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This bill contains a more than $1 trillion increase in the federal debt ceiling. Raising the debt ceiling should be accompanied by measures to cut spending so that such an increase would not be necessary in future. Instead, this bill merely contains a "pay-as-you-go" procedure which Congress can easily ignore and which does nothing to address the current record spending levels.
The HIRE Act massively increases federal highway spending and other spending in order to supposedly stimulate the economy, operating under the Keynesian fallacy that a country can spend its way to prosperity. This bill will create few private sector jobs, while burdening our economy with still more deficit spending.
This resolution is the House "Rule" that would allow consideration of the "reconciliation" bill, H.R. 4872. The reconciliation bill would make the recently passed health care legislation even worse by enacting massive tax increases and creating still more new government bureaucracies in order to support it.
This is the vote on the final passage of ObamaCare. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act neither protects patients nor provides affordable care. It would kill jobs, drive up the price of health care, bankrupt the government, and ruin the world's best health care system. The bill also contains an unconstitutional individual mandate, which forces everyone to either purchase health care or pay a penalty, violating our individual liberty.
The reconciliation bill makes the terrible health care legislation recently enacted even worse with more job killing tax hikes, harsher penalties, and new government bureaucracies. This bill also builds a massive new student loan bureaucracy by essentially nationalizing the student loan industry.
This key vote is on the motion to concur in Senate amendments. The reconciliation bill makes the terrible health care legislation recently enacted even worse with more job killing tax hikes, harsher penalties, and new government bureaucracies. The reconciliation bill also builds a massive new student loan bureaucracy by nationalizing the student loan industry.
The American Workers, State, and Business Relief Act of 2010 contains several tax hikes that impose significant costs on businesses and threaten job creation. One undesirable tax increase included in the bill is the elimination of the punitive damages tax deduction. Another added tax increase is a new tax on carried interest.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act would impose new mandates, fees, and regulations on the nation's financial services sector and create a permanent $150 billion Wall Street bailout fund. Although it claims to prevent another financial meltdown like that of 2008, this bill actually institutionalizes the very financial practices and moral hazard that led to the crisi in the first place. It also creates a massive new regulatory apparatus with several agencies, such as the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), that have sweeping new powers but are generally unaccountable to Congress and the American public.
The Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2010 would extend unemployment benefits to November 30th for the long-term jobless. It would not boost job growth and it would add to our skyrocketing national debt.
This would make emergency supplemental appropriations for disaster relief and summer jobs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, and for other purposes. This bill would add to our national debt.
This bill would further tax and impose harmful regulations on oil and gas producers and removes the legal liability cap for offshore operators.
This bill in its present form would authorize over $26 billion for an "education jobs fund", and would extend continue increased funding for the "Federal Medical Assistance Percentages" for Medicaid. The "pay-for" for this bill is a $9.6 billion tax increase, and even with the tax hike the bill would still add billions to our the nation's deficit spending.
The Small Business Lending Fund Act of 2010 would allocate $30 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to a new fund for financial institutions with less than $10 billion in assets. The legislation would also create a new $2 billion federal program to encourage states to develop initiatives to increase access to capital for small businesses.
This bill is the vehicle for reauthorizing the Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which were set to expire at the end of 2010. However, the bill would allow the tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest tiers of income earners - a bad policy at any time, but even worse at a time when the economy is recovering from a recession. The bill would also reinstate the death tax. Soaking the rich will not fund our excessive government spending, and will further harm a precariously shaky economy.
H.R. 3082 would fund the government for the next ten months at current 2010 levels. With Congress failing to pass any of the required 12 annual appropriation bills, leaders have opted to put forth a massive $1.1 trillion continuing resolution that includes a number of costly provisions.
This spending bill would double authorized funding levels for scientific research agencies within ten years. Research and development are best left to the academy and the marketplace, instead of allowing the government to potentially use taxpayer dollars to favor research that suits a political agenda.
The FDA Food "Safety" Modernization Act would grant the federal government unprecedented control over our diets while not making our food any safer. The bill imposes new regulations upon farmers and other food producers and also requires the government to hire a troop thousands of new bureaucrats to enforce the new rules. They will be funded by "such sums as may be necessary." Besides wasting taxpayer dollars directly, the cost of producers complying with these new regulations will simply be passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices. Outbreaks of food-borne illnesses have decreased dramatically in frequency in recent decades, and there is simply no need for such an intrusive and expensive new set of regulations on food safety.
H.R. 3082 would fund the government for the next ten months at current 2010 levels. With Congress failing to pass any of the required 12 annual appropriation bills, leaders have opted to put forth a massive $1.1 trillion continuing resolution that includes a number of costly provisions.
The Paycheck Fairness Act would enforce more strictly the wage provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in order to address a perceived wage "gender gap". Instead, its provisions are an invitation to increase lawsuits with no end in sight for compensation. We should not be heaping more financial burdens on our business institutions and taking away the power of employers to make sound personnel decisions - all because of a misunderstood statistic.
This bill would amend Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to permit discrimination claims against employers well outside of the current statute of 180 days. This presents a radical departure from current anti-discrimination laws. Doing away with any practical statute of limitations, which has been considered a just practice in courts for centuries, opens the flood gates to a river of frivolous lawsuits.
