[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 29 (Thursday, February 12, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2184-S2209]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
STIMULUS PACKAGE
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, the stimulus bill is the subject of
discussion. There are some things we know about it and some we don't.
We know, for example, it is a massive amount of money, almost $800
billion. These are numbers we throw around. But according to the
Politico newspaper last month, this is more than we spent on Iraq, more
than we spent on Afghanistan, more than we spent going to the Moon in
today's dollars, and more than the Federal Government spent in the
entire New Deal in today's dollars. It's a massive amount of money. It
is not like some of the money we were authorizing to be spent in
October and November, when we were giving the Department of the
Treasury, in effect, a line of credit to help financial institutions
begin to lend again so people could get auto loans. This is money we
are spending. It goes out the door. We have to pay it back. It adds to
the national debt. It took from the founding of our country all the way
to the late 1970s to accumulate a national debt as large as the amount
of money we are spending in this bill. We have been moving rapidly on
this legislation. It is not only spending. The amount of money spent
for education is such that it may be the largest Federal education bill
we have ever passed in terms of dollars. The amount of money spent for
energy is enough that it will be one of the largest Energy bills. The
amount of money spent for Medicaid in the House and Senate bills,
nearly $90 billion over 2 years to the States, may completely distort
the discussion we are about to have on national health care policy.
These are all topics that normally we would take weeks to consider.
For example, if we are going to add $40 billion to a Department of
Education that only spends $68 billion today, we would ask the
question: $40 billion for more of the same, or do we have some better
ideas about how we might reward outstanding teachers or give teachers
more discretion or parents more choices of schools?
I ask the assistant Republican leader from Arizona, this is one of
the most important, massive bills. Republicans want a stimulus package.
We have made clear we think we ought to start by fixing housing first,
letting people keep more of their own money, and confining the spending
to only those projects that create jobs.
I ask the Senator from Arizona, where are we? Has he had an
opportunity to read the legislation to know how much is being spent,
how much is actually targeted for jobs, and how temporary that
targeting might be?
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, we do not know yet. I received an e-mail that
said the Speaker of the House would be holding a press conference
sometime in about an hour. I assume that, therefore, by then they will
actually have produced the bill, that there will actually be a bill she
can then share with her colleagues in the House and then would come
over here and we could begin to read as well.
The answer to the first question is, despite all the discussion, we
don't know yet exactly what is in it, how much it is, and what the
long-term consequences will be. We do know from news media that certain
things in the bill that passed the Senate have been changed. We are
also told the basic amount is somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 or
$30 billion less than the House-passed bill. If that is true, we can
make some rough guesses. I will be happy to share what the
Congressional Budget Office says about those guesses about future
amounts of money.
If I may indulge by setting one bit of background first, when the
Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan staff for the Congress,
develops their cost estimates, they base it on what the language of the
bill is and how the bill needs to work in the future. They always
provide us with a 10-year cost. That is particularly important because
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we hear about the cost of the bill, and we assume that is all there is.
The truth is, there is a lot of cost that isn't calculated into the
bill. When we hear about a bill that is $790 billion or $820 billion,
that is not the true cost.
I will give an example. One of the programs in the bill expands
Medicaid. It is called the FMAP increase in Medicaid. That went through
the Finance Committee. For about 25 years, they calculate the cost of
expanding the eligibility for Medicaid. Then they simply assume,
because the cost was getting to be too big, that it stops at that
point. For the rest of the 5 years for the 10-year total, in effect,
the program goes away. Everybody knows the program is not going away.
One program that is not going away is Medicaid. The eligible people on
Medicaid are not going to suddenly be wiped off the program. Obviously,
Congress will continue the program. What CBO had to do is calculate not
only the first-year cost or the 5-year cost but what will it cost over
10 years. They have done the same thing with Head Start, Early Head
Start, title I education--incidentally, there is something about all
these programs; they do not in any way create jobs or stimulate
economic growth, as they are social programs deemed to be a good thing
but having nothing to do with stimulus--the LIHEAP program, the
National Institutes of Health, COBRA insurance coverage, Medicaid, and
other programs.
What CBO did was to take the House bill and calculate the true cost
over the 10-year period. When one does that, it jumps from $820 billion
to over $2.5 trillion. Then add in the interest payments on that amount
which are about $744 billion. The total deficit impact, then, over the
10-year period would be $3.27 trillion. Assume that the bill might be
slightly less expensive than what CBO is estimating, it is still,
obviously, going to be in the neighborhood of $3 trillion over 10
years.
It is important to look at expenses over an extended period because,
as the Senator noted, this is borrowed money. This is not money we have
today. We are borrowing it. Therefore, the long-term consequences of
that borrowing are important. What the CBO also said was that by the
10th year, we are actually going to be creating negative economic
growth. The GDP will grow by between .1 and .3 of a percent less in the
year 2019 than it would if we hadn't even passed this bill.
I compare it to kids eating sugar. They get a sugar high. They have
all kinds of energy for a while. But when they crash, we have seen what
that can be. While some of this might be stimulative early on, once the
sugar high is gone, we are going to be left with the longer term
consequences. Over this 10-year period the CBO has to calculate, we are
talking about getting into negative economic growth, over $3 trillion
in cost.
The question is, At that point, what is that going to do to our
economy? I don't think anybody can say it is good news. But it is the
kind of thing we have been talking about, to think about the long-term
consequences of what we are doing. If one is gambling with a couple
hundred million, that is one thing. Start gambling with $3 trillion,
one better be right. I don't think anybody can say, with any degree of
certainty, that what is in this legislation we can doggone guarantee is
going to work and be worth the expenditure.
Mr. ALEXANDER. As I listen to the Senator, what occurs to me is, we
have some laws about truth in labeling, truth in packaging. This bill
wouldn't meet any definition I have ever seen. The whole argument for
this legislation is, we are in an economic downturn. We Republicans
know that. Americans are hurting. We feel that too. So we thought, what
can we do to help make a difference? The thought was, fix housing
first. We suggested lower interest rate mortgages. We suggested, with
the leadership of Senator Isakson, a $15,000 tax credit for home buyers
for the next 2 years to create more demand to stabilize home values.
Those ideas would have been actually stimulative. But most of the
legislation the Senator from Arizona talks about is very different.
Medicaid would come up in the regular appropriations process.
As I am thinking about it, what has the Senator heard about one of
the aspects of this bill that would be actually stimulative, the one I
mentioned, Senator Isakson's proposal for a tax credit of $15,000 for
home buyers, so that if they bought a home, they would get $15,000 off
their taxes, cash in their pocket, as a way of stimulating the market?
Is that in the compromise legislation?
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I say to my colleague, obviously, we don't
know because we haven't read it. But what my staff believes, from
contact they have had with other staff, is that in order to make room
for a bunch of other spending, that incentive program has been slashed.
The amount of money has at least been cut in half. The people eligible
to take advantage of it have been narrowed to first-time home buyers.
There would be an income cap. I think now that CBO would score that
somewhere in the neighborhood of about $2 billion, meaning that the
impact of it on the economy could not be particularly significant.
May I mention one other thing, because it reminded me of another idea
that we had. We had a lot of good ideas because we wanted to make sure
this would work. We mentioned, several of us, the fact that 80 percent
of the jobs are created by small business. So we looked in the bill to
see where the relief would be targeted to small businesses to encourage
them to hire more folks. When we finally found what was in there, it
amounted to .8 of 1 percent of all of tax provisions in here that could
be utilized by small business, hiring 80 percent of the jobs. Only .8
of 1 percent of the bill is dedicated to those kind of businesses as
tax relief.
So when we talk about targeted, well, our idea of targeting relief
obviously does not comport with the authors of the bill, and that is
another one of the real questions and concerns we have about this
legislation.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, if I could ask the Senator from Arizona
one more question.
Over the last couple days, we have heard testimony from the Secretary
of Treasury about the importance of moving now to help strengthen
financial institutions so they can lend money, so people can buy cars,
buy homes, send their kids to college. We have heard about the
importance of the housing plan that is coming. We have heard numbers of
$1 trillion, $2.5 trillion. We have had testimony from experts outside
the administration who have estimated that the so-called bad bank
option for taking toxic assets out of banks might need $2 trillion and
that we ought to capitalize that bank at several hundred billion
dollars.
I ask the Senator, is it possible, if we spend the whole piggy bank
on this so-called stimulus package, we will not have the dollars left
to get the economy moving again by fixing housing and strengthening our
financial institutions?
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I say to the Senator from Tennessee, a friend
of mine has a saying that probably applies here: You broke the code.
That is one of the big problems. We know we are going to need a massive
amount of money to deal with the housing problem and to deal with the
credit problem so when you go to the bank, they will have money to lend
to you.
Because this so-called stimulus bill is taking so much borrowed
money--well over a trillion dollars just in the first 2 years; $3
trillion over 10 years--there is a real question about how much money
we can afford to spend on these other things that, as you note, are
absolutely critical. There will come a point in time when the people
who buy U.S. debt--primarily foreign governments and foreign entities
now--are going to believe we are so heavily in debt they are not going
to trust our debt or be willing to give us as good a rate on that debt,
the result of which there will come a tipping point when we cannot
afford to borrow anymore. By, in effect, wasting a lot of it on this
stimulus bill, I think the Senator's question is exactly on point: Will
we have what is necessary when the real time comes?
If I could finish with an analogy. Some of my friends on the other
side have said: Well, when the house is on fire, you just go put it
out. You don't worry about how much water it takes or whatever. Well,
that is fine, unless the fire is going to spread to the second house
and the third house and the fourth house. You better not waste all your
water on the first house. That is the essence of the question from the
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Senator from Tennessee, and I think it is a very good point. I thank
him.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Or to put it another way: Don't dump the water out on
the street and fertilize the field if you need to throw it on the
house.
Mr. KYL. Right.
Mr. ALEXANDER. We have a limited amount of water, a limited amount of
money. I note the Senator from Arizona as well as I both voted to give
President Obama the money he needed to work on housing and to work on
financial institutions, and we may have to do it again. So it is not
just a matter of saying no to proposals; it is a matter of being
greatly disappointed this legislation is not targeted, is not
temporary.
The Senator from Wyoming is in the Chamber. He has been an
outstanding spokesman on the importance of the stimulus legislation,
how to fashion that. I ask the Senator from Wyoming, as he looks at
this legislation--and I know we have not yet seen the entire
compromise--but how satisfied is he the legislation focuses on the
problem that will actually create new jobs for Americans in a short
period of time?
Mr. BARRASSO. Well, Mr. President, that is my biggest concern. I make
a point of getting home to Wyoming every weekend. I have been to
Wyoming just last weekend and the weekend before that and the weekend
before that and this is what the people of Wyoming want to know. Is
this money going to be well spent? Are they going to get value for
their taxpayer dollars?
Similar to the other Members of this body, I have not yet seen a copy
of the final proposal. But I think the answer, from what I see of the
little snippets, is the value is not there for taxpayers. In today's
Investor's Business Daily there is a front-page story, and the headline
is ``Stimulus Bill Funds Programs Deemed `Ineffective' by OMB''--the
Office of Management and Budget. Stimulus bill funds programs deemed
ineffective.
Well, if they are going to be ineffective at stimulating the economy,
my question is: Why are they in a stimulus bill? The people at home get
it right. This past Saturday I was at a Boys & Girls Clubs function. We
had 700 people trying to help our Positive Place For Kids in the
community, and many of them talked to me about this and said: We want
to help. We want a program that will succeed. We need a program that
will help our Nation and will help our economy. But they say, every
dollar you put into this that is not really targeted and timely--and
then, of course, temporary--every dollar that is spent that is not
stimulating the economy is an extra dollar we or our kids or our
grandkids are going to owe to people from around the world--owe to the
Chinese, owe to others--and that is not the way to have a strong
economy for our Nation.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I wonder if I might ask the Senator, he
has been especially effective as a spokesman for the importance of
fixing housing first. Many of us, especially on this side, believe
housing got us into this mess and helping housing restart will get us
out of the mess. Can you explain why there seems to be, in a nearly $1
trillion bill, so little focus on housing?
Mr. BARRASSO. Well, I think they did not focus where they should have
put the focus, which is where we got into the problem in the first
place and that was housing. I believe this body said unanimously we
need to fix housing first, and we put in a significant amount of money:
a $15,000 tax credit, tax relief for people who buy a house, to get the
economy moving in the area that got us into the problem in the first
place. Then--while we have not seen the bill yet--that has been
stripped away, I understand, in this new compromise between the House
and the Senate, and they have taken billions out of it, to a very small
number, where it is $8,000 for certain, limited numbers of first-time
home buyers.
So there is a significant decrease in dealing with housing. But there
is money in for all sorts of other things that will not effectively
help our economy, and that is what I have trouble with. I am looking
for something I can support, can vote for. President Clinton's economic
adviser, Alice Rivlin, said there should be something much smaller,
something that is targeted at the problem. Because, to me, this seems
rushed. We are making rushed judgments on energy, education, health
care that, to me, do not belong in a stimulus package. We should be
focused on what got us into the problem in the first place. That, to
me, is housing.
So we can go on about other problems I see with this legislation.
People all say to me: Hey, how are you going to judge success? I say:
Well, the American people are going to judge success. They will be the
ones to decide whether this will be a successful program. If people
believe things are working and the Government is working for them, then
terrific. But if the people of America feel the burden of this whole
package--the burden is on them with inflation, with increased taxes,
with less buying power, with more Government rules--well, then, the
people of America will judge this to not be a successful package.
But whether it is throwing water on a fire or breaking the piggy
bank, the people of Wyoming think of this as we are using so much
money, we are shooting all our bullets at once, and we are not going to
have any ammunition left over if we have to come after this again.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Wyoming for
his leadership, especially as a spokesman on the importance of fixing
housing first, which we believe the American people have gotten that
message, but apparently the majority writing this bill has not gotten
that message.
The Senator from South Dakota has arrived. He is vice chairman of the
Republican conference, one of the leaders, too, in this debate. I have
heard him speak about the importance of this legislation for stimulus
being temporary and targeted. Actually, to give credit where credit is
due, I believe we borrowed that phrase from the Speaker of the House,
who said last year that stimulus packages, programs to create jobs for
the American people, should meet the test of temporary, timely, and
targeted.
I ask the Senator from South Dakota, specifically in light of the
McCain amendment, which was offered--which you may want to describe--
whether he looks at this compromise which is coming our way as
temporary, timely, and targeted on the problem of creating jobs for
Americans?
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I appreciate the Senator from Tennessee
yielding and the comments of my colleague from Wyoming in focusing this
debate where it should be, on things that are actually stimulus, that
actually do create jobs in the economy, that actually do stimulate the
economy and create growth and economic opportunity for more Americans.
I would say to my colleague from Tennessee that there are lots of
things about this bill that do not meet that criteria, that do not meet
that definition. You used the phrase ``timely, targeted, and
temporary.'' I would argue that much of the substance of this bill is
much different than that. In fact, it is slow, it is unfocused, and it
is unending.
Again, we do not know exactly what is in it, unfortunately, because
we have yet to see the bill. All we know is it is going to be somewhere
in the neighborhood of $800 billion in face amount. When you add in the
interest to that--some $350 billion--you are talking about almost $1.2
trillion in obligations we are handing off to future generations.
