[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 69 (Thursday, May 16, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5111-S5140]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. DeWine). The Senate will now resume
consideration of Senate Concurrent Resolution 57, which the clerk will
report.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
A concurrent resolution (S. Con. Res. 57) setting forth the
congressional budget for the United States Government for
fiscal years 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002.
Mr. GORTON addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. GORTON. I suggest the absence of a quorum and ask unanimous
consent that it be charged equally on both sides.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The clerk
will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. EXON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Amendment No. 3965
(Purpose: Setting forth the congressional budget for the United States
Government for fiscal years 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002)
Mr. EXON. Mr. President, as agreed to yesterday, at this time I send
an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from Nebraska [Mr. Exon], for himself, Mr.
Daschle, Mr. Dodd, and Mr. Kerry, proposes an amendment
numbered 3965.
Mr. EXON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the
amendment be dispensed with.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(The text of the amendment is printed in today's Record under
``Amendments Submitted.'')
Mr. EXON. Mr. President, in the arrangement between myself and the
Budget Committee chairman, Senator Domenici, I am offering this
amendment today as a substitute for the basic Republican amendment that
was laid down when we began the budget debate yesterday by the chairman
of the Budget Committee.
[[Page S5112]]
The amendment that I am offering is very clear cut. It is not
difficult to understand. I am proposing the President's 7-year, CBO
certified balanced budget as a substitute to the Republican budget that
is now before the Senate.
Let us turn back the clock to a year ago. That is when my Republican
colleagues pulled our leg on the Senate floor. The Republicans offered
the President's budget recommendation as a substitute for their own
amendment. They offered that as a substitute resolution. As a result of
that, they had a good laugh at our expense as the amendment was voted
down 99 to 0, with this Senator, the ranking Democrat on the Budget
Committee, voting with the 99.
But what a difference a year makes. It is not only a different year,
Mr. President. It is a different budget. And I do not think my
colleagues on the other side would be smirking if they did the same
thing this year as they did last year, but, of course, there is no
indication that they will do that. It would not be the meaningless,
hollow political gesture that it was in May 1995. This President's
balanced budget is real in every sense of the word, and it is certified
to be in balance by the Congressional Budget Office.
Throughout last year I heard one chorus from the Republican majority.
They repeated it over and over again: ``Mr. President, give us a 7-year
balanced budget, certified by the Congressional Budget Office.'' I was
urging the President to do the same thing. The difference was that I
was interested in sound budget politics rather than partisan politics.
It is now a done deal. The President has complied with what the
Republicans were seeking and what this Senator was seeking.
Now we hear something different from the Republicans. In order to
avoid dealing with the President, House Budget Chairman Kasich has now
reversed course and tells CNN, ``The problem is, of course, not in the
numbers.'' It is the extremist Republican philosophy that President
Clinton and mainstream Americans have soundly rejected, but they are
still on that course. For my colleagues who still believe that honest
numbers are important, here is a product, the President's budget, far
superior to the Republican budget that is now on the floor. For, as the
Republican budget delivers fresh and needless pain, across the years,
the President's budget is a smart mixture of fiscal constraint and
compassion.
The President's budget achieves balance in 7 years, but it does so
without the terrible burden being brought on our senior citizens,
working families, and the most vulnerable in America. It reflects the
values and the priorities of the American people. It protects Medicare
benefits and it protects Medicare beneficiaries. It invests in our
children's education, it protects the environment from the search-and-
destroy right wing radicals. It preserves nursing home standards and
nursing home benefits. It prevents ordinary Americans from going broke
to pay for nursing home care.
As I noted a few moments ago, this will be the last budget resolution
of my Senate career, and I thank President Clinton for saving the best
for last, as far as this Senator is concerned. In my 18 years in this
great body, I cannot think of another budget that better hits the mark
right from the start. I cannot think of another budget that I could
endorse so eagerly. I cannot think of another budget that ordinary
Americans could so readily call their own.
Having said that, of course the President's budget is not without
some flaws as far as this Senator is concerned. We could all find
things on which we would disagree. There is always a pea under the
mattress that irritates one or more of the 100 Members of this body.
And there are some things in the President's budget that cause me some
concern. But what we are talking about here is a document that I am
introducing today that I hope would be the basic model that we would
begin from, rather than the budget proposal endorsed and put together
and offered by the Republican majority. In other words, I, too, would
hope we could do some fine tuning on the President's budget, which I
think is necessary.
But I want to be clear on this point: The underlying mechanism in
this budget, which is fiscal restraint coupled with protecting our
economic investments so vital to America, is synchronized and in fine
working order, but I would certainly entertain some amendments to it.
After 18 years in the Senate, I harbor few illusions that there will
be a mass conversion on the other side of the table to what I consider
to be my reasonable appeal. I ask my colleagues, however, to have a
serious discussion and have a serious look at the amendment I am
offering.
For too many months we have been talking at each other and not with
each other about how to balance the budget in 7 years. This
Presidential proposal is a serious and a honest budget, and I hope all
of my colleagues will approach this amendment in that spirit so we can
move ahead in an expeditious fashion.
Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time, and I yield the
floor.
Mr. GORTON addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, we are now beginning a debate over the
President's budget proposal for 1997 and for succeeding years. In a
very real sense, the fact that we are debating this proposal represents
a major step forward from the situation in which we found ourselves
last year.
As my friend, the Senator from Nebraska, has pointed out, last year
it was members of the Republican Party who put up the President's
budget to be voted on and voted down. Members of his own party were not
willing, systematically, to defend that budget. Because, Mr. President,
as you will remember, last year the debate was fixed very firmly on the
proposition that one side, the new Republican majority, felt it vitally
important not only to promise a balanced budget at some time in the
future, but to make the very difficult policy decisions that were
required to assure that the budget was, in fact, balanced.
We succeeded in doing so. We succeeded in doing so so well that
during the entire period of time in which it looked as though this
promise would be kept, interest rates declined all across the country.
What did that mean? It meant that people buying homes paid less in the
way of interest on their mortgages and therefore were more likely to be
able to afford to buy a home or to buy a better home. It meant that
businesses, small and large, paid less in interest and were therefore
able to increase their productivity and increase the jobs that they had
to offer and increase the quality and compensation for the jobs which
they did offer. In other words, even a binding promise to reach balance
in the future that was believable had a positive impact on our economy,
and by the year of balance, 2002, it would have meant at least $1,000
per family in the pockets of the average American family.
During the entire development of that balanced budget, the other side
refused to come up with any alternative that would reach that balance,
and the struggle was between a group of Republicans who felt it
absolutely unethical and immoral to continue to spend money by the
hundreds of billions of dollars, the bills for which we sent to our
children and grandchildren, and a side led by the President who felt
this was not relevant and was unimportant.
Beginning in December, however, and culminating with the offer of
this Presidential budget, we have had, in fact, at least lip service--
and I must say that lip service is important to the proposition that a
balanced budget is of great help to all Americans by removing some of
the burdens of Government from their shoulders, by freeing them up and,
implicitly, leaving more of their hard-earned money in their own
pockets.
Unfortunately, however, doing that job is more difficult. It is
harder work than the President of the United States is willing to
undertake.
His dedication to the proposition is welcome. The product itself is
seriously flawed. As a consequence, that makes even less valid his
characterization of our efforts as being extreme in nature. In fact,
the President has never made any real steps in our direction, even when
compromises and modifications were made on the part of the Speaker of
the House and the majority leader of the Senate and the distinguished
chairman of our Budget Committee, Senator Domenici.
[[Page S5113]]
So we now have a unity with respect to our goals, but a dramatic
difference in connection with the way in which those goals are reached.
What we have in this proposal, the amendment that is the subject matter
before the Senate right now, is spending increases in 1997, rather than
a move on a steady path of lowering spending so that we reach a goal on
a gradual but even path between now and the year 2002, 6 years from
today.
What we get are a series of mechanisms and gimmicks rather than
choices that do require the Congressional Budget Office to show reduced
spending and reduced deficits, though there is not a single detail as
to how we get there in the key years right after the turn of the
century.
More accurately, if we look at the policy judgments that are
contained in this Presidential budget, we see that it has a deficit of
$84 billion in the year 2002, according to the Congressional Budget
Office. Mr. President, $84 billion is not a modest amount of money by
any stretch of the imagination, just under $100 billion after 6 more
years of lip service to a balanced budget and at that--to get to that
figure, our one-time savings and assets sales, which is immediately
after that year, will have resulted--the budget deficit would increase
very, very substantially.
So this proposal is a very modest step in the right direction, but it
is not a balanced budget. It is not a serious attempt to make decisions
now that will lead to a balanced budget. It is, in fact, a promise of
very difficult choices for the President after next, for the President
who is elected not in 1996 but in the year 2000.
What are the gimmicks, what are the mechanisms that allow this to be
determined as a balanced budget that are, in fact, no more than
gimmicks? A discretionary trigger, No. 1; an end to the tax reductions
that are called for in the bill, No. 2; outrageous shell games with
respect to Medicare, one of the vital social safety nets in our entire
society; welfare reform that is not reform; and a number of other
sleights of hand.
Let us go to some of the gimmicks first. This proposal increases
domestic discretionary spending for next year, the one year of the
budget that is absolutely binding, by $10 billion, so that the
President, during the course of the reelection campaign, can point to a
wide variety of increases in programs supported by various interest
groups and by large numbers of people.
Then from 1998 to 2002, there are a significant number of cuts, none
of which is specified, none of which can be attacked because they are
amorphous. They are simply figures on the wall without any detail to
back them up.
Finally, for the last 2 years, the President calls for increased
discretionary spending, even though the Congressional Budget Office
says that the trigger mechanism to balance the budget included in this
proposal will reduce discretionary spending by $45 billion in the year
2002 alone. But worse than that--worse than that, Mr. President--as
gimmicky as it is, is the President's treatment of Medicare. This
budget takes one of the most vital elements of Medicare, an element
that is now protected by being in the Medicare trust fund, paid for by
the payroll taxes that each of us at work pays every single year: Home
health care, not an insubstantial program, Mr. President, which costs
$55 billion. It is taken out of the trust fund by the President's
proposal, out of the protection of the trust fund in order that the
President can show that the trust fund stays solvent for a longer
period of time than would otherwise be the case, and transfers it we
really know not where.
In one sense, this Presidential budget says, ``Well, we're going to
transfer home health care to Medicare part B,'' the part that pays for
physicians' fees in Medicare, an element of Medicare that is not
covered by the trust fund, an element of which about 75 percent is paid
by general taxes, that is to say, the deficit, and 25 percent by
premiums paid by the beneficiaries.
Medicare part B, of course, is voluntary. It is such a good deal that
there is practically no one eligible for it who does not take it when
you are only paying 25 percent of its cost. But it is voluntary. So
home health care at one level is transferred into part B. But it does
not become voluntary, it is still there. It is not subject to any of
the copayments that are a part of part B. It is not subject to the 25-
percent premium cost that part B is subject to otherwise. So, in fact,
it simply becomes a completely, totally, absolutely unfunded
entitlement, Mr. President.
What does that mean? It means $55 billion a year more in bills
transferred to working Americans, out of the trust fund, which they are
already paying and--incidentally, those payments are not cut at all--
simply into the general fund to be added to the deficit.
That does one of three things, Mr. President: either it greatly
increases the deficit by that $55 billion, or it will result in a tax
increase of $55 billion on the American people, a new tax, or at some
point or another, when things get tough, it just will not be paid for
at all, and it will disappear, home health care will disappear.
Mr. President, I use the word ``gimmick.'' This does not really get
appropriately covered by the word ``gimmick.'' This is a fraud. This is
something to which people are entitled now, that is being paid for now,
that is in a trust fund now, that suddenly is just hanging out there
with a new bill for the American people.
There are other gimmicks in the Medicare cuts that are in the
President's budget. The amount of money he claims to save is not saved,
according to the scoring of the Congressional Budget Office, what they
come up with for it. There are more triggers on the amounts of money
for outpatient hospital services. There is a new entitlement program
for workers temporarily unemployed, but it sunsets in the year 2000.
Taxes on working families, college students, and small businesses
will be increased in the year 2001. Payroll taxes will be accelerated
at that particular period of time, Mr. President. And these really are
gimmicks. A whole slew of asset sales are pushed into the year 2002 to
show a one-time balance with, of course, no balance thereafter.
There is a spectrum auction of spectrum for the year 2002, of
spectrum that will not be returned to the Federal Government until
2005, even if it is ready to be returned at that particular time. Will
it get less money than if it were auctioned at the time it is actually
available? Obviously those will be lower.
So as CBO indicates that they will be $6 billion short, there is just
a contingent $6 billion charge on broadcasters to make up the
difference for the year 2002. Governors Island in New York Harbor is
going to be deserted after 1998, but it will not be sold until 2002 so
that it can balance the budget in that year. The strategic petroleum
reserve, the Weeks Island Naval Petroleum Reserve--the same thing, they
get sold long after we have assumed that they would be sold to balance
the budget in that year.
In welfare, the President's welfare reform program does not require
its recipients to be enrolled in Work First until 2003 so that the
payment for their new education and training management does not begin
until later.
So even if you accept all of the gimmicks, all of the tax increases,
all of the unspecified spending cuts, to get us to balance in 2002, it
all goes to hell in a hand basket immediately thereafter.
Mr. President, I have only begun to list the gimmicks and the
outrageous transfers of responsibility that are included in this
proposal. It just is not serious. Successive speakers will speak to
some of the circular reasoning that is contained in this proposal. It
is a proposal that is very comfortable for next year, one in many
respects in connection with discretionary spending I wish that I could
support, but one I cannot support when it does not really reform
entitlements, when it leaves all of the heavy lifting to the President
after next, and when it leaves that President after next with a huge
unfunded liability in the third year of his or her Presidency.
As I said to begin these remarks, Mr. President, it is a major step
forward to have a commitment to a balanced budget on the part of the
President of the United States. But when that commitment is lip service
only, when there is no heavy lifting, when there are no serious
reductions or serious policy changes, we have not even gotten halfway.
We should be and we are grateful that we are halfway.
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I am grateful that the Senate is actually seriously debating two--no,
three before we are done--serious possibilities. I will support two of
those possibilities, the bipartisan budget which will come up, I
suspect tomorrow, and the Republican one because, while they take a
slightly different path, they both deal seriously with the problem of
balancing the budget. They have a real balanced budget. They have
policy decisions that will affect the years not directly covered by
this budget as well as those that are covered by it. I regret to say
that the proposal that we have before us this minute does none of those
things. Lipservice, Mr. President, is not enough. Action is required.
Mr. EXON addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.
Mr. EXON. Mr. President, we are hearing repeatedly today what we
heard from the Republican side of the aisle yesterday--every time it is
said I intend to correct it--and that is that the President's budget is
not in balance.
As I said in my opening remarks yesterday, and in my opening remarks
this morning, contrary to the statements that are being made from that
side of the aisle, the President's budget is certified to be in balance
by the Congressional Budget Office. Lest we forget what that is, the
Congressional Budget Office is run and managed by a Republican
appointee whom I supported to be the head of that organization.
The Congressional Budget Office, whether run by a Democrat or
Republican, has always been considered to be about as fair as you can
get with regard to certifying numbers.
I quote once again, as I did yesterday--and I will keep quoting it
today every time somebody on that side of the aisle says that the
President's budget is not balanced--and that is this quote from the
Congressional Budget Office headed by June O'Neill.
The President's budget proposes policies that the
Congressional Budget Office estimates would balance the
budget by the year 2002.
Yet that side of the aisle keeps saying, ``It does not. It does not.
It does not.'' I am not going to get into ``You said that, she said
that, he said that.'' But their claims are fundamentally wrong and they
do not not contribute to a legitimate debate on the budget when they
keep saying, ``the President's budget doesn't balance.''
Likewise, I would say, that the Congressional Budget Office has said
that the Republican budget proposal introduced by Chairman Domenici
yesterday does balance. There are several things that I could pick
apart on that. There are several things that I could get up and say,
``I don't agree with CBO. I think that the Republican budget does not
balance in the year 2002 for this reason, for that reason, for the
gimmicks that are included in their budget.''
But it seems to me that when I take that kind of an argument, I am
undermining the basic context that I think is important; that is, that
CBO has certified that in their best judgment and by their best
estimates both the President's budget, that I have just offered, and
the Republican budget offered yesterday by Chairman Domenici, have been
certified to by CBO as balancing the budget by the year 2002.
Now, I do not think we accomplished very much since both of the basic
budgets that we are arguing about here have been certified by CBO. Last
year, I repeat again, the Republicans hounded the President, hounded
the Democrats and challenged the President to come forth with a budget
that could be certified to as being balanced by the year 2002 by the
Congressional Budget Office. Now that it has been done, as I said
yesterday, they are moving the goal posts once again.
I think we can have legitimate debate on what are the rights and what
are the wrongs in both the President's budget and, the Republican
budget. I admitted and conceded in my opening remarks this morning,
that there are some parts of the President's budget that I do not agree
with. I think we accomplish very little by getting up on the floor of
the U.S. Senate, as Republicans did yesterday and as they are starting
out to do today, to say the President's budget is not balanced. Says
who? Says the Republican majority. The Republican majority is a
partisan referee and therefore their claims should not be considered as
authentic with regard to whose budget balances best and in what
timeframe.
As I say, I think there are many policy problems with the Republican
budget, and I think there are policy problems with the President's
budget. I suggest we could expedite the proceedings and come to more
intelligent debate if we stop saying this budget does not balance and
that budget does not balance, and agree, if we can, that the CBO has
certified both the Republican budget and the President's budget that I
have just introduced as being balanced by the year 2002. If we are
going to go down that road, we are just going to be throwing stones at
each other's budget without getting to the specifics of what we would
like to see done.
Once again, to bring that point home, I want to talk for just a
moment about the Medicare part A and B trust funds that have become
focal in the debate, and justifiably so. Once again, I am going to
introduce for the Record and read a very short letter from June
O'Neill, the Republican-appointed Director of the Congressional Budget
Office. The letter is dated May 9, 1996:
Congressional Budget Office,
Washington, DC, May 9, 1996.
Hon. J. James Exon,
Ranking Minority Member, Committee on the Budget, U.S.
Senate, Washington, DC.
Dear Senator: At your request, the Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) has examined the effects of the Administration's
budgetary proposals on the Hospital Insurance (HI) trust
fund. Under current law, the HI trust fund is projected to
become insolvent in 2001. CBO estimates that the
Administration's proposals would postpone this date to 2005.
Sincerely,
June E. O'Neill.
Director.
Mr. President, in listening to the Senator from Washington, he seems
to assert that the home health care part of the budget would be safer
in Medicaid part A than it would be in Medicaid part B. I find this
association somewhat ironic in view of the fact there is no place in
the entire Republican budget where the majority seeks to find more
savings, or, placed in a better context, there is no place where
reductions from real needs have been more savaged by the Republicans
than in Medicare part A. Yet, the majority wants to reduce $123 billion
from protected Medicare part A spending. If that is what they do to
programs that they claim are safe, I hate to see what they would do to
programs they dislike.
What I am saying is the sound and fury from the other side with the
President's shift in home health care--he is shifting it into an area
that would make it safer. The President is taking and transferring this
out of the part of the budget that the Republicans are savaging with
cuts that would be far below real needs.
Once again, I am not sure we are talking about apples and apples and
apples and oranges here. Suffice it to say, I think so far the attack
on the President's budget, while, once again, I say is not perfect in
my eye, is not honest and straightforward. I think some of their
arguments are somewhat suspect.
Mr. President, one more quote, again from my remarks of yesterday,
that are found on page 203 of the committee report:
The Republican budget is rife with gimmicks. The tax cuts
mysteriously drop off from $23 billion to $16 billion by the
year 2002. The Republicans count on savings towards balancing
the budget from spending cuts that they already used in the
Kennedy-Kassebaum health bill. They similarly count twice the
savings in housing. Without these gimmicks, the Republican
budget would not be in balance.
I only cite that, Mr. President, to say this Senator, too, could be
charged with trying to undermine the Republican budget. The term
``gimmicks'' in the President's budget was used by my friend and
colleague from Washington in remarks just concluded. This Senator used
the term ``gimmicks'' yesterday explaining shortcomings that I see in
the Republican budget.
I do not believe that either of us should keep hounding the other
side on gimmicks because the facts of the matter are, there are lots of
things in the President's budget and there are lots of things in the
Republican budget that could be deemed as gimmicks. Those of us who
call parts of the Republican budget gimmicks and, likewise, when the
Republicans call parts of the President's budget gimmicks, we are
voicing
[[Page S5115]]
an opinion. Only time will tell whether it is true or not.
While I have attacked parts of the Republican budget as gimmicks, I
say in the end what we should all do is recognize and realize that
gimmicks or no gimmicks, the Congressional Budget Office, which we all
recognize as a legitimate referee, has certified that, in their
opinion, both budgets reach balance by the year 2002. And I suspect,
because I respect the professionalism of the Congressional Budget
Office, that they are not necessarily blind-sided by what the Senator
from Nebraska calls gimmicks in the Republican proposal, or likewise,
when the Republicans charge that parts of the President's budget has
gimmicks in it.
So, gimmicks or no gimmicks, I think we should get on with the debate
by recognizing that while there is legitimate criticism in order to
both of the budget proposals, I hope that we can get off the kick of
saying it over and over again that the President's budget does not
balance and that the Republican budget does not balance. We can say
that, but I think it contributes not a great deal to the legitimate
discussion, since it is a moot point.
The Congressional Budget Office has said that both budgets are
balanced. I think there is plenty of room for debate on changes that
should be made to improve the two budgets. But let us, hopefully, agree
that we are talking about two budgets that do meet balance by the year
2002, and that should not be a key part of the debate.
I reserve the remainder of my time and yield the floor.
Mr. GORTON addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. GORTON. I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Missouri.
Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Washington. Let me
say, I am going to agree with----
Mr. EXON. If the Senator will withhold for a minute so we can talk
about time here, a lot of people have asked me when we are going to
vote. I simply say--and I have not had a report from the Senator yet
this morning--that we have about 34 amendments that Democrats are
intending to offer. We asked last night that they try and advise us,
and your side advise you, what amendments we have. We are trying to
complete this effort by tomorrow night. We are certainly going to have
to have some discipline somewhere along the line to get that done.
I would like to ask, first, about how many amendments do you see on
your side, or do you know about at the present time? When we have that,
we will add that to the 34 that we have here and multiply that out by
the number of hours that each one of those amendments are entitled to.
Then we will begin to see the difficult task we are going to have by
trying to finish this by tomorrow night.
The second question I want to ask to move this debate along is this.
Last night, Senators on both sides suggested that we put off this
debate until this morning and not have a vote before noon. I am
wondering if we could possibly get an agreement that we would try and
balance out time so that we could have a vote in the vicinity of noon
today on this matter. Is that a feasible proposal? Does the Senator
think that might move things along?
