mr. speaker , i wanted to say one thing , and then i want to lead into the issue of this budget reconciliation that we want to talk about tonight . 
i wanted to go back to what my colleague from massachusetts said about how , since the bush administration came into office , the fiscal policy benefits wealthy people and is at the expense of the middle class . 
there is no question that is true . 
i would venture to say that the republican fiscal policy is really stupid for everyone because the bottom line is that in the last few years of the clinton administration , when we had a surplus and we were balancing the budget , everybody was getting richer . 
the richer were getting richer , the middle class was doing better , and the poor were doing better . 
i do not even think if you are wealthy you are doing better under bush . 
you are doing better than the rest of the guys because the rest of the guys are suffering , but the irony of it is , in the last few years of the clinton administration , the economy was booming so much that everybody was doing better . 
i do not even care if i were the wealthiest person in the world , i do not see how i benefit under this administration ultimately , because if the economy does not grow the way it did in the boom years of the clinton administration , nobody benefits . 
it is true , of course , that it is primarily for the benefit of the wealthy . 
there is no question about that . 
what i wanted to stress tonight , and all that we do is that the republicans now have gone even further . 
now they are saying because they have to pay for katrina , they want to do this budget reconciliation , which is another sort of round of budget cuts ; and those budget cuts are primarily at the expense of poor people and working-class people rather than the wealthy . 
what we are seeing is all the programs that might benefit middle-class people , working-class people or poor people , whether it is student loans or it is health care or it is housing , are all being cut ; and those cuts directly impact the hurricane victims . 
rather than going after wealthy individuals or cutting benefits of programs that might benefit wealthy individuals or corporate interests , they are simply cutting programs for poor people and working people . 
that is simply not right . 
as my colleague from massachusetts was saying , the irony of it is they are increasing the deficit in order to give more tax breaks for the rich and for the corporate interests . 
at the same time , they are increasing the deficit by paying for iraq because none of that is paid for . 
none of the war reconstruction in iraq is paid for ; and if you look at these charts , as you were saying , you can see that the very cuts that are being proposed in programs here in the united states , in many cases money is being spent in iraq , deficit spending , to do the same things in iraq that are being cut here . 
i do not want to go through the whole thing , but if you look at health care , $ 10 billion in medicaid cuts are proposed by this republican budget ; $ 252 million in cuts for health care professionals ; $ 94 million in cuts to community health clinics in the u.s. in iraq , we get 110 primary health care centers built or renovated , 2 , 000 health educators trained , 32 million children vaccinated . 
you can go through this whole list . 