I think whenever you talk about that, you need to make sure you are
understanding what you are getting for that amount of investment and
what that means to future generations. For example, a lot of people do
not realize or think about the debt we have today. The gross Federal
debt is $10.7 trillion. Now, that means that every man, woman, and
child in the United States owes approximately $35,000. That is their
personal part of the Federal debt. CBO projects the fiscal year 2009
deficit to be $1.2 trillion before--before--any additional stimulus
measures are considered. So when you start adding that in, the deficit
as a percentage of our gross domestic product will be 10 percent, which
is the highest level--the last time we saw that kind of a deficit-to-
GDP ratio was back in 1945 when it was 8 percent. That is the amount of
debt we are talking about.
I heard my colleague from Tennessee say before that this generation
of
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Americans will be the first generation of Americans who will not have
the same standard of living as their parents. If you think about what
we are doing, we are making matters much worse. We have a lot of young
people out there who do not have a voice in this debate. I would
characterize them as the ``silent generation'' who are not going to be
heard. Somebody needs to be their voice in this debate too. Somebody
needs to bring some rhyme or reason to what is happening here and hope
we can get something reasonable passed through the Senate that is
focused on job creation, that is temporary, that is targeted, that is
timely--all the things we have talked about should be but this bill is
not.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, if I could ask the Senator from South
Dakota: As I recall, Senator McCain offered one amendment which almost
all of us voted for, which was very targeted and cost about $400
billion, but he also offered another amendment which would have
guaranteed that whatever was passed actually be temporary.
Mr. THUNE. Yes, that is correct. We had an opportunity to vote on a
number of alternatives. The McCain alternative, which you and I both
supported, was one that, in my judgment, made a lot of sense because it
got you about twice the effectiveness, twice the job creation, at half
the cost.
It was focused, as you mentioned earlier, and as our colleague from
Wyoming mentioned, on the central issue of housing, which is so
critical to bringing our economy back on a pathway to recovery. It also
focused on tax relief for middle-income Americans and for small
businesses which are responsible for creating most of the jobs in this
country. It had an appropriate focus on infrastructure, which many of
us agree is an area that can create jobs. It also had a trigger in
there, a hard trigger that said when you have two consecutive quarters
of economic growth, the spending would cease or would terminate. In
other words, when we start to get our way out of the recession, we
would actually bring some fiscal responsibility to this debate.
What troubles me about where we are going with this particular bill
right now is it does not have that. In fact, much of the spending in
here is long term and extends well beyond the so-called period we are
looking at in terms of getting some stimulus into the economy. Many of
the commitments that are made, many of the obligations will be
obligations we are going to experience for months and years to come.
Much of the spending in the bill is on what we call mandatory spending;
in other words, spending that will be factored into the baseline and
that we are going to be responsible for going into the future.
Senator McCain's amendment would have addressed that issue. It would
have brought some fiscal responsibility to this proposal.
Unfortunately, it was defeated. But that being said, there are lots of
things in here that still I think the average American, when they look
at this, they will wonder: What is Washington doing, and why are they
spending money on these sorts of things?
I am looking here at another proposal: $750 million for the
replacement of the Social Security Administration's National Computer
Center. Now, that is almost a billion dollars we are talking about, and
you have to ask the question: What does this do to create jobs? How is
it that this in any way stimulates anything other than perhaps some
jobs in a government agency in Washington, DC? We have $2.5 billion to
turn Federal buildings into green buildings; $1 billion for the U.S.
Census; $850 million in new subsidies for Amtrak; $650 million in
additional funds for digital TV conversion boxes; $645 million for new
and repaired facilities at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration; $448 million for the headquarters of the Department of
Homeland Security in Washington; $300 million for new cars for
government workers; $228 million to the State Department for
information technology upgrades; $125 million for the Washington, DC,
sewer system; $20 million for the removal of fish barriers. These are
all things that are included. I forgot this one: $3 million tax benefit
for golf carts, electric motorcycles, and ATVs, provided they don't
exceed 25 miles per hour. These are all things that are in this
legislation, and I think it would be very hard to convince the majority
of the American people these have anything to do with stimulus.
Furthermore, as the Senator from Tennessee has very appropriately
pointed out on many occasions, with some of the spending in here, what
the States are asking for in terms of assistance--because many of them
have shortfalls in their budget. My State is an example of Medicaid now
constituting a bigger portion of our State's budget. It was 15.83
percent of the State's budget in 2000, and in 2008 it was 23.33 percent
of the budget--a dramatic increase. What we are talking about is
sending a lot more money out there. I have heard the Senator from
Tennessee talk about it as the States asking for a life raft, and we
are sending them the yacht from Washington, DC--
Mr. ALEXANDER. And we are going down to the bank and borrowing the
money in their name?
Mr. THUNE.--to do it, almost eight times the amount of money they
would need just to cover additional enrollment due to the downturn.
Eight times the amount the States would need to get that done is what
we are going to be shipping out there and, as the Senator from
Tennessee mentioned, borrowing from future generations and piling on to
that $35,000 that every man, woman, and child in America already owes
as their part or their share of the Federal debt.
This is a very bad direction, in my view, to be heading for the
country. I think we have had some opportunities to improve the bill, to
make it better. We have had some alternatives offered. The McCain
alternative which the Senator mentioned was one that I think, again,
was very well balanced, focused on housing and tax relief and
infrastructure and had the kind of fiscal responsibility and discipline
in it that makes sure a lot of the spending doesn't go on ad
infinitum--forever.
So I would concur with the points and the arguments that have been
made by my colleague from Tennessee and say that we ought to be
thinking not just about today but about the next generation because we
have always had a history in this country--for 200 years Americans have
sacrificed to make the next generation's lives better, to create a
better life for our children and grandchildren. We are asking our
children and grandchildren to sacrifice for us. That is a reversal of
200 years of American history. For generation after generation after
generation, we have attempted to build a better, brighter, more
prosperous future for our children and grandchildren. What we are
essentially asking them to do is to loan us $1 trillion to do these
things--some of which I mentioned and that I think are just completely
outside the realm of anything that fits within the mission of job
creation or stimulating the economy--at enormous cost to them because
it is going to pile additional debt on top of the $35,000 they already
owe, their share of the Federal debt we have today.
So I hope in the end people will come to the realization that this is
a mistake and that we will see the necessary votes to defeat it and
perhaps go back to the drawing board and put something together that
really does, in fact, address the fundamental problem we are facing in
the country right now, to get the focus back on housing, to get the
focus back on the American people and families and small businesses,
and to make sure we are doing it in a fiscally responsible way.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from South Dakota. I imagine my 30
minutes has expired, but seeing none of my colleagues, I ask unanimous
consent for up to 10 more minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from South Dakota
for his eloquent words. The numbers being thrown around are so huge--
and numbers get thrown around so often in Washington, DC--that it is
sometimes hard to distinguish between $1 million and $1 trillion or $1
billion or $10.
One thing I was thinking of as the Senator from South Dakota was
speaking, I believe he said as much as 10 percent of the gross domestic
product of the United States would be the size of this year's Federal
deficit. What that means is, this country--even in these
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bad times--is such a marvelous country that we will produce about 25
percent of all of the money in the world just for Americans, 5 percent
of the people in the world. So what we are saying is, just this year we
are going to run up a debt of 10 percent of 25 percent of all of the
money in the world and add it to the national debt we already have and
which we already know we are going to be increasing because of the
responsibilities we have to try to help fix housing and encourage the
financial institutions to support the efforts that the President is
making to get the economy moving again.
What we are asking is, why would we spend the whole piggybank on a $1
trillion piece of legislation that isn't targeted to create jobs when
we have so many other pressing responsibilities for this limited amount
of borrowed money--namely, fixing housing and getting lending moving
again? That is where we would put our attention. So we have a lot of
questions about the bill.
As the Senator from South Dakota said, Republicans offered our
legislation, which was voted down, and it focused on housing, it
focused on letting people keep more of their own money and on a limited
amount of spending for targeted, job-creating infrastructure projects.
That saved $500 or $600 billion which could have been reserved for
housing, for lending, or to reduce the debt. But this bill, I am
afraid--and we will know more about it as it comes--is mostly spending
instead of mostly stimulus. Not enough of the jobs come quickly enough
to make as much difference as this borrowed money should make. Even
most of the tax cuts in the bill aren't stimulative. They may be
welcome, they may leave 13 more dollars in your paycheck each week. But
is running up the debt this much more worth that? This is a lot of
money--according to one report, more than the Federal Government spent
in the entire New Deal, more than we spent in Iraq, more than we spent
in Afghanistan, and we should spend this money carefully.
As the Senators from South Dakota and Arizona have pointed out, what
happens after 2 years? The Senate rejected our amendment that said once
the economy recovers, the new spending stops so we don't continue to
run up an unimaginable debt.
States are having trouble and in a shortfall. Tennessee has a $900
million shortfall this year. But we are sending Tennessee, according to
the latest estimates--even with the cuts and the compromise--about $3.8
billion. We are establishing policy without even thinking about it. In
this legislation, which has never been to the authorization committees,
we are having possibly the largest, I believe, Federal education bill
in our history in terms of dollars. We are having one of the largest
health care bills. We are having one of the largest energy bills. That
is not the way we make energy, education, and health care policy--just
by passing an appropriations bill with a huge amount of money.
We are very disappointed about the lack of bipartisanship. We respect
our new President. We want him to succeed because if he succeeds, our
country succeeds. We expected that in this first major piece of
legislation, a number of us would sit down on both sides of the aisle
and compare our notes and say: Let's go forward. We know the Democrats
have the majority and we have the minority, and so more of their ideas
are going to be included than more of our ideas, but 58 Democrats and 3
Republicans is not a bipartisan effort. That is not the way we do
things around here.
The way we do things in a bipartisan way around here is when we had
the Energy bill in 2005 and Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman
worked side by side. All ideas were considered. We had our votes. It
took weeks and we got a big result. Another example is when we passed
the America COMPETES Act and we worked side by side, or even with a
contentious area such as intelligence surveillance when Senator Bond
and Senator Rockefeller worked side by side and we came to a conclusion
together. The American people gained more confidence in what we could
do and in the result that we came to. I am afraid in this case we have
not had that kind of bipartisanship.
What I fear is that this is not a good sign for the future because
this is the easy piece of legislation. This is the first major proposal
from the President. This is just a spending bill, albeit a massive
spending bill. Next comes health care and controlling entitlements and
whether we want to authorize more money to take bad assets out of banks
and to help housing. Next comes whether we want to pass this version of
climate change or that version of climate change. All of these are
difficult pieces of legislation.
I have said on this floor before that President Bush technically did
not have to have broad-based congressional support to wage the war in
Iraq because he was the Commander in Chief. So he went ahead, and it
made the war more difficult. It made his Presidency less successful.
``We won the election, we will write the bill'' is not a recipe for
resolving a difficult problem or for a successful Presidency.
I would hope we can either do as the South Dakota Senator said, which
is start over again on this bill and retarget it, make it temporary,
make it timely, and save hundreds of billions of dollars while focusing
on housing and lending. That somehow we can get the Congress on track
with the President so that when we say bipartisan, we do bipartisan,
and we don't have an attitude that says, in effect: We won the
election; we will write the bill.
Unless the Senator from South Dakota has additional comments--I am
finished with mine, so I yield the floor and yield to him.
Mr. THUNE. Who controls the time, Mr. President?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Senators are authorized to speak for up to 10 minutes each.
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to use up to that
amount of time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. THUNE. Again, to my colleague from Tennessee, I thank him for his
leadership on this issue and particularly for bringing to the forefront
of the debate the housing issue which, as so many have mentioned
already, really is an integral, essential part of the solution. If we
don't deal with that, then I think we are not going to be able to lead
our country out of the recession. I don't think anybody will dispute
the fact that housing played a very important role in where we are
today, and I think trying to recover is going to require a good amount
of focus and attention on that issue which, in this bill, is very
light. In fact, if you look at what is included in the bill--let me
see--1 percent of the Senate bill goes toward fixing housing. Even the
$15,000 new home buyer credit that was reportedly cut in half in the
final version of the bill, I am told--and I don't know the answer to
this because I have not seen the final bill, nor, I don't think, have
any of us seen the details in it--that entire housing tax credit may,
in fact, be gone which would eliminate any commitment to helping to
repair that aspect of our economy--the housing sector of the economy--
which I think is going to be so important in helping us to recover.
So 1 percent of the Senate bill goes toward housing currently, 2.3
percent of the Senate bill goes toward small business tax relief, and,
as I mentioned before, small businesses create two-thirds or three-
fourths of all of the new jobs in our economy. It seems to me at least
that ought to be a very proper and important focus of this legislation.
Of course, some of the alternatives we voted on last week, one of
which was the McCain alternative which we referenced earlier, did
include a significant amount of incentive for small businesses to
invest and to create jobs. I offered a couple of tax amendments to a
couple of alternatives to the bill which really did focus on tax relief
for middle-income families and for small businesses. That, of course,
was defeated as well.
I guess my point is, the bill as we have it in front of us is going
to be very much oriented toward spending, and spending on government
programs and spending which, in many cases, doesn't go away; that isn't
temporary, that, in fact, makes obligations and commitments and
liabilities well into the future. We talked about up to about $200
billion of funding in the bill being what we call mandatory spending;
in other words, spending that is built into the baseline, that isn't
temporary, and it is hard to see how that
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fits into the definition of temporary, targeted, and timely, which was
the criteria that was set out by the President and by the Democratic
leadership in developing this bill in the first place.
The Senator from Tennessee, when he touched upon the amount of money
his State of Tennessee will receive and what the State's need is--and I
would repeat what I said earlier, that under this bill, we are not
giving States what they have estimated their amount is to cover the
increased Medicaid enrollment due to the economic downturn.
We are giving them--if you can believe this--almost eight times the
amount of money they would need to cover additional enrollment due to
the economic downturn. Why? States, of course, aren't going to refuse
it. Which Governor out there will turn down additional resources? It is
estimated that States would need about $11 billion in additional
funding to cover enrollment-driven growth in State Medicaid Programs.
Under this bill, we provide $87 billion with absolutely no strings
attached and no requirements that States get their own spending and
fraud and abuse under control. I hope we have pointed out--and we will
continue to point out--the ways in which the funding under this bill is
being spent. Again, I mention some of the particular earmarks here,
much of which go to Government agencies: $20 million for the removal of
fish barriers; $300 million for new cars for Government workers; $645
million for new and repaired facilities at the NOAA; and $750 million
for the new computer center for the Social Security Administration.
It is hard to argue that these things are stimulus. Perhaps they are
needed and, in fact, perhaps ought to be debated, but it ought to be
done in the regular order, handled through the normal annual
appropriations process, not included in a bill that is being sold to
the American people as stimulating the economy and creating jobs. There
is little in here I can see that meets that definition.
I want to make a final point with regard to the whole issue of job
creation, because the CBO, in a letter dated February 11, 2009, clearly
describes the false economic theories behind this Government spending
bill. The CBO letter encompasses the majority of the economists' views
on this legislation. Specifically, the letter states that beyond the
year 2014, this legislation is estimated to reduce gross domestic
product by up to two-tenths of 1 percent. The reduction in GDP is
therefore estimated to be reflected in lower wages, rather than lower
employment. Workers will be less productive because the capital stock
is smaller. The legislation's long-run impact on output also would
depend on whether it permanently changed incentives to work or save.
