Mr. President, I rise today to speak to the issues on the floor before the Senate, the vote we will take later today on two competing plans for our path forward.
Mr. President, as you and I and all the members of this chamber know, our national debt and our deficit are enormous, they’re unsustainable. And last week an array of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle came to the floor one after the other to make exactly that point. Members of both parties agree that excessive debt hurts our competitiveness, that it causes interest rates to rise and crowds out critical investments in our country’s future.
My own experience, Mr. President, in the private sector and six years of tough budget balancing as a county executive in my home state of Delaware taught me how important it is to have responsible budget processes in place, to manage your way through difficult financial times, to create opportunity for our communities, while still reducing our deficits and debt.
There is no question, Mr. President, that high debt levels lead to lower growth in the long run and can restrain or starve or strangle the dreams of our communities, our children for our future.
Our deficit and debt is a ticking time bomb and one everyone — Republicans and Democrats, Independents, economists, experts, working families, small business owners, the American people —
know that we want to and we have to deal with. But the key, Mr. President, in my view, is to deal with this problem responsibly and fairly and in a way that reflects America’s values.
Our debt is neither a Republican nor a Democratic problem, but a shared and structural problem. It took both parties to get us into this mess, and it will take both parties working together to dig us out. Each member of this body must take responsibility and look at what’s best for the next generation not just for winning the next election.
For my part, I will continue the fight for balanced and responsible deficit reduction. If the American people can share in sacrifice in our cities, counties and states all over this country, as they’re already doing in my home state of Delaware, then Republicans and Democrats have to show that we too can come together and find a way to compromise.
Mr. President, it’s time we recognize the sobering reality that if we’re going to plug the hole in our national balance sheets, if we’re going to avoid the fate of Europe, and it is a really, really big hole in the bottom of America’s balance sheet, while still continuing to investment in our future and in the strength and promise and opportunity for our communities we have to find, I think, a more responsible and more fair balance between spending cuts and revenue increases. We simply cannot achieve the level of savings we need through spending cuts alone.
Drastic cuts, dramatic cuts, across-the-board cuts violate our very values and will drive down the possibility of recovery and growth in the future. Spending cuts must be a central part of the solution to our budget problem, but the fact is revenue must also play a meaningful role. We need, Mr. President, balance. It’s the only way to provide the economic certainty necessary to sustain a recovery, and in my view, the only way to sustain investments that are critical for our future.
Let’s be clear, Mr. President, about some rhetoric that we’ve heard both out in the country and here in this chamber. The United States doesn’t begrudge success. We as Democrats, we in this chamber don’t resent those who have achieved, who have succeeded. In fact, that’s the engine that for generations has drawn people from around this world to this country and pulled people forward. The hopes and dreams of those who see reason to work in this country because of the promise of opportunity, the very real history of entrepreneurship, of risk taking and the very great rewards this country provides those who succeed beyond their wildest dreams through hard work, through innovation, through creativity. No, we don’t resent or reject wealth and success in this chamber or in this country. In fact we admire it and want to create the groundwork for a whole new generation of Americans to achieve the successes of the last generation. If we’re going to do right by the next generation of Bill Gateses or Warren Buffetts, that requires us to find solutions that makes our tax system fairer and prevent burdening the next generation of Americans with a crushing national debt.
As President Lyndon Johnson said once, “It’s not just enough to open the gates of opportunity. All of our citizens have to have the ability to walk through those gates.” The ability of future Americans to walk through those gates, Mr. President, I believe, requires sustainable investments in our future, in our schools and teachers so our children can compete in the global economy and we can keep improving public education. In infrastructure, so our businesses can move their products and ideas as fast as our competitors can on our roads and rails and broadband. In research and development, so America can continue to be a world leader in innovation and scientific breakthroughs.
Mr. President, we all know that health care costs are among the greatest drivers of our mounting national deficit and debt and we’ve got two paths forward. One where we cut, constrain and reduce our spending. Another where we invest in basic science and research, where we innovate and cure our way out of these challenges. I think this latter way of investing in our schools, infrastructure, our innovation and in finding path-breaking cures is more true to the American Spirit.
Cuts, as you know Mr. President, to essential services and programs are already deep. Although this is not broadly known throughout country sacrifices have already been made here and pennies are already being pinched from programs that, in my view, serve the people who can least afford them. In my home state of Delaware, due to choices we’ve made here, we’ve already seen cuts to critical programs like heating assistance to low-income families and programs like the Community Development Block Grants and HOME programs that were cut roughly 30% in last year’s budget. Programs that for so long have supported affordable housing for the disabled, for seniors, for the low-income.
We must continue to make cuts across the board to move our way towards a sustainable federal deficit. But cuts alone cannot responsibly make our path forward. We’ve seen proposals in the other chamber that would decimate vital safety net programs like Medicare and Medicaid shifting the burden of deficit-reduction to our most vulnerable citizens. We need to bring balance back to how we solve these problems and we need to do it in a way that puts a circle of protection, Mr. President, around those who are most vulnerable in our society.