The $700 billion in Wall Street bailout funds authorized by TARP was a bad policy in its own right, and the actual use of those funds has been even more troubling. The "TARP Reform and Accountability Act" fails to adequately protect these taxpayer funds or safeguard how they are being used. This motion to recommit would have stopped the unused $350 billion in TARP funding from being spent at all, and would have forced the Treasury Department to submit a repayment plan for those bailout funds which have already been spent.
This legislation calls for spending an additional $33 billion over the next five years to expand coverage under the S-CHIP program. At a time when our nation is facing record-breaking deficits in the trillions of dollars, expanding autopilot spending programs should not be on the agenda.
This bill would create $787 billion in new government spending on projects designed to stimulate an economic recovery. It is neither the government's role, nor is it within its ability, to spend the economy into prosperity. This stimulus package merely spends a fortune in taxpayers' hard-earned money to give away to whatever special interests are best able to claim that they can "create jobs".
This bill to fund the federal government contains a whopping 80 percent spending increase and is packed with earmarks and sweeping policy changes. Altogether, this omnibus bill increases government spending at more than double the rate of inflation and almost triple the rate of median growth in household incomes. With budget deficits already running at record highs, this bill just accelerates Washington's already out-of-control spending.
This legislation allows bankruptcy judges to modify home mortgages - including reducing principal - rather than leaving those business decisions in the hands of the banks and lenders who own the homes. The act modifies the Hope for Homeowners program by removing the taxpayer protections in place, making it easier for those who took mortgages they could not afford to receive a taxpayer-funded bailout.
This amendment sought to remove all Davis-Bacon prevailing wage provisions from the 2009 water resources bill. Davis-Bacon is a leftover from the New Deal era which costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year because it requires government contractors to pay "local prevailing wages" for every project, which really means letting expensive union labor receive the contracts regardless of other competition.
Their budget taxes too much, spends too much, and borrows too much. And, potentially worst of all, it would open the door for socialized medicine and a massive energy tax to be enacted later this year without substantial debate through the reconciliation process.
The bill includes a $100 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. The bill contains funding for other projects that should not be used as a vehicle to ram IMF funding through Congress. Using this method to get the IMF funding passed is dirty Washington politics and law makers should reject it.
This legislation marks a radical increase in power for the Food and Drug Administration over the tobacco industry, and another attempt by a parental government to make citizens' health choices for them.
The bill includes a $100 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. The bill contains funding for other projects that should not be used as a vehicle to ram IMF funding through Congress. Using this method to get the IMF funding passed is dirty Washington politics and law makers should reject it.
The Waxman-Markey energy bill calls for a “cap-and-trade” system for the regulation of greenhouse gases, and is, in essence, a massive tax on all energy use. The resulting spike in energy costs would devastate the economy across the board, and would particularly harm lower-income individuals, who would have even less money to spend on steadily rising electric and heating bills.
This bill introduces federal control of employee compensation to a degree that is both constitutionally questionable and has no place in a market economy. Perhaps most startling about this bill is that the new mandates it establishes on the private sector are so broad and ill-defined that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is unable to determine just how much these rules will cost the economy, making it impossible to conduct a cost-benefit analysis.
The bill would essentially provide an endless line of credit to college students, as well as greatly increasing the amount given out through Pell Grants. Guaranteeing students access to free, easy loans on grants will encourage them to take on more debt that they cannot afford, while colleges will continue to raise their tuition to match the flow of government money. This bill further expands the massive student loan debt bubble, which - like the housing bubble before it - will eventually burst.
(Note: this was the original version of ObamaCare, later passed as H.R. 3590.) This comprehensive government takeover of health care saddles hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes upon the American people. The bill contains an unconstitutional individual mandate forcing people to buy health insurance simply because they exist. Instead of making health care more affordable, this bill's mandates and regulations will massively increase the cost of everyone's health insurance and reduce the quality of care over time.
This bill contains the "doc fix" that Congress passes annually in order to keep Medicare payments to doctors from sharply decreasing. While the doc fix may be necessary in order to keep doctors from opting out of seeing Medicare patients, this bill would cost $200 billion over ten years, with no spending reforms to offset its huge expense. Separating this bill from the main comprehensive health care reform bill is thus a fundamentally dishonest attempt to hide the true costs of the massive health care takeover being discussed in Congress, and to kick the problem of Medicare reform down the road yet again.
While this bill claims to enact "permanent estate tax relief", the legislation puts in place a permanent 45 percent tax on estates over $3.5 million. A 45 percent tax is a dramatic tax increase over the zero percent death tax that will be in place in 2010, when death is scheduled to no longer be a taxable event.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010, or so-called “minibus” would combine six of the seven remaining appropriations bills to fund nine Cabinet departments to the tune of $447 billion and $600 billion in funding for Medicare and Medicaid for a total of $1.1 trillion; a 13% increase over FY 2009 and a 25% increase over FY 2008.
This motion to recommit would have amended the Dodd-Frank bill to fully repeal the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and to reduce the national debt limit by an amount corresponding to the hundreds of billions that would be saved by TARP's repeal.
The "Dodd-Frank" bill not only fails in its stated goal of reining in the risky lending that led to the current fiscal crisis, it actually institutionalizes the practice of bailing out banks deemed to be "too big to fail". By telling Wall Street banks that irresponsible lending will be rewarded by government bailouts, this bill almost guarantees another financial bubble and collapse in the future.