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Rep. Brad Miller votes against Republican spending bill
Story Date: 2/21/2011
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Source: Press Release, 2/19/11
The U.S. House of Representatives voted today on H.R.1: The Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011, a bill which would fund the federal government through December 31, 2011. Rep. Brad Miller (NC-13) cast a “no” vote on this bill.
“Much of the bill is obviously not about whether government is big or small, but whose side government is on.” Rep. Miller said. The bill cuts dramatically funding for public education, Head Start, and the new bureau designed to protect middle class families from the financial tricks and the traps that got us into this financial mess. We had a choice before we got where we are today, and Republicans chose to extend tax cuts for millionaires over supporting the middle class.”
The following is the complete text of Rep. Miller’s remarks on the House floor during debate of this bill:
Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose this bill and the priorities and values it represents.
Republicans repeat like robots the same talking points, that to get our debt under control, middle class families have to suck it up. Our economic problems, Republicans tell us, are because the middle class has it too good. So they say we have no choice but to cut public education drastically, along with head start for the children who otherwise would start kindergarten too far behind ever to catch up, job training for workers who’ve lost their jobs, Pell Grants so middle class kids can afford a college education, research at the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, and on and on.
Mr. Speaker, just a decade ago the debate here was what to do with the surplus. Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, worried that it might unsettle the economy if we paid off the national debt too quickly. President Clinton argued that we could use the surplus to shore up Social Security, so that my generation could live in dignity and security when we retire.
A Republican President and a Republican Congress decided instead to cut sharply taxes for the richest of the rich.
And we saw last year that protecting those tax cuts for the richest of the rich, even Americans making more than $1 million a year, was their first priority.
So now Congress is voting to kick 200,000 kids out of Head Start so that those Americans who worked and strived to be conceived to the right parents will pay little in inheritance taxes.
Now Congress is voting to fire 17,000 teachers and special educators, so Americans making more than $1 million a year will not have to pay the taxes they would have paid in the nineties.
And much of the bill is obviously not about whether government is big or small, but whose side government is on. The bill cuts drastically the funding to protect middle class families from the gouging that has lurked in the legalese, the fine print of financial contracts, the tricks and the traps, written by banks’ lawyers.
We have seen clusters of rare cancers and birth defects that we know are the result of environmental exposure to something, and this bill devastates environmental protection. Middle class children face life with lower IQs because of environmental exposures so polluters can have bigger profits and CEOs can reward themselves with bigger bonuses.
Many of my colleagues have argued that this bill is short sighted, penny wise and pound foolish, and it is, at least for the middle class. Many have argued that this bill is bad for the struggling economy, and it is.
But I am most disturbed that this bill represents values that are incompatible with those I learned at my mother’s knee, the values of generations of Americans, the values of the faith traditions of most Americans, the values that have been the glue that held our nation together in tough times, that to whom much is given, much is required.
I will vote no.
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