[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 184 (Saturday, November 18, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S17449-S17451]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           BUDGET PRIORITIES

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I would like to pick up, if I may, where 
the Senator from North Dakota leaves off.
  He talked about the dozens and dozens of nuggets that are in this 
bill. I know my colleague from Massachusetts is going to talk about 
some of those specific items. I would like to speak for a moment, if I 
may, about the word that the Senator from North Dakota kept using about 
priorities.
  I wish to emphasize, as I think every Democrat wants to emphasize, 
this debate is not about whether to balance the budget. We keep hearing 
Republican friends come to the floor, and they keep saying we have to 
do this because this is the only way to balance the budget. If we do 
not do this, the Democrats will not balance the budget. They do not 
want to balance the budget.
  Mr. President, this is not the only way to balance the budget. That 
is what this fight is about. And, indeed, the majority of Democrats 
have voted to balance the budget, balance it in 7 years--balance the 
budget. We voted for a 9-year balancing of the budget. The balancing of 
the budget is not what is at issue before America today. What is at 
issue is what choices will we make as we balance it.
  Now, it is uncontested--every analysis of our economy shows--that 
those Americans we keep talking about, the Americans who work every day 
the hardest, the people who go and punch in a clock or the people who 
are the nitty-gritty of the production of goods in this country, are 
working harder, and they are making less money for their effort. They 
have less ability to 

[[Page S 17450]]
purchase, less ability to buy the new car, less ability to send their 
kid to get a decent education. Those are the people we ought to be 
fighting for. That is the majority of Americans. But the majority of 
Americans do not make out in this bill that was passed as well as 
people at the upper end of our scale.

  That is just not fair. I am at the upper end of the scale. Most of us 
in the Senate are at the upper end of the scale. The minute you get a 
U.S. Senator's salary, unsupplemented by anything else, you are up to 
the top tiny digits of wage earners in America. The truth is that we do 
better in this bill than the average American, and that is disgraceful. 
That is not what we were sent here to do. We ought to be able to go 
home and look people in the eye and say, ``You are going to do as well 
or better.'' We cannot do that.
  I know all the arguments are made, well, this is going to help people 
in the long term because it is going to reduce their income taxes, 
ultimately it is going to lower the interest rates.
  I agree that it can do all that. Balancing the budget can do all 
that. But I do not know any American--nobody in Massachusetts has come 
up to me and said, ``Senator, I want to live next to a Superfund site. 
I want to live next to a toxic waste site.'' But for some reason, in 
this budget the money to clean up those sites is reduced.
  I do not know anybody who has come to me in any community in 
Massachusetts and said, ``I don't think that people who have a drug 
addiction shouldn't get treatment.'' In fact, for all the rhetoric in 
the Senate about crime, 70 percent of the people in jail today are 
there on a drug-related offense or they are on drugs. If you want to 
deal with drugs in America, you are going to have to have drug 
treatment. And yet this budget cuts drug treatment.
  This budget cuts safe schools and drug-free schools money. I do not 
understand that. I do not understand how you make those cuts and turn 
around and give somebody with a $5 million asset base over $1 million 
worth of tax break.
  I used the word ``moral'' earlier. I do not want to offend anybody. 
It is not only my word. I have heard people like Pete Peterson, whom I 
respect enormously, former Commerce Secretary, Paul Tsongas, Warren 
Rudman of the Concord Coalition, they use that word, because if you 
have a $245 billion tax break, which you have, you are effectively 
borrowing $300 billion of money from future taxpayers and shifting it 
to current taxpayers.
  That is the very thing that supposedly this budget is geared to 
address. The whole purpose of balancing the budget today is to stop 
borrowing, and yet we are going to borrow in order to give this tax 
break to the people who least need it.

