republican budget, and it 
is this: The Republican budget isn't worth the paper it is written on. 
It is going to go nowhere. There is no chance of the budget actually 
being implemented. President Obama and the congressional Democrats are 
committed to the middle class, so we are not going to let it happen.
  The administration has made it very clear that President Obama is not 
willing to lock in sequestration in any appropriations bill or in 
anything else. In a Statement of Administration Policy--the forerunner 
of a veto--the Obama administration said: ``The President's senior 
advisors would recommend that he veto . . . any legislation that 
implements the current Republican budget framework.'' Nor will the 
President accept fixes to defense without also fixing nondefense budget 
items. For President Obama, it is simply a matter of principle, and 
congressional Democrats fully agree with his principle. So the 
Republican budget isn't going anywhere.
  If Republicans insist on moving appropriations bills based on that 
budget, it is a waste of their time. It will not

[[Page 5707]]

happen. We will not let that happen. What we need is a budget that is 
based in reality, a budget that is fair to the middle class, fair to 
the American people, a budget that will only happen when Republicans 
abandon their extreme attacks on the poor and middle class and sit down 
and talk to us about the way forward.
  I note that no one is seeking the floor, and I would ask that the 
Chair announce the business of the day.

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