The legislation would not have any significant permanent effects on
those incentives.
Those are quotes from the CBO letter that came out last week. Even
the most optimistic CBO projection states that long-run GDP growth will
increase by zero percent. Even the most optimistic projection is built
on an assumption that all of the relevant investments, on average,
would add as much to output as would a comparable amount of private
investment.
The Government spending included in the House and Senate bills
doesn't change GDP at all due to Government spending crowding out
private investment.
Most of us would agree--I think most of us on this side would agree--
that we are much better served in terms of creating economic growth and
jobs, in seeing that the jobs are created in the private sector, and
that we are providing the necessary incentives for investments in new
jobs. This bill is very light on the types of incentives that would
lead small businesses to go out and invest and do the sorts of things
that actually will create jobs and help us recover and build a better
and more prosperous future for our children and grandchildren which, as
I said earlier, in my view, is in serious jeopardy because of this
legislation--primarily because of the enormous amount of borrowing it
includes and how much it adds to the debt for every man, woman, and
child in America, and $35,000 is that share of the debt. Under this
bill, that would grow $2,700 per every man, woman, and child in
America.
What we are doing to future generations is wrong, it is not fair to
them. This Government needs to learn to live within its means. We need
to think about building and sacrificing so that our children and
grandchildren and future generations will have a brighter future. That
is the way it has always been in this country. It is part of our
culture and ethic that we work hard and sacrifice so that future
generations can have a brighter and better future. This completely
turns that whole history, that legacy, we have as a nation on its head
by asking future generations to sacrifice for us. That is the wrong
thing to do.
I hope we will reject this legislation and go back to the drawing
board and do something that is effective and creates jobs and does work
and will give the American taxpayer a good return on their investment.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas is recognized.
Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I want to join my colleagues and
discuss the spending package that will be back in front of us--the $800
billion but, with interest, probably $1.2 trillion, which will be in
the package, and it will all be borrowed--every cent of it. We don't
have that money presently. So we are going to be borrowing it to do
this.
A couple of things strike me. One, we learned last fall--and there is
an old saying that is true in government and certainly with individuals
as well, which is ``haste makes waste.'' I grew up with that saying.
People say, look, if you hurry at this and you don't get it right, you
are going to have to do it again. We saw that last fall with TARP. We
put in $750 billion because they said we have to do it now and we have
to do it fast. But at the end of the day, that haste made waste. The
Treasury Department went pillar to post, saying we are going to do this
or we are going to do that, and they ended up spending the money. Now
we are looking at TARP II and the banks still need help. I have a lot
of people back home saying: What happened to the first hundreds of
billions of dollars you gave the banks? Haste makes waste. We saw it
then.
There is no reason for us to rush to get this wrong on the stimulus
package. Yes, we need a stimulus package. My State needs a stimulus
package. This country needs it. We need a stimulus package, not a
spending bill. If we slow down a little bit--I think we should refer
this back to the Committees on Finance and the Appropriations and put a
requirement on it that every dollar spent must yield at least $1.50 in
economic activity over and above what is spent.
We should make it a stimulus bill, not a spending bill. We have not
done that. We are hastily putting this forward. I believe, tragically,
we will be wastefully putting it out. There will be a number of
programs that can use the funds, I have no doubt about that. But if the
target is to get this economy off its knees and moving forward, we have
to hit that target and not a multiple set of targets, and not a set of
spending targets that are not stimulative in nature.
There is another saying that President Reagan was fond of using, and
it was that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary Government
program. That was his experience and it has been mine as well. Once
something gets started, it is hard to stop, because it gets a
constituency built up around it, and people build up their expectations
and infrastructure around it. When you go to eliminate it once it has
started, it is like, wait a minute, now this has a multiplier impact on
a broader cross-section of individuals. That is why there is nothing so
permanent as a temporary Government program.
I think that is probably why some people are looking at starting
things under the guise of stimulus that are, in actuality, starting new
Federal spending programs with the hope that infrastructure builds up
around it and in future years, when it goes to be cut, people will say
you cannot do this because it will have this multiplier impact. That is
the history of the Federal Government and its growth.
According to a CBO analysis, if most of the new spending programs
enacted under the proposed stimulus were to become long-term spending
programs--and that is our history and what we have seen in the past--
the cost of the
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stimulus package would rise to $2.5 trillion over the next decade, and
$3.3 trillion if you include interest payments on that debt. We are
borrowing every cent. You are looking at long-term spending in the $3.3
trillion category. If you do and you look at a rough outline of this,
you are going to move the Federal Government from about 20 percent of
the economy, which it has been, up to 25 and possibly 30 percent of the
economy. At what time do you come to the tipping point? And that is
before you add in the baby boomers retiring and the increased costs in
Medicare, and when that baby boomer generation is retired and using the
Government programs instead of paying into them. You will get to a
tipping point where people cannot afford the tax structure that is
needed underneath that. That is not wise for us to do.
In this stimulus bill, we will take the Federal debt in private hands
relative to our gross domestic product from below 40 percent of GDP to
move it well over 60 percent of GDP. So that will be like saying I have
a job and I make $100,000 a year, and I borrowed $40,000 that I am
paying on, and now I am going to jump it to $60,000. You are looking at
that in this soft economy and saying, is that a smart thing to do? Most
people would say, no, that is not the right thing to do. You want to
try to stimulate things, not harm them.
Finally is this thought: I don't believe that hastily constructed
bills such as this one being sold as stimulative is a plan to help our
economy weather this recession. It strikes me as a highly leveraged,
speculative bet on larger Government and massive long-term spending as
a cure to our economic woes. We have seen what the aftermath of highly
leveraged speculative bets can bring. That is what we have gotten into
in the first place, where you have had highly speculative leveraged
events taking place in the housing market and expanding into credit
card use, into automobile loans. A number of homes were bought with 100
or 110 percent borrowing, and they thought the appreciation would pay
for that. Those were completely leveraged events. That doesn't bring
economic prosperity; it brings bubbles. I don't think you are even
going to see that with this one. You are going to see long-term costs.
We are going to see speculative debt with the Government using our
children as leverage. Is that the way we want to go?
Clearly, the people in my State believe no, and they believe we need
a stimulus package, and that we need to work together on a bipartisan
package. We should take it through the regular order, through the
Appropriations Committee and the Finance Committee, and hold hearings
on it, look at what actually works, set a criteria on this. When we had
this very rapid, hastily put together TARP legislation--and everybody
is mad about that now--we didn't hold hearings on it. We did it quickly
and in closed sessions. Out pops the package, and now we are back at
it. I think we will be back at this one also if we don't do what we
need to do. But only our ammo box will be empty. We are not going to
have anything in it, because haste makes waste. We rush out there
trying to get it done and we don't work the process and work together
on it. We are not going to hit the target and that will be sad for the
American public.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. DORGAN. 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. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in
morning business for 20 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there has been a generous amount of
discussion on the floor today about the economic recovery package that
has been put together and about the dire conditions of our economy. If
you listen, they have been described in so many different ways--
financial crisis, deep recession, economic trouble, a wreck, a dire
condition--and I suspect almost anybody who has been experiencing
trouble in the workplace as a result of this rather steep economic
decline would understand all of those terms.
I have been listening to the debate on the floor of the Senate, and I
had to come to see if we could add a little clarity to what has caused
all this. It is pretty hard to describe a remedy unless you understand
what has caused it.
I understand from a lot of discussion a bit ago that there are a lot
of people who don't want to do anything or they want to do something
much less or they are not sure. In any event, I was thinking of how
many people in the Senate lined up to help the banks. The Treasury
Secretary said we have to pass legislation to help the big Wall Street
banks. He said we have to pass a 3-page bill in 3 days for $750
billion. Boy, there was a big-old traffic jam trying to get up here to
the well to vote in favor of that legislation, helping out all the big
banks with hundreds of billions of dollars. Now we are talking about
helping someone else out, helping out folks who need jobs, and all of a
sudden, there is a big problem. Mr. President, $700 billion to bail out
big banks and steer this economy in the ditch--that is OK, big traffic
jam to do that, but some money to help put people get back on payrolls,
no, that is deficit spending, we are told.
I showed this chart the other day on the floor of the Senate. There
were 35 jobs available in Miami for firefighters, and 1,000 people
showed up on the sidewalk and lined up to apply.
For some, it may be easy to come to the floor of the Senate and talk
about the 598,000 people who lost their jobs last month, the 1 million
people who lost their jobs in the last 2 months, and the 3.6 million
people who lost their jobs since this recession began. But name 1, name
10, name 1,000, name 1 million or look at their picture and see the
faces of people who want to work but cannot because they were told
their jobs no longer exist. Then ask whether this is important, and ask
yourself: What are you going to do about it? What do you think the
remedy is? What do you think the priority ought to be with respect to
putting people, such as these people, back to work: giving them an
opportunity with a job or lining up in the well of the Senate to say to
the big banks: Here I come; here is $700 billion. Big difference, in my
judgment.
The difficulties we face in this country today are not some natural
disaster. This is not Hurricane Katrina that came raging through our
country. This is not some disaster over which we had no control. This
is an economy which is collapsing and has very serious trouble as a
result of specific things that have been done that have been
irresponsible.
How on Earth do you describe a solution unless you are willing to
admit what has caused it? Let me go through some of it. It is not a
question of pointing fingers, it is just a matter of deciding, let's be
straight about where we are and how we got here. They will write in the
history books about this era and this age. We studied the Gay Nineties.
We studied the Roaring Twenties. Somebody will study this age, this age
of excess, this carnival of greed in the history books in the future.
So how did we get here? Let me describe it by saying we got, in my
judgment, several fundamentally flawed policy changes that happened
over a long period of time.
Trade. First of all, you cannot suggest this problem we have does not
lay right on the doorstep of those who have allowed this trade deficit
in this country to rise to $700 billion to $800 billion a year, buying
$2 billion more each day than we sell abroad and racking up a giant
deficit for this country that we must repay to other countries. Most of
the Members of this body have been perfectly willing to be brain dead
on that subject for a long time. Trade doesn't matter, the deficits
don't count. Don't worry about jobs going overseas, don't worry about
unfair trade agreements, just ignore it and just keep chanting about
free trade. That is one big mistake that has been made for a very long
time and no more so than during the past 8 years of the past
administration.
With a trade deficit of $700 billion to $800 billion a year, add to
that budget deficits. I know what they say about the budget deficit in
the newspaper. OMB puts out a number. I think the
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last administration said it is some $450 billion. That is not true at
all. It is not $450 billion. The question is how much did we have to
borrow last year. That is the impact. It is between $700 billion and
$800 billion, even more depending on whose counting. So with an economy
of $14 trillion or so, a $700 billion to $800 billion trade deficit, a
budget deficit of somewhere around $700 billion to $800 billion, that
is 10-percent or so indebtedness in 1 single year.
But it is not just the fact we have this budget deficit that has been
so out of whack ever since the last administration took office--and by
the way, they inherited a budget surplus. We had a big debate on the
floor of the Senate, and those now saying: Let's not do much to remedy
this economy, were standing on the floor of the Senate saying: We want
to get rid of the budget surplus; we want very big tax cuts for a very
long time, most of which will go to the very wealthy. Some of us said:
Let's be careful, let's be conservative. No. Katy, bar the door. They
passed their legislation. We ran into very big budget deficits in a
very big hurry.
Trade deficits, budget deficits--and by the way, a budget deficit
that was, in part, constructed by deciding to fight a war and not
paying for it. Can you imagine, fighting a war and saying we are going
to charge every penny. We say to the American people: You go shopping.
That is what President Bush said: Your job is to go shopping. We are
going to fight this war. We are going to spend $10 billion, $12 billion
a month, and we don't intend to pay a penny of it. Some of us who
wanted to pay for part of it were told: We will veto the legislation if
you try. He said: I will veto the legislation if you try.
Trade deficits and budget deficits have weighed this economy down in
a very significant way. And the very folks who have come today to talk
about spending and deficits are the ones who supported all along a
fiscal policy that created the most significant budget deficits in the
history of this country.
Those are not the only two things. They are significant--trade
deficit, a budget deficit, reckless fiscal policy. They are
significant, but something else happened, something very significant,
and I talked about it frequently on the floor of the Senate. The same
people who are so concerned about these issues now joined forces to
say: You know what, we need to modernize America's banking system. It
is way old-fashioned, way out of date. We put in place all kinds of
things since the Great Depression to prevent banks from being
modernized, and we need to have one-stop shopping. We need to let banks
get involved in real estate investments again. We need banks to get
involved in securities investments again. And so they passed--yes, the
Congress did; incidentally, there was bipartisan support for it--a
piece of legislation called the Financial Services Modernization Act.
It got rid of old-fashioned things that were put in place after the
Great Depression and helped create the big bank holding companies that
could get involved in securities, real estate, and all kinds of risk
ventures attached to banking which we had prevented for 80 years.
All of a sudden, we saw the pyramid created, the big holding
companies, and it was Katy, bar the door. What we saw was the buildup
of unbelievable leveraged debt in these institutions and a substantial
amount of risk brought into America's banking system.
Almost immediately, that system allowed greed to permeate. Here is
how it manifested itself in one significant part of the contributor to
this economic malaise, and that is the housing bubble and the subprime
loan scandal. I have spoken about it at great length--I am sure people
are tired of hearing it--the subprime loan scandal. We know people who
were cold-called by brokers to say: We know you are paying a 7-percent
interest rate. We will give you a 2-percent interest rate, and by the
way, you don't have to pay any principal; 2-percent interest rate and
no principal, and you don't have to document your income to us. No-doc
loan, no principal, 2-percent rate. They put people in subprime loans
not telling or emphasizing that it is going to reset in 2 years to 10
percent or 11 percent and you can't prepay because there is a
prepayment penalty for doing it.
They larded up a whole lot of securities because they wrapped these
into securities with bad loans, bad mortgages, and then sold them
upstream to mortgage banks, hedge funds, investment banks. They were
all fat and happy, and that included the rating agencies that would
take a look at that security and say: That is a good security; that is
AAA. They were all in on the take. By ``the take,'' I mean infected
with greed. So we had the housing bubble. We had all of these mortgages
out there.
Consider this: A $14,000-a-year strawberry picker buying a $720,000
home placed by a broker who got a big bonus for placing the mortgage
without any chance of that person being able to make payments. But that
mortgage then becomes a mortgage wrapped into a security sold to a
hedge fund, rated as a security as AAA, sold to an investment bank. Now
all of a sudden you have brokers who are happy because they are making
massive amounts of money; you have the mortgage banks, they love it,
they are making lots of money; hedge funds, they are making so much
money they can't count it.
By the way, the top hedge fund manager a year and a half ago earned
$3.7 billion. By my calculation, that is $300 million a month, about
$10 million a day.
Honey, how are you doing at work?
I am doing pretty well, $10 million a day. I make as much in 3
minutes as the average American worker does in a year.
