[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 44 (Monday, April 10, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2451-S2454]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SENATE SCHEDULE
Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I will talk a few minutes about the schedule
for the week and then comment specifically on some of the issues we
will be addressing during the schedule for Tuesday, Wednesday, and
Thursday.
We have several important issues before the Senate to take up and
hopefully complete action on. One of them is the question of our
national energy policy. That will be brought to the Senate during the
day on Tuesday with a vote on the gas tax issue.
Following that, we will be discussing the marriage penalty tax. This
past Saturday, I had occasion to be in a store and one of the other
customers asked me: Are we finally going to get rid of the unfair
marriage penalty tax? I said we would try to and hoped to do it this
week.
I went on about my business and the customer went on about his. The
customer came back later and said: Do you think you actually will begin
to eliminate the very unfair tax? I said: That is what we are trying to
do.
Then he came back a third time and said: You are going to have a vote
next week? I said: Yes, we are. He asked if he could get the names of
those voting against getting rid of the unfair tax. I said: Yes, it
will be in the Record. Call my office; we will be glad to get it to
you.
That is what we hear in the real world, off of Capitol Hill. People
say this is a real problem.
We have been talking about eliminating the marriage penalty tax for
years. It is time we get it done. We will have that debate on Wednesday
and, I presume, a vote Wednesday or Thursday to see exactly where the
Senate is: Do we want to eliminate the marriage penalty tax or not? I
think we should. I certainly will vote that way.
Before the week is out, we hope to take up a number of Executive
Calendar nominations. We have a number of nominations that we should be
able to clear. We will work with interested Senators and committees
involved on both sides of the aisle to see if we can clear a number of
these nominations.
Last and certainly not least is the fact we will also want to
complete action on the conference on the budget. We completed action on
the budget resolution of the Senate on Friday. I understand the
conferees will be working together during the next 2 days, hopefully,
to file the necessary report by Tuesday night. Then we will have the
necessary debate, whatever time that might be. It could be up to as
much as 10 hours. Then we will have a vote on that conference report
Thursday evening or Friday morning.
That leads me to another point I want to be sure to make early in the
week. As I have notified Senators in the past, during these weeks right
before a recess--in this case the Easter recess--we will go home and be
with our constituents and families. Senators should anticipate the
possibility or even the likelihood of votes on Friday. If we can
complete the work I have outlined by Thursday night then we will not be
in session on Friday. But if for some reason we have not been able to
complete at least the vote on the conference report on the budget, then
we will be in session on Friday. We certainly hope to finish it by noon
on Friday, but that will depend on how much time is needed and when the
Senate wishes to get to a final vote.
I wanted to go over the schedule for the week so Senators know what
to anticipate on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and the possibility even
of Friday votes on the budget resolution conference report.
Now let me go back and talk about some of these issues, to try to
make clear what I am trying to do by moving
[[Page S2452]]
these bills, and explain what the situation is with regard to the gas
tax, for instance.
There have been those who said the Senate voted last week during the
debate on the budget resolution on a sense of the Senate that basically
the Senate would not temporarily suspend or in any way remove the gas
tax.
The Federal gasoline tax is 4.3 cents a gallon. That was added back
in 1993. But the total amount of the Federal tax is 18.4 cents a
gallon. I remind my colleagues, that does not count the State taxes and
in many cases local taxes on gasoline. Where I am from, we even have,
in addition to the State and Federal taxes, what is known as the
seawall tax.
That is quite curious because quite often we do not see anything
happening on the seawall, but the tax is being collected and spent on
general improvement of roads. Most people do not gripe because we have
a developing area and we want to have good roads. I think that is a
very important thing.
But, as a matter of fact, the total tax on gasoline in most States is
as much as a quarter or a third or more of the total cost of a gallon
of gasoline. So the taxes on gasoline are significant.
With regard to this vote last week, the so-called Byrd sense-of-the-
Senate resolution said it is the sense of the Senate that the
functional totals in this budget resolution do not assume the reduction
of any Federal gasoline taxes on either a temporary or permanent basis.
What we will be considering today and tomorrow morning in our gas tax
bill is specifically designed to make certain that highway spending,
and thus the functional totals, are not changed by our gas tax
suspension.
