[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 24 (Tuesday, February 27, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1593-S1597]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS

  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, tonight we will hear from President Bush 
as he presents the budget. I remember when I first came to this town as 
a very young man back in the 1960s, one of my wise mentors commented 
that every President enjoys a honeymoon, and it lasts until he offers 
his first budget. Once we get down to the money, the platitudes stop; 
that is when the honeymoon ends.
  I suppose tonight we will see the end of whatever honeymoon President 
Bush is experiencing as people begin to disagree with his priorities 
with respect to the money. That is as it should be.

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 We should get away from the generalities and, frankly, the hyperbole 
of the political campaign and down to the realities of governing as 
quickly as possible.
  I can't help but think back over my first experience as a Member of 
this body some 8 years ago when President Clinton presented his first 
budget. I was a brand-new Member of the minority. I had gone through 
the campaign with President Clinton. He and I had both campaigned on 
the same thing: Change. He, of course, wanted to change the Presidency; 
I wanted to change the Congress. He succeeded; I didn't. But I at least 
got elected back into a Congress where the Republicans were very much 
in the minority.
  In his campaign, President Clinton promised a middle-class tax cut. 
But when he stood before America on that first occasion and presented 
his first budget, he said things were so much different once he had 
gotten into the Presidency than he had thought they were when he was 
running for the Presidency he had to not only rescind his call for a 
tax cut but ask for a tax increase.
  One of the things I am looking forward to tonight is that President 
George W. Bush will not change from the position he took in the 
campaign. He promised he would campaign for a tax cut, for tax relief, 
and I understand tonight he will, in fact, propose that on which he 
campaigned--tax relief.
  He will propose a number of other things. We will go down them in the 
standard checklist, laundry list fashion of politicians, and say that 
is too much for this, that is not enough for that, we are in favor of 
this, but we want to amend that. And we will go down it as if this is a 
checklist that is cast in bronze. We will fight over the details.
  Again, I have learned that is what goes on around here. In fact, 
however, if we can step back from that process for a minute, we should 
realize the economy is not a checklist. The economy is a constantly 
shifting, constantly changing series of literally millions of 
priorities on the part of individuals. Individuals change jobs; 
individuals graduate from college; individuals start businesses; 
individuals see their businesses fail. Sometimes large corporations see 
their businesses fail. The best projections come to sometimes 
unpleasant surprises.
  Look, for example, at what was billed as the largest merger in the 
history of the automotive industry, Daimler and Chrysler. Daimler, the 
organization from Germany, thought they were buying the crown jewel of 
the American automobile industry in Chrysler, the most profitable of 
the big three in America, only to discover a few years later their 
projections had gone awry and they were facing mountains of red ink. 
Now they are scrambling to change.
  We are looking at the best projections we can find with respect to 
what will happen in the American economy over the next 10 years, and we 
are setting down some priorities as to how we will respond if, indeed, 
those projections come to pass. I make here a very bold prediction: The 
projections we have before us for the next 10 years will not be 
accurate.

  That is a very far limb I am going out on, I realize, but I feel 
confident with that. I will be even more specific: They will either be 
too good or too bad. We have never had the experience of any Federal 
agency making projections over the coming years with anything like the 
pinpoint accuracy we presume when we debate budgets around here. We 
stand here and we say this is so many billion too high for this and so 
many billion too low, and so on. Then reality comes in, and we are 
always stunned that it is different from our projections.
  When I first came here 8 years ago and debated President Clinton's 
first projections, we were being told with absolute certainty that we 
were facing budget deficits as far as the eye could see and we had to 
have this tax increase to deal with these overwhelming deficits. Now we 
are being told we are facing budget surpluses that will go on as far as 
the eye can see into the trillions of dollars.
  I happen to think we will, indeed, see surpluses but they will not be 
in the exact order of magnitude that our current projections say they 
will. They will be, I say with great confidence, either higher or 
lower. It is similar to the question someone asked of, I believe it was 
J.P. Morgan, when they said, ``What will the stock market do today?'' 
thinking he was the greatest expert on the stock market. He looked at 
his questioner with great sagacity, and he said: ``It will fluctuate.''
  What will the economy do? It will grow or it will shrink, and it will 
do so in a pattern that is virtually impossible to estimate with the 
exactness that we get budget figures. To say the total surplus over the 
next 10 years will be exactly $5.6 trillion is an exercise in 
guessing--creative guessing, educated guessing, well-researched 
guessing, but it is still guessing.
  So as we get into the budget President Bush will give us, and as we 
go through the necessary exercise of adopting exact numbers, let us 
recognize that this is an exercise we go through every year. Every year 
we adjust the budget, every year we adjust our guesses, every year we 
try to do a little better than we did the year before, and every year 
we have a year's more hard data behind us that we hope will help guide 
us where we are going in the future.
  We now know, for example, when President Clinton said we were in a 
serious recession as we were adopting the budget in 1993, if we look 
back at the economic data, the recession in fact ended in 1991. It 
still felt like a recession, but we were, in fact, not in one. I think 
we took some steps that, in retrospect, we probably should not have 
taken on the basis of what things seemed to be rather than on the basis 
of what things were.
  All right, having said that, let me comment on what I see in 
President George W. Bush's budget. He is setting out his priorities. I 
think that is what we should focus on: What are the priorities that 
this President hopes this Congress will adopt as we look to the future.
  My own guess of the future surplus is that it is going to be better, 
in terms of Federal income, than $5.6 trillion. I think the $5.6 
trillion number which has been adopted as the best summary of the 
various estimates is probably low. If I were the CEO of a business 
looking at this kind of forecast, I would say let's get fairly 
aggressive at trying to grow the business, let's get fairly aggressive 
at taking those steps that will prepare us for the prosperity that we 
think lies ahead.