They were all happy, all making massive amounts of money. The problem
is, they built a pyramid. The scheme of this pyramid is not much
different from Mr. Madoff, who apparently allegedly got away with a $50
billion Ponzi scheme. This scheme was not much different. All of a
sudden, it began to collapse.
Huge trade debt, big federal debt, reckless fiscal policy, fighting a
war and not paying for it, charging every penny, in fact, insisting on
continuing tax cuts even during the war, and then this unbelievable
banking scandal by removing the protections that existed since the
Great Depression and saying to the big banks: You can create holding
companies, you can attach risk, such as securities and other issues,
and it will be just fine. You can do that. And so they did. All of it
was built on leverage--trade debt, budget debt, leverage debt in the
private sector, almost unparalleled in the history of this country.
Then the tent pole began to come down. All of a sudden, we discover a
very serious problem.
To describe how significant the money that was being paid was, there
was a discussion in the last couple of days in the Congress about maybe
doing what President Obama suggested; that is, to those big companies
that got bailout funds, for the top 25 people in those companies, their
compensation should be limited to half a million dollars a year. It is
interesting, when they tried to do that, my understanding is there was
a budget cost to that of something close to $10 billion. Why would
there be a budget cost? Because they were all making so much money that
the income tax they would pay as a result of that money was so
significant that you had a $10 billion budget cost if you limited the
income of the top people on Wall Street in these firms to $500,000 a
year. That is almost unbelievable to me. But having done some work to
study how much income exists in those areas, that is exactly true.
There was an investigative story in the Washington Post about the
failure of one of the largest investment banks. They described the top
trader in that organization, a person trading securities and the person
who was in charge of risk management. It turns out they carpooled every
day from Connecticut to New York. It wasn't very hard to have the top
trader deal with his best friend risk manager and get things done
pretty easily. The top trader, they said, was making $20 million to $30
million a year. So that company turns out to be loaded with toxic
assets, as were most of the other institutions engaged in exactly the
same business because they were making so much money.
Now we are told the taxpayers have to come to the rescue of these
banking institutions. So $700 billion has been voted in what is called
the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP. I did not support that
legislation. I didn't think
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the Treasury Secretary had the foggiest idea what he was doing, and I
think history shows that to be the case.
But one of the questions I think needs to be asked at this moment,
is: Is there a requirement that we bail out these specific banks? Is
that some divine right of existing institutions, to come to the
Government to say: We are in trouble, you need to help us. Well, what
has happened is the Government has allowed them to become so big they
are referred to as being too big to fail. That is an actual specific
category at the Federal Reserve Board--too big to fail. Despite the
fact that they are bailing them out, our Government--the Federal
Reserve Board and the Treasury, which have said these institutions are
too big to fail, and have in fact failed and need taxpayer money to
bail them out--our Government is actually pursuing mergers to make them
bigger. It is unbelievably ignorant, in my judgment, as a policy
matter. But I think it is important for us to ask some basic questions
here. Do we care about too big to fail; and should we, at some point,
decide to take apart those institutions and create different entities,
smaller institutions?
I understand we can't tomorrow decide there will not be any major
banking institutions in this country. Our country can't function like
that. Credit is critical to every business in this country. I know many
profitable Main Street businesses that are having great difficulty
finding credit from established credit sources they have had for
decades. So I understand the urgency and the need for credit from
banking institutions. My only observation is this: If we are pushing
$700 billion after failed institutions in order to try to make them
well, even as we are saying to them, we want you to become bigger, and
when, in fact, they are already too big to fail, I am saying that
doesn't add up to me. I think maybe we should have a discussion here in
this Congress about whether there is some inherent right to preserve
institutions, or whether those that are too big to fail should be
perhaps taken apart and create institutions that will better serve this
country's interest.
Now, some say there are only two choices in the future as we try to
take a look at financial reform. And by the way, there is very little
action on that at this point, and I believe it ought to go concurrent
with all the discussion about trying to put people back to work and so
on. But it seems to me the two choices are: You go back to a world in
which you had Glass-Steagall and separation of banks from other
inherently risky things, such as securities and real estate. And I
believe we should do that. That means banks essentially become very
much like a utility. That is the way it was. They were regulated, but
generally performing traditional banking functions and making money.
Then risky enterprises are over here, regulated in a different way but
nonetheless able to engage in substantial amounts of risk with
securities, real estate, and other items.
We have to make that choice, and the sooner the better. I think to
ignore that is to suggest, as some are now doing, that what we are
going to do is we are going to have taxpayer money chase current
institutions that have failed, and perhaps even make them bigger when
they are already too big to fail. That makes no sense to me at all.
And that brings me to this issue today of the economic recovery plan
that has been negotiated. I don't think anyone comes willingly to this
either starting line or finish line with this kind of a plan to say, I
am pleased to be here. But I do think this: I see all of the energy of
people who rush to try to help the big banks with $700 billion, and
then see so much concern about trying to help people who are out of
work, and I say: Wait a second; maybe we have our priorities wrong
here. I believe that the economic engine in this country works best
when people have something to work with, when American families have a
job to go to, a job that pays well and allows them to take care of
their family. I think that is a percolating-up kind of strategy with
the economic engine, and I think it is perfectly appropriate and
important. In fact, I think it is essential for us to worry about
trying to put people back to work during a very deep recession.
No one can say that what happened last month doesn't matter. You
can't say that 598,000 people coming home at night and telling their
loved ones they lost their job doesn't matter to this place. If it
mattered to this place that the biggest banks in the country were
having some difficulty, and they had to get $700 billion, why doesn't
it matter that we care a little bit about the people who lined up in
Miami, FL, a thousand of them, trying to get a little shot at 35
firefighting jobs? This too ought to matter. It is not unfair, as some
have suggested last week when I showed this chart, and said I was
playing on sympathy. This isn't sympathy. This is reality. Isn't it
important that we talk a little about reality and a little less about
theory here in the Chamber of the Senate? The fact is these people got
up, stood in line, because they need a job, and we ought to be able to
do something about that, to try to put people back to work and give
this economy a lift.
I think it is pretty clear that no one knows exactly what the
medicine is or the menu is to try to make this economy well and healthy
once again. But this legislation we are going to be considering
contains a couple of things that I put in during this past week when it
was considered. One is very simple: If we are going to put people back
to work building roads and dams and bridges and so on and so forth,
putting people on payrolls to do these projects that will invest in
America's infrastructure, then let's try to buy American products while
we do it so that we are putting people on factory floors to produce
those products. I am talking about steel and iron and manufactured
projects.
When I suggested that we buy American for the major purchases that we
are going to make to put people back to work, I did that because I know
when we buy those products we will put our people back to work in those
factories. But you would have thought I was talking the most radical
kind of talk in the world, by the reaction of some--you are going to
upset the international balance of trade. That is absurd. We are
already so out of balance in trade. We are $700 billion to $800 billion
in red in trade. At any rate, my legislation is here. So as we try to
put people back to work and invest in our infrastructure to create
jobs, we should buy American. It is common sense.
The second amendment I put in this piece of legislation is different
than anything that has been required with all the other money that has
been shoved out the door by the Federal Reserve Board, by the Treasury
Department, by the FDIC, and, yes, with TARP, supported by the
Congress, and that is a provision that says: I want accountability. If
you get money from this economic recovery package, you have to report
to us on a quarterly basis that says: Here is who I am, here is the
money I got, here is how I used it, and here is how many jobs I
created. That kind of accountability, demanding that kind of reporting,
is essential for my support for this bill. And that is in this piece of
legislation because I put it there last week.
Now, one final point, if I might. I understand, as I have said many
times, that in most ways the issue of trying to promote economic
recovery in this country is not about some menu. It is not about a menu
of tax cuts or more spending. It is not about a menu of M1B or anything
of that sort in fiscal or monetary policy. It is about trying to give
the American people some increased confidence about the future. That is
critical in order to have an expansion of our economy. People have to
feel confident about the future in order to act on that confidence--to
buy a suit, buy a new washing machine, buy a car, buy a home, take a
trip. It is the kind of things people do when they are working and they
feel good about the future and their job is secure. They do things that
expand the economy.
When people aren't confident, they do the exact opposite, and that
causes a contraction of the economy. That is where we are today. People
aren't confident about the future. I understand that. I mean, I think
all of us know why. They have seen the most significant era of greed
perhaps since the 1920s, and they do not like it. They have seen a
collapse of the housing bubble, they have seen big investment bankers
get rich, they have seen all these things--the scandals--and it is hard
to be confident. They have seen the country fight a war without paying
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for it. Some people have given their lives. So I understand that we
have a lack of confidence. The question is not whether that exists; the
question is what do we do about it? Do we decide to do something about
it? And if so, what?
I have described often the response of Mark Twain when asked if he
would engage in a debate at this organization, and he said: Oh yes, if
I can take the negative side. They said, but we haven't even told you
the subject yet. He said: Oh, the subject doesn't matter. The negative
side will take no preparation.
So I understand how easy it is to simply be opposed to everything.
The question now, however, is: What do we do to lift this country? What
do we do to help lift this country out of this deep recession and give
people some confidence that we are on the right road? Perhaps a trade
policy that begins to insist on some balance in trade so we are not
deep in the red; a budget policy that at some point says you can't
spend what you don't have on what you don't need. You have to have some
balance in fiscal policy and you have to recognize that. And you have
to have a policy on banking and finance that says we're not going to
allow you to do this anymore. We are not going to merge the safety and
soundness of banking with speculation and risk in real estate and
securities. We are not going to do it. If we would take those steps, it
seems to me we would give some substantial confidence to the American
people.
Passing the legislation that is going to be proposed today or
tomorrow--the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--is not the
easiest thing, I understand, because it is counterintuitive to somehow
believe that the way out, when you are deep in debt, is to spend some
money. Well, I understand that is counterintuitive. Yet all of the
lessons we have learned are that you have to prime the pump to put
people back on a payroll. If you have half a million people a month
losing their jobs, you have to find a way to put people back on the
payroll and to inspire some confidence in the economy again.
I have heard discussions today about, well, I worry about this piece
or that piece, and people won't go back to work. I am telling you, I
think there are a lot of things in this bill that will put people back
to work.
I chair the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water. We have
$4.6 billion in this with the Corps of Engineers, and the Corps of
Engineers will be repairing mostly bridges and water projects--that are
designed, engineered, and ready to go. They will be being hiring
contractors who will be hiring workers. The fact is there will be a lot
of jobs created with this package--we believe 3.5 to 4 million jobs.
That is going to make a difference, I believe.
Having described in some cases our disagreements, let me say that I
do think every single person in this Chamber wants the same thing for
this country. We perhaps have different approaches to how to get there,
but we all want this country to prosper, the economy to be lifted and
to recover, for people to go back to work, and for us to have the kind
of future that we expect for our children. I believe that is possible.
If I didn't believe it was possible, I would hardly be able to go to
work in the morning.
Let me tell one story, if I might--I have mentioned it before, a
couple of weeks ago--and some people have heard of this. I talked about
this guy named Ken Mink from Kentucky, because it is so inspiring. It
is so indicative of people in this country who think we can do anything
and they can do anything.
Ken Mink, from a news report I read, was 73 years old. He was out in
the back yard shooting baskets, and he came in and said to his wife:
Honey, it is back. She said what is back? He said: My shot. My
basketball shot is back. No matter where I shoot in the back yard, I
don't miss. So he sat down that night and wrote applications to
colleges--junior colleges--at age 73. He got into a junior college and
tried out for the basketball team, at age 73, and made the basketball
team. About a month and a half ago, he made two points in a college
basketball game. The oldest man, by 40 years, ever to score at a
college basketball game, at age 73. I was thinking about that the other
day, and I thought: What a wonderful inspirational story, of somebody
who didn't understand what he couldn't do. Who says you can't play
basketball at age 73 for a junior college some place in Kentucky?
My point is: I think that represents the story of our country. We
have so many stories of people who, against the odds, do things that
make this a better place. And if we work together and believe in
ourselves, and believe in what we have accomplished in decades past and
will accomplish in the future, this country is going to be fine. So we
are going to get through this week, and hopefully we will give some
boost to this economy, and after which I believe we will see an economy
that provides more jobs and begins to expand and provides opportunity
for American families once again.
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. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(The remarks of Mr. Bennett and Mr. Wyden pertaining to the
introduction of S. 426 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements
on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Klobuchar). The Senator from Oregon is
recognized.
Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, in the course of debating the economic
stimulus legislation, every Senator I have talked to has been
interested in trying to find savings to keep down the cost of the
economic stimulus bill. I have come to the floor this afternoon because
it appears that when the Senate debates the final stimulus legislation,
it is not going to include a bipartisan provision to protect taxpayers,
a bipartisan provision which would require that Wall Street companies
that recently paid excessive bonuses be required to pay those bonuses
back to the taxpayers.
Taxpayers in this country were horrified several weeks ago to learn
about the fact that recently Wall Street companies that had received
TARP financing--TARP, of course, being the Troubled Asset Relief
Program--had just paid $18 billion in bonuses. Once that news became
public, everybody in Government spoke out against the bonuses.
Everybody lined up in front of the television cameras to say the
bonuses were wrong. Everybody said that it was outrageous and
unacceptable for these Wall Street bonuses to have been paid when these
institutions were receiving billions and billions of dollars of
taxpayer money.
After the news, three of us on the Senate Finance Committee--a
bipartisan group--said we were going to do more than say the bonuses
were wrong; we were going to take steps to make sure the bonuses were
actually paid back. So we came together and put forward a bipartisan
proposal. We collaborated with law professors across the country and
had the Joint Committee on Taxation, under the able leadership of
Edward Kleinbard, review the financial underpinnings of the proposal,
and they found that our modest approach that would allow taxpayers to
be paid back the excessive amount of the cash bonuses would generate
$3.2 billion for American taxpayers--just a fraction of what had been
paid out. We felt it was a modest proposal. We felt it was a bipartisan
proposal.
The fact is, nobody would oppose our idea in broad daylight, but it
now seems that when the ink is dry on the final legislation, the
taxpayers of this country are still going to get soaked. It is not
right. It is not right because taxpayers in this country have been
taking a beating with their health care costs and their fuel costs and
trying to figure out how to stay in their homes.
Companies normally pay bonuses when they are doing well. That wasn't
the case with these Wall Street financial firms. Here is the math. The
Wall Street firms took $274 billion in taxpayer money. When they
weren't doing well, they paid $18 billion in bonuses, but they couldn't
pay the taxpayers $3.2 billion of the amount paid--the excessive amount
paid--in cash bonuses when the taxpayers are being hit in
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their wallets, as we all have seen every time we are home and talking
to our constituents.
The arguments of the financial firms don't add up to me, and they
aren't going to add up to the millions of taxpayers whose money has
gone to the financial firms. The taxpayers deserve to see in this
stimulus legislation that somebody was actually standing up for them;
that it wasn't just about speeches; it wasn't just about saying
something was wrong; it was about backing up those words and taking
concrete action to protect taxpayers.
So I have come to the floor more than anything else to make it clear
that I am a persistent guy, and I am going to stay at this until there
is a better accounting for our taxpayers' money, until Congress puts a
stop to these kinds of actions where financial firms take taxpayers'
money and give the citizens of this country a runaround. This needs to
end, and it needs to end now. It means concrete action has to be taken.