Therefore, the spending assumptions in the budget resolution do not
assume the reduction of any Federal gas taxes on either a temporary or
permanent basis. The revenue levels in the budget resolution, however,
do assume a temporary suspension of the 4.3-cent-a-gallon so-called
Gore tax increase.
If the Byrd amendment had been drafted to read, ``it is the sense of
the Senate that the functional totals and the revenue levels in this
budget resolution do not assume . . .'' then it would have had a very
different impact. So I am trying to clarify the difference in what some
people thought the resolution did last week and what we are actually
doing.
Under the budget resolution, there is no question we could have this
debate and have this vote on gas tax because this is what it would do.
It says we would temporarily suspend, just for the remainder of this
year, 4.3 cents a gallon--I will come back to that in a moment--and, if
gasoline prices go to $2 a gallon national average, then the entire
18.4 cents a gallon would be suspended in a gas tax holiday just to the
end of the year.
So when people say, How much would this cost? The first answer is it
would depend on whether or not gasoline reached the national average of
$2 a gallon and when that would occur, when that would take effect.
The amendment language is drafted so this will not affect the highway
trust fund. I want to emphasize that: It will not reduce the funds in
the highway trust fund. It would hold harmless the highway trust fund.
If there is this gas tax holiday, it would come out of the surplus.
I remind my colleagues, we do at this point have a $23 billion on-
budget surplus now; that is, surplus in addition to what we have as a
result of the FICA, Social Security tax. So there is a surplus there.
While we would like to protect that surplus as much as possible and not
use it, or see it used to pay down the national debt, this is what I
think to be a reasonable way to use some of it, if gasoline prices
should actually go up to $2 a gallon.
What I am saying is, there is no difference between what we are
trying to do and what the Byrd sense-of-the-Senate resolution said. He
was trying, I believe, to make sure it did not come out of the highway
trust fund. As a matter of fact, this amendment is drafted in such a
way it does not.
Let me remind my colleagues how we got to this additional 4.3-cent-a-
gallon gas tax. It was added in 1993. In the Senate, it passed on a tie
vote with the Vice President, Vice President Gore, breaking that tie.
There was a big debate about whether or not we should be increasing the
price of gasoline by raising this tax in the first place.
But there was an even more important, very telling point, and that
was, in this case the gas tax would not go into the highway trust fund
but it was going to go into the General Treasury to be used for any
number of purposes by the Federal Government, not to build highways and
bridges and to improve urban mass transportation and rail service or
anything of that nature, just to go into the big, deep, dark hole of
the Federal Treasury.
By the way, I think about $21 billion of gas tax revenue went into
the General Treasury. But then in 1997 Congress changed that and said
no, this is a gasoline tax and it should go, like other gasoline taxes,
into the highway trust fund. So it started going into the highway trust
fund.
With regard to what we are trying to do here, the elite Washington
position is: Oh, what difference does 4.3 cents a gallon make? We can
afford that.
Yes, maybe, if you live and work on Capitol Hill or for the Federal
Government. But if you are out there in the real world, and you are a
working family, and you are driving 100 miles a day round trip to get
to an industrial job, or to get to where your employment is, while it
still will not add up to a lot of money, when you are a blue-collar
worker, when you are a union worker, working at a shipyard or
International Paper mill, a few dollars more a week in the price of
gasoline does make a difference. It comes right out of that family
budget.
So it is typically what you get here in Washington, the elite
attitude: Well, it will not make that much difference. But it is not
only the individual who is paying those higher gas taxes, it also
affects smaller business men and women. It affects barge operators on
our rivers and inland lakes across America. It affects the truck driver
who, by the way, if he is an independent driver--he owns his own rig,
he drives not a few hundred miles a week, he drives many hundreds of
miles a week up and down this country and back and forth across this
country--it is hitting him or her very hard because he is paying this
extra cost to run those trucks.
Or, if you are in a business that involves a lot of trucks, a lot of
heavy equipment, such as road construction or sand and gravel work, you
have seen the cost of doing business go up considerably. It is not a
few dollars, it is not hundreds of dollars, it is thousands of dollars
in cases such as that.
By the way, that comes right out of the bottom line because quite
often you are carrying out a contract for which you have already
submitted a bid, you have a price agreement, and now you see you are
having to take this extra cost right out of getting this job done. So
it is having a real impact.
