[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 60 (Friday, May 3, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4692-S4694]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              THE GAS TAX

  Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, if we do not hurry up and get the 
Presidential race over with, I do not know

[[Page S4693]]

what will happen in this country. How Senator Dole has voted on the gas 
tax in the past is not relevant to me. What kind of a country my 
children and grandchildren inherit is.
  I happen to strongly disagree with Senator Dole on repealing the 4.3-
cent gasoline tax that we put on--not to build highways but to balance 
the budget--that fateful August day in 1993. That particular deficit 
reduction package, in my opinion, is still the hallmark of the Clinton 
administration, the most responsible thing the President has done, the 
most courageous thing he has done. When we open our mail each day a 
certain portion of it is hate mail. Some of it is just plain critical. 
Some of it is very complimentary. When you get to the hate mail it is 
always, ``Why don't you people screw up your nerve and make those 
courageous decisions?''
  I have said on the floor of the Senate many times the definition of a 
courageous decision is an unpopular one. The definition of a courageous 
vote is an unpopular vote. If it were popular, it would not be 
courageous. How many times do you see people walk down this aisle and 
vote, and they look to see how it is going, and it is 50 to 5 or 50 to 
10, yeas versus nays, 9 times out of 10, nobody wants to be caught out 
there with 5 Senators, so they vote yea, too.
  In 1993, every Republican Senator voted against that bill, and 
perhaps this clamor to repeal the gas tax which was part of the deficit 
reduction package, maybe the Republicans would like to find some 
justification for the fact that every single one of them voted no on a 
very courageous deficit reduction package which today, 1996, will give 
us a $144 billion deficit this year. Before we passed that bill in 
1993, we were facing a $290 billion deficit for this year.
  I was proud of that vote in 1993. I am proud of it now. I do not 
intend to take the easy political way out by voting for the repeal of 
the 4.3-cent gasoline tax. That might gain you applause for about 10 
minutes back home, but nobody, so far, has said how we are going to 
make up this $3 billion-plus in revenue we lose with the repeal of this 
gas tax. Now, you talk about an easy, popular vote, here is one. You 
vote to cut that gas tax for the rest of the year, it comes to about $3 
billion, and you do not have to figure out where you are going to get 
the $3 billion. What an easy vote that would be.