That means more than speeches.
We know in the days ahead these financial firms are likely to come
back to the Congress of the United States and say they need additional
sums of money to deal with the toxic loans that are on their books. How
can one have confidence about giving these firms additional money when
they have just paid bonuses during these tough times and they have
fought--I know for a fact--against a reasonable provision to require
that these bonuses be paid back.
I intend to stay at this. It concerns me greatly that we didn't have
a recorded vote here on the floor of the Senate on this provision. I
knew that nobody would oppose this in broad daylight, but I had no idea
there would be such an aggressive effort behind the scenes to kill a
modest step to protect taxpayers, and particularly to find savings in
this legislation. For days now, Senators of both political parties have
been talking about ways to hold down the costs. A bipartisan group of
Senators found a way--a reasonable way--to save more than $3 billion,
according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
It is time to put a stop to financial firms taking taxpayers' money
and using the money to pay bonuses to many of the same people
responsible for the current financial crisis. I am old enough to know
that normally you pay bonuses when you do well. That is what the
American economy is all about. That is what capitalism is all about.
Somehow, some of these institutions think they ought to be able to
privatize their gains and socialize their losses. That is not right,
and it wasn't right to kill this modest provision to force the
repayment of the excessive amount of these Wall Street bonuses.
So I intend to come back to the floor of the Senate on this subject.
I will do everything I can to get a fair shake for the taxpayers of
Oregon and the taxpayers of this country. I wish this bonus recovery
provision was in the stimulus legislation that will be voted on here in
the Senate. I regret greatly that it is not. I am going to stay with
this until the taxpayers recover this money that shouldn't have been
paid out in the first place.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida is recognized.
Mr. MARTINEZ. Madam President, I wish to speak on the pending matter,
which is the so-called stimulus plan, with great concern about where we
are. As we hear, the plan has been agreed to and the package is being
put together; however, we have yet to see it. So I am going to make
some assumptions about the things I hear that may or may not be
included in it.
It appears we have some clear idea of some things that definitely
won't be a part of this package. The fact is that as we approach this
problem--and this is a serious problem for our Nation--the President
talked about a timely, targeted, and temporary spending package. The
President talked about it being timely because we needed to get the
money out the door now so that it would get into the mainstream of
commerce, so that it could get into the economy so that we could avoid
a deep and long-lasting recession. It also needed to be targeted
because it made no sense to do those things that would spend money but
not create jobs, not create economic activity; the types of tax cuts
that are geared toward creating more jobs in the marketplace, not
simply to give money to people that may or may not ultimately be spent.
It needed to be temporary because we all know that Government spending
in excess during a time of a recovery, when the Government should not
be overspending, should not be overheating the economy, could lead to a
slowdown of the recovery because it would increase inflation.
So that is why, when the President made those comments, I was
excited. I was positive. I was very positive in thinking this is
exactly what our country needed at this point in time. However, we have
found that as this has evolved through the Halls of Congress, that is
not what we are getting. We are getting an unfocused spending plan
which spends money on things that are far afield from shovel ready,
ready-to-get-out-the-door types of projects, but which is really an
unfocused spending measure that, in my view and in the view of many
others, spends too much at a time when we can hardly afford to be
overspending needlessly, but it also does not spend on that which is
designed to create the jobs America desperately needs today.
In my view, there are ways we could have crafted a package. I made a
proposal because I do believe that to simply oppose what the President
proposes and what the majority of this body and across the hall have
put together is--it is not enough to just say no, don't do it. We have
a responsibility to be responsible and offer alternatives, to offer a
proposal, because at this point in time we know we are in deep and
serious economic times. So the key to this is oppose but propose.
The fact is that some of us did attempt mightily to see if we could
not come to a bipartisan compromise, a spending package that would have
spent about $650 billion--a very big package of spending. But the
spending would have been focused on what I believe would have gotten
out the door quickly. We also know it would have been good to spend on
things that we needed to spend the money on anyway. In fact, military
reset, the resetting of equipment that has been damaged or lost in the
long struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been a great way for
us to be spending it--those things that we have to spend money on
anyway but at the same time be doing so now in a manner that gets it
out the door in a hurry.
We have the infrastructure in place for military purchases of
equipment. That would have helped. We could have also done more in the
infrastructure field. I think this plan is not big enough as it relates
to the building of highways and bridges. The fact is that the Presiding
Officer well knows the need for bridges. In Minnesota, there is a
tremendous need for infrastructure. I wanted to see more bridges.
Across this Nation, we have bridges that are failing and need to be
rebuilt, and more highways and bridges and infrastructure in that sense
would have been the right way to approach it.
Obviously, a part of the package should also be tax cuts geared to
job creation. There is a difference between giving money to the people
who would use it to pay down debt or hoard and hold it because they are
fearful of what is coming in the economy. I believe in more focused tax
cuts, such as payroll deduction or the corporate tax rate being
reduced, which ultimately is America's small businesses that will put
America back to work. Giving those small businesses a tax break would
have encouraged them to get people back on the rolls of the employed.
My largest disappointment of all is that this plan fails to address
the problem that got us into this mess in the first place. Why did the
President and my Governor appear in Fort Myers a couple of days ago?
Because that is the foreclosure capital of America, and that is where
more houses are being foreclosed than anyplace else in Florida. I was
speaking with a group of government officials from Charlotte County, a
little north of Fort Myers, where there is 11 percent unemployment and
a terrible problem with foreclosures. They said: Please do something
about foreclosures. If we can stop houses from being foreclosed, we can
do two very important things. We can keep a family in their home and
keep that family whole; we can keep that street from having a
foreclosed house, and we
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keep that community from yet declining further and further in the
prices of homes.
In addition, we also do something else; we sustain home values in a
way that will help yet another foreclosure from occurring as the
declining spiral of housing prices continues to go downhill.
The second one I would have loved to have seen in this package--and I
am disappointed to know it is not in there--is the proposal by Senator
Isakson, which is to give a $15,000 tax credit to anybody who purchases
a home--not just first-time home buyers but anybody. We know one of the
great problems in the housing market today is that there is an enormous
inventory of unsold homes, many the result of foreclosures. If we
encourage potential home buyers by giving them a significant tax break,
they would get into the marketplace and make the decision to buy, and
we could begin then to stave off this continuing cycle of declining
home prices, stalled sales, and more foreclosures.
I know when the President went to Fort Myers, he went there because
there is a foreclosure problem. If there wasn't a foreclosure problem
in Fort Myers, there would not be double digit inflation in Lee County
and Charlotte County. I know my Governor wishes to see this package
passed. I don't know that my Governor understands all of the details in
the package. There will be nothing here to help with Florida's housing
economy, which is the No. 1 problem we have today. Until we address the
housing problem, we are not going to bring Florida back to economic
health.
There is not enough largess that can come to Florida from the Federal
Government to fill the coffers of the State's needs. We need for
Florida's economy to get back on its feet. We need tax cuts so that the
taxpayers have more money to spend, and we need to work on the housing
problem. We need to work on the overall economy of the country so that
tourism comes back to our State. All of these things working in unison
will bring America back to economic health.
This package, unfortunately, misses the mark. One of the great
dangers in it is that at the cost of almost just a hair under $800
billion, there are not enough additional hundreds of billions that we
can safely spend. We have to get it right, because some of us in the
Banking Committee this week heard from the Secretary of the Treasury,
who told us to get ready, another almost $2 trillion more is going to
be asked of you for the financial institutions. At the end of the day,
this is very costly. At some point, continued Government spending isn't
going to cut it. So that is why it is so important that this package be
gotten right.
I hate to oppose this package, because I would have loved for us to
have come up with something that was a truly bipartisan package--not
just a way of getting three votes but a way of, in fact, working
together and getting the best thinking of both sides and working on
something that was bipartisan. Not working in that fashion has caused
some of us to oppose this package. I hate doing that. I wanted to work
with President Obama. I wish our new President well, and I hope the
package succeeds and has the desired effect. In my conscience, I cannot
support it because I don't feel it will do what this economy currently
needs or that it will do what in fact all of us need to work together
toward doing, and that is getting our country back on the road to
recovery.
With great regret, I will not be able to support this package. I look
forward to seeing the final outcome because we have not all read the
bill yet. I will analyze it again to see if the component parts are
there that will allow me to support it. But it appears clear to me, in
the information we have, that that in fact will not be the case. I am
increasingly disappointed, but at the same time my hope is that it will
succeed because, at this moment, at this juncture in history, we need
for our country to be successful, so that Americans can get back to
work and our Nation can get back to prosperity.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized.
Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I have been listening to the remarks of
the Senator from Florida. I find myself in agreement with him. I want
to elaborate a little bit. For that reason, I ask unanimous consent
that my 10 minutes be extended to 15 minutes should I need that time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized.
(The remarks of Mr. Inhofe pertaining to the introduction of S.J.
Res. 10 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced
Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
Mr. INHOFE. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Whitehouse). The Senator from Utah.
Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I rise to express my opposition to the
conference report that has been granted and put together accompanying
the American recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, more commonly known
as the stimulus package.
When I spoke on the floor last week about my disappointments in the
Senate version of the stimulus bill, I did not think the bill would get
much worse in conference. In fact, I harbored some hope it would
actually improve. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
What we have seen emerge from the conference weakens the stronger
provisions of the Senate bill and worsens the less effective
provisions.
Many Utahans have called and written me to express their concerns
about this stimulus package and the process by which it has been
legislated. They are rightly worried about the consequences of an
economic stimulus package that, with interest, will cost taxpayers well
over $1 trillion. That is just the beginning, by the way. They are
particularly worried it will be ineffective in saving or creating jobs.
Last year, President Obama's campaign was based on ``hope not fear.''
That is until he needs fear to help him pass a bill, as Charles
Krauthammer of the Washington Post points out. The pressure is on the
majority to convince the American people this is the right economic
package.
On Tuesday, President Obama spoke to the American people, not about
the audacity of hope but rather to instill fear into Americans. He said
at that time:
A failure to act will only deepen the crisis as well as the
pain of Americans.
He also said:
The Federal Government is the only entity left with the
resources to jolt our economy.
While I do not disagree with these statements, it is wrong to use
fear to force the completion of an unbalanced, largely partisan package
that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will create at most 1.9
million jobs by the end of 2011 and leave us with a lower gross
domestic product in 10 years than if we do nothing at all.
Keep in mind, the head of the Congressional Budget Office is a
Democratic appointee.
It is clear we are in an economic recession and that action is needed
to stimulate the Government. I think every one of our colleagues agrees
with this. What troubles me is the misperception about why most
Republicans are opposed to this bill. The President and many of our
Democratic colleagues have unfairly implied that Republicans prefer to
do nothing. That is absolutely not true. Yes, we are opposed to this
bill, but we are not opposed to stimulating the economy. We simply want
to do it in the most effective and least wasteful way as possible. We
do not want to see us make a $1 trillion mistake, and this is a $1
trillion-plus mistake.
Yet we Republicans were shut out of negotiating the final conference
report, which is something President Obama vowed to the American people
he would change. According to President Obama's Presidential campaign
Web site, change.gov, he vowed to ``end the practice of writing
legislation behind closed doors.''
Specifically he said he would `` . . . work to reform congressional
rules to require all legislative sessions, including committee mark-
ups, and conference committees, to be conducted in public.''
That certainly did not happen here. I believe this bill could be much
more effective and so does President Obama. At his Tuesday press
conference, he admitted as much when he said:
I cannot tell you for sure that everything in this plan
will work exactly as we hope.
That concerns me. If we plan to spend an amount equal to the 15th
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largest economy in the world, we ought to make sure the stimulus plan
is drafted in the most effective way possible.
For example, many economists say the make work pay tax credit
provision in the plan, which will give workers roughly $15 more a week
in each paycheck, will largely be ineffective in stimulating the
economy. It is not going to help the economy. Yet it is a tremendous
cost, around $150 billion, that could have easily been spent on
something that would help the economy, create jobs. I suggested the
research and development tax credit by making that permanent. I cannot
begin to tell you how that would keep our unqualified lead in the high-
tech world.
My objection to this bill is not based on the fact it includes
spending, it is because it lacks an effective balance of spending and
tax relief.
If we look closely at the bill, we will see that much of what the
majority lists as tax relief is actually spending. In other words,
those who do not pay any income taxes, as well as State and local
governments, are receiving money through the Tax Code. How can there be
tax relief to those who do not pay taxes? That is more taxes for those
who do. Tax relief from what? I am not saying those who do not pay
income taxes should not benefit from this stimulus package. I am saying
if you are going to give money to people who do not pay taxes, call it
what it is--it is spending, it is not tax relief.
Like I say, I would far rather would have had a permanent research
and development tax credit, which would cost about only two-thirds of
what they are going to spend on this so-called make work pay provision
that would create millions of jobs in America and throughout the world.
In fact, when one adds up all the provisions in the bill, more than
70 percent is spending and less than 30 percent is real tax relief.
Where is the balance? Even worse, only one-half of 1 percent of this
bill--one-half of 1 percent of this bill--is devoted to tax relief to
help struggling businesses keep their doors open. One-half of 1
percent--that is pathetic. We know small business produces most of the
jobs. Yet this is what we are doing. Moreover, the bill fails to
adequately address the housing crisis. Unfortunately, the $15,000 tax
credit for home buyers, which is one of the few bipartisan amendments
accepted into the Senate bill during the Senate debate, has now been
watered down drastically. So has the other major bipartisan amendment
added on the Senate floor--the deduction for interest on a new auto
loan. And one of the few provisions to help struggling companies keep
their doors open--the expanded period for carryback net operating
losses--has been erased from the conference report, except for small
businesses.
Now, I have some news for my Democratic colleagues. Small businesses
are not the only companies that are laying off workers. Allowing
companies to get quick refunds of taxes previously paid was one of the
few smart and efficient provisions in the Senate bill, designed to
directly save jobs. Now that has been whittled down to a mere shadow of
what it was.
I worry that my friends on the other side of the aisle are looking
through rose-colored glasses, spectacles tinted by spending priorities,
such as expanding Government programs, which they hope will stimulate
the economy. They are trying to convince America that spending millions
on Government vehicles will somehow stimulate the economy. They refuse
to listen to even the President's Chair of the Council of Economic
Advisers, Christina Romer, who in a study determined that every dollar
of Government spending increases the gross domestic product by $1.40,
while every dollar of tax relief increases the gross domestic product
by $3. That is what the study says. The President's own Chair of the
Council of Economic Advisers says that $1 of Government spending equals
a $1.40 increase in GDP, but if you do it in tax relief, $1 will give
you a $3 increase in GDP. Doesn't take too many brains to figure out it
is far better to do it the second way.
The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the Senate
version of this so-called stimulus package would only save or create
between 600,000 and 1.9 million jobs by the end of 2011. At a cost of
$1.2 trillion, including interest, the cost to the taxpayer for each
job saved or created under the plan is at least $632,000 and as much as
$2 million if that goes up. We are spending taxpayer money to create
one job at the rate of $632,000 per job.
