[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 135 (Tuesday, October 15, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10408-S10409]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BALANCING THE RECORD
Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I have heard a couple of speeches by our
Democrat colleagues that are basically saying the entire fault of the
economy is that of President Bush. I just have a little different view
and wish to share the view somewhat to balance the record.
It is kind of interesting; we are an equal branch of Government, the
legislative branch. We are an equal branch to that of the executive.
For one branch of Government to say, wait a minute, the economy is bad
and it is all the President's fault, I find kind of interesting. We
have equal powers under the Constitution. Our powers are a little
different. Maybe sometimes the President gets all the credit when
things are good and all the fault when things are bad, but that is not
quite accurate. Congress shares its portion of responsibility, whether
it be good or bad.
We have done a couple things that are good and some things that are
bad. Maybe I will point out some of those differences.
I find it interesting where one branch of Government is faulting the
other and assuming that is really the solution. That is not the case.
When the recession started, I remember the stock market crashing or
falling dramatically in March of 2000. I believe President Clinton was
President at that time, and the market continued to fall. It rebounded
a little bit in August of 2000, and then it fell a lot more and has
been falling since. If you look at the precipitous rise in the stock
market, it probably had risen too much too fast, and so it had some
falling out to do. It has fallen; I hope it has not fallen too much.
Maybe now it has bottomed out and started to increase.
Actually, the last few days have been very promising. If somebody
just got into the market last Monday or Tuesday, they have made a
remarkable rate of return in the last few days alone. I hope maybe the
market has bottomed out. To say that is all President Bush's fault is
incorrect.
The Washington Post on October 25 said:
To blame the weak American economy on Mr. Bush is nonsense.
That is a direct quote from the Washington Post, which is not exactly
President Bush's biggest cheerleader. But they happen to be right.
Let me say, instead of just trying to throw rocks at the Bush
administration, we should be looking at Congress. What can we do. I
don't know that we can just pass a few bills and make everything rosy
in the economy. Nor does everything we do have a negative impact. But I
do believe we can make a difference.
Some of the things we pass can help, and some of the things we don't
pass can either help or hurt. I will mention those.
I remember a person all of us respect, Chairman Greenspan. His
recommendation, his advice to Congress was to do two things: Show some
fiscal discipline and also do things that would stimulate trade. And we
did pass a bill, trade promotion authority, this year. Due to President
Bush's leadership, we did get it through the House and the Senate. It
wasn't easy. It wasn't even pretty in some respects. But it passed both
Houses. It passed the House by one vote; it passed the Senate by more
than that after extraneous measures were put on that were not in the
committee. That was not a good way to legislate. There were three bills
combined into one. But we eventually did pass trade promotion
authority. That was good. That will help the economy.
On the second recommendation, Chairman Greenspan said show fiscal
discipline. I give the White House high marks in many regards. I give
Congress a very low grade. If I was going to grade Congress on fiscal
discipline, the grade would be an F. I am critical. I am on the Budget
Committee. I used to be on the Appropriations Committee. But for the
first time since 1974, we didn't pass a budget. And we have shown no
discipline whatsoever. As a matter of fact, for the last two or three
Congresses, we have shown very little discipline, whether or not we had
a budget. Even when we had a budget in the last 2 or 3 years of the
Clinton administration, we continually waived it.
If you are going to waive it by declaring things an emergency, or
waive it and say it doesn't count, we basically had no budget. So as a
result, we had Federal spending climbing and climbing dramatically.
Total outlays increased, in the year we just completed, 2002, the
fiscal year, by $148 billion. That is the largest percentage growth in
spending programs in 20 years.
Defense grew by 13 percent. I agree with that. We underfunded defense
for many years. Unemployment comp grew by a staggering 72 percent.
Medicaid grew by 13.2 percent, the fastest since 1992. Total outlays
grew by 7.9 percent in fiscal year 2002. But if you exclude the
decrease for net interest, spending grew by 11 percent last year, about
3 times the rate of inflation. And then I look at some of the other
things Congress did that affect spending. Now, we can control that. We
control how much money we spend. We had a farm bill that was billions
of dollars over what was budgeted. The trade adjustment assistance bill
had $11 billion of new entitlement spending. We had an emergency
supplemental bill that was $4 billion over the President's request. I
could go on and on.
There was $6 billion in drought assistance that--when we passed the
farm bill that was so expensive, the proponents said we won't need to
do drought assistance every year. Then we came back and, sure enough,
Congress passes billions of dollars more. So my complaint is against
Congress because, for the first time, we didn't pass a budget. Then
because we didn't pass a budget, we didn't pass appropriations bills.
[[Page S10409]]
This is embarrassing. Here we are in the new fiscal year and we have
not sent the President any appropriations bills. By the end of this
week, I think we will have sent the President two appropriations
bills--2 out of 13, all of which are supposed to be done by the end of
September. And here we are in the middle of October. Congress, on
appropriations bills, deserves an ``F'' this year because we have not
done a budget, and Congress deserves an ``F'' because we have not done
one of our constitutional responsibilities, which is to pass
appropriations bills on time.
So I look at the Members of Congress who keep throwing rocks at the
President, saying the economy is in bad shape. Yet what are we doing?