  I saw in the paper this morning where the House and Senate Armed 
Services Committees have voted to increase defense spending in 1997 by 
over $12 billion. Why? Make no bones about it. So they can portray 
President Clinton as weak on defense. But the question ought to be, 
``Weak against whom?'' Who is the enemy that we are going to spend $270 
billion next year to defend against? The Soviet Union is gone. Russia 
is a basket case. The Chinese do not even have antiaircraft missiles on 
their ships, such ships as they have. That $270 billion, in 1997, will 
be the equivalent of the amount that our 10 most likely enemies, 
combined, will spend. It is twice as much as the 5 most likely enemies 
will spend, including China and Russia.
  Mr. President, $12 billion is a lot of money to prove that the 
President is weak on defense. Why do we not just get on the floor and 
say, ``You are right, the President is weak on defense; now do not 
spend the $12 billion"? Or you might say, ``Please tell us the enemy 
that you are proposing to spend this $12 billion to defend against.''
  Now, I do not normally read Charles Krauthammer in the Post, but I 
read it this morning because it dealt with this gasoline tax, and it 
was a beautiful article. He hit the nail right on the head. Everybody 
is looking for a scapegoat. In my 22 years in the Senate, when somebody 
made a terrible mistake in judgment, or somebody was just plain 
negligent, if the incident had any political appeal, somebody else 
could always be counted on to call for a hearing. Congress has to think 
about this. We have now spent over $30 million on Whitewater, and 
counting, and the American people are still wondering what it is about.
  Now there is going to be a hearing in the House about the fact that 
the President did not take an affirmative or a negative position on 
Iran furnishing arms to the Bosnians. I doubt very seriously if there 
was anybody in the U.S. Senate that did not know it was going on. But 
it is only now after the fact that we have to have a hearing. We have 
to investigate this. Why does everybody want to investigate everything? 
Because that is where the television cameras come. If you hold a 
hearing in your committee and bring the television cameras in and turn 
those red lights on, they will keep going forever if they can.
  You do not have to be a rocket scientist to know why gas prices are 
up. They are up because, under the Clean Air Act, we demanded 
reformulated gasoline so the air would be cleaner, and that costs about 
a nickel a gallon. We pay it here in Washington, but not in Little Rock 
because our air was not dirty enough to require us to use reformulated 
gasoline. What else? The average driver in this country is driving 
2,000 miles more per year per car than they did 10 years ago. We have a 
lot of younger drivers being added to the driver rolls. We are driving 
bigger cars and more trucks. If you are a yuppie, you have to have a 
sport utility vehicle. I do not know what those suckers get per mile 
per gallon, but I know one thing--if you are in the in-crowd, you sure 
better have a Blazer, or an Explorer or a Cherokee. We took all the 
speed limits off. Montana does not even have a speed limit.
  What else? We had a harsh winter, and we diverted so much of our oil 
to heating oil instead of gasoline. So our stocks of gasoline were low.
  What else? Everybody thought we were going to let Iraq start selling 
oil on the world markets.
  Those are seven reasons the price of gasoline has gone up. As Charles 
Krauthammer so eloquently said in his column this morning, ``Why has 
all this happened? How about a wild guess? Because supply is down and 
demand is up.''
  How long will this go on? Who knows? The energy information office 
says that prices will start down by August. They are down 4 cents where 
I buy gasoline now from where they were 2 weeks ago. But this is a 
Presidential year. You have to get what you can when you can get it.
  My good friend, the junior Senator from Louisiana, John Breaux, said 
that to cut the gasoline tax--that 4.3 cents per gallon--off and think 
that you are going to do something to relieve this problem is like 
spitting in the ocean and hoping to make it rise.
  Mr. President, if we do this, if this is brought to the floor of the 
Senate, Senator Bryan of Nevada and I are going to offer an amendment 
to raise what we call the CAFE standards. The CAFE standards--for the 
uninitiated who do not serve on the Energy Committee--are the average 
miles per gallon that we require the automobile makers to meet. Right 
now, we have CAFE standards that have given us a 21-mile-per-gallon 
average of all of our vehicles.
  In 1973, when the Arab oil embargo hit, the average car in America 
got 13 miles per gallon. With Scoop Jackson, who was a great Senator 
from Washington and chairman of the Energy Committee, we passed the 
CAFE standards and said to the automobile industry that they have to 
provide cars that do better. They have to be more fuel efficient. They 
assured us that they were going to go broke. Every time we ask them to 
do something, we are assured that they are going to go broke. But that 
did not influence us much. That is when they thought the little 
Japanese cars were funny looking and the American people would never 
buy them. We probably saved their lives by imposing the CAFE standards 
on them. In any event, it was 13 miles per gallon. In 1990, we achieved 
21 miles per gallon, and there it stands today. We have not improved 
our mileage per gallon one iota in 6 years.
  And so Senator Bryan and I will offer an amendment if this gas tax 
repeal is debated. We will say forget Presidential politics, forget the 
grandstanding. Let us do something meaningful. Let us raise the fuel 
efficiency of all the vehicles in this country. That will actually do 
something about saving energy.
  The U.S. Public Interest Research Group says that if we raised the 
CAFE standards, which are about 27.5 miles per gallon now for 
automobiles, a little less than that for trucks, to 45 miles per 
gallon--which could be done--for automobiles, and 34 miles per gallon 
for small trucks, in 10 years' time we would save $65 billion.

[[Page S4694]]

  You think of what that would do to our trade deficit. Everybody knows 
that the oil we import is the biggest single contributor to our trade 
deficit and our balance of payments problems. But it is very difficult 
to pass a CAFE standard because that inconveniences people. It is true, 
oil company profits were really excessive the first quarter, and the 
oil companies are taking advantage of these price increases because the 
demand is high and the supply is low. But is that not the good old 
American system? Is not supply and demand at the very heart of 
capitalism?
  So, Mr. President, you can never get it perfect. The President wants 
the cattlemen to get a better shake, and I understand that. This 
morning I looked at the commodity prices. It is absolutely incredible. 
Wheat is almost $6 a bushel, soybeans $8 a bushel, corn $4.50 a bushel. 
And you know what this body did. It voted to do away with the law that 
made those prices possible and said we are going to pass this freedom-
to-farm bill. You can get 85 cents a pound for cotton, $6 for wheat, 
$4.50 for corn, and we will give you a big fat check on top of that. It 
is going to cost $21 billion more over the next 7 years.
  It is the silliest thing this body has ever done. Even the farmers 
did not want it. So the cattlemen are having to pay these exorbitant 
prices for grain, and the supply of cattle is high. You can sell oil 
out of the strategic petroleum reserve. That is sort of like spitting 
in the ocean, too. And you can repeal the 4.3-cent-a-gallon tax, which 
is worth $27 a year to the average car owner in this country, and say 
the deficit will be up $3 billion more this year, and if we allow it to 
stay, it will be up by several billion more in the next 2 years.
  Everybody wants to vote for the easy, popular things, and if it 
raises the deficit, so be it. That is just something we talk about. 
Well, Mr. President, I do not know that anybody wants to filibuster a 
proposal to repeal that 4.3-cent gas tax, but I hope it will not come 
up. If it does, I hope the debate will be extended. It would be the 
height of folly.
  Mr. President, the minority leader will be here momentarily, I 
assume. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lott). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  The Democratic leader is recognized.

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