Now that the Senate bill has been scaled back significantly, this
job-creation estimate is almost sure to go down significantly. We can
do better than this, Mr. President. This is not good enough for
Government work. With the amount of money spent in this bill, you could
give every man, woman, and child in America $4,000. I think Utahns and
all Americans would put $1.2 trillion to better use than what this bill
does.
A large share of this stimulus bill will go to States to implement
temporary programs. When that funding runs out, what do we tell all of
those employees who were hired and now have to be let go? Will we say:
Sorry, this is just a temporary job. Who are we kidding? This makes
about as much sense as denying an undefeated football team the chance
to play in the national championship game. I know that sounds a little
bit like sour grapes since the University of Utah was the only
undefeated team this last year but had absolutely zero chance to play
in the national championship game.
The majority knows the American people want to see more tax relief in
this stimulus bill. A February 9 poll conducted by the Rasmussen Report
found that 62 percent of U.S. voters want the plan to include more tax
relief and less Government spending. It appears as if the more time
Americans have to review this bill, the less they like it. That is
certainly the case for me.
While time is of the essence, we cannot afford to get this wrong. The
stakes are too high. Yet President Obama has chosen to break the theme
of his Presidential campaign and use fear to hurriedly pass this flawed
economic stimulus package. Now, I am not sure I can blame him for that
because he is stuck with what the people up here have done to him and
to what he said he would do. So I suppose he was limited to using fear
to get this package passed. I have a lot of respect for him. I
personally have helped him, and I intend to help him more. But, gee
whiz, this is pathetic.
Mr. President, we Republicans realize the severity of this economic
situation. We recognize the need to stimulate the economy with a
balanced stimulus package that has an appropriate mix of spending and
real tax relief. We want to create jobs and spur economic growth. But
haste makes waste, and, like many of my constituents, I believe our
efforts are about to be wasted--squandered on a stimulus bill that will
stimulate more criticism and feeling of futility than the economy.
The great American poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier
wrote:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are
these: ``It might have been!''
And while those words were written more than a century ago, they can
certainly be applied now to Congress. Faced with serious recession, we
need to do our very best to get the economy moving again. Instead, it
looks as if this body will settle for a partisan bill that could well
fail to do the job our Nation requires. We should do better. We could
do much better. The American people need us to do much better. And if
this legislation passes, many of us will one day shake our heads at the
opportunity lost and wonder aloud about what might have been.
I have told a few people over the last number of weeks who have
blamed both parties for what has gone on here over the last number of
years that I have been here 33 years and there hasn't been 1 day in the
Senate that I can point to where a fiscal conservative majority has
been in control of the Senate--not 1 day in 33 years--because there are
always enough liberal Republicans, combined with the mostly all liberal
Democrats, to do just about anything they want to in spending. It is
discouraging, I have to admit. We have won some battles because we have
outworked the other side or we have had a President who has made a
difference on some issues, no question about it. But not 1 day that I
can recall where, if you count the liberals on our side and the
liberals on the Democratic side and you put them together--it is
usually only five or six, really, on our side--we always have the
majority on
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the other side. That is why President Bush was hammered all the time
for his spending programs when, in fact, his budgets were at all times
less than what we ultimately passed here in both Houses.
Mr. President, I would like to now take a few minutes to talk about
the health care provisions in this so-called stimulus package or, more
appropriately, the next installment of the ``Socialized Health Care for
All Act of 2009.'' Democrats hate to hear that. They think it is
terrible to hear the word ``socialism.''
President Obama recently made the media rounds stating that any delay
in passing this Government spending package would be inexcusable and
irresponsible. Well, today I am going to highlight certain health care
provisions in this Trojan horse legislation that, in the President's
own words, should be classified as inexcusable and irresponsible.
First and foremost, let me make this point again, even though I am
starting to sound like a broken record. Reforming our health care
system to ensure that every American has access to quality, affordable,
and portable health care is not a Republican or Democratic issue, it is
an American issue. When we are dealing with 17 percent of our total
economy, it is absolutely imperative that we address this challenge in
an open and bipartisan process.
Think about it. We are going to talk about this for just a minute.
Just like the partisan SCHIP exercise preceding this bill, this
stimulus legislation is another example of the Democrats justifying the
current economic turmoil to simply expand our entitlement programs and
make the Federal Government bigger. More and more Americans are being
pushed into Government-run health care programs. Special interests have
taken priority over families; politics, of course, over policy.
In this time of national crisis, we should have come together as one
group to write a responsible bill for the American families who are
faced with rising unemployment and dropping home values. Instead, the
other side has simply chosen to turn this into a government-expansion
exercise and a grab-bag of favors for the liberal special interests.
I continue to hope that the other side's promise of change was more
than a campaign slogan that did not expire on November 4, 2008. Let's
all remember: Actions speak louder than words.
Let me start with the COBRA provisions in this package. The Senate
version of the stimulus includes more than $20 billion in subsidies for
health insurance premiums for those who have lost their jobs in these
tough economic conditions. However, this subsidy will only go to those
Americans who had access to COBRA coverage through their employers.
Now, let me put this inequity into perspective. If you worked for a
large employer, such as Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns in New York
City, which had access to a COBRA qualified group health plan, you will
get help under this bill. But mom-and-pop stores in Salt Lake City that
could not afford a group health plan for their hard-working employees,
they get nothing. Not a thing. Now, let me repeat again--nothing. This
is not only unfair, it is unconscionable.
That is not all. It gets worse. Both the Senate- and the House-passed
language gave the same COBRA subsidy--50 percent and 65 percent
respectively--regardless of one's income threshold. Look at this chart.
You probably recognize the fellow on the left. This is Richard Fuld,
the former CEO of the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, who made almost
half a billion dollars in salary, bonuses, and stock options since the
year 2000. He is going to get the same level of subsidy for his health
insurance premiums as the laid-off construction worker on the right
here in Utah.
I worked with Senator Grassley to write an amendment that would have
applied income testing to this provision to target this taxpayer-funded
help to those who needed it the most. We income test Medicare Part B
for our seniors, so why not do the same for these subsidies?
Unfortunately, it was not included in the Senate package.
Another concern Americans need to be mindful about is the impact of
this massive COBRA subsidy on our Nation's employers, who are already
struggling to meet their payroll needs.
By the way, just so everybody understands what COBRA means, if you
get fired or the business ends or you have to leave the business, you
have a right under COBRA to continue the insurance, but you have to pay
for it rather than your employer.
Even though employers are not explicitly liable for the COBRA
subsidies in this legislation, they will suffer from this phenomenon of
adverse selection. A number of COBRA-eligible individuals have premiums
that exceed those of active workers. Studies have shown that the
average COBRA premiums are at 145 percent of active worker premium
payments. According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the 10-year
impact of this provision on employers, even when limited to those in
the 55-to-64 age group, could be up to $65 billion. Economics 101
dictates that these additional costs will simply be passed on to
employers, which in return will result in lower wages and more layoffs.
This is not exactly what would qualify as ``stimulus'' in my book--
spending, sure, but definitely not stimulus.
Let me shift my attention to the comparative effectiveness provision.
The idea behind this concept is simple: Compare the effectiveness of
medical treatments and procedures so payers, providers, and patients
can make smart choices. Sounds good. However, the difficulty arises
when you decide to compare on the basis of what is cheaper rather than
what works well. Both the House- and the Senate-passed versions
provided $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness, including a $400
million slush fund to be used by the Secretary at his or her
discretion. Once again, this is a topic of bipartisan interest and
concern that should have been discussed in the context of comprehensive
reform.
We can all agree that a one-size-fits-all approach is the wrong
approach for the American health care system. Based on our own personal
experiences, we know that what works best for one does not always work
the same for the other. Allowing comparative effectiveness on the basis
of cost can have disastrous consequences not only on innovation of
lifesaving treatments but also in the delivery of quality care.
On this chart, for example, we see Jack Tagg, a former World War II
pilot, who in 2006 suffered from a severe case of macular degeneration.
The regional health board that utilized cost-based comparative
effectiveness rejected his request for treatment citing high cost,
unless the disease hit his other eye also.
It took 3 years to overturn that decision. Now let's just all
remember that a family member with cancer in an intensive care unit
would probably neither have the time nor the resources to appeal such
an egregious decision. We need to remember the real implications of
these provisions--not simply in terms of political spin and special
interests--but in terms of its impact on real people who are our
mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, brother and sisters--children.
During the Finance Committee consideration of the stimulus
legislation, Senators Baucus, Enzi, Conrad, and I discussed the
importance of getting the comparative effectiveness provision right.
I believe that comparative effectiveness must focus on clinical
effectiveness, not cost, and it should maintain patient choice and
innovation. Failure to do so could have disastrous consequences.
As I have already said multiple times, I am disappointed that
Democrats have decided to use the stimulus legislation to address
health care reform in a partisan and piecemeal manner. Health IT--
information technology--is another perfect example. It is an area of
consensus that should have been part of a comprehensive and bipartisan
health care reform dialogue.
It is my hope that the Health Information Technology Standards
Committee that is created in this legislation will take into account
the work of States like Utah that already have adopted statewide HIT.
standards for the exchange of clinical data. Utah is much further down
the road than other States in this area. Therefore, when the committee
is making recommendations for HIT standards, it is my hope that the
work of States like Utah will be taken into account and seriously
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considered by the HIT Standards Committee members. Utah has been a
national leader in this area and I believe that its work in this area
should be used as a template when national HIT standards are developed.
In addition, as we incentivize physicians, hospitals and other health
care providers to use electronic health records--EHR, it is important
that we provide assistance for them with both the purchase and
maintenance of EHR systems. I have heard from one Utah physician in
Ogden who paid over $8,000 for software only to discover that the
software simply does not work. This is unacceptable. Therefore, if we
are going to incentivize health providers to use electronic health
records, we need to make sure that providers will have assistance in
choosing, implementing and using electronic health records.
Utah has been a leader in physician EHR implementation as a result of
its participation in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services--
CMS--Medicare Care Management Performance--MCMP demonstration project
which was created through the Medicare Modernization Act. The
demonstration provided incentive funding to Utah physicians for
adopting EHRs and offered these doctors support and assistance with
their EHRs systems. In the bill we are considering, I included language
to ensure that health providers in Utah and across the country will
continue to receive that assistance. Without such assistance, many
practices will move forward with a commitment to adopt EHRs, but will
not choose the right product for their needs or could have difficulty
using the system.
Another concern that has been brought to my attention by Utah health
care providers is that the maintenance of effort provision in this
legislation only applies to eligible State and local governments and
not to State and local health care providers. This is a real concern in
Utah. My State, like others across the Nation, is experiencing economic
difficulties and, as a result, is contemplating reducing provider
payments. I am deeply concerned about the impact this provision could
have not only on providers but patient access to quality health care.
Finally, I would like to briefly address the enforcement provisions
contained in section 13410 of this legislation relating to the State
attorneys general. When adopting rules to implement the health
information technology provisions in this act, I would urge Secretary
of HHS to include rules to require the States to notify the HHS
Secretary as to any outside groups that will have contracts to assist
with the enforcement of these provisions. I appreciate the opportunity
to work with my colleagues on this important issue.
I look forward to working together to transform our sick-care system
into a true health care system. However, the other side at this time
seems focused on transforming it into a socialized welfare system
through this Government-spending bill. I continue to hold deep hope in
my heart that we will soon move beyond these beltway games and work
together to fix Main Street and make sure that our Nation continues to
be the shining city on the hill.
Let me just make one other comment. When our bill went over to the
House--the House bill was passed too--I happened to notice that the
welfare reform program that we worked so hard on in the mid-1990s, that
President Clinton vetoed twice until he finally decided that it was
worthwhile and signed it, has been greatly modified in this bill. I may
be wrong in this because I have not read that section, but I have had
indications that that section basically has changed our welfare reform
law. It basically put, within a short time thereafter, two-thirds of
the people who had been on welfare to work, many of those people second
and third generations on welfare. They found out that they could work
and get the self-esteem that comes from being able to work, while still
having a welfare system to care for those who can't care for themselves
but would if they could.
My understanding is they have changed the rules now where people can
stay on welfare their whole lifetime. I hope that has been changed. I
have not looked at this final version, but I hope that has been
changed. If not, let me make a prediction. For most all of my time in
the Senate, the percentage of GDP that our Federal Government has
required is somewhere between 18 and 20 percent. If this bill goes
through and there is another $2 or $3 trillion in spending, without
being done right, we are talking about Europeanizing America. We are
talking about the percentage of GDP going up as high as 39 percent--
according to the economists I talked to. That would be disastrous.
Some are so crude that they suggest that is the plan of our more
liberal friends on the other side because the more they get people
dependent on the Federal Government, the more they think the Democratic
Party is the only one that is going to take care of them.
We prefer a little different approach to it. We prefer to help those
who can't take care of themselves but would if they could, to help them
in every way we possibly can. We have difficulty--at least I do--
helping those who can help themselves but will not.
I hope that provision is no longer in this bill, but I strongly
suspect it is. If that is so, we will have done the American economy
tremendous harm.
I am concerned about this. I can't vote for this bill, but I would
have liked to have voted for a really good bill that really provided
appropriate tax relief and made it possible to expand jobs in such a
way as to bring this economy back to the greatest economy in the world,
bar none, without question, and without question of its future
greatness.
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. COBURN. 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. COBURN. Mr. President, I wanted to spend a few minutes this
evening talking about what we think, what we think--I am going to
emphasize that--because nobody has seen the bill that I understand we
are supposed to vote on tomorrow morning, that spends almost $700 plus
billion. We have not seen the bill. We have not seen the report
language. And I can assure you that this Senator is not about to vote
on this bill until he has read the bill and we will do due diligence to
do that, if we ever get a copy of the bill.
But I wanted to talk about a couple of things that are important that
we think are in the bill, and it has to do with health care. I have a
little bit of experience in that. I have practiced medicine now for 28,
29 years. I find parts of this bill that I know when it is explained to
the American public, they will agree with me, it is ludicrous.
Let me tell you the first part of the bill. There is $20 billion in
this bill to pay hospitals and doctors to buy health IT. Now, at the
beginning you would say, well, what is wrong with that? We want
electronic medical records. We want to see the benefits that come from
the economy of scale, the increased productivity that comes from IT to
help us in health care.
Where this bill does not understand what is happening out there is
doctors will buy health IT, and hospitals will improve--they all have
health IT right now, by the way--will improve their health IT once
there is a program out there that is interoperable with the rest of the
program. The reason doctors are not buying programs for electronic
medical records has nothing to do with a lack of money, it is this very
simple reason: They know if they buy it now they get to buy it again,
because none of the computers in health IT talk to each other. They
will not talk.
The way to make them talk is called an interoperable standard. And a
good example for you to compare, think about where we had ATMs. How did
we make an ATM, where you can go anywhere in the country if you have a
credit card that allows you to get cash and go into any ATM in this
country and get cash. How did we do that? How did ATMs come about? They
came about because the private sector, the banking industry, created an
interoperable standard first. Because they had the interoperability
standard, where every bank could make sure that they could talk to
every other bank, they put in ATMs.
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All of a sudden, voila, anywhere in the world today, if you have
money in the bank and you have an ATM card, you can get money out of
the bank. They did not build the ATMs first, they did not have the
Government buy the ATMs before they had the standard set.
People say, well, we have taken care of that in this bill. We are
going to have the Government decide what the interoperable standard is.
