Van Hollen Discusses Federal Spending for FY 2011 and 2012
Washington,
Mar 22, 2011 -
Today on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Ranking Member on the House Budget Committee, discussed federal spending, funding for the rest of this year, the deficit, and the FY 2012 budget. Highlights from the interview are below, and you can watch the full interview here:
VAN HOLLEN ON FY 2011 FUNDING:
“You had a situation where 54 of the House Republicans said no to the House Republican leadership, to taking another three weeks of cuts here. What that said very clearly was that you’ve got a pretty large group of Republicans in the House that has taken an ‘it’s our way or the highway’ position. In other words, the President of the United States, Democrats in Congress, you’ve got to take our approach, which was these very deep and immediate cuts, which most economists have said would slow down the very fragile economic recovery and put people out of work. That’s a reckless approach. We need to take a responsible approach to the budget, which would include, of course, some cuts – but we should also be looking at special interest tax breaks that are giveaways to various special interests around the country.”
VAN HOLLEN ON THE DEFICIT:
“With respect to Democrats, we have a very clear record on deficits, which is we do believe they do matter, which is why when President Clinton was in office we passed the pay-as-you-go rule in the Congress that said when Congress adds to the deficit – whether through spending or by providing tax breaks, you have to pay for it. You have to come up with offsets…. Now the PAYGO rule wasn’t the only thing, there were other factors of course. But clearly the Democrats had imposed a series of measures to have some fiscal discipline that resulted in a $5.6 trillion surplus…
“What we have seen from Republicans is this back-and-forth. When the last President Bush was in charge, some of the members in his Cabinet that were notoriously quoted as saying, ‘deficits don’t matter.’ And in fact, if you look at their policies, they lived by the rule that deficits don’t matter because they took that $5.6 trillion surplus that they inherited from the Clinton Administration and totally squandered it.
“How? They passed the prescription drug law that they did not pay for – not a penny was paid for. Secondly, we had two wars that we have not paid for as a country. And third, they enacted these big tax cuts that disproportionally benefitted the very wealthy in this country.”
VAN HOLLEN ON THE FY 2012 BUDGET:
“The President has made a very good faith effort in the budget he submitted. It includes significant cuts in domestic discretionary spending – very deep cuts – that will cause considerable pain in many places around the country. It’s a tough love budget. He does take domestic discretionary spending down to the lowest level, as a percentage of the economy, since the Eisenhower Administration. Should we look to other areas, for example, tax reform? I think we should, and I do think we can work together to come up with a plan that will reduce the deficits even more in the out years, and we should do that.”
“We’re looking forward to seeing exactly what [Chairman Ryan and Republicans] come up with. We had a series of hearings in the Committee, I hope we’ll some more hearings before we actually mark-up the budget… it seems to me that before we mark-up a budget we should also look at some of the other big pieces of this – that the Commission’s looked at. I mean, we talked about Pentagon spending. There’s also all the tax expenditures and all the stuff in the tax code that distorts the market, and yet is sort of a giveaway of tax dollars through a different mechanism. So we should look at all of that, and I would hope that everyone takes a more balanced approach to this.”
VAN HOLLEN ON SOCIAL SECURITY
“Look, there’s been a lot of confusion about this particular issue…. If you look at all of the funds that have accumulated through the full faith and credit, through treasury bonds, in the Social Security program to the beneficiaries, its sufficient to pay 100 percent through the year 2037…. Beyond that date, for people who are going to retire after the year 2037, if we did nothing at all people would see a 25 percent drop in their benefits, which is why it is important to come together on a bipartisan basis to put the Social Security program on fiscally sustainable footing. But for those who suggest that the Social Security program is not going to make due on its promises – that is a lot of scare talk.”
Congressman Chris Van Hollen