Mr. GORTON. The Senator from Nebraska has me at a certain
disadvantage. As he knows, I am sitting in for the chairman of the
Budget Committee this morning. I cannot give him definitive answers to
either of his questions. I can say, however, that I have no
anticipation that we would vote before noon. I am sure we can
informally divide the time between now and noon and give Members
assurance we will not vote before then. It may be that it is after noon
before we get to do so.
As was the case with the Senator from Nebraska, our chairman asked
Republican Members to report to him on all the amendments they would
have by noon today. Well, it is still an hour and a half from noon. We
have only a relative handful.
Mr. EXON. That is a good sign.
Mr. GORTON. That is certainly a good sign. We will be able to answer
his question, of course, more definitively in a relatively short period
of time. I think that, on an informal basis, we can agree to simply go
back and forth. We have yielded time to the Senator from Missouri. I
see the Senator from South Carolina. It would be appropriate for him to
go next, and then back and forth for a period of time, at least.
Mr. EXON. I thank the Senator. That helps answer some of the
questions. Let us move forward.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Inhofe.) The Senator from Missouri.
Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I assume that did not count against my 10
minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. It did not.
Mr. BOND. If we can start afresh, let me thank my distinguished
colleague from Washington and warn my good friend from Nebraska that I
am going to agree with him. I know that maybe this will help the
process move along. But we have before us the President's budget. This
is a massive work that would cost about a hundred dollars if you want
to buy it. It has the numbers in here that the President proposes.
Mr. President, in one sense, the Senator from Washington is right.
The numbers here do not balance. The numbers in the book do not come to
balance. Now, the President has done something in this budget. You have
to look at the supplement to see what he has done. He said, if it does
not work, I have a trigger. On page 13, it says, ``In case the new
assumptions produce a deficit in 2002, the President's budget proposes
an immediate adjustment to the annual limit, or caps on discretionary
spending, lowering them enough to reach balance in 2002.''
I agree with the Senator from Nebraska. When you impose those caps,
the President's budget does come to balance in 2002. I am not going to
call that automatic cut a gimmick, or that trigger a gimmick. Let us
just take it for what it does. The President has presented a budget,
and he said if it does not balance, you take a whack at it. Well, that
whack is a $16 billion tax increase on families in the year 2002. It is
a $67 billion cut in spending, 10 percent in 2001 and 18 percent in
2002.
So when you take a look at all these numbers, remember that these
numbers do not balance. You have to apply the trigger. You have to
shoot that budget down to get it to balance. I am going to show you
what that does to some of these discretionary spending programs. I hope
that my colleagues, before they vote on the President's budget, will
understand the impact of these cuts triggered because the President
claims he wants to get to a balanced budget.
Now, that may sound kind of complicated. Let me reduce it to common,
everyday terms. It is as if you went to the grocery store and you
filled up your basket; you gathered all the things you needed and all
the things you wanted. You took it to the checkout counter, and the
clerk ran it up at the checkout counter, and all those bar scanner
codes recorded the numbers. At the end, the bill comes out to be $100.
You look in your wallet and you say, ``Whoops, I only have $80.'' You
have $100 worth of wishes and wants, but you only have $80. So you are
going to have to start putting some things back. So you put $20 worth
of stuff back, and you pay your $80 and take the goods home.
Well, when we talk about the budget that the President proposes, let
us talk about that $80 that he is actually going to spend. Do not be
misled if somebody talks about the $100 he wants. Do not be misled
about the tax cuts because there is going to be a $16 billion increase
for individuals and families. There will be a $16 billion tax increase
for families in 2002 because, unless you do that, these numbers do not
add up.
Mr. President, the point I made yesterday and the day before is that
numbers do not lie. Let us take a look at the numbers.
Mr. President, I think it is important that we take a look at some of
the vital impacts on health and children in this. I mentioned yesterday
the Food and Drug Administration. The budget we have before us reported
out of the Senate Budget Committee essentially keeps funding for the
Food and Drug Administration on an even keel. The Food and Drug
Administration is vitally important because its diverse
responsibilities include licensing blood banks, monitoring clinical
investigations, reviewing and approving prescription drugs, generic
drugs, animal drugs, vaccines, biologicals, medical devices, and food
additives. The FDA ensures the quality of a trillion dollars
[[Page S5116]]
worth of products. This year it proposes to certify over 10,000
mammography facilities across the country--vital to the health and
well-being of our country.
What happens when the President applies that trigger, those caps,
those cuts to the FDA? Look at this red line that shows the dramatic
reduction in funding for the FDA from almost $900 million to under $700
million in 2001 only coming up above $700 million in 2002. This is a
tremendous cut in the vitally important activities of the Food and Drug
Administration.
I mentioned yesterday the National Institutes of Health looking for
new cures, new ways of dealing with the diseases. The President has a
nice little blip up here. But when he gets over to get to balance and
you apply the trigger, you take the cuts, you take the whacks, that
funding drops off the map. It goes from almost $12.5 billion to below
$11 billion, $1.5 billion cut year to year from 2,000 to 2002--$1.5
billion.
Are we going to have all the answers to health and well-being? Are we
going to still need the National Institutes of Health? I think so. We
cannot afford the cuts that the President proposed. We are dealing with
real numbers.
This is what would happen, if you believed the President and if you
believed this budget will get to balance.
Child care and development block grant. I was very pleased to work
with my colleague from Connecticut on the act for better child care. We
turned it into a development block grant because we recognized the
importance of assisting working families with care for their children.
The President has a little upswing this year. This is an election year,
of course. But then look what happens. From over $1 billion, about $1.5
billion, this thing drops off the cliff to about $800 million in the
year 2002--almost a $250 million cut in child care because of the
President's trigger.
Do we really want to say to people who are trying to get off welfare,
``Hey. Get off welfare this year. We are going to assist you with your
child care expenses. But sorry about the ensuing years. There is not
going to be the money there.''
That is what the President's budget does. That is if you implement
the mechanism the Senator from Nebraska rightly pointed out is in the
President's budget. That is how it gets to a balance.
WIC, funding for women, infants, and children. We both support this
at least in the early years. The President's line goes up. The
Republican line goes up. But, whoops. The President had said he wants
to balance the budget. So you fire the gun, you put on the cap, you
pull the trigger, and what happens to funding for women, infants, and
children? It goes, in his budget, from over $4.2 billion down to about
$3.7 billion.
This is a significant cut. If you believe and advocate and want to
stand up for the President's budget, you have to be willing to say,
``Hey. We are going to get to balance in the year 2002 by taking this
much of a whack out of the feeding program for women, infants, and
children.''
Mr. President, I do not believe that is going to happen. That is not
a realistic budget. But the President is standing by that budget.
Anybody who votes for it says, ``I am voting for it. I believe in it.''
If you vote for the President's budget, then, Mr. President, you have
to be saying, ``I believe these numbers, and I will support these
numbers.''
I have talked a good deal about the Veterans' Administration because
that happens to be one of the vital functions that is funded in the
appropriations subcommittee which I chair. The Veterans' Administration
budget has been very contentious. Last year we had a floor amendment,
an amendment sponsored by the Senator from West Virginia, Senator
Rockefeller, and Senators Mikulski, Leahy, and Wellstone.
They said, if we kept an even spending level, we would have to close
four veterans hospitals. The Republican budget has even funding. This
cuts almost $13 billion--25 percent. That means that one out of four
facilities, or more, in the United States would have to be closed. Here
are the States with veterans facilities. Florida has 6, Massachusetts
has 5, New York has 13, and California has 11. One out of four--that
means California is going to have three, four, or five closed. The
Senator from California [Mrs. Boxer] was complaining that we did not
open a hospital last year. The question is, Which of these is going to
be cut?
Mr. President, the budget provided by the President is not workable.
Those numbers do not lie.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. HOLLINGS addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina is recognized.
Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, I yield such time as is required for the
moment.
Mr. President, the distinguished Senator from Missouri talks about
assumptions. With respect to assumptions, I only have to point out that
when I asked the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee,
Senator Domenici from New Mexico, about the budget assumptions, he
said, ``No. That is no magic asterisk. Assumptions are not binding on
anyone. Use the assumptions in the President's budget. Do what you want
to be bound by it. It does not make any difference.''
With respect to the trigger, I remember that trigger when they had it
last year in the Republican Medicare assault. Unfortunately, the
distinguished President of the United States, coming from Arkansas,
having balanced budgets for 10 years, had taken on some of the bad
habits of this Republican crowd.
Right to the point, Mr. President: I was listening this morning to
the chatter on the early morning shows, and the pundits were all
allowing that the distinguished Senator from Kansas was having to
retire from the Senate because he wanted to get away from the Senate
itself; that the Senate had such a bad reputation.
I take exception to that, Mr. President. It is the Republican program
that has such a bad reputation. I feel for the distinguished Senator
from Kansas as the Republican nominee going around the country because,
though he physically removes himself, he still has to carry that load.
I told him so yesterday afternoon.
It is a ridiculous contract. Get rid of plans that are working and
the programs on crime. The policemen on the beat; they were all here
yesterday in support of those programs.
That is what is really frightening the American people. It is a
ridiculous plan: let us get rid of the Department of Commerce, the
Department of Energy, the Department of Housing, the Department of
Education. Whoever heard of being elected to public office and then
trying to tear down the office itself? We are elected to come to
Washington to make the Government work. But this pollster party is
running on hot button items like 5-cent gas taxes and that kind of
thing, trying to throw the long pass play. They are not really giving
the American people a program of responsibility and direction, a sense
of where we are headed in the next 4 years. The truth of the matter is
that the wrong man resigned from the Congress. We ought to have gotten
the distinguished Speaker to be gone with that silly contract. Let him
move out and maybe the pollster party would have a chance in November.
But my point this morning is that yes, I am going to vote for the
President's budget. It is the nearest to a factual approach to this
particular dilemma. It does not use the CPI. It does not have these
mammoth tax cuts that are down to $8 billion. We do not have any taxes
to cut.
That is another flaw in the contract, it leads the American people to
believe that you can balance this budget by merely cutting spending. I
have voted for many, many cuts in spending. I voted, as did a third of
the Senate, to do away with a good part of the payroll tax--$190
billion in tax cuts to put Social Security on a pay-as-you-go basis.
But I do not believe in cutting taxes when we are running these
horrendous deficits, when the debt is going up and the interest cost on
the debt ruining the land. And so what I am trying to do is get the
nearest as I can. We tried every approach. In January 1993, we put in
what would be required of a really true, honest balanced budget. It
included both the horrendous cuts that would be necessary in
discretionary spending and taxes. I challenge and continue to
challenge. At the Commerce Committee the other day, the distinguished
Senator from Texas said that she believed the budget could be
[[Page S5117]]
balanced by spending cuts. I challenge her. I challenge anyone in the
Congress to give me a 7-year balanced budget without a tax increase. I
want to see it. You can eliminate the Government as they call it, but
we have worked our way into such a dilemma that, if you did away with
Government as the people know it to be--foreign aid, the Department of
Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, Justice Department, the FBI, the DEA,
do away with the President, the Congress, the courts--it would still
only be $228 billion.
Now, look at the bottom line, what are we spending? This pollster
party has got us to the point that we are required to spend $353
billion in interest costs on a national debt that they quintupled. They
did it, not President Clinton--$353 billion, $1 billion a day spending
on automatic pilot for absolutely no Government. We do not get anything
for it. It is merely the carrying charges. If they had not engaged in
that misconduct, we could have two Departments of Commerce, two
Departments of Energy, two Departments of Education--double the
Government. We are spending the money for it, but we are not getting
the Government.
And that is this particular Senator's dilemma. We are supposed to be
rebuilding our economy in the wake of the cold war, putting more into
education, more into technology, more into the Department of Commerce.
Instead the Republicans pursue their political endeavors solely for
reelection purposes. They are not looking at the next generation but at
the next election. And we have to go through this false nonsense of a
budget fraud because it is their contract.
Unfortunately, we Democrats, to get any kind of results, have to go
along with this kind of thing. President Clinton put out a good budget
when he first came. We had to cut $500 billion in spending. We had to
increase taxes on cigarettes, beer, liquor, gasoline. Yes, we voted to
increase taxes on Social Security, we performed a real act of fiscal
discipline and responsibility without a single Republican vote in the
Senate, without a single Republican vote in the House of
Representatives. And they have the audacity, the unmitigated gall to
come around here talking about hoaxes.
Let me get everybody to turn to pages 4 and 5 of this wonderful
document, Senate Concurrent Resolution 57, by the distinguished Senator
from New Mexico [Mr. Domenici], for the Committee on the Budget. This
is the budget resolution now in debate. Look on pages 4 and 5 under
``Deficits.'' For fiscal year 2002 you will see a deficit of
$108,300,000,000.
Mr. President, for Heaven's sake, you pick up the morning paper, the
Washington Post, and it is talking about the ``Republican Balanced
Budget Proposal.'' There is no idea of balancing this budget by
Republicans or Democrats. It is one big political exercise, one grand
budget fraud. And that is what everybody is running on. I am trying to
get them to state what the law is and what the truth is.
The fact is here in the budget book itself: ``Budget Process Law
Annotated,'' up to date, 1993 edition. You will find in this book no
such word as ``unified.'' That is a political gimmick that the press,
the money market in New York and politicians use. We have to hear about
fraud; we have to hear about hoaxes; we have to hear about trickery,
but the truth of the matter is there is no such thing as unified. There
is such a thing as not being able to rob the Social Security trust
fund. Look at it. Section 13301 of this particular document says thou
shalt not use the Social Security funds to obscure the size of the
deficit. We owe Social Security at this moment $503 billion, and in
this particular budget that I hold up, this document here, they
continue to rob the Social Security trust fund in violation of the law.
They are robbing other trust funds as well that are not written in the
law. I wish they were. But we continue to rob the Social Security trust
fund of approximately $500 billion over a 6-year period and over $600
billion over 7 years. So that by the year 2002, 2003, we come around,
under this political drama--the best off-Broadway show you are going to
find, running currently on C-SPAN--and they will say, ``Oh, we have
balanced the budget. We are the party of responsibility and we balanced
the budget.''
Even if it were true, using their own figures we have decimated--
decimated, exhausted the Social Security trust fund. We will owe it
over $1.1 trillion. Then we will not have to hear the arguments about
the year 2012 or 2023--just by that year 2002 we will already owe that
money. Who is going to raise $1 trillion to make Social Security
solvent? You should have heard it--I wish I had that record before me--
the distinguished chairman of our Budget Committee in his prepared
statement stated: We are making Medicare solvent for 10 years. Under
this budget we are making Medicare solvent for 10 years; we are making
Social Security totally insolvent in 6 years. It will be totally
insolvent in 6 years. And they want credit for their so-called fiscal
responsibility.
Unfortunately, both sides are guilty. Why? Why do I say that about
this budget fraud? I have not seen a budget yet that does not
immediately start off by moving deficits--not eliminating deficits--
moving them from the general Government over to the Social Security
trust fund to the tune of $500 billion. The Republican budget does it.
The President's budget does it. And the so-called centrist coalition
does.
They think it is wonderful they can get together, Republicans and
Democrats, in a fraud. I did not join them. I told them: It is a fraud
on the face of it. You can see it. You know it. Look at it. You are not
only robbing trust funds to the tune of what will amount to almost $1
trillion, but we owe the civil service retirement, the military
retirees.
You go down the list. Medicare is solvent right now. They have been
robbing the Medicare trust fund and on down the line to highway trust
funds. Finally, over on the House side, they have been robbing the
airport funding. There are not enough inspectors. We just had a hearing
on that. Why? Because we have been taking the money that the traveling
public has been putting in. While they have been paying their taxes in
order to provide those inspectors, Congress has been using the moneys
to politically obscure the size of the deficit. This way they can say,
``Reelect me, I am fiscally responsible up there in Washington but the
other crowd is a bunch of bums.''
They know what they are doing. Not only do they rob trust funds, but
all of their spending cuts are backloaded. There is the gimmick. That
is why, when President Reagan first came to office, he said he was
going to balance the budget in 1 year. After he got here he said it was
such a disaster that it would take him 3 years. When Congress saw that
was not working with the so-called Reaganomics, that we were going in
the exact opposite direction, we tried the spending cut approach with
Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. But all along, then after Gramm-Rudman-
Hollings--and I'm talking about the crowd that voted to repeal it on
October 19 at 12:41 a.m--they are now all writing books now how
responsible and how against deficits they were. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings
worked. The reason the Senator from South Carolina asked for a divorce
is that instead of using Gramm-Rudman-Hollings as a spear to prod
fiscal responsibility, they were using it as a shield to obscure fiscal
irresponsibility.
When they started doing that, I said let me out of this thing. We
raised the point of order, made cuts across the board. And Gramm-
Rudman-Hollings worked. Do not say it did not work. It was about to
work too well, until they got into that cabal to reelect the President
in 1992. Everybody knows what happened there, in 1990, when they voted
for its repeal. But they all, then, started backloading. Now, instead
of 5 years of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, we are going up to a 7-year
budget. If this crowd can get reelected they will come back next year
and they will have a 10-year budget. They keep moving the goalposts and
getting the good government award.
The fact of the matter is, two-thirds of these cuts occur after two
Presidential elections. They come out here and talk about the
President--a hoax. But it is not a hoax--come on. Everybody can see
what is going on. Every one of them, including the centrist budget,
uses tax cuts.
If you look at the centrist document, the centrist document says the
President cuts $8 billion in 6 years. The Republicans cut $122 billion,
the Breaux-Chafee in 7 years cuts $105 billion. We
[[Page S5118]]
do not have any taxes to cut. So the closest to responsibility is
President Clinton's budget. They are running around still trying to
lead rather than demand. The consultants will demand. Poor Presidential
nominee Dole will have to respond, run all over the land trying to tell
people that which he knows not to be the case. He was chairman of the
Finance Committee. He did not favor that Reaganomics. It was Kemp-Roth
at that time. I know him, but now he is caught up with the Gingrich
contract and he has to go around and sell it. That is his dilemma, not
the Senate as a body. They will be here long after we are gone, long
after the contract crowd is gone.
Mr. President, we finally see the free world voting in free
elections. We witness the spread of, not only capitalism, but
democratic representative government; which is, according to Arthur
Schlesinger, the greatest gift of the American people to free men the
world around. And it has taken root, Mr. President, in 14 different
countries. Over in Russia now, the Communists are getting ready for a
vote. Over in China, where I recently traveled with the distinguished
Senator from Maine, Senator Cohen, in the provinces they are beginning
to have local elections. Now, when free democratic government is just
taking root, the contract crowd says, ``Get rid of the Government. The
Government is not the solution, the Government is the problem. The
Government is the enemy.'' And they wonder why they are down in the
polls.
Back to the point: tax cuts. They talk about a dividend. I speak as
the former chairman of the Budget Committee. I speak as an original
mover, along with Senator Muskie. I am the last of the Mohicans on the
House or the Senate side who was in on the game back in the mid-1970's.
I voted for a balanced budget in 1968. I worked there with George
Mahon. We said, ``Talk to President Johnson. Can we cut another $5
billion?'' We cut another $5 billion. The entire Great Society and the
cost of the war in Vietnam was $178 billion. Interest costs on the
national debt is $353--double the amount. And you wonder at the trouble
we are in? They do not want to talk sense. They want to engage in
another fraud. A $254 billion dividend. That came up in 1990.
We called it into question. They say, ``Oh, no, you look at the 1990
budget.'' They have their charts and everything else. The 1990 budget
said that by 1995, last year, we would not only be balanced we would
have a $20 billion surplus. Can you imagine the word surplus in a
Government document? They put it in there.
Instead, the real deficit was in the neighborhood of $277 billion.
There was not any surplus--using the dividend. So they play more games.
Now the centrist coalition crowd has come up with a new one, the CPI.
They come in and want to monkey around with the Consumer Price Index.
So if you do one, you have to do the other, but they only do one.
They are not only going to cut the benefits of the Social Security
recipient, which could be done--this Senator has recommended a freeze,
a freeze, if you please. But instead of inuring to the benefit of the
Social Security trust fund, they take even more money, robbing Social
Security and allocating it to the deficit. All the Medicare plans call
for an increase in the premiums in order to get the benefits. Then they
come around with this lower CPI and give them less money. A double
whammy.
They are doing it. But it is a political year and the media is
supposed to cover Congress and give the American people the truth. And
what is the headline? ``Balanced Budget.'' A balanced budget, come on.
There is not any balance in the budget before us, and they know it.
For Heaven's sake, deliver me from this characterization of the
President's character. A hoax. The pollster says they have to attack
President Clinton on his character. So every 10 seconds the Republicans
get up: ``Hoax,'' ``Character.'' One Senator even said, ``Liar.''
``We'll just get in on a true-false quiz in November, and we are the
truth and the Democratic Party is false.''
I do not think the American people are going along with that
nonsense. Deliver me from that, particularly when they are the ones
engaged, with the misrepresentation. That is the nicest word I can
think.
Yesterday, May 15, 1996, I heard it again in the Budget Committee.
This is a statement by the distinguished chairman of the Budget
Committee:
This budget will restore America's fiscal equilibrium. It
will balance the budget by the year 2002 without touching
Social Security.
Absolutely false. He said that in the Budget Committee. I called his
hand on it, but they continue to insist on it and the news media will
write it. It touches Social Security. The best rationale the chairman
can give is, ``We didn't cut, momentarily, the benefits.'' But he means
the benefits for me at 72--old Strom and I are going to get ours. But
that Parliamentarian is not going to get his money. And I have to ask
the Parliamentarian if this really is a budget resolution. Because
section (C) where they have in there a provision for tax cuts in
September, will actually increase the deficit.
But the truth of the matter is, Mr. President, they not only touch
it, they emasculate the fund. I made that clear. Do not come along and
say ``without touching Social Security.'' They know what they are
doing.
We have had a group of off-the-record sessions to try to get together
on the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. I favor such an
amendment, and said I would vote for it in a flash. I voted for it
before. But I am not going to vote by repealing section 13301. The
proposal has been made time and again, ``Well, let's just use up Social
Security until 2002 and stop using it.''
I remember when I had Clement Haynesworth before the U.S. Supreme
Court--he had been charged with using his office in conflict with the
stock investments that he had. They said that under the law, he should
have recused himself. One day, unbeknownst to me and Attorney General
Mitchell, he came and said, irrespective of what occurred, he was going
to take all these stock holdings and put them in a trust fund.
The next morning, Herblock had that cartoon with the Congress as the
court. The Attorney General is the lawyer and a little client who
looked like a school boy with a school bag with stock tape and tickets
streaming out on the floor. ``But Your Honor,'' said Mitchell, the
Attorney General, ``my client hasn't done anything wrong, and he
promises to stop doing it.''