The next argument against reducing the gasoline tax, or having a gas
tax holiday, is that: Look, this is temporary. It was just a spike up
in the price of gasoline. We did not see it coming. We were caught
napping--according to the Secretary of Energy, Secretary Richardson--
and the OPEC countries will open the spigot up a little bit and
everything will be fine, prices will go back down.
Maybe they will. They have ticked down some in some areas, although I
bought gasoline on Saturday and it cost $1.63 a gallon, and that was
not the premium; premium was more than that. In some places it is more
than that, in some places it is probably less than that. So maybe it
will come down and maybe it will stay down, but I think maybe it might,
as a matter of fact, tick back up because world demand is going to
exceed supply. We are going to be drawing down reserves around the
world. So I am concerned it could go back up, in addition to the fact
it is still very high.
So this is an issue we should think about. We should be careful how
we proceed. But we should have this debate. It is bigger than just
gasoline price and the Federal gas tax, although, I repeat, to a lot of
working people it has had an impact and it will continue to do so.
There is a broader question involved, and that is: What is our
national energy plan? What are we going to do about the price of fuel,
alternative fuels, conservation, environmental impact? All these
questions are looming.
I do not think we have a true national energy plan for the future.
Our dependence on foreign oil has gone
[[Page S2453]]
from 45 percent of our needs 10 years ago to around 55 or 56 percent
now. I think it is going to go over 60.
What are we going to do? Are we comfortable with that? Are the
American people comfortable with that? I do not think so.
In the early seventies, we had the higher prices. We had the gas
lines. Nobody liked it. People really got mad. We put forth a lot of
effort in Congress to develop a national energy plan and to make
ourselves less dependent on oil. It has not worked. It has gone the
other way.
We need to ask ourselves what we are going to do about this. What if
the OPEC countries and other countries from whom we get our oil decide
to cut the spigot down or cut it off? Economically, we would be in a
real mess quickly.
We have the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is something we did in
the aftermath of the last price increase and the long lines. We have
SPR filled up so if we have a national emergency, we can use it for
about a month.
Is that enough? Should we do more? What are we going to do in the
broader sense? I view this current upward spike as another knock on the
door, another tap on the shoulder: Hey, America, you have a problem.
You are dependent on Libya and Qadhafi; you are dependent on Iraq for
about 700,000 barrels of oil a day. Are you comfortable with that?
When I go home, I have people come up to me and say: Aren't these the
same people we went to war for a few years ago? And now they are
turning the spigot on and off, and the prices go way low or high. Is
this what we want? I do not think so. It is very dangerous.
Then one may ask: What is going to be done? What can be done? We do
need to look for more oil reserves of our own. We need to give
incentives for our men and women, our independents, our wildcats, the
small operators, and the big ones, to find more reserves, to make use
of these oil wells that are capped right now. There are a few in my own
State and certainly other places around the country. We ought to see if
there are other places we can open up.
The Senate voted last week against an amendment that would have
prevented using the reserves in ANWR in Alaska. I believe we can get at
those oil reserves without causing environmental damage, and we should
do that.
It is not just about more oil. The President said we should look at
alternatives. I agree. What are the alternatives about which we are
talking? One is natural gas. When I sit on my front porch in my
hometown of Pascagoula, MS, looking off to the south and the east, I
see a natural gas well. I believe natural gas is a good alternative. It
is clean, and we can make a lot more use of it if we provide some
incentives for making greater use of natural gas. We have tremendous
reserves of natural gas. So much of it is in the ground; so much has
been capped because it has not been worthwhile to get it out. That is
an alternative that is environmentally safe, and we have lots of it.
That is one option.
Also, in my part of the country we use coal to provide electricity to
our people. It is cheap, and it also is clean-burning coal. Our
companies have taken actions to deal with the emissions problems. Yet
EPA today is putting genuine hard pressure on five companies in
America, including Southern Company in our part of the United States,
that will drive up the cost and will cause real problems using coal as
their fuel supply in the future.
That is one alternative we ought to keep. We ought to find more oil;
we ought to make use of natural gas; we ought to continue to find ways
to burn coal with clean technology, with modern technology, but also
that it is clean coal being burned.
