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WASHINGTON — Sen. Mitt Romney expressed frustration with what he said is the unserious nature of the Senate budget process during a hearing on the president's proposed budget Tuesday.
Utah's junior Republican senator criticized the Biden administration for proposing a budget he says is certain to fail in a divided Congress and called the work of the Senate Budget Committee largely performative.
"It's appropriate that this hearing is being held during Academy Awards season. I'm afraid what we do here is more 'Barbie' than it is 'Oppenheimer.' The public thinks we work on the budget, but we don't," Romney said. "You realize in the time I've been in this committee, we've never met privately. We've never come together and negotiated and given some give and take and come up with proposals to somehow get us closer to a balanced budget or deal with the debt."
Romney noted that a majority of public hearings held during the current Congress have focused on the economic threats posed by climate change.
"These are important topics. They just don't belong in the Budget Committee," he said. "This is a committee that's about performing, getting on stage, and acting like we care about these things. But there's actually no work being done by this committee to deal with our budget and to deal with federal spending."
Can the US stabilize its national debt? Mitt Romney, Joe Manchin have a plan
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney introduced a bipartisan bill that would create a commission to look into ways to stabilize the national debt to GDP ratio.President Joe Biden, a Democrat, issued his budget proposal Monday, with provisions to lower taxes for families and increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
But Romney said the president's characterization that billionaires pay only 8% in taxes is "very disingenuous," and "Academy Awards worthy," because that includes unrealized capital gains on assets that are not taxed. He said as much during an exchange with Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
"Are there any countries in the world that tax unreal capital gains?" Romney asked.
"Senator, if those unrealized gains are good enough to take to a bank to get hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, they should be taxed like income," Young replied.
Romney said taxing unrealized gains is "the stupidest idea I've ever heard — would devastate our economy." When it comes to fiscal responsibility, he plugged bipartisan legislation introduced by himself and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, that would create a commission to study ways to reduce the national debt over the next decade.
"We need to work as a committee and as a Congress to stop acting for the cameras and start working for the American people to finally deal with the massive deficits and debt that we have. And that's not happening," he said. "That's why Sen. Manchin and I have proposed a bipartisan, bicameral commission to finally tackle this before it becomes such a crisis it can't be resolved without calamity."
