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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, no one asked for this. No one asked for the biggest wealth transfer in American history from the poorest people in the country to the richest people to ever exist. No one asked for the biggest ever cuts to Medicaid, to kick 14 million people off of health insurance, and raise out-of-pocket costs for 20 million people. No one asked for food assistance to be slashed for millions of children and low-income families. No one asked for higher prices at the pump or on their electricity bills. No one asked for students across the country to lose Federal financial aid.

No one asked for any of this--and I really mean that. That is not just a rhetorical flourish. I don't think Trump voters asked for this. I know Harris voters did not ask for this. I don't think anybody really wants this.

I think the reason that all of these crazy, harmful policies are about to be enacted is for one simple reason, and that is to generate enough revenue to satisfy the insatiable desire for tax cuts for people who make more than $4 million a year. They are literally taking money out of food assistance and Medicaid and Affordable Care Act monthly subsidies.

By the way, you don't know if you get a subsidy or not. You just go on the exchange, and you pay the thing. The thing is, that thing is probably $400 or $500 or $600 a month less than it used to be because of the subsidies.

It is one thing to say 14 million people are going to get kicked off of Medicaid--and they will. It is another thing to say, because of those Medicaid cuts, a bunch of clinics and hospitals in rural communities are going to shut down--and they will.

I think what is a little underrated is many, many more millions of people are going to pay not $50 more a year, not $100 more per month, but many hundreds of dollars more per month. Why? Because when you yank that money out of the system, it is what is called a pay-for. It means it generates a ton of revenue.

How does it generate that revenue? By screwing regular people.

They are racing to pass a bill that does all of these things and that raises the debt by many trillions of dollars.

I think the problem some of us have--and I really appreciate the Presiding Officer. And when we agree, we work really well together, and when we disagree, we are at least able to stay civil. So I am trying to take the edge off of this. But one of the reasons that it sounds like I am frothing at the mouth and saying a bunch of partisan talking points is that it is kind of hard to believe that any political party would actually do this on purpose.

It is quite hard to believe that you would cut food assistance and cut healthcare and cut help for regular working people in order to shovel money to people making more than $4 million a year. But that is exactly what they are doing.

It is as if they designed this bill in a lab to make the maximum number of people angry. It is unpopular. It is unnecessary. And they are doing it anyway.

Hospitals serving rural and low-income communities will be forced to shutter because they won't be adequately compensated for their services--by the way, again, not a talking point. Go and visit any rural clinic or hospital. Ask them what percentage of their payer mix comes from Medicaid and what would happen if they lost a big chunk of that. A lot of them say--the big ones--big is relative. But in the State of Hawaii, our big institutions say: We could stay afloat. We just have to deliver a lot less care. And then everybody would end up in the ER, right?

The Queen's Medical Center, the sort of No. 1 trauma center in the middle of Honolulu, is already bursting at the seams. You have multiple people in the hallways. All of the rooms, all of the beds are taken. It was just a couple of months ago that they finally figured out a way not to release the psychiatric emergencies right onto Punchbowl Street in their hospital gowns.

That is before they do this to the hospitals.

After the ACA passed, you would go on the exchange, select a plan, and pay a fraction of what you used to pay. I think one of the things is that ObamaCare is now so old that people forgot how horrible it was before then--really horrible. So now you just go on, and you are kind of irritated because it is still money, and still feels like too much, and it feels like your HMO or provider nitpicks you and doesn't cover a bunch of care, and copays are too high. But it is way, way, way better than it used to be.

So this whole enterprise is for one single purpose, and that is to generate enough money to cut taxes for billionaire corporations and people who make $4 million or more in revenue. It is very, very few people benefiting and tens of millions of people being screwed.

There is little in this bill that will help regular people who are already struggling to meet their monthly obligations. But there are plenty of rewards for the ultrawealthy. Millionaires stand to gain roughly $70,000 in tax cuts, while billionaires in the top 1 percent receive close to $300,000 in benefits.

And how did they find that money to shovel to the millionaires and billionaires?

I don't mind a millionaire or a billionaire. I know, like, two billionaires. We are not close, but I have met them. I am sure I know many millionaires. There are a number of colleagues in the Senate who are in that category. So it is not like--I am not trying to demonize anybody.

I am saying: Do they need $300,000? I know people who need $300. I know people who actually won't be able to stay on any healthcare at all if these subsidies go away.

This is not the closing of loopholes. This is not fiscal discipline. I want to make this point as clearly as I can. We would be in a harder position to argue against this bill if it were actually deficit-neutral because, traditionally, the accusation against Democrats is they want to bust the budget, and Republicans want to be responsible.

But this one is weird because this is under the guise of ``We have got to do austerity; we have got to do tough stuff; we have got to cut.'' Then they come up with a bill that actually increases the deficit over baseline, even when they do their kind of nonsensical accounting where they basically have stopped counting the tax cuts that are in place because, you know, that is the baseline.

And so the whole enterprise--and everybody needs to understand this. They are making everything more expensive. That is food. That is medicine. That is groceries. That is gasoline. That is electricity. And the reason they are making it more expensive is because they are either indifferent to the suffering or, more importantly, they just need the money.

And they don't need the money to--you know, we raised taxes in the past, as a country, to fight a war, to beat Nazism; or we raised taxes in the past to shrink the deficit; or we raised taxes and raised costs for people to invest in something important. That is not what we are doing here. We are blowing up the budget, and we are harming regular people in order to provide tax cuts for people who literally didn't ask for it.

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