I thank my friend from California. I hope you don't go too far for that water, because I want to express my concern about the way the Republican Party, the majority in the House, is providing for running this country. It is a pretty…
I thank my friend from California. I hope you don't go too far for that water, because I want to express my concern about the way the Republican Party, the majority in the House, is providing for running this country. It is a pretty frightening set of circumstances that we have when this country is run on a week-to-week basis; the funding for our troops, the funding for our transportation, the funding for Medicare, for Social Security and for health care of all kinds is on a week-to-week basis. It is very difficult for a family to operate on a week-to-week basis. It is nearly impossible for a business to operate on a week-to-week basis. But apparently for my friends on the Republican side, it is okay for the Nation to run on a week-to-week basis.
So today, in what they, I think, believe was a great accomplishment, provide for another week of funding so that the various parts of our government, whether it is education, transportation, homeland security, the military or Veterans Affairs, all those kinds of things are just operating on a one-week basis. That is no way to run a railroad or a country.
We have got to do much better than this. And there is no question that we have budgetary issues that this Nation has to confront. My friends on the Republican side of the aisle would like to take it all out, deal with the whole budget, but only in a very slim part, in effect, punish a very tiny part of the budget for the ills that I would say occurred under the Bush administration: big tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, prosecute a couple wars without paying for them, and then allow Wall Street to run amok without any police. That's what caused the debt.
Energy efficiency didn't cause the debt in America. Preschool programs didn't cause the debt in America. The National Institutes of Health didn't cause this debt in America that we really do have to deal with today, there is no question about it. But those are the people, those are the things that they would like to blame for the debt. It is across the board. And there has got to be a shared sacrifice. Both millionaires and billionaires have to put up as part of their approach to all this. There has to be a revenue component to this as well as an expense.
And so I would say to my friend from California that this 1-week approach to managing something as big as America is crazy, and it has got to stop. We need to have a real budget and real appropriations so that people that do business with the government can have solid expectations for their contracts and people that work in the government know that they are going to get paid, people that receive benefits in one fashion or another know that next week things will keep going. Because this country is great and it is strong and it will be here a long time after any of us. But this month-to-month, day-to-day, week- to-week approach to management is just bad news for America. I hope it changes very soon.
I would return the mic to my friend from California.
And I would say to my friend, look, I wish we were not here. I wish that, going back to 2001, 2002, I wish President Bush hadn't had the country take a voluntary pay cut. We were on the road to a surplus. We were almost done getting rid of the debt. But, no, we are just the opposite right now because we took a voluntary pay cut to this country.
Then we prosecute two big wars, to the tune of a trillion dollars. And under the Bush administration, they
had those wars on a whole set of different books. They didn't really account for it as part of the debt of this country. Now, under President Obama, we have real accounting, so we know how bad the books look. And then we had this crash on Wall Street. Now those things all add up to a lot of debt. There is no doubt about it. And when the country hit the crash, the income to the country dropped and the expenses went up.
I don't think we should ever forget how we got here, but we are here, and we have to deal with it. So I respect people who want to confront this, but the values and the priorities that are being expressed by the Republican Party in how to deal with this are just so misplaced. They want to maintain the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. They want to maintain tax cuts that encourage people to send jobs overseas. And they want to maintain tax cuts for oil companies when we are at $105 or $106 a barrel, for goodness sake. You don't need much encouragement to start drilling at that high a price.
So those kinds of things have to be looked at very closely when all of a sudden you are taking it out of a number of those programs and people that you talked about: early childhood, health care, education, and transportation. We are going to have to share this sacrifice, no question about it. And as Democrats, we are prepared to do that. It isn't going to be fun. It isn't a lot of excitement when you really have to manage those expenses, but you also have to have the revenue to deal with the budget that we have in front of us.
My friends on the Republican side of the aisle would like to say, you know what, nobody really has to pay for these tax cuts, nobody really has to pay for sending jobs overseas. They are wrong. They are just flat wrong.
We have to change this. And they are in the majority. They are running the show here in the House. This one week at a time, that's a joke. Nobody can really manage, and people doing business with the government, with the country, they need to have some firm confidence in what is going on.
My friends on the Republican side of the aisle just keep undermining the confidence of people doing business in this country. So we have a lot of work to do. It really is going to take both sides of the aisle. I appreciate the President rolling up his sleeves and trying to get this done, and the Senate working on it. But there are some on the other side of the aisle who don't understand what the word ``compromise'' means to get to a greater goal, which is to get this budget under control.
Thank you, Mr. Garamendi.
The way I would wrap it up is that, yes, we are confronted with a budgetary issue that we have got to deal with. We can't run away from it.
We can't forget how we got here: tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, prosecute a couple of wars to the tune of a trillion dollars, and then a crash on Wall Street--all under the Bush administration. But we're here. We've got to deal with it.
I ask my friends on the Republican side of the aisle that sacrifice has got to be shared, where is that shared sacrifice? It isn't just against early childhood education. It isn't just against medical research. It isn't just against Medicare and Medicaid or education or transportation. You can't just get this budget balanced on a very narrow slice of the budget. Let's share the sacrifice. Let's get this country back on track. Things are recovering. Let's keep it going.
I would just reiterate, if we make it in America, we will make it in America.