[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.
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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.
____________________