Have we done our job? No. What else could Congress have done? What
could the Senate have done? The House passed an energy bill and we
spent 7 or 8 weeks on it and it is still stuck in conference. If we
would have passed an energy bill that had allowed exploration in ANWR--
the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge--as the House did, we could create
hundreds of thousands of jobs. That is still stuck, so the Congress has
not passed an energy bill.
We have not passed a reinsurance bill. It passed the House and the
Senate, but we have not worked out the differences in conference,
mainly because the Trial Lawyers Association wants to have the extended
ability to sue victims of terrorism. So there are billions of dollars
in construction projects being held hostage because Congress hasn't
been able to pass antiterrorism insurance.
The House passed pension reform months ago. The Senate Finance
Committee--of which I am a member--I believe, passed pension reform
unanimously in committee. We have not passed it on the floor of the
Senate. I urge the majority leader to call that bill up. If you want to
talk about 401(k)s, and we want to protect them, and pension plans, and
so on, let's pass the bipartisan bill that passed out of the Finance
Committee to lend some protection there.
We have not moved to make permanent the tax cuts passed last year. I
keep hearing people being critical of the tax bill that passed. They
want to say that tax bill caused all the deficits. That is totally
false. The real cause, or culprit, wasn't the tax cut; it is the fact
of the failing economy. The economy is staggering. Income receipts are
down, and it is not so much because of the tax cuts but because of the
economy. So we need to turn the economy around and allow people to keep
more of their own money. Let's make the tax cuts permanent.
Some people say, no, let's increase taxes. Let's change the law. I
don't think that is the remedy being advocated by many, but I don't
think that is a very good solution.
Then I heard our colleagues say we didn't pass a prescription drug
bill. That is not our fault. The majority leader and the chairman of
the Finance Committee never even had a markup on prescription drugs in
the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over that issue. They
pulled the bill up on the floor and we debated it for weeks, but we
didn't pass a comprehensive bill to add prescription drugs as a benefit
for Medicare because we didn't let the Senate work its will. We didn't
have it marked up in committee. We didn't allow Members to proceed as
we should.
I mention those few things. We are getting close to election time, so
they want to start throwing rocks at the President and criticizing him
for the economy, without saying, what have we done? What has the Senate
done? I might say we should be thankful for some things that we didn't
do and what some of our friends on the Democratic side of the aisle
wanted to do, or have tried to do, which, if they were successful,
would have made the economy a lot worse.
I will mention one: ergonomics standards. There was a regulation
promulgated by the Clinton administration in the last day or two of his
term in office called ergonomics standards, which would have cost the
economy billions and billions of dollars. I saw one estimate that was
up to $100 billion. It was going to have the Federal Government set up
a Federal workers compensation system--I started to say ``scheme''--
that would have cost billions of dollars to regulate movement in the
workplace. It had such ridiculous rules, such as you could not move
over 50 pounds 20 times a day and all kinds of little rules on how OSHA
is going to regulate business. Congress wisely stopped that regulation.
That was good. Some people still want to pass that. It would have cost
billions and billions.
Some people say let's pass the Patients' Bill of Rights, which would
increase everybody's health care costs. Actually, the Senate passed
that a year ago in June. It is interesting to note that the House
already passed it a year ago, but we have not even gone to conference
on that bill--maybe for a good reason. That bill would greatly expand
not only the right to sue the HMOs but also employers for providing
health care insurance for their employees. The employers could be sued,
and the net result would be that a lot of employers would drop their
health care. That would hurt the economy, not help it.
Some people say let's increase the minimum wage. That is one of the
proposals many Democrats are pushing now--increase that by $1.50 over
the next 14 months. That is almost a 30-percent increase. Oh, that is
great. What if the business could not pay $6.65? What if this is
somebody trying to help at a convenience store, and all they can afford
to pay is $5, maybe $6 an hour? We are just going to say that is too
bad; we would rather have you unemployed than to have a job like that.
If you cannot pay $6.65, you are out of work.
CAFE standards: On the energy bill, many Democrat colleagues say
let's increase the CAFE standards for automobiles. That is great. We
are going to make everybody drive a Volkswagen-type automobile. That is
not very safe; that is not what consumers want. It would certainly be
detrimental, and it would cost thousands of jobs.
I mention these to say that there are two sides to the story. We are
a little less than 3 weeks from the election and a lot of colleagues
are saying: We want to throw rocks at the President, blame the
President for the deficit. So we want to stop making permanent the tax
cuts the President already passed; and, incidentally, we want to spend
a whole lot more money. So they are against the deficits when it comes
to taxes, but in favor of them when it comes to spending money. Whether
you are talking about Medicare adjustments, drought assistance,
unemployment compensation--which, in a moment, we will probably be
debating--we are going to have a major expansion of unemployment
compensation, more than double the Federal program that we have today.
Some will possibly propose that. It only cost $17 billion. What
difference does it make? We don't have a budget anyway. In other words,
they don't care about the deficit when it comes to spending--only when
it comes to the tax side.
I say these things because I think it is important to move together
and improve the economy. I think we can do it if Congress works
together. We can take a lot of the measures the House passed and we can
help the economy. If we would pass an energy bill, a reinsurance bill,
pension reform, and if we would be responsible and pass a budget, pass
appropriations bills that meet the budget guidelines, I think we could
help the economy. I don't think we help the economy by making a bunch
of political speeches and blaming everything on President Bush.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada is recognized.
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