No, they have not done anything wrong--``We do not touch Social
Security''--they just take Social Security to mask the deficit.
Government is borrowing from itself and writing IOU's from $503 billion
to $1.1 trillion. But they promise to stop doing it in 2002. By that
time, who is going to put on the taxes to pay back $1.1 trillion?
The New York crowd keeps talking about entitlements, entitlements,
entitlements. In Time magazine and other major papers, they say: ``The
trouble is, we have to get a bridle on this Social Security causing the
deficits.'' Social Security has not caused a deficit. It is in the
black. Every one of the 100 Senators would have to agree with that.
What is causing the deficit, I say to the distinguished Presiding
Officer, is all these general uses of Government, from defense to
education to housing to foreign aid to law enforcement. I happen to
handle the law enforcement budget. Everybody is for more policemen on
the beat, everybody is for more FBI, more DEA, more Border Patrol, more
immigration control, more this, more that. In 1987, it was just at $4
billion. Now it is at $16.7 billion. They are complaining about the
growth of Government, saying ``cut spending, cut spending.'' Do you
think they ever recommended a dime to pay for it all the programs they
demand? No.
I joined with Republicans back in 1987. We saw the dilemma. We put in
a value-added tax of 5 percent to get rid of this monster deficit
growing and growing, the interest costs growing up to where we cannot
have Government.
But that is the effect of pollster politics. The pollster party says,
``Get rid of the Government.'' They succeed. If we do not have a
Department of Commerce, they are happy. If we do not have a Department
of Education, they are enthralled. If we can get rid of the Department
of Energy and Department of Housing and just leave them all on the
streets, so be it; let the market forces operate.
That is why they are down in the polls, and leaving this august body
[[Page S5119]]
does not release the distinguished Senator from Kansas from that silly
contract of getting rid of the Government. That is what he has try and
sell today as he goes around in Chicago. The contract is frightening
the American people.
At least he had the excuse of trying to keep us organized here in
this particular body. Now he has to sit back and listen on the hot line
to Speaker Gingrich saying, ``Wait a minute, you've got to stick with
the contract, stick with the contract.''
All this chatter. Meanwhile we face the largest deficit in the
history of the Republic.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article from
January 1, 1995, by Judy Mann in the Washington Post.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Post]
Fiddling With the Numbers
(By Judy Mann)
Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, the Republican meteor from New
Jersey, had the unusual honor for a first-term governor of
being asked to deliver her party's response to President
Clinton's State of the Union message last week.
And she delivered a whopper of what can most kindly be
called a glaring inaccuracy.
Sandwiched into her Republican sales pitch was the kind of
line that does serious political damage: Clinton, she
intoned, ``imposed the biggest tax increase in American
history.''
And millions of Americans sat in front of their television
sets, perhaps believing that Clinton and the Democrat-
controlled Congress had done a real number on them.
The trouble is that this poster lady for tax cuts was not
letting any facts get in her way. But don't hold your breath
waiting for the talk show hosts to set the record straight.
The biggest tax increase in history did not occur in the
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. The biggest tax
increase in post-World War II history occurred in 1982 under
President Ronald Reagan.
Here is how the two compare, according to Bill Gale, a
specialist on tax policy and senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution. The 1993 act raised taxes for the next five
years by a gross total of $268 billion, but with the
expansion of the earned income tax credit to more working
poor families, the net increase comes to $240.4 billion in
1993. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982,
by comparison, increased taxes by a net of $217.5 billion
over five years. Nominally, then, it is true that the 1993
tax bill was the biggest in history.
But things don't work nominally. ``A dollar now is worth
less than a dollar was back then, so that a tax increase of,
say, $10 billion in 1982 would be a tax increase of $15
billion now,'' says Gale. In fact, if you adjust for the 48
percent change in price level, the 1982 tax increase becomes
a $325.6 billion increase in 1993 dollars. And that makes it
the biggest tax increase in history by $85 billion.
Moreover, says Gale, the population of the country
increased, so that, on a per person basis, the 1993 tax
increase is lower than the one in 1982, and the gross
domestic product increased over the decade, which means that
personal income rose. ``Once you adjust for price
translation, it's not the biggest, and when you account for
population and GDP, it gets even smaller.''
He raises another point that makes this whole business of
tax policy just a bit more complex than the heroic tax
slashers would have us believe. ``The question is whether
[the 1993 tax increase] was a good idea or a bad idea, not
whether it was the biggest tax increase. Suppose it was the
biggest? I find it frustrating that the level of the debate
about stuff like this as carried on by politicians is
generally so low.''
So was it good idea? ``We needed to reduce the deficit,''
he says, ``we still need to reduce the deficit. The bond
market responded positively. Interest rates fell. There may
be a longer term benefit in that it shows Congress and the
president are capable of cutting the deficit even without a
balanced budget amendment.''
Other long-term benefits, he says, are that ``more capital
is freed up for private investment, and ultimately that can
result in more productive and highly paid workers.''
How bad was the hit for those few who did have to pay more
taxes? One tax attorney says that his increased taxes were
more than offset by savings he was able to generate by
refinancing the mortgage on his house at the lower interest
rates we've had as a result. The 1993 tax increase did
include a 4.3-cent-a-gallon rise in gasoline tax, which hits
the middle class. But most of us did not have to endure an
income tax increase. In 1992, the top tax rate was 31 percent
of the taxable income over $51,900 for single taxpayers and
$86,500 for married couples filing jointly. Two new tax
brackets were added in 1993: 36 percent for singles with
taxable incomes over $115,000 and married couples with
incomes over $140,000; and 39.6 percent for singles and
married couples with taxable incomes over $250,000.
Not exactly your working poor or even your average family.
The rising GOP stars are finding out that when they say or
do something stupid or mendacious, folks notice. The jury
ought to be out on Whitman's performance as governor until we
see the effects of supply side economics on New Jersey. But
in her first nationally televised performance as a
spokeswoman for her party, she should have known better than
to give the country only half the story. In the process, she
left a lot to be desired in one quality Americans are looking
for in politicians: honesty.
(Mr. CAMPBELL assumed the chair.)
Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, I quote:
A dollar now is less than a dollar was back then--
Talking in the eighties under President Reagan.
so that a tax increase of, say, $10 billion in 1992 would be
a tax increase of $15 billion now. . . In fact, if you
adjusted for the 48 percent change in price level, the 1982
tax increase would become a $325.6 billion increase in 1993.
That makes it the biggest tax increase in the history by $85
billion. Nominally then, it is true that the 1993 tax bill
was the biggest in history. However, the biggest tax increase
in post-World War II history occurred in 1982 under President
Reagan.
And the Senator from South Carolina voted for it.
I voted against Reaganomics. Senator Dole was against it in the
original instance. The then-majority leader Howard Baker called it ``a
riverboat gamble.'' Then-Vice President Bush called it voodoo. But they
want to forget that. Read Warren Rudman's book. He lays it all out. A
substantial group of Republicans said this could not possibly work.
But I ask, Mr. President, to include in the Record the budget tables.
If you look at the budget tables, back when President Reagan came into
office, the key figure is the Gross Interest Cost, which at that time
was $74.8 billion. Today it is $353 billion. This crowd is against
increasing spending--I'm against spending increases; I'm against
spending increases. We have put spending increases on automatic pilot
to the tune of $1 billion a day. I ask unanimous consent that those
tables be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the tables were ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
BUDGET TABLES
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
U.S. budget Gross Federal
President and Year (outlays in Trust funds Real deficit debt Gross interest
billions) (billions)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Truman:
1945........................ 92.7 5.4 .............. 260.1 ..............
1946........................ 55.2 3.9 -10.9 271.0 ..............
1947........................ 34.5 3.4 +13.9 257.1 ..............
1948........................ 29.8 3.0 +5.1 252.0 ..............
1949........................ 38.8 2.4 -0.6 252.6 ..............
1950........................ 42.6 -0.1 -4.3 256.9 ..............
1951........................ 45.5 3.7 +1.6 255.3 ..............
1952........................ 67.7 3.5 -3.8 259.1 ..............
Eisenhower:
1953........................ 76.1 3.4 -6.9 266.0 ..............
1954........................ 70.9 2.0 -4.8 270.8 ..............
1955........................ 68.4 1.2 -3.6 274.4 ..............
1956........................ 70.6 2.6 +1.7 272.7 ..............
1957........................ 76.6 1.8 +0.4 272.3 ..............
1958........................ 82.4 0.2 -7.4 279.7 ..............
1959........................ 92.1 -1.6 -7.8 287.5 ..............
1960........................ 92.2 -0.5 -3.0 290.5 ..............
Kennedy:
1961........................ 97.7 0.9 -2.1 292.6 ..............
1962........................ 106.8 -0.3 -10.3 302.9 9.1
[[Page S5120]]
1963........................ 111.3 1.9 -7.4 310.3 9.9
Johnson:
1964........................ 118.5 2.7 -5.8 316.1 10.7
1965........................ 118.2 2.5 -6.2 322.3 11.3
1966........................ 134.5 1.5 -6.2 328.5 12.0
1967........................ 157.5 7.1 -11.9 340.4 13.4
1968........................ 178.1 3.1 -28.3 368.7 14.6
Nixon:
1969........................ 183.6 -0.3 +2.9 365.8 16.6
1970........................ 195.6 12.3 -15.1 380.9 19.3
1971........................ 210.2 4.3 -27.3 408.2 21.0
1972........................ 230.7 4.3 -27.7 435.9 21.8
1973........................ 245.7 15.5 -30.4 466.3 24.2
1974........................ 269.4 11.5 -17.6 483.9 29.3
Ford:
1975........................ 332.3 4.8 -58.0 541.9 32.7
1976........................ 371.8 13.4 -87.1 629.0 37.1
Carter:
1977........................ 409.2 23.7 -77.4 706.4 41.9
1978........................ 458.7 11.0 -70.2 776.6 48.7
1979........................ 503.5 12.2 -52.9 829.5 59.9
1980........................ 590.9 5.8 -79.6 909.1 74.8
Reagan:
1981........................ 678.2 6.7 -85.7 994.8 95.5
1982........................ 745.8 14.5 -142.5 1,137.3 117.2
1983........................ 808.4 26.6 -234.4 1,371.7 128.7
1984........................ 851.8 7.6 -193.0 1,564.7 153.9
1985........................ 946.4 40.6 -252.9 1,817.6 178.9
1986........................ 990.3 81.8 -303.0 2,120.6 190.3
1987........................ 1,003.9 75.7 -225.5 2,346.1 195.3
1988........................ 1,064.1 100.0 -255.2 2,601.3 214.1
Bush:
1989........................ 1,143.2 114.2 -266.7 2,868.0 240.9
1990........................ 1,252.7 117.2 -338.6 3,206.6 264.7
1991........................ 1,323.8 122.7 -391.9 3,598.5 285.5
1992........................ 1,380.9 113.2 -403.6 4,002.1 292.3
Clinton:
1993........................ 1,408.2 94.2 -349.3 4,351.4 292.5
1994........................ 1,460.6 89.1 -292.3 4,643.7 296.3
1995........................ 1,514,4 113.4 -277.3 4,921.0 332.4
1996........................ 1,572.0 126.0 -270.0 5,191.0 344.0
1997 est.................... 1,651.0 127.0 -292.0 5,483.0 353.0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Historical Tables, Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 1996; Beginning in 1962, CBO's 1995
Economic and Budget Outlook.
Mr. HOLLINGS. If any Members want to, they can get the entire record
of each one of the particular Presidents. What happened is--let me
quote David Stockman:
The root problem goes back to the July 1981 frenzy of
excessive and imprudent tax-cutting that shattered the
nation's fiscal stability. A noisy faction of Republicans
have willfully denied this giant mistake of fiscal
governance, and their own culpability in it, ever since.
Instead, they have incessantly poisoned the political debate
with a mindless stream of anti-tax venom, while pretending
that economic growth and spending cuts alone could cure the
deficit.
So they have given the Senator from Kansas the chant, ``Growth,
growth; tax cuts, tax cuts; growth, growth; tax cuts.'' Will we ever
learn?
The debt from the beginning--from 1776 up until 1981--the debt was
less than $1 trillion. With all the wars, the Revolution, 1812, Civil
War, Spanish-American, Mexican War, World War I, II, Korea, Vietnam,
the costs of all the wars were less than $1 trillion--$903 billion.
Now, in 15 years, without a war--without a war, because the other crowd
are supposed to have paid for the gulf war--in 15 years, we have gone
up to $5 trillion and automatic tax increases, because that is what the
automatic spending of interest costs amounts to.
You cannot evade death, you cannot evade taxes, and you cannot evade
interest costs or interest taxes on the national debt. So those who say
that ``I am against increasing taxes,'' is the crowd that comes in here
without shame and derides President Clinton and this particular budget.
President Clinton came to town, and he is the only President to
reduce the deficit. Since 1968, President Nixon did not. President
Ford, President Carter, President Reagan, and President Bush all
increased the deficit. The one man in town not responsible for this
nonsense, President Clinton, the only man in town that has done
anything about it, has reduced the deficit in half, and is derided now
with all these monkeyshine charts. ``Look at how he said this. Look how
he did this. Look how he did that.''
The economy is working, is it not? Unemployment is down. Job creation
is up. Interest is down. How do we get the truth out to the American
people? The truth is, as I said before, that Gramm-Rudman-Hollings was
repealed. But we continue to read suggestions that we have already
tried, suggestions that totally ignore the track record of some of us
who have tried.
A couple days ago our distinguished friend, Mr. Dave Broder, allowed
that what we ought to do is do away with the payroll tax with a flat
tax, recommended by Senators Domenici and Nunn. Well, in April 1991,
the Senator from New York, Senator Moynihan, the Senator from
Wisconsin, Senator Kasten, and the Senator from South Carolina, Senator
Hollings, we all said, ``Look, if you are going to continue to violate
section 13-301 and rob the Social Security trust fund, then, Heavens
above, let's put Social Security on a pay-as-you-go basis so they will
know it,'' we were completely against an increase in the Social
Security taxes at the time.
It would have been a tax cut, Mr. President, of $190 billion. But
they voted against that tax cut. They say they are for tax cuts for the
rich, for capital gains, but not for the wage earner, the fellow who is
pulling the wagon. But Congress is in the wagon. We have to get these
Senators and Congressmen out of the wagon. We are the ones using the
trust funds, not paying the bills, and wrecking the economy.
Mr. President, for the poor wage earner, who is pulling the wagon, we
said, ``Let's cut their taxes,'' the payroll taxes suggested by Mr.
Broder, we had that vote in 1991. But they do not want it that way.
They want to continue the charade.
So, Mr. President, I only hope there is a free press. Jefferson said
it better than anyone. He said, if it is between the free press and a
free Government, I would choose the former --intoning, if you please,
that you can have a free Government, but it is not going to be free
long unless you have a free press. It is supposed to keep us honest,
supposed to keep us politicians honest.
Instead, as Jim Fallows says in his wonderful book, ``Breaking the
News,'' the press has joined in the post-party pap of ``I'm against
taxes. And we can balance the budget by just cutting spending.''
I have made my point on that. I wish it could be done. I have tried.
We tried, first, cuts across the board. We tried spending cuts. We
continue to try spending cuts where possible. We have tried a value-
added tax. We have tried everything possible, but we cannot get the
truth out to the American people.
Yes, I am voting for President Clinton's budget. His track record is
true. He is the only President we have had around here that has done
something
[[Page S5121]]
about this deficit. He has cut it in half. He has done it with tax
increases as well as $500 billion in spending cuts. And the ones that
caused this deficit--there ought to be ashes in their mouths--the ones
that caused this rotten dilemma of spending $1 billion a day for
nothing, have the audacity to be running around saying how honest they
are and how true they are and how balanced their budget is.
Read page 5: Deficits. It does not say ``balance'' in their document.
It cannot under the law. In fact, it is really more than the $108
billion listed, because the law does not require them to list robbing
the distinguished Chair's retirement, robbing the military retirees,
still robbing the Medicare trust fund, and others. All told, it is
$151.9 billion. That is why these funds are not being used for the
highways, the airports, or workers' retirement. We are robbing them. It
is a shabby act.
But they know no shame. They come around with their little charts. We
hadn't seen their budget or anything else. They had the President's
budget for 4 months, so they would work up their charts. And we would
go into the Budget Committee, and they would go through their little
acts. They had the Senator from Texas complaining about exactly what
they have in defense.
They had the Senator from Missouri talk about veterans, the next one
talked about defense and came on with all his charts. It was just all
applesauce, just a show on C-SPAN. We had no choice except to take
their plan or leave it. What they offered was a three-way breakdown of
the reconciliation process and ultimately, in my opinion, a violation
of the Byrd rule.
For the first time to my knowledge, they are using the reconciliation
process to actually increase the deficit. By at least $122 billion. You
can read it again in this document, in section (c) on page 51, that if
the legislation is enacted pursuant to sections A and B no later than
September 18, the Committee on Finance shall report to the Senate a
reconciliation bill proposing changes in laws with any jurisdiction
necessary to reduce revenues. That is so they can go around to the rich
crowd in New York and say, ``We will give you capital gains.'' It is in
their contract but it will not work.
The one that should have set himself aside and be done with that
silly contract is the distinguished Speaker. I yield the floor.
Mr. ABRAHAM. Mr. President, on behalf of this side, I yield 20
minutes to the Senator from Texas.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas [Mr. Gramm], is
recognized for 20 minutes.
Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I am going to get back to the subject that
we are here to talk about, the President's budget. Rather than getting
into all of this argument about what is phony and what is not phony, it
seems to me we what we ought to do is look at what this budget claims
to do. The budget is the one issue of the year through which we define
what we want America to be. In this case, we are talking about what we
want America to be over the next 7 years.
Let me begin by doing something that we do not do much of around
here. Let us assume that every word in the President's budget is true,
let us assume that we are going to do everything he asks us to do, and
let us assume that everything he says will work will indeed work. We
will grant him every assumption you would grant somebody to try to give
them the benefit of the doubt.
Let us take this budget, this great big thick document that we now
have debated for 2 hours, and view it as Bill Clinton's vision for the
future of America. What I want to do is ask not whether you can find on
page 54 something that does not make sense, but rather to ask ``What
kind of vision is this?'' Is this an America we want? This is the
question that we are here today to talk about.
First of all, let me just look at the Clinton budget and assume that
everything works out exactly the way the President wants it to work
out. I want to talk about what kind of America we will have if this
happens and compare it to the America of the 1940's, the 1950's, the
1960's, the 1970's, and the 1980's. This, again, assumes that
everything works out exactly as the President hopes it will. This is
the best case Bill Clinton scenario.
First of all, let us look at the tax burden. In the 1940's, the
average American family sent to Washington about 16.5 percent of
everything they made; the Government took about 16.5 percent of all
goods and services produced in America. In the 1950's, it rose to 17.6
percent. In the 1960's and 1970's, it was up to 18 percent. If we adopt
Bill Clinton's budget and enforce it exactly as it is written, where
everything works out exactly as he wants it to and with the most rosy
scenarios he can assume, we are committing ourselves to the highest tax
burden in the history of the United States of America: 19.3 percent out
of every dollar earned in America is going to come to Washington and be
spent by Bill Clinton. These are the President's numbers and this is
the President's vision. Under the best of circumstances, where
everything works out exactly as the President would like it to, the
American taxpayer will face the highest tax burden in the history of
the United States of America.
Further, under the President's plan, the cumulative tax burden will
never have been higher. When you add up State, local, and Federal
taxes, over 30 percent of all money earned by all sources in America
will be spent not by the people who earn the money but by their
Government. So this is the first part of the Clinton vision--the
highest taxes in American history.
The second part of his vision is social spending, by which I mean
nondefense spending. In the 1950's, the Federal Government spent 7.4
cents out of every dollar earned by every American on nondefense
programs. This rose in the 1960's, in the so-called Great Society
period, to 10.2 cents out of every dollar earned. It rose to 14.6 cents
out of every dollar in the 1970's, and then 17.1 cents in the 1980's.
If we adopt Bill Clinton's budget, and if it does everything he says it
will do, we are still talking about social spending taking 17.3 cents
out of every dollar earned by every American. That is the highest level
of social spending in the history of the United States of America--thus
giving us both the highest taxes in American history and the highest
level of social spending.
What about defense? In the 1940's, 7.9 percent of all income earned
by all Americans went to national defense. As the cold war heated up in
the 1950's, it grew to 10.6 percent. In the 1960's, it was 8.9 percent,
and then it leveled out at 6 percent in the 1970's and 1980's. If we
adopt Bill Clinton's budget and all the dramatic cuts in national
defense expenditures that it entails, expenditures on national security
as a percentage of the income earned by all Americans will be at the
lowest level since the 1930's, with only 3.4 cents out of every dollar
going to our national defense. This is the President's vision: the
highest tax burden in American history, the highest social spending in
American history, and the lowest defense spending in the post-war era.
If we adopt the President's budget, we will have social spending twice
as high as the Great Society's social spending, we will have taxes
substantially above the tax burden of the Great Society, and we will
have defense spending substantially below the Jimmy Carter era. That is
the Clinton vision.
In addition, what kind of growth rate does the Clinton administration
say his budget is capable of generating? Let me begin with a brief
reminder of the country we live in. If you have ever wondered why
Americans, until this generation, have always been confident that their
children will have a brighter future than they had, it is because up
until now this has been true. We live in one of the few countries in
the history of the world where it has been the routine for people's
parents to do better than their grandparents, who did better than their
great-grandparents, and where people knew that if they worked hard, if
they were dedicated, they were going to do better than their own
parents.
Here is the reason why: In the 1950's, we had real economic growth in
America which resulted in job creation, growth in the value of the
things that we produced, and, as a result, real GNP grew on average by
4 percent. It grew by 4.4 percent in the decade of the 1960's.
But then something happened in the decade of the 1960's. What
happened in the decade of the 1960's is that we traded an economy which
was growing at 4
[[Page S5122]]
percent a year for a government that would grow at 9 percent a year,
and, as a result, economic growth started falling. We had 3.2 percent
growth in the 1970's, and 2.8 percent growth in the 1980's. The most
optimistic assumption that the Clinton administration could come up
with, given their budget, given what they are doing in taxing and
spending, is that the economy will grow by a mere 2.3 percent. This is
their rosy scenario.
So, when you go back and look at it, what is the Clinton vision? It
is the highest tax level in American history. It is the highest level
of spending on social programs in American history. It is the lowest
defense expenditure level since World War II and it is the lowest
economic growth rate that we have had in the 20th century. That is the
vision of this budget and that is exactly why it ought to be rejected.
