[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15708-15717]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




        CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2018

  The Committee resumed its sitting.
  Mrs. BLACK. Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished 
gentleman from Florida (Mr. Francis Rooney).
  Mr. FRANCIS ROONEY of Florida. Mr. Chair, with all respect, the cruel 
and unusual punishment is the Democratic-proposed substitute amendment. 
The raw deal is the Democratic-proposed substitute amendment that 
increases spending $6.2 trillion over our budget.
  This thing raises taxes--$2.7 trillion, the largest tax increase in 
American history, at a time when we are drowning in debt and stagnant 
wage growth.
  It requires a one-to-one match of defense and nondefense 
discretionary spending at a time when we can't keep our F-18s flying 
and we have airplanes crashing around the country for lack of 
maintenance.

[[Page 15709]]

  This is unconscionable. This budget never balances. It will leave us 
with an $852 billion deficit by fiscal year 2027. It expands ObamaCare, 
the most disastrous and heinous trick played on the American people 
that I can remember. It prioritizes amnesty over security.
  We are never going to get our country straight and preserve our 
sovereignty if we don't protect our security. On the other hand, we 
have got the Republican budget that offers to do a lot of things. One 
thing it offers to do is put a work requirement for able-bodied adults 
with no dependent children into welfare.
  Mr. Chair, I include in the Record an article by Nicholas Eberstadt 
of AEI talking about the horrible condition of our labor force now and 
how drastically important this is and how much it will improve the 
opportunities for people to rise out of poverty. We have got three 25- 
to 54-year-old males sitting out of the labor force collecting benefits 
for every one that is unemployed. The unemployed rate is 4.7 percent. 
That makes the total 20 percent. It is almost over 5 million people 
that we owe them a moral obligation to offer them an opportunity to 
rise out of poverty through work, and that is what the Republican 
budget does.

                      [Commentary, Feb. 15, 2017]

                  Economy: Our Miserable 21st Century

                       (By Nicholas N. Eberstadt)

       On the morning of November 9, 2016, American's elite--its 
     talking and deciding classes--woke up to a country they did 
     not know. To most privileged and well-educated Americans, 
     especially those living in its bicoastal bastions, the 
     election of Donald Trump had been a thing almost impossible 
     even to imagine. What sort of country would go and elect 
     someone like Trump as president? Certainly not one they were 
     familiar with, or understood anything about.
       Whatever else it may or may not have accomplished, the 2016 
     election was a sort of shock therapy for Americans living 
     within what Charles Murray famously termed ``the bubble'' 
     (the protective barrier of prosperity and self-selected 
     associations that increasingly shield our best and brightest 
     from contact with the rest of their society). The very fact 
     of Trump's election served as a truth broadcast about a 
     reality that could no longer be denied: Things out there in 
     America are a whole lot different from what you thought.
       Yes, things are very different indeed these days in the 
     ``real America'' outside the bubble. In fact, things have 
     been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the 
     21st century.
       It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical 
     milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the 
     Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive 
     generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living 
     and levels of social well-being, broke down around then--and 
     broke down very badly.
       The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons 
     sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits 
     and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, 
     ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were 
     for the most part too distant from the distress of the 
     general population to see or hear it. (So much for the 
     vaunted ``information era'' and ``big-data revolution.'') Now 
     that those signals are no longer possible to ignore, it is 
     high time for experts and intellectuals to reacquaint 
     themselves with the country in which they live and to begin 
     the task of describing what has befallen the country in which 
     we have lived since the dawn of the new century.
       Consider the condition of the American economy. In some 
     circles people still widely believe, as one recent New York 
     Times business-section article cluelessly insisted before the 
     inauguration, that ``Mr. Trump will inherit an economy that 
     is fundamentally solid.'' But this is patent nonsense. By now 
     it should be painfully obvious that the U.S. economy has been 
     in the grip of deep dysfunction since the dawn of the new 
     century. And in retrospect, it should also be apparent that 
     America's strange new economic maladies were almost perfectly 
     designed to set the stage for a populist storm.
       Ever since 2000, basic indicators have offered oddly 
     inconsistent readings on America's economic performance and 
     prospects. It is curious and highly uncharacteristic to find 
     such measures so very far out of alignment with one another. 
     We are witnessing an ominous and growing divergence between 
     three trends that should ordinarily move in tandem: wealth, 
     output, and employment.
       Depending upon which of these three indicators you choose, 
     America looks to be heading up, down, or more or less 
     nowhere. From the standpoint of wealth creation, the 21st 
     century is off to a roaring start. By this yardstick, it 
     looks as if Americans have never had it so good and as if the 
     future is full of promise. Between early 2000 and late 2016, 
     the estimated net worth of American households and nonprofit 
     institutions more than doubled, from $44 trillion to $90 
     trillion.
       Although that wealth is not evenly distributed, it is still 
     a fantastic sum of money--an average of over a million 
     dollars for every notional family of four. This upsurge of 
     wealth took place despite the crash of 2008--indeed, private 
     wealth holdings are over $20 trillion higher now than they 
     were at their pre-crash apogee. The value of American real-
     estate assets is near or at all-time highs, and America's 
     businesses appear to be thriving. Even before the ``Trump 
     rally'' of late 2016 and early 2017, U.S. equities markets 
     were hitting new highs--and since stock prices are strongly 
     shaped by expectations of future profits, investors evidently 
     are counting on the continuation of the current happy days 
     for U.S. asset holders for some time to come.
       A rather less cheering picture, though, emerges if we look 
     instead at real trends for the macro-economy. Here, 
     performance since the start of the century might charitably 
     be described as mediocre, and prospects today are no better 
     than guarded. The recovery from the crash of 2008--which 
     unleashed the worst recession since the Great Depression--has 
     been singularly slow and weak. According to the Bureau of 
     Economic Analysis (BEA), it took nearly four years for 
     America's gross domestic product (GDP) to re-attain its late 
     2007 level. As of late 2016, total value added to the U.S. 
     economy was just 12 percent higher than in 2007. The 
     situation is even more sobering if we consider per capita 
     growth. It took America six and a half years--until mid-
     2014--to get back to its late 2007 per capita production 
     levels. And in late 2016, per capita output was just 4 
     percent higher than in late 2007--nine years earlier. By this 
     reckoning, the American economy looks to have suffered 
     something close to a lost decade.
       But there was clearly trouble brewing in America's macro-
     economy well before the 2008 crash, too. Between late 2000 
     and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5 
     percent per annum. That compares with the nation's long-term 
     postwar 1948-2000 per capita growth rate of almost 2.3 
     percent, which in turn can be compared to the ``snap back'' 
     tempo of 1.1 percent per annum since per capita GDP bottomed 
     out in 2009. Between 2000 and 2016, per capita growth in 
     America has averaged less than 1 percent a year. To state it 
     plainly: With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years 
     2000-2016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20 
     percent higher than it is today.
       The reasons for America's newly fitful and halting 
     macroeconomic performance are still a puzzlement to 
     economists and a subject of considerable contention and 
     debate. Economists are generally in consensus, however, in 
     one area: They have begun redefining the growth potential of 
     the U.S. economy downwards. The U.S. Congressional Budget 
     Office (CBO), for example, suggests that the ``potential 
     growth'' rate for the U.S. economy at full employment of 
     factors of production has now dropped below 1.7 percent a 
     year, implying a sustainable long-term annual per capita 
     economic growth rate for America today of well under 1 
     percent.
       Then there is the employment situation. If 21st-century 
     America's GDP trends have been disappointing, labor-force 
     trends have been utterly dismal. Work rates have fallen off a 
     cliff since the year 2000 and are at their lowest levels in 
     decades. We can see this by looking at the estimates by the 
     Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the civilian employment 
     rate, the jobs-to-population ratio for adult civilian men and 
     women. Between early 2000 and late 2016, America's overall 
     work rate for Americans age 20 and older underwent a drastic 
     decline. It plunged by almost 5 percentage points (from 64.6 
     to 59.7). Unless you are a labor economist, you may not 
     appreciate just how severe a falloff in employment such 
     numbers attest to. Postwar America never experienced anything 
     comparable.
       From peak to trough, the collapse in work rates for U.S. 
     adults between 2008 and 2010 was roughly twice the amplitude 
     of what had previously been the country's worst postwar 
     recession, back in the early 1980s. In that previous steep 
     recession, it took America five years to re-attain the adult 
     work rates recorded at the start of 1980. This time, the U.S. 
     job market has as yet, in early 2017, scarcely begun to claw 
     its way back up to the work rates of 2007--much less back to 
     the work rates from early 2000. U.S. adult work rates never 
     recovered entirely from the recession of 2001--much less the 
     crash of '08.
       And the work rates being measured here include people who 
     are engaged in any paid employment--any job, at any wage, for 
     any number of hours of work at all.
       On Wall Street and in some parts of Washington these days, 
     one hears that America has gotten back to ``near full 
     employment.'' For Americans outside the bubble, such talk 
     must seem nonsensical. It is true that the oft-cited 
     ``civilian unemployment rate'' looked pretty good by the end 
     of the Obama era--in December 2016, it was down to 4.7 
     percent, about the same as it had been back in 1965, at a 
     time of genuine full employment. The problem here is that the 
     unemployment rate only tracks joblessness for those still in 
     the labor force; it takes no account of workforce dropouts. 
     Alas, the exodus out of the

