[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 118 (Tuesday, September 20, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10203-S10205]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            AMERICA'S AGENDA

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this country is reminded virtually every 
morning that we are at war. This morning we learned that additional 
Americans--these, I believe, civilian contractors--have been killed in 
the country of Iraq.
  I have been listening in recent days to the discussions in the Senate 
and discussions from President Bush about where we find ourselves and 
what our obligations are. We not only are at war, we have just 
experienced the most significant natural disaster in the history of 
this country along the gulf coast, with a million people displaced from 
their homes. Yet the discussion in recent days from the President and 
others is that nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. Our agenda is 
the same.
  I went back and pulled out a speech of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a 
fireside chat on April 28, 1942. I want to read what the discussion was 
by someone who provided, I thought, great leadership to this country at 
a time of war. He said:

       As we here at home contemplate our own duties, our own 
     responsibilities . . . our soldiers and sailors are members 
     of well disciplined units. But they are still and forever 
     individuals--free individuals. They are farmers, and workers, 
     businessmen, professional men, artists, clerks. They are the 
     United States of America. That is why they fight. We too are 
     the United States of America. That is why we must work and 
     sacrifice. It is for them. It is for us. It is for victory.

  That is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
  The thing is, leadership is not about accounting or numbers. 
Leadership is calling this country together to say we are all in this 
together; yes, in a war, and in a response to a devastating hurricane. 
Yet we continue to hear around this Chamber and at the White House: No, 
things haven't changed. The agenda is the same. More tax cuts. Repeal 
the death tax--which, incidentally, doesn't exist. There is no death 
tax.

[[Page S10204]]

But it is still a priority. We must repeal the death tax; tax work, 
exempt investment. Nothing really has changed.
  The thing is, perhaps the President's agenda hasn't changed, but 
everything else has changed. Some years ago, 4\1/2\ years ago, we had a 
robust economy. It was morning in America, as it would have been 
portrayed in 1984 in the Reagan commercials: ``Morning in America.'' We 
had budget surpluses, we were told, and things were growing and we had 
budget surpluses that would last 10 years. So the President, the new 
President, said let's provide very large tax cuts for a long period, 
the bulk of which went to the highest income earners in America.
  Some of us, and I, on this Senate floor, said maybe we should be a 
little bit conservative. What if something happens? After all, these 
budget surpluses don't yet exist. They are projections. What if they do 
not exist? What if they do not materialize? What if something happens 
in the interim?
  ``Oh, be happy, don't worry,'' the President and others said. So the 
Congress passed very large tax cuts, and it was not long before some 
things happened. We found ourselves in a recession. Then, very shortly 
we found ourselves victims of a devastating attack by terrorists on 9/
11/2001. Following that, we found ourselves in a war in Afghanistan, a 
war in Iraq, and then we saw, instead of budget surpluses, the largest 
deficits in history begin to grow in this country. Even as that 
happened, we saw the dependency of this country on foreign oil continue 
to increase to now over 60 percent and headed toward 69 percent. 
Following that, of course, a natural disaster unlike any we have seen 
in this country, with a million people displaced, called Hurricane 
Katrina.
  The response from the President? Nothing has really changed with 
respect to his fiscal policy or his plans. We have spent over $200 
billion in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of it borrowed, none of it paid 
for. It is anticipated we will spend somewhere close to $200 billion 
with respect to Katrina and the natural disaster, the devastating 
disaster. The question is, What do we do to pay for that? The President 
says we can manage that. We can manage that.
  We send soldiers abroad and ask for their sacrifice, but we ask 
nothing of the American people at the same time: Be happy.
  There are legitimate questions being asked about the response to 
Hurricane Katrina. But in my judgment we face a time when the question 
is not, Are we doing things right? The question is, Are we doing the 
right things? Are we on the right track? As I said, it is not about 
accounting; it is about leadership. It is about asking a country to 
join in common purpose and asking a country to sacrifice. Sometimes 
leadership asks people to do things that are not popular at the moment.
  Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted a country out of a depression and 
lifted the spirits of the country in the middle of the Second World 
War. He did that by being brutally honest with straight talk. He said 
to the American people: Here is what you must sacrifice. And he said: 
Sacrifice is a privilege, when in this country, together, we go to war 
with a need to be victorious over the oppression of the Nazis.
  So he asked the American people for sacrifice. That is what 
leadership is about. It is about being honest. It is about straight 
talk, which we have too little of today.
  The truth is, this country is off course and we need to put it on 
course. The truth is, we have made some mistakes, all of us. We started 
a war in Iraq because we said there were weapons of mass destruction in 
Iraq. It appears there were not. The intelligence community provided 
this information to us with great certainty, but now it turns out it 
was wrong. The person who led the Central Intelligence Agency during 
that period was given the Medal of Freedom after he retired, for 
reasons I will never understand.
  But we are where we are. We now must ask more of the American people. 
In my judgment, we should not just ask of our soldiers for their 
sacrifice. We are where we are and we must ask the American people for 
their sacrifice as well.
  We had the largest tax cuts in the history of this country because we 
were expected to have 10 years of budget surplus that was 
unprecedented. It turns out that was not accurate. It turns out things 
happened that were not anticipated by this President and others, and 
the result is we now have the highest deficits in history, not the 
highest surplus in history. But now we are told that the tax cuts were 
not for the purpose of giving back the surplus. That is what they were 
designed to do, and that is what we were told they were in 2001, but 
now we are told the tax cuts are really about stimulating the economy. 
So nothing ever really changes and now we have a hurricane, a 
devastating hurricane that hits the gulf coast of this country 
displacing 1 million people, perhaps costing up to $200 billion.