Let me address another issue: Medicare. It is an issue that
frustrates me, because almost nobody is facing up to this problem,
least of all the Clinton administration. The trustees of Medicare did a
study last year which, given the rate that money is being spent out of
the Medicare trust fund, and given the rate that it is coming into the
trust fund from the high premium you pay in your payroll tax and the
part B premium that our senior citizens pay for physician services,
concluded that only people who were age 60 and above had any kind of
guarantee of receiving benefits. This means that the remaining 93
percent of the people in America, many of whom had paid in excess of
$30,000 into Medicare, had no guarantee whatsoever that they were going
to ever get a penny of benefits from Medicare. Now, I remind you that
three of these trustees are Cabinet officials of the Clinton
administration. So this is not Senator Domenici talking; this is the
Clinton administration.
What happened since that time? Well, two things have happened. The
commission has gone back and looked at the data and, because costs are
up sharply, they have concluded that Medicare is not 7 years from
bankruptcy, it is now 6, and we are moving toward 5--so the numbers are
actually worse than what is on this chart. The Clinton administration
claims that it has submitted a plan that will protect 13 percent of the
beneficiaries of Medicare and will roughly guarantee benefits to
everybody who is 55 or older. That means that, according to President
Clinton's own figures, 87 percent of the people who have paid into
Medicare have no guarantee whatsoever.
But when CBO looked at the Clinton proposal, they concluded that, at
best, it would keep Social Security solvent only for one extra year. So
the best the Clinton administration could do, while telling senior
citizens that the people who want to deal with the Medicare crisis are
trying to take their benefits away, is give us a Medicare policy that
says to 92 percent of the people who have already paid into Medicare,
``We are not going to guarantee your benefits. The problem is getting
worse, but we are not going to fool with it.'' Why? Well, 7 years is
two Presidential elections away so it's not this President's problem.
Now, we can be sure that after the election, they are going to start
talking about raising the payroll tax because if you raise that payroll
tax by about a third, you can begin to come to grips with this problem.
Let me remind you of what the Republicans tried to do in the balanced
budget act that the President vetoed. The President went on and on
about how we were going to decimate Medicare. But let me just show you
how modest our attempt was relative to the crisis we are facing. We
tried to guarantee Medicare for a generation. Had our reforms been
signed into law, it would have guaranteed Medicare, under the current
estimates, to everybody who, based on an average life expectancy, is 46
years old or older. But you will notice that for 72 percent of the
people who have paid Medicare taxes, we could not have guaranteed their
benefits. We have, in our budget today, a modest proposal on Medicare,
with the goal of making it solvent for another decade. Some day, we are
going to have to come to grips with this.
The great tragedy is, rather than the President doing what, very much
to his credit, Ronald Reagan did--that is, getting a bipartisan group
together in the mid 1980's and solving, at least for 20 years, the
Social Security problem--the President is now playing politics. He
calls dealing with a third of the problem an assault on Medicare while
letting 92 percent of the people stand with no guarantee of medical
benefit is called responsible.
The truth is that the President has not come to grips with this
problem, and the real crime is that our senior citizens are being told
that the Republicans, who are attempting to deal responsibly with this
situation, are trying to take something away from them. The truth,
however, is that leaving the current situation in place, where in 6
years Medicare is going to be bankrupt, creates an environment in which
a great tragedy is just waiting to happen. In the private sector,
anybody in a position of fiduciary responsibility in who let this
happen would go to prison.
Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. GRAMM. I am happy to yield.
Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Parliamentarian be sure to advise us when the
Senator's time has expired? I will yield him time off the resolution.
Will the Senator look at the last column, the 31 percent, which is
the Republican proposal? Is it not true that in order to get that which
was vetoed by the President--and we are talking about the trust fund
only--is it not true that there was not any increase in payments by
senior citizens, that this was done by reform, that was done by
provider changes and giving options to the senior citizens, and there
were no increases in the costs of part B protection to the seniors? Is
that not correct?
Mr. GRAMM. That is right.
Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the Senator.
Mr. GRAMM. I want to note one other thing. I do not want to get into
a big discussion on Medicare but one of the clearly irresponsible
actions that ought to be denounced on a bipartisan basis is what the
President has done with his nursing home provision. One of the things
the President's budget does in order to make Medicare look less
insolvent is to take the nursing home component, which costs $55
billion over 7 years and which is now being paid for out of part A, out
of Medicare. But he is not putting it anywhere, and, as if by magic, he
assumes that somewhere this $55 billion is going to appear.
The final issue I would like to talk about is the issue of taxing and
spending. Let me start by talking about taxes. It never ceases to amaze
me that we have something underway here in Washington that the public
is beginning to understand, but has not quite come to fully appreciate,
and it is very much like the defense realization that occurred in the
1980's. By the early part of the 1980's, the American people understood
that, in foreign policy, the Democrats had a basic approach of blame-
America-first. Whatever happened, according to the Democrats, it was
our fault. If there were troubles in the world, the Democrats said it
was because of our greed and our imperialism. But finally, in the
1980's, the American people began to disregard these claims because
they realized that this was just the knee-jerk approach of the
Democrats. I want to talk about taxes from this point of view and the
point I want to make is this: To the Democrats, every tax increase is
fair, and no matter how unfair it may actually be, they define it as
being fair and go to incredible lengths to convince people it is fair.
The second point I want to make is that, according to the Democrats,
every tax cut is unfair, no matter who it goes to and no matter who it
affects. By definition, the Democrats say every tax cut is unfair. And
after a tax is increased and it actually turns out to be unfair, only
then do the Democrats say it is unfair--yet they propose to correct it
by raising taxes again.
Let me give you an example. In 1993, we heard on the floor of the
Senate--and the President to this day says, ``We only taxed rich
people.'' Let me take a couple of examples that I think reveal the
errors of this statement.
The President proposed in his budget in 1993, in his largest tax
increase in American history, to raise taxes on people who earned
Social Security benefits. He raised taxes on people who made $25,000 or
more, but how did he go about hiding it?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair would tell the Senator that his time
has expired.
[[Page S5123]]
Mr. GRAMM. Will the Senator yield me 10 minutes?
Mr. DOMENICI. I yield 10 minutes off the resolution.
Mr. GRAMM. How they went about hiding it is, first, they said that
really they are not talking about people earning $25,000 because these
are older people who own their own homes. So we are going to impute,
for the first time ever, income, and it became part of a concept of
American budgeting. So if your mother owns her own home, the President
would say, ``Well, look, if she had to rent that home she would have
had to pay $400 a month or $500 a month. So we are not really taxing
her at $25,000 because we are not taxing the imputed value of her
home.'' Or she owns a lawn mower, or she owns a car, or she owns a
dishwasher; if she rented those things, it would be imputed income.
Actually, she is rich. She is making $25,000 a year, but she is rich
because she may own a dishwasher, she may own a car. She worked a
lifetime. She owns her own home. If you imputed the value of all of
those things, her income would be higher.
The Congress rightfully rejected that. But our Democratic colleagues
imposed the tax on anybody making $34,000 a year or more who gets any
Social Security. They said, this is not an income tax. But I want to
show you that it is.
This chart is a page from the advisory that was put out to go with
your 1040 form in 1994, the year after the tax increase went into
effect. People get a notice from the IRS that they are getting ready to
be taxed again, then later get a form telling them how to fill it out,
and then they get the tax form.
Let me read for you what the IRS said when they sent income tax forms
to 120 million Americans. Here is what they said:
Social Security benefits. If your income, including one-
half of your Social Security benefits, is over $34,000 if
single (over $44,000 if married, filing jointly), more of
your benefits may be taxable. See the instructions for lines
20(a) and 20(b).
Let me show you on the 1040 form. This is income taxes. Look down
here at line 20(a) which I have blown up. What line 20(a) says is,
``Social Security benefits.'' In other words, you put your Social
Security benefits right there and then you pay an income tax on them.
So do you know how the Democrats argue that they were taxing rich
people? Basically, they argued if you make $25,000 or more, you are
rich, and if you own a dishwasher or if you own your own home or you
own your own car, you are richer than you think, because if you had to
rent all of those things, it would cost you money.
We are trying to cut taxes on working families. The only tax cut in
our budget this year is the $500-per-child tax credit. That would mean
that if you have two children, you are going to pay $1,000 less in
income taxes. You are going to be able to invest that money in your own
children, your own family, your own future.
We know that most people who are rich or who are upper-middle income
really only start making money once their children are grown. So we are
not shocked to hear that 75 percent of the benefits of this $500 tax
credit goes to families that make less than $75,000 a year. But do our
colleagues say, ``Well, we are against cutting taxes for working
families because we believe Government can do a better job spending
their money than they can do for themselves''? No. They say this is a
tax cut for the rich. When they tax people who make $25,000 a year,
they say they are rich. So, in one sense, they are consistent.
But let me remind you what they are consistent about. They are
consistent in saying that every tax is a tax on the rich and that every
tax is fair.
Another example which disproves this is the gasoline tax. President
Clinton tried to implement a so-called Btu tax that would have raised
the price of gasoline 7 cents a gallon. What he got was 4.3 cents. I am
glad every Republican voted against it. I am proud of it. This was the
first permanent gasoline tax that went to general revenue, and not
toward build highways.
Historically, the gas tax has gone to highways because to do
otherwise makes it a discriminatory tax. If you live in Texas, the odds
are you spend almost twice as much on gas than if you live in New York.
If you live in a rural area where you have to drive great distances to
get to work, you spend more on gasoline. If you live in the West, you
spend more. If you live in the East, you spend less. If you live in the
South, you spend more. If you live in the North, you spend less.
The way we have dealt with the inequity is that we have used the
gasoline taxes to build highways. So if you pay more, you get more. But
President Clinton took the 4.3-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline and spent
it on his social programs. So we took money away from people driving
their car and their truck to work to give money to people who do not
work.
Is that taxing the rich? No. It is taxing working people. We are
trying to repeal the tax--the Democrats say it is a great idea. The
problem is, this is the 21st day that we have tried to offer an
amendment to repeal that 4.3-cent-a-gallon tax and, to this day, we
have not gotten a vote.
So, the principle I want people to understand is: whenever the
Democrats raise taxes, whether they tax people who make $34,000 a year
or whether they tax gasoline, they always claim to be taxing rich
people. Whenever we try to cut taxes, therefore, they say we are
cutting taxes for rich people.
The plain truth is, God did not make enough rich people to make the
Democrats's claims hold true. As these tax burdens, year after year
after year, have gone up, what we have discovered is, if you are going
to take 19.3 percent out of every dollar earned in America, you are
going to have to take it from the people who earn that money. That is
basically middle-income or upper-middle-income families and that is
what the Democrats have consistently done.
One very final point--and I do not want to get into the sparring
contests with our colleagues about what is phony and what is not phony,
but to stand up here and say that President Clinton's budget is in
balance with a straight face neglects the fact that when the
Congressional Budget Office Director, Dr. June O'Neill, was before the
Finance Committee and she was asked, ``Is the Clinton budget in
balance,'' here is what she said: ``CBO estimates that the basic policy
proposals in the President's budget would lower the deficit
substantially below the Congressional Budget Office baseline
projections, but the deficit would still total $84 billion 7 years from
now.''
So how does the President close that gap? He closes that gap with a
little piece of fine print where, in essence, he says, if for some
reason the budget is not in balance, take back the tax cut.
Tax America first. Spend first, tax first. Always tax. Never give the
tax back. This is the Clinton prescription that we are talking about
here.
In the end, we are talking about competing visions. What kind of
vision do we have for our country? The vision of Bill Clinton, the
vision of our Democratic colleagues, is one of more Government, more
social spending than ever in history, less defense than ever in the
postwar period, and the highest tax burden in American history. That is
their vision.
Our vision is different. You can be for it. You can be against it.
But our vision is a vision of more freedom and opportunity. We want to
control spending. We want to let working families keep more of what
they earn. We think families can spend their money better than the
Government.
That is the choice. The Democrats believe Government can do it
better. We believe that families can do it better. It is a choice the
American people need to make. We are going to make part of that choice
here on the Clinton budget. The question is, do we want to commit
ourselves to a future of more taxing and more spending? I think the
answer is no. I yield the floor.
Mr. DOMENICI addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Abraham). The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I yield myself 10 minutes off the
resolution.
Before Senator Gramm leaves the floor, would you put up your Medicare
chart?
I want to share a few observations with you about this, and you can
tell me whether you think I am right, and you can add your marvelous
way of expressing things to what I am talking about.
[[Page S5124]]
We have in our files a letter from the Congressional Budget Office
that says if you do not do something about part A, the Medicare trust
fund, in 10 years--10 years--it will be $440 billion in the red.
Now, you have been talking about whether we ought to do something or
not based upon what we understand the facts to be.
It seems to me that what the President is doing--and yesterday I gave
the President's budget an award. I crowned it with a new award. It is
going to get the Oscar for fiction. The Oscar for fiction.
Let me ask you if you do not think this is a marvelous fiction in
this budget. While this fund is going to be $440 billion in the red,
the President says, ``I want to fix that, so I will take away some of
the responsibility of this trust fund.'' Right? That is what you have
been telling us about. What is the responsibility in that trust fund
that is growing the fastest of all of the accounts?
Mr. GRAMM. Home health care.
Mr. DOMENICI. Home health care. Right.
Now, if you wanted to fix that trust fund without doing anything
real, then you would say, ``Let us not pay for the fastest growing part
of Medicare. Take it out.'' So the President's budget says, ``We are
not going to pay for that out of the trust fund and, seniors, you ought
to be thrilled; I am making your trust fund more solvent.''
My mind has not yet permitted me to reduce this to some simple
statement, but it is smoke and mirrors at least. It is gimmickry at its
worst.
Mr. GRAMM. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. DOMENICI. Please.
Mr. GRAMM. It seems to me it goes beyond that because there is
already a lot of cynicism in budgeting--probably because the numbers
are so big and we are doing it over multiple years. But to simply take
home health care, the fastest growing part of Medicare and say we are
going to help Medicare by taking it out of the Medicare expenditure
accounting but we are not paying for it in any other way, we are just
simply taking it out of accounting, that creates a level of cynicism
which I think reaches a new level.
It would be like if the Senator went to the doctor and the doctor
says: You are in great shape except you have liver cancer. I cannot
cure that but let me tell you, I can work on the rest of your body. You
can go on an exercise program, you lose a little weight; you can quit
smoking----
Mr. DOMENICI. You did not mean me.
Mr. GRAMM. No, but you would not just do all this other stuff until
you died. No doctor in the world would do that. Instead he would say:
Look, we have got to do something about this cancer. We have got to do
it right now.
All I am saying is, and I am not giving us the Academy Award for
solving the Medicare problem, but we are trying to solve the problem
for at least a generation. The President, however, is simply saying:
Look, it is not going to happen until after the election. After the
election, maybe we can raise the payroll tax.
I think this is something we ought to do something about now.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, let me say that the Senator actually
said it right. The President takes $55 billion worth of the
responsibility from the protected care for seniors. They are guaranteed
it under that trust fund, and he takes it out. And you said he does not
provide any means of paying for it.
Now, in a sense, that is because the taxpayers are going to pay for
it--$55 billion worth of new taxes are going to be required for that
$55 billion that, lo and behold, made Medicare solvent so the President
did not have to bite any difficult bullets with reference to Medicare.
Now, that is how I see it. I am being as honest as I can.
Now, let me finish the thought and you fill in anything if I have not
said it right. There is the second part of Medicare, which is the part
B insurance program, started under Dwight Eisenhower, a great idea. We
said back then we will put up 50 percent; seniors, you put up 50
percent, and we will write you a health insurance. Everything that is
not covered in the trust fund we cover. That is essentially the rules
of the game. But we always thought the senior would pay part and the
Government would pay part.
Incidentally, the whole argument last year was what that part should
be. Should it be 31 percent or 25, should it be $6 more or $7 more or
$2 more. The President decided that for this new $55 billion, the
seniors would pay nothing. The taxpayers will pay the $55 billion.
Now, frankly, that is nice. That is nice except I wonder about the
working families around who have two or three children and they do not
have any health insurance or they are struggling for it. They have just
been given a nice present--$55 billion of your taxes over the next 6
years have to be used to pay for the President's gimmick, as I see it.
I thank the Senator for accommodating me.
Mr. GRAMM. If I may just conclude with this point. I have always
believed that not addressing this problem before the election means
sometime later we will be looking at a massive increase in the payroll
tax. I believe that next year or the year after, if we do not address
this problem now, we are going to be here on the floor of the Senate
debating a 20- or 30-percent increase in the payroll tax, and all
because the President was unwilling to do anything about these
exploding costs.
Mr. DOMENICI. I want to just close my remarks. There was an article
by Robert Samuelson found in the Washington Post a few days ago.
Actually, it was about Senator Dole's opportunities. That was the
styling of it. I am going to put it in the Record after my remarks. But
I want to read two sentences.
At some point, spending and benefits will be cut to avoid
costs that seem politically intolerable. The trouble is that
the longer the changes are delayed, the more abrupt and
unfair they will be. That's why silence is irresponsible.
I believe that is true. Silence or gimmickry on this issue is
irresponsible.
I yield the floor.
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I rise in support of the amendment by the
distinguished minority leader, Mr. Daschle, and the distinguished
ranking member of the Budget Committee, Mr. Exon.
I have been talking with the people of Massachusetts about this
budget. The people of Leominster and Worcester and Falmouth don't come
up to me and say: ``Senator, how does that spending compare to the OMB
baseline?'' They don't scream out: ``What is the savings in the
outyears compared with the savings in next fiscal year?'' They don't
ask: ``What is the cap on entitlement spending?'' But, Mr. President,
that does not mean that the people of Massachusetts are apathetic about
the Federal budget. They want to know if the Congress is going to work
with the President to balance the budget. And they want to know how the
budget is going to help them.
The proposal submitted to Congress by the President of the United
States balances the budget. This proposal before us eliminates the
deficit in 2002.
When he came to office in 1993, the President worked with Democrats
in Congress, and we took a $290 billion deficit and cut it in half in 3
years. That achievement fulfills the President's promise in 1992 to
halve the deficit in his first term.
America's deficit is still pernicious--but right now, we are doing
better than any other nation in the world. Our deficit is smaller as a
share of our economy than the shortfall in any other major economy in
the world.
Mr. President, let me state clearly: President Clinton and the
Democrats in Congress worked together to enact this economic plan--and
we did this without one single Republican vote.
This budget reflects our priorities of deficit reduction without
forgetting our commitment to middle-class Americans. Please remember,
Mr. President, something the Republican Party seems to forget: Deficit
reduction, in and of itself, is not an economic policy.
It is part of a larger picture. It is part of a vision--the
Democrats' vision--of this country's future which will lead us into the
next century with a healthier American economy and a stronger middle
class. That's good for America's corporate headquarters and America's
households.
Our plan has kept interest rates low, so more Americans have been
able to buy a first home or a new car.
Our plan has subdued inflation to 2.7 percent since 1993--the yield
on 10-year
[[Page S5125]]
Treasury notes dropped a full point when this plan was enacted. That
helped alleviate the credit crunch which hurt so many of my friends and
neighbors in Massachusetts during the Reagan-Bush recession.
Our plan has created more than 8 million jobs--including 1 million
jobs in basic industries like construction and manufacturing. It has
fostered robust and steady growth of gross domestic product--unlike the
recession of the early 1990's which crippled the American family.
This proposal before us, the President's budget, continues our good
record. It balances the budget the right way--by making Government
smaller and more efficient, by promoting a strong economy and a healthy
business environment, by investing in the programs that matter to
working Americans.
There is a right way to balance the budget--to make Government more
efficient without ripping away the safety net from the American family.
This budget leaves no one behind. It helps people who need help and
closes loopholes on those who don't.
The American people understand this, Mr. President. This is a budget
which reflects their priorities.
Mr. President, let me take a moment to tell our colleagues about the
impact this budget has on the families in my home State of
Massachusetts. The President's budget designates more American cities
as empowerment zones--a program designed to stimulate community
revitalization. Our colleague from Connecticut, Senator Lieberman,
understands how important this program is to America's cities. He has
introduced legislation which would expand the tax credits under the
Empowerment Zone Program to cities designated as enterprise
communities. I support his efforts and I support the President's
expansion of the current successful program.
The expansion promises to help communities across Massachusetts like
Boston, Lowell, Springfield, and Lawrence. The President's budget will
allow these cities and others to develop and expand opportunities for
their residents through a series of tax benefits, social service
grants, and better program coordination.
At a time when some cities face high unemployment and high poverty
rates, the Congress should be passing a budget which encourages
economic growth and citizen participation in strategic plans for
revitalization.
We, Democrats, are fighting to expand empowerment zones while we hold
back Republican attempts to distress our urban centers further by
cutting services vital to low-income Americans, like the low-income tax
credit.
The President's budget commits a full $1 billion for the Low-Income
Home Energy Assistance Program in fiscal year 1997, $1 billion in
advanced appropriations for fiscal year 1998 and $300 million for
emergency funding. Mr. President, this past winter, my State survived
one of the most brutal winters we have seen in a century.
There was record snow in Boston and small towns all over New England.
Families in Dorchester, in Everett, and in Malden--families all across
Massachusetts--relied on LIHEAP to assist with staggering heating
bills.
This program literally kept families from freezing: I am proud the
President has committed Federal resources necessary to meet the needs
of working Americans, and I am discouraged that the Republican budget
resolution is silent on funding for LIHEAP. The President and the
Democrats are committed to the working families in Massachusetts and
New England. The Republicans are silent.
The President's budget proposes $200 million to electrify the Amtrak
segment between Boston and New Haven--a project which will make
possible high-speed rail travel between Boston and Washington, DC, by
the year 2000.
The President and Democrats commit $5.5 million to conservation and
management of fisheries which would help restore New England's
collapsed stock of cod, flounder, and haddock. The Republicans are
silent.
The President and the Democrats are fighting for $500 million in mass
transit operating subsidies for Massachusetts. This means commuters to
Boston will not constantly be asked to pay higher fares just to get to
work. Republicans are silent.
The President and the Democrats are fighting for $650 million for the
Central Artery. The Republicans are silent.
The President and the Democrats are fighting to expand the Summer
Jobs Program which gives so many young people in Massachusetts their
first work experience.
This budget follows the wisdom of Mayor Menino who joined me in
fighting against the Republican shut-downs earlier this year. He knew
the effect these shut-downs would have on summer jobs. We forced them
to open the Government, fund the Summer Jobs Program and we will
together fight to expand it by giving another 500,000 kids a chance for
employment. But, then as now, the Republicans are silent.
The President and the Democrats are fighting the AIDS epidemic and
have committed resources to highly affected cities like Boston by fully
funding the Ryan White CARE Program. This means nutrition services to
people living with AIDS, and testing and counseling for those who fear
HIV-infection, will continue at the AIDS services organizations across
the State. The Republicans are silent.
The President and the Democrats are fighting for $100 million for the
clean-up of Boston Harbor, and the Republicans are silent.
