[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.

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