Well, the Government has been working for 6 years to develop an
interoperability standard. They are at least doing it through a private
consortium now, and 80 percent of that standard has been accomplished.
It will be completed in 2011. But it will not be completed the way this
bill is written, because we are going to pull it all back from this
public-private consortium and we are going to have some bureaucrats at
HHS decide what the standard is going to be.
There are a lot of problems with that. One is nobody at HHS knows
that information. No. 2 is, everything that is out there in the market
today is now put at risk, so you are going to absolutely stop private
investment in this area that is so much needed.
So what we are going to do is we are going to allow bureaucrats to
decide what is it going to be. We are going to eliminate companies that
have great ideas, because they are not going to be in the mix, and we
are going to accept a standard that is not going to be the best
standard.
The way HHS has it set up now with a public-private consortium was a
poor way to do it, but at least it has got it 80 percent of the way
there. We are going to backtrack on it. Just so you know, we are so
good at spending money. We have spent $780 million already of your
money trying to get this, that we are going to now throw down the
toilet so we can start over and have bureaucrats exactly decide what
the standard is going to be.
Well, I will predict to you, everything else we do in IT in the
Federal Government, 50 percent of the money we waste. That is what our
studies show. We waste $32 billion a year on IT programs that never
work, out of a $64 billion budget for IT programs alone. So we are
going to waste a ton of money.
But that is not the important thing in this bill. We are going to
give every doctor in the country, no matter how much money they make,
if they do not have electronic medical records, we are going to give
them $60,000 to buy an electronic medical record.
Now, it would seem to me that with the incomes of the average
physician being over $200,000, the last place we want to give $60,000
to buy a piece of software that is not going to work, that is going to
have to be replaced anyway, is to those who are in the upper income in
this country.
But that is probably not as important as we are going to give for-
profit hospitals and the profitable non-profit hospitals $11 million
each to buy electronic medical record software that still will not talk
to the doctors who bought it and we gave $60,000.
The total cost of this, and what we are doing, is going to be in
excess, by the time all of the problems are solved and all of the
defects are figured out, and all of the wasted money, of $100 billion.
This bill is going to waste $100 billion.
Now, tell me for a minute why we would give some of the most
profitable companies in the country, the for-profit hospitals and the
not-for-profit hospitals who last year made in excess of $6 billion--
that is the not-for-profit hospitals made in excess of $6 billion
besides doing the charity care that they did--why are we going to give
them $11 million each to accomplish something that cannot be
accomplished?
I will tell you why we are going to do it. Because some Congressman
or some Senator said the way you solve this problem is to throw money
at it. They haven't thought it through. There has been no development
on or recognition of what is needed, which is an interoperable
standard. What should we have done? Seven years ago when we started
down this process, there were three great programs out there: one at
Mayo--I am talking big programs--one at Cleveland Clinic, and one at
Kaiser Permanente. What should we have done? We should have bought all
three of those, created the ability for those three programs to talk to
each other and given it away. We would have spent about $20 or $30
million, maybe $100 million, maybe $200 million, but not $100 billion.
So again, Washington has messed it up. The very thing we are hoping to
fix we are going to ruin. As we do it, we are going to waste $100
billion, and $30 billion of that total is in this bill.
The other interesting thing is none of this money starts rolling out
until the middle of next year.
I am told I have 1 minute remaining. I ask unanimous consent for 2
additional minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. COBURN. That is one of the problems with this bill.
Let's talk about the big problem. As a practicing physician, I know
what physicians are taught. First, do no harm. Second, listen to your
patient, and they will tell you what is wrong with them. Third, if it
has already been done, don't do it again. That is what they are taught.
With that comes years of experience, clinical judgment, and in-depth
knowledge about people and their disease. In this bill is a statement
that says: We are going to develop, through a large slush fund at
Health and Human Services, a model called comparative effectiveness.
There is nothing wrong with comparing effective outcomes. There is
nothing wrong with trying to use clinical data to move us in a better
direction. But that is not what this is about. This is comparative
effectiveness to control cost.
I warn the American people tonight, if this bill goes through, we are
well on the way to absolute government control of the patient-doctor
relationship, because we are going to assume that there is no way that
a doctor can make a better decision than a computer. I will give two
examples that happened in the last 5 years in my practice, two people
who came in who had no clinical signs, had no indications other than my
knowing them for years and developing a suspicion that something was
wrong. They didn't come with a complaint. Their complaint was something
else. I ordered MRIs on both patients. They were both denied by their
insurance company. I arranged for both of them to get MRIs. Both had
deadly brain tumors. They never would have fit in the comparative
effectiveness or the cost control mechanism that we are setting up with
this so we can control Medicare costs. This is the first step for the
government to start rationing the very care it says it wants to give to
the American people.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator has expired.
Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. COBURN. The American people better pay very close attention to
this bill. If you are on Medicare today or if you are 55 years of age,
you better be plenty afraid of the language in this bill, because it is
setting up the basis with which the Government will decide what kind of
care you get. We are going to use a chart. If you don't fit in the
chart, you are out of luck. You are going to lose the ability for
clinical skills to make a difference in your life. Talk to the people
of Great Britain where cancer cure rates are lower than ours because
they don't have access to treatments Americans have today.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Begich). The Senator from New Mexico.
(The remarks of Mr. Udall of New Mexico pertaining to the
introduction of S. 433 are located in today's Record under ``Statements
on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. President, I rise to discuss the economic stimulus
plan, and I rise in dismay. I am dismayed because we are about to spend
$786 billion--or whatever the latest figure is that keeps changing
almost by the hour--one of the most expensive bills this or any other
Congress has ever seen that will not truly stimulate anything. I am
also dismayed that in doing so we are placing an almost insurmountable
fiscal yoke across the next generation's shoulders.
Yesterday, I became the proud grandfather of two twin granddaughters.
It saddens me to know the result of the
[[Page S2200]]
votes we cast, I assume, tomorrow--and the ultimate cost of this bill--
is going to be borne by those two little girls in their lifetimes and
not by my generation in ours. We are saddling this next generation of
our children and grandchildren with an unbelievable debt for the
purpose of trying to stimulate the economy when, in fact, there is
virtually nothing in this bill that truly is going to stimulate the
economy in the current crisis we are in.
Georgians and Americans are struggling. They need jobs. They need
food on the table. They need to be able to go to bed at night knowing,
at the very least, they have the blessing of a roof over their heads.
But provisions in the bill that could have truly helped Americans,
such as a $500-per-worker tax credit, have been so watered down that
now the experts say that particular provision is going to provide about
$13 more per week in workers' pockets. That is not a stimulus plan.
I commend my good friend and my colleague, Senator Isakson from
Georgia, who worked to put an idea in this bill, a housing tax credit
that we know would have stimulated the economy and revived the
plummeting housing market.
Now, why are we in this economic crisis we are in today? If you ask
any economist to point to one thing that has put us in this crisis,
every single one of them--Republican and Democratic economists,
conservative and liberal economists, Independent economists--every one
of them will tell you the housing crisis is the No. 1 issue that put us
into this crisis.
Unfortunately, the bill that came out of the House, the bill that
originally came out of the Finance Committee in the Senate, contained
not one single provision, in either bill, that was focused on
addressing this issue of the housing crisis.
Under Senator Isakson's proposal that was an amendment to the bill on
the floor of the Senate, a $15,000 home buyer tax credit would have
been given to anyone who purchased a home during the next year. That
would have had a very positive effect on the economy. How do we know
that? We know that because Congress passed a similar housing tax credit
in 1975, when we were in the midst of another declining housing
industry situation in a crisis that was not as severe as this one but
still in a crisis. What we found then was that particular provision
turned around America's sagging economic fortunes.
I know families across the country were waiting for this tax credit
to pass. I have heard from Georgians over and over again, over the last
several weeks, who are looking for a new home to buy, but they,
frankly, have been waiting on the proposal because they have been
reading about it.
I got a call from a radio talk show host in my home State today who
made the statement to me, before we started the interview: Tell me
about Senator Isakson's tax credit provision. Where does it stand
because I am looking for a home to buy and my realtor called me and
said: Look, you can afford to pay a little bit more because here is
what is going to be the result of your buying this house: a $15,000 tax
credit.
Now, with the way this provision has been watered down, it may as
well not even be in there. It is unfortunate. This was a bipartisan
amendment, an amendment that was talked about on both sides of the
aisle by Senators in this Chamber, and was agreed to without even
calling for a vote because everybody recognizes the housing sector has
to be fixed and that this would play a major role in fixing that
sector.
All week we have read in the papers and heard from a majority of our
colleagues that this bill is a compromise. Well, let me say this: This
bill is no compromise. When deals of this magnitude are struck in
closed-door, back-room sessions, when the White House talks to this
side of the aisle but does not truly listen, you do not have a
compromise.
It is pretty clear the White House has not listened to this side of
the aisle in crafting this final proposal that apparently is in the
process of being agreed to. My Republican colleagues have offered
proposal after proposal to create jobs, to fix the real crux of our
economic troubles--the housing crisis--and to lend a hand to laid-off
workers who are suffering through no fault of their own. Instead, we
are spending money we do not have on projects or programs that are not
needed.
What taxpayers are getting instead is a bloated Government giveaway
packed with pet projects. Let me say there has been a lot of
conversation coming from the White House, as well as on the floor of
the Senate, that this bill does not contain earmarks. Well, anybody who
says that simply has not read the bill. This bill is packed with as
many earmarks as I have seen in any bill that has come into this body
in the time I have been here. There is earmark after earmark in here,
and we are going to talk some more about that before this bill is voted
on, presumably tomorrow.
The American people know something needs to be done, and I agree that
it does. But this legislation is not what is needed to address the
housing crisis, put hard-earned dollars back in our citizens' pockets
to spend as they wish, and put Americans back to work.
Our side of the aisle offered a very targeted combination of spending
and tax reductions in the McCain amendment. A truly bipartisan effort
by the majority and the Senate as a whole would have passed that
amendment, and we could be headed down the road of reaching a
bipartisan agreement on the issue of trying to solve this economic
crisis. Unfortunately, that amendment was not agreed to because it was
not voted on in a bipartisan way.
With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his
excellent comments about the housing proposal offered by our colleague,
Senator Isakson. I thought it was a good idea when he first brought it
up. It would have pleased me if that had been included at the time
President Bush sent out those checks a year ago that had no real
permanent benefit, and I thought it should have been included then. I
was very much supportive of it when he brought it forward later, last
week, and I thought we had adopted it. But it looks like it is going to
be taken out or so reduced it will not have the same effect.
The advantage of that was it would target the real problem we have;
which is the housing supply that is growing. The growing supply of
unoccupied housing causes the price of everyone's home to decline. We
know it had to decline some because we had a bubble in housing. But
there is a danger when home prices fall below what the real market
value is. When they fall too low, it does begin to have serious
ramifications in the economy.
Similar to Senator Chambliss, I thought Senator McCain's proposal had
some real infrastructure spending, some targeted tax reductions that
would put money in people's pockets immediately but would not
necessarily be permanent, and we could shut that off without creating a
bureaucracy. I thought that was a real good piece of legislation. It
cost about half the cost of this legislation.
So there are some things we could do. I was certainly prepared to
consider other options and other alternatives. But, as it is, there has
been very little input into this bill. Right now, we still have not
seen it. There was talk about trying to vote on it tonight. That is
unthinkable: to have a 700-plus page piece of legislation, spending
almost $800 billion, and people who have not read it are going to vote
on it? Surely, that will not happen. It is not a good process, in my
view.
I am disturbed about it, and I think the financial soul of our
country is at stake. If this becomes a pattern, if this becomes the way
we do business and the way we spend money and throw money around, it
seems to me, too much in a political way, rather than in a stimulative
way, we will say to our constituents and to the world: The United
States does not have its house in order, it is not a safe place to put
money, and there is no certainty about what will happen next because
unpredictable Government actions may dwarf the natural economic forces
that people relied on in the past to make their investments. So I am
worried about that.
I would share something here. When you get the Government spending a
large amount of money, it creates a lot
[[Page S2201]]
of problems. Our economy has always been less dominated by Government
spending than the European economies, at least Germany and France in
particular. They have had Government spending that represents as much
as 45 or 50 percent of their gross domestic product. It is a huge
portion of their economy. Their unemployment rate has always tended to
be higher than ours, and their growth has not kept up with ours.
One other thing happens when the Government injects itself into the
economy; and that is, it has a tendency to corrupt the Government
itself. We have had a lot of criticisms about lobbyists, that we have
too many lobbyists. Lobbyists have too much influence, and we should
have fewer lobbyists and they should have less influence. But as the
size and power of the Government expands, I think it is only natural
that one would expect companies worth billions of dollars would feel a
necessity to have more lobbyists. This is a Washington Times piece not
long ago dealing with the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, and it
shows some of the things that were happening. During the fourth
quarter, Citigroup had $1.28 million in lobbyist expenses. In the third
quarter, they had $1.39 million in lobbyist expenses. People say, well,
that is unbelievable. That is a lot of money. There are 1,000 million
dollars in a billion. That is how many 1 billion is, 1,000 million.
During that time, Citigroup gets $45 billion from the U.S. Government.
So what is that? Forty-five billion is forty-five thousand million. So
it is probably a pretty good idea, from the company's point of view, to
spend $1 million on lobbyists. That is a pretty good bargain. That is
all I am saying. The bigger the Government, the more the Government
gets interfaced with what has historically been a private sector that
we didn't stick our nose in. Historically, the companies paid taxes,
they obeyed the law, and the Government didn't subsidize winners and
losers in the banking industry.
So AIG, they actually got, I think now, over $100 billion. They spent
$390,000 in fourth quarter expenses. General Motors, look at that:
$3,320,000. They got money out of this Wall Street financial bailout
that nobody ever thought they could get. They got the Government to
give them $10 billion. So I guess they consider $3 million in lobbying
expenses to be a pretty good bargain. Those are some of the dangers
when we stick our nose into matters that we out not to meddle in.
Once again, I wish to share this chart because I think it is
instructive of the situation in which we find ourselves. Back in 2004,
President Bush had the biggest deficit up to that time since World War
II--maybe ever, in terms of real dollars. It was $413 billion. That is
when he was criticized so aggressively, as many of my colleagues will
remember, for reckless spending and running up the deficit. I thought a
lot of that criticism was valid, but we had a war going on and we had
some other things. We didn't contain spending as well as we should
have. The recession that occurred was biting into revenue, and we ended
up with a $413 billion deficit, the biggest we had ever had. It dropped
in 2005 to $318 billion, it dropped to $248 billion in 2006, and in
2007 the deficit dropped to $161 billion. It was definitely heading in
the right direction. That represented only 1.2 percent of GDP. This 3.6
percent of GDP for the deficit was the highest in about 30 years, since
the recession in 1980, as I recall.
So what about 2008, the last fiscal year, ending September 30 of
2008. We sent out the $150 billion in checks to Americans in the hope
that it would do something good for the economy. People blamed the
President for it. I think he deserves blame for it because it didn't
work. However, the President has no authority whatsoever to spend a
dime that Congress doesn't give him. He had to come to Congress and ask
for that money. The Democratic leadership supported it and moved the
bill forward, and we sent out the checks. That, plus the economic
slowdown, caused the 2008 deficit. Last September 30, it was $455
billion, the largest ever.