[[Page 15710]]

     workforce has been the big labor-market story for America's 
     new century. (At this writing, for every unemployed American 
     man between 25 and 55 years of age, there are another three 
     who are neither working nor looking for work.) Thus the 
     ``unemployment rate'' increasingly looks like an antique 
     index devised for some earlier and increasingly distant war: 
     the economic equivalent of a musket inventory or a cavalry 
     count.
       By the criterion of adult work rates, by contrast, 
     employment conditions in America remain remarkably bleak. 
     From late 2009 through early 2014, the country's work rates 
     more or less flatlined. So far as can be told, this is the 
     only ``recovery'' in U.S. economic history in which that 
     basic labor-market indicator almost completely failed to 
     respond.
       Since 2014, there has finally been a measure of improvement 
     in the work rate--but it would be unwise to exaggerate the 
     dimensions of that turnaround. As of late 2016, the adult 
     work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more 
     than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation's 
     work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century 
     highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently 
     have paying jobs.
       There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers. They are 
     not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by 
     population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for 
     adult students, or by any other genuine change in 
     contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-
     century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.
       For an apples-to-apples look at America's 21st-century jobs 
     problem, we can focus on the 25-54 population--known to labor 
     economists for self-evident reasons as the ``prime working 
     age'' group. For this key labor-force cohort, work rates in 
     late 2016 were down almost 4 percentage points from their 
     year-2000 highs. That is a jobs gap approaching 5 million for 
     this group alone.
       It is not only that work rates for prime-age males have 
     fallen since the year 2000--they have, but the collapse of 
     work for American men is a tale that goes back at least half 
     a century. (I wrote a short book last year about this sad 
     saga.) What is perhaps more startling is the unexpected and 
     largely unnoticed fall-off in work rates for prime-age women. 
     In the U.S. and all other Western societies, postwar labor 
     markets underwent an epochal transformation. After World War 
     II, work rates for prime women surged, and continued to 
     rise--until the year 2000. Since then, they too have 
     declined. Current work rates for prime-age women are back to 
     where they were a generation ago, in the late 1980s. The 
     21st-century U.S. economy has been brutal for male and female 
     laborers alike--and the wreckage in the labor market has been 
     sufficiently powerful to cancel, and even reverse, one of our 
     society's most distinctive postwar trends: the rise of paid 
     work for women outside the household.
       In our era of no more than indifferent economic growth, 
     21st-century America has somehow managed to produce markedly 
     more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided 
     markedly less work for its workers. And trends for paid hours 
     of work look even worse than the work rates themselves. 
     Between 2000 and 2015, according to the BEA, total paid hours 
     of work in America increased by just 4 percent (as against a 
     35 percent increase for 1985-2000, the 15-year period 
     immediately preceding this one).
       Over the 2000-2015 period, however, the adult civilian 
     population rose by almost 18 percent--meaning that paid hours 
     of work per adult civilian have plummeted by a shocking 12 
     percent thus far in our new American century.
       This is the terrible contradiction of economic life in what 
     we might call America's Second Gilded Age (2000--). It is a 
     paradox that may help us understand a number of overarching 
     features of our new century. These include the consistent 
     findings that public trust in almost all U.S. institutions 
     has sharply declined since 2000, even as growing majorities 
     hold that America is ``heading in the wrong direction.'' It 
     provides an immediate answer to why overwhelming majorities 
     of respondents in public-opinion surveys continue to tell 
     pollsters, year after year, that our ever-richer America is 
     still stuck in the middle of a recession. The mounting 
     economic woes of the ``little people'' may not have been 
     generally recognized by those inside the bubble, or even by 
     many bubble inhabitants who claimed to be economic 
     specialists--but they proved to be potent fuel for the 
     populist fire that raged through American politics in 2016.
       So general economic conditions for many ordinary 
     Americans--not least of these, Americans who did not fit 
     within the academy's designated victim classes--have been 
     rather more insecure than those within the comfort of the 
     bubble understood. But the anxiety, dissatisfaction, anger, 
     and despair that range within our borders today are not 
     wholly a reaction to the way our economy is misfiring. On the 
     nonmaterial front, it is likewise clear that many things in 
     our society are going wrong and yet seem beyond our powers to 
     correct.
       Some of these gnawing problems are by no means new: A 
     number of them (such as family breakdown) can be traced back 
     at least to the 1960s, while others are arguably as old as 
     modernity itself (anomie and isolation in big anonymous 
     communities, secularization and the decline of faith). But a 
     number have roared down upon us by surprise since the turn of 
     the century--and others have redoubled with fearsome new 
     intensity since roughly the year 2000.
       American health conditions seem to have taken a seriously 
     wrong turn in the new century. It is not just that overall 
     health progress has been shockingly slow, despite the 
     trillions we devote to medical services each year. (Which 
     ``Cold War babies'' among us would have predicted we'd live 
     to see the day when life expectancy in East Germany was 
     higher than in the United States, as is the case today?)
       Alas, the problem is not just slowdowns in health 
     progress--there also appears to have been positive 
     retrogression for broad and heretofore seemingly untroubled 
     segments of the national population. A short but electrifying 
     2015 paper by Anne Case and Nobel Economics Laureate Angus 
     Deaton talked about a mortality trend that had gone almost 
     unnoticed until then: rising death rates for middle-aged U.S. 
     whites. By Case and Deaton's reckoning, death rates rose 
     somewhat slightly over the 1999-2013 period for all non-
     Hispanic white men and women 45-54 years of age--but they 
     rose sharply for those with high-school degrees or less, and 
     for this less-educated grouping most of the rise in death 
     rates was accounted for by suicides, chronic liver cirrhosis, 
     and poisonings (including drug overdoses).
       Though some researchers, for highly technical reasons, 
     suggested that the mortality spike might not have been quite 
     as sharp as Case and Deaton reckoned, there is little doubt 
     that the spike itself has taken place. Health has been 
     deteriorating for a significant swath of white America in our 
     new century, thanks in large part to drug and alcohol abuse. 
     All this sounds a little too close for comfort to the story 
     of modern Russia, with its devastating vodka- and drug-
     binging health setbacks. Yes: It can happen here, and it has. 
     Welcome to our new America.
       In December 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and 
     Prevention (CDC) reported that for the first time in decades, 
     life expectancy at birth in the United States had dropped 
     very slightly (to 78.8 years in 2015, from 78.9 years in 
     2014). Though the decline was small, it was statistically 
     meaningful--rising death rates were characteristic of males 
     and females alike; of blacks and whites and Latinos together. 
     (Only black women avoided mortality increases--their death 
     levels were stagnant.) A jump in ``unintentional injuries'' 
     accounted for much of the overall uptick.
       It would be unwarranted to place too much portent in a 
     single year's mortality changes; slight annual drops in U.S. 
     life expectancy have occasionally been registered in the 
     past, too, followed by continued improvements. But given 
     other developments we are witnessing in our new America, we 
     must wonder whether the 2015 decline in life expectancy is 
     just a blip, or the start of a new trend. We will find out 
     soon enough. It cannot be encouraging, though, that the Human 
     Mortality Database, an international consortium of 
     demographers who vet national data to improve comparability 
     between countries, has suggested that health progress in 
     America essentially ceased in 2012--that the U.S. gained on 
     average only about a single day of life expectancy at birth 
     between 2012 and 2014, before the 2015 turndown.
       The opioid epidemic of pain pills and heroin that has been 
     ravaging and shortening lives from coast to coast is a new 
     plague for our new century. The terrifying novelty of this 
     particular drug epidemic, of course, is that it has gone (so 
     to speak) ``mainstream'' this time, effecting breakout from 
     disadvantaged minority communities to Main Street White 
     America. By 2013, according to a 2015 report by the Drug 
     Enforcement Administration, more Americans died from drug 
     overdoses (largely but not wholly opioid abuse) than from 
     either traffic fatalities or guns. The dimensions of the 
     opioid epidemic in the real America are still not fully 
     appreciated within the bubble, where drug use tends to be 
     more carefully limited and recreational. In Dreamland, his 
     harrowing and magisterial account of modern America's opioid 
     explosion, the journalist Sam Quinones notes in passing that 
     ``in one three-month period'' just a few years ago, according 
     to the Ohio Department of Health, ``fully 11 percent of all 
     Ohioans were prescribed opiates.'' And of course many 
     Americans self-medicate with licit or illicit painkillers 
     without doctors' orders.
       In the fall of 2016, Alan Krueger, former chairman of the 
     President's Council of Economic Advisers, released a study 
     that further refined the picture of the real existing opioid 
     epidemic in America: According to his work, nearly half of 
     all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts--an army now 
     totaling roughly 7 million men--currently take pain 
     medication on a daily basis.
       We already knew from other sources (such as BLS ``time 
     use'' surveys) that the overwhelming majority of the prime-
     age men in this un-working army generally don't ``do civil 
     society'' (charitable work, religious activities, 
     volunteering), or for that matter much in the way of child 
     care or help for others in the home either, despite the 
     abundance of time on their hands. Their routine,