In previous generations that served in this chamber, when they came together and reached the resolutions that solved our country’s fiscal problems, in 1983, for example, they put a circle of protection around the most vulnerable Americans. They chose not to slash, or cut, or eliminate those programs that are focused on the most vulnerable in our society: the disabled, low-income seniors, children in the early stages of life. And I think it’s important that we remember those values as we look at the choices we make here today and as we come together in the months leading up to the election and, hopefully after the election to craft a solution to our structural problems.
Today on the floor, Mr. President, the Senate is considering the other piece of the equation from cuts: revenue.
Mr. President, we have a stark choice between us today. We have two plans, a Reid plan and a
Hatch plan. We have a Democrat proposal and a Republican proposal. And let me put this in some context that I think has been missing in some of the speeches I’ve heard on the floor here earlier today.
In both cases, these are plans that make choices about which of our existing tax cuts, which of the existing tax expenditures, we will allow to expire and which we will extend. There’s a lot of talk about the coming “tax-mageddon” about the greatest onetime tax increase in American history. But let’s be clear, what we’re talking about are tax cuts that were enacted in 2001 and 2003 and other tax cuts that were enacted in 2009 and 2010, and whether they should be extended. Or whether these temporary tax cuts should be allowed to be that and expire.
We have two starkly different plans, Mr. President. In one, the Republican plan, they extend all of the Bush tax cuts even for the highest income earners, even on the marginal rates of the highest-income earners. The Democrat plan extends and does not allow to expire critical tax cuts, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Tuition Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit that 25 million Americans, the working poor, working families with children, rely on to get through this difficult recession.
The Republican plan allows all three of those to expire and thus, to use their language, raises taxes on 25 million of the working poor. It should be an obscenity Mr. President, for there to be people who are working full-time and yet poor in this country. This is the country, as I said before, of opportunity, the place to which millions have come over generations from around the world seeking the opportunity of this country.
Yet today, and especially in this economy, working poor has real meaning as the rate of poverty has raised to alarming levels, one in six Americans is poor today, the highest rate since the 1960’s. The economic inequality and the lack of opportunity and justice for those who are the poorest is at an alarming rate.
We have, as I said before, a structural challenge before us, a deficit and debt we must deal with and so the Democratic plan that is on the floor today — where we will take a vote later today, whether this body wants to proceed to take a deciding vote on it – would allow the marginal tax rates above $200,000 for individuals, $250,000 for couples to return to the Clinton era.
So let’s be clear, because I think this is often lost. Under the Democrats’ tax plan, we would continue tax breaks for all Americans who earn income, for all small businesses that are revenue-earning, but just on the first $200,000 individual income or $250,000 couple income; so even the millionaires and billionaires would continue to get some of the benefit of the tax breaks first enacted in 2001 and 2003. What would be raised is the tax rate on income above $250,000 for couples. So everyone continues to get some tax advantage, but the excessive, the highest reductions in tax burden on the very wealthiest Americans, we would allow to expire. What’s the impact on our deficit and debt? $850 billion over ten years, which, with the interest savings, is nearly $1 trillion in deficit and debt reduction.
These are significant savings, Mr. President. And if we asked the wealthiest 2% of Americans to take on that burden, to go back to the interest rates on marginal income that they lived through in the Clinton era, what might that do? Significantly reduce our deficit and debt, make it possible for us to sustain the Earned Income Tax Cut, the Tuition Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, and frankly reflect our values.
Mr. President, as I said before, this recession has brought an alarming rise in the rate of poverty. I’m someone who believes that our faith traditions — and we come from a very broad range of faith traditions — speak to us and challenge us to show our values in our budget. As the Vice President, who held the seat that I hold in Delaware before me has so often said, his father and his grandfather once said to him, “show me your budget and I’ll should you your values.”
Psalm 72 teaches us that to defend the cause of the poor, and to give deliverance to the needy, is one of our highest callings. A call that is repeated throughout books of the Torah and the New Testament, in many faith traditions across this country, to reject this deliverance to the needy, to reject the great tradition of a circle of protection, of a prayerful reflection on those who are the neediest in our society and instead say we will extend ad infinitum the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, I think, defies America’s values and defies our greatest tradition of creating and sustaining opportunity while protecting the most vulnerable amongst us.
I think, Mr. President that our belief in the American dream and our commitment to basic fairness and responsible problem-solving calls us forward to vote for the Reid plan today.
This bill is not a substitute for the comprehensive tax reform our nation truly needs, tax reform that simplifies the code, that closes many unsustainable and costly loopholes while lowering rates and broadening the base. No, that’s a task to which we must turn at another time. But in the current political environment, Mr. President, I believe this bill, to which I hope this body will turn, is the best chance we’ve got at retaining these important tax credits and opportunities for the working poor, while bringing some sanity to the rates at the highest end and asking those who have benefited the most to contribute to solving our problems.
Last week I got a letter from Judith in Talleyville, Delaware who wrote my office to say, “Millionaires and billionaires must be asked to pay their fair share to sustain our economic recovery.” Mr. President, Judith puts their finger on the crux of this issue. If we’re going to solve our deficit issue, if we are going to resolve the hole at the bottom of America’s balance sheet in a way that reflects our core values, I think we must move to, we must consider, and we must pass the Reid plan in this Senate this day.
Thank you.
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