[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 184 (Saturday, November 18, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S17425-S17426]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            BALANCED BUDGET

  Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I want to address a couple of topics. 
First, I want to congratulate the Senator from Missouri for his cogent 
comments on how we get to a balanced budget, how we score the question 
of spending, and how we maintain some semblance of credibility to the 
numbers here in Congress.
  I respect his leadership as a former Governor in this area and 
recognize that he understands, maybe more than many of us, the 
importance of having honest numbers because, of course, in his State 
they had to have a balanced budget--something, unfortunately, that we 
do not have to have at the Federal level. It would be nice if we did. 
When you have to live by a balanced budget, as he did as Governor of 
Missouri, the real numbers become very important.
  It is not a gamesmanship exercise here in obtaining real numbers and 
his points are well-taken as we move forward to try to resolve this 
continuing resolution process issue, that we have to have hard numbers 
that are real numbers so that there can be true movement toward a 
balanced budget, not something done by mirrors or smoke.
  I want to talk a little bit, also, about what the President has been 
saying about the balanced budget amendment which we passed yesterday, 
the balanced budget resolution. The President has once again in his 
radio address, as I understand it, misrepresented facts and the 
situation especially in the area of Medicare.
  It is now extremely ironic that the administration should continue to 
attack the Republican membership for our bill to balance the budget, 
which bill, at the same time, puts the Medicare trust fund into 
solvency and gives the senior citizens of this country choices which 
they do not have today, choices which are similar to those that we have 
as Members of Congress.
  It is ironic that the President and the Vice President and his 
minions should continue to attack us for putting forward a proposal 
like this, calling our proposals extremist, cuts, slashing of the 
Medicare system, when, in fact, the number agreed to and which was 
passed last night by this Senate and by the House and therefore by the 
Congress and sent down to the President for the rate of growth of 
Medicare which we have agreed to, which the Republicans have put 
forward, actually now exceeds the number that the President of the 
United States sent up as his rate of growth that he would like to see 
in the area of Medicare spending in his June budget.
  To go over it in specifics, in his June budget the President said he 
wanted Medicare to grow at 7.1 percent. Why did he say that? Because 
his trustees of the trust fund had just come back--Secretary Rubin, 
Secretary Shalala, and Secretary Reich had just come back--and said if 
we did not slow the rate of growth in Medicare the trust fund would go 
bankrupt in the year 2002, and the rate of growth of the trust fund was 
10 percent. In other words, every year we are spending 10 percent more 
on Medicare than we spent the year before. The reason we are doing that 
is because the system is broken.

  So, the President understood this in his June submission and said, 
``We have to slow that rate of growth to 7.1 percent annually, down 
from 10 percent.''
  Then we put forward our proposal and we suggested the rate of growth, 
in our initial proposal, should be 6.4 percent. That is what the debate 
was about, the difference between 7.1 percent and 6.4 percent, or 
approximately 0.7 percent.
  Now, after negotiating with the House and making some changes to try 
to address the concerns of some of the seniors in this country and 
their groups, we have come forward with a budget which allows Medicare 
to grow at 7.4 percent. That is what the Republican resolution, the 
Balanced Budget Act which we passed last night, has as a number: 7.4 
percent. I think it is very important the press and the people of this 
country take note of that. Because we are now 0.3 percent higher in our 
rate of growth in Medicare than what the President had in his budget 
submission in June. So, if he is going to continue to say we are 
slashing, cutting, savaging the Medicare system, then he must have the 
integrity to say that his proposal exceeded our slashes, exceeded our 
cuts, exceeded our attacks on Medicare, if that is the case.
  Of course, in fact, it is not the case. Actually what we have done 
is, rather than slash, cut, or in any other way negatively impact the 
Medicare system, we have actually created a new system which is going 
to strengthen the Medicare system. We are going to spend $349 billion 
more on Medicare over the next 7 years than we are spending if we were 
to just flat-fund it; a $349 billion increase in spending. Every senior 
in this country on Medicare today gets $4,900 in benefits, they are 
going to get $6,700 by the year 2002. They will not only get additional 
benefits in the way of dollars, but they will get additional benefits 
in the way of opportunities. They will be able to go out and try some 
other types of health care delivery systems, many of those systems 
which we now as Members of Congress have available to us but seniors do 
not have available to them. In the same process, we are not going to 
limit their ability to stay in their present Medicare system. We are 
actually going to let them expand that ability, if they desire to do 
so.
  So, the President once again is being a bit disingenuous in his 
positions--to be kind. He is misrepresenting, not only his position but 
our position. What for? To pander to an electorate, to try to scare 
that electorate, to try to run for reelection rather than substantively 
address the issues which we have to address, which of course is that we 
need to balance this budget in order to make sure that our children 
have a chance for a prosperous lifestyle and our seniors have a 
Medicare trust fund that is solvent.
  So we have put forward this balanced budget which makes a great deal 
of sense, because if we do not pass this balanced budget, we would be 
passing on to our children no opportunity for prosperity because we 
would be passing on to them a country which would be confronted with 
trillions of dollars of additional debt which our children will have to 
pay. A child born today will have to pay $186,000 in taxes just to pay 
the interest on the Federal debt. That is not right. It is not fair. 
Our generation is spending our children's future and it is not right.