  We need to create kind of a Marshall Plan to rebuild and to tell 
those folks we want to help you. Surely, if this country can 
reconstruct the country of Iraq, it can decide it is important to 
reconstruct this country. Any country that commits the billions of 
dollars we have to reconstruct the country of Iraq can reconstruct the 
gulf region of the United States of America. But we can't do that 
saying nothing has changed and our priority remains tax cuts for 
America's wealthy.
  Cut spending; we should tighten our belt. I will support spending 
cuts. I believe all of us ought to tighten our belts. But if belt 
tightening, as it usually does, means withdrawing health care from poor 
people and the kind of things that hurt most those who are poorest in 
this country, that, in my judgment, is not advancing America's cause.
  Warren Buffett, the second richest man in America and perhaps the 
world, as far as I know, wrote an op-ed piece and said: By the way, 
when all these tax cuts proposed by the President are phased in--that 
is exempting income from investments and taxing work--I will pay a tax 
rate of one-tenth the tax rate that is paid by the receptionist in my 
office.
  So the question is, Are we willing as a country to sacrifice? Have 
some things changed? Are we willing to change course? Are we willing to 
take some risks? Is there some leadership, perhaps in the White House, 
maybe in this Congress? After all, we are in this together. All of us 
want the same thing for our country.
  I take no pleasure in criticizing the President's program, nor the 
President and his actions. But I understand that our future is 
dependent on making right choices now. It is dependent on our deciding 
to look truth in the eye and to insist the President do the same and 
understand things have changed. That requires us to adjust course. It 
requires us to ask of the American people that we have a common purpose 
together and work together and join together--yes, to support our 
soldiers, to support those in the gulf region who are rebuilding, to 
support those in this country who have no health insurance, to support 
those in this country who are jobless so we lift America up and make 
America better. That is our responsibility.
  That will not happen by a message coming from the White House or from 
this Congress that nothing has changed, that our responsibility is to 
continue to press to see if we cannot give higher tax cuts, more tax 
cuts. At a time when we are borrowing money to fund a war and we are 
going to borrow money for reconstruction for Iraq, to give more tax 
cuts for the upper income people in America--why? Because those who do 
believe that America works when you dump something on top and it 
filters down--that is called trickle down economics.
  I had a guy in North Dakota write me some while ago who said: I have 
been listening to all this trickle down nonsense for a long time and I 
ain't even damp.
  The fact is, trickle down does not work. What works in this country 
is percolate up economics. You give the American people something to 
work with: A job and opportunity and hope.
  When America goes to work, America does just fine. But, as I said, 
you have to look truth in the eye. And when this President says nothing 
has changed, he is wrong. My hope is that Republicans and Democrats 
will understand two things: Yes, we need to tighten our belts. Yes, we 
need to cut some spending. Yes, we need to decide when we are going to 
have to start paying taxes once again, and that we have a common 
purpose, and our common purpose

[[Page S10205]]

ought to be to work together and march together toward a common goal.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask to be given 10 minutes from the 
Democratic morning business and that I be notified when I have consumed 
9 minutes of the 10.
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator will be notified.

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