CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS ALTERNATIVE BUDGET, FY2016

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the Congressional Black Caucus budget, which is a more credible and responsible alternative than the underlying Republican budget.

A nation's budget reflects its priorities, but the Republican budget continues to highlight the wrong priorities. The underlying Republican budget is not a serious plan. It contains trillions of dollars in tax cuts, but claims to be revenue neutral, without showing a dime's worth of tax increases that will be necessary to make it revenue neutral.

It includes trillions of dollars in unspecified cuts, and many of the specified cuts will not be made. For example, are we really going to repeal Medicare as we know it?

If you actually believe that the Republican majority will carry out their plan, it would actually devastate

our economy by balancing the budget on the backs of students, workers, seniors, the disabled, and vulnerable communities across the Nation.

The Republican budget assumes that sequestration cuts will be enacted and then adds an additional $759 billion in nondefense discretionary spending cuts. That is the part of the budget that invests in education, workforce training, scientific research, transportation, and infrastructure.

In stark contrast to the Republican budget, the Congressional Black Caucus budget actually puts real numbers on the page. We show our arithmetic. The CBC budget proposes $2.7 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade, but our budget lays out $5.6 trillion in specific revenue options and loophole closings that Congress could adopt to achieve that goal.

With this additional revenue, we eliminate sequestration; we propose a $500 billion jobs package that will put millions of people back to work, and we include more than $300 billion above the President's budget for significant and sustained investments in programs that have been instrumental in lifting millions of Americans out of poverty.

Our budget also calls for a raise in the minimum wage, adds a public option to the health insurance marketplace, and calls for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform. Factoring in the paid-for elimination of sequestration, our revenue enhancements, CBO's analysis of the deficit reduction impacts of both enacting a public option and comprehensive immigration reform, our budget credibly reduces the 10-year deficit by $1.9 trillion when compared to CBO's March baseline.

Mr. Chairman, our budget is a credible alternative to the vague and unrealistic plan offered by our Republican colleagues, and I urge my colleagues to support the CBC budget.