[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 138 (Wednesday, September 28, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 28, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                        THE MOOD OF THE COUNTRY

  Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I have made a few speeches in the last 60 
days dealing with the mood of the country--which incidentally, I do not 
fully understand. And I do not think I am alone. I do not think there 
are very many people in the U.S. Congress that really quite understand 
what has precipitated the mood of the country, which is admittedly 
hostile; a good portion of it directed at the U.S. Congress and 
certainly toward the President.
  It is a unique and unprecedented thing in this country for the 
electorate to be in such a hostile mood while at the same time the 
economy is perking along at a clip of about 3.5 to 3.8 percent; 
inflation as low as it ever gets; interest rates within a reasonable 
range, low enough not to impede business development; people are 
working and the jobless rate is down about 1.7 percent from where it 
was the day President Clinton was inaugurated.
  And the best news of all, the deficit is going down more dramatically 
than ever before in the history of the country. The deficit, as a 
percentage of our GNP, is approximately half what it was when President 
Clinton was sworn in.
  It has been a short 14 years since Ronald Reagan was elected 
President almost solely on the promise that he would balance the 
budget. And, without recounting the details of that promise and the 
terrible results of that 12-year period, we all know what they were.
  Yet yesterday, on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, at what I would call 
the Snake Oil Convention, the same proposals that President Reagan ran 
on in 1980 were thrown out again to the American people like a lure on 
the end of a fishing line, waiting for the American people to bite on 
it in November's elections--something in the program for every person 
in America, particularly those who are mad.
  Three hundred Republican incumbent House Members and challengers 
promised to reinstate the dream IRA savings account. IRA's are very 
popular in this country. An awful lot of people have them. And the 
Republicans are going to take the cap off of the $50,000 earnings limit 
for IRA's and say any and everybody can have them. So we know who is 
going to be able to establish IRA's under that plan yesterday by Mr. 
Gingrich and the Republican incumbents and challengers. It will go to 
the top 20 percent of the wage earners in the country. And the cost 5 
years from now will be $8 billion per year.
  Then they are going to provide a $500 tax credit for every child. 
That has some merit at the lower income levels, though it does nothing 
for people who make under $16,000 a year, no matter how many children 
they have because they are not in a taxable category. It does nothing 
for them. And it gives twice the amount of tax cut to a couple making 
$180,000 as it does a couple making $40,000. And I suspect that one of 
the ways they are going to try to pay for this is to either cut or do 
away with the earned income tax credit which actually did give lower 
middle-income and poor people in this country a substantial tax break.
  So while I champion the idea of a middle-class income tax cut--and 
you can do it with increasing the tax credits for children; that is one 
way of doing it--it still has to be paid for. I have no idea what the 
cost of that is.
  They want to cut the corporate tax, even though corporate profits are 
at an all time high.
  There is just a goody in there for everybody. And it is estimated 
that it will cost, I guess, over the next 5 years, $388 billion.
  And then you get down to the really interesting part of the proposal, 
and that is: How are you going to pay for it?
  People in the country that are paying attention ought to be euphoric 
about the conditions of the economy but especially about this dramatic 
reduction in the deficit.
  Let me just digress a moment to say, virtually everybody on this side 
of the aisle voted for the budget reconciliation bill last year which 
raised taxes $250 billion and cut spending $250 billion and was 
calculated to reduce the deficit by $500 billion over a 5-year period--
not balance the budget, but cut it $500 billion below what it otherwise 
would be. And now that figure is up to about $670 billion in deficit 
reduction. It was a very courageous vote by the 50 people on this side 
of the aisle who voted for it.
  You know, the people send mixed signals to Members of Congress. They 
say, on the one hand, ``Why don't you people stiffen your spine and 
make the tough votes? Why don't you vote courageously for a change?''
  But, Mr. President, do you know what a tough, courageous vote is? It 
is, by definition, an unpopular vote. And so when you cast that 
unpopular vote, as we did last summer to raise taxes on the richest 1.2 
percent of the people in this country in an effort to do something 
about the deficit, because they are the ones who can best afford it, 
when you do that and you go home, there is not a dirt farmer in 
Arkansas that did not think we had raised his taxes. It took a lot of 
tall explaining because it was an unpopular vote.