That silence is unacceptable, Mr. President.
I will do all I can to break the silence. I will come to the floor as
often as possible and discuss the ill-effects of the Republican budget.
If the President's proposal is not accepted by the Senate, I will not
give up on the environment. I will offer an amendment at a later stage
in this debate, and I will fight to restore drastic cuts in
environmental programs the Republicans have imposed on the American
people and the residents of Massachusetts.
And, while we fight to clean our air and our water, the Republicans
have locked arms against the American taxpayers. The Republican plan
slashes funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and allows
polluters to foist the tab for their mess on the taxpayers rather than
forcing the polluters to clean up after themselves.
If the President's budget is not accepted, I will offer an amendment
that recognizes education as the key to economic and income security. I
will offer an amendment to add-back the cuts the Republicans are making
to the President's plan. I am proud he has included a provision for
which I have been fighting in this Congress--the President's budget
calls for a $10,000 deduction for educational expenses. That is real
money to working families who face double-digit inflation in the cost
of higher education.
Real money to help real people. Listen to some of the letters I have
received recently:
Melvin Harris of Roxbury wrote to me:
My son is currently attending school at Morgan State
University in Baltimore. He and I were shocked to find that
federal funds had been cut drastically which he was depending
on. With me being a retiree, it is hard for me to pay his
tuition, room and board. Would you please do something to
help me?
The President's budget will help Mr. Harris.
Timothy Crawford of Wellesley wrote to me:
As a senior in high school, I am looking forward to going
away to college next year. I have worked hard to get good
grades throughout high school and have been accepted to good
schools and am now trying to make the decision of where to
attend. One very important part of my decision is the price
of the school and the assistance I can get.
I am afraid the Republicans in our government will cut
education programs and I may not be able to attend college,
my brother may not be able to attend college, or we have to
work out a plan so that one of us goes to college while the
other works.
I hope you will continue to support education and do
something to help us.
The President's proposal will help Timothy Crawford and his family.
I have dozens of letters from students at Wellesley College. And,
hundreds of letters from physicians and attorneys who cannot repay
their student loans, and millworkers and musicians who ask for help
sending their kids to college. And, the President's proposal will help
them all.
The President has learned from Massachusetts the importance of
science and technology to the American economy. This budget marks the
fourth
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straight year the Democrats have proposed an increase in science and
technology programs--while the Republicans would cut science and
technology programs by 30 percent by the year 2002.
I will fight for the President's proposal for an increase of $13
billion for university-based research: it is the key to America's
future. And, Massachusetts knows this better than almost every other
State in the Union.
The President and the Democrats have given us a chance to fight back
against crime in our neighborhoods. This budget proposes $2 billion for
49,000 new police officers to protect America's neighborhoods. Putting
additional cops on the beat in communities across Massachusetts will
help deter crime, break the cycle of violence, and make our towns and
neighbhoods safer places to live.
In 1994, I fought successfully to increase the funding in the crime
bill to put an additional 100,000 cops on the street by the year 2000.
And, it is paying off for Massachusetts. Just this week, 99
Massachusetts cities will receive more funding--Worcester will receive
$1.85 million to hire 18 officers. Springfield will receive $1.25
million to hire 17 officers and Lowell will receive $1.5 million to
hire 20 new officers. To date, thanks to this program, my home State
has received funding for 1,300 new police men and women.
While the Republicans continue to threaten the community policing
fund--jeopardizing the safety of corner stores and neighborhood schools
and households--the President's budget understands the needs of
Massachusetts' neighborhoods. That's why I support this proposal.
The President and the Democrats also propose $25 million for new
advanced police officer education and training. State and local police
departments need assistance to meet the growing demands of law
enforcement and I am prepared to fight to help them.
And, Mr. President, what do we hear from the other side of the aisle?
The same, war-torn, threadbare rhetoric about tax and spending. The
same partisan bickering. Is this proposal all tax and spend? Of course
not. The President's budget is certified by the Congressional Budget
Office to balance in 6 years. It protects the environment. It protects
our elderly. It funds education and puts cops on the street. It takes
care of the little guy.
In the face of the extreme Republican budget, the President and we,
Democrats, have given the country hope by reducing the deficit with
common sense and compassion. It saves the Medicare Program for our
seniors, and the Medicaid Program for our children and low-income
Americans.
My friends in Massachusetts just don't buy it when you tell them:
``this isn't a cut--it's merely a reduction in the growth of
spending.'' They understand that the extreme Republican budget forces
them to spending twice as much on Medicare premiums.
They understand that Cape Cod beaches will be under attack, and
Boston harbor clean-up will be stalled while their water and sewer
rates are skyrocketing. They understand that they are paying into the
system and--under the Republican plan--they will be getting little in
return.
They understand that when the Republicans are not speaking in arcane,
incomprehensible, confusing budget jargon--they are silent.
The President's budget speaks to the people I meet at home in
Massachusetts. This budget meets our spending priorities and promises
more good economic news for the American family. That is why I support
it.
I urge our colleagues to support his balanced budget.
Mr. DODD addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time? The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I yield myself as much time as I may consume
off the resolution.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kyl). The Senator from Connecticut is
recognized.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, let me begin my remarks by commending my
colleague from New Mexico, who is the chairman of this committee, who
has the unenviable task of chairing the Budget Committee. While we have
our disagreements from time to time, I have a great deal of respect for
him as a colleague, as a Member, and I appreciate the fine work that he
does on behalf of his State and on behalf of the country.
I will take a few minutes and go over some of the budget items. He
does not have to stay. I know he has other things to do. But I did not
want him to leave the floor without expressing my appreciation for the
work he does.
Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. DODD. I will be happy to yield.
Mr. DOMENICI. I want to say for the Record, it is mutual. While my
colleague does not chair the budget committee--there cannot be that
mutuality--he probably would not want it anyway. In any event, I want
to say that my colleague's participation and contribution in matters
that we work on, from my standpoint, is very much appreciated. I
commend the Senator on the way he has handled himself.
Mr. DODD. I thank the Senator.
Mr. President, at some later point I will also have some extended
remarks on the announcement by the majority leader, who has decided he
is going to retire from the Senate the first part of June. While we,
too, have our differences, suffice it to say, as a colleague and a
friend, he will be missed. I mean that very deeply and sincerely.
Mr. President, I will just begin my remarks here by asking unanimous
consent to have printed in the Record a letter from June O'Neill, who
is the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, dated May 9, 1996,
in response in part to the colloquy between my colleague from New
Mexico and our colleague from Texas regarding the condition of the
hospital insurance trust fund. She says in that letter, here, and I am
quoting it now:
Under current law, the HI trust fund is projected to become
insolvent in 2001. CBO estimates the administration's
proposals would postpone this date to 2005.
She goes into greater length here, responding to that, but I thought
for the Record my colleagues ought to know what the Congressional
Budget Office says with regard to the hospital trust fund.
There being no objection, the letter was ordered to be printed in the
Record, as follows:
Congressional Budget Office,
Washington, DC, May 9, 1996.
Hon. J. James Exon,
Ranking Minority Member, Committee on the Budget, U.S.
Senate, Washington, DC.
Dear Senator: At your request, the Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) has examined the effects of the Administration's
budgetary proposals on the Hospital Insurance (HI) trust
fund. Under current law, the HI trust fund is projected to
become insolvent in 2001. CBO estimates that the
Administration's proposals would postpone this date to 2005.
Sincerely,
June E. O'Neill,
Director.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I want to begin by trying to, if we can, get
back to some basic information here, because you can get lost in a lot
of the data and charts and numbers that get thrown around. Let us just
remember we are talking about the President's budget. There is a budget
presented by the committee and there will be some alternatives that
will be offered in the coming days when we debate what the budget of
the country ought to be, but I think it is worthwhile to point out we
are talking about the President's budget to begin with.
Remember, this is a man who arrived in town in January 1993, 40
months ago--not 40 years ago, not a decade ago or 15 years ago; 40
months ago he arrives in town. He never served in Congress, never
served in the Cabinet. He was the Governor of a small State. As he
arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he has left on his doorstep a
mountain of debt. A mountain of debt is left on his doorstep. As you
begin to look back at 1980 and start there and follow this redline,
where the Congressional Budget Office projections were before, those
are facts, where the deficit was going, where it was headed just prior
to the President's arrival in town, and then what has happened to the
projection of the deficit since his arriving, right here, in 1993. Here
we get clearly where things were going up until his arrival here, and
now the same Congressional Budget Office says we are headed this way.
So, just for the purpose of clarity, let us keep in mind conditions
when this
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President arrives. We had mountains of debt, most of it accumulated
between 1981 and 1993. In fact, we had a debt that went up almost $4
trillion, from $1 trillion in 1981 to $4 trillion the day this
President arrives in town. Then, in the 40 months he has been here, he
has taken the projection of our deficit, which we are told was headed
in this direction, and we are now moving it downward. So you begin with
at least looking at the trend lines and where we are going.
The President's budget is a commonsense approach. It cuts more than
half a trillion dollars in spending over 7 years, yet, at the same
time, it maintains our priorities as a nation. The President's budget
invests in people. It protects Medicare and Medicaid, education and the
environment, and it would maintain our national investments in
education, job training and technology, all of which I think we agree
are important.
The budget maintains access to health care for our Nation's most
vulnerable citizens. It keeps our natural environment and our
workplaces safe. It understands that our overwhelming focus on
balancing the budget should not cause us to ignore our national
priorities. The President understands that all of this talk about
balancing the budget should not cause us to lose sight of our most
important national goals.
As I have said in the past, this body, in my view, needs to be
focusing more of its attention on increasing economic growth. We need
to reform the Tax Code so it promotes savings and investment and higher
growth. We need to increase opportunities for education and job
training so that all Americans will have the tools to succeed. We need
to make pensions and health care portable so that Americans can better
cope with the technological and economic changes that are occurring in
their lives.
We should all remember that an increase of as little as one-half of 1
percent in the growth rate of the United States could create enormous
opportunities for new jobs and expand options for millions of working
Americans. Increasing growth is a priority, in my view, that should be
reflected in everything that we do in Washington, and it should be
reflected in the Federal budget. It is reflected in the President's
budget.
All along, President Clinton has stressed there is a right way and a
wrong way to balance the budget. The right way is by maintaining our
commitment to Head Start, to police officers on the beat, to clean and
healthy drinking water, to summer jobs, and to encouraging community
service. Those are the kinds of priorities that help build a strong
nation.
The wrong way to balance the budget is by having unnecessary, unwise
spending cuts and tax cuts for those, frankly, who do not need them. I
am going to get to that in a minute here. Our dear friends on the other
side, with all due respect, have not learned the lesson. The American
public have said over and over again: You are going in the wrong
direction. We want our budget balanced. We want it done, if we can, in
the next 6 or 7 years, but we want our priorities to be reflected in
that decisionmaking process.
What good does it do if you balance the budget and simultaneously
make it impossible for my children to get a decent education, have
access to higher education in this country? Balancing the budget and
depriving the next generation of the tools it needs is foolhardy.
What good does it do to talk about balancing the budget if you are
going to rip the heart out of the environmental laws that have made
this a stronger and a healthier nation? What good is it to balance the
budget if you then increase the financial burden of older Americans, if
you begin to make it more difficult, because Medicare is being reduced,
for these people to make ends meet? How many middle-income families
depend upon Medicaid so their parents and their grandparents can have a
decent, long-term health care program?
These are the kinds of things people say we need to invest in
intelligently, making choices about where you reduce spending so we can
achieve a balanced budget but make our country strong simultaneously.
In our view, the President has done that with his budget. No one is
suggesting any budget proposal is perfect, but certainly, given the
evidence of the last 40 months, the direction we are heading in will
make the case that this is a good proposal and one we ought to be
working on, if we can, to achieve some common ground over the next 20
or so days left here so we can complete this budget process and do what
the American public have asked us to do.
Let me, if I can, address some of these issues with greater
specificity. I want to begin with the budget being cut. I say this
because I think it is important that people understand where we have
come from in the last 40 months. This is what is called a primary
budget. This is entitled ``Budget Without Interest Payments.''
Obviously, interest payments must, like any financial obligation, be
paid. But if you remove the interest payments--remember, you only get
interest payments because of the burdens you accumulate. So if you take
away the interest payments, here is the deficit that occurred over the
12 years from 1981 to 1993, those 12 years: $660 billion. If you took
away the interest obligations in the last 40 months, we have created a
surplus of $239 billion in this country in the last 40 months. Those
numbers are not being made up. Those are real numbers.
So with all of this talk of what has happened here, here is a
President who arrives in town in Washington for the first time in a
Federal Government position, and in 40 months he is able to move us
into the black, if you will--this chart is in the blue--but into the
black for the first time in years.
President Clinton inherited a $290 billion deficit in the year that
he arrived in office. This year, the 1996 deficit will be $144 billion.
That is cut in half. Those are the realities.
Back in 1993, the Congressional Budget Office projected the deficit
would hover around $300 billion. That was their projection. Following
the implementation of the Clinton budget plan in 1993, as I pointed out
earlier, the budget has declined sharply. In fact, Mr. President, let
me point out one additional statistic reflected in this chart. The
Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 1996 deficit will come
in at 1.9 percent of the gross domestic product. That will be the first
time since 1979 that the deficit has been below 2 percent of the gross
domestic product. That is significant progress, and we ought to stay on
that track, if we can.
This chart is without interest payments, as I said, and has been cut
in half as a result of what has happened just in the last 40 months of
this administration.
Let me, if I can, turn to the chart on job growth rate, because this
is what people care about. Again, you can balance the budget tomorrow
if you want to, just by juggling some numbers around here and getting
rid of a lot of things. But this cannot be a process of just people
with green visors and sharp pencils. What happens to real people in
this country as a result of the decisions we make? If our only function
were to balance the budget, we could do that simply by cutting out all
our spending, if we wanted to, and raising taxes on everybody.
We have to ask the question: What happens to real people when you do
this? So while we have been able to cut the deficit in half, and, if we
eliminate the interest payments, actually we put this country into
surplus for the first time in years. What has happened to jobs out
there? What has happened to people's jobs? Again, look at jobs created
per year.
In 1981 to 1992, jobs created per year were 1,540,000. That is the
number of jobs created each year in those years. In 1989 through 1992,
it averaged 608,000 jobs per year. But from 1993 to the present time,
Mr. President, we have created in excess of 2,684,000 jobs a year.
Compare that with 1,500,000 from 1981 to 1992; 600,000 from 1989 to
1992. We are now getting close to 3 million new jobs a year, while
simultaneously bringing the deficit down.
Mrs. BOXER. Will the Senator yield, because I think it is so
important.
What that chart shows is the number of jobs created essentially under
the Bush Presidency as opposed to the Clinton Presidency. What my
friend is saying, and it is so dramatic I would like him to repeat it,
is that under the Bush Presidency, there were how many new jobs
created?
[[Page S5128]]
Mr. DODD. Under the 4 years President Bush served as President, we
created on average of 608,000 jobs per year, and in the last 40 months,
from January of 1993 through December of 1995--it does not include
these last 4 or 5 months, but my colleagues will recall there were in
excess of 620,000 jobs created in the month of February alone. That is
more jobs created on a yearly basis than between 1989 and 1992.
Quickly someone is going to say, ``Well, those aren't great jobs.''
That is wrong. The overwhelming number of jobs, more than 90 percent of
these jobs, are private sector jobs, and well over 60 percent of these
jobs are high-paying jobs. Not every one of them is, but the
overwhelming majority are high-paying jobs in the private sector.
Mrs. BOXER. My last question. When President Clinton ran for office,
he made a promise on new jobs. As I understand it, that promise has
been met; is that correct?
Mr. DODD. I say to my colleague from California, I believe it has,
and promises were made in terms of cutting the deficit in half. Those
are real numbers. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, says they
are real numbers. So here is the deficit coming down, job creation is
going up, and my colleagues on the other side are treating this like
bad news, as if this was some dreadful information.
If we are on the right track, if things are working right, why do you
not stick with the plan and the program here so that you have a healthy
balance--investment in education, investment in our environment,
cutting back our spending where we can, trying to have some sense of
fairness about all of this so we move into the 21st century as a
healthy nation.
Today, of the G-7 countries, we are the healthiest economy. We are
the healthiest economy of all the great economic powers in the world.
We are the healthiest today in terms of job creation and deficit
reduction. Why are our markets responding the way they are? The people
on Wall Street are not making those investments because they want to
help Bill Clinton get reelected. It is not because they are Democrats.
They are making cold, hard financial decisions: Are we heading in the
right direction or the wrong direction? They are investing because they
think things are going in the right direction. It is their money they
are putting on the table, and they like the trend lines they see: the
deficit coming down, job creation going up.
You can dance all around this, you can try to throw out a lot of
misinformation about it, but the hard line bottom facts are, we are on
the right track, we are going in the right direction. A lot more has to
be done. It would be foolish for anyone to stand up here and say our
work is over with. It is not. There are going to be some difficult
decisions that have to be made. But you cannot argue with the facts.
Job creation, deficit reduction, the trend lines of where we are going
in this country are on a solid and sound footing.
So, Mr. President, I urge my colleagues in the coming days to move
away from politics as usual. We need to come together. We have 20 to 25
days to get a job done. There is no debate here about whether or not we
ought to balance the budget. I know some hope others will take a
position--in fact, I heard someone the other day in the House of
Representatives say, ``We don't want to settle this because it is too
good of an issue.''
It reminds me of the story of the law clerk who arrives in a law firm
and he has only been there a month. He walks in to the senior partner
with this huge file, a file that has been around 20 years. He says to
the senior partner of the law firm, ``I've got great news, boss. This
case that has been here 20 years. I've settled this case. It's over
with. It's done. Everybody's happy.''
The senior partner says, ``Why did you do a thing like that for? I've
educated four of my children on that file. You don't want to close that
case, that's too good a case, keep that case open.''
So we have certain friends who want to keep the case open, because it
is a good case politically for them. Do not let it settle. For God's
sake, do not come to an agreement, they say. Do not try to resolve your
differences. The politics of that are dreadful; they are dreadful
politics. Keep the issue alive, keep the debate going.
We are here to say today, let us end the debate. We can. We have
agreed on balancing the budget in 7 years. We all have agreed to do it
according to the Congressional Budget Office numbers. We are on the
right track. The differences are not that great. They can be resolved.
We can get the work done.
I urge my colleagues today on both sides, particularly those on the
majority side--it is difficult, I know, to admit when you are wrong.
That is a hard thing for anybody to do in this world. It is
particularly hard, if you are in politics, to admit you are wrong, but
the facts do not lie. The deficit has come down. A young Governor
arrives from a small State in January of 1993, gets dumped on his
doorstep--dumped on his doorstep--$4 trillion in debt, some $290
billion, $300 billion in an annual deficit.
In 40 months, that deficit is down to $144 billion. The Congressional
Budget Office now says we are heading in the right direction, going in
the right direction now. That is the right direction to be going in.
Job creation is up, the basic thing people need. The best social
program anybody ever created is a job, a good job in this country. Here
we have jobs being produced in the Nation while the deficit is coming
down, and intelligent priorities, good priorities.
I heard the other day the House majority leader--put aside whether
you are for or against a gasoline tax; we can debate that, and will, in
the coming days--but, my Lord, to hear the majority leader of the House
of Representatives say, I'll tell you how we'll pay for that--we'll cut
education.
In my State, my working-class families in my State need the Pell
grants and the student loans and the Stafford grants and so forth.
Otherwise, they could not get an education. We have commencements
coming up.
I am going to give a commencement speech at Western Connecticut State
University, a State university in my State. Fifty percent of their
students receive some form of financial help or assistance. Here we
have the majority leader of the House of Representatives saying we
ought to just pay for that gasoline tax by going after education. You
wonder why people are suspicious.
Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. DODD. With some reluctance, I yield to my colleague.
Mr. DOMENICI. I just say----
Mr. DODD. I am on a roll.
Mr. DOMENICI. The distinguished majority leader in the House has not
said that since that day.
Mr. DODD. My colleague from New Mexico obviously got a hold of him
and straightened him out. I appreciate that. But come on, what else do
you rely on, when you get up on a national news program and you say,
``I'll tell you how I'd do it. This is how I'd do it''? Immediately the
phones were ringing off the hook. What a foolish thing to say. So
immediately they start to backtrack.
But if you wonder why the American people get suspicious about what
the priorities are, it is statements like that. What are your real
intentions?
So when we hear statements about Medicare, and we say, ``We will let
it wither on the vine,'' or, ``I'm proud I voted against it 35 years
ago,'' then everyone gets upset. You can understand the average person
in this country gets a little nervous when they hear that. If they are
relying on Medicare, relying on Medicaid, in order to meet basic health
care costs, they are wondering, which side do we chose here? Who is
going to watch out for me? They have one person saying, ``Look, I think
it ought to die or we get rid of it. I never thought it worked very
well.'' And others say, ``Look, we're going to have to make it work
better and make tough decisions so it's there.'' Then you begin to
understand the suspicions, the worries, the fears, the insecurities
that many people feel. This is not an abstraction to them.
We have a good health care program as Members of the U.S. Congress.
Thank God for it. We have a good health care program. But millions of
Americans outside of Washington, Mr. President, they rely on Medicare.
They rely on it. For many, Medicare is the difference between having a
life of relative decency and being wiped out financially. It is not an
abstraction to them.
[[Page S5129]]
So when we talk about these numbers and CBO and OMB and percentages
and GDP, and so forth, that person out there today watching this debate
says, ``What does that mean in terms of me, my kids, our jobs, our
health care? Where are we going? Who is on my side?''
So, again, I come back to the point, Mr. President, I tried to make
at the outset here. Put aside all the glitter and all the distractions;
we are going in the right direction on deficit reduction. It is a major
issue. People care about it deeply. This President in 40 months, not 40
years, not 15 years, but 40 months, has moved the country in the right
direction on deficit reduction for the first time in decades.
At the end of this fiscal year, we will have now had 4 years of
deficit reduction, 4 consecutive years. You have to go back to Harry
Truman's adminis-
tration--Harry Truman's administra-
tion--to find another American President who took us through 4 years of
consecutive deficit reduction.
We have reduced the size of the Federal work force under President
Clinton by 270,000 jobs. Now, 30 percent of those jobs were in the
military. My colleagues on the Budget Committee pointed that out. That
is accurate. But 70 percent of those jobs came from the civilian work
force.
By contrast, with all due respect, under President Reagan, the
Federal work force increased by 188,000 positions; 188,000 positions
during the 8 years of President Reagan. Contrast that with 270,000
fewer jobs in 40 months under President Clinton.
Under the leadership of Al Gore, the President has ripped out 16,000
pages of the 80,000 pages of Federal regulations, so that businesses in
this country can work with less paperwork cluttering their desks.