  I think there are those who say: No, no, the $5.6 trillion number is 
too high; let us get very conservative; let us get very restrictive 
with what we do with the money in this budget. My own gut tells me that 
is the way to make sure we do not hit the $5.6 trillion, that we 
constrict the growth, and we see to it that this economy gets less 
rather than more in the future.
  But these are the President's priorities as I understand them. Let me 
just list them and then talk about whether or not it is a good set of 
priorities. His first priority has to do with improving our educational 
system. I think our educational system since the demise of the Soviet 
Union has become the No. 1 survival issue for the United States. If we 
do not get our educational system geared to the needs of the future, we 
will pay a huge price in the future. So his priority of improving 
education strikes me as the right budgetary priority, the thing that 
should be first.
  Next is protecting Social Security. That has become the Holy Grail of 
American politics. Every politician says he wants to protect Social 
Security. It is to be expected that President Bush will put it right 
next to education.
  Next, preserve Medicare. I have a little bit of a reaction to that 
language, ``preserve Medicare,'' because I have found that everybody 
who deals with Medicare in its present structure hates it. Oh, they 
don't hate the idea of having money to deal with their health care 
problem, but the structure is absolutely devastating. Yes, from a 
budgetary standpoint I think what the President is going to propose is 
wise. But I hope as we go through that process we can start talking 
about changing Medicare so human beings can understand it.
  Just a quick vignette: I have a constituent who came to me and she 
said: I am a very intelligent person, I think. I am a college graduate, 
and I have a professional life. I take care of my mother's medical 
problems, and my mother is on Medicare.

[[Page S1595]]