  But, Mr. President, you cannot deal with a $4 trillion debt by making 
everybody happy. The happy talk that we got in 1980 cost us $3 trillion 
in 12 years. What a siren song we got in 1980--increase defense 
spending, cut taxes, and balance the budget. And that is the same siren 
song you heard yesterday afternoon on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, 
the same snake oil. We tried that $3 trillion ago.
  But back to the courageous vote. When you cast that courageous vote, 
then you go home and your constituents say, ``You clowns don't care 
what I think. You just vote the way you want to.'' It is an ambivalent 
signal.
  So where is all of this money going to come from to keep the deficit 
from soaring again?
  Well, I will tell you. They say they are going to use the $124 
billion, I guess, that we were going to get under President Clinton's 
health care reform for Medicare $114 billion from Medicaid. That is all 
well and good. The problem is, we did not get the Clinton health care 
bill. If you want to cut Medicare by that amount and Medicaid by that 
amount, that is just fine, but be prepared for an outcry.
  And if you want to do welfare reform, which they refer to in quotes, 
``welfare reform,'' and pick up $100 billion, tell the States, tell my 
Governor and your Governor who are on us constantly about mandating 
programs that they have to pay for. We mandate it. They have to figure 
out how to pay for it.
  You tell them where they are going to find the money to provide 
health care for the poorest of the poor in their State under Medicaid 
when we cut $114 billion. You tell them what they are going to do for 
the poor people when we cut food stamps and Aid for Families with 
Dependent Children by $50 billion.
  We have a bill that we are going to consider before we leave here to 
provide some relief to the States from the kind of mandates they have 
been squawking about.
  When I was Governor of my State, we were forever and eternally 
requiring the cities of my State to raise the salaries of firemen. I 
came from a town so small we did not have a fire department, so that 
was all a mystery to me. But we were always raising the salaries of 
firemen, because it was popular with the firemen, but we did not send 
them any money. And the mayors would converge on my office and say, 
``Look, you're requiring us to raise the salaries of our people by 
cutting their work week. We don't have the money.''
  All I could do was stand there with a blank face.
  And that is what Congress is doing to the States and that is what has 
Governors absolutely livid.
  So to those people who stood on the steps yesterday afternoon, I 
invite you to tell the Governors of this Nation where they are going to 
find the money to make up for this $388 billion that you are going to 
cut to pay for all these wonderful tax cuts for the well-to-do.
  Well, if you ask for a more specific, definitive method of cutting 
spending, they have the best answer I have ever heard. ``How are we 
going to cut $388 billion?''
  ``Why, we are going to amend the Constitution of the United States to 
say that Congress has to provide for a balanced budget.''
  ``Ain't'' that beautiful--just write a little provision into the 
Constitution saying, ``Ye shall have a balanced budget.''
  I have never voted for a constitutional amendment to balance the 
budget in my life. But if that is all there were to it, I would be for 
it. If all I had to do was stand on the floor and say I know that some 
mysterious thing was going to happen to balance the budget, count me 
in. Unhappily, you have to be a big snake oil buyer to believe that.
  Well, they said we are also going to add the line-item veto which 
transfers more and more power to the President of the United States and 
away from the legislative branch.
  I do not feel nearly as strongly, and I do not oppose the line-item 
veto nearly to the extent I do the balanced budget amendment, but 
neither one of them will balance the budget.
  What will balance the budget is a majority--strike that--60 U.S. 
Senators standing on their hind legs, and saying, ``I care about the 
future of the country. I deplore the lack of hope and the lack of faith 
that exists across this great land.''
  I have said this before, and it is not smart for a politician to say 
it, but I am going to say it anyway. If I had a goal of being carried 
out of the U.S. Senate in a pine box, I know exactly how to vote. I 
would do like a lot of people do. I would get out of bed in the 
morning. I would walk out on my front porch and decide which way the 
wind was blowing and what the overnight polls showed, and that is the 
way I would vote.
  But sometimes that can be very, very, wrong; not only sometimes, but 
often is wrong.
  I do not believe the people elected a single Member of the U.S. 
Senate to simply do what is popular at any given moment.
  It was irresistible in 1980. The people found it irresistible to 
believe that you could actually increase defense spending--yea, double 
it--and cut taxes and balance the budget.
