There are merits to the six tax provisions being considered today. I am among those who have favored extending the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit and I support other provisions before us.
But the manner in which Republicans are proceeding - selecting six of the approximately 60 tax provisions that expired last year to make permanent, without any offsets - is both fiscally irresponsible and fundamentally hypocritical. And its implications are deeply troublesome.
The Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated that the bills, without an offset, would add a combined $310 billion to the deficit.
To put that figure into context, that total represents more than half of the entire federal deficit this year - which I should note is the lowest it has been since President Obama took office.
The total represents nearly two-thirds of all non-defense domestic discretionary spending in 2014. It is more than three times what we spend annually on education, job training and social services. It is five times more than we spend on veterans. And it is five times more than we spend on medical research and public health.
Left to an uncertain fate are provisions like the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, the American Opportunity Tax Credit, the New Markets Tax Credit and the renewable energy tax credits, as well as the long-range status of the EITC and the Child Tax Credit.
To say that Republican action today is hypocritical is a serious understatement. Four months ago, Republicans let emergency unemployment insurance expire for more than 1.3 million Americans by arguing that an adequate offset had yet to be proposed. In early April, the Senate came to a bipartisan agreement on an offset after months of painstaking negotiations.
Yet House Republicans still refuse to act. Every day, I receive letters from people affected.
One mother of four from Decatur, Illinois, wrote last week that she is on the verge of “losing everything," as she put it.
“I feel as if I have worked my whole life and never asked for a handout and now I am barely making ends meet," she wrote.
Mr. Chairman, it wasn’t long ago that you declared that “the path to our economic recovery starts with fiscal responsibility in Washington."
This approach today flies smack in the face of fiscal responsibility.
Fiscal responsibility should not simply be a slogan.