[[Page 15711]]

     instead, typically centers on watching--watching TV, DVDs, 
     Internet, hand-held devices, etc.--and indeed watching for an 
     average of 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job. 
     But Krueger's study adds a poignant and immensely sad detail 
     to this portrait of daily life in 21st-century America: In 
     our mind's eye we can now picture many millions of un-working 
     men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for 
     jobs, sitting in front of screens--stoned.
       But how did so many millions of un-working men, whose 
     incomes are limited, manage en masse to afford a constant 
     supply of pain medication? Oxycontin is not cheap. As 
     Dreamland carefully explains, one main mechanism today has 
     been the welfare state: more specifically, Medicaid, Uncle 
     Sam's means-tested health-benefits program. Here is how it 
     works (we are with Quinones in Portsmouth, Ohio):
       [The Medicaid card] pays for medicine--whatever pills a 
     doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who 
     receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a 
     federal disability program known as SSI. . . . If you could 
     get a prescription from a willing doctor--and Portsmouth had 
     plenty of them--Medicaid health-insurance cards paid for that 
     prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, 
     therefore, addicts got pills priced at thousands of dollars, 
     with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A 
     user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for 
     that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars 
     on the street.
       In 21st-century America, ``dependence on government'' has 
     thus come to take on an entirely new meaning.
       You may now wish to ask: What share of prime-working-age 
     men these days are enrolled in Medicaid? According to the 
     Census Bureau's SIPP survey (Survey of Income and Program 
     Participation), as of 2013, over one-fifth (21 percent) of 
     all civilian men between 25 and 55 years of age were Medicaid 
     beneficiaries. For prime-age people not in the labor force, 
     the share was over half (53 percent). And for un-working 
     Anglos (non-Hispanic white men not in the labor force) of 
     prime working age, the share enrolled in Medicaid was 48 
     percent.
       By the way: Of the entire un-working prime-age male Anglo 
     population in 2013, nearly three-fifths (57 percent) were 
     reportedly collecting disability benefits from one or more 
     government disability program in 2013. Disability checks and 
     means-tested benefits cannot support a lavish lifestyle. But 
     they can offer a permanent alternative to paid employment, 
     and for growing numbers of American men, they do. The rise of 
     these programs has coincided with the death of work for 
     larger and larger numbers of American men not yet of 
     retirement age. We cannot say that these programs caused the 
     death of work for millions upon millions of younger men: What 
     is incontrovertible, however, is that they have financed it--
     just as Medicaid inadvertently helped finance America's 
     immense and increasing appetite for opioids in our new 
     century.
       It is intriguing to note that America's nationwide opioid 
     epidemic has not been accompanied by a nationwide crime wave 
     (excepting of course the apparent explosion of illicit heroin 
     use). Just the opposite: As best can be told, national 
     victimization rates for violent crimes and property crimes 
     have both reportedly dropped by about two-thirds over the 
     past two decades. The drop in crime over the past generation 
     has done great things for the general quality of life in much 
     of America. There is one complication from this drama, 
     however, that inhabitants of the bubble may not be aware of, 
     even though it is all too well known to a great many 
     residents of the real America. This is the extraordinary 
     expansion of what some have termed America's ``criminal 
     class''--the population sentenced to prison or convicted of 
     felony offenses--in recent decades. This trend did not begin 
     in our century, but it has taken on breathtaking enormity 
     since the year 2000.
       Most well-informed readers know that the U.S. currently has 
     a higher share of its populace in jail or prison than almost 
     any other country on earth, that Barack Obama and others talk 
     of our criminal-justice process as ``mass incarceration,'' 
     and know that well over 2 million men were in prison or jail 
     in recent years. But only a tiny fraction of all living 
     Americans ever convicted of a felony is actually incarcerated 
     at this very moment. Quite the contrary: Maybe 90 percent of 
     all sentenced felons today are out of confinement and living 
     more or less among us. The reason: the basic arithmetic of 
     sentencing and incarceration in America today.
       Correctional release and sentenced community supervision 
     (probation and parole) guarantee a steady annual ``flow'' of 
     convicted felons back into society to augment the very 
     considerable ``stock'' of felons and ex-felons already there. 
     And this ``stock'' is by now truly enormous.
       One forthcoming demographic study by Sarah Shannon and five 
     other researchers estimates that the cohort of current and 
     former felons in America very nearly reached 20 million by 
     the year 2010. If its estimates are roughly accurate, and if 
     America's felon population has continued to grow at more or 
     less the same tempotraced out for the years leading up to 
     2010, we would expect it to surpass 23 million persons by the 
     end of 2016 at the latest. Very rough calculations might 
     therefore suggest that at this writing, America's population 
     of non-institutionalized adults with a felony conviction 
     somewhere in their past has almost certainly broken the 20 
     million mark by the end of 2016. A little more rough 
     arithmetic suggests that about 17 million men in our general 
     population have a felony conviction somewhere in their CV. 
     That works out to one of every eight adult males in America 
     today.
       We have to use rough estimates here, rather than precise 
     official numbers, because the government does not collect any 
     data at all on the size or socioeconomic circumstances of 
     this population of 20 million, and never has. Amazing as this 
     may sound and scandalous though it may be, America has, at 
     least to date, effectively banished this huge group--a group 
     roughly twice the total size of our illegal-immigrant 
     population and an adult population larger than that in any 
     state but California--to a near-total and seemingly unending 
     statistical invisibility. Our ex-cons are, so to speak, 
     statistical outcasts who live in a darkness our polity does 
     not care enough to illuminate--beyond the scope or interest 
     of public policy, unless and until they next run afoul of the 
     law.
       Thus we cannot describe with any precision or certainty 
     what has become of those who make up our ``criminal class'' 
     after their (latest) sentencing or release. In the most 
     stylized terms, however, we might guess that their odds in 
     the real America are not all that favorable. And when we 
     consider some of the other trends we have already mentioned--
     employment, health, addiction, welfare dependence--we can see 
     the emergence of a malign new nationwide undertow, pulling 
     downward against social mobility.
       Social mobility has always been the jewel in the crown of 
     the American mythos and ethos. The idea (not without a 
     measure of truth to back it up) was that people in America 
     are free to achieve according to their merit and their grit--
     unlike in other places, where they are trapped by barriers of 
     class or the misfortune of misrule. Nearly two decades into 
     our new century, there are unmistakable signs that America's 
     fabled social mobility is in trouble--perhaps even in serious 
     trouble.
       Consider the following facts. First, according to the 
     Census Bureau, geographical mobility in America has been on 
     the decline for three decades, and in 2016 the annual 
     movement of households from one location to the next was 
     reportedly at an all-time (postwar) low. Second, as a study 
     by three Federal Reserve economists and a Notre Dame 
     colleague demonstrated last year, ``labor market fluidity''--
     the churning between jobs that among other things allows 
     people to get ahead--has been on the decline in the American 
     labor market for decades, with no sign as yet of a 
     turnaround. Finally, and not least important, a December 2016 
     report by the ``Equal Opportunity Project,'' a team led by 
     the formidable Stanford economist Raj Chetty, calculated that 
     the odds of a 30-year-old's earning more than his parents at 
     the same age was now just 51 percent: down from 86 percent 40 
     years ago. Other researchers who have examined the same data 
     argue that the odds may not be quite as low as the Chetty 
     team concludes, but agree that the chances of surpassing 
     one's parents' real income have been on the downswing and are 
     probably lower now than ever before in postwar America.
       Thus the bittersweet reality of life for real Americans in 
     the early 21st century: Even though the American economy 
     still remains the world's unrivaled engine of wealth 
     generation, those outside the bubble may have less of a shot 
     at the American Dream than has been the case for decades, 
     maybe generations--possibly even since the Great Depression.
       The funny thing is, people inside the bubble are forever 
     talking about ``economic inequality,'' that wonderful seminar 
     construct, and forever virtue-signaling about how personally 
     opposed they are to it. By contrast, ``economic insecurity'' 
     is akin to a phrase from an unknown language. But if we were 
     somehow to find a ``Google Translate'' function for 
     communicating from real America into the bubble, an important 
     message might be conveyed:
       The abstraction of ``inequality'' doesn't matter a lot to 
     ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does. 
     The Great American Escalator is broken--and it badly needs to 
     be fixed.
       With the election of 2016, Americans within the bubble 
     finally learned that the 21st century has gotten off to a 
     very bad start in America. Welcome to the reality. We have a 
     lot of work to do together to turn this around.

  Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Cohen), a distinguished member of the Transportation and 
Infrastructure Committee.
  Mr. COHEN. Mr. Chair, the other day, a young man who lives in my 
neighborhood came over, and he asked me to try to teach him how to 
drive a car. And I told him: Son, it is real easy to drive a car. It is 
just kind of like these budget proposals you will see in Congress. If 
you want to go forward and do

[[Page 15712]]

things down the road, you put the car in D, like Democrat, for drive, 
and your car will go forward. But if you want to go backwards and 
reverse back to the 1950s, you put it in R, like a Republican.
  He learned quick, and that is what these budgets are about. If you 
want to go forward, you go with the Democratic budget--forward on 
building highways, school construction, broadband expansion; research, 
research on the deadly diseases that are killing each and every one of 
us and our children in time to come, and research by the National 
Institutes of Health that are cut by the budget. There is nothing more 
important that can be in the budget than moneys for the National 
Institutes of Health, yet they are being cut. Cancer, Alzheimer's, 
AIDS, stroke, diabetes, all are going to come at us and our relatives.
  Some will say, and I said this one time before, and Mr. Kingston on 
the other side said: Well, our children and our grandchildren will have 
to pay for it. Who do you think is going to get the cures and the 
treatments? Our children and our grandchildren and generations to come.
  And they cut research. They cut opportunities for America. You talk 
about taxes and the debt, the Republican plan gives billionaires the 
biggest cuts in history, over $50 billion with estate tax elimination 
for people like the Koch brothers and the Waltons and all those folks, 
and that money will never come back.
  The alternative minimum tax is eliminated. That is the only thing 
that made clear that President Trump paid any taxes in the only tax 
return we know about. If it weren't for that, he wouldn't have paid 
anything. We are talking multimillion- and billion-dollar tax cuts for 
the richest that create deficits in the future, but that is okay when 
it is giving money to those who already have it.
  Franklin Roosevelt was right. You judge a society not by what it does 
for those who have an abundance, but you judge it by what it does for 
those who have the least.
  Mrs. BLACK. Mr. Chairman, I do want to say to my good friend and 
colleague from Tennessee that I think the D stands for debt for 
Democrats, and I think the R stands for Republicans and recovery.
  Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. 
Womack), a distinguished member of the Budget Committee and the 
Appropriations Committee.
  Mr. WOMACK. Mr. Chair, I thank the distinguished chairwoman of the 
Budget Committee for her outstanding work.
  My friend from Tennessee talks about driving forward. I think we need 
to pump the brakes. You are driving right off a cliff with this budget.
  Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition. It is my strong belief that our 
Nation has a debt crisis on its hand, and I am astonished by how many 
people on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Chairman, just refuse to 
acknowledge the problem. It is as if the problem doesn't exist.
  Under their plan, taxes are going to be raised nearly $3 trillion. We 
are going to continue to raise spending to the tune of over $6 
trillion. We will have a meager $2.6 billion in deficit reduction, by 
the way, compared to our budget that does well over $6 trillion in 
deficit reduction.
  Our Nation is $20 trillion in debt, and it is a complete absurdity to 
think that we could begin to relinquish this process if we enacted such 
a burdensome budgetary proposal that is being offered by our friends on 
the other side of the aisle.
  This budget would also diminish our national security apparatus. It 
would end the global war on terrorism fund by 2019. Let's go ahead and 
telegraph that we are going to end the global war on terrorism fund by 
2019. The only people who I know who would support that would be our 
adversaries.
  It seeks to promote the collapsing Affordable Care Act by keeping 
those burdensome mandates in place. This resolution before us right now 
refuses to do anything about the runaway entitlement programs that are 
the primary drivers of the deficit and debt in the country.
  Mr. Chairman, their budget just will never balance. Never.
  The Acting CHAIR (Mr. Simpson). The time of the gentleman has 
expired.

                              {time}  1030

  Mrs. BLACK. I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from 
Arkansas.
  Mr. WOMACK. It will give no reconciliation instruction so that we can 
finally get control and protect for long-term sustainability the social 
safety net program that many depend on.
  The bottom line is, you either acknowledge we have a deficit and a 
debt crisis, or you do not. And if you believe as I do, you will refuse 
this budget, and you will support ours.
  Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from 
Minnesota (Mr. Nolan), a distinguished member of the Agriculture 
Committee.
  Mr. NOLAN. Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, I rise in support 
of the Democratic budget alternative and in opposition to the 
Republican budget that has been proposed.
  It has been often said that gracious living and good politics is all 
about gratitude. Paying something forward is how you show your 
gratitude.
  Quite frankly, the simple truth about this Republican budget is that 
it rolls back a century of progress. It sets the stage for the 
dismantling of Social Security, which lifted more people out of poverty 
than anything, and for Speaker Ryan's plan to turn it over to Wall 
Street.
  It sets the stage for turning Medicare over to the insurance 
industry--Medicare that provided our elderly with insurance and life 
opportunities that heretofore had not existed.
  This century of progress that this budget rolls back includes clean 
air and water. It includes healthy, safe working places and conditions. 
It includes an opportunity society that invests in our people.
  And guess what? In a little over a century, we doubled life 
expectancies. Wow, what a marvelous accomplishment.
  We created the best and biggest middle class in the history of the 
world. We became a model for the world; jobs with living wages and 
healthcare benefits and pension benefits.
  This Republican budget proposes to roll back that entire century of 
progress. It is nothing about paying it forward. It is nothing about 
paying things back. It is about rolling back a century of progress, and 
we can not let that happen.
  That is what the Democratic budget is really all about, investing in 
people, investing in infrastructure, investing in America, and 
investing in people's jobs and living wages, and in their benefits. 
That is how you show your gratitude, and we have got a lot to be 
grateful for.
  Let's vote and enact this Democratic budget proposal which invests in 
America, which invests in people, which invests in opportunities. That 
is what this debate is really all about.
  Mrs. BLACK. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman 
from Ohio (Mr. Johnson), who is a member of the Budget Committee.
  Mr. JOHNSON of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I saw recently, and I remember 
Ronald Reagan said something when he finally got his tax reform package 
done back in 1986--why it took so long and why it was so difficult. And 
at the end the day, he said: You know, the lawmakers and the 
policymakers forgot one important factor in their calculations that 
brought us to this point; they forgot to include what the American 
people have to say about this.
  That is what is happening here today, Mr. Chairman. The American 
people have told us they want economic growth. They want opportunities 
for their kids and their families, a better quality of life. They want 
Washington to live within its means and stop taking more and more and 
more from them out of their paychecks.
  So let's do a little bit of comparison. Let's look at, my colleagues, 
the Democrat budget. It raises taxes by $2.7 trillion, compared to the 
CBO January baseline. That is almost $3.8 trillion more than revenue 
levels in our House

[[Page 15713]]

