Republican Budget Betrays Middle Class

Floor Speech

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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, we are now in the eighth week of the 119th Congress, which has distinguished itself with incredibly low productivity and low effort.

So far, we have brought up just a bunch of moldy old leftovers from the last Congress. We have been averaging roughly about two votes a day since the Congress was sworn in on January 3.

Despite the fact that we have a government shutdown looming in about 2 weeks, on March 14, the Speaker is much more focused on other things than trying to again avoid a catastrophe like that.

It appears that this week we actually are going to take up the budget reconciliation bill that again has been worked out down at the Mar-a- Lago hotel over the last 2 months or so, where a conga line of billionaires have been observed walking through, meeting with leadership of the Republican Conference, laying out their priorities, not the American people's priorities, in terms of what they want to see in that reconciliation bill.

This week, we are going to take up, apparently, according to the Speaker's Office, an actual vote on that.

Why is that being given priority over a government shutdown? The real reason that is being given priority is that the tax cuts that were passed in 2017, particularly on personal rates, are going to be expiring in 2025. For the people who benefited the most, the top 1 percent of this country in terms of their economic position, for them, that is their number one priority.

A week ago Friday, in the Budget Committee, on a party-line vote, the Republicans produced their bill, their budget reconciliation bill, which extends those tax cuts, despite the fact that it worsens our budget deficit and leaves middle-class and lower income Americans in the dust.

This chart was done by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank, which shows again where the benefit of that bill is going to go. The top 1 percent in income--in the State of Connecticut from where I am from, that is people whose income is about $1.2 million a year--they are going to get a $70,000 tax cut. For somebody who is in the lowest quintile, which is income up to $14,000 a year, you can see on this chart they are going to get about $130. For a middle-income person who makes roughly about $114,000 a year, they are going get about a grand in terms of their tax payments.

Now, if we actually had a mature, reasonable process in this Chamber where Democrats would also be consulted in terms of putting together a plan to make sure that lower income and middle-income individuals' taxes don't go up, we could work out an arrangement, but not with a price tag of which the top 1 percent are going to continue to rake in tax cuts that were, again, shoved into the bill in 2017, lowering the top marginal rate from 39 percent to 36 percent. Again, that was just a complete and total windfall for people who don't need that type of tax relief.

Let's look again at what else the Budget Committee did with this chart, which shows how they are going to pay for extending those tax cuts. The cost of extending those tax cuts for the top 1 percent is $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

There were some other additions that they put into the budget, which are going to add to the deficit. To pay for it, they included a whole bunch of cuts. The big one is to cut the Medicaid program, a program which provides healthcare for 70 million Americans, such as people in nursing homes. Almost half the live births in this country are covered by Medicaid. Young, working-class individuals, because of the ACA expansion, are covered by Medicaid.

Again, this bill talks about cutting $880 billion, about 20 percent of the cost of the program, indiscriminately with no precision in terms of who it is affecting. It has work requirements. Are people in their nineties in nursing homes really going to do that? Give me a break.

There are some other cuts to higher education to help pay for this.

The bottom line is, at the end of the day, we are still going to be adding to the deficit. The deficit hawks in the Republican Party are adding to the deficit with this measure on top of the deficits that we are already running today.

This bill is fiscally irresponsible and outrageously unfair in terms of who benefits from it. It is extremely harmful to middle-class and working families of this country whose essential need for educational services and healthcare are going to be cut. They will take the hit in terms of advancing this priority.

This is an important vote for the people of this country to be watching. This is a gut check for every Member in this House about where their priorities are because that is what budgets are about. They are an expression of people's moral values and their priorities in terms of who should get help in our country.

This measure will not help the people who need it, who are still struggling with the high cost of living, and who don't need to basically have the rug pulled out from under them with a measure like this.

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