Scalise: This Is the First Step In Restoring Fiscal Sanity In Washington

Press Release

Tonight, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) joined Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), House Republican Chief Deputy Whip Guy Reschenthaler (R-Penn.), House Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), and Congressman Garret Graves (R-La.) to celebrate the passage of H.R. 3746, the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Leader Scalise celebrated the bill as the first step in correcting the country's financial tailspin driven by the Biden Administration's out-of-control spending.

Click here or the image above to view Leader Scalise's remarks.

Leader Scalise's remarks:

"Nobody said it would be easy to break Washington's out-of-control spending pattern. It's been going on for decades. If you look at the spending curve -- just how much money every year -- Washington has been spending more than it takes in. And for years and years, people would say, "Somewhere it's gonna start, where they turn the ship or they start righting the ship. Where we finally start cutting spending.'

"It never happened. Republican [and] Democrat administrations failed, and tonight we took the first step. A bill that actually cuts real-dollar spending next year compared to what it was this year. That's an important critical first start. Yet it's just the beginning. This is by far not the end. It is the beginning of changing the pattern of spending in Washington, and make no mistake: if [Congresswoman] Pelosi was still Speaker and the Democrats were in charge, we wouldn't be having a conversation about how much we cut. The conversation would be about how much more did Washington vote to spend [and] how many more taxes [President] Biden put on the hardworking families of America? Because that's what President Biden wanted to do. He made it crystal clear, not just to Speaker McCarthy, but he actually talked about it publicly. He wanted more taxes, even though he's passed over a trillion dollars in new taxes, and that tax-and-spend burden over the last two years is one of the reasons why families are struggling today. Why inflation is running -- skyrocketing -- out of control today.

"It wasn't until Speaker McCarthy said, "That day is over. No taxes. In fact, no new spending.' We're finally going to start negotiating about how much to cut. How much to save for the American people. How much can we finally get our country turned around and start growing the economy. And this bill contains components of all of those elements. Real cuts in spending. But if you look at some of those important factors, just over a billion dollars in the [Internal Revenue Service]. President Biden wanted to more than double the agency, and [the Congressional Budget Office] confirmed it was going to be going after lower-income families. People [who] are single moms [and] working two jobs [were] going to be paying more, and we finally started to reverse that trend.

"Real work requirements. You want to talk about something that's going to help change the culture of this country -- getting people back to work, at a time when everybody is looking for workers -- you know, people think it is psychotic [that] the federal government is borrowing money from countries like China to pay people not to work when everyone is looking for workers. And not only do these work requirements help restore the dignity of work, but these work requirements will help strengthen programs like Social Security and Medicare that are so vital to us and so important to those people who earned those benefits. Yet when President Biden started paying millions of more people to sit on the sidelines -- to turn down work and still get over 35,000 [dollars] a year in benefits -- they're not paying into Social Security. They're not paying into Medicare. That's one of the reasons why those programs are going towards bankruptcy under President Biden.

"We reverse that trend by strengthening important programs like Social Security and Medicare. A lot of other important provisions in this bill, but again, this is the first step. This is a down payment on the other things that we are going to start doing, but none of those things would be possible if we didn't start tonight and the action that was taken in this House by this majority."

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