  She said: I am totally defeated by the paper that comes through the 
mail to me with respect to mother's Medicare, and I finally adopted 
this strategy. I throw everything away, and once a month I call the 
Salt Lake Clinic where my mother is being treated and I say, ``How much 
money do I owe you?'' And they give me a number, and I write them a 
check.
  She said that is the only way she can deal with the complexities that 
come out of Medicare.
  A much younger man who came to me when we were out in our home States 
celebrating Presidents Day said: My father just went on Medicare. I had 
no idea how disastrously complicated that really is and how far short 
of really meeting his needs it is.
  So let's not get carried away in the political rhetoric of preserving 
Medicare to think that the Medicare system as it is currently running 
makes any sense at all. Let us understand that if we are going to fund 
Medicare--and President Bush recommends that we do--we have the 
responsibility to do some fairly heavy lifting between now and the time 
that funding comes along, to examine the way Medicare is run.
  I hope Secretary Thompson, as the new Secretary of HHS, will take a 
long, hard look at HCFA and say what can be done to make the Medicare 
accounting process and examination of claims process intelligible to 
human beings because it is clearly not that at the moment.
  All right: Education, Social Security, Medicare--defense. One of the 
things we have seen over the last 8 years has been what used to be 
called the peace dividend. Ever since Ronald Reagan and George Bush's 
father, Bush the 1st, or Bush the 41st--whatever shorthand title we 
wish to put on him--ended the cold war and the Soviet Union 
disappeared, we have seen the defense budget as a percentage of gross 
domestic product decrease dramatically. We should see that happen. That 
is the peace dividend we should hope for.
  When President Clinton used to stand and say this is the smallest 
Government in a generation, basically he was talking about the Defense 
Department. All of the shrinking of civilian jobs in the Government, of 
which he was so proud, occurred primarily in the Defense Department. We 
got to the point where we went a little too far with that. Our defense 
budget is now a smaller percentage of the gross domestic product than 
it was prior to World War II.
  It is back to the 1939-1940 level. It is beginning to show. We do not 
need the kind of defense we needed during the cold war, but we need a 
defense that can deter anyone who would like to take us to world war 
III. It is appropriate that President Bush has listed that as his next 
priority.
  Improving health care. I have already talked about improvements I 
would like to see in Medicare. President Bush recognizes that this is 
an area where we need to spend more, not less.
  Interestingly, many Republicans say any kind of government 
expenditure is bad. They want to cut anything. And any budget cut that 
comes along, they immediately clear. This is an area where we should 
not be cutting because it is an investment that will, indeed, pay huge 
dividends in the future. I am delighted, as one who has supported 
doubling the funding for NIH and other basic research in health care, 
to note that President Bush is going to double the funding for medical 
research on such important health issues as cancer. I look forward to 
the country reaping the benefits of that kind of investment.
  The fact that President Bush can talk about that kind of an increase 
even as he is talking about presiding over a smaller government 
demonstrates that this is a man who has his priorities straight. This 
has been a Republican initiative right from the first. It started with 
Senator Connie Mack of Florida who has had personal experience with the 
ravages of cancer. He didn't just have a knee-jerk response to those 
experiences but began to look into what was being done at the National 
Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, and came back 
to the rest of us and said this is good, sound investment.
  Hearings were held. Testimony was taken. We Republicans led the way 
on seeing to it that basic health research would be increased very 
substantially in this country because we recognized the dividends that 
would pass.
  I am delighted to note that President Bush is going to carry on that 
Republican initiative that began on the floor of this Senate with 
Senator Mack from Florida and is proposing this kind of an increase for 
NIH medical research.
  Next, the environment. We hear an enormous amount of conversation 
about the environment. We must cut back on this; we must do that, and 
so on. Frankly, if you dig into it, from my point of view, much of it 
is based on what is being called junk science.
  Junk science, to summarize it very quickly, is that science that is 
produced and then taken to the media rather than for peer review. 
Scientists come to a conclusion and then call a press conference rather 
than turning to other scientists to say where they went wrong. Once the 
media has hold of it and has spread it, then there is no calling it 
back. Then it gets set into the public mind, and the public culture is 
absolute truth. Those who try to catch up with it after the fact always 
have difficulty. We have seen examples of that. One that rankled the 
agricultural field was the excitement over the alar scare where film 
stars suddenly became scientists and testified before the Congress 
about all of the apples being tainted. Checking into it carefully and 
doing peer review indicated that, in fact, alar was not going to poison 
every man, woman, and child in the United States. But the scare had a 
tremendous impact on apple growers. Frankly, parents wanted kids to eat 
more apples. And it has taken a long time for the reality to catch up 
with that kind of junk science.
  When we are talking about the environment, let's not talk about junk 
science. Let's talk about some significant investments in the 
environment that make sense.
  President Bush is proposing fully funding the Land and Water 
Conservation Fund, which is a $900 million commitment, and he is giving 
EPA the second highest operating budget in its history which, for 
whatever it is worth, happens to be $59 million higher than the request 
from President Clinton.
  I am not at all impressed with the idea that we must spend more than 
President Clinton in a certain area. But since there are those in the 
media who think President Clinton was the example of how you fund 
efforts on the environment, I think it is important to point out that 
George W. Bush is not cutting back on that kind of commitment.
  Those are his priorities. Identify first; then the standard, Social 
Security and Medicare; a new one for the administration, which is 
defense, funding for health care research, and activities to protect 
the environment. Those are a pretty good series of priorities, in my 
view.
  But there are two others that are in this particular budget that are 
different from what we have seen. One is a commitment to pay off the 
debt.
  When I first got here 8 years ago, we were told with the same 
confidence that we are being told about surpluses how we would have 
deficits as far as the eye could see. Those deficits have disappeared. 
They have turned into surpluses because the economy has--surprise--
grown faster than anybody anticipated it would and registered those 
projections, inaccurate as that. As that is going on, we must continue 
to pay down the debt. George W. Bush said we will do that.
  It comes down to this: He says: These are my priorities; these are 
the priorities I recommend to the Congress. Once these priorities are 
fully funded, we have this much left over. And what do we do with the 
money left over? He says we do two things: First, we pay down the debt; 
second, we give whatever is left back to the people who have been 
overcharged for the Government services they have been buying with 
their taxes.
  I think that is an appropriate arrangement of the money. Here is the 
priority. Here is what we are going to spend it on. Yes, we are going 
to be spending more than we were spending in the past, but we still 
have this much left.
  What do we do with that which we have left? We pay our debts and we 
give money back to people whom we have overcharged. Could anything be 
fairer than that? Can anything be simpler than that? But the big fight, 
of course, is going to be on the last item--giving money back to those 
who have been

