[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 24 (Tuesday, February 15, 2011)] [House] [Pages H799-H800] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] BLOWING SMOKE AMIDST DIRE FINANCIAL STRAITS The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes. Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, our Nation is in dire financial straits, and, unfortunately, many on both sides of the aisle are blowing smoke about how serious they are in dealing with this problem. The fact is we are looking at a record $1.6 trillion deficit. Now, it wouldn't have been a record and it wouldn't have been $1.6 trillion but for one vote: the Obama-McConnell tax compromise, the Republicans insisting that all of the Bush tax cuts passed in a time of surplus should be continued in a time of record deficits. That means, with borrowed money, there will be tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and other special interests, or we will forgo the revenue of having them pay their fair share of taxes, say the rate they paid in the Clinton era when the economy did very well and they did very well. So with that one single vote, suddenly we jumped up to a $1.6 trillion deficit. Now, the Republican majority says, oh, no, no, no, that cutting taxes doesn't count. Their rules deem that cutting taxes doesn't count. We can cut taxes without reducing spending; we can borrow the money and increase the deficit and the debt, but they say it doesn't count. They have deemed that in their rules. So they're really blowing smoke here. You cannot pretend that you're serious about the deficit if you say we can continue to reduce income. Here is what this year's Federal budget looks like. [[Page H800]] This is the total budget. Look, we are borrowing from China and other places around the world almost half of what we're spending. We are borrowing $1.6 trillion, and the Federal tax revenue is $2.2 billion. Those are just extraordinary numbers. Now, they say they'll fix that by cutting. Well, here we go. Here we go again with the budget at $3.8 trillion and the deficit at $1.6 trillion. They said, Well, wait a minute. You can't increase revenues. No. You could decrease revenues. They say that wouldn't count. Then, Oh, well. The Department of Defense is off limits. Entitlements are all off limits. Mandatory spending, meaning agriculture subsidies and other egregious things, are all off limits. We will balance the budget by going after non-defense discretionary spending. There seems to be a little bit of a problem here. Here is the deficit of $1.6 trillion. Now, if we eliminated all non- defense discretionary spending, which would mean basically the daily operations of the Government of the United States outside the Defense Department, it would be all gone; close the door; open the Federal prisons, and let the prisoners out. There would be no more Justice Department, no more FBI, no more Border Patrol, none of those things. Just get rid of all that stuff--the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, health education, the Centers for Disease Control. All gone. Well, you would still have a $1 trillion deficit. But don't worry, they're going to get us there by cutting. You can't get there simply by cutting. Yes, you need to cut. You need to reduce and eliminate wasteful programs, but you can't pretend that you can cut revenues or that you can maintain tax loopholes for companies that move their headquarters to post office boxes in the Bahamas, like Carnival Cruise Lines--excuse me, their post office box is in Panama--which operate out of the U.S., get their customers in the U.S., use the ports of the U.S., use the U.S. Coast Guard, and whose executives live in the U.S. but they don't pay taxes here. There is ExxonMobil, which doesn't pay taxes in the United States, but pays in other places around the world. We borrow money to give a subsidy to ExxonMobil. Yet in the last quarter of last year, they had the largest single corporate profit in the history of the world, and we're going to borrow money to give them tax rebates for taxes they didn't pay in the United States of America but that they paid elsewhere. That system can't be fixed, the Republicans say. Those will be tax increases. You can't plug those tax loopholes. The agriculture subsidies pay people $20 billion not to grow things. No, can't go there. We're going to balance the budget by hacking away at non-defense discretionary spending. Unfortunately, physics and reality don't work for them here, nor does the math because it's a tiny fraction of the deficit if we totally eliminate those programs instead of just hack away at them. So let's get real. Let's get together here. The country is confronted with a serious long-term debt problem. As everybody said yesterday, everything is on the table. Well, it's not, but everything should be on the table. ____________________