  One old farmer in Arkansas said, ``What a dynamite idea, I wonder why 
nobody ever thought about that before.'' We now know why we have a $4 
trillion debt to show for it. Let the same people who stood on the 
steps yesterday take a poll among their number--see how many of them 
are willing to vote against the space station. Ask them how many of 
them are willing to torpedo Milstar, a worthless communications system 
down at the Defense Department that costs billions and billions of 
dollars. How many of them would be willing to cut back on D-5 missile 
purchases, which costs billions. And I guarantee you most of the people 
who stood on those steps yesterday support another 20 B-2 bombers, more 
aircraft carriers, more everything. Because they are scared to death if 
they do not when they go home their opponent is going to say they are 
soft on defense.
  And what is this group out on the Capitol steps going to do about 
those mandates we are going to be imposing on the States? They take 
care of that, too. They are going to pay the States for all the 
mandates. We are going to cut welfare, AFDC, food stamps, all of those 
programs and dump it back on the States--but tell them we will 
reimburse them for it. Where is the savings? Of course it is popular 
with the Governors of the States to say we are going to fund all these 
mandates. It is popular with the people of this country to say you are 
going to cut welfare by $50 billion.
  If you want to get a big standing ovation at the banquet, just tell 
them that. There are 100 people here who are pretty savvy. They know 
what the applause lines are. They know how to play a crowd. Tell them 
you can have it all. There is no tomorrow.
  One of the Congressmen who stood on the steps yesterday afternoon 
said, ``If we do not do what we say the people ought to throw us out.''
  I would change that and say, ``If you do what you say the people will 
surely throw you out.'' But the deficit will be up another $2 trillion 
when they get around to it.
  Then they call for a balanced budget by the year 2003. We are not 
only going to balance the budget in 2003 by cutting Medicare and 
Medicaid and unspecified welfare reform and other unspecified cuts, we 
are going to do it through economic growth. Does that sound familiar? 
That was always the answer in 1980.
  How are you going to cut taxes, raise defense spending and balance 
the budget?
  When you cut people's taxes there is going to be so much economic 
activity and they are going to pay so much in income tax the whole 
thing will just balance out.
  I think maybe we are getting ready to get back on the bill and I do 
not want to take up more time, but I just want to issue this 
admonition. It sounds a bit preachy, but so be it. If the American 
people should, by some stretch of the imagination, buy into what I saw 
in the paper this morning and what I have seen from the Budget 
Committee about that proposal, they are saying ``We do not really care 
how big the deficit is.''
  I can remember when they did. It is a strange anomaly, is it not? 
That for years the catalyzing political issue in this country was the 
deficit. And last year the deficit was down about $50 billion. And this 
year it is going to be down almost $100 billion less than it was 
projected to be 18 months ago. And back to the people who voted that 
courageous vote last summer, I have told those who are up for 
reelection this year--and every one of them is getting hammered by his 
opponents about it--I would not wait for my opponent to bring it up. I 
would bring it up first. I would say to my constituents: You want 
responsible Government? You want fiscal responsibility? You want your 
children and grandchildren to grow up in a Nation that is fiscally 
responsible and can educate its children and feed its poor and provide 
for a strong military? We are doing every bit of it right now and 
reducing the deficit at the same time.
  Why are people not dancing in the streets? I do not know. So I close 
where I started by saying the mood of the people of the country is 
unfathomable to me. I know where a lot of it started: Term limits. It 
is an expression of the people's frustration about gridlock here in the 
U.S. Senate. It is a frustration about scandals from time to time. It 
is a frustration about the fact that real personal income is 20 percent 
less today than it was in 1970. It is because they don't believe their 
children will have as good a life as they have had.
  My parents told me they wanted a better life for me than they had 
when they were growing up. When I was a child during the Depression, of 
course, that was easy. It was almost impossible not to have a better 
life than we had when we were children. But my father told me so many 
times: ``Son, I want all of you children to have every opportunity for 
a good education because I want you to have a better life than I've 
had.''
  He and my mother had worked hard, tilled the soil, taught school, ran 
a business, scraped up enough money so that together with the GI bill 
all three of us could get a good education.
  Today parents cannot look at their children and honestly say you are 
going to have a better life than I had. An awful lot of children and 
young adults have lost faith in the future of this Nation, and there is 
not a Member of the U.S. Senate who does not know what to do about 
that. It is a question of whether we have the moral courage, the 
political stamina, and the intellectual honesty to do what it takes to 
say: Yes, things are going to be better for your children and here is 
why.