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overcharged. Who are they? Maybe the people who should get the money 
back shouldn't be the people who sent it here in the first place. Maybe 
the money should not go back to the people who were overcharged but to 
the people who never shopped in the first place.
  That would be the conversation we would have if this were a business. 
Of course, it wouldn't be cast in those terms because this is not a 
business. This is a government. As a government in a democracy, this 
means there are votes to be courted. There are special interest groups 
to be satisfied. When we get back to that area of money to be given 
back to those who have been overcharged, that is where the heat will 
come. That is where the rhetoric will come. That is where the shouting 
will come. That is where we will have our most bitter debates.
  I, for one, am encouraged by the fact that the heart of President 
Bush's tax plan is the reduction of the marginal rate. This is why.
  First, there is the question of fairness. Should anybody be required 
to pay more than a third of his or her income to the Federal 
Government? If you take a poll--there are those who live by polls in 
this Chamber--and ask the American people what should be the highest 
total anybody should pay, over the years the numbers have stayed pretty 
stable. It is 25 percent. Most Americans think no one should be forced 
to pay more than 25 percent of his or her income into the Federal 
Government. We are now close to 40. President Bush is saying no. Let's 
bring that number back to a third. Let's bring that number back to 33. 
I don't think that is unreasonable. I think it fits with where the 
American people think we ought to be.
  The second reason why I think we ought to bring down the top rate 
from roughly 40 to a third is because I recognize that it is in that 
area that the American entrepreneurial machine takes hold. Look at our 
counterparts in Europe. Japan: I have owned a business in Japan. I have 
been involved in a joint venture with companies in Europe. I know that 
in those countries they have many of the things we have. You think they 
are almost identical. They have big corporations. They have hard-
working people. They have a well-educated workforce. The one thing they 
don't have that is almost uniquely American, with perhaps the exception 
of Hong Kong, is they do not have the entrepreneurial spirit. And where 
do the entrepreneurs fund their businesses? They fund their 
businesses--the growth, the new jobs, the new creation--at the edge of 
the marginal tax rate.
  If you bring the top marginal tax rate down from 40 percent to 33 
percent, you are going to see a whole host of new industries, new 
enterprises, and new activities spring up that will make it possible 
for the higher end of the projection of what will happen in the economy 
come to pass.
  Mr. President, that is a brief overview of the President's proposal. 
I look forward to hearing him flesh it out tonight in his presentation 
to the joint session of Congress. I express my delight that we are 
going to hear this President stand true to the things he said during 
the campaign. It will be a refreshing change.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Thomas). The Senator from Texas.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Utah for his 
remarks about the budget.
  I have had some White House briefings on what would be in the 
President's budget. It is so refreshing to see a President, who made 
promises, and tonight is going to unveil his plans to keep the promises 
he made to the American people.
  I, as one Member of the Senate, am certainly going to try to help the 
President keep those promises because I, too, made those promises to 
the American people because I believe we can treat this budget as any 
family in America treats their household budget; that is, we can make 
priorities. We can decide what we want to spend more money to do, what 
we want to spend less money to do, and where our priorities are going 
to be for saving our own money. That is the theory behind the 
President's budget.
  He is basically saying: We are going to cover our priorities. We are 
going to increase spending in the priority areas. We are going to flat 
line the areas that are not priorities or areas where the project is 
complete. And we are going to have more of our own money back in our 
pocketbooks. At the same time, the President is going to pay down the 
debt at the greatest rate that we can pay it down. I think that is a 
balanced approach.
  Let's talk about some of the priorities. One that I am very pleased 
the President is going to put forward is the No. 1 priority, which is 
education. Public education is the foundation of our country. It is 
what makes us different from most other countries in the world; and 
that is we want public education to give every child the chance to 
reach his or her full potential; that they can go to public schools all 
their life, and they will have a great education that will allow them 
to do whatever they want to do in life. That is the American way. We 
have fallen behind in that dream. The President wants that dream to 
come back. And Congress is going to support him. We are going to make 
sure every child can reach his or her full potential in this country 
with a public education.

