[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 172 (Thursday, November 2, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S16572-S16574]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




FIVE STEPS CLINTON MUST TAKE TO PROVE HE IS SERIOUS ABOUT BALANCING THE 
                                 BUDGET

  Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, last week we passed out of this body the 
reconciliation bill which will lead to a balanced budget. This is 
obviously a significant step on the road to guaranteeing our children a 
nation which can be prosperous and which is solvent. I believe most 
Americans understand the importance of the balanced budget. They 
certainly expressed it in my district, and I am sure in other States, 
year after year as they have gone to the polls. They understand it 
because in their homelife they experience the need to maintain fiscal 
solvency. They know that if they continue to spend every year more than 
they take in, it will lead to some sort of economic chaos in their own 
lives, and intuitively and logically they understand, therefore, that 
for the Federal Government to do that, not only year after year but 
what has amounted to generation after generation, leads inevitably to 
economic chaos.
  So the Republican leadership in the Senate and the House has produced 
a budget which will give us a balanced budget by the year 2002. For the 
first time in years we will actually be living within our means. This 
is, I believe, a critical step on the path to assuring, as I said 
earlier, a solvent nation for our children, which is, I believe, our 
No. 1 responsibility as keepers of the flame of America as Members of 
this Senate.
  The question, however, is whether or not the President will join us 
in this effort in a serious way. The President has repeatedly said that 
he wants to balance the budget. But so far his actions have certainly 
not matched his words. Although we have produced a serious proposal for 
balancing the budget, which the Congressional Budget Office has scored 
as being in balance, and are now trying to iron out the differences, we 
do not find that the President has been willing to join in 
substantively discussing this matter in a serious way.
  Conventional wisdom holds, in fact, that the President will veto this 
bill and then he and the Congress will negotiate and reach some type of 
agreement, hopefully. But I am not so sure. 

[[Page S 16573]]

 I say this because before we can negotiate, the President, despite all 
his nice political statements, still must prove he is truly serious 
with accomplishing a balanced budget. So far, he has not taken this 
action. He certainly has not proved it either to the Congress or to the 
American people.
  In my view, there are five things which the President must do if he 
is to prove that he is serious about the issue of balancing the budget. 
These go beyond the rhetoric of campaign promises. I would like to go 
over these five items.
  First, we must start using the same numbers to talk about the issue 
of balancing the budget. The administration began its term with a very 
grandiose statement back in February 1993 fresh off the election that 
they would use the Congressional Budget Office for the purposes of 
determining the fair scorekeeping of the budget process. He made this 
statement a number of times. But he made it most eloquently when he 
spoke in his initial speech to the Congress.
  In taking this position when he was first elected President, he took 
the right position, the correct position. The Congressional Budget 
Office is the fair arbiter of the scoring of the budget process. 
However, since the Congressional Budget Office scoring process has no 
longer become convenient to the administration, the President has 
abandoned his original commitment. This is a mistake. The numbers which 
he sent up to us in June--which were basically a sheaf of paper and 
were not really a budget--represented, according to the President and 
to his people, a balanced budget which we would reach in 10 years. 
Unfortunately, those numbers used as their baseline and for their 
assumptions were numbers produced by his own inhouse accountants, the 
Office of Management and Budget.
  When that budget was scored by the Congressional Budget Office, the 
fair arbiter of budget scoring in this body and which the President had 
initially said would be the fair arbiter, it turned out that their 
budget did not reach balance, that, in fact, it represented $200 
billion deficits each year for as far as the eye could see and that 
there was no closure between spending and revenues.
  So, the first thing the President's people have to do is be willing 
to agree to use numbers which are credible and which are acceptable. 
And I would suggest that we go back to the beginning of this Presidency 
and follow the counsel that he gave us at that time and use the 
Congressional Budget Office numbers.
  In June, the President submitted a revised budget, and, as I 
mentioned, it alleged that it would reach balance in 10 years. 
Unfortunately, he only released 25 pages, and he gave us no specifics 
as to how he would accomplish this, even in terms of the numbers, which 
as I mentioned earlier, were inaccurate.
  It is essential that we get details, that he--as we have as Members 
of the Senate and as Members of the House--produce a budget which has 
the details behind the numbers, which has substance, which has meat on 
the bones. We cannot possibly reach a budget agreement if we are simply 
going to work off a sheaf of paper which has no specifics.
  We have put down on the table in extensive language what we as 
Republicans think should be done to correct some of the excesses of the 
Federal Government, to improve the manner in which it delivers 
services, to give people an opportunity to have a Medicare trust fund 
which will remain solvent. We need now to hear from the President as to 
his specifics in detail as to what he would do in the area of Medicare 
reform, in the area of Medicaid reform, in the area of welfare reform. 
Yet, we have not heard that. That is why one questions his sincerity 
when he talks about producing a budget that will be in balance.
  Third, we need to reach an agreement as to when we should reach a 
balanced budget.
  We, as Republicans, have put forward a budget which reaches balance 
in 7 years. It was not easy. It meant that we had to make some very 
difficult decisions. We had to agree--amongst ourselves, unfortunately, 
because the White House was not willing to participate--to agree to 
take $1 trillion of spending out of the Federal stream of spending. 
That did not mean we cut the size of the Federal Government. In fact, 
it will continue to grow by 3.3 percent annually. Medicare will 
continue to grow by 6.4 percent annually, and Medicaid will continue to 
grow by approximately 4.5 percent annually. But we did have to slow the 
rate of growth of those programs, and we did, in a number of programs, 
actually have to cut spending. For example, defense spending will go 
down in real terms over the next 7 years by $19 billion.
  But we have to have a definable period when we are going to reach a 
balanced budget. The people of this country have a right to know that 
we are willing to step up to the issue and define the terms of the 
issue in benchmarks that are scorable and which we can be held 
accountable for. We have said we will reach a balanced budget in 7 
years. We have produced a budget which accomplishes that. It is 
absolutely critical that the President give us a timeframe in which he 
is willing to put forward a budget which reaches balance with real 
numbers and with details. Recently, he said 7 years was something he 
could live with. If that is his position today, I believe he should 
state it. Unfortunately, sometimes his positions change. But hopefully 
he can stick with the 7-year commitment. If he can, that means we can 
reach agreement on that one critical point.
  Fourth, if we are going to reach an understanding, we have to have 
the ability to sit down with the President and talk to him in terms 
that are substantive and not in simply political election-year 
rhetoric. If you look at what the President sent up here in June and 
you take those numbers and score them by CBO's accounting rather than 
by OMB's accounting, you find that we really were not that far apart. 
For example, in the area of Medicare, he wanted Medicare to grow at a 
rate of 7 percent. We suggested it grow at a rate of 6.4 percent. Both 
of those numbers were significantly less than the present 10-percent 
rate of growth that Medicare is experiencing. That 10-percent rate of 
growth we know is not sustainable. The Medicare trustees have told us 
that if we continue to allow Medicare to grow at that rate, it will be 
insolvent, there will be no trust fund for the seniors from which they 
can get a health care benefit.
  So we have suggested proposals which will give seniors more choices, 
more options, which we think will strengthen the Medicare system and 
which will slow the rate of growth to 6.4 percent.
  The President sent us up a number which when it was recalculated by 
CBO--granted, it came up under OMB's scoring mechanisms, but when it 
was calculated by CBO said we only want Medicare to grow at 7 percent. 
I believe that difference is not great. And yet if you listen to this 
administration, they talk in terms of hyperbole which would make you 
think that the Republican proposal on Medicare was going to slash, was 
going to devastate, was going to savage the rights to health care which 
we all recognize are absolutely essential for our seniors.
  In fact, the Vice President of the United States had the temerity to 
come to New Hampshire just a few days ago and speak to a very self-
serving audience, the AFL-CIO convention, and state time and again--in 
fact, I think we found the word ``extremist'' in every sentence during 
the period of a couple paragraphs--that our Medicare Program was 
slashing.
  If our Medicare Program is slashing, and we are talking about a 6.4-
percent rate of increase and the President is talking about a 7-percent 
rate of increase, which is 3 percent down from 10 percent and we are 
3.5 percent down from 10 percent, what is the President's program? He 
would have to apply the same standards to his own. It would also be 
slashing. It would also be extremist.
  The fact is that neither of the proposals are extremist or slashing. 
They are both--at least in our case--a reasonable attempt to try to 
strengthen the Medicare system so that seniors will have a solvent 
trust fund.
  If the President would send up details of his proposal, maybe we 
could say that his proposal was also a reasonable attempt to accomplish 
the same goal, but at least the number he is talking about, a 7-percent 
rate of growth, is something that is within the ballpark, 

