[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 25 (Monday, March 3, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1818-S1820]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION

  Mr. COATS. Mr. President, over the last 15 years, the balanced budget 
amendment has been debated over and over again in this Chamber. Members 
of one or both Chambers of Congress actually have voted on this 
proposal six times. The arguments, by this point, are familiar. We have 
heard them over the last several weeks and the last several years in 
these debates. So there is the disturbing process by which the vested 
interests of this institution are protected against the clear will of 
our democracy.
  We are not, of course, debating about passage of a balanced budget 
amendment. We are debating whether or not to send that decision to the 
States and to the people of America. Often that gets confused. People 
think that the entire decision, the entire vote, rests with the 100 
Members of this Senate body, when in fact the only thing that rests 
with us is whether or not we will make the decision to give the people 
of America, to give democracy, an opportunity to decide whether or not 
we ought to have a balanced budget directing our fiscal affairs here in 
Washington.

  We are debating whether to prefer our interests above their wisdom, 
and it appears we will once again by the narrowest of margins decide to 
sustain this corrupt and corrupting Federal power of unlimited debt.
  Once again our debate on this matter has been conducted to maximize 
public cynicism--not intentionally but that is certainly the result--
with twisted arms, violated promises, pressure tactics, and broken 
commitments. We have seen it all surround this issue time and time 
again. And, once again, as we are debating this, people are switching 
their position, people pledging to their constituents during the 
campaign: ``I will be there when the balanced budget call is taken; 
when the roll is called, I will be on the plus side.'' And, of course, 
now we hear the excuses as to why since the election is over that is no 
longer the case. Even those who have voted for the balanced budget 
amendment in the past now find convenient reasons not to do so in the 
present.
  So I guess we cannot really blame the American people for being 
cynical, for being apathetic about what takes place here in this body, 
in the Congress, in Washington. All of this in a desperate attempt to 
prevent the American citizen from having a voice and having a vote, all 
to prop up, if just for a few more years, the ability of Congress to 
cripple the success and the prosperity of the future.
  There are many divisive issues debated in this Chamber, but this 
issue is unique in one way. The defeat of a balanced budget amendment 
represents the raw exercise of political power against the desires of 
over 80 percent of the American public. In my experience in politics, 
no proposal with support so strong and so consistent has ever been 
frustrated for so long by the Congress.
  Make no mistake. A balanced budget amendment will eventually be sent 
to the States for ratification. I think that is guaranteed by the 
breadth of public commitment which will not go away and will only grow 
in strength. We can delay this process, as apparently we will do once 
again, but not deny it. Every year of delay increases our danger and 
ought to add to our shame and guilt.
  Rather than rehearse the detailed arguments of this debate, let me 
take, if I could, a long review of what I think we have learned. First, 
the history of the last few decades and the nature of the political 
process itself argues that the Congress is incapable of self-restraint. 
We have a system in place, a system that allows us to vote public 
benefits to the very people who keep us in office. We have a system 
that allows us to place the burden of those benefits on the future 
while we gain political support from the present. We have found an 
efficient way to betray future generations in favor of the present. And 
it is easy and relatively painless because our generation can vote 
while future generations cannot and our silence and their anger is 
distant. We do not feel or hear their anger at the next election 
because they do not have a vote at the next election. So we please 
those who benefit us now at the expense of those in the future.

[[Page S1819]]

  The only thing we sacrifice in this process--Mr. President, I would 
say it is a great sacrifice--is our integrity and our historical 
reputation. In a distortion of the Constitution, we promote the general 
welfare for ourselves at the expense of our posterity. As it stands, 
there is no weight on the other side of this balance. There is no 
reliable check on this process of intergenerational theft. It is 
politically prudent, even popular, and this political calculation will 
not change, will never permanently change without some kind of 
systematic institutional counterweight, without some measure to give 
posterity a voice in our affairs. Nothing, in my view, will permanently 
change until the accumulation of popular debt is a violation of our 
oath to the Constitution. Perverse incentives of the current system 
will not be altered until the system itself is altered, until our 
political interests are balanced by the weighty words of a 
constitutional amendment.
  The second lesson I believe we have learned in the last few decades 
is that despite all the talk we hear in Congress, despite all the 
posturing, despite all the rhetoric, we are simply ignoring the coming 
entitlement crisis. We are not facing up to the hard question. We have 
chosen cheerful oblivion over public responsibility. The train wreck is 
a precise, measurable distance away. Trustees predict that the Medicare 
part A will be bankrupt by the year 2002. Trustees of Social Security 
believe that the system will begin to run a deficit in 2013 and could 
collapse by 2029.
  Former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson recently wrote that if 
entitlements are not reformed, the cost of Social Security and Medicare 
by the year 2040 will take between 35 and 55 percent of every worker's 
paycheck. It is a crisis propelled by demographics and propelled by 
Federal irresponsibility. Every year we avoid real reform we make real 
reform more painful.

