Paul Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I want to echo the point he made. Our chairman, the distinguished gentleman from South Carolina, came to the floor and accurately said both budgets, the Senate budget resolution and the House-passed budget resolution, balance the budget. That is correct. They do. It is certified by the Congressional Budget Office. There is only one reason and way and method how they balance the budget, though, Mr. Speaker: by raising taxes. The House-passed budget resolution relies upon, requires, in fact, makes sure that it passes the largest tax increase in American history in order to balance the budget. The Senate-passed budget resolution relies upon, requires and ensures that the second largest tax increase in American history be enacted on the American people, on the American taxpayers, in order to achieve balance. I have two major concerns with this budget resolution, Mr. Speaker. Number one, it is very bad economic policy. And number two, it is an enormous missed opportunity. Why is this budget resolution bad economic policy? Inflicting the largest tax increase in American history on the American family, business, entrepreneur, on American taxpayers, is bad economic policy. And here is why: Back in 2001, where we realized we had 9/11, and in 2003, where we realized we had a recession, with the dot-com bubble burst, with Enron scandals, we had job losses to the tune where we were losing about 124,000 jobs a month. We had to act quickly to get people back to work, so we cut taxes across the board. We cut taxes on entrepreneurs, on families, on workers, on businesses, on capital. What happened: 7.6 million new jobs were created since then. We have been creating on average over 200,000 jobs a month since then. The stock market turned around. The savings portfolios of senior citizens which were eviscerated in the market crash came back. The Dow hit 13,000 last week, an all-time high. We saw business investment, from negative decline after negative decline for 11 consecutive quarters, turn around and hit all-time highs. More jobs were created. And what happened at these lower tax rates? Revenues came into the Federal Government at a much, much faster pace, at about a 25-year high. So we saw more revenues coming into the Federal Government, which actually brought the deficit down at these lower tax rates. What this budget resolution does is it puts that economic recovery plan in jeopardy. By raising taxes on people and businesses and entrepreneurs, you are reducing job growth in America. You are raising the cost of capital. We have a problem, Mr. Speaker, and that is we live in the era of globalization. The oceans no longer separate our economy from the rest of the world. Ninety-five percent of the world's consumers don't live in this country. They are overseas. So, Mr. Speaker, we have got to wake up. Wake up to the fact that we have real competitive pressures. Countries like China and India, let alone Japan and Europe, are giving us real competitive pressures, real competitive challenges. And when we go back to the old adage of taxing, taxing and taxing, what we are going to do is tax more and more jobs overseas to these other countries. By taxing our economy and our businesses and our workers more and more than our competitors tax theirs, you know what happens? They get our jobs. That is a mistake. That is wrong. America taxes capital more than any other industrialized country in the world except for one, Japan, and they just finished two decades of recession. So it is really bad economic policy to have all these tax increases. You just heard the gentleman from Massachusetts talk about the reserve funds they have in this budget. They really want to make sure that they don't raise these taxes. So they put a reserve fund in the budget. And the reserve fund basically says, we don't want to raise these taxes; we would like to come up and pay for them, but our money is not there. A budget is basically a page full of numbers, and numbers don't lie. The numbers in this budget require these taxes to go up, require these taxes to sunset; otherwise, they don't balance the budget. You can't have it both ways. You can't balance the budget on the left hand and then say we are not raising taxes on the right hand. It is one or the other. So regardless of how many empty promise reserve funds you have in a budget resolution, the numbers don't lie, and the numbers say these taxes are being raised. Now, as to the point that the sunset was put in by the Republicans, not by the Democrats, and we are simply letting this Republican policy manifest itself, and we are budgeting for it, that is not quite true, Mr. Speaker. And I remember being a member of the Ways and Means Committee and working on the conference committee at this time. When these tax cuts went through the Ways and Means Committee in the House, when these tax cuts passed the House floor, they were permanent. They never had a sunset in them. What happened? This arcane rule in the Senate called the Byrd rule was put in place. And the Byrd rule said for these tax cuts to be permanent, it needs 60 votes in the Senate. What happened? We had 52 Republicans voting to make them permanent; no Democrats would vote to make these tax cuts permanent. So the Democrats filibustered making these tax cuts permanent, and because of the Democrat filibuster in the Senate, these tax cuts were made temporary. The only way to get this tax relief to the American economy, to