‘They Will Raise Your Taxes’: Marshall Slams Dem Colleagues: ‘That Is Their Solution To Everything’

4 months ago

Before the Congressional recess, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) questioned CBO Director Philip Swagel on debt during a Senate Budget Committee hearing.

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Transcript

00:00Thank you Senator Marshall for your courtesy to Senator Padilla. It is now

00:04your floor. Thank you Mr. Chairman and welcome Dr. Swigle. If there's one thing

00:08clear from this meeting it's that my friends across the aisle have promised

00:14they will raise your taxes. That that is their solution to everything is to raise

00:18your taxes. Folks we don't have a taxing problem in this government. We have a

00:24spending problem. The tax the Trump tax cuts demonstrated that if you lower

00:30taxes it grows the economy and increases the tax revenue. It's a rising tide

00:38raising all boats. I think it's quite evident no one can argue that. It's

00:42unarguable. But what's not arguable is that that indeed that these tax cuts

00:50have worked in the past. Dr. Swigle let me ask you do you ever review your work

00:56in the past? Do you go back and look at the last ten years and say what

01:00percentage were we off on our scores? We do. We go back and for you know for major

01:06legislation and analyze what in terms of what we got right and what we got wrong.

01:09Over the last ten years what what does your score sheet look like in speaking

01:12in general? So we compare ourselves to other major forecasters and we do pretty

01:19well. There's some things that we've. No you don't do well. You just missed the

01:22the deficit this year by half a trillion dollars. That's not doing well. I just

01:29don't you think you're off 10, 20, 30, 40 percent on most of the big numbers? Right

01:34so from from February to June the deficit went up by 27 percent mainly

01:38because of actions taken by the administration. And so there's student

01:42loans, the FDIC, actions on Medicaid that right we're providing you with the

01:47current law. So through executive fiat they added goodness three or four true

01:52goodness I guess it's about a trillion dollars. That's right between

01:57student loans and the other pieces there's a you know several hundred

02:01billion dollars. Would you have the ability to score if we did our job if we

02:08followed the Budget Act of 1974 and all the additions where the president

02:13submitted a budget on time if we did a meaningful bipartisan Senate budget

02:18resolution and and we went back to regular order and the House did their

02:23job would if we did a real budget would that have impact on how much money we

02:29spend and is that something you could help generate a CBO score for? I mean we

02:34would certainly support the Congress in doing that. It's hard to say what the

02:40outcome would be you know of regular order would certainly you certainly be a

02:45change but I can't tell you what the you know what the fiscal certainly it works

02:49in the private sector to do a meaningful budget and then use that as the

02:52blueprint and not allow an administration to tack on like you just

02:57mentioned almost a trillion dollars of unsuspected spending through executive

03:01fiat and which is unconstitutional the way they did it. As we mentioned before

03:06the 2024 budget deficit is going to be two trillion dollars. We're going to spend two

03:12trillion more than we take in in this year. The administration added 2.1

03:17trillion with the American Rescue Plan another 800 billion dollar with the

03:21Inflation Stimulation Act people call it the Inflation Reduction Act is actually

03:25inflationary as well as over another trillion unilaterally as you mentioned

03:29through executive actions the student loans 400 billion. They redefined the

03:35Thrifty Plan and another 300 billion dollars and then they did some voodoo

03:41with the ACA and another 300 billion dollars as well. I want to talk about

03:47SNAP for a second. We're in the middle of trying to write a farm bill and I'm

03:51concerned about the politics at play and scoring a piece of legislation that's

03:54extremely important to everybody. You know a farm bill 85% of a farm bill is

03:58SNAP payments, nutritional programs. The largest part of the farm bill also has

04:05the highest fraud rate and the error rate. There's been an annual overpayment

04:09rate of 10% stopping the error rates, stopping the fraud, stopping the

04:15overpayments result in nearly 100 billion dollars in savings to the SNAP

04:19program over the next 10 years. So if we get rid of the fraud and abuse and

04:24errors it would save a hundred billion dollars over ten years. Do you believe

04:27that fixing the error rate and SNAP would be a cut to the program? In sense

04:32it would make sure that the beneficiaries who are supposed to get

04:35the benefits are getting them and you know not other people. Okay. The

04:40bipartisan farm bill is passed out the House Ag Committee has a provision in

04:43the nutrition title which preserves SNAP benefits and ensures that benefits can

04:48modestly increase with the cost of living. Now my friends across the aisle

04:53in the Senate are calling these provisions the largest cut to SNAP in

04:56history. In you in your opinion do you consider this a cut? So you know after we

05:04saw what the administration did with the changes to the thrifty food plan we then

05:08had to assume that in the future there could be such large increases again and

05:13I said I said before that was about 200 to 250 billion dollars of additional

05:18costs and so that gets built into the baseline. What the House has done is

05:21scaled that back and so there's a sense in which they're preventing a future

05:26administration from doing the kind of increase that that was done. But net net

05:31at the end of the day we're gonna be spending more money on SNAP in the

05:34future than we are today. That's correct. Thank you.

‘They Will Raise Your Taxes’: Marshall Slams Dem Colleagues: ‘That Is Their Solution To Everything’

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