  All over the world people are scratching and clawing, incidentally, 
to get to this country with all its flaws. We are still the oldest 
democracy on Earth. It is not working too well right now, but we still 
have it. We have that magnificent Constitution. We have these great 
institutions called the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice--which 
is not always fair but at least you get a shot at a fair trial by a 
jury of your peers. Those institutions and others are all in place and 
people all over the world are scratching and clawing to get to the 
shores of this Nation. And we are trashing the system as never before. 
What a paradox.
  I made a graduation speech about 3 weeks ago and I made these points, 
that those clowns in Congress that you hear talked about in coffee 
shops all across America--this is the good part of the speech because 
it is complimentary of Congress--those clowns in Washington, for all of 
their foibles and their failures and their lack of courage, have 
provided this Nation with 205 years of uninterrupted, unfettered 
freedom. No other nation on Earth can even come close to that claim. So 
why are people not dancing in the streets?
  One of the reasons is Rush Limbaugh does not think that. He does not 
think people have any reason to dance in the streets. There must be 500 
little Rush Limbaughs across the country who believe that everything is 
wrong every day.
  Jefferson said one time, ``The price of freedom is eternal 
vigilance.'' That means different things to different people. But we 
have it and I do not want to lose it. I do not want to lose our 
economic freedoms. I do not want to lose our political freedoms. I want 
to see our culture mean something. I want us to spend money on 
educating our children and providing health care for our people. I want 
more people to appreciate the Constitution of the United States and 
their right and privilege to vote.
  I took my family to the Eastern Shore the weekend after Labor Day. I 
could not afford to rent any of that property on Labor Day weekend, I 
had to wait until the weekend after Labor Day, but it was not nearly as 
crowded and a lot more pleasant. I have three great children--all 
married to in-laws that we love, believe it or not--and two wonderful 
grandchildren. We spent 4 days at the beach, and on the way home Betty 
and I were returning home through two States; I will not mention which 
ones. I stopped to get gas and this fellow was pumping gas into my car. 
I said, ``How is the Senate race going over here?''
  He said, ``You asking me?
  ``Yeah.''
  ``I ain't never voted in my life and ain't never going to.''
  ``Really?''
  ``No, it don't make no difference. Just like that place right over 
there.''
  ``What place right over there?''
  ``That place over there where they are supposed to take in old folks. 
Half of them over there are 35 and under.''
  ``You don't want to vote to change that if that is true?''
  ``No, it wouldn't make no difference.''
  I did not really want to pursue this conversation with this gentlemen 
any further. But I did tell him, I said, ``You know, every time we have 
an election and you do not vote you are voting against the system that 
has provided you with all these freedoms.''
  I am getting off the beaten path. I just want to say the price of 
freedom really is eternal vigilance. And it also requires a few 
courageous votes from time to time around here. If you look at 
civilization, and read Barbara Tuchman's book ``The March of Folly,'' 
and see what has happened to civilizations that ignore a lot of voices 
crying in the wilderness it has often been fatal. Do not do that. Even 
Yamamoto said: ``Do not bomb Pearl Harbor. You people do not know 
anything about the United States. You will not win that war.''
  The warlords ran over him like a Mack truck. He could not stop them.
  Even the Trojan horse, when the Greeks put the Trojan horse outside 
Troy's bastille, the debate was, ``Should we let that horse in here?'' 
One man spoke up and said, ``That is a Greek trick. Don't do it.'' It's 
a long story, but they let the Trojan horse in, and the rest is 
history.
  In World War I, a couple of German U-boat commanders said ``You are 
depending on us to sink all that Allied shipping and we cannot do it.''
  You ought to read that book, ``March of Folly,'' by Barbara Tuchman. 
She just died a couple years ago. She was a magnificent historian. And 
throughout the book, cool, collected intelligent voices said: ``Don't 
do that. Politically it is wonderful, but in effect it is going to be 
disastrous.''
  So, I worry about what happened on the Capitol steps yesterday but I 
cannot imagine people's memories being so short that they would buy 
into Voodoo Economics II after we tried it 12 years ago--14 years ago, 
now--at a terrible, staggering cost to all of us.
  I yield the floor, Mr. President, and suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.

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