February 10, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 27 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session
All in Senate sectionPrev30 of 32Next
BUDGET PROPOSAL; Congressional Record Vol. 166, No. 27
(Senate - February 10, 2020)
Text available as:
Formatting necessary for an accurate reading of this text may be shown by tags (e.g., <DELETED> or <BOLD>) or may be missing from this TXT display. For complete and accurate display of this text, see the PDF.
[Pages S966-S967] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] BUDGET PROPOSAL Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, thank you, and I thank the Republican leader. Last month, while this body was trying, as we know--and failing--to hold the President accountable for betraying the American people, President Trump went to Davos, and he doubled down on another betrayal of the American people. While he was hobnobbing with the global elite in Switzerland, he let slip his plan, after his tax handouts to billionaires and corporations blew up the deficit--we know deficits now. Thanks to Republican governing, thanks to [[Page S967]] this President's tax cut and my Republican colleagues going along with this tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the wealthiest people in this country, the budget deficit has just skyrocketed. We know all that. President Trump now wants to pay for it by cutting Social Security and Medicare. He wants to pay for it by cutting Social Security and Medicare. Today we got President Trump's budget. This document makes it clear how he wants to pay for his tax scam--on the backs of working families and seniors. I want to start with one that is of special interest in Ohio. We all know that just in the last 2 or 3 years--well, starting soon after President Trump was elected and then over about a year-and-a-half period, the Lordstown auto plant--about 4,500 jobs--shut down. President Trump had promised those workers--he said to Mahoning Valley: Don't sell your homes. These jobs are coming back. This is going to work for us. And then the President Trump did absolutely nothing. The third shift was laid off. The second shift laid was off. The first shift was laid off. The plant closed, and there were 4,500 lost jobs. I have been working with Senator Portman--my Republican colleague-- and others on getting somebody to come into that plant. It will not just be the 4,500 good UAW jobs, but it could be, potentially, a good many jobs. There was a loan program that we and this company were going to use to make sure they could, if you will, reindustrialize part of the Lordstown complex. Well, the President's budget axed that plan, that loan program. We were counting on that as a way to replace some of those jobs that the President of the United States promised would come back, and now we can't even count on that. There is that. Then, in addition to the cuts to Medicare and Social Security, he is taking a sledgehammer to Medicaid, to food stamps, to investments in infrastructure, and support for rural communities and small towns. He wants to make it harder to clean up our drinking water and stop polluters. At a time when one in four renters spends more than half of their income in housing, he wants to make it harder to help families find and afford loans for a home. Pretty much the only ones who escaped unscathed, the only ones the President's budget acts didn't hit: corporations and their wealthy, unaccountable CEOs. To fund their tax cuts--again, the tax cuts 2 years ago--70 percent of the tax cuts went to the wealthiest 1 percent of people in this country. To pay for those tax cuts that have exploded the Federal budget deficit--you don't have to be an accountant like my friend from Wyoming to understand what has happened to this deficit--President Trump wants to ask more from families struggling to make ends meet, the families he promised to fight for, the families he has betrayed. He wants to ask more of seniors and people with disabilities and students and kids who need healthcare, all to pay for this tax scam. President Trump sold us a tax cut for working people, but the jig is up. We know people aren't seeing more money in their paychecks. People see Trump's tax scam for what it really was: a giveaway to corporations and the wealthiest, tiny sliver of the population. Remember the promises the President made that his tax law would mean raises for workers? He said it over and over. I was in the President's Cabinet room with the President and a handful of Senators from both parties. He promised, before it passed, With this tax bill, everybody will get a $4,000 raise, he said--well, not exactly true. He told workers last year, the month after he signed the law, You are going to start seeing a lot more money in your paycheck. One lie after another lie after another lie. Instead of investing in workers, corporations bought back trillions--literally, trillions--of dollars of their own stock to line investors' pockets. Meanwhile, the deficit exploded. We know what the corporate crowd's plan always is to deal with the deficit, every single time: cut taxes, blow a hole in the deficit, and then go back and pay for it by cuts to Social Security and Medicare. How do we know that is what they are going to do? Because they told us that is what they are going to do. In spring 2017, right after President Trump was elected, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by economist Martin Feldstein, who has built his career pushing tax cuts for his rich friends. Guess how he wanted President Trump to pay for his corporate giveaway? In those days, the President said, We will have so much economic growth that it will pay for itself. Well, the economic growth has been less in these 3 years of Trump than in the last 3 years of Obama, but that is not the point. The point is he said it would pay for itself. Well, Martin Feldstein didn't believe that. He knew. He said in this article that it will not pay for itself; it will pay a little bit. But he said the best way to do it is raise the Social Security retirement age. It looks like President Trump was listening to Martin Feldstein. It always comes back to whose side are you on. You stand with workers, or you stand with corporations. You stand with insurance companies, or you stand with patients. You stand with Wall Street, or you stand with consumers. Do you fight for Wall Street wealth? Or do you fight for the dignity of work? If you love this country, you fight for the people who make it work. The President promised to fight for American workers and their families. This budget he released today is the latest in a long line of broken promises and betrayals. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The senior Senator from Wyoming. ____________________
All in Senate sectionPrev30 of 32Next