[[Page S 16574]]

within the range of doability and certainly within the range of what is 
necessary to keep the trust fund solvent.
  So in substance what he sent up here in June can be discussed, and it 
can be worked for the purposes of resolving the matter. But when the 
President and the Vice President talk in such outrageous political 
terms and use such hyperbole, it is not constructive to the process.
  So the fourth thing I think the President must do is stop running for 
reelection all the time and start trying to govern the country. Is that 
not his job for the next year and a half? There will be plenty of time 
to have an election next summer. Let us get about governing the 
country. Let us start talking some substance around here.
  And that comes to my fifth point, which is leadership. If there is 
one obligation of the Presidency, it is to lead. Regrettably, this 
President has been leading like a bumper car. It is time that he gave 
us some definition and direction. It is time that he sent up here a 
budget based on numbers which everyone can agree are honest and fair, 
CBO numbers--a budget which has details attached to it, or if not a 
whole budget at least major programmatic activities that have details 
attached to them so that we can evaluate them.
  It is time he started talking to Members of Congress as if they were 
colleagues working on a problem rather than opponents created by some 
political spinmeister that he has hired to do his polling for him. The 
fact is that leadership does not involve running for reelection. 
Leadership involves guiding this country through some very difficult 
times.
  So the time has come, in my opinion, for the President to engage in 
these five areas, to show that he is serious about balancing this 
budget. We have put on the table serious proposals to balance this 
budget, to give our children a future, to make sure that this country 
brings under control its most serious threat to its future, which is 
the expansion of its Federal debt and the fact that our generation is 
borrowing from the next generation to finance day-to-day activity that 
we are benefiting from today.
  If the President is serious, he has to address these five points. He 
has to start using numbers that we all agree are reasonable. And I 
suggest CBO numbers are the ones that are the best. He has to start 
giving us some details of what he intends to do in these major 
programmatic areas such as Medicare and Medicaid. He has to agree to a 
goal that is scorable, such as a 7-year goal to reach a balanced 
budget. He has to stop politicizing the issue, using the extreme 
language that may score well in the polling place but does nothing to 
move the process along.
  Finally and most importantly, he has to give us some definable 
leadership that shows us where he feels we can reach compromise and 
govern rather than run for reelection.
  Mr. President, I yield back the remainder of my time.

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