the American people, to get out of the job loss, to get out of the recession, was this temporary tax policy because of the Democrat-led filibuster by then Senator Daschle at the time in the Senate. That's why there's a sunset in this law. We always kind of wondered at the time, why would they stand in the way of the taxpayer and make these tax cuts temporary? Why would they insist upon these sunsets? Well, now we know why. Because it is how they balance the budget because they plan on, bank for, certify, require, rely on these tax cuts going away. The second reason I think this is a bad policy is it is an enormous missed opportunity, Mr. Speaker. The gentleman from South Carolina, who really is a gentleman from South Carolina, and I mean that sincerely, had a lot of good hearings in the Budget Committee. We have had a few in Ways and Means as well. We had all these experts coming to us from the left and from the right, from think tanks on the left side of the aisle and think tanks on the right side of the aisle, we had the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve Chairman, the Treasury Department coming to us, all saying the same thing: Entitlements are growing out of control. The entitlement program problem is enormous. We are doubling the amount of retirees in this country within one generation; yet we are only increasing the amount of workers coming in behind them by 17 percent. We have an enormous unfunded liability, about $49 trillion. It's a mind-boggling number. But when you take three entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, those three entitlements right there, Mr. Speaker, will consume 100 percent of the Federal budget by the time my children are my age. So all these experts came to us and said, Do something. You're the Budget Committee, you've got to do something to control the growth of entitlements. It's going to bankrupt America. And if we don't do anything, if we keep the government we have today and do nothing to reform entitlements, by the time my children are my age, they will literally have to pay double the amount of taxes for that Federal Government at that time. Let me say it one other way, Mr. Speaker. Since about 1960, Washington has funded the Federal Government by taxing the U.S. economy by about 18 percent of the economy. About 18 percent of the gross domestic product has been required to pay for the Federal Government. It's been remarkably consistent. Now, if you take today's government, add no new programs, take none away, and transfer that out to about 2040 when my kids are my age, just to keep today's government afloat at that time you will have to tax 40 percent of GDP, 40 percent of the national economy just to pay for that government because of three entitlement programs. You can't compete with China and India by taxing our economy at 40 percent, let alone Germany and Japan. You can't prepare for globalization. You can't help people get careers for tomorrow and enjoy higher standards of living if we don't address our entitlements right now. That is the biggest travesty of this bill, Mr. Speaker. This bill says we will do absolutely nothing, nada, zilch, nothing at all either in the Senate budget resolution or the House budget resolution to attack and reform entitlement programs, to attack this problem for 5 years. This budget says let's do nothing to fix our entitlement programs for 5 years. That means we accelerate and exacerbate the bankruptcy of Social Security, of Medicare, of Medicaid. How is that helping senior citizens if we push these programs faster toward bankruptcy? I think that's wrong. I think we need to fix these programs so seniors can better rely on these programs. And you know what, Mr. Speaker? In Wisconsin we say this a lot, and I think people say it around the country, and prior generations always told this to me, my parents and my grandparents, they said, the thing about America, what's beautiful about America is that one generation works hard and leaves to the next generation a country that's better off. The dream of parents is to leave your children with a country that's better off so you can enjoy a higher standard of living. That is the beautiful legacy of America. Mr. Speaker, we are at risk of severing that legacy. If we don't address these entitlements, if we simply go the old easy Washington route of simply raising taxes and raising spending and doing nothing to address this entitlement problem, we will really run the risk of severing that legacy and giving our children a lower standard of living than that which we enjoy today. We have new competitive pressures from other countries unlike any we have seen before. Raising taxes on families and workers will not bring more prosperity to America. It will give jobs to other countries. Doing nothing to attack the entitlement problem in this country will only ensure that an unprecedented mountain of debt is befallen onto our children and our grandchildren, and they are going to have to pay far higher taxes than any American has ever paid in the past. This, Mr. Speaker, is why I say vote against this rule and vote against this budget resolution, which includes and relies on the largest tax increase in American history and the biggest missed opportunity by doing nothing to reform entitlements over the next 5 years. This could have been a bipartisan opportunity to fix these problems. Sadly, it's not.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Will the chairman yield for an additional question?

