[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 181 (Wednesday, November 15, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S17085-S17086]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          BUDGET CONFRONTATION

  Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. President, I thank the manager for the time, and I 
thank the Chair.
  I think the people of America must be getting pretty tired of this by 
now. My hunch is they are. My hunch is, in real-life America, they are 
saying, ``What are these jerks up to?'' That means the President, that 
means the people in Congress, that means all of us. That is what we are 
looking at.
  And they must be just numb, as we are sitting here arguing about 
whether to go 4 or 5 bucks more a month on a program which is called 
part B premiums on Medicare, which is voluntary anyway. You do not have 
to belong. I mean, it boggles the mind.
  One of the fascinating things about coming to the Senate is the 
experience of living in two realities. There is one that you actually 
live, and there is another one that you read about in the papers. That 
is an interesting one, too. Sometimes I wonder if, indeed, there is any 
possible correlation between the two.
  A case in point is this current standoff, this Government shutdown. 
The headlines and the television would indicate that it is nearly--
nearly--the same as Three Mile Island, which was back in 1979. That got 
a lot of hysteria. The plume was supposed to be floating towards 
Washington to paralyze us all in our sacks at night. This is the kind 
of stuff that goes with this business. Any time you have 24-hour-a-day 
news, you have to find the news to stick in it, and, boy, they stick it 
in.
  This confrontation about the budget has inspired the media to new 
heights of hysteria, about the President bringing the Government to a 
halt. They say, ``No, no, the President didn't do that; the Congress 
did that.'' I would like to remind my colleagues about a fact or two, 
because one can watch all the television, read the newspapers in utter 
vain until your eyes pop out of their sockets and see the television 
until you get a migraine, and you will never hear described what has 
really happened here.

  What has happened is that the President decided to shut down the 
Government. I hope you heard that. We in the Congress sent him 
continuing resolutions, called CR's--you have heard that before--to 
keep it going. And he said, no, that he was going to shut it down.
  There are people lobbying the Congress now about this matter trying 
to pressure us into ``doing something about it.'' Someone does not 
realize what has happened. We cannot force the President to sign our 
resolutions to keep the Government operating. I hope you hear that. He 
does, indeed, have the power to shut the Government down, and he has. 
It is not something which can be changed by lobbying the Congress.
  So that is just one little item that seems to have glanced off the 
simian skulls of many of the Nation's media for reasons quite unclear 
to me.
  Here is another one. The President decided to veto our first 
continuing resolution, he said, because of a necessary measure to 
maintain Medicare premiums at a constant fraction of program costs.
  Just a few raw facts about that particular action. Fact 1: The 
President himself, his very self, endorsed increases in Medicare part B 
premiums. Has anybody missed this, that the President of the United 
States has asked for these? And they are within $5 of where Republican 
budgets have been headed. I hope that everyone will hear that one.
  Medicare part B, fact 2, was originally structured so the 
beneficiaries pay 50 percent of the program costs and the general 
taxpayers the other 50 percent. We have now let it slip to 31 percent, 
and if we did not take that action to arrest that decline, it would 
have dipped to 25 percent next year, meaning that we would have raised 
the effective taxes on the American public up to 75 percent of all of 
this program cost.
  That was the action that the President was demanding when he blocked 
the Medicare provision. He was demanding that we increase the 
taxpayers' contributions to the program to 75 percent of the overall 
program costs. That is called raising people's taxes.
  Guess who is paying the taxes? Thirty-one percent is paid by the 
beneficiary, regardless of their net worth or their income in a 
voluntary program. No one can refute that. I challenge anyone.
  So 70 percent, 69 percent paid by Joe Six-Pack and now the President 
wants to have Joe Six-Pack paying 75 percent of the premium and doing 
things for the little guy? The drinks are on me.
  Fact 3: Taking that action, blocking that measure will vastly worsen 
the deficit outlook in the years to come, because it would require the 
Government, that is, taxpayers, and I hope somebody has that figured 
out, who this Government is, to spend more and more on Medicare part B 
than it otherwise would. So the President was making a stand here for 
higher deficits. I guess that is what he wanted to do.

