President’s Budget Makes Critical Investments and Difficult Choices

Washington, DC – Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn. -3) issued the following statement on President Barack Obama's budget outline for fiscal year 2010.

President Obama has put forward a responsible budget that recognizes the challenges we face and the difficult decisions critical to get our country back on track. It restores fiscal responsibility, while also making investments critical to our future.

The President inherited a mess – an economy in the midst of the worst recession since the great depression and a growing deficit – a result of mistaken policies and eight years of irresponsibility that avoided the hard decisions.

But with this budget, President Obama responds to these challenges. He puts forward a blue print for how we move this country forward and restore the middle class. It is an honest assessment of where the country is at and what will be required to by each of us to tackle the issues we must - reforming our health care system, setting the country on the path to energy independence, and addressing climate change.

By spotlighting health care reform in his budget, the President is taking aim at a facto essential to fixing our economy. The cost of inaction is too high. According to estimates, the cost of doing nothing about health care, including poor health and shorter life span of the uninsured is well above $200 billion a year and rising. Over the next ten years this cost would rise to at least $2 trillion, which makes the President's proposal to invest $634 billion over that same time period a forward-thinking approach to achieving a more efficient, less costly and higher quality health care system for every American.

We need to finally tackle the high health care costs that are making the whole system unsustainable. This means we must start getting better value for our health care dollars – through better information about which technologies work best, informed patient decision-making, and investing in prevention.

And by proposing to expand and enhance existing federal infrastructure through a National Infrastructure Bank – an effort I have long supported – we can leverage private sector dollars to invest in our most critical transportation, environmental, energy and telecommunications infrastructure needs. We cannot again allow our nation's roads, bridges, and electrical grid to go for such a length of time without adequate modernization and maintenance.

This budget also restores balance to the tax system, cutting taxes for the middle class. It makes permanent the President's new $800 Making Work Pay tax cut for 95% of America's working families. The budget also makes permanent the President's new $2,500 American Opportunity Tax Credit to help students afford college. And the President will continue to cut taxes for the families of millions of children through an expansion of the Child Tax Credit. The budget makes permanent the expanded refundability of the Child tax credit passed in the recovery act.

In working with President Obama we will make the difficult decisions that will spur job creation and restore our long term economic growth.