Republican budget. It increases spending by $6.2 trillion, compared to 
the Republican budget over that 10-year period. It increases the debt 
held by the public by $3.9 trillion, almost $4 trillion relative to the 
House Republican budget.
  And what is important, Mr. Chair, it never balances. There is not 
even an attempt to balance; not to mention that there are no 
reconciliation instructions that would give us an opportunity to deal 
with healthcare and other economic growth reforms.
  Mr. Chairman, this is not a responsible budget that is being offered 
by our colleagues on the other side. I urge my colleagues to oppose it 
and to support the House Republican budget later today.
  Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from 
Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), a distinguished member of the Budget 
Committee.
  Ms. JACKSON LEE. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from 
Kentucky for his astute analysis on what the American people really 
want. I thank the manager, the chairwoman of this bill, and I 
acknowledge the position that they take.
  But what America really wants is for Washington, for America, for the 
government, to stand by them in their time of need.
  I am very grateful to be part of a party that is not about politics 
but is about values. We are the better choice party. We offer a better 
deal on this project that we have worked so hard on called the American 
budget.
  The American budget, in contrast to our friends on the other side of 
the aisle, recognizes, as I visited the National Institutes for Health, 
that 80 percent of their budget that we are going to lose goes for 
research and researchers--looking those researchers in the eyes when 
they explain the research in medical science to help save lives, and to 
know that the Republican budget cuts the NIH, the Centers for Disease 
Control, and takes up the TrumpCare that cuts trillions in Medicaid and 
$500 billion in Medicare. That is the story of this bill.
  Then, as my good friend from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen) indicated, we 
invest in infrastructure, and we help this young man, not only with his 
healthcare but with education. Do we realize how many jobs go unable to 
find individuals in this country? Hundreds of thousands because of the 
lack of training.
  So if my friends want growth, you know how you get growth? You invest 
in the American people. Or you tell the American people when tragedies 
strike, whether it is the Virgin Islands, or Puerto Rico, or Florida, 
or Texas, or tragically, in Nevada, that you will stand by them. You 
provide them with the infrastructure to be able to overcome.
  Not the Republican budget, because the Republican budget is giving 
trillions in tax cuts, and the distribution of those moneys will not 
see the front door of low-income, moderate-income, middle class working 
Americans.
  That is the distinction between the Democratic budget. It increases 
opportunity through a higher minimum wage. It believes in equal pay for 
equal work. It knows that immigration reform will bring in billions of 
dollars. It will create opportunities for work.
  Then, of course, we know that the Democratic budget strengthens our 
healthcare, and it provides that her Social Security, her Medicare, 
will not be in jeopardy. The Medicare trust fund will not lose with a 
Republican budget and the trillions of dollars of tax cuts, her life, 
as she continues to seek some balance of good life will be lost.
  We are the right direction. We are for the American people. We are 
standing by the American people with the Democratic budget. I ask my 
colleagues to vote for the Democratic alternative.
  Mrs. BLACK. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished 
gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx), the chairman of the 
Education and the Workforce Committee.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank my colleague from Tennessee, 
the chair of the Budget Committee, for the wonderful work she has done 
on bringing us to this position.
  Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this substitute amendment.
  As chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee, my priority 
this Congress is to ensure that our policies promote a climate of job 
creation through economic growth, a sound fiscal policy, and a global 
economic competitiveness.
  Our budget helps achieve all of these priorities by laying the 
foundation for a robust and comprehensive simplification of our 
burdensome Tax Code. The Democrat substitute not only fails to do so 
but would decimate America's workforce.
  Our budget reforms our broken Tax Code so that it works for every 
American at every income level, regardless of where they live or how 
much money they earn.
  The top U.S. tax rate for individuals has been as high as 90 percent 
and as low as 28 percent. At the same time, income tax revenue has 
remained fairly steady, despite these sharp rate swings. It turns out 
that the biggest driver of Federal revenue is not higher tax rates but 
economic growth.
  In fact, a sizeable majority of economists point out that a broad 
base and low rates are key in a tax system that fosters economic growth 
and competitiveness. Legislators on both sides of the aisle agree on 
this basic principle, and history has shown it to be true.
  Instead of raising taxes, we should, instead, embrace the policies 
contained in this budget resolution that encourages economic growth, 
like reducing regulatory burdens, welfare reform, and comprehensive tax 
reform for all individuals, not just a select few.
  Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mrs. BLACK. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from 
South Carolina (Mr. Sanford), a member of our Budget Committee.
  Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I rise, as well, in opposition to the 
substitute amendment, and I do so because I am struck by the ways in 
which you can, at times, agree on the diagnosis but disagree on the 
cure.
  I think we would all agree, Republicans and Democrats alike, that we 
have a real problem in the way that wages have indeed stagnated over 
the last 30 years. A lot of my Democratic colleagues are nailing it in 
terms of that diagnosis.
  The question though, is the cure. And the question there is: Can we 
fix that problem by raising taxes by $2.7 trillion? Can we fix that 
problem by increasing spending by $6.2 trillion? Can we fix that 
problem by increasing the debt by $3.9 trillion and, in essence, having 
a budget that never balances?
  I would argue, no, and I would say, instead, what we have to look at 
is the basics, which we have been dancing around, which is the 
mathematic formula that says: Savings drives investment, which drives 
productivity gain which, ultimately, impacts standard of living or 
wages. And what we don't focus on enough is this notion of the 
investment part of investment; if you want to increase productivity, 
you have got to increase investment.
  In fairness to my Democratic colleagues, part of that is public 
investment, but another part is private.
  What my colleague from Virginia was just getting at a moment ago was, 
for 50 years, regardless of tax rate, 90 or 28 percent, the take to 
government has been about 18 percent of GDP very consistently.
  So what I would argue is we, indeed, need more public investment, but 
we also need private investment to go with it. And if we don't watch 
out, what is being contemplated with this Democratic substitute is a 
process that will ultimately crowd out that much more in the way of 
private investment so key to increasing productivity.
  The Acting CHAIR. The gentleman from Kentucky has 3\1/2\ minutes 
remaining. The gentlewoman from Tennessee has 1\1/4\ minutes remaining.
  Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.
  Mr. Chairman, in closing, it is clear that we have a very different 
budget and a very different understanding of the challenges facing our 
country. We see that so many Americans are working harder and longer 
and can't remember the last time they got a raise.

[[Page 15714]]

  We know families are worried about how to pay for college, or if 
their parents' retirement is secure, or if they will ever be able to 
afford to stop working. And we know that trillions of dollars in tax 
cuts for millionaires and large corporations will turn these fears of 
hardworking Americans families into reality.

                              {time}  1045

  Just a few minutes ago, my Republican colleague from Ohio talked 
about what the American people want. On many of those things, we agree. 
But I know one thing the American people don't want. They don't want 
massive tax cuts for the top 1 percent of Americans.
  The Democratic budget rejects tax cuts for the wealthy. We invest in 
programs that will grow our economy, create good-paying jobs, provide 
real support for working families and real security in retirement. We 
make education and childcare more affordable, and we support policies 
to help every American get the healthcare that they need.
  Those are the priorities of our budget, and they are the priorities 
of the American people.
  I, therefore, urge my colleagues to support the Democratic 
alternative, and I yield back the balance of my time.
  Mrs. BLACK. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Chair, I look into my children's and grandchildren's eyes, and I 
say: I want you to know that right now you owe $63,000 for your part of 
the debt of this country.
  What we are doing in Congress right now, if we were to vote on and 
accept this amendment, we would be increasing that burden on our 
children and grandchildren.
  I, for one, cannot do that, and I think that we have got to be 
responsible. We have got to look at how we in this country can get back 
to the place, as has already been said, that we ask families and 
businesses to do, and that is to live within their means.
  Mr. Chair, I urge a ``no'' vote on this amendment, and I yield back 
the balance of my time.
  The Acting CHAIR. The question is on the amendment in the nature of a 
substitute offered by the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Yarmuth).
  The question was taken; and the Acting Chair announced that the noes 
appeared to have it.


                             Recorded Vote

  Mr. YARMUTH. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.
  A recorded vote was ordered.
  The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--ayes 156, 
noes 268, not voting 9, as follows:

                             [Roll No. 556]

                               AYES--156

     Adams
     Aguilar
     Barragan
     Bass
     Beatty
     Beyer
     Bishop (GA)
     Blumenauer
     Blunt Rochester
     Bonamici
     Boyle, Brendan F.
     Brady (PA)
     Brown (MD)
     Butterfield
     Capuano
     Carbajal
     Cardenas
     Carson (IN)
     Cartwright
     Castor (FL)
     Castro (TX)
     Chu, Judy
     Cicilline
     Clark (MA)
     Clarke (NY)
     Clay
     Cleaver
     Clyburn
     Cohen
     Connolly
     Conyers
     Correa
     Courtney
     Crowley
     Cummings
     Davis (CA)
     Davis, Danny
     DeFazio
     DeGette
     DeLauro
     DelBene
     Demings
     DeSaulnier
     Deutch
     Dingell
     Doggett
     Ellison
     Engel
     Eshoo
     Espaillat
     Esty (CT)
     Evans
     Frankel (FL)
     Gabbard
     Gallego
     Garamendi
     Gomez
     Gonzalez (TX)
     Green, Al
     Green, Gene
     Grijalva
     Gutierrez
     Hanabusa
     Hastings
     Heck
     Higgins (NY)
     Hoyer
     Huffman
     Jackson Lee
     Jayapal
     Jeffries
     Johnson (GA)
     Johnson, E. B.
     Kaptur
     Keating
     Kelly (IL)
     Kennedy
     Khanna
     Kildee
     Kilmer
     Langevin
     Larsen (WA)
     Larson (CT)
     Lawrence
     Lawson (FL)
     Lee
     Levin
     Lewis (GA)
     Lieu, Ted
     Lofgren
     Lowenthal
     Lowey
     Lujan Grisham, M.
     Lujan, Ben Ray
     Lynch
     Maloney, Carolyn B.
     Matsui
     McCollum
     McEachin
     McGovern
     McNerney
     Meeks
     Meng
     Moore
     Moulton
     Nadler
     Neal
     Nolan
     Norcross
     O'Rourke
     Pallone
     Panetta
     Pascrell
     Pelosi
     Perlmutter
     Pingree
     Pocan
     Polis
     Price (NC)
     Quigley
     Raskin
     Roybal-Allard
     Ruppersberger
     Rush
     Ryan (OH)
     Sanchez
     Sarbanes
     Schakowsky
     Schiff
     Scott (VA)
     Scott, David
     Serrano
     Sewell (AL)
     Shea-Porter
     Sherman
     Sires
     Slaughter
     Smith (WA)
     Soto
     Speier
     Swalwell (CA)
     Takano
     Thompson (CA)
     Tonko
     Torres
     Tsongas
     Vargas
     Veasey
     Vela
     Velazquez
     Wasserman Schultz
     Waters, Maxine
     Watson Coleman
     Welch
     Wilson (FL)
     Yarmuth

