“Before President Obama took office, that month, this country lost between seven and eight hundred thousand jobs a month. That’s because of the failed policies of the previous Administration. What’s happened since? Over 14 million jobs have been created. Seventy straight months of growth. The unemployment rate has been essentially cut in half. And the annual deficit has gone down substantially. And over 18 million people have been insured through the ACA.
“Essentially what is being proposed here by the Republican Majority is this: the President inherited a deep hole - the deepest since the Great Depression. Since then, we have essentially been digging out of it. And now it’s being proposed in this testimony and by the Republican Majority - go back to the failed policies, trickle-down economics, essentially digging the hole deeper and deeper.
“We have an issue of income inequality. The Republicans have failed to do a single thing to address income inequality - except to propose more tax cuts for the very wealthy. And if there’s an inversion, where essentially a corporation is not moving anything except its headquarters to a different place to escape taxation, the answer from this Republican Majority is, at best, kind of a blank stare.
“So, the answer is not to return to the failed policies of the past, but to build on the progress that we’ve been making all of these months. So we welcome this panel. And you can expect that there will be some very important questions. I think we’re going to hear a lot about dynamic scoring from one or more of you. And I finish by quoting Bruce Bartlett. He says this about all of the talk about dynamic scoring - which essentially I think is an effort to kind of cover up policies that will mainly increase income inequality in this country. He says, “It is not about honest revenue-estimating; it’s about using smoke and mirrors to institutionalize Republican ideology into the budget process."
“The last thing we need to do is to go back to the past as we face the future. We need to build on the progress that we’ve made these last seven years."