  Oh, and the attitude here is, well, 2002, 2013, 2029, I will probably 
be out of office by then, or hopefully something will change by then, 
or let us not think beyond 1998. That is the next election, isn't it. 
Let us see what we can do to slip by one more election. But it is 
always one more election, one more election, one more election.
  When I came here in 1980, we were charged with the responsibility of 
dealing with deficit spending. We were charged with the responsibility 
of getting a handle on the entitlements and being straightforward and 
real with the American people, but each time it slipped one more 
election, one more election, one more election. Now we are looking at 
1998.
  There does not appear to be any movement out of this administration 
to address entitlements in a serious structural way--some tinkering at 
the edges suggesting but not proffered, some concerns about the 
political implications of making the hard choices, making the difficult 
decisions, but nothing concrete before us as a body. And so we will 
pass again for 2 more years.
  Opponents of the balanced budget amendment talk a great deal about 
Social Security, but they do not talk about solving its most 
fundamental problems. Instead, their efforts are designed to move it 
off budget, creating the illusion that this action will somehow save 
the system.
  This is a distraction, as I think everyone in this Chamber knows. It 
is not a solution. It is a distraction from the fact that our current 
budget rules are deceptive. We are borrowing from the Social Security 
trust fund and replacing real money with T-bills. There is not some 
giant pot of money out here waiting for Social Security recipients. It 
is a pay-as-you-go system. Some have called it the ultimate pyramid 
system. We are borrowing from it and putting pieces of paper into it to 
pay it back someday. That payback has to come from the general revenue. 
Those T-bills are a promise to pay benefits in the future, yet this 
borrowing is not reflected in our deficit calculations each year.
  As a matter of budgeting integrity, we should stop the shell game. We 
need an accurate accounting of the yearly deficit and the Federal debt. 
In fiscal 1996, we reported a budget deficit of $107 billion, but we 
failed to report an additional $66 billion borrowed from and owed to 
Social Security. Where does that money come from? It comes from the 
American taxpayer. It comes from taxes imposed against their paychecks. 
It is money that is going to have to be paid back.
  To say we can solve this problem by conveniently taking it off budget 
is a shell game. It is a deception of the American people. What it 
really amounts to is keeping two sets of books. These kinds of budget 
tricks make the job of balancing the budget easier in the short term--
and of course it is the short term here that everyone is concerned 
about, the next election-- but they compound the problems of future 
generations.
  I urge my colleagues to put aside this phony debate over Social 
Security. It is impossible to disentangle Social Security revenues and 
expenditures from the budget. Congress should address the national debt 
by passing the balanced budget amendment and then turn quickly to real 
solutions, real reform of Social Security.
  It is unfortunate and it is undeniable that President Clinton's 
budget currently on the table understands none of these lessons, and 
actually deepens our problems. It is a symbol of the Federal 
Government's failure of will and nerve.
  When I came to the Congress in 1981, our total Federal debt was just 
under $1 trillion. In the plan the President submitted recently to this 
Congress, his budgets will contribute another $1 trillion to the debt 
before those budgets are supposed to come into balance. This is hardly 
an act of courage. In fact, the President's plan demands that nearly 
all the courage be shown by others, since it postpones real spending 
cuts until after he leaves office. Moreover, if the President's own 
optimistic estimates about future deficits do not prove accurate, he 
relies on triggers--automatic cuts in spending and increased taxes--to 
bring the budget into balance. All of this occurring, again, after he 
has left office, after he no longer will be held to account.
  Harry Truman's famous injunction, ``the buck stops here,'' apparently 
now reads: The buck stops at the desk of the next person to occupy this 
office.
  Now we will apparently learn from CBO later this week that even the 
President's budget numbers are not accurate. They are not even close. 
We will, in fact, be about $70 billion short of balance in 2002. This 
year's budgets alone will see a 20 percent increase in the deficit.
  This budget is the embodiment of the point I am trying to make. 
Deferring responsibility is easy. Shifting hard choices to the future 
is easy. Deficit spending is easy. Everybody plays the game unless a 
constitutional amendment changes the ground rules, unless fiscal 
discipline is imposed from above, not from within. Unless the system is 
changed, exposing and ending all of our tricks and excuses, that is the 
only way we can be honest with the American people. That is the only 
way we can end the cynicism toward our efforts here in the Congress, 
which are falling, I am afraid, ever more on deaf ears.
  There is a great deal at stake here. As others have argued at length, 
increasing debt has an economic cost in higher interest rates. For 
businesses, this means slowed or stalled expansion, and for families it 
means that buying that new house or sending that child to college 
becomes more difficult each year.
  Another cost is measured in lost opportunities to meet justified 
public needs. By fiscal year 1998, interest payments on the national 
debt will approach $250 billion--$250 billion in interest payments. 
That figure is 21 times more money on interest than on the entire 
Federal expenditure for agriculture; 17 times more than the entire 
Federal expenditures for international affairs; 11 times more than on 
natural resources and the environment combined; and 4 times more than 
on education, training, and employment. We stand on this floor and 
argue, and we work in committee, just to try to scratch a little bit 
more money out for job training, for education, to deal with problems 
of the environment and our natural resources, to deal with 
international affairs and pressing problems in agriculture. We try to 
scratch a few million dollars here, a few hundred million dollars 
there. Yet $250 billion simply goes to pay interest.
  What could we do with that $250 billion if we did not have to pay any 
interest? A big healthy return to the