                               NOES--268

     Abraham
     Aderholt
     Allen
     Amash
     Amodei
     Arrington
     Babin
     Bacon
     Banks (IN)
     Barletta
     Barr
     Barton
     Bera
     Bergman
     Biggs
     Bilirakis
     Bishop (MI)
     Bishop (UT)
     Black
     Blackburn
     Blum
     Bost
     Brady (TX)
     Brat
     Brooks (AL)
     Brooks (IN)
     Brownley (CA)
     Buchanan
     Buck
     Bucshon
     Budd
     Burgess
     Bustos
     Byrne
     Calvert
     Carter (GA)
     Carter (TX)
     Chabot
     Cheney
     Coffman
     Cole
     Collins (GA)
     Collins (NY)
     Comer
     Comstock
     Conaway
     Cook
     Cooper
     Costa
     Costello (PA)
     Cramer
     Crawford
     Crist
     Cuellar
     Culberson
     Curbelo (FL)
     Davidson
     Davis, Rodney
     Delaney
     Denham
     Dent
     DesJarlais
     Diaz-Balart
     Donovan
     Duffy
     Duncan (SC)
     Duncan (TN)
     Dunn
     Emmer
     Estes (KS)
     Farenthold
     Faso
     Ferguson
     Fitzpatrick
     Fleischmann
     Flores
     Fortenberry
     Foster
     Foxx
     Franks (AZ)
     Frelinghuysen
     Fudge
     Gaetz
     Gallagher
     Garrett
     Gianforte
     Gibbs
     Gohmert
     Goodlatte
     Gosar
     Gottheimer
     Gowdy
     Granger
     Graves (GA)
     Graves (LA)
     Graves (MO)
     Griffith
     Grothman
     Guthrie
     Handel
     Harper
     Harris
     Hartzler
     Hensarling
     Herrera Beutler
     Hice, Jody B.
     Higgins (LA)
     Hill
     Himes
     Holding
     Hollingsworth
     Hudson
     Huizenga
     Hultgren
     Hunter
     Hurd
     Issa
     Jenkins (KS)
     Jenkins (WV)
     Johnson (LA)
     Johnson (OH)
     Johnson, Sam
     Jones
     Jordan
     Joyce (OH)
     Katko
     Kelly (MS)
     Kelly (PA)
     Kind
     King (IA)
     King (NY)
     Kinzinger
     Knight
     Krishnamoorthi
     Kuster (NH)
     Kustoff (TN)
     Labrador
     LaHood
     LaMalfa
     Lamborn
     Lance
     Latta
     Lewis (MN)
     Lipinski
     LoBiondo
     Loebsack
     Long
     Loudermilk
     Love
     Lucas
     Luetkemeyer
     MacArthur
     Maloney, Sean
     Marchant
     Marino
     Marshall
     Massie
     Mast
     McCarthy
     McCaul
     McClintock
     McHenry
     McKinley
     McMorris Rodgers
     McSally
     Meadows
     Meehan
     Messer
     Mitchell
     Moolenaar
     Mooney (WV)
     Mullin
     Murphy (FL)
     Newhouse
     Noem
     Norman
     Nunes
     O'Halleran
     Olson
     Palazzo
     Palmer
     Paulsen
     Payne
     Pearce
     Perry
     Peters
     Peterson
     Pittenger
     Poe (TX)
     Poliquin
     Posey
     Ratcliffe
     Reed
     Reichert
     Renacci
     Rice (NY)
     Rice (SC)
     Richmond
     Roby
     Roe (TN)
     Rogers (AL)
     Rogers (KY)
     Rohrabacher
     Rokita
     Rooney, Francis
     Rooney, Thomas J.
     Ros-Lehtinen
     Roskam
     Ross
     Rothfus
     Rouzer
     Royce (CA)
     Ruiz
     Russell
     Rutherford
     Sanford
     Scalise
     Schneider
     Schrader
     Schweikert
     Scott, Austin
     Sensenbrenner
     Sessions
     Shimkus
     Shuster
     Simpson
     Sinema
     Smith (MO)
     Smith (NE)
     Smith (NJ)
     Smith (TX)
     Smucker
     Stefanik
     Stewart
     Stivers
     Suozzi
     Taylor
     Tenney
     Thompson (MS)
     Thompson (PA)
     Thornberry
     Tiberi
     Tipton
     Trott
     Turner
     Upton
     Valadao
     Visclosky
     Wagner
     Walberg
     Walden
     Walker
     Walorski
     Walters, Mimi
     Weber (TX)
     Webster (FL)
     Wenstrup
     Westerman
     Williams
     Wilson (SC)
     Wittman
     Womack
     Woodall
     Yoder
     Yoho
     Young (AK)
     Young (IA)
     Zeldin

                             NOT VOTING--9

     Bridenstine
     DeSantis
     Doyle, Michael F.
     Kihuen
     Murphy (PA)
     Napolitano
     Rosen
     Titus
     Walz

                              {time}  1111

  Ms. SINEMA, Messrs. GAETZ, MARSHALL, MAST, BANKS of Indiana, and 
FRANKS of Arizona changed their vote from ``aye'' to ``no.''
  Mses. VELAZQUEZ, WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Messrs. KEATING, and CARSON of 
Indiana changed their vote from ``no'' to ``aye.''
  So the amendment in the nature of a substitute was rejected.
  The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.
  The Acting CHAIR (Mrs. Walorski). Pursuant to the rule, it is now in 
order to consider a final period of general debate, which shall not 
exceed 10 minutes equally divided and controlled by the chair and 
ranking minority member of the Committee on the Budget.
  The gentlewoman from Tennessee (Mrs. Black) and the gentleman from 
Kentucky (Mr. Yarmuth) each will control 5 minutes.
  The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Tennessee.

[[Page 15715]]


  Mrs. BLACK. Madam Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from 
Alabama (Mr. Palmer), who is a member of the Budget Committee.
  Mr. PALMER. Madam Chairman, I appreciate the hard work the Budget 
Committee has put forth to produce a budget that prioritizes our 
national defense and sets forth bold policy reforms that will get this 
country back on track to fiscal responsibility.
  Specifically, I am pleased to see that this budget commits to 
reducing the substantial amount of improper payments throughout the 
Federal Government. The Government Accountability Office estimates that 
there were $144 billion--I want to emphasize $144 billion--in improper 
payments in 2016 alone, and that is not even a complete estimate. In 
fact, 18 Federal programs did not report their improper payments, so 
the total is undoubtedly higher.
  To make matters worse, since 2013, the amount we have been 
incorrectly sending out has been trending upwards. Instead of reducing 
our fraudulent payments, the rate at which we pay them out has been 
increasing. Since 2003, there has been a total of $1.2 trillion in 
improper payments. Let me repeat, that is $1.2 trillion plus interest.

