[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 62 (Tuesday, May 7, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4811-S4812]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            THE GAS TAX CUT

  Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I want to again reiterate my strong 
opposition to the so-called gas tax cut. I have labored on the Energy 
Committee for 21 years and 4 months. An awful lot of that time has been 
spent preaching about conservation and how we must achieve some degree 
of energy independence.
  It has not been too long since cars were lined up at the service 
stations. Getting their gas tanks filled was a 1 to 2 hour proposition. 
How soon we forget. There were cries then that we ought to raise the 
gasoline tax by as much as $1 per gallon. I was never for that. The 
reason I was never for it is because people in my State, which is 
mainly rural, have to drive many miles to go to work and do errands. In 
a rural State people drive from their homes to work in communities 25 
miles away. That is a 50-mile-a-day commute. A 50-mile commute a day 
with a $1 per gallon gasoline tax adds up to a staggering burden on 
middle- and low-income workers.

  I have, however, always been a strong champion of fuel efficiency. 
The first year I was in the Senate under the leadership of Scoop 
Jackson, who was chairman of the Energy Committee, we forced the 
American automobile industry to achieve fuel efficiency standards, 
which they did not want to do. At that point, it was already apparent 
to anybody who watched that the American people had become rather 
captivated by small Japanese-made automobiles that were getting 35 to 
50 miles a gallon. The automobile industry assured Senator Jackson and 
other Members of the Senate that requiring them to achieve some kind of 
a national fuel miles-per-gallon fuel standard would be disastrous for 
them.
  In truth the car companies were wrong. We imposed Corporate Average 
Fuel Economy [CAFE] standards on the automobile industry. We told them 
that by 1985 they had to achieve an average national fuel efficiency 
standard of 27.5 miles per gallon per fleet. At that time in this 
country, the national average of all vehicles on the road, and that was 
roughly 30 million fewer cars than we have now, was a little over 13 
miles per gallon.
  You did not have to be a rocket scientist to know if we were using 
6\1/2\ million barrels of gasoline a day that if you could improve fuel 
efficiency like that, with a snap of a finger, by one-third, you could 
have cut the import of oil into this country by 2 million barrels a 
day. At that time, the United States was producing between 60 percent 
and 65 percent of its own needs. Just parenthetically, today we produce 
about 50 percent and we import the rest. It is easily the single 
biggest contributor to our trade deficit.
  In the 1980's we also raised the gas tax. The Federal gas tax had 
been 4 cents for a very long time. The tax was raised twice in the 
1980's and twice again in the 1990's. Today it is 18.3 cents a gallon. 
In the past, we have always put gasoline taxes into the transportation 
trust funds to be used for building highways and for mass transit.
  In the summer of 1993, as we labored in this body to honor a 
commitment that the President had made during his campaign that he 
would cut the deficit in half during his 4-year term, he sent a 
proposal to the U.S. Congress. He said if you adopt this proposal it 
will reduce the deficit by $500 billion over the next 5 years. We have 
done this precisely the way the people around the coffee shops say they 
want it done--$250 billion in new taxes, $250 billion in spending cuts.
  How often have you heard people say, ``I would not mind paying more 
taxes but they will just spend the money.'' Believe you me, there has 
always been enough action taken around here to give credence to that 
idea. Every poll shows the American people would opt for a plan if it 
cuts spending dollar for dollar against tax increases. So we raised 
income taxes on the wealthiest of Americans and we raised the gasoline 
tax by 4.3 cents a gallon.
  What was that 4.3 cents per gallon tax worth? Over a 5-year-period it 
was worth $24.5 billion. That total package was worth $500 billion over 
a 5-year period, so we said.
  In fact, Madam President, as of this moment, it is headed toward 
being $700 billion in deficit reduction. How did we pass it? At that 
time what some of us like to refer to as the ``good old days,'' we had 
56 Democratic Senators, 6 voted no, 50 voted aye, and Vice President 
Albert Gore sat in that chair and voted to break the tie of 50-50, and 
we passed that deficit reduction package, which included this 4.3-cent 
a gallon gas tax.
  Now we are back, and everyone wants to balance the budget. The 
American people have issued a nonnegotiable demand that they want the 
budget balanced. I happen to believe that any time the American people 
speak almost with one voice, they are heard here. So this body for the 
first time since I have been in the Senate has gotten serious about the 
business of balancing the budget.
  Let me digress to say this, Madam President. The Presiding Officer is 
a member of the Republican Party. I am a Democrat. There are 53 
Republicans sitting on the other side and there are 47 Democrats 
sitting on this side. In truth, this ought to be pleasing to the ears 
of the American people. We would all agree on about 90 percent of what 
we believe to be the core values of this country. Madam President, 90 
percent of the core values that have made us a great Nation. And we 
are, make no mistake about it.
  One of the values that every Democrat and every Republican and 
virtually everybody in the country would agree on is we should balance 
our budget. Where did we diverge? A couple of my very good friends on 
this side of the aisle are no longer here, and they are no longer here 
because they had the courage to be one of the 50 to vote for honest-to-
God deficit reduction. If we had not done that, we would be looking at 
a $290 to $300 billion deficit today. One of the reasons the American 
people are feeling slightly better is that this year the deficit is 
going to be $144 billion--less than half what it was projected to be 
and less than half what it would have been if a few people had not 
screwed up their nerve and been courageous enough to vote for something 
that was obviously unpopular. Nobody wants to vote for a tax increase 
of any kind. I wish I could just wave a wand and vote to repeal the 
4.3-cent gas tax and say, ``Well, we will take care of the deficit some 
other way.''

