[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8316-8318]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         THE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Faso). Under the Speaker's announced

[[Page 8317]]

policy of January 3, 2017, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Garamendi) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues who, for the last 
hour, have talked about an extremely important part of America's social 
fabric: the Scouting programs of America. I thank them for bringing to 
Congress and to the American people the importance of Scouting at all 
levels. And for those of us who have achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, 
much was discussed.
  Equally important are the men that enter and only spend a couple of 
weeks and do not pass beyond the Tenderfoot level because they, too, 
have achieved, at least in part, the opportunities that Scouting 
presents.
  I will talk about that more in the future, and I will look forward to 
that discussion. In the meantime, let's see if we can now talk about 
other things that are before Congress and the American public.
  Mr. Speaker, almost unnoticed as a result of all of the issues--all 
of the controversies surrounding the President here in the United 
States, the controversies of Russia and Russia's involvement in the 
election, the firing of Comey and the investigations now conducted by a 
new special counsel, and, of course, the President's foreign travels, 
with all of that, we have basically not heard much about another 
extremely important and quite possibly a much longer lasting thing that 
has happened.
  Today the President presented his budget. A budget presented by the 
President is often just waved aside by the Congress and considered to 
be dead on arrival, and surely this one should be. But I want to back 
up for a moment and I want us all to ponder exactly what it is that the 
President has proposed.

                              {time}  1900

  Because, you see, the budget, whether it is a Democratic budget or a 
Republican budget, an Obama budget or a Trump budget or a George H.W. 
Bush budget, those budgets are a statement of priorities. They are a 
statement of the value, the values that is what it is that the 
President thinks is important and how that fits into the American 
society.
  We need to really understand and value the statement that the 
President, President Trump, has made in presenting to us his 
priorities. We ought not just wave it aside and say it is of no 
consequence because, after all, we are going to rewrite it and we are 
going to write our own, which is the tradition. However, it would be a 
gross mistake not to analyze what it is that the President of the 
United States of America, the strongest, the wealthiest country in the 
world, has proposed.
  Take a careful look, America. Don't just brush it aside. This is what 
the President wants. This is what he wants us to be. This is his vision 
of America.
  I must tell you, it is awful--not my words only, but the words of 
many Republican leaders, of, obviously, the Democrats.
  Take a look, America, at what it is he is proposing.
  I am going to run through some of this because we need to understand, 
Members of Congress, we Americans need to understand what it is that 
this President wants us to be, what it is he sees as America. I am 
going to go through just some things very, very quickly, and then we 
want to go into it perhaps in a little more detail.
  Medicaid is a program that has been in existence for some 60-plus 
years. It is a program that provides healthcare to the poor. It is a 
program that provides care to seniors. It is a program that is relied 
upon all across this country by families so that the children and 
adults can get medical care.
  The President has proposed, in his budget, a $610 billion reduction 
in Medicare on top of, in addition to, an $800 billion cut in what we 
know now as Trump and RyanCare, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. 
A $1.5 trillion reduction in medical services to the poor. And they are 
not all kids. They are not all families. More than half of that money 
goes to seniors in nursing homes.
  This is the vision of the President of the United States: $1.5 
trillion reduction in medical services over the next 10 years to 
working men and women just above the poverty level, to seniors who are 
in nursing homes, and to women and children who are below the poverty 
level. This is his vision of healthcare in America.
  And that is not all. That is not the end of the story.
  In the 1990s, we knew that children not covered by Medicaid or, in 
California, Medi-Cal were not getting medical services; and so the 
American people, through their representatives in Congress and the 
Senate, created what we now know as the Children's Health Insurance 
Program, CHIP--Children's Health Insurance Program.
  And so what is the vision? What is the value? What is the moral 
purpose of our President?
  He would cut $3.2 billion out of that program and effectively deny 
medical services for the 6 million children that are currently covered 
by the Children's Health Insurance Program.
  For the aged, blind, and disabled--the aged, blind, and disabled 
Americans--that receive supplemental Social Security programs, $64 
billion would be cut from those aged, blind, and disabled who receive 
supplemental Social Security insurance.
  Students? How many times on this floor of the House of 
Representatives have we heard Democrats and Republicans talk about the 
terrible problem of student loans, the huge cost of providing 
educational services? So what is in this budget?
  Student loans, financial aid, and repayment, $143 billion reduction. 
How does that help our educational program? How does that help students 
who are suffering under the cost of higher education? I don't know what 
the answer is except it does not.
  For men and women who are working at minimum wage or below minimum 
wage across the United States, there is a program that was established 
by Richard Nixon called the earned income tax credit to encourage 
people to work. Men and women that are out there working but at a low 
wage, minimum wage, the earned income tax credit was established to 
lift them up to a liveable amount of money and encourage them to 
continue to work.
  What does the President propose? Well, let's cut, by $40 billion, the 
earned income tax credit and the child tax credit.
  It goes on and on. This is President Trump's statement of what he 
values in America.
  I think it is immoral. I think it is terrible public policy, and, 
when coupled with the rest of the story, it becomes an abomination.
  The rest of the story, the rest of the story is the most massive tax 
cut ever for the wealthy in the United States. You take that tax cut 
that has been proposed in the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, 
ObamaCare, and you couple it with the tax cuts that are embedded in the 
President's budget, and we are talking somewhere north of $3.5 trillion 
tax cuts, 80 percent of which goes to the top 20 percent of America's 
income earners.
  All the discussion last year about income inequality from President 
Trump, from Hillary Clinton, from everybody else about income 
inequality and the problem it presents to America was somehow 
forgotten. Because, when you take the repeal of the Affordable Care 
Act, which some call the American Health Care Act now, and you couple 
it with this budget, the tax cuts that are embedded in both of them 
amount to the largest transfer of wealth ever in tax policy from the 
poor, from the working Americans, to the top earners in America, to the 
superwealthy.
  If you are concerned about income inequality, this is exactly 
backwards. It is from the working men and women, the middle class of 
America and the poor to the wealthy. That is exactly what is happening 
here.
  Is that a rational vision of America? Is this a sense of value of 
what America is all about: more for the wealthy, less for the working 
men and women, the middle class, for the families that presumably--
presumably--were at the heart of last year's election?
  Yes, we heard Mr. Trump and we heard Ms. Clinton go around the Nation 
talking about how we need to