                              {time}  1115

  Because we have been running deficits over that timeframe, we have 
literally had to borrow that money to send it to fraudsters and others 
who would not have received it. This is unacceptable.
  As you can see from this chart, this represents improper payments for 
2016 alone. It is money borrowed that we pay interest on to send to 
people who are not supposed to get it. We are borrowing money and 
adding to our debt through improper payments.
  This budget, for the first time, sets forth a bold strategy for 
cutting these payments in half over the budget window, saving us $700 
billion over our 10-year window.
  While I hope, in the near future, we can zero these payments out, I 
am thrilled to see that we are beginning to tackle a problem that is 
putting an additional strain on this country's fiscal problems.
  Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this budget.
  Mr. YARMUTH. Madam Chairwoman, I yield myself 4 minutes.
  Madam Chairwoman, I suppose I should be saying thank you. I will get 
a huge tax cut under the Republican tax cut plan, as well the majority 
of those people sitting here--the majority of our colleagues in 
Congress--who are, like me, fortunate enough to be millionaires 
already.
  Forgive me if I am in no mood to say thank you, because I was elected 
not just to represent millionaires, but to represent aspiring 
millionaires, working families, seniors, and veterans. For all of them, 
for anyone who isn't already a millionaire, this budget is a slap in 
the face.
  With all of the problems facing our country right now, all the people 
struggling to get ahead, it is unfathomable to me that this Congress 
could look at people like me and say: Hey, that guy, let's give him 
more money. In fact, let's give all millionaires hundreds of thousands 
of dollars in tax cuts.
  Really, I am small potatoes. President Trump, according to his 
financial disclosure, will get hundreds of millions of dollars in tax 
cuts.
  Where is all that money coming from? If you are listening to this and 
you are not a millionaire, probably from you.
  To pay for our own tax cuts and the tax cuts for wealthy donors, 
Republicans are going to increase taxes on 45 percent of American 
families with children. That is just the start. Seniors, people with 
disabilities, and low-income families will see their healthcare cut.
  Poor seniors will lose benefits that help them keep food on the table 
and their homes heated in the winter. Veteran benefits, meals for 
hungry schoolchildren, programs that make education affordable and job 
training available, investments that generate economic growth and 
create good-paying jobs are all at risk in this budget.
  They are also cutting corporate tax rates, which we will be paying 
for by plunging our Nation into deeper and deeper debt, giving 
multinational giants another advantage over small- and mid-size 
businesses in the name of perpetuating the myth of supply-side 
economics.
  Supply-side failed. They renamed it trickle-down, but nothing 
trickled down. Now it is job creators. When that fails, maybe they will 
call it ``I get mine now; you get yours later--maybe.'' But whatever 
they name it, it is a sham. This plan is a hoax on the American people, 
and it will make most people's lives more difficult.
  So forgive me if I am in no mood to say thank you for the extra money 
in my pocket. With millions of Americans struggling and scraping to get 
ahead, and with my tax cut increasing their challenges, I cannot begin 
to justify my extra money, and, quite frankly, I cannot fathom how my 
Republican colleagues are able to justify theirs.
  With this budget, Republicans aren't just passing the buck, they are 
pocketing it. Madam Chair, I strongly urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' 
on the Republican budget.
  Madam Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. 
Pelosi), the distinguished minority leader.
  Ms. PELOSI. Madam Chair, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank 
him for his great leadership as the ranking member on the Budget 
Committee in the House, and I thank all of the members of the Budget 
Committee for their great work to make the budget that was proposed 
earlier, the Yarmuth budget, a statement of our values. That is exactly 
what a budget should be.
  A Federal budget should be a statement of our national values, and 
what is important to us as a country should be reflected in the 
priorities that we place into that budget. The budget before us, 
proposed by the Republicans, is just the opposite of that. It is 
accompanied by a tax proposal that they put in, one of the biggest 
transfers of wealth to the wealthiest people in our country in our 
country's history. Every time they do it, they make it worse.
  I let you be the judge: Is a statement of our national values to cut 
a trillion dollars from Medicaid, cap and take Medicaid down a bad 
path, in order to give tax cuts to the richest people in our country?
  Is it a statement of our values to take a half trillion dollars out 
of Medicare to give a tax cut to the wealthiest people in our country?
  Our distinguished ranking member has listed some of the things that 
would be cut if we went down this unfortunate path posed by our 
colleagues on the other side.
  This is a budget that steals from the middle class. It steals 
hundreds of billions of dollars from critical job-creating, wage-
increasing investments, infrastructure, job training, and clean energy. 
It harms veterans, it cuts education, it abandons rural America, and it 
guts education.
  This is really a mystery to me. When you cut education, with the 
stiff competition we have, this is one of the worst budget decisions 
that you have made. Nothing brings more money to the Treasury than 
investing in education: early childhood, K-12, higher education, 
postgraduate, and lifetime learning for our workers.
  That is how you grow the economy. That is how you bring money to the 
Treasury, and not by cutting it in order to give tax cuts to the 
wealthiest people in our country.
  Is it a statement of values to cut education so that you have a tax 
cut that benefits 80 percent?
  I know you don't want the public to hear this, and I can understand 
why. How could it be a statement of the values of the American people 
to cut the education of our children in order to have a tax cut where 
80 percent of it benefits the top 1 percent of people in our country? 
It is just not right.
  As they do that, the deficit hawks, who seem to be an endangered 
species on the Republican side of the aisle these days, are adding 
close to $2.4 trillion to the deficit, not counting debt service or 
interest on that national debt. Then they say: Oh, that is okay;

[[Page 15716]]

we need to increase the national debt by trillions of dollars so that 
we can give tax cuts.
  Where do the tax cuts go? $2.6 trillion goes to corporate America.
  Guess what happens to the middle class. There are $470 billion in tax 
increases to the middle class, about a half trillion dollars in 
increases to the middle class, $2.5 trillion in tax cuts for corporate 
America. Again, it is adding so much to the deficit.
  Now they say: Oh, trickle-down economics is going to pay its own way. 
We will get that money back.
  Not so. It never happens. Nonsense. But don't take it from me. No 
less a figure than Bruce Bartlett, who worked for Congressman Jack 
Kemp, a real supporter of supply-side economics--and, as was said, 
supply-side turn into trickle-down, et cetera. As a proponent of 
supply-side economics, he said: We never said it would pay for itself. 
We just advocate it as an economic approach.
  But anyone who says, and this is from him, that the whole supply-side 
dynamic scoring pays for itself--part of this argument--is all 
nonsense. It is not true. He went on to say that it was bull--you 
finish the sentence.
  So, here we are at a place where we can increase the deficit, 
decrease job creation, hurt the middle class, benefit the top 1 
percent, and add to the national debt in historic proportions that will 
be very hard to collect from deficit hawks--if any of you exist over 
there.
  Instead, we have an opportunity today for a better deal for the 
American people--better jobs, better pay, better wages, and a better 
future--where we lower costs for America's working families and middle 
class families, and where we prepare them with the tools for the 
economy of the 21st century.
  I thank the distinguished gentleman from Kentucky, the chair of the 
Bourbon Caucus, for his great leadership in bringing a better budget 
that is a statement of our national values, that supports American 
workers with responsible tax reform, calls for parity between defense 
and nondefense, and strengthens the ACA and protects Medicare.
  Every time the Republicans come to the floor and try to stack the 
deck even further for their wealthy friends, we have to have this 
conversation. Democrats will fight these tax cuts and this unfortunate, 
deceptive budget that they have on the floor. I urge my colleagues to 
start by voting ``no'' today and to continue the conversation with the 
American people to fight this unfortunate path they want to take us 
down: the road to ruin.
  I urge a ``no'' vote.
  Mr. YARMUTH. Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
  Mrs. BLACK. Madam Chairman, I am going to be brief in my closing 
comments.
  I do want to ask my colleague to consider this: Are we proud of a 
country where we are leaving our children and grandchildren in further 
and further debt?
  During our discussion in this Chamber, we have shared our ideas for 
building a better America, an America that we would be proud to entrust 
to future generations. While it requires confronting real challenges 
along the road ahead, it is, undoubtedly, worth the journey.
  First, our budget forces the Federal Government to live within its 
means, just like hardworking Americans and small businesses do on a 
daily basis.
  Second, our budget identifies wasteful spending and finds much-needed 
savings and reforms for unsustainable mandatory spending. In fact, our 
committee has put forward the largest reform package for mandatory 
programs that has been seen in 20 years.
  Third, it calls for a robust funding of our military, ensuring the 
resources that will allow us to be ready and protect our mainland. It 
also starts the process of restoring our military readiness, which 
suffered dramatically during the Obama administration.
  Finally, our budget is the golden key that unlocks progrowth tax 
reform and takes us one step further to the great ideas unveiled in the 
framework last week.
  Without question, our budget plan reflects American values and shared 
priorities. I urge my colleagues to join me in their support for a win 
for all Americans, because doing so will begin to ensure a brighter and 
better future for generations to come, and I urge a ``yes'' vote.
  Madam Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.
  The Acting CHAIR. All time for general debate has expired.
  Pursuant to House Resolution 553, the Committee rises.
  Accordingly, the Committee rose; and the Speaker pro tempore (Mr. 
Newhouse) having assumed the chair, Mrs. Walorski, Acting Chair of the 
Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union, reported that 
that Committee, having had under consideration the concurrent 
resolution (H. Con. Res. 71) establishing the congressional budget for 
the United States Government for fiscal year 2018 and setting forth the 
appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2019 through 2027, and, 
pursuant to House Resolution 553, she reported the concurrent 
resolution back to the House.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the rule, the previous question is 
ordered.
  The question is adoption of the concurrent resolution.
  Under clause 10 of rule XX, the yeas and nays are ordered.
  Members will record their votes by electronic device.
  Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, this 15-minute vote on adoption of 
the concurrent resolution will be followed by a 5-minute vote on 
agreeing to the Speaker's approval of the Journal, if ordered.
  The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--yeas 219, 
nays 206, not voting 9, as follows:

