One trillion dollars in unpaid for tax cuts. That’s how much Republicans have proposed adding to our national debt when you add the cost of today’s bills with those considered by this Committee earlier this year. If you stacked up a trillion one-dollar bills, you would get almost one quarter of the way to the moon.
This is being proposed at a time when we are reaching the debt ceiling and the Republicans are now proposing that we push the deficit through the roof.
This is being proposed at a time when there is uneasy talk about the Republicans once again shutting down the government.
This is being proposed at a time when sequestration is threatening to curtail necessary defense expenditures and the percent of GDP being spent on domestic investment is approaching the lowest it’s been.
This is being proposed when a desperately needed infrastructure bill remains stuck in a deep Congressional fiscal pothole.
Piling up debt may be motivated by appeasing rifts in the Republican Conference. But that is not a defensible reason.
Nor is trying to make it easier to pass some version of tax reform, which, like those recently proposed by prominent Republicans, would mainly benefit the very wealthiest at a time of growing income and wealth inequality.
So the bills before us alone would add $411 billion to the deficit. By far the largest among them is a permanent extension of bonus depreciation, which costs $281 billion and is not offset.
The approach by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to mark up these “extenders" is not only fiscally irresponsible, it also leaves many other provisions behind that are vital to working families and small businesses - including the exclusion for mortgage debt forgiveness, the New Markets Tax Credits, and continuations of the expansions to the Earned Income Tax Credit and refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit.
We must not pursue this path of fiscal irresponsibility - flooding our nation with debt while leaving hardworking American families high and dry.