  Fact 4: The President did not do this to protect Medicare 
beneficiaries from Republicans--evil Republicans--for he had already 
endorsed restraints on the growth of Medicare that are almost exactly 
the same as Republicans have. This President said he wanted a 7.1 
percent annual growth limit in his own package, his budget, just 
assumptions--at least he said 7.1. What do Republicans want to do? Let 
it go up only 6.4. So we are seven-tenths of 1 percent apart and 
shutting down the Government.
  So let us not be bamboozled into thinking that this was some 
principled stand, if you will, to hold Medicare harmless.
  Fact 5: The President got his own way. We offered him a clean 
continuing resolution, no Medicare provision. Yet, he has kept the 
Government shut down. So what are we and the people to make about all 
of this? I would opine that the President has forgotten one essential 
factor needed for a man who 

[[Page S17086]]
intends to stand on principle: There has to be a principle there to 
stand on.
  What does he want now? What will convince him to let the Government 
operate again? We have offered him a clean continuing resolution, if 
only he will work with us to balance the budget in 7 years. He said he 
wanted to balance it in 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10--pick one, any one. That, my 
colleagues, is the sticking point. The administration will not agree to 
that.
  The President would sooner keep the Government shut down than to work 
with us--while stockpiling mountains of debt upon our children and 
grandchildren--at least until after November 1996. Then there will be 
lots of scurried action, you bet, patching together a limping Nation, 
but not until after November 1996. The President is hung up over a 
couple of requirements. One is that he does not want to agree in 
advance to a deadline for a balanced budget. That, very simply, is 
because he simply has no plans to balance the budget. Thus, he refuses 
to be held to any standard which would require that this be done.
  The other serious problem he has is that if he refuses to adopt the 
standards which he himself previously had endorsed--even demanded and 
required--and that is a certification by the Congressional Budget 
Office. He well knows that if real numbers are used, if the books are 
not cooked, then none of his own proposals will be judged to balance 
the budget and will never see the light of day. And he is out, then, on 
the statement he made at the State of the Union Address a couple of 
years ago when he said, ``Let us use CBO numbers, ladies and gentlemen, 
no more phony numbers. Let us use Congressional Budget Office.'' And 
everybody cheered. What numbers do we use now? OMB. I know that sounds 
like inside baseball. I call it deception.

  That is the problem. The President is saying: Let me cook the books, 
let me avoid any deadline for balancing the budget, and I will set 
Government running again. That does not sound like much of a principled 
stand to me.
  Let us try to look at this from the President's point of view for a 
moment. Consider what would happen if he did agree to try to balance 
the budget in 7 years, using real numbers, without gimmicks and 
chicanery in the books, and without assumptions and all the stuff we 
have seen both administrations use for decades; then he would have to 
agree with the Congress as to making really tough decisions. Then he 
would have to take a long, hard look at what is really happening in 
Medicare, and that it is going broke. His own trustees are telling him 
that--people he appointed, people of the stature of Robert Rubin, 
Robert Reich and Donna Shalala. He would have to give up the 
pretending.
  He would have to give up the posturing and the pretending that he is 
the great defender of unlimited spending on the poor, the elderly, the 
veteran, the downtrodden, everybody. He can choose to pose now as their 
greatest protector because he is held to no standard at all of 
budgetary responsibility--none. But if the standard is required of him, 
then suddenly he cannot continue to say what he has been saying, that 
he can shield these vulnerable folks from evil depredations and balance 
the books all at the same time.
  So that is where we are. This whole Government shut down as a result 
of a gap between the administration's rhetoric. They claimed to want to 
balance the budget 18 times in one speech yesterday, and they 
simultaneously claim that no favorite political constituency in this 
land, not a single sacred cow, needs to be touched. On the other hand, 
the reality is that some severe, very tough choices have to be made in 
order to balance the budget. The American citizens know it, and 
everybody in this Chamber knows it.
  As soon as the administration is held to an honest standard of 
accountability, this gap will be exposed. And, politically, the 
administration simply cannot bear to face that. So they are going to 
keep the Government shut down.
  This is a curious version and vision of leadership. The 
administration will not be able to play this game forever. It will be 
great for a short period of time. It is going to be a lot of fun. They 
received a temporary boost from playing the Medicare political card. 
But I do not think in any long-term way the public will believe that 
refusal to commit to balancing the budget is any worthy or worthwhile 
lesson or reason to shut down the Government of the United States for 5 
bucks a month on a program that is voluntary, which in any other 
society would be called an income transfer, because 70 percent of it is 
paid by Joe Six-Pack, and 30 percent of it is paid by the beneficiary, 
regardless of their net worth or income. No wonder the people think we 
are nuts.

  Mr. BUMPERS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.

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