                             [Roll No. 557]

                               YEAS--219

     Abraham
     Aderholt
     Allen
     Amodei
     Arrington
     Babin
     Bacon
     Banks (IN)
     Barletta
     Barr
     Barton
     Bergman
     Biggs
     Bilirakis
     Bishop (MI)
     Bishop (UT)
     Black
     Blackburn
     Bost
     Brady (TX)
     Brat
     Brooks (AL)
     Brooks (IN)
     Buchanan
     Bucshon
     Budd
     Burgess
     Byrne
     Calvert
     Carter (GA)
     Carter (TX)
     Chabot
     Cheney
     Coffman
     Cole
     Collins (GA)
     Collins (NY)
     Comer
     Conaway
     Cook
     Cramer
     Crawford
     Culberson
     Curbelo (FL)
     Davidson
     Davis, Rodney
     Denham
     DesJarlais
     Diaz-Balart
     Donovan
     Duffy
     Duncan (SC)
     Duncan (TN)
     Dunn
     Emmer
     Estes (KS)
     Farenthold
     Faso
     Ferguson
     Fleischmann
     Flores
     Fortenberry
     Foxx
     Franks (AZ)
     Frelinghuysen
     Gaetz
     Gallagher
     Garrett
     Gianforte
     Gibbs
     Gohmert
     Goodlatte
     Gosar
     Gowdy
     Granger
     Graves (GA)
     Graves (LA)
     Graves (MO)
     Griffith
     Grothman
     Guthrie
     Handel
     Harper
     Harris
     Hartzler
     Hensarling
     Herrera Beutler
     Hice, Jody B.
     Higgins (LA)
     Hill
     Holding
     Hollingsworth
     Hudson
     Huizenga
     Hultgren
     Hunter
     Hurd
     Issa
     Jenkins (KS)
     Jenkins (WV)
     Johnson (LA)
     Johnson (OH)
     Johnson, Sam
     Jordan
     Joyce (OH)
     Kelly (MS)
     Kelly (PA)
     King (IA)
     Kinzinger
     Knight
     Kustoff (TN)
     Labrador
     LaHood
     LaMalfa
     Lamborn
     Latta
     Lewis (MN)
     Long
     Loudermilk
     Love
     Lucas
     Luetkemeyer
     MacArthur
     Marchant
     Marino
     Marshall
     McCarthy
     McCaul
     McClintock
     McHenry
     McMorris Rodgers
     McSally
     Meadows
     Messer
     Mitchell
     Moolenaar
     Mooney (WV)
     Mullin
     Newhouse
     Noem
     Norman
     Nunes
     Olson
     Palazzo
     Palmer
     Paulsen
     Pearce
     Perry
     Pittenger
     Poe (TX)
     Poliquin
     Posey
     Ratcliffe
     Reed
     Reichert
     Renacci
     Rice (SC)
     Roby
     Roe (TN)
     Rogers (AL)
     Rogers (KY)
     Rohrabacher
     Rokita
     Rooney, Francis
     Rooney, Thomas J.
     Roskam
     Ross
     Rothfus
     Rouzer
     Royce (CA)
     Russell
     Rutherford
     Ryan (WI)
     Sanford
     Scalise
     Schweikert
     Scott, Austin
     Sensenbrenner
     Sessions
     Shimkus
     Shuster
     Simpson
     Smith (MO)
     Smith (NE)
     Smith (TX)
     Smucker
     Stefanik
     Stewart
     Stivers
     Taylor
     Tenney
     Thompson (PA)
     Thornberry
     Tiberi
     Tipton
     Trott
     Turner
     Upton
     Valadao
     Wagner
     Walberg
     Walden
     Walker
     Walorski
     Walters, Mimi
     Weber (TX)
     Webster (FL)
     Wenstrup
     Westerman
     Williams
     Wilson (SC)
     Wittman
     Womack
     Woodall
     Yoder
     Yoho
     Young (AK)
     Young (IA)
     Zeldin

                               NAYS--206

     Adams
     Aguilar
     Amash
     Barragan
     Bass
     Beatty
     Bera
     Beyer
     Bishop (GA)
     Blum
     Blumenauer
     Blunt Rochester
     Bonamici
     Boyle, Brendan F.

[[Page 15717]]


     Brady (PA)
     Brown (MD)
     Brownley (CA)
     Buck
     Bustos
     Butterfield
     Capuano
     Carbajal
     Cardenas
     Carson (IN)
     Cartwright
     Castor (FL)
     Castro (TX)
     Chu, Judy
     Cicilline
     Clark (MA)
     Clarke (NY)
     Clay
     Cleaver
     Clyburn
     Cohen
     Comstock
     Connolly
     Conyers
     Cooper
     Correa
     Costa
     Costello (PA)
     Courtney
     Crist
     Crowley
     Cuellar
     Cummings
     Davis (CA)
     Davis, Danny
     DeFazio
     DeGette
     Delaney
     DeLauro
     DelBene
     Demings
     Dent
     DeSaulnier
     Deutch
     Dingell
     Doggett
     Ellison
     Engel
     Eshoo
     Espaillat
     Esty (CT)
     Evans
     Fitzpatrick
     Foster
     Frankel (FL)
     Fudge
     Gabbard
     Gallego
     Garamendi
     Gomez
     Gonzalez (TX)
     Gottheimer
     Green, Al
     Green, Gene
     Grijalva
     Gutierrez
     Hanabusa
     Hastings
     Heck
     Higgins (NY)
     Himes
     Hoyer
     Huffman
     Jackson Lee
     Jayapal
     Jeffries
     Johnson (GA)
     Johnson, E. B.
     Jones
     Kaptur
     Katko
     Keating
     Kelly (IL)
     Kennedy
     Khanna
     Kildee
     Kilmer
     Kind
     King (NY)
     Krishnamoorthi
     Kuster (NH)
     Lance
     Langevin
     Larsen (WA)
     Larson (CT)
     Lawrence
     Lawson (FL)
     Lee
     Levin
     Lewis (GA)
     Lieu, Ted
     Lipinski
     LoBiondo
     Loebsack
     Lofgren
     Lowenthal
     Lowey
     Lujan Grisham, M.
     Lujan, Ben Ray
     Lynch
     Maloney, Carolyn B.
     Maloney, Sean
     Massie
     Mast
     Matsui
     McCollum
     McEachin
     McGovern
     McKinley
     McNerney
     Meehan
     Meeks
     Meng
     Moore
     Moulton
     Murphy (FL)
     Nadler
     Neal
     Nolan
     Norcross
     O'Halleran
     O'Rourke
     Pallone
     Panetta
     Pascrell
     Payne
     Pelosi
     Perlmutter
     Peters
     Peterson
     Pingree
     Pocan
     Polis
     Price (NC)
     Quigley
     Raskin
     Rice (NY)
     Richmond
     Ros-Lehtinen
     Roybal-Allard
     Ruiz
     Ruppersberger
     Rush
     Ryan (OH)
     Sanchez
     Sarbanes
     Schakowsky
     Schiff
     Schneider
     Schrader
     Scott (VA)
     Scott, David
     Serrano
     Sewell (AL)
     Shea-Porter
     Sherman
     Sinema
     Sires
     Slaughter
     Smith (NJ)
     Smith (WA)
     Soto
     Speier
     Suozzi
     Swalwell (CA)
     Takano
     Thompson (CA)
     Thompson (MS)
     Tonko
     Torres
     Tsongas
     Vargas
     Veasey
     Vela
     Velazquez
     Visclosky
     Wasserman Schultz
     Waters, Maxine
     Watson Coleman
     Welch
     Wilson (FL)
     Yarmuth

                             NOT VOTING--9

     Bridenstine
     DeSantis
     Doyle, Michael F.
     Kihuen
     Murphy (PA)
     Napolitano
     Rosen
     Titus
     Walz

                              {time}  1148

  Mr. HOYER changed his vote from ``yea'' to ``nay.''
  So the concurrent resolution was agreed to.
  The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.


                          PERSONAL EXPLANATION

  Mrs. NAPOLITANO. Mr. Speaker, I was absent during roll call votes No. 
556 through 557 due to my spouse's health situation in California. Had 
I been present, I would have voted aye on the Yarmuth of Kentucky 
Substitute Amendment No. 4, and no on final passage of the Budget 
Resolution.

                          ____________________