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, when the new majority came into power, they talked about being fiscally conservative. They talked about bringing fiscal responsibility back to the people's House. Well, that's not what we see here today, and that's not what we have seen for the last 4 months. Last session, Mr. Speaker, we brought a bill that said if we are going to do emergency spending bills, let's clean these up. Let's not put pork barrel, unnecessary spending in emergency spending. We actually defined what an emergency is. And then we set aside a reserve fund, $6.4 billion, to say we are setting this aside for emergency spending, and if we go over this amount, we have to scrutinize every dollar to make sure that it is truly an emergency. What did the new majority do? To their credit, they carried these rules over into this session of Congress. Thankfully, they said, you know what? Let's not pork up emergency spending bills. Let's make sure that if it's really an emergency, it will get funded as an emergency. If it's not, it won't. What happened the first time the pressure hit? They waived the rules. They waived the rules completely. And now the new budget resolution the majority is proposing gets rid of these proposals altogether. No more checks on emergency spending. All it takes is to waive the rules, stamp it as an emergency, and we can spend as much as we want. It's outside the budget caps. It gets added onto the deficit. And that's what is happening right here tonight. In fact, Mr. Speaker, this bill right here violates the majority's own PAYGO rules by $5.8 billion. That's right. They are violating their own PAYGO that they put into place just a few months ago by $5.8 billion. They are adding $21 billion of nonemergency spending that were unrequested, that have nothing to do with the war on terror. And they have added $11 billion of congressional add-ons that have nothing to do with the war on terror, that were not requested. The majority came out with their first spending bill, adding $6 billion on top of the deficit. Now they are adding $21 billion on top of the deficit with this unrequested, nonemergency spending. And in their budget resolution they are bringing to the floor, another $25 billion next year. Fiscal responsibility is the last thing you could say to describe this bill. I urge rejection of this motion.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. I think the gentleman mentioned something about sunsetting taxes. If my memory serves me, having served on the Ways and Means at the time that bill was written, all tax bills which originate in the Ways and Means Committee in the House were permanent. It was the Democrat Party in the Senate that made it temporary, that put in, because of a cloture vote, put the temporary nature of the tax cuts in. The tax cuts sunset in 2012 because of the Byrd rule and because we did not have sufficient numbers of the Democrat Party at the time vote for cloture so that we could make these tax cuts permanent.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I simply want to rise to say that the bill that just passed, which I actually supported because I think it was the right thing to do constitutionally, and just good government, it violated PAYGO for 2 hours. So what we have here is a too-cute-by-half PAYGO fix. And it is my hope that when the majority brings new bills to the floor that the bills themselves will be fixed with respect to PAYGO. This rule tactic that is being deployed, I think, denied the minority rights to have the kinds of motions to recommit that the minority traditionally has been given. But more importantly, this really is a violation of PAYGO. It is fixed now because it was broken just a minute ago. It is a half-hearted attempt for the majority to submit to their own rules. The PAYGO principle of pay-as-you-go ought to apply every minute, every second, every hour. If you believe in it, don't make it just apply for 2 hours and then bring it back an hour later just because you want to deny the minority an ability to have an effective motion to recommit. I would be happy to yield to the leader.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, the battle of ideas is alive and well here in the House of Representatives where we have two different parties with two different philosophies; and nowhere is that more clear than in the budget debate that is occurring today. In the budget that passed the House before the Easter recess, the majority passed the largest tax increase in American history. I just held 34 town hall meetings in my First Congressional District of Wisconsin, and my constituents are telling me they don't want to see the per-child tax credit get cut in half. They don't want to see the marriage penalty come back. They don't want to see income tax rates raised across the board. They don't want to see the death tax come back in full force. The tax cuts that passed in 2001 and 2003 created 7.6 million new jobs. We don't need tax increases; but, unfortunately, the budget that the majority passed here does just that. It gets rid of all of that tax relief that created all of these jobs, and it gives the American people the largest tax increase in American history. I think it is wrong. We on this side of the aisle, the minority, we believe in a different path: Balance the budget by controlling spending and keep taxes low. That's the way to go, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Madam Chairman, at this time I would like to address why we are here today. We are here to balance the budget, and what is very good about this debate we are having here today is we are talking about not if we should balance the budget; we are talking about how to balance the budget. So for that point we have come to a good part of this debate, where I believe, based on the numbers I have seen, all of these amendments we are going to experience today and the base Democrat budget balances by 2012. That is a good start. So now we here in Congress are agreeing, let us balance the budget. That is good. The question then becomes how do we balance the budget. This is where there are enormous differences between the two parties. The three budgets on the other side of the aisle, the Progressive budget, the Congressional Black Caucus budget and the base