  So we are going to target those funds so that when the local school 
district wants to do creative things--wants to have teacher incentives, 
wants to encourage people to come from careers into the classroom, or 
from military retirement into the classroom--we will allow that 
alternative certification to bring that person in to give language or 
math or science that is not able to be offered in that school unless we 
do some creative recruiting.
  Those are the kinds of things that we want to foster with the Federal 
funds. We want the decisions to be made at the local level. We want 
goals to make sure every child can read by the third grade because we 
know if a child cannot read in the third grade, they are going to start 
falling behind. Of course, they are not going to be able to pass 
algebra if they do not have the basic reading skills. So we take one 
step at a time. And we start with the basics. That is what the goals 
will be.
  Secondly, tonight our President is going to call for prescription 
drug benefits and options under Medicare. That is very important. 
Fifteen years ago, people would have had to go in the hospital; they 
would have to have major surgery to treat an illness. Today, that can 
be done with drugs. And, yes, those prescription drugs are expensive. 
So we need to make sure we are covering those drug costs and giving 
people the options to be able to afford the drugs they need to stay 
healthy, while at the same time having their other living expenses be 
covered.
  So we want to have a prescription drug option in Medicare. We want to 
have benefits for those who cannot afford it. That is going to be a 
priority in the President's budget.
  We are going to keep national defense as our highest priority. We are 
going to make sure our military is strong and ready. I have visited our 
troops in the field all over the world. I know morale has been low. We 
have not focused enough on our national defense and the people who are 
serving in our military. So we are going to have pay raises, we are 
going to upgrade the health care for our military personnel and their 
families, and we are going to make sure they have quality housing.
  Just last week, in Texas, I was at Fort Sam Houston and I walked 
through housing where the paint was peeling. That is not acceptable. We 
are not going to have that for our military personnel. We are going to 
give them good, quality housing and health care. We are going to make 
sure their children have quality education, especially on the bases 
that have school districts within the bases. We are going to step up to 
the plate to make sure we are doing what is necessary to give our young 
people, who are the dependents of military personnel, a quality public 
education.
  So we are going to do those things to upgrade our military. And we 
are going to make sure we have the quality equipment and the training 
to give these people who are pledging their lives for our freedom the 
chance to do their jobs, and to do it right. We are going to support 
our military.
  These are areas where we are going to increase spending.
  I believe Congress will support President Bush's initiatives in the 
budget.
  Also, another priority we have not talked very much about is a rainy 
day

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fund. President Bush is going to put in place a rainy day fund. Some 
people are concerned that maybe our economy will go soft. We do not 
want to get into a deficit again. So he is going to suggest we have a 
rainy day fund. And I am going to support him all the way. I will 
introduce legislation to make sure we have a rainy day fund, just like 
every home in America will have if they have a quality budget in their 
homes--a rainy day fund for emergencies.
  So those are the priorities we will have in our budget. But it is no 
less of a priority that we also pay down the debt and that we have more 
money for taxpayers in their own pocketbooks because they are sending 
too much to Washington in income taxes.
  It is very important that people be able to keep more of the money 
they earn because people are paying higher taxes than they have ever 
paid in peacetime. We need to give them some relief, particularly 
because the economy is a little soft right now. We want people to have 
the confidence they can spend their money.
  But we also want them to be able to save some of their money. So we 
are going to have a balanced plan that will pay down the debt and will 
give tax relief for hard-working Americans--for every hard-working 
American. We are going to have priority spending, and we are going to 
do what every household in America will do; that is, provide for the 
priorities in our budget and not spend more in the areas where we do 
not need to spend more and target those areas where we know we are 
going to have to do a better job than we have been doing in national 
defense, in education, in prescription drug options. Those are the 
things we will focus on in this budget.
  I am so pleased our President is showing the leadership we have 
needed in this country to go in the right direction for responsible 
stewardship of our taxpayer dollars.
  Mr. President, I thank you and look forward to introducing the 
legislation and working with others who have already introduced 
legislation to accomplish the goals that will be outlined tonight by 
the President of the United States.
  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. BROWNBACK. 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. BROWNBACK. I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business 
for up to 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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