The next thing is nuclear power. Nuclear power is clean. There is
nuclear power already in Europe, China, and Japan. Yet we have been
trying for years and have spent billions of dollars finding a
repository for nuclear waste. The Senate passed a bill, I believe, two
or three times, and the President is threatening to veto a very
carefully thought out procedure of a repository for nuclear waste.
Sooner or later, if we cannot deal with that problem, our nuclear
plants will be faced with the threat of shutting down. If we do not
explore for more oil, if we do not make greater use of natural gas, if
we put limits and make it difficult to use coal, if, as a matter of
fact, we cannot use nuclear power because we cannot come up with a
proper way with which to deal with nuclear waste disposal--talk about
an environmental problem. Deciding how to deal with nuclear waste is
the biggest environmental problem in America today. We have been
batting that ball back and forth for 10 years or more, and we still
have not resolved it.
If not oil, not natural gas, not coal, and not nuclear, what? Solar
and wind? That will help some, but the statistics I have seen show that
will provide a very small percentage of our needs. Ethanol--I have
supported ethanol. I just do not believe wind and solar, ethanol, and
alternative sources beyond the ones I have been talking about will
solve this problem.
I hope, as a result of the debate today and tomorrow, we will admit
that we do not have a national energy policy, that we are dependent on
foreign oil and are going to be for the foreseeable future unless we
sit down, think this through, and come up with some ideas on how to
proceed.
I have urged the committees of jurisdiction--the Energy and Natural
Resources Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, and other
committees--to have joint hearings or have hearings and ask questions
about these long-term problems of how we are going to deal with these
issues. I hope after we have this debate and votes tomorrow, we will
have a broader, general energy package that will begin to address these
long-term problems. I am concerned about it. I hope the Senate will
step up to this issue and make a difference beyond what we have done in
the past.
The second issue on which the Senate will be working this week is the
marriage penalty tax. I believe most Americans have some idea by now of
what it is. There have been different proposals on how to deal with it.
Some of the arguments are: Yes, but if you are married, you get certain
bonuses. I do not think that applies to what we are trying to deal with
here.
The fact of the matter is, if you are a young couple or, as we
realized last week, an older couple--couples married 25 years get hit
with a marriage penalty tax, but for young couples it is particularly
startling.
I found that to be the case with my own family. Our daughter got
married last May. She has been hearing talk about the marriage penalty
tax, so she decided to find out what that would mean for her. She and
her husband both work. Together, they have a pretty good income,
although they are certainly not wealthy, but they are in that middle
bracket. She figured it would cost them about $500 more this year in
taxes because they got married.
By the way, it is going to escalate over the next few years to about
$1,400 a year. This is just basically wrong. We should encourage people
to get married. We should not in any way discourage them by saying: Oh,
by the way, if you do get married, you will pay more in taxes.
Some people will complain the package that came out of the Finance
Committee is too big; that, as a matter of fact, not only did we deal
with the low-income people by increasing what was in the House bill for
the so-called earned-income tax credit, EITC, we also said we will
double the 15-percent bracket and the 28-percent bracket because we do
think if a marriage penalty tax is wrong, it should be wrong for
everybody. It should not be wrong just for the entry-level, lower
income people; it ought to be also unfair for the upper lower income
bracket and the middle-income bracket; as a matter of fact, right
across the board.
But we at least broadened its application to the middle bracket to
make sure, if you have a young couple who are both working--whether
they are in blue-color jobs or whether they are in entry-level
professional jobs--they should have this penalty eliminated.
Senator Moynihan of New York, and others, have an alternative
proposal. I think it is worth considering. In fact, if we could afford
it, I would like to have what we are doing and what Senator Moynihan is
proposing in terms of--I guess it is the income splitting option. But I
think we ought to have that offered and debated.
I think we can come up with a way that we can have a full debate
where
[[Page S2454]]
there could be amendments with regard to the marriage penalty
legislation. I hope we can reach an agreement on how that would come
up. Then on Wednesday and Thursday, we would debate the alternatives
and we would have a vote. But it is long overdue.
I hope we can do as we did on the Social Security earnings
limitation. We passed it unanimously in the Senate. A lot of people
said: Oh, gee, that was so easy. Why didn't you do it before? We have
been talking about it for 20 years. We couldn't get it done.
