[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 84 (Monday, June 10, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5999-S6000]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         THE BUDGET RESOLUTION

  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, sometime late tomorrow or early on 
Wednesday the Senate will begin formal consideration of the budget 
resolution adopted late last week by a conference committee. That 
budget resolution, in common with its predecessor a year ago, will 
clearly put the United States on the road to a balanced budget, a goal 
shared by more than 80 percent of all of our fellow citizens.
  To a certain extent, Mr. President, a balanced budget is a goal in 
the abstract. It is a phrase that sounds good, sounds responsible, but 
nonetheless is divorced from our day-to-day concerns. It is, however, 
vitally important to our future, but most particularly to the future of 
our children and our grandchildren, to those who come after us.
  Almost 200 years ago Thomas Jefferson spoke of it as a moral 
imperative, that it was simply a moral wrong for the politicians of his 
day or of ours to spend money on programs, however worthy, that they 
supported, but to refuse to pay the bill, to send that bill to someone 
else.
  Thomas Jefferson's words are as important and as valid today as they 
were at the beginning of the 19th century. It is our obligation to seek 
this goal, and not just to seek it, but to put the Nation on a path 
pursuant to which it will be attained.
  It does, of course, go beyond a pure moral imperative. It is a 
financial imperative as well.
  We know by the almost unanimous opinion of economists who dig deeply 
into this issue that the mere promise of a balanced budget, accompanied 
by a set of policies that will lead us shortly after the turn of the 
century to reach one, will have a positive impact. Such a promise will 
lower the interest rates that men and women pay on the homes they 
purchase or wish to purchase, on their automobiles and other large 
consumer purchases, on their businesses, small and large, designed for 
their own future, and for the creation of opportunity in our society 
and our economy.
  The actual accomplishment shortly after the turn of the century of a 
balanced budget will mean somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 per 
average American family additional in their pockets, partly because of 
the lower interest rates that I have already described and partly 
because, all other things being equal, the economy will be that much 
stronger. There will be that many more and better jobs for Americans in 
just a very few years from now. This is a case in which the moral 
imperative and the financial desirability as a course of action lead us 
in precisely the same direction.
  Mr. President, under those circumstances, why is this not only a 
unanimous goal, but why are not the policies that lead to that equally 
unanimous? I do not remember during the course of the last year any 
Member of this body standing before the body and saying, ``It is a poor 
idea. It is not something that we should bother with at all.'' No, Mr. 
President, everyone gives at least lip service to the idea, but that 
lip service goes little further when it comes to the practical methods 
of attaining the goal. With those who voted no as recently as last week 
on a constitutional amendment that would mandate attaining a goal, to 
those who will vote no tomorrow or the next day, the answer will 
constantly be, ``We have to do it differently. I do not like this 
balanced budget.'' It is some other balanced budget, my own or someone 
else's, that is the only way to go. In other words, the details, the 
tendency for perfection in the mind of each individual Member, 
interferes with attaining a goal so important both morally and 
economically.
  Mr. President, perhaps all of us could have been accused of that 
course of action as recently as a handful of years ago. Almost never, 
in my memory, did anyone seriously propose a budget that led to that 
balance until the dramatic vote of something more than a year ago in 
which the balanced budget constitutional amendment, having been 
approved by the House of Representatives, was defeated here by a single 
vote. Following that dramatic loss, many Members took much more 
seriously the lip service they previously had given to a balanced 
budget. In fact, a majority of this body came up with a budget 
resolution and then enforcing statutes that would reach that goal by 
the year 2002.
  Regrettably--I think profoundly regrettably--the President of the 
United States vetoed that proposal with the statement that we ought to 
do it in a different way. Now, that statement came in spite of the fact 
that the President of the United States had never

[[Page S6000]]

previously proposed any way of reaching that goal. Since that veto, Mr. 
President, not surprisingly, given the predictions of what success 
would bring, failure has brought an increase in interest rates. Almost 
half of last year's gain has now been lost. The prospects of the good 
economics that result from a balanced budget are limited.
  The President criticized the budget by reason of what it did to 
strengthen and preserve Medicare. Yet, just last week, his own Medicare 
trustees have said the very challenges in the Medicare system that last 
year's balanced budget was designed to cure have become not better, but 
worse. Even so, Mr. President, we now have a proposal from the 
administration called a ``balanced budget'' that has been severely, and 
I think appropriately, criticized by Members on this side of the aisle 
on the ground that it was not real.

  Just yesterday in the Washington Post we saw an analysis of some 
elements of that proposal by a normally relatively liberal columnist 
who pointed out what we already knew, the President's budget for this 
year increases spending on a number of politically popular programs and 
proposes dramatic cuts in those programs next year and the year after. 
However, Mr. President, when his Cabinet Members in charge of 
administering those programs were asked how they would deal with those 
reductions in future years, they assured Members of Congress that, in 
fact, the President had privately assured that they would never, in 
fact, take place; that they were, in effect, phony figures designed to 
create a paper balance that never, in fact, would take place.
  Now, Mr. President, we are faced with a dramatic choice: Do we vote 
in favor of the one proposed budget resolution now available to us that 
includes difficult but necessary policy decisions to reach this goal 
desired by so many Americans for so many good reasons, or do we 
continue to say, ``Not this one, not now, wait until next year, do it 
differently''?
  Mr. President, I was one of the dozen Republican Members who joined 
with a dozen Democratic Members to come up with a different proposal, a 
bipartisan proposal, to reach the same goal in approximately the same 
period of time, a proposal that I thought at least in some respects to 
be superior to the one that is about to come to the floor of this U.S. 
Senate. Mr. President, that proposal received 46 affirmative votes out 
of 100 Members of the Senate. That is not quite enough. The reason that 
it did not quite go over the top was that the President of the United 
States rejected that proposal to exactly the same extent that he 
rejected the Republican proposal. He would not endorse it. He would not 
even say he would sign it if its enforcing legislation was to be 
passed.
  So the first bipartisan attempt in a decade at solving this 
contracted budget problem has been rejected. Now we are faced with 
another proposal, almost as good, certainly plenty good enough to reach 
the goal, which is very, very likely to be passed by a strictly 
partisan vote, and then to have its enforcing legislation vetoed by the 
President of the United States. I regret that, Mr. President.
  I hope during the course of the debate in the next 2 or 3 days some 
Members of the other party who worked so hard and so sincerely and so 
diligently on the bipartisan proposal will see the many similarities 
between their product, our product, and the one that is now before 
us, and will generously and with a good heart determine that if they 
cannot have perfection, they can certainly get--even from their own 
perspective, with our budget--a vastly superior program to that 
proposed by the President's administration. I hope that some of them at 
least will have courage enough to join with us to move the whole 
project forward, to help us see to it that we do something that we are 
enjoying to do, like no less a historic personage than Thomas 
Jefferson, as a matter of moral imperative, and something that will 
have such a tremendously positive impact on our children and 
grandchildren in general and generations yet to come, who do not have 
the right to vote in this fall's election, but who are our 
responsibility nevertheless.

  Mr. President, this is a fine resolution. It is a courageous 
resolution. It is a moral resolution. It is an effective resolution. It 
should be passed, and it should be enforced.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. LUGAR addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana is recognized.
  Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that time allocated 
to Senator Domenici in this period of time be allocated to me and that 
I may use as much time as I may require.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Grams). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

                          ____________________