[[Page S4812]]

  Madam President, this is the first time we have attempted to undo any 
portion of that deficit reduction package of 1993. I am opposed to it 
because I lost two good friends who were courageous enough to vote for 
it. I am opposed to it on energy efficiency grounds, and I am opposed 
to it because you cannot balance the budget and keep giving away the 
Treasury.
  It is really slightly hypocritical to ask the people of this place to 
repeal the 4.3-cent gasoline tax which will cost us, just for the 
remainder of this year of 1996, about $3 billion? If we take the 4.3 
cents tax off for the ensuing 7 years, you are talking about $32 
billion.
  Where are you going to get the money to offset that? The majority 
leader in the House of Representatives said, ``Well, let us take it out 
of education. We are not getting a very good bang for the buck on our 
money for education. We will take it out of education.''
  Madam President, the rules of the Senate do not permit me to say what 
I really would like to say about that. But needless to say, that is a 
crazy idea.
  Somebody else has said, ``Well, we are getting ready to impose a tax 
on the banks and S&L's to go under the so-called SAIF to pay off the 
bonds that we issued to bail the S&L's out. So we will just take it out 
of the savings and loan insurance fund.
  You think about that one. We are going to reduce the gas tax 4.3 
cents a gallon and make it up by charging the same amount to people of 
this country because they have deposits in the bank. That is passed on 
to the consumer one way or another. If we make the banks and the S&L's 
pay more into the insurance fund, they will pass it on to the 
customers. So if you say, ``Well, we will take the gas tax off, but we 
will pick it up over here in the bank fund,'' I do not consider that 
the most enlightened solution either.
  Madam President, 3 weeks ago the price of oil was $24 a barrel. 
Yesterday it was $21 a barrel--12.5 percent less than it was 3 weeks 
ago. It takes a while before that reduced price of oil works its way 
through the pipeline, and the consumers get the benefit of it. But the 
Energy Information Administration says by October the price of oil will 
be $17 a barrel.
  I wish to goodness we could get this Presidential election over with 
so we could start talking seriously about things that really matter 
instead of playing around with things like this for whatever political 
impact they might have in November.
  Madam President, how are we going to tell the American people that 
their gasoline prices are going to go down 4.3 cents a gallon? Answer. 
We are not, because we do not have any way of knowing that. The oil 
companies can put that 4.3 cents a gallon in their pocket.
  But more to the point, how do we make up the $3 billion we are going 
to lose? Nobody has said yet anything credible. No credible offer has 
been made as to how we are going to offset it. I frankly think the 
politics of this thing is not on the side of the proponents.
  Yesterday, I had 150 people in a committee room over in the Dirksen 
Building, members of the chamber of commerce from my State. They were 
all here for their big national shindig. So for openers I just asked, 
``How many people here would like to repeal the 4.3 cents per gallon 
gas tax?'' This is the chamber of commerce; these are business people 
normally who dislike taxes intensely. I did not embellish. I did not 
try to argue one way or the other. I just asked the question point 
blank. Five people. ``How many would like to leave the gas tax alone?'' 
Roughly 70 to 90 voted to leave it alone.
  Today, the rural cooperatives were in town. I heard the distinguished 
Senator from North Dakota today say that farmers use six to seven times 
as much gasoline as the ordinary driver uses. There must have been 
about 75 people at the meeting today. ``How many of you would like to 
repeal the 4.3-cent gas tax?'' Three. All the rest were opposed.
  So for all of the reasons I have enumerated plus others--and I will 
not take additional time, Madam President, because we are ready to shut 
this operation down for the night, but for all of those reasons and 
many more, the repeal of the 4.3-cents-per-gallon gas tax is a foolish 
idea.
  And I am not going to vote for a constitutional amendment to balance 
the budget, which is an equally foolish idea. So many people in this 
body treat the Constitution like it is a rough draft that they are 
supposed to finish up somehow or other.
  Everybody wants to amend the Constitution. I do not. I have only 
voted for one amendment, and I intend to think twice before voting for 
another amendment. I do not like a lot of the Members of this body 
tampering with what Madison and Adams, Hamilton and Franklin did 207 
years ago.
  Madam President, if we ever debate this gasoline tax, which I 
understood we were going to take up today, I will be back in the 
Chamber largely repeating what I just said plus some additional things. 
But I can tell you the American people are not behind this. They do not 
want it. If you want to do something to please the American people, get 
the budget balanced. Do not be tinkering around with the politics of 
the 4.3-cent gasoline tax. And above all, do not ask me to vote to undo 
the deficit reduction we have going which has been successful to a 
staggering degree. We should not start unraveling it now because there 
is a Presidential election in November.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.

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