[[Page S1820]]

American people would be the first start, a big tax cut to give them 
back some more of their hard-earned money. And there may be priorities, 
there may be roads that need to be repaired or built, there may be 
education expenditures that are appropriate, there may be natural 
resource and environmental concerns that ought to be addressed, there 
may be agricultural items that ought to be funded, and a whole raft of 
other appropriate spending efforts. Yet those are squeezed ever more, 
as more and more of our budget goes to pay interest.
  Beyond this, there is a moral cost of continued debt, a price paid in 
the character of our Nation. I have quoted Thomas Jefferson in this 
debate before, but let me quote him once more. It is an injunction that 
this Congress has ignored time after time:

       The question of whether one generation has the right to 
     bind another by the deficit it imposes is a question of such 
     consequence as to place it among the fundamental principles 
     of government. We should consider ourselves unauthorized to 
     saddle posterity with our debts and be morally bound to pay 
     for them by ourselves.

  Those were words of a great American a long time ago. I wonder what 
he would say today, looking at over $5.4 trillion of national debt and 
continuing budget deficits year after year after year after year. ``We 
should consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our 
debts and be morally bound to pay them ourselves,'' said Thomas 
Jefferson, one of the most fundamental principles of government.
  In this debate we are accustomed to thinking in terms of dollars and 
cents. We should also be thinking in terms of right and wrong. It is 
simply wrong to accumulate power in the present by placing burdens on 
the future. And that is exactly what we are doing. We are accumulating 
power in the present, the power of spending, and the way we are doing 
it is placing burdens on the future. It is an important part of our 
moral tradition, to sacrifice for posterity. It is rank selfishness to 
demand that posterity sacrifice for us. And there is only one way to 
ensure that this strong and constant temptation is defeated, by making 
a balanced budget a fundamental institutional commitment of our 
Government.
  After 25 years of budget deficits, the call to voluntary restraint is 
hollow. Too many promises have been made and broken. Congress has spent 
the full measure of public trust. Meaningful budget restraint, if we 
find it, will come from above, not from within. This fundamental 
principle of government should be, and hopefully someday will be, and I 
predict it will be, in America's fundamental law. That day cannot come 
too soon. We should be ashamed if that process does not begin tomorrow.
  Tomorrow we will vote once again. Two years ago I sat in my seat, one 
row down, listening to the final debate on the balanced budget 
amendment, listening to the call of the roll. As every Senator sat at 
his or her desk, each stood to record his or her vote, and as we went 
through the roll we tallied the numbers and we stopped at 66. We came 
one vote short. One vote short, not of adopting a constitutional 
amendment to balance the budget, one vote short of exercising the right 
in a democracy of the people to determine that matter for themselves. 
It appears that we will stop one vote short again. I hope that is not 
the case. I pray that is not the case.
  We desperately need to arrest the power of the purse that has so 
corrupted our ability to represent the will of the people. I hope 
tomorrow we will demonstrate the courage to finally say: Power to the 
people. Let them decide the fiscal course for this Nation.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.

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