  This is a question of priorities. How do you explain to people in a 
nursing home, who are senior, that they are now going to have to become 
destitute and live under a whole new set of standards because in order 
to allow the nursing homes to meet the expectations of being able to 
reduce the cost, we are not going to do it in a sort of sensible, 
humane way; we are going to do it by changing the standards in nursing 
homes so that the people who own the nursing homes do not have to live 
up to the same standard of the provision of care so they can reduce the 
cost.
  This is about priorities. It is about what do we care about.
  One of the most egregious things that happens in America, has 
happened in the last 13 years, is that those people at the bottom end 
of the income scale, the bottom 20 percent saw their income go down 
over the last 13 years 17 percent. The next 20 percent of Americans saw 
their income go down 4 percent. The middle two percentiles of Americans 
stayed about the same. And the top quintile of Americans went up 105 
percent in income.
  In a country that is increasingly competing against a world 
marketplace where information is power, where skill comes through your 
education level, where the kind of job you can have and the kind of 
income you can earn comes through your access to education, to be 
making it harder for Americans to get that education is simply 
inexplicable.
  But that is what this bill does. It is going to make about 1,200 of 
our educational institutions drop out of direct lending. About 1.8 
million students are going to be dropped off of student loans. And many 
of us have been visited--the senior Senator from Massachusetts and I 
have been visited by our University of Massachusetts folks, who tell us 
that they are literally going to have kids drop out of school as a 
consequence of the increase in student loan costs because it is that 
marginal for them, their ability to be able to go to school in the 
first place.
  So, Mr. President, I share the feeling of the Senator from Rhode 
Island. There is a middle ground here. I absolutely agree with him. We 
must reduce the rate of growth in entitlements. We cannot have it both 
ways. And we cannot talk out of both sides of our mouth. I voted for a 
bill that reduced Medicare and reduced Medicaid, but not three times 
what the trustees tell us we need.
  I hope that my friend from Rhode Island and others on the Republican 
side would agree, look, there are 100 Senators here, you cannot come to 
the floor of the Senate and have 20 people decide, or 30 people, that 
it is just going to be their way. We have to have some compromise. We 
are prepared on our side, I know, to compromise on things that we do 
not necessarily agree with completely in the hopes that we will not 
wind up with such a lopsided, unfair, and, frankly, unwise approach to 
the problems of this country.
  We need to raise the income of Americans. And we are going to have to 
train them and educate them to do that. I know there is nobody on the 
other side of the aisle more committed to doing that than the Senator 
from Rhode Island. I must say to my friend from Rhode Island, I would 
love to do it in 7 years. I am prepared to commit to 7 years, if we can 
find a reasonable agreement on what you base your numbers on. But if 
somebody comes to me and says, Senator, we could balance this budget in 
8\1/2\ years or 8 years, we can balance it fairly, and we can also 
provide drug treatment to 50 percent more drug addicts and we can also 
send 2.5 million more kids to college, I will go for that. And I think 
a lot of people here would go for that.
  I will tell you something. Most Americans would go for that. 
Americans want truth and common sense. They are tired of rigid 
intuition-ordained 7-year goals. They want this place to legislate on 
the basis of honesty and common sense. And my prayer is that in the 
next few hours we will get the Government of this country back to work 
and we will sit down like adults and come to an agreement about what 
the best interests of this Nation are.
  Mr. GORTON addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.


                     Order for Recess Until 4 P.M.

  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following the 
conclusion of the remarks of the Senator from Rhode Island [Mr. 
Chafee], the Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Kennedy], and the Senator 
from Minnesota [Mr. Grams], the Senate stand in recess until 4 p.m., 
today.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CHAFEE addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, I listened carefully to the remarks of the 
Senator from Massachusetts and appreciate the thoughtfulness of his 
approach to this situation. It seems to me that while each side has to 
exercise some common sense in all of this, I really do think that there 
is an underlying thrust that we must not forget, and that is, that we 
feel very strongly on this side of the aisle that we have to reach a 
zero deficit situation.
  We believe in the year 2002. And it seems to me, as I have stated 
before, that is a reasonable goal. And I have heard the Democratic 
senior Senator from Georgia say that is a reasonable goal. And I think 
we all ought to agree that the year 2002 is something that is 
attainable and that it is fair, that we all concur in that.
  Now, on the other side of the aisle they feel strongly that there 
should not be a tax cut at all, or if there is going to be a tax cut, 
it should be of a far lower nature than we have proposed on this side. 
To me, that is fair for 

[[Page S 17451]]
them to make that request. And I think we have to back off on this side 
on the size of the tax cut that we are seeking.
  But I would hope this, Mr. President--I know there are going to be 
other speakers, and I know the senior Senator from Massachusetts has 
some charts prepared, and we are ready for all the evils, to hear about 
all the evils of the deficit reduction bill that we passed last 
evening. All right. We are used to that. But I would hope that whoever 
speaks on this floor will say how he or she is going to reach a zero 
deficit. It is all right to criticize what we have done. And I suppose 
you can come up with 35 items of how what we passed last evening was 
not correct. All right. That is fair game. But in return, I would hope 
that the critics come up with how they would do it, and in what year, 
and how and where the savings are going to come from.
  Is it going to be a CPI adjustment, or is it going to be keeping the 
Medicare part B premium at 31.5 percent, or is it going to be a 
reduction in that, all of which costs money, if you change? How is that 
individual or those individuals proposing that we reach this zero 
deficit? I think that is a fair requirement for us to impose on the 
critics of the plan that we passed last evening.
  I thank the Chair.
  Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.

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