  So we passed this bill last night and it was a good bill. It had 
changes in basic programs which will be positive and which will make 
those programs deliver better services. But, as with all good bills 
that pass this Congress, when they are large bills sometimes something 
happens. Some little cadre of folks around here realizes those bills 
have a certain amount of momentum and they are going to pass because 
they are good bills and on balance everybody who is thoughtful about 
quality Government is probably going to vote for them and there will be 
a majority that will pass them.
  So they sometimes sneak little provisions into these bills that are 
not that good. But because you have an up-or-down vote on the whole 
bill and you cannot get those provisions out, you end up with those 
provisions in. In this instance, that occurred, unfortunately, and I 
want to talk briefly about that; sort of the dark side of the 
reconciliation bill, if you will, because, unfortunately, there were 
some dark corners in the reconciliation bill. 

[[Page S 17426]]

  The most egregious example of that was what happened with the sugar 
program. Let us first understand what the sugar program is in this 
country. It is basically a ripoff of the consumers of America to the 
tune of $1.4 billion every year. It is the last vestiges of a Marxist 
economic system in, probably, the world. Well, maybe they still have it 
in Cuba, a Marxist economic system. But the last real strong vestiges 
of it is right here in the United States in our sugar program.
  What does the sugar program do? It basically, arbitrarily, without 
any relationship to the market forces of the economy, fixes the price 
of sugar at a price which is 50 percent higher--30 to 50 percent higher 
than what sugar should cost Americans. In the open market today you can 
buy sugar at 10 cents. Under our system of farm subsidy and price 
control, we pay 22 cents, 23 cents. This is an outrage, but it is a 
cartel in this country that has a grip on the economics of the issue of 
sugar and, unfortunately, on this Congress, because it uses vehicles 
like the reconciliation bill to abuse the process.
  So, in this reconciliation bill there was not a 1-year, not 2-year, 
but a 7-year extension of this outrage, of this program which is the 
ultimate example of the former East European market approach to 
economics. It was extended because these folks were able to slip this 
in. And the irony of it, of course, is that it was put in by people who 
on most days are the greatest supporters of capitalism, and some of the 
strongest supporters of conservative thought on this floor. They 
slipped it in here,  for whatever reasons I cannot imagine, because 
they could not justify it, I am sure, under any intellectual basis. But 
it got slipped in here for the purposes of raiding the pocketbooks of 
Americans, for the purposes of benefiting a very small group of people.

  The GAO did a study of this and 17 farms--17 cane farmers in this 
country get 58 percent of the benefit, 58 percent of the benefit. That 
is a huge amount of dollars on a $1.4 billion subsidy. That is a huge 
amount of dollars to one small group of individuals in this country who 
happen to have the capacity to have put their idea into this 
reconciliation.
  Now, there are many of us on our side--on both sides of the aisle, 
this is a bipartisan outrage at this--who find this to be an 
inexcusable event, who think the idea that an attempt to balance the 
budget should have in it a plan which essentially affronts the 
sensibilities of everything that Adam Smith ever stood for, and that 
the market economy ever stood for, that capitalism ever stood for, that 
our country's basic economic structure stands for--that that program 
should be in this bill is not only ironic, it is an outrage. However, 
due to the rules of this Senate, we were not able to remove it from 
this bill. But we all understand this bill, unfortunately, because it 
has a huge amount of good in it, unfortunately it will end up vetoed. 
It will come back to us.
  I want to put folks on notice. When it comes back, in whatever form 
it comes back, this sugar debate is not going to be allowed to be 
shoved into the back corner. This sugar debate is going to be out 
there, it is going to be on the front burner. Because the American 
people can no longer be subject to this outrage of having $1.4 billion 
transferred out of their pockets into the pockets of a few cane growers 
and a few processors, simply because somebody used the parliamentary 
rules around here to protect a program that is absolutely indefensible 
under any other circumstances.
  So, this issue shall be revisited when this bill is revisited and it 
shall be revisited with much more intensity than the last go-around. 
Because of the fact it was necessary, because of the overriding 
strength of this bill in the area of getting under control entitlement 
spending generally, on such things as Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare, 
and the overriding desire to address that, we had to unfortunately--we 
ended up, unfortunately, being gamed on the issue of sugar.
  But in the next go-around, I simply put people on notice that game 
will be joined with much more intensity because the consumers of this 
country do not deserve to have to pay $1.4 billion simply because a 
bunch of cane growers want to make money.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. EXON addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.

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