Is it done yet? No; but for the first time, there is a real reduction
in paperwork, real reduction in the size of the Federal work force,
real reduction in the deficit, getting the unemployment rate down.
Those are the things that people care about, seeing to it that
Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment are going to get
proper protection.
It is a commonsense budget. That is what has happened under this
proposal. That is why I urge my colleagues on the other side in these
coming few days to sit down. Let us work out this budget.
The President extended the hand to our majority leader. He said,
``Let's come on down, you and I, no staff, no one else, and let's work
this out together.'' Our majority leader is going to be here until June
11. I hope he will take him up on that offer. What a great thing it
would be, before the majority leader leaves and retires from the
Senate, with one of the great issues we have tried to resolve, if an
American President and the majority leader, from the two different
parties in this country, the two major parties, came together, with no
one else in the room, and the two of them sat down and worked out this
problem before June 11.
What a great achievement that would be. I think both individuals
would deserve the sincere praise and credit from the American public. I
know we have an election in 25 weeks, but this issue deserves
resolution, and we are close to achieving it.
You have a President taking us in the right direction. You have a
majority leader who is about to retire from here, who I think could
close the gap. I urge that that offer the President made to our
majority leader be picked up before he retires, and let's see if we
cannot complete this work.
For those reasons, Mr. President, I urge our colleagues to take a
good, strong hard look at the budget that has been proposed by the
President. It takes us in the right direction for all the reasons I
mentioned. I urge its adoption. With that, Mr. President, I yield the
floor.
Mr. DOMENICI addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. DOMENICI. I speak off the resolution, Mr. President.
I might say to Senator Dodd, I cannot at this point, because we are
going to offer an amendment--but so the Senator will know, I will have
an interesting rebuttal to what the Senator has said. I will give the
other side of the coin sometime today. I do not want to do that and not
have the Senator know about it. I cannot do it right now while the
Senator is here because I have some commitments. But we will let the
Senator know in advance, so if he wants to come down and sort of chide
me, as I did him, he can.
I say, I had a little trouble with the Senator's analogy of the law
firm and the old case, because it seems to me it is the President who
is gaining from this budget debate. He is the one who has that old
case. He is the one who ought not to get rid of it because it has been
good for him. I have a strong suspicion that unless you settle the case
his way, he is going to have that old case right on through the
election because it is, as that senior partner said, it is a great
livelihood and it has kind of been a great political livelihood for
him.
Mr. DODD. If my colleague will yield.
Mr. DOMENICI. Of course.
Mr. DODD. Our colleagues will appreciate that my friend from New
Mexico and I have spent a lot of time working together on old cases.
Mr. DOMENICI. That is right.
Mr. DODD. So we share at least our concern about old cases. I
appreciate his comments. I will try to be here when he makes them.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I think we have tendered an amendment,
second-degree amendment. We have given it to the minority so they know
what it is. I understand that there are 7 minutes left on our side for
our statutory time to rebut the President's budget. Is that correct?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
Mr. DOMENICI. I yield back the 7 minutes. Now I yield to Senator
Frist for a second-degree amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time is yielded back.
Amendment No. 3968 To Amendment No. 3965
(Purpose: To express the sense of the Senate that the discretionary
spending caps should not include triggers that would make drastic
reductions in nondefense discretionary spending in fiscal years 2001
and 2002 (the last 2 years of the budget) for the purpose of achieving
a balanced budget in fiscal year 2002)
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for
its immediate consideration.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from Tennessee [Mr. Frist] proposes an
amendment numbered 3968 to amendment No. 3965.
Mr. FRIST. I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the
amendment be dispensed with.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The amendment is as follows:
At the end of the pending amendment.
SEC. . COMMON SENSE BUDGETING AMENDMENT.
(a) Findings.--The Congress finds that--
(1) President Clinton proposed in this fiscal year 1997
budget submission immediate downward adjustments to
discretionary caps after the year 2000 if the Congressional
Budget Office projected that his budget would not balance in
2002;
(2) the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated
that President Clinton's fiscal year 1997 budget submission
will incur a deficit of $84,000,000,000 in 2002;
(3) as a result of CBO's projected deficit in fiscal year
2002, the President's budget would trigger drastic reductions
in discretionary spending in 2001 and 2002 to reach balance;
(4) these drastic reductions would have to occur in
nondefense programs such as education, environment, crime
control, science, veterans, and other human resource
programs;
(5) 100 percent of the nondefense discretionary cuts in the
President's budget occur in 2001 and 2002; and
(6) the inclusion in a budget submission of triggers to
make immediate, drastic reductions in discretionary spending
is inconsistent with sound budgeting practices and should be
recognized as a ``budgetary gimmick'' that is antithetical to
legitimate efforts to achieve balance in 2002.
(b) Sense of Senate.--It is the sense of the Senate that
the discretionary spending caps should not include triggers
that would--
(1) result in 100 percent of the nondefense discretionary
reductions occurring in fiscal years 2001 and 2002; and
(2) make drastic reductions in nondefense discretionary
spending in fiscal years 2001 and 2002 (the last 2 years of
the budget) for the purpose of achieving a balanced budget in
fiscal year 2002.
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I submit what is a very simple and
straightforward amendment today that strikes, I think, at the heart of
one of the major problems that we all have with the President's
proposal.
[[Page S5130]]
To set the stage for this amendment, let me go back and set the
background, starting with where we are today and how we have gotten
here.
The President proposed in his budget, the 1997 fiscal year budget,
that there would be immediate downward adjustments to discretionary
caps after the year 2000 if the Congressional Budget Office projected
that his budget would not balance in the year 2002.
The Congressional Budget Office, second, has estimated to us that
President Clinton's fiscal year 1997 budget submission will, indeed,
incur a deficit of $84 billion in the year 2002. Now, as a result of
the CBO's projected deficit in the year 2002, the President's budget
will trigger drastic, drastic reductions in discretionary spending in
the years 2001 and 2002. It is important for my colleagues to
understand that these drastic reductions which will kick in would have
to occur in those nondefense programs such as education, the
environment, crime control, science, veterans, and other human resource
programs.
It is also interesting, and, again, important for our colleagues all
to understand, that 100 percent of the nondefense discretionary cuts in
the President's budget that occur in 2001 and 2002, over that 2-year
period, 100 percent of those cuts will occur.
Now, the inclusion of a budget submission of triggers to make
immediate drastic reductions in discretionary spending is simply
inconsistent with sound budgeting practices and needs to be recognized
for what it is--budgetary gimmickry, smoke and mirrors. This is,
indeed, inconsistent with our bipartisan, I hope, legitimate efforts to
balance the budget by the year 2002.
Thus, this sense-of-the-Senate amendment says it is the sense of the
Senate that the discretionary spending caps should not include triggers
which would result in 100 percent of the nondefense discretionary
reductions occurring in fiscal year 2001 and 2002, and, second, should
not include triggers that make drastic reductions in nondefense
discretionary spending in fiscal years 2001 and 2002, the last 2 years
of the budget, for the purpose of achieving a balanced budget in the
year 2002.
This amendment is very simple. That is it. You just heard the sense-
of-the-Senate amendment. It is straightforward. By passing this
amendment, the Senate, today, can make a strong statement opposing
budgetary gimmickry, smoke and mirrors, and in support of nonsense
budgeting.
We all travel around this country and to our town meetings. It is
very clear that the American people are tired of gimmicks out of
Washington, are tired of the smoke-and-mirrors budgeting that we have
undertaken in the past and that is reflected in the President's budget.
Repeated use of these gimmicks over time has contributed to the overall
lack of confidence that we see in our budgetary process in our Federal
Government today.
A few months ago, the President introduced his 1997 budget, proudly
claiming that his budget balanced in the year 2002 using Congressional
Budget Office numbers. Now, this is the 2,200 pages of the President's
budget for 1997. Intrigued by the President's new enthusiasm, very
different than a year and a half ago, for a balanced budget, my
colleagues and I on the Budget Committee went through the 2,000 pages.
It was very interesting what we discovered. Buried in the budget
supplement on page 13, we discovered a very troubling budget gimmick
that it is important for all of our colleagues to understand, to note
that is in there. It is really the purpose of the sense of that
amendment to point this out and to refute it.
On page 13, it says that in case the new assumptions produce a
deficit in 2002, the President's budget proposes an immediate
adjustment to the annual limits or caps on discretionary spending,
lowering them enough to reach balance in the year 2002.
Let me explain how this proposal works. The proposal is called a
trigger here in Washington, but to the typical American it is not a
trigger. It is a gimmick. It is a smoke-and-mirrors approach. The CBO,
the nonpartisan Federal budget analysts that look at this information,
says the budget of the President will have a deficit of $81 billion in
the year 2002. To make up that deficit which the CBO tells us will
exist in 6 years, the President's budget, in this document, includes a
trigger. That trigger will make unspecified cuts in discretionary
spending over those last 2 years. That is how his budget achieves so-
called balance, through this gimmick.
Now, discretionary spending, what is it? It makes up one-third of our
entire Federal budget. It includes spending on our basic Government
functions, including education, including roads, including the
environment, including science and scientific research, including
veterans, including medical research. The President's trigger says it
cuts discretionary spending in these fields in the years 2001 and 2002
but does not say where these cuts will come from. It does not say which
programs will have to absorb these drastic and instant cuts of such
magnitude.
Let me refer to this first chart. It basically is headed ``Spend now,
save later.'' In red is the President's budget. In green is the budget
proposed today before the U.S. Senate, the chairman's mark. The
President's budget frontloads the spending and backloads the savings.
The President proposes to increase spending over the next several
years. This is 1996, 1997, and 1998.
The President's budget says: Yes, increase the nondefense
discretionary spending over the next several years and then drastically
cut thereafter. Contrast that to the mark that we have before us today,
the chairman's mark for spending cuts; reductions begin and continue
evenly over that entire period of time.
These drastic cuts are really what we are focusing on in this sense-
of-the-Senate amendment today because what the President's budget tells
us in the supplement, that if they do not reach balance and the CBO
says it will not reach balance, these cuts come in. Look at the drastic
cuts occurring in these 2 outlying years. The chairman's mark shows a
steady glidepath of decreased spending over time.
Now, discretionary spending is an inside-the-beltway term. Let me
show how the cuts and the President's budget compare to the cuts in the
Senate balanced budget resolution. On the second chart we will look at
one such area that is of the Food and Drug Administration. As we can
see in our budget before the Senate today, in the Senate budget, we see
we assume a freeze at a spending of about $880 million over the next 6
years. In contrast, we see the President's budget also has a freeze the
first year but then a reduction over time--again, with drastic cuts
coming in to the year 2000.
The Food and Drug Administration, a program we all know is valuable
to the safety of our country, that is valuable both in terms of food
and drug safeguards, we see the significant cuts. If we look at the
Environmental Protection Agency, the Senate plan, again, in green,
increases spending about $900 million next year and freezes it over the
period out to the year 2002. In contrast, the President's plan
increases spending over time. But, again, in those last 2 years,
because of this smoke and mirrors, because of this budgetary gimmickry,
we see drastic cuts that have to take place according to the budget as
presented and written by the President in these last 2 years.
It is these drastic cuts that we are addressing in this sense-of-the-
Senate amendment. On the one hand, we have had many attacks on this
side of the aisle for ravaging the environment. Look at the difference
of what actually occurs in the Senate-reported budget versus that of
the President of the United States.
Let me turn to another area which is obviously quite close to me,
being a scientist in the U.S. Senate. That is the National Science
Foundation. Once again, you see that what is in the chairman's mark,
passed out of the Budget Committee, is very different than what is
proposed in the President's budget--once again, if we focus on the last
2 years.
The National Science Foundation funds many of those important
scientific research policies, projects, and investigations, which have
long-term payouts and affect our individual lives.
Another area I am very close to is the National Institutes of Health.
If there is one thing I keep coming back to this floor talking about,
it is that we need to think long term. We cannot just think short term
and think just what gets us to the next election, or what will be
politically appealing to the masses of people today. We have to
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think long term. The National Institutes of Health, as you can see, is
at about $12 billion in spending right now. Under the Senate-reported
plan, it will be frozen and will continue at that level. Right now,
under the President's plan, there is a proposed increase. It makes us
feel good because this is long-term investment for this country. But
look what is also in the document. Look what happens in 2001 and 2002,
which is 5 years from now. There are drastic cuts in the President's
plan for the National Institutes of Health--a valuable program that
engages in life-saving research that will affect everybody's lives in
this body and all Americans lives in the future. It is this long-term
view, not just the short-term view, that we must take.
We can look at another area, again, that I have been close to, which
is veterans' medical care and hospital services. I have had the
privilege, over the last 12 years of my life, to spend every week
operating in a veterans' hospital, either in Tennessee or in
California. It has been a big part of my life to see the sort of care
that can be delivered to our veterans, who deserve this care. Well,
once again, we see in green on the chart what happens under our budget
proposal, which came through the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. You can
see that over time, there is essentially a freeze of about $17 billion.
But contrast that with the realities that are in the President's
budget. The realities are that we have extreme and drastic cuts, over
time, into the year 2000.
Again, we will focus on the years 2001 and 2002. These charts are
really selected charts. You can go on and on, program by program. But
what is important is for all of our colleagues to understand what
happens by putting in this budgetary gimmickry. These are just a few
examples, and there are many, many more. The simple fact is, Mr.
President, that these cuts are never going to happen. I hope that they
will not happen because they are so drastic, and they would occur in
fields that need sufficient funds. And that is, science, education, the
environment, and the Veterans' Administration. People know that these
drastic cuts will never happen. We have this feeling put forward in the
President's budget that we can spend more right now, and we can worry
about saving later, and that we can cut drastically later. This is not
fair to the American people or to Members of this body.
We, as Senators and elected leaders, must avoid gimmicks when we are
dealing with taxpayers' money. Earlier today, there has been a lot of
pointing as to what happened in the past, 10 years ago, and with
asterisks, and 15 years ago. Well, it is a new day and time, and there
are new people in this body, and we have come here and said, ``No more
gimmicks. That is not what the American people want. No more smoke and
mirrors. Let us address the problems that can be addressed in a
bipartisan way.'' We know what the problem is and the problem is that
we have not been spending very smart in the past. We have been spending
too much. Now is the time to avoid gimmicks and to spend smarter.
Again, I will also re-echo what my distinguished colleague from
Connecticut just said. This can be done in a bipartisan way; this can
be done bringing both sides of the aisle together. I hope that in that
spirit of bipartisanship both sides of the aisle will come together and
join me in opposing the budgetary gimmicks and the budgetary smoke and
mirrors that are in the President's plan, and support commonsense
budgeting.
Mr. President, at this juncture, I will yield 5 minutes to my
colleague from the State of Missouri, and that 5 minutes should be
taken off the resolution.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
The Senator from Missouri is recognized.
Mr. BOND. I thank and congratulate my colleague from Tennessee.
Senator Frist has put his finger on the real problem in this budget.
The President, in his budget, has glowing words, as several of my
colleagues on the other side have, about the priorities that they think
are important. The President has said that we must invest in education
and training, the environment, science and technology, law enforcement,
and other priorities.
But, as I pointed out earlier today, when it comes to making these
sets of numbers balance out, they have a meat ax, a paint-by-numbers
meat ax that whacks 10 percent out of all of those budgets in 2001, and
18 percent in 2002. Now, are you for the priorities? If so, this is an
opportunity to vote for some honesty in budgeting. The President has
claimed he gets to balance. I think most of the people in this body say
we want to get to balance. But do we really want to get to balance by
taking the drastic cuts that my colleague from Tennessee has just
talked about?
I talked earlier this morning about the cuts in NIH, National
Institutes of Health, FDA. Yesterday, I talked about the serious cuts
that would happen to the Environmental Protection Agency if you apply
this meat ax arbitrarily in 2001 and 2002, because the President's
numbers do not add up, unless you have the meat ax.
What the Senator from Tennessee is saying is, if you are serious
about this budget, serious about reporting a responsible budget that
gets to balance, let us take a look at what your budget, as now
proposed, would actually do. It savages some of the very programs the
President said he wants to promote and defend on the way to a balanced
budget.
Well, Mr. President, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle,
if you are serious about establishing priorities, if you really believe
that numbers do not lie, if you believe that budgets should say what
they mean and mean what they say, let us get rid of the arbitrary cuts
in NIH, funding for the Women, Infants and Children Program, funding
for child care, funding for the National Science Foundation, and NASA,
and, yes, funding for the Veterans' Administration.
My distinguished colleague who has had experience in working with the
Veterans, Administration knows how compelling the needs of those
veterans are. I have visited facilities and talked with people who are
finding that the problems in those Veterans' Administration facilities
cannot be dealt with.
If we follow this meat ax budget approach, we would be closing more
than one out of four veterans' facilities in the Nation. That means, as
I said, California, with 11 hospitals, would lose 3, or probably 4. Our
friends from California might want to tell us which of these four
hospitals would be closed; and Florida, with six facilities, would
probably lose at least one, maybe two; Illinois, with six, would also
lose one or two; Massachusetts, at least one; Missouri, at least one;
New York, at least three, and probably four; Pennsylvania, at least
two, and probably three; Texas, at least two; Ohio, at least one.
Do we arbitrarily want to close all of these facilities because we do
not want to meet our obligations to the men and women who have defended
this country who are either injured in war or who are now medically
indigent? I cannot believe that is a serious budget proposal.
If my colleagues really want to pursue the President's budget and
defend his priority, then I urge them to vote for the Frist resolution
so that they can go back and make some intelligent decisions rather
than taking a meat ax to the very programs the President said he wants
as his priorities. His program would slash environment, children,
education, and health care for veterans. Mr. President, that is not
acceptable.
I urge my colleagues to support the amendment which I think is very
well considered presented by the Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. LAUTENBERG addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I yield myself 15 minutes off the
amendment.
Mr. President, as we begin consideration of the fiscal 1997 budget
resolution, we ought to take a good look at the history of what has
happened to the Federal budget in the last 15 years.
The fiscal records of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Reagan could not
be more different. For 12 years the Reagan and Bush administrations
racked up $2.3 trillion a day. In fact, if we did not have to pay the
interest on the debt that was chalked up in these 12 years, the budget
would be balanced in fiscal 1996.
Just to be sure there was not too much confusion to make the point,
let me repeat that, if we did not have to
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pay the interest on the debt that was stacked up in these 12 years, the
12 years of the Reagan and Bush administrations, $2.3 trillion worth of
debt, the budget would be balanced in fiscal year 1996. Not once did
President Reagan or President Bush propose a balanced budget.
Fortunately, President Clinton's 3-year record is much different.
President Clinton promised a change in 1992, and he has produced one.
If you would consider the following, it makes the point very clearly.
The deficit has gone down for 4 straight years. The deficit for the
year that we are in now is expected to be only $144 billion which is
1.9 percent of our gross domestic product. This is the lowest annual
percentage of any industrialized country. For example, Japan's deficit
is over 3 percent of its GDP. Great Britain's is 7 percent, and Italy
is 9 percent budget to GDP.
Finally, President Clinton is the first President to put forward a
balanced budget proposal since the 1974 Budget Act created the Budget
Committees.
So the question is no longer whether we will balance the budget. The
question is how we will balance the budget. President Clinton has laid
out the right way to balance the budget. He did exactly what the
Republicans demanded last year. He put forward a 7-year balanced budget
scored by the Congressional Budget Office.
President Clinton once again has put forward a 7-year balanced budget
scored by the Congressional Budget Office. His budget is much different
than the Republican budget. His budget protects Medicare and Medicaid,
education and the environment, and does not increase taxes on working
families. The President's budget not only protects 37 million senior
citizens from deep Medicare cuts contained in this budget but would
also make the Medicare trust fund solvent until the year 2006. It
preserves the guarantee of Medicaid for 37 million seniors and disabled
persons. It protects our Nation's environment by ensuring full funding
for implementation of the major environmental programs that so many
support like clean air, clean water, and toxic waste cleanups. It makes
critical investments in education and training. It provides increased
funding for programs like Head Start, title I, and Safe and Drug-Free
Schools.
Finally, the President's budget maintains the EITC, the earned-income
tax credit, which provides tax relief for working families who earn
less than $28,000 a year. This allows them to maintain their family
needs for basic essentials for sustenance.
The Republican budget is much different. It is punitive to working
families and senior citizens. In reality, the underlying budget
resolution should be dubbed ``extremist budget, part 2.''
For example, they claim that they have lowered their Medicare care
cuts. But have they? The answer is no. They claim that their cuts have
come down to the President's level. But they have not. In January the
final Republican offer in the budget negotiations included a $226
billion cut in Medicare over 7 years. This budget resolution calls for
$228 million in Medicare cuts over 7 years. The number is virtually the
same.
These large cuts combined with their structural changes will truly
make Medicare, as it is said, ``wither on the vine.'' I think that
quote comes from the Speaker of the House. If the Republican budget is
enacted Medicare will become a second-class health care system.
The Republican budget also eliminates the guarantee of Medicaid
coverage for seniors, for the disabled, for children, and for pregnant
women.
This budget continues the Republican assault on education. Over 7
years the budget cuts $70 billion in education and training compared to
the President's budget.
This budget contains the Republican trashing of the environment. It
will cut environmental programs by 19 percent in the year 2002. It will
slow down toxic waste cleanups.
I am not going to stand idly by, and neither are many, and watch this
pillaging of the environment go unchallenged. Senator John Kerry and I
will offer an amendment to restore these deep cuts in the environmental
protection programs.
Finally, their budget contains the Republican war on working
families. At the same time the Republican leadership is opposing an
increase in the minimum wage, they are also proposing a tax increase on
working families who earn under $28,000 a year. It is hard. It is
unfair. And that is why this resolution should be called ``extremist
budget, part 2.''
Mr. President, as we heard the debate here, I have heard references
to moral fiber; to the fact that the President lacks the moral fiber to
produce a budget that truly answers the question as to balance in 7
years. Mr. President, when we talk about moral fiber I cannot help but
think about the moral fiber that is necessary to say to 12 million
Americans that you ought to make more than $4.25 an hour, that on $180
you are still way below the poverty level, and when you go, if we
finally can get there, to $5.15 an hour, you are still being asked to
get by on less than the poverty level.
Where is the morality of that issue? I cannot see it. We can talk
about the accountants' version of morality. That is what we are
discussing. We are discussing whether or not this budget is balanced in
7 years.
The President, President Clinton, has delivered on his promise, and
the budget deficit has come down 4 years in a row. It is the first time
since President Truman that has happened. And we question the moral
fiber of the proposal? It is an outrage.
Part of the proposal put into the underlying budget resolution is a
reduction, or the elimination, of much of the earned income tax credit.
That is the payroll tax portion of the incomes less than $28,000. Give
it back--$28,000.