Democrat budget, all have one big thing in common: they raise taxes. They raise a lot of taxes, anywhere from $400 billion to $1 trillion just over the next 5 years. What kind of taxes are we talking about? Well, let's look at the tax relief that occurred. In 2003, if you take a look at what happened to our country in 2001 with 9/11, with the Enron scandals, with the dot- com bubble bursting, the fact that we went to war and we went into a recession, we lost a lot of jobs. We were losing over 100,000 jobs a month at that time. We went into a recession. Three years of revenues declined. We had a big deficit. So while revenues went down because people lost jobs, we went into deficit and spending went up. Why? Because we had unemployment. We had programs to help people who lost their jobs. We had war costs, and so what ended up happening was we needed to get people back to work. We needed to get this economy growing again. So what did we do? At that time, we were in the majority. We decided we needed a package of reforms, of tax cuts to get the economy growing again, to get people working again. So we cut taxes on families, cut taxes on small businesses, cut taxes on business investment. What happened? 7.6 million new jobs were created since those tax cuts in 2003. We went from growing our economy at an anemic 1.1 percent prior to the tax cuts to growing our economy at an average of 3.5 percent. We went to creating about 160,000 jobs per month since those tax cuts. What also happened? Revenues went up. Revenues went up for double digits the 2 years following. This year so far the revenues are up about 10 percent. So revenues came in, why? Because we actually cut taxes. We have lower tax rates, but we have higher revenues because people went back to work. People went to work, to jobs and paid more taxes. What happened? The deficit went as high as $412 billion. Now it is as low as $176 billion. I would like to say that it is because we did a great job on controlling spending. No, that is not the case. The reason the deficit for the most part went down is because revenues went up, because the economy grew, people went back to work, paid their taxes. So, Madam Chairman, we do not have a revenue problem in Washington. Revenues are coming in fast. We have a spending problem in Washington, and this is the difference between our philosophies, our budgets. We believe that the money people make really is their money, not the government's money. We believe that when someone starts a business, when someone goes to work, that is the fruit of their own labor and they ought to keep more of their hard-earned money, because at the end of the day, if government takes more money out of the person's paycheck, you are taking more freedom out of their lives. If you take more money out of a family budget, you are taking more freedom away from that family. That is the difference. We believe that people ought to keep more of what they earn. We believe that small businesses, which are the engine of economic growth in this society, which create all these jobs, should not be taxed at tax rates higher than large corporations, but that is what will happen if any of these three budgets pass, if the Progressive budget, the Congressional Black Caucus budget, or the Democrat budget passes. We believe that we need to focus on spending and not on raising taxes, because more important than that, I want to show you one chart, Madam Chairman. If you take a look at these revenue lines, even if we take the low line, the blue line, that is the line of revenues coming in if we don't raise taxes. That is the line the Republicans are using for our budget, and we balance our budget by controlling spending instead of raising taxes, and we control spending to the point where we stop the raid on the Social Security trust fund and we pay down $100 billion in debt in the fifth year alone. The red line, not much higher, but the red line says, let's raise taxes by $400 billion. That is the smallest of the tax increases we are looking at of these budgets today. That still shows, but it is a lot lower than the green line, the spending line. Spending is the problem. If we do nothing to control spending, by the time my children are my age, the Federal Government will double in size simply by growing on the current path that it is on. This has to be dealt with, Madam Chairman. This has to be dealt with, and no matter how much you propose to raise taxes, no matter how much you want to raise taxes on small businesses, take away the per-child tax credit, bring back the marriage penalty, reinstate the death tax, raise taxes on businesses and capital investment and seniors and dividends and capital gains, no matter how much you want to raise taxes here, if you pass one of these other three budgets, we still will not have enough to meet the spending line, the spending appetite, the spending trajectory of this Federal Government. That has to be dealt with. Why does that have to be dealt with? Because we do not want to pass onto our children and our grandchildren a mountain of debt. The debt has increased. Sadly, over the last 8 years, it went up $3 trillion. I think you are going to hear that from other people. I have got news for you, Madam Chairman, just Social Security alone by doing nothing to address this program over the next 5 years, that debt will go up by $3 trillion. Medicare, if we do not address Medicare's growth, if we do not reform and maintain and save Medicare, the debt to just Medicare will go up almost $20 trillion over the next 5 years by doing nothing. So, Madam Chairman, let's not raise taxes. Let's work on spending, and let's reform these programs. I want to reserve the balance of my time, but I want to say one thing before I do, and that is these three programs which we commonly refer to as our entitlements are the most important domestic programs in the Federal Government. Medicare helps people who are an older age get health care. Medicaid helps people who are low income get health care. Really, really important missions, Madam Chairman. And Social Security helps provide people with retirement security. These programs are too important to let slip into bankruptcy. These programs are too important to go for five more years without any reforms designed to extend their solvency and make them work better and be more responsive to the needs of the American people. I think that is where we should place our efforts. Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. May I inquire about the time allotment remaining between the two parties.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Madam Chair, this is an important moment for our time of fiscal responsibility in America. I would like to read from a few quotes. We have had great hearings in the Budget Committee. I want to compliment the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) for holding great hearings. In all of these hearings, we had fiscal experts coming to testify from both parties, from nonpartisan organizations like the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office, from the Federal Reserve. I would like to read a few quotes about the fiscal condition that is staring us in the face that this budget should be addressing today. On the urgency of entitlement reform, we had Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, come in and say, ``Without early and meaningful action to address entitlements, the U.S. economy could be seriously weakened, with future generations bearing much of the cost.'' Then we had the Comptroller General, Mr. Walker, on 60 Minutes say, ``Health care is the number one fiscal challenge for the Federal and State governments. If there is one thing that can bankrupt America, it is health care. We need dramatic and fundamental health care reforms.'' That's at a hearing. On 60 Minutes, he said, ``The rising cost of government entitlements is a fiscal cancer that threatens catastrophic consequences for our country and could bankrupt America.'' Here is what Mr. Walker is talking about. If you take a look at this chart, it shows you that, consistently, our government has been taxing the American economy at about 18 percent of our gross domestic product. What that means is, basically, since about 1960, to finance our Federal government, we have had to tax the American economy, families, businesses, all those things, at about 18 percent of our economic output. It has been remarkably consistent. Because of the unsustainable growth of government spending programs, of our entitlement programs, they are growing at such a quick pace that by the time my 5-, 3-, and 2-year-olds are in my age bracket, they will have to tax the American economy at 40 percent just to pay the bills. Let me put it another way around. We have very important programs. We call them our entitlement programs. They meet critical missions of the Federal Government. When they were set up, they made sense at the time the way they were financed. They were called pay-as-you-go. Current workers pay taxes, particularly payroll taxes, to pay the benefits for current retirees, for current beneficiaries. It worked fine for many years. Not now, though. Because as the baby boomers begin to retire, which begins next year, we will double the amount of retirees in this country; and we will only increase the amount of workers coming to this country by 17 percent. For all of those who had kids during that baby boom generation, they had a lot of kids; and it was wonderful. Our birth rates went up. But, since then, we haven't had as many kids. Heck, in my own hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, where I come from an Irish Catholic family, I had 65 cousins in just Janesville, Wisconsin. But I am a Generation Xer; and at my family level, we didn't have as many kids. That is what is happening across the world and across the country. Why am I saying all of this? What did it mean? It means that these programs are going to double the amount of consumers to the programs and not double the amount of payers into the programs. We have to reform these programs. We have to make them work better, and we have got to prevent our kids from having their taxes doubled. That is what this is about at the end of the day, Madam Chair. It is about our children and our grandchildren. Now, this seems to be a cliche thing that everybody says when they get up to a microphone. But, quite honestly, if we don't get a handle on our fiscal situation, if we don't recognize the fact that if all you do is raise taxes to balance the budget in 2012, you are going to go right back into deficit soon thereafter if we don't control spending, if we don't reform government, if we don't fix our entitlement perhaps. If we don't do this, the debt we have today will pale, pale in comparison to the debt we are going to be passing on to our children and our grandchildren. We have new economic challenges and threats unlike any we have ever seen before in this country. We don't have oceans that separate us anymore. We have broadband, Internet, digital technology. We have to compete with workers on a daily basis from countries like China and India overnight. We have real economic challenges facing us, and we can't survive and thrive in this era of globalization. We can't continue to be America's economic superpower, the world's economic superpower, if we are going to double the taxes on future generations. You can't tax your way into prosperity. We already today tax our businesses, our capital, more than any other country in the industrialized world except for one, Japan. They just finished two decades of recession. We have got to wise up to the fact that we have to be lean and mean and compete with China and India and these other countries. We have got to make sure that the way we run our health care system works for patients, that the way we have our entitlement benefits gives us income security, retirement security, health security. We have got to make sure that it doesn't do it in such a way that it literally doubles the entire tax burden on the American economy, on the American family. If we do that, we will push more jobs overseas. We will lose our standard of living, the great gift of America of a generation to the next. The legacy of the American Dream is that each generation bequeaths unto the next a higher and better standard of living. That is exactly what my parents and grandparents told me. We are at risk of severing that tie. We are at risk of discontinuing that legacy of giving our kids and our grandkids a better standard of living, a better economy, things better off than when we found them. Budgets matter, and the budget that we have before us today, whether it's the CBC budget, the Progressive budget or the Democrat budget, raises taxes by anywhere from $400 billion to $1 trillion over the next 4 years and does absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing to control spending, to reform government, to prevent this mountain of debt going onto our children's backs. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Madam Chair, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Madam Chair, I reserve the right to close, and I think that they still have more speakers, so I will just reserve my time.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Madam Chair, I will address the House for the remainder of my time from the well.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the remainder of the time. Here it comes, Mr. Chairman, the closing of this debate. We have heard it all. We have heard the quotes: these cuts are so deep, so extreme about the Republican budget. Well, let's just see how deep and extreme these cuts are. Instead of spending over the next 5 years $14.976 trillion, our budget proposes $14.928 trillion over the next 5 years. Instead of growing entitlement spending at 4.7 percent a year, we will grow it at 4.1 percent a year. What do we accomplish with this? What do we do with that? We balance the budget without raising taxes. We stop the raid on the Social Security trust fund and we pay down debt. That is what we accomplish with our budget. What do the Democrats accomplish? No matter how they spin it, no matter how they duck it, no matter how they hide, they are raising taxes. Don't ask me. Just look at The Washington Post that said: ``And while the House Democrats say they want to preserve key parts of Bush's signature tax cuts, they project a surplus by 2012 only by assuming that all of these tax cuts go away.'' Meet the new Democrat majority, Mr. Chairman, the same as the old Democrat majority. And the last time they had the majority in 1993, what did they do? They passed the largest tax increase in American history, $241 billion. Now, 3\1/2\ months into the new majority, what are they planning to do? Passing the largest tax increase in American history, about $400 billion. Is that to control spending or something like that? No. They are engaging on a gorge of new spending. $50 billion is already being thrown out the door just this year, and it is not even April into their new majority. Mr. Chairman, this is a direction. This is a choice between two visions. Do we or do we not let people keep more of their own hard- earned money? Or do we just keep taxing them more and more and more and spending more and more and more? That is the choice. We believe in the people. We believe people should keep more of their own money. We believe people should keep their child tax credit. We don't want to tax people for being married. We believe small businesses should be taxed no more than large corporations. We believe seniors ought to be able to enjoy their retirement savings. We believe in preserving, saving, and enhancing our entitlement programs by extending their solvency. What are they going to do? They are hastening the demise of our entitlements, they are accelerating the bankruptcy of these programs, and they are giving us the largest tax increase in American history. Like it or not, the numbers are clear. You can reserve fund everything you want, you can put any wish list you want in a piece of legislation, but numbers don't lie. And the numbers are crystal clear and they tell the truth: this budget, the Democrat budget, gives us the largest tax increase in American history, and the Republican budget keeps taxes low, and it balances the budget by controlling spending and it stops the raid on the Social Security trust fund and it pays down debt. Pass the Republican budget. Defeat the Democrat budget.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Chairman, as I yield to my friend from Michigan, I will note that Illinois taxpayers will pay $3,282 higher every year. That hits 4,731,000 Illinois taxpayers budgets under their budget. I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Chair, I yield myself 10 seconds, as I yield to our minority leader, simply to say the gentleman from Maryland comes from a State which under their budget will see an average household tax increase of $3,238 per household. This will affect 2,259,000 Maryland taxpayers. At this time, Mr. Chairman, I would like to yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Missouri, the minority whip (Mr. Blunt).

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining on each side.

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Chairman, isn't the gentleman supposed to address the Chair, not specific Members?

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to a member of our leadership, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Cantor).

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence). (Mr. PENCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin

Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin. Madam Speaker, the Democrat budget raises taxes, plain and simple. You can cite all of these other groups that say one thing or another, but the group that counts is the Congressional Budget Office. That is the official scorekeeping agency that measures our budgets. And according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Democrat budget provides for the largest tax increase in American history. Either that, or they don't balance the budget. They can't have it both ways. They are saying they balance the budget, and the only way they balance the budget is by raising taxes, cutting the child tax credit in half, bringing back the marriage tax penalty, bringing back the death tax, raising tax rates across the board on all income tax payers, repealing the 10 percent for low-income Americans, bringing back higher tax rates on capital gains and dividends which create jobs and help seniors save. In fact, if their tax plan comes to fruition, if they actually accomplish what they are seeking to accomplish, they will tax the small businesses of America at higher tax rates than the largest corporations in America. Madam Speaker, these tax cuts created jobs. They created 7.6 million jobs. Don't raise taxes.