[[Page 8318]]

raise up the middle class, how we need to deal with this income 
inequality, what a problem it was for our society and our economy, 
months and months of political rhetoric. And now we see what is 
actually--actually--taking place: the greatest transfer of wealth from 
the middle class and the poor to the wealthy that has ever been found 
in any piece of legislation proposed.
  God help us if it is enacted. Watch carefully, America. This budget, 
the repeal of the Affordable Care Act together with the proposed tax 
cuts, will devastate, seriously harm, personal lives in America by 
taking away their health insurance, by taking away their money that 
they depend upon to pay their rent, to put food on the table, to care 
for their children.
  This is not the America that I want to see, and I don't think this is 
the America that the American public voted for. Whether they were a 
Democrat or a Republican, whether they voted for Trump or Hillary, they 
did not envision an America that would take $1.5 trillion out of the 
Medicaid program, of which 50 percent of that money goes to seniors in 
nursing homes.
  I don't think that is what they had in mind when they voted last 
November. That is not what they were promised. That is not what either 
of the two candidates promised. They promised to deal with this income 
inequality issue. They promised, both of them, to provide more 
healthcare, not less. That is just on this one side of it.
  Neither promised massive tax cuts for the superwealthy. In fact, both 
railed against the way in which we have seen those at the top of the 
heap benefit while the rest were stagnated. Both candidates did that. 
And yet the proposal that has been put before this Congress in the last 
127 days has been quite the opposite.
  The repeal of the Affordable Care Act, ripping away healthcare 
benefits for 24 million Americans, and now on top of it, this budget 
proposal that the President has given to us.

                              {time}  1915

  I want to take just another moment because this one ought to be close 
to every American. In the President's budget proposal, there is a $7 
billion reduction for research in the National Institutes of Health. 
What does the National Institutes of Health do? It does research. It 
does research on disease. Over the years, Democrats, Republicans, both 
sides of the aisle have put forth proposals to advance and increase the 
research in healthcare.
  And the result? The result of that is this. I have used this many 
times on the floor. As I looked at the President's proposal to cut $7 
billion out of the National Institutes of Health, I thought we ought to 
come back to this. Deaths from major diseases over the years. Because 
we have invested in research, we have seen breast cancer deaths decline 
by 2 percent, prostate cancer decline by 11 percent, heart disease 
decline by 14 percent, stroke by 23 percent, HIV/AIDS by 52 percent. 
That is what happens when you invest in research. That is what happens 
when we take the taxpayer money and we put it into research on 
healthcare and medical issues.
  Today, the National Institutes of Health has $5 billion of valuable 
research projects that cannot be funded, research projects on all of 
these. Instead of adding an additional $5 billion, the President 
proposes to give that $5 billion to the wealthiest of Americans. The 
top 40 families in America, under his proposals, would receive a $7 
million reduction in their taxes. And I daresay that four or five of 
those families are either the President's family or in the Cabinet.
  This purple line here, this one, over the last year, we have 
increased the funding for Alzheimer's from just over $500 million to 
just under $1 billion. This one is out of control. Every family in 
America is experiencing the effects of dementia and Alzheimer's. My 
family. My mother-in-law spent her last 3 years in our home and died of 
Alzheimer's. It is not unusual. In fact, it is common.
  Incidentally, cancer is some $6 billion a year for research; heart 
disease, $5 billion; HIV/AIDS, about $3 billion; Alzheimer's about $900 
million. We know that if we were to spend the money, we could delay the 
onset, dramatically improve the lives not only of the individuals but 
of the families.
  So what does the President propose? Not adding $5 billion for 
research that we know would provide benefits, extend the lives of 
Americans. He proposed to cut by $7 billion. Is this a statement of his 
values, of what he thinks is important, of his morality, of his 
administration? On the floor of the House, in the cloakrooms, what is 
argued and often said is that each and every bill that passes here, 
each and every proposal that we introduce, is a statement of our own 
personal sense of morality of what is right and what is wrong, of 
values.
  Today, I looked at the Hill papers, what we fondly call the Hill 
rags, three of them. The top story is not the President's budget. The 
top story is the President's scandals. But I will tell you this: This 
budget is the real story because this is going to live on. This is what 
we will be fighting about. All the issues of the scandal in Russia and 
everything else will be dealt with by others and some of our 
committees, but this is what is going to affect the American public in 
their homes, in their lives, in their healthcare, in their education, 
and in their jobs. The President proposed a budget, and it is a 
reflection of what he believes to be important. That is a scandal.
  I can go on and on here, and I suppose I promised some that I 
wouldn't. There is much that we can do. There is much that we need to 
do. We have great needs in the United States. We need an infrastructure 
program. We need a healthcare system that provides benefits to all in 
which the costs are controlled. We have a military and we have national 
security, and we will debate these things, but I cannot let a day go by 
without contemplating what it is that the President has proposed to 
America. Not to us but to America. And it is not good.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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