The poverty level for an individual today is $8,000 worth of income,
and $11,000 for a family of three. But we are saying that even though
the average income is substantially above the $28,000 that we ought to
raise taxes on those people. Does anybody have an idea how well you can
support a family in the high-cost areas of the country on $28,000 a
year? At the same time, Mr. President, it is proposed that we furnish a
tax break for those in the higher income levels. Under the original
proposal, if someone earned $350,000, they would have gotten an $8,500
tax deduction, but we do not want to give a 90-cent raise to people
making $4.25 an hour. It is outrageous. We ought not to loosely talk
about morality when we discuss these. If we want to discuss them as
numbers, if we want to challenge the figures, everyone has a right to
do that. But when we get into the subjective evaluations of what is
moral and what is right, it is more hokum than a serious evaluation of
morality.
Mr. President, I have had the good fortune to have spent a lot of my
years in the corporate sector, and I ran a fairly successful company.
The company today employees 29,000 people, the company that I started
with two other fellows, all of us from poor families in the working
community of Patterson, NJ. So I know something about the corporate
world, and I know something about how one conducts business. When I
hear about how we have to achieve this balance in our budget, eliminate
the deficit in 7 years, I think it is a worthwhile target, but I think
we have to include in that evaluation which part of the budget is
important and which part of it is simply paying attention and
fulfilling obligations to special interests.
There are few companies worth their salt in this country that do not
brag about their creditworthiness, about their ability to borrow to
make investments in the future. Unfortunately, the accounting technique
that we use in Government does not permit us to take capital
investments and amortize them over a period of years. They are treated
like cash investments. So we have a skewed view of what national
accounting is about.
I announce here and now that I, too, want to achieve a budget
balance, but I do not want to do it on the backs of poor working-class
families. I do not want to do it on the backs of citizens who have been
promised as they paid into the Medicare trust fund that they would get
particular benefits, that they had a contract with their Government. I
do not want to balance the budget on their backs. I do not want to
balance the budget on the backs of young people who desire and have the
ability to get an education who are not going to be able to get it if
we continue to cut into college loan funds.
[[Page S5133]]
So it is a question of not when we are ready to balance the budget--
the President has laid down a budget that will balance in 7 years; CBO
says they agree with him; they are the objective voice that we are
using here--it is only a question of how we get that budget balanced. I
think if we all work at it, we all try our best, we can achieve
something that is fairer to all of the members of our society.
So I hope my colleagues will support the President's balanced budget
and oppose the extremist Republican budget. Last year, we stopped the
extremist Republican budget that gutted Medicare to pay for tax breaks
for the rich. They want to do it again.
At this point, Mr. President, I ask how much time we have on the
amendment?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There are 15 minutes 45 seconds.
Mr. LAUTENBERG. I yield the remainder of that time to the
distinguished Senator from Oregon to use as he sees fit.
Mr. FRIST addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. FRIST. I ask, how much time on this side?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There are 13 minutes 45 seconds.
Mrs. BOXER. May I ask the Senator from Oregon if he would reserve
just 3 minutes of his 15 minutes. We do have an offer we want to
propound to the other side.
Mr. WYDEN. I would be happy to.
Mrs. BOXER. I thank the Senator.
Mr. WYDEN. Let me say thank you to my friend from New Jersey as well
and say that I think he has made a fine statement and offered much on
this issue with which I agree. I commend him for it.
Mr. LAUTENBERG. I thank the Senator.
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, many Americans see the process of setting a
budget resolution as a murky, inside-the-beltway exercise that,
charitably speaking, leaves them confused and frustrated. More than
occasionally I have shared this frustration. But Americans also know
that the decisions we make now are going to affect their futures and
the futures of their children and their grandchildren. At home in
Oregon, that means doing the hard work that the majority budget
resolution simply ignores. At home in Oregon, it means making tough
choices, not politically expedient ones.
For example, it means fixing Medicare and Medicaid, not just sucking
billions of dollars out of these extraordinarily important health care
programs. At home in Oregon, we have ground down the cost of health
care and Medicare to one of the lowest per capita averages in our
Nation. Republican budget drafters could have built on Oregon's
success. They could have helped transform the Medicare Program, its
management and its finances, in a way to encourage innovation and
equality and efficiency as we have done in much of my State. But this
budget simply cuts rather than transforms. It leaves behind many of the
same old problems in the Medicare Program, the problems that have seen
so often results in rewards for inefficiency and instead again pounds
the vulnerable. I think it is a mistake, and I think it is possible to
do far better.
On the welfare reform issue, all of us understand this is a job that
must be done. Again, at home in Oregon, we found a way to make a real
start by reforming our health care system for the working poor and
launching a new welfare-to-work program that is putting our citizens in
good-paying jobs. It took an up-front investment that is already paying
dividends and is expected to be yet more successful in the future. But
it took political will. It took reasonable public support to get the
job done, and again I think this budget is not going to make that
possible.
I am afraid this budget on the welfare reform issue promises a
stillbirth for future efforts in other States by operating on the idea
that you can just out-cheap the system rather than transform it to make
it work.
If you look at the budget offered by the majority, we would have to
cut $56 billion more than the administration foresees for education and
training. On one of the issues most important to the future of Oregon
families, this budget says it is more important to spend on a number of
outdated military weapons systems than it is to support education and
vocational training for our children who are going to need the skills
and the experiences essential to compete in a global economy.
I say to my friends, the cold war is over. We won it. But the
majority budget does not reflect this reality.
The new war, the economic war that enlists every schoolchild in my
State and across the country, is the one that we are going to have to
fight aggressively. Our competitors in Asia and Europe shoot with real
bullets. They are making stronger investments in education and training
than we are, and they are creating world standard, technical quality
work forces.
What is the response in this budget? The majority budget extracts
funds that we need for training and educating our schoolchildren and
reinvests it in goldplated weapons systems that even the military
questions today. The majority budget goes on to cap the Direct Student
Loan Program at 20 percent, a program that eliminates red-tape and
middle-level bureaucracy in order to get funds to working families and
students. Head Start would be frozen, eliminating opportunities for up
to 20,000 children. And, while Americans across the country are talking
about the specter of corporate downsizing, this budget would deny
assistance over the next 6 years through the Job Training for
Dislocated Workers Program to many of the workers in our Nation who
have lost their jobs.
On the environmental issue, an issue of great importance to our
State, we see again how there is a retreat in this budget from much of
the great bipartisan progress that has been made in the last 20 years.
For example, in my State this bipartisan progress has led to effective
stewardship of great natural treasures like Crater Lake and the Three
Sisters Wilderness. This budget would put that bipartisan tradition of
environmental protection in reverse, simply by cutting the National
Park Service budget by 20 percent below the administration's proposal.
This is going to force some parks to close, others are going to cut
back on maintenance and access, and we are going to spoil, in my view,
much of the important progress in environmental protection that has
been made in the last few decades.
In the early 1960's, citizens of my State launched a huge public
program to clean up the polluted Willamette River, a project that, at
that time, was one of the biggest and most expensive environmental
efforts in our history. We understand the value of clean water and
resource protection, and we were willing to pay the price of renewing
that great river. And that wise investment has been paid back many
times.
The people of our State want to see those special values and
environmental stewardship projected in this budget resolution. But this
budget makes a retreat from those values by cutting the environmental
programs nearly 20 percent in 2002. The budget would relieve polluters
of certain Superfund cleanup costs and make every taxpayer shoulder new
burdens. EPA enforcement activities would be rolled back, and there
would be fewer environmental cops on the beat.
I am particularly concerned that the need for salmon restoration
funds in the Columbia River and maintaining our fish hatcheries in this
Great Basin are priorities that again come up unattended and short in
this resolution.
So I say to my colleagues on both sides, one of the efforts I have
been proudest of in my early days in the Senate was getting 34 Senators
to join me in a letter that I authored, making it clear that it was
important to get the nongermane and devastating environmental riders
out of the omnibus appropriations bill. We were successful at that. The
spending bill does not gut the environmental protections that have been
pushed so hard by so many for so long. If this budget resolution forces
a retreat on environmental protection, we will make the same effort, as
this process goes forward, to turn it around as we did in our
successful work in terms of getting the antienvironmental riders out of
the omnibus appropriations bill.
Let me conclude with a word or two about taxes. Oregonians want tax
reform and they believe that this should be a priority as part of this
budget resolution. But this majority budget cuts taxes in strange and
mysterious ways
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that many of my constituents challenge. A $500 per child tax credit for
a person making $110,000 per year? How does that square against
increasing taxes to low-income working families, families that work
hard, that play by the rules, and have had a chance to see work
rewarded under the earned income tax credit? This budget,
unfortunately, retreats, in terms of support for working families that
are struggling to get ahead. It retreats on the question of Medicare
and Medicaid. And I believe, as a result of those changes, we are going
to see lower quality health care, a sicker pool of individuals relying
on those Government programs, and we will see, as a result of the tax
changes and the health changes, a significant reduction in the
opportunities that all of us want to see for individuals in these
public programs who want to get out having that opportunity to do so.
The proposed cuts in Medicaid would end guaranteed health coverage,
for example, for 36 million Americans. For seniors, the $250 billion in
Medicaid cuts over 7 years risks cutting off prescription drugs, home
and community-based care, and assistive devices such as wheelchairs. I
do not think our families can afford those additional burdens.
So, as we now go to the amendments on this issue of extraordinary
importance, let us look beyond the cold, stark figures of the budget.
Budgets just are not about numbers, they are about the hopes and
aspirations of the American people. We have to get a balanced budget.
The families of my State balance their budgets. It is important for the
Congress to balance the Federal budget as well. But it has to be
approached in a way that ensures a sense of fairness, that sacrifices
are not just singled out for those who do not have political power. Let
us make sure that this budget resolution, this budget resolution which
would provide an opportunity to reform Medicare and Medicaid in a way
that Oregonians have already begun, would be pursued by the Congress as
a whole.
I am happy to yield time to the Senator from California.
Mr. FRIST addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. FRIST. Have the yeas and nays been ordered?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. They have not.
Mr. FRIST. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There is not a sufficient second.
Mrs. BOXER. If the Senator will yield, I would explain we would just
like to assure the vote is after 2 o'clock and we will be delighted to
vote on this amendment.
Mr. FRIST. That will be fine.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California has 2 minutes and
25 seconds.
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There is a sufficient second.
The yeas and nays were ordered.
Mr. DOMENICI addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, do we have a unanimous-consent agreement
now we are going to vote on the Frist amendment at 2 o'clock?
Mrs. BOXER. We do not yet.
Mr. DOMENICI. Is all time yielded back?
Mrs. BOXER. No. We have 2 minutes and 30 seconds we would like to
use.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, does the Senator from Tennessee have any
additional time he would like to use?
Mr. FRIST. We still have 13 minutes on our side. If we have time, the
Senator from Michigan would like to use some of that.
Mr. DOMENICI. In any event, I ask unanimous consent we vote on the
Frist amendment at 2 o'clock, and there be no intervening amendments or
requests for votes in the interim.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from California.
Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I would like to just ask--we would like to
use a few minutes off the bill as well as this 2\1/2\ minutes. We would
like to do that. Under the rules, are we permitted to do that? Would I
have that right?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. You may choose what block of time you would
like.
Mrs. BOXER. I would like to add to the 2 minutes another 6 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are you yielding it from the time on the
resolution?
Mrs. BOXER. Yes; that is correct.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has that right.
Mrs. BOXER. Thank you very much, Mr. President.
Mr. President, I am a little bit puzzled by the amendment the Senator
from Tennessee has offered because it is an amendment regarding a
trigger that is supposedly in the Democratic budget that is on the
table, and there is no trigger mechanism in the budget we have offered.
I ask my colleagues to carefully peruse this document, and you will not
find a trigger mentioned in the budget that is before you.
So this is really a phantom amendment about something that is not
happening in the Democratic budget. Behind me is a chart which shows
the Democratic budget that we have before us, and it shows that the
discretionary spending is fairly close between the two budgets, the
Democratic one and Republican one, despite the fact Senators on the
other side have decried steep reductions in veterans, so on and so
forth. That is not true. There is no trigger in this budget. We spend
$65 billion more on discretionary spending than does the Republican
budget.
So, in our view, this is a kind of bizarre situation. We are happy to
vote for the Senator's amendment because we agree that we do not want
to see deep cuts in the outyears, and we do not have them in our
budget. So we would be happy to take this without a vote, although
Senator Domenici says he prefers a record vote. We are happy to do
that. I yield to the Senator from North Dakota who has comments to make
on this.
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, it seems to me a mistake has been made
here, and I do not know the genesis of the mistake. As I understand it,
we have an amendment that has been offered that suggests there should
not be a triggered reduction in discretionary spending pending certain
events, and there is no such trigger in the legislation before the
Senate.
Mr. FRIST. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. DORGAN. Momentarily--I will be happy to yield, just briefly.
Mr. FRIST. The word ``trigger'' is not used, but if you look in
function 920 of the document--I do not have it before me, I will have
it shortly--you will see a series of numbers, and in those series of
numbers the trigger is spelled out in actual numbers. So the effect of
the trigger is spelled out in function 920, and that is what we are
addressing.
Mr. DORGAN. This is a matter of fact, not a matter of conjecture.
There is no trigger that would automatically reduce discretionary
spending pending certain events in the future. If we are going to
legislate this way, maybe we should legislate against four or five
other triggers that do not exist. As long as there is no prohibition
against legislating to prohibit things that do not exist, let us amend
this by saying, ``Let's prohibit a trigger that would reduce defense
spending.'' There is no such trigger, but why not add that.
I do not quite understand the circumstances here. There is, in fact,
a trigger that given certain circumstances would allow an increase in
certain discretionary spending, but there is no trigger that would
provide for the decreases that are the subject of this amendment.
In fact, the important point here is contrary to the assertions that
have been made on the floor of the Senate yesterday and today about a
whole range of issues, including funding for the NIH, funding for the
EPA and others, contrary to those assertions, the budget that has been
proposed by the President would provide more spending in these areas.
In the aggregate, it proposes more spending in the discretionary
spending accounts because that represents what he believes to be a
priority.
We have the circumstance of people coming to the floor of the Senate
saying, ``We want more spending''--the majority party--``We want $11
billion more spending on defense. We want to buy trucks the Defense
Department did not ask for, planes they do not need, ships they do not
want. We want to spend it on defense.''
[[Page S5135]]
The President has said he believes we ought to spend slightly more on
discretionary spending than the majority party is proposing. But this
amendment is a real Trojan horse. It seeks to preclude something that
has not been proposed, and if that is a new standard of amendments,
then let us have fun by precluding a dozen additional proposals that
have never been made. But it is not, in my judgment, a very sensible
way to legislate.
Mrs. BOXER. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. DORGAN. I will be happy to.
Mrs. BOXER. I want to thank the Senator for participating in this. As
a member of the Budget Committee, I will tell you right now, we have
looked at this document. There is no word ``trigger'' in it. The
Senator from Tennessee, who wrote this, admits there is no word
``trigger.'' And yet, he has a sense-of-the Senate amendment that says
the discretionary spending caps should not include triggers. We agree.
That is why the bill we have put forward, the Democratic budget, has no
triggers.
This is what it has. We have used these numbers. They are $65 billion
more than the Republicans have put forward, and they are complaining
that we cut the budget too much--we cut the budget too much. They spend
$65 billion less on veterans, $65 billion less on all of these
discretionary spending areas.
So this amendment is a phantom amendment, and that is why we are
going to support it, because we do not like the idea of a trigger. We
have not offered a budget that has a trigger, so why have an argument
about it?
I yield to my friend.
Mr. DORGAN. I simply observe, it seems a waste of the Senate's time
to have a record vote on an amendment designed to prohibit something no
one proposed. It might be fun to offer an amendment like this, but it
serves no purpose and will simply delay the Senate.
I think the Senator from California, I think the Senator from
Nebraska also said, since this has not been proposed, if someone feels
the urge to offer an amendment to prohibit something not proposed, we
accept it. It seems to me irrelevant and nonproductive to have a record
vote.
Mrs. BOXER. We are ready to do a voice vote, but if the chairman
wants a record vote that has nothing to do with the budget on the
table, we will vote for it.
Mr. FRIST addressed the Chair.
Mrs. BOXER. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I will be referring to function 950 in the
amendment. This is the President's policy which is laid out, the
numbers that were put before us in the President's bill. Let me just
read, again, what that policy is, and I quote page 13 of the
President's budget:
In case the new assumptions produce a deficit in the year
2002, the President's budget proposes an immediate adjustment
to the annual limits or caps on discretionary spending,
lowering them enough to reach balance in the year 2002.
June O'Neill from the Congressional Budget Office came before our
committee, and I will quote from her testimony on April 18, 1996. She
says:
The basic policies outlined in the President's budget would
bring down the deficit to about $80 billion by the year
2002 instead of producing the budget surplus that the
administration estimates.
Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. FRIST. Let me finish this line of thinking. We are going to have
a deficit in the year 2002, according to CBO, using the policies set
forth in the budget presented by the President of the United States.
That is the President's plan. The President does have a trigger in his
plan, and it is spelled out in function 950, which I ask you to refer
to. Correction, 920. And if you look on page 41, those triggers, the
trigger in the reduction is actually spelled out in numbers. The
trigger has already taken place, and what my sense-of-the-Senate
amendment simply says is that those triggers, which result in drastic
reductions in the year 2001 and 2002, which are spelled out on page 41
of this document, are already written and worded right now. Those
triggers have taken place.
My sense-of-the-Senate amendment says those drastic reductions
spelled out in actual numbers, as spelled out in the policy by the
President of the United States, are wrong.
Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. FRIST. Yes.
Mr. DORGAN. I appreciate that. I yielded to the Senator when he
asked. I enjoy the opportunity to discuss this. I guess the Senator's
point is accurate with respect to what he read from the document in
front of him. That is not what is before the Senate.
Will the Senator not agree with me that is not what we have laid
before the Senate, and if that is the case, you are talking about
something we are not debating today?
If I can make one final point. When you talk about cuts, there is not
any way to deny that the amount of discretionary spending proposed by
the majority party is substantially less than the amount of
discretionary spending proposed by the President.
So those two questions: Is it not true that we are debating something
here that is not before the Senate? And what is laid before the Senate
does not contain a trigger; is that correct?
Mr. FRIST. To answer the Senator's question, is this the President's
budget? This is the President's budget. I read the policy. The budget
is spelled out in actual numbers on page 41 of function 950, the actual
numbers which is the trigger in place, the actual numbers of policy
spelled out in the document.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, how much time remains on either side?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is 9\1/2\ minutes.
Mr. FRIST. I yield to my colleague from Michigan on the amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
Mr. ABRAHAM. Thank you, Mr. President.
Mr. President, I think we should begin by just reminding everybody
what we are about. Pending is an amendment to the Republican budget
resolution which would substitute the President's budget for our own.
So I will incorporate here in my comments remarks both about that
budget itself, as well as the amendment by the Senator from Tennessee.
The President's budget, in my judgment, is quite deficient in a
variety of ways. We can call it a balanced budget if we want to, but as
the amendment before us reveals, it is only a balanced budget if
drastic reductions in discretionary spending take place in the final
years of that budget. But that is not the only problem with the budget.
First, and foremost, I believe the budget is inadequate to deal with
the Medicare crisis which faces this country. We know already that the
Medicare part A trust fund is headed towards bankruptcy. We have not
gotten the most recent projections of the trustees of the Medicare
trust account, but we believe that the date of bankruptcy will be much
sooner than anticipated just a year ago when the majority attempted to
try to address the problem and were thwarted by the President and the
minority.
The fact is that Americans expect the trust fund to be solvent. Right
now the trust fund is paying out more than it is taking in. It will
reach insolvency far sooner than anticipated. What we have attempted to
do, in the budget that the majority has presented here today, is to try
to keep that trust fund solvent for 10 years.
The President's budget attempts to do that by simply removing a very
vital part, home health care, from the trust fund and moving it off the
trust fund somewhere else.
If that is the way we are going to approach Medicare, Mr. President,
then who knows what will be taken out of the trust fund next. Americans
have a right to expect that trust fund will remain constant, that the
items covered will remain protected, and that every time we face a
crisis, Congress does not simply remove more and more parts of the
trust fund and eliminate the coverage it provides.
By moving them, as they have in the President's budget, the President
and his budgeteers are, in fact, moving some $55 billion of trust fund
responsibility to the taxpayers as part of the general account. That is
not the way to guarantee the solvency of Medicare, and it is in
contrast to Republican efforts to ensure Medicare's solvency for 10
years its solvency in the budget we have presented.
[[Page S5136]]
The second concern I think needs to be addressed is the issue of
taxes. As Senator Gramm just a few moments ago indicated in a series of
charts that the tax burden faced by America's hard-working families is
the highest in the history of this Nation. Indeed, if the President's
budget becomes the law of this land, under this budget we will move to
the highest federal tax burden ever.
At the same time, Mr. President, under this budget, social spending
will also reach record highs at 17.3 percent of the gross domestic
product of this country. That means more and more working families
sending more and more dollars to Washington to pay for more and more
programs that Americans find to be overbloated, bureaucratic and, in
many cases, unnecessary.
That is not the direction we should head, Mr. President. That is why
the President's budget sends us in the wrong direction.
To just once again comment on the tax portion of this budget, as I
said, it heads us toward the highest tax burden in history. There has
been an effort in the budget to address the question of high taxes with
a purported tax cut. But when one examines the President's budget and
calculates all the taxes that are cut and all the taxes that are
raised, what you come up with is a final bottom line number of $6
spread over 6 years. Distributed to 250 million American people, that
works out, Mr. President, to $4 per year per American.
I have talked to the taxpayers in my State. When they think in terms
of getting a tax break, they at least were hoping for something
slightly more substantial than that, Mr. President. The $4 a year will
not make much of an impact on the hard-working middle-class families of
my State or any of the other States.
But I would like to more totally focus my comments at this point on
the amendment before us to this budget. In this amendment, we are
trying to address what we consider to be the truly extremist issue
before us today. That is the proposal that in the final 2 years of this
budget we will see drastic cuts, across the board virtually, in the
domestic discretionary spending programs, huge cuts, cuts which I think
go way too far. I think probably most of my colleagues, one way or the
other, would agree they go too far.
To approach balancing the budget in this fashion, to approach it by
having all of these cuts happen somewhere in the far distant future,
and to happen at this drastic of a level, literally 100 percent of the
President's discretionary spending reductions happening in the years
2001 and 2002, in my judgment, totally undermines any validity to claim
that this is a balanced budget.
This is the same thing as having a family say, ``Well, we're running
in the red right now. We're spending more money than we take in. We've
got to correct this. The way we're going to do it is not by addressing
the problems over a period of time, this year, next year, and the
following years, but 5 years from now we're going to eliminate all our
expenditures on food.''
