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Sheldon Whitehouse on Budget & Economy |
WHITEHOUSE: The Bush administration tax cuts have run up our budget deficit to the highest levels ever. We now owe nearly a trillion dollars to the Chinese government, much of which went to finance tax cuts for the very richest Americans. If you are a middle-income Rhode Islander, and you got $1 of tax relief under the Bush tax cut, somebody making more than $200,000 got $111. That has not been good policy. We need to repeal the Bush tax cuts.
CHAFEE: I'm all for tax cuts as long as we can cut our spending. The difficulty has been that we cut the taxes but we don't cut our spending. We've had some tremendous unforeseen costs -- with 9/11, the war in Iraq & Afghanistan, and Katrina. I think we should prepare for those, and I don't believe tax cuts, as long as we're not cutting our spending, is a wise course to take. During the 1990s, we had something called "pay as you go." We would not enact any spending programs that we couldn't pay for with revenue.
A: Republicans in Washington have abandoned the Clinton-era commitment to balanced budgets, by embracing tax cuts for the wealthy that explode the deficit. Congress should stick to pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budgeting rules, and we need full disclosure and public votes for earmarked special-interest pork projects.
Proponents recommend voting YES because:
My amendment says we are going to take about $18 billion as a strong signal from the Congress that we want to support effective programs and we want the taxpayer dollars spent in a responsible way. My amendment doesn't take all of the $88 billion for the programs found by PART, realizing there may be points in time when another program is not meeting its goals and needs more money. So that flexibility is allowed in this particular amendment. It doesn't target any specific program. Almost worse than being rated ineffective, we have programs out there that have made absolutely no effort at all to measure their results. I believe these are the worst offenders. In the following years, I hope Congress will look at those programs to create accountability.
Opponents recommend voting NO because:
The effect of this amendment will simply be to cut domestic discretionary spending $18 billion. Understand the programs that have been identified in the PART program are results not proven. Here are programs affected: Border Patrol, Coast Guard search and rescue, high-intensity drug trafficking areas, LIHEAP, rural education, child abuse prevention, and treatment. If there is a problem in those programs, they ought to be fixed. We ought not to be cutting Border Patrol, Coast Guard search and rescue, high-intensity drug trafficking areas, LIHEAP, rural education, and the rest. I urge a "no" vote.
Sen. DODD: Today we are facing a crisis in the mortgage markets on a scale that has not been seen since the Great Depression: over 2 million homeowners face foreclosure at a loss of over $160 billion in hard-earned home equity; over one out of every 5 subprime loans is currently delinquent. These high default rates have frozen the subprime and jumbo mortgage markets and infected the capital markets to the point where central banks around the world have had to inject liquidity into the system to avoid the crisis from spreading to other segments of the market.
One of the fundamental causes of this serious crisis is abusive and predatory subprime mortgage lending. The Homeownership Preservation and Protection Act of 2007 is designed to protect American homeowners from these practices, and prevent this disaster from happening again. The legislation will:
In the coming months, the housing crisis is going to get worse. We will need to continue to press lenders and servicers to provide real relief for homeowners threatened with foreclosure.