They said it cost too much or that senior citizens didn't really need
it or it was a part of a package. But for some reason or another--for
years and years--it did not happen. Finally, we isolated it, passed it
clean, and passed it overwhelmingly.
The President had a big signing ceremony last week saying: Finally,
we have eliminated the Social Security earnings test. Good. The main
thing is our seniors who are between 65 and 69, who want to continue
working without being penalized in their Social Security benefits, are
going to have that opportunity.
But I think the same is true here. It is clear now we have isolated
it. The marriage penalty tax is not connected to incentives for people
to adopt children. It is not connected to the death tax or the estate
tax. It is not connected to anything else. We are just going to have a
debate about the marriage penalty tax. Senator Hutchison of Texas and
Senator Ashcroft of Missouri, and a number of other Senators on both
sides, are going to say: We ought to do this. This is the way to do it.
But in the end, this is the point: We are going to see this week if
the Senate is for eliminating the marriage penalty tax or not.
The guy in the store where I was shopping is going to have a list of
the names of those who vote against it. I hope the Senate will step up
to this and that we will begin the process of totally eliminating the
marriage penalty tax.
Then, finally, on the budget resolution, I hope we can get a final
agreement on the conference report and that we will pass it before the
end of the week so we can go forward with our appropriations bills.
That is a very important part of what we need to do this year; that is,
pass the 13 appropriations bills for Agriculture, for defense, for the
Interior, and for all the various Agencies and Departments of the
Government, and more importantly for the American people.
We ought to do it earlier than usual. There is no reason why we
should wait until June or July to do the appropriations bills. Let's
get started in May. Let's move them earlier. That is where we can
include things that we think should be done.
For instance, on the foreign relations bill, I think we should
provide aid for Colombia to fight the narcoguerrillas and try to get
control of that drug war there. I think we ought to do it, and do it on
the foreign relations bill.
With regard to Kosovo and defense, the first bill that comes along,
whether it is MilCon--military construction--or the defense bill, I
hope we will add that additional funding. This budget resolution
conference report will get all of that started.
Then I think important, once again, is, we should give credit to the
Budget Committee and to what we are doing in the Congress as a result
of this budget resolution. No. 1, for the third year in a row, we have
the ability to have a balanced budget--3 years running now. Before
that, we had not had one since 1969. Yet this year we have the ability
to do that for a third time, and to protect every cent of the Social
Security trust fund income. Every cent that comes in from FICA taxes
will be preserved and set aside and will not be spent on other Federal
Government spending programs.
I do not know exactly what that amount would be for the coming year,
but it would be significant. I think maybe the figure is approximately
$160 billion, or something close to that. But over a 10-year period, it
will be $1 trillion. By not spending it, that is good for the program,
it is good for technology, and we can pay down the national debt.
Over a 3-year period now, I understand we may have reduced the
national debt by somewhere more than $300 billion. A lot of people
never thought they would see the day come when we would actually begin
to pay down the national debt.
If we stay on the path we are on, if we stay on the trajectory we now
see with technology--and a lot has to happen; we have to have good
fiscal responsibility, monetary policy, stable energy prices, right
across the board--but if those things will stay within the ranges we
are looking for, we could reduce completely the national debt by the
year 2013 or 2015. That has not been done since Andrew Jackson was
President of the United States. That is really an amazing thing.
If we can continue to keep in place policies by congressional
actions, and by monetary policy, and by the administration, and see
economic growth year after year of around 4.5 percent--and in recent
years it has been more than that; but just 4.5 percent--it would have a
tremendous impact on the economy and the explosion of revenue coming
into the Social Security trust fund.
When we come to the point, over the next 2 or 3 years, where we are
going to have fundamental reform of Social Security, to make sure it is
preserved, protected, and, as a matter of fact, it is there for our
children and our grandchildren in a way that will be meaningful to
them, just that growth in the economy of 4.5 percent will give us the
options we need to have a very strong program that will go not just
into the year 2040 but go throughout this century.
I think these are very important issues. This is going to be an
interesting week to have debate. When we complete that budget
resolution, it will be a very positive action and will set the course
for not only this year but well into the rest of this decade.
Mr. President, I have been looking forward to this opportunity to
have this debate and have these votes this week. I look forward to that
process as we go forward.
Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to restore the
remaining, I believe, 15 minutes of the hour that was reserved on the
Democratic side.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________