That might make the budget of the family balanced in the fifth year,
but it is unrealistic and wholly improbable that in one year an
American family is not going to consume any food. The same way, it is
inconceivable that 100 percent of the discretionary spending cuts are
going to take place in the final 2 years of this budget to achieve
balance. Neither will happen, Mr. President.
For those reasons, I think the approach that is taken in this
amendment is on track. I think we have to make a clear statement to the
American people that we are not going to achieve a balanced budget with
any kind of cook books, any kind of gimmickry, any kind of last-year
changes of this magnitude. We are going to go at it in a responsible
way.
So for those reasons, Mr. President, I am pleased to support the
Frist amendment and urge my colleagues to do so as well. I yield the
floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. DOMENICI addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. DOMENICI. What is the situation? Do we have a unanimous consent
to vote at 2 p.m. on the pending amendment? What exists with reference
to time?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. That is correct. Senator Frist's side has 1
minute 50 seconds. The Senator from Nebraska has 2 minutes. The
remainder of the time can be taken from the general-issue pool.
Mr. EXON addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.
Mr. EXON. Mr. President, while the distinguished manager of the bill
is here, I will just make a comment or two and see if we cannot do
something to move this process along. I understand that a rollcall vote
has been demanded on that side of the aisle, which is surely their
right to demand a rollcall vote. I understand--I do not know who it
is--but someone on this side of the aisle could not be here to vote
until after 2 o'clock.
I simply point out that we are wasting an awful lot of time. In the
committee, as the chairman knows, this Senator has tried to move things
along. On the floor, this Senator has been trying to move things along.
Here we are debating a sense-of-the-Senate resolution which we all
know has no effect in law whatsoever. But if we are going to spend this
much time on sense-of-the-Senate resolutions that have no effect in
law, and then put off votes that should have occurred an hour ago until
some time after 2 o'clock--if that holdup is on our side, I apologize--
I simply say that I guess we have given up all chances of finishing
this bill by tomorrow night as was clearly stated was the goal.
Since that goal was stated, we have had one vote. We have been locked
pretty much in meaningless debate in the view of this Senator, since
yesterday morning at 9:30. We had only one vote yesterday. Like
yesterday we came in at 9:30 this morning. Here we are at 2 o'clock
this afternoon and we are continuing to move around, politicize and
question the motives of others.
We have so much to do in the U.S. Senate. I would have liked to have
seen this finished by tomorrow night. I recognize now that is
impossible. I simply say that this Senator is interested in reducing
the number of the amendments that we have, as best we can. I simply say
I hope we do not get tied up for this lengthy period of time as we have
on the amendment before the Senate. We have agreed to accept the
amendment.
Earlier today I said we had 31 or 32 amendments. We now have 51
Democratic amendments on this side of the aisle. If we take as much
time on those and other amendments that I am sure are pending on that
side, we could be here through July 4th on the budget resolution,
talking past each other. We have agreed to accept this meaningless
amendment by voice vote, but that is not good enough. Why? I do not
quite understand. I simply say I think we are bogging down this process
in an unreasonable manner. I renew my pledge to do whatever I can to
expedite the process.
I do not think there is any question that the majority is going to
vote down the budget of the President of the United States, which is
their right. Why do they not just go ahead and do it and move on with
the process?
I renew my pleading to the chairman that we move forward and expedite
this process.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I yield myself 2 minutes. I very much
want to not use up our time. Senator Hutchison would like to have some
time before this 2 o'clock time. She has been waiting a long time.
Let me suggest to my good friend, Senator Exon, first, if the Senator
wants to work with me to establish policy for the rest of this debate,
that sense-of-the-Senate resolutions--what was your word--are
irrelevant, unnecessary.
Mr. EXON. I said it had no effect in law, which it does not.
Mr. DOMENICI. We will make a deal with you. We will get a grand
agreement. You do not offer any of them, we will not offer any of them.
I put that before you, since sense of the Senates have no effect in
law. We are ready to negotiate. Just have real amendments from now
until tomorrow afternoon at 3 o'clock and we will be finished with
this. I am authorized to speak for the majority leader. We intend to
finish this budget resolution this weekend so people who have plans
better start talking to our leaders about how they might help us get
this budget resolution finished. Everybody has plans, but
[[Page S5137]]
we have plans to get a budget resolution finished. Frankly, I think we
can. I look over the list of amendments on our side. I have not had a
chance to look over them on your side. I will shortly.
Frankly, I do not know why, from now until 3:30 tomorrow afternoon,
giving us until 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock tonight, and a nice chunk of
time tomorrow, we could not get it finished.
Let me talk a little bit about this amendment. The interesting thing
about this amendment and the budget tendered by the minority, they may
have pulled the trigger but they have replaced it with a giant plug.
There may be no trigger but there is a plug. The plug is $67 billion
out there in a little compartment of Government called function 920.
You do not have to tell anybody how you got there, just put $67 billion
in. What it will do, who it will hurt, what it will cut, is not
itemized, as ours is. We would like to make sure that the vote says we
want to pull the plug, pull the trigger on that plug so it is not
there.
Having said that, Senator, I seriously will work with you to try to
narrow what we are doing and get on and try and get this done. Thank
you for your cooperation.
Mr. EXON. Mr. Chairman, I thank you for your cooperation. This is an
irrelevant amendment, a sense of the Senate that we should not have
debated as long as we have. But we have. Talk about plugs, the kettle
keeps calling the pot black.
I simply cite on page 43, line 20, there is a $43 billion plug in
your budget. Take a look at it. Maybe you can explain it. I simply say
that it seems to me we keep blaming each other for the delays, when it
is a responsibility of both of us. I think this sense-of-the-Senate
matter is irrelevant. That is why I agreed to a voice vote. But you are
entitled to a rollcall vote.
I yield 4 minutes off my time to the Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this is not a debate about plugs and
triggers but a debate about that we feel is important in terms of
investments for the future of this country. I am going to speak, after
we have voted on this amendment, about the budget more generally. I
want to stay on this subject because I think it is very important to
lay out the facts.
The facts are these: If you get rid of all the discussion about any
triggers, all the discussion about plugs, the question of who is
spending more or investing more in discretionary spending, especially
nondefense discretionary spending, is not a serious question any longer
at all. The President's budget proposes more investment in the kinds of
things that many of us think are very important--college financial aid,
Head Start, cops on the beat, the WIC Program. Things that we think are
important are going to be better funded in the President's budget.
Now, the majority party says their priority is to add $11 billion
above what the Pentagon asked to be spent to buy trucks, planes, ships,
and submarines that the Pentagon did not request. They want to add $11
billion in that spending. Then they want to make the case that somehow
they are spending more money in discretionary spending than the
President's budget. It is simply not true.
If you pull out the defense numbers from that chart, which is
included in discretionary spending, the Republican budget would put $10
billion less in nondefense discretionary, which means that the
Republican budget over those 6 years is $116 billion below the budget
submitted by the President in budget authority--$116 billion below in
discretionary spending.
You cannot paint those numbers any other way. That chart does not
lie. That chart, if you take out the $11 billion increase in defense
the majority party wants, would show a wider gap in nondefense
discretionary spending. The President is requesting a much more
substantial amount of spending in things like Head Start, WIC,
education, student financial aid, cops on the beat, and a whole series
of those issues than would exist in the majority party budget. They
would have us believe somehow with charts and all kinds of tapdances
around these numbers that they are proposing more funding for
discretionary spending. It is simply and demonstrably not true. That is
the point that is important as we cast this next vote.
The Senator from Nebraska has it absolutely right. I do not know why
we are wasting time voting on a proposal to eliminate something that
does not exist, but, I suppose, some people will feel better if they
can amend something that did not exist and maybe we can have six or
eight more of these, but it wastes time and accomplishes nothing.
I yield the floor.
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I yield the remaining time on the
amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time on the amendment has been consumed.
The Senator would now have to yield time on the resolution.
Mr. FRIST. I yield time from the resolution to the Senator from
Texas.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas [Mrs. Hutchison], is
recognized.
Mrs. HUTCHISON. Thank you, Mr. President. I thank Senator Domenici
and Senator Frist for all the work they are doing to try to draw
distinctions between the President's budget, which is before us as an
amendment, and the underlying budget resolution, which is the
responsible budget resolution that really balances by the year 2002.
My colleagues have said that the President's budget balances and that
it provides for middle-class tax relief. The American people want a
Federal budget that balances, and they also want to keep more of the
money that they work so hard to earn. But let us look at the
President's budget and let us respond to the demands of the American
people. As Paul Harvey would say, ``Now it is time for the rest of the
story.''
Let us look at the issue of balance. I really think the President
cannot have a straight face when he says his budget balances, when more
than half of the cuts--more than half--come in the last 2 years--2001
and 2002--of the 7-year period the budget covers. There are $600
billion in cuts over 7 years, and some $350 billion of those are in the
last 2 years.
I think it is very obvious that whoever is elected President this
year, 1996, is not going to have to face the issues in the year 2001
and 2002, because there will be yet another President.
I do not think we can, responsibly, with a straight face, pass the
President's budget and tell the American people that we have done the
responsible thing. I want to use some examples of what the President's
budget does. Take NASA for an example. Under the President's budget,
the NASA budget lopes along about where it is now for 3 years, and then
it drops 10 percent over 2 years. Now, that is not a responsible
approach toward a research, technology, or scientific endeavor. How can
you be midway into an experiment and, all of a sudden, not have the
money for it?
The Republican budget, on the other hand, has steady declines in the
NASA budget, for which they can prepare. NASA officials can see very
clearly what is going to happen and plan how they are going to have to
allocate their resources.
Let us take defense spending, another example. The President is
proposing another $3 billion in cuts this year. That would make it the
12th straight year of decline in defense spending. Today we spend only
a little more than one-half of what we spent on defense in 1985.
Weapons purchases alone are down 70 percent from 1985. And here we are,
at a time when we have American troops all over the world that are
seeking to keep peace in some way or another; while we must maintain
the highest defense readiness, and we are looking at a major technology
initiative in theater missile defense to defend against the very real
ballistic missile threat to our country and our troops in the field;
with all these priorities, we are looking at a Presidential budget that
reduces defense spending again.
Now let us look at tax cuts. The President's budget has a tax credit
of $300 per child up to the age of 13. But the tax credit is only
temporary, because it ends if a balanced budget isn't reached in the
year 2002. And, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the
President's budget will not be balanced by the year 2002.
By comparison, the Republican budget, the underlying budget, has a
permanent tax credit of $500 up to the age of 18 for middle-income
taxpayers. That is
[[Page S5138]]
a big difference to an American family. Anyone who has a teenager knows
that those are the years when you face the most urgent demands on their
hard-earned income.
Let us talk about the homemakers of this country. The budget that is
underlying--like the budget that we sent to the President last year and
which was vetoed--hopefully will include homemaker IRA's. But the
President's budget does not. He does not think that the work done
inside the home is every bit as important as the work done outside the
home. Therefore, he did not provide for the retirement security options
for the homemakers of this country. We must not stand for that. We must
make sure that this year we do address that terrible inequity, so that
a one-income-earner family and a two-income-earner family will have the
same retirement security options. It is only fair that homemakers have
their retirement nest egg and that one-income-earner families, who are
sacrificing to have a homemaker at home when their children come home
from school, will not have to suffer in retirement years.
So there are big differences between the President's budget and the
budget that we are trying to pass today. We must reject the President's
budget. It is a hollow budget. The balance will only occur if we make
huge cuts in the year 2001 and the year 2002.
Mr. President, now is the time for Congress to act responsibly, to
have cuts that are sloping very gradually, so that agencies or people
that are entitled to benefits will know exactly what is there in a
responsible manner. The cuts in the rate of growth of spending should
be gradual, not staying at the same level until no one around here will
be in office anymore, and then cutting to the bone and saying, ``Oh,
yes, we are going to set the budget numbers, but we are going to let
you in the future make the tough decisions.'' No, Mr. President, now is
the time to make the tough decisions, and that is the issue before us.
Are we going to do the responsible thing for our children and
grandchildren for the future of this country, or are we going to adopt
the President's budget that is before us on the floor right now, which
will not really balance? Those tough decisions being put off now will
not be any easier then. Most certainly, we cannot expect a defense
budget to go up, down, and back up. Nor can we afford to have an
experiment at NASA proceed to a certain point and then drop off the
face of the Earth--figuratively speaking.
Mr. President, that is not responsible. We know it, and the American
people know it. Let us do the responsible thing and reject the
President's hollow budget and make the real tough decisions now. That
is what the American people asked of us in 1994. It is what we
promised. Let us keep the promise.
I yield the floor.
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, how much time is remaining?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There are 2 minutes before the vote. There is
no time remaining on the amendment.
Mr. FRIST. We yield back our time.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we proceed
immediately to the vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
The question is on agreeing to the amendment of the Senator from
Tennessee.
The yeas and nays have been ordered.
The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. LOTT. I announce that the Senator from Kansas [Mr. Dole] is
necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 99, nays 0, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 114 Leg.]
YEAS--99
Abraham
Akaka
Ashcroft
Baucus
Bennett
Biden
Bingaman
Bond
Boxer
Bradley
Breaux
Brown
Bryan
Bumpers
Burns
Byrd
Campbell
Chafee
Coats
Cochran
Cohen
Conrad
Coverdell
Craig
D'Amato
Daschle
DeWine
Dodd
Domenici
Dorgan
Exon
Faircloth
Feingold
Feinstein
Ford
Frist
Glenn
Gorton
Graham
Gramm
Grams
Grassley
Gregg
Harkin
Hatch
Hatfield
Heflin
Helms
Hollings
Hutchison
Inhofe
Inouye
Jeffords
Johnston
Kassebaum
Kempthorne
Kennedy
Kerrey
Kerry
Kohl
Kyl
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lieberman
Lott
Lugar
Mack
McCain
McConnell
Mikulski
Moseley-Braun
Moynihan
Murkowski
Murray
Nickles
Nunn
Pell
Pressler
Pryor
Reid
Robb
Rockefeller
Roth
Santorum
Sarbanes
Shelby
Simon
Simpson
Smith
Snowe
Specter
Stevens
Thomas
Thompson
Thurmond
Warner
Wellstone
Wyden
NOT VOTING--1
Dole
The amendment (No. 3968) was agreed to.
Mr. DOMENICI addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Snowe). The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, let me tell my colleagues where we
are. Frankly, we have a long way to go. Once again, I am urging that
Senators on our side--and I will yield to Senator Exon on his side--we
need all the amendments, everybody who has an amendment to get us the
amendment or at least the substance of it. We are going to try to work
something out so we can get out of here at a reasonable time.
We are not anywhere close to that. I think on our side we have 22
proposed amendments. We are looking them over, first with staff and
then with various Senators.
Senator Exon has a tentative list that is not even completed, of how
many?
Mr. EXON. Fifty-one.
Mr. DOMENICI. That is 51, and 22, that makes 73 amendments.
Our leader has told me his desire is that we finish this budget
resolution over this weekend. That means we have all night tonight and
we have all day tomorrow and perhaps we have part of Saturday. I know
that brings a lot of grumpy looks on lots of faces, because I am sure
everybody has something they planned to do tomorrow. I have great
respect for that. But if I am the general, I will do the job. If I am
the follower, I will do the job. Right now, I am the follower. I am
doing what the leader suggested.
We are going to be here a long time unless we can reach some
agreement. In fairness, we are working with the minority leader and
with Senator Exon, who is being very cooperative, to see how we can
narrow this down.
Maybe my colleague could report to the Senate from his side?
Mr. EXON. I thank the chairman for bringing this up.
Mr. DOMENICI. We need order.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Order in the Chamber.
Mr. EXON. Madam President, everything he said I second. The way we
are going we will not be through even if we would stay here all weekend
including Sunday. The way we are going that would not be enough, we
would not get out of here until July 4 sometime, and I am not saying
what year. We must move this ahead, not only because I think we are
wasting a lot of time but because we have other things that we must
address.
I say to the leader, we are sending out a hotline at the present time
to try to get an agreement that all the Democratic Senators would file
amendments with me by 4 o'clock, or maybe 5 o'clock. I think something
like that would very likely be acceptable on my colleague's side. Then
we would know how many amendments we have and we might be able to work
out something so we can maybe come to a reasonable agreement and if
necessary go over sometime until next week, which I think everyone
would like to do.
But we are not going to do that, I suggest, following up on the
statement of the manager of the bill, the chairman of the committee, as
he has just indicated, unless we can have some movement. I think we can
get that small amount done, and that small amount is simply to get the
amendments listed as we have previously. I think that can happen, but I
cannot commit to that now because we are running a hotline. But I
believe that
[[Page S5139]]
will come to pass. I think the immediate thing we have to do is decide
where do we go from here? The Senator from Nebraska is interested in
going to a vote as soon as possible on my amendment offered this
morning at 9:30, to have a vote on the President's budget. We have had
a lot of debate on it. I do not know whether we shed much light, but we
have had a lot of debate.
In the meantime, I understand the next amendment on that side, and
correct me if I am wrong, is an amendment that is supposed to be
offered by the Senator from Missouri. Is that correct?
Mr. DOMENICI. That is correct.
Mr. EXON. I am looking at this for the first time now. Is this a
sense of the Senate? It is not a sense of the Senate?
Mr. DOMENICI. No, sir, it is a substantive amendment.
Mr. REID. Will the Senator from Nebraska yield for a question?
Mr. EXON. Certainly.
Mr. REID. Madam President, I have been here listening to the dialog
between my colleague from Nebraska and the Senator from New Mexico, the
manager of the bill. I just have a question maybe one of them can
answer.
I have been faithfully attending to my duties here in the Senate the
last 3 weeks. Frankly, we have not been doing anything. We have been
playing here on the gas tax, minimum wage, and something called the
TEAM Act. What, all of a sudden, when we finally have something we can
work on that is substantive --what is the rush? Why, suddenly, are we
going to work like we have not been working before? Is there some
reason suddenly we have to work on these very weighty issues into the
middle of the night and on weekends?
Mr. EXON. I do not know for sure how to answer my friend and
colleague from Nevada, except to say I do not think it would hurt the
image of this place very much, in the public mind, if we would at least
appear to be getting something done. That is the reason that I have to
say we should move on this more expeditiously. But I think the question
can more likely be answered by the chairman of the committee, with whom
I have been working. I suspect maybe that is who the question was
directed to anyway.
Mr. REID. The Senator from Nebraska had the floor. I certainly am
willing to work whatever hours anyone wants. I, like most Senators
here, when there are not things going on on the floor, still have lots
of work to do on committees.
Mr. EXON. May we have order in the Senate?
Mr. REID. I will await the judgment of the manager of the bill and
the Democratic manager of the bill and be available whenever it
requires. My only comment was that we have not been doing a great deal
the last few weeks and I hope since we are on the bill now
substantively, where we do not have the opportunity to offer an
amendment on minimum wage which 90 percent of the American public
wants, that we can handle this--expeditiously, of course--but I see no
reason to treat this bill any differently than we do other bills. There
is a lot of work that needs to be done and I think we should do it in
an expeditious fashion, not necessarily work in the middle of the
night, on weekends, on this bill when we have not been doing it on
others.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, I would say to my good friend, Senator
Reid, from Nevada, it is not like we are trying to hurry this thing
through. We almost always have agreed to waive substantial portions of
the time on budget resolutions. Almost every evening as we went out we
would say we have agreed to use up 5 hours or 7 hours, and I am
checking so we will know and next time we can answer you, how we have
been doing that.
Second, it is very important we get this finished because we want to
give the Appropriations Committee--the Senator serves on that
committee--we want to give them their numbers at the earliest possible
time so the 13 appropriations bills can be done early this year, rather
than holding them over until December and maybe next year.
In addition, we are not in any way talking about forbearing,
precluding amendments. We are talking about whether we really need to
do 75 amendments.
Mr. REID. If my friend will yield, I understand. I know how hard he
has worked on this bill.
I do say, however, the budget resolution was not reported on time. I
say to my friend from New Mexico, and I am not speaking for anyone
other than myself, I have listened to the debate on this. I think it
has been a productive debate to this point. I think it has been good
for the Senate. I think it has been good for the American public to
have this debate.
I hope this budget resolution can be debated in its entirety. I think
we need to have debate on the issues. I say to my friend, I agree with
my friend from New Mexico, I do not think we need 75 or 100 amendments
on this budget resolution but there are some substantive amendments
that I think we need to fully debate and arrive at conclusions on.
My only point is, as my friend knows, he works hard, I work hard. I
am willing to do that. I just am a little bit concerned that there is
some attempt to stop a full and complete discussion on this, one of the
most important matters we are going to decide all year. But I
appreciate the courtesy of explaining the Senator's position.
Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the Senator.
Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, I have just received word, I want to
say--Senator Daschle is here--I just want to say we are going to have
Senator Bond's amendment ready in 5 or 10 minutes. He will come down
and offer it. In the meantime, I want to say it is the intention of the
majority that we proceed well into the night to see how much time we
can use and how many amendments we can take care of.
I wanted to make sure you knew that, your Senators know that, and I
am informing ours right now.
Mr. DASCHLE. I appreciate the Senator's comments. I hope we can get a
good debate on amendments. We have a number of them we are prepared to
offer just as soon as we dispose of the amendment offered by the
distinguished ranking member. We will be prepared to offer those. I
assume we will alternate back and forth.
I think it is good to put Senators on notice that we will be here
tonight. We are prepared to vote, and we ought to continue as we are.
I thank the Senator.
COAST GUARD BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 1997
Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, with an extensive shoreline in Washington
State, the Coast Guard plays an important role in protecting those
people who rely on the waters of the Columbia River, Puget Sound, and
the Pacific Ocean for commercial and recreational purposes. Whether it
is dangerous search and rescue operations, enforcement of existing
fishing treaties with Canada, or maintenance of navigational aids, the
Coast Guard does its job and it does it well.
For that reason, Mr. President, I included language in the report
accompanying the budget resolution that commends the Coast Guard for
both its current operations, as well as its efforts to streamline and
reduce its overall budget. Under Adm. Robert Kramek's leadership as
Commandant of the Coast Guard for the past 3 years, the Coast Guard has
reduced its work force by 4,000 positions and lowered its budget by
$400 million per year. All of this done without reducing any valuable
services to the general public.
In all of the debate over the next 9 months regarding funding for
specific programs, I hope that the fiscal year 1997 Coast Guard budget
appropriately reflects the efforts being made by Admiral Kramek and all
of his staff to provide better government at less cost, while still
providing important services to the citizens in Washington State and
across the country.
Mr. DOMENICI. I suggest the absence of a quorum just for a few
moments until Senator Bond arrives and that it be charged equally.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
[[Page S5140]]
Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in
morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DOMENICI. How long does the Senator desire to speak?
Mr. GRASSLEY. Ten minutes.
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