What about this year? Our own Congressional Budget Office has done
some analysis. And I would just say that the CBO is a nonpartisan
group. We just elected a new Director. He was basically selected by the
Democratic majority. The Republican members of the Budget Committee
liked him. We thought he was an honest, capable man, and we voted for
him. So we got a new Director. He is, I believe, an honorable person,
gives us good numbers, as the previous Director did. So the CBO
estimates, without the stimulus, the deficit ending September 30 of
this year will be $1.3 trillion. That will represent 8.3 percent of
GDP, the highest ever.
Now we are about to pass another almost $800 billion stimulus package
on top of that. It all would not get spent in 2009. It is not all going
to get spent before September 30 of this year, so of that 800 they are
scoring about 232 to be spent in this year, meaning the total deficit
would be $1.4 trillion, three times--three times--the size of the
highest deficit we have ever had in history.
I have to tell my colleagues, Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning
economist, and another one of his associates, just wrote an op-ed in
the Wall Street Journal. He questioned this stimulus package. He used
careful language. He said normally in a stimulus package, for every
dollar you expend, you hope to get a dollar and a half of growth. He
said in their opinion, because of the nature of this legislation--I
will say the political nature of it rather than the stimulus nature of
it--they conclude each dollar spent will produce less than a dollar of
stimulus.
So we are adding another $800 billion on to our debt total for very
little benefit. When you go to next year, they are expecting it to be
another $1 trillion deficit and the year after that, $640 billion. By
the way, these 2 years at least have $70 billion more which will be
added because we are going to fix the AMT, the alternative minimum tax.
It costs $70 billion to fix it, and we do it every year, and that is
never scored until we fix it. So that will be added on to both of
those. Also, physicians are set to get a 20-percent reduction next year
in their physician payments. Why do we do that? Well, we passed a law a
long time ago that would call for that. We have long since recognized
we can't cut our doctors' pay that way, we can't cut them 20 percent.
Every year, we put the money back in. It is about $30 billion, I
believe, a year. That doesn't score in these numbers. So you can assume
the deficit next year will be at least about $100 billion higher than
current estimates. Those are gimmicks we use to hide the real nature of
the deficit.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, interest in the
stimulus bill alone over the next 10 years will amount to $326 billion,
and that includes the first 2 years when all is not yet spent. It will
actually be about $40 billion a year thereafter once it all gets spent.
That is a huge thing. That is $400 billion every decade. Who is going
to pay it? Our children and grandchildren. There is no plan to pay this
off. So this is not a minor matter.
Finally, our own Congressional Budget Office, after studying this
package, concluded these things: It would have a temporary stimulus
effect in the first 2 to 3 years, but over a 10-year period, they
conclude the gross domestic product would grow less if the legislation
were enacted than if we didn't pass anything. They project that over a
10-year period it would hurt the economy--not a lot, but it would be
down. Why? Because when we borrow $1 trillion from the private economy
to pay this debt, it crowds out private people who may want to borrow
money and create jobs.
Secondly, you have to pay the interest on it every year; we have to
pay $40 billion a year in interest. How much is $40 billion? That is
the amount of the entire Federal highway budget each year, $40
billion--a lot of money. Now we are going to add that every year, just
in interest, which we will be paying indefinitely. Some people have
said--even some conservatives have said deficits don't matter. Wrong.
Deficits do matter.
Finally, I would just point out these facts about why the bill is not
effective to do what it says it wants to do, which is to create jobs.
It is simple arithmetic. We wrote this chart when the bill was $826
billion. It actually came out of the Senate at $838 billion. We are
hearing it is going to come out less than that, and that we will end up
with about $789 billion. So we don't know. Apparently, they are still
arguing over what to spend and how to spend the
[[Page S2202]]
money. The interest on that version, according to CBO, would run $347
billion, give or take a billion or two, over the next decade.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. SESSIONS. I ask unanimous consent for 2 additional minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. SESSIONS. So that totals over $1.1 trillion. You divide that out
per taxpayer, per person who pays taxes--don't think that something can
be created for nothing. To inject $800 billion into the economy today,
we have to borrow it. How much does that mean that the average American
is assuming as new debt? Well, what we conclude is--just from simple
arithmetic--it is about $8,400 per taxpayer. Think about that. Just
like that, we are going to pass a bill that over 10 years will cost
over $1.1 trillion and increase the average taxpayer's share of the
debt by about $8,400. It is like adding it to your mortgage or
something.
If it produces 3.9 million jobs, which is the high end of what the
Congressional Budget Office says it would create--the goal for those
pushing the legislation say they want to create 4 million jobs. That is
the high side of what--it is higher, actually, than what CBO, our own
budget office, tells us it will create. So 3.9 million jobs, that costs
$300,000 per job. Do the arithmetic.
Is that a good deal for America? Is that worth burdening us with
$8,400 each? What if it came out on the low side? What if it only
created 1.3 million jobs, which was the low side that CBO scored--1.3
to 3.9? That would be $900,000 per job.
Mr. President, I would say that, yes, we can do some things to
improve this economy, but we are moving a political agenda; we are
moving programmatic ideas. A lot of people might like to see some of
these things become law, but they don't want to go through the entire
budget process, to compete and debate. They just stick these programs
into this emergency stimulus bill that goes straight to the debt, none
of which is paid for, and then it is all debt. I don't think it is a
good idea.
Good people might disagree, but I firmly believe it is not a good
idea for my constituents. My phones are ringing off the hook against
it. I don't believe it is good for my children, my grandchildren, or
yours.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey is recognized.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I understand we are in morning business
for up to 10 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up
to 15 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, what we are debating in the Senate is
about fighting for the economic future of America.
Dr. King talked about the ``fierce urgency of now'' in the context of
a struggle for civil rights. We have to remember the fierce urgency of
now when we are tackling the worst economic crisis our country has seen
in generations.
We have to understand the urgency for the 3.6 million Americans who
have lost their job since December 2007--almost 600,000 in the last
month alone. It is an urgent situation when millions of American
families are in danger of losing their homes. It is a dire situation
when State budgets are stretched so thin they have to watch school
buildings crumble. It is an emergency situation when local communities
are forced to consider cutting police or firefighters who protect their
residents. It is an immediate crisis when a young girl needs an
operation but her parents cannot afford health insurance. The Dow lost
40 percent in a year's time. Businesses are closing. Life savings are
being drained.
Even for the hard-working Americans who still have their jobs,
pensions, and health care, there is still a lot of fear out there that
their careers and health insurance aren't secure; that the job loss or
foreclosure that hit their neighbor might knock on their door next. Yet
in the midst of all of that, I hear so many of my colleagues basically
saying: Oh, no, do nothing.
Without bold and decisive action, the country faces the possibility
of a prolonged economic collapse rivaling the worst we have ever seen.
In a crisis this severe, the Federal Government has the
responsibility to step in and to stabilize the economy and lay the
groundwork for recovery. We are not just talking about the financial
recovery of individuals; we are talking about the renewal of a nation.
We have before us a tremendous opportunity to strengthen the 21st-
century economy, to make investments so the private sector can create
the innovations that will help our country prosper in the future, to
transition away from fossil fuels and stop sending our money abroad,
enhance America's energy security and meet the climate crisis that
threatens our planet.
We have an opportunity very soon to vote on a bold plan to create and
maintain more than 3.5 million jobs in America and 100,000 in my home
State of New Jersey, helping workers damaged by this crisis and laying
the foundations for economic growth well into the future.
Is the bill we are considering perfect? No. But in my many years of
legislating, I have never seen a perfect bill. People are losing their
jobs, their homes, and their life savings. The unemployment rate in New
Jersey is the highest it has been in a decade and a half. More
Americans are filing first-time jobless claims than any time in a
quarter of a century. This isn't a time for delay, and it isn't a time
for games or political posturing. It is time for quick, bold action.
This is a complicated piece of legislation, so I will take a little
time to lay out its most important provisions.
First, this bill brings tax relief to the middle class--about $230
billion worth of tax cuts. In the Finance Committee, I introduced an
amendment to save over 1 million New Jerseyans from the alternative
minimum tax, saving families up to $5,600.
That AMT tax was originally designed to ensure that the wealthiest
Americans could not use creative accounting to avoid all taxes, but it
was never intended to hit the middle class as hard as it is hitting
them now. If we don't act, millions of taxpayers could wake up next tax
season to realize they owe more in taxes even though their income
hasn't changed.
The cornerstone of this legislation, in terms of tax relief, is a
making work pay credit--the credit that is available to those who are
working. The average working family--95 percent of all working
families--are going to get a tax cut of up to $800 to put money back
into their pockets to support their families and, at the same time,
create demand for goods and services in this economy that will be
provided largely by the private sector that creates other jobs for
those who provide those goods and service.
It expands the earned-income and child tax credit to help low-income
working families get through these difficult times. Those are the
individuals who need money, and when they have it, they spend it in an
economy that also creates demand for goods and services, created
largely by the private sector. In fact, 90 percent of all of the jobs
created under this bill will be from the private sector. It supports
tax incentives for businesses to make new investments and hire new
employees.
This recovery package would not just create jobs; it will create a
new generation of green jobs. What we are considering today is a green
recovery package, which will help change the direction of our economy
for one based on fossil fuels to one based on clean renewable energy.
It makes important investments in building efficiency, renewable fuels,
clean vehicles, and green job training. It makes a massive investment
in weatherizing homes, which will reduce emissions while bringing down
energy costs. All along the way, each of those initiatives creates a
different sector of the job marketplace that Americans will be able to
fulfill.
Just like the rest of it, the energy piece of this legislation isn't
perfect. I would have liked to have seen more support for mass transit.
They are facing major budget crises and have to consider service
cutbacks, just as ridership is growing and climate change is
accelerating. Transit funding is essential if we are going to meet our
emissions goals, get cars off the streets, and keep efficient
transportation affordable.
[[Page S2203]]
The Federal Government has been dragging its feet on energy security
and climate change for too long. Our local governments have been
leading the way. That is why I am proud to have created the energy
efficiency and conservation block grant in 2007, along with Senator
Sanders, to help fund and reward them for that work. I am thrilled
this Economic Recovery Act contains substantial funding for these
grants, including tens of millions of dollars for New Jersey. Cities
and communities across the country can use the funding to promote
efficiency, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and invest in renewable
energy and the jobs that will go along with that in doing that work.
A municipality could work to insulate office buildings, install
fluorescent light bulbs, install solar panels, invest in LED lighting
for traffic signals or purchase more efficient municipal vehicles. Of
course, what a municipality would do for energy efficiency in New
Jersey would be different from what one might do in Alaska or Arizona.
So the funding allows for flexibility.
There is strong support for solar energy, including a manufacturing
tax credit and tax incentives for homeowners to install solar panels.
That is good news for New Jersey, which is the second-biggest solar-
producing State in the country and where the solar cell was invented.
The support for energy efficiency is complemented by important
investments in infrastructure. With this recovery plan, we can start
building and rehabilitating scores of roads, bridges, and bypasses.
We have the chance to secure a stream of funding to start
construction on the ARC rail tunnel, to ease commutes across the
Hudson, reduce traffic, and clean our air. Most important, those kinds
of projects put people to work. Not only the construction people but
the engineers and architects, the clerical workers in their office, and
everybody who creates supplies for these jobs at their places of work,
and the transportation that brings it to the job site. This is how we
create all of these jobs, and they're mostly in the private sector.
We understand a major part of helping the economic recovery is
allowing workers who have lost their jobs to keep their families
afloat, develop the skills necessary to maintain long-term employment
and find new jobs.
This economic recovery package makes exactly this type of bold
investment. It helps States close gaps in their unemployment programs.
It rewards States for innovative reforms, providing benefits to more
than 500,000 workers a year who are now falling through the cracks of
the unemployment program. It stimulates the broader economy as every
dollar put into the hands of temporarily displaced workers and their
families generates $1.64 in economic growth, whether it is spent on
housing, groceries, or other basic necessities.
For those who have fallen on the hardest of times--who have been laid
off and haven't been able to find work and are having trouble putting
food on the table or keeping a roof overhead--the recovery package
includes important support for food assistance, as well as housing
programs that will help prevent foreclosures, rehabilitate homes, and
provide emergency housing in New Jersey.
This legislation that we are talking about is not only recovery but
investment. This legislation also means about $4 billion for worker
training and employment services. The labor market has fundamentally
changed. If we are going to stay competitive in our State and country,
we need to invest in human capital and give our workers the skills to
thrive in the 21st-century economy.
Preparing those students and workers and those who will prepare them
for the high-tech, high-paying jobs means investing in education at
every level. That is also not only going to lay the foundation for
long-term economic growth but give immediate opportunities for jobs as
well. These are ways in which we, in fact, can modernize our schools.
At least 205 New Jersey schools will have the opportunity to modernize
themselves with the technology necessary and the laboratory necessary
for preparation for this 21st-century economy. It is an investment that
could mean the difference between a crumbling schoolroom and a science
lab that prepares a child for a career in biomedical engineering.
I was raised in a tenement, poor, the son of immigrants, the first in
my family to go to college. I know I would not be standing in the
Senate today if it weren't for the Federal Government's support and
those opportunities. Whether it is our public education program or in
college through the Pell grants and the opportunities in the American
opportunity tax credit to make college more affordable, it will produce
a workforce that can compete anywhere in the world and be able to
capture the new jobs created under this bill.
Any parent in America knows the challenges of affording health care,
even if you haven't lost your job. Families working in low-wage or even
moderate-wage jobs struggle every month just to pay the bills, not to
mention the medical bills on top of that. Those who have recently lost
jobs are pretty much out of luck. Unfortunately, a child's illness
doesn't always wait for a good-paying job with health care to come
along.
That is why we have included provisions in this bill to help States
continue to provide health coverage to those children and families they
are serving. For those who lose their jobs and their health insurance
with it, we have included a tax break to help them pay for the COBRA
coverage they are eligible for in between jobs.
I will end where this whole crisis began, in housing. This bill
includes provisions that will allow more families to get tax relief
when they buy a home, provide additional funding for those who recently
lost their home, and provide additional funding for a provision I
authored to help children affected by a home foreclosure stay in
school.
This plan may be detailed; the investments it makes may be diverse.
But we are not talking about just throwing money haphazardly. We
understand every dollar in the plan belongs to the American taxpayer.
They deserve assurances that their money is invested wisely. So we are
going to ensure unprecedented transparency, oversight, and
accountability to the plan so Americans can see not only how their
money is being spent, but also the results of their investments.
This includes requiring the President to report quarterly on the
plan's progress, as well as establishing an oversight panel to review
the management of taxpayer dollars.
We have had a vigorous debate in the legislation. That is part of our
democracy and it is always welcome. It has been troubling to me to see
such a bad case of amnesia in some of my colleagues on the other side
of the aisle. I think it would make every American who loss his or her
job in this recession cringe to hear that some of my Republican
colleagues want to repeat the policies that helped create this crisis
in the first place.
Republican policies dominated the last Presidency over the last 8
years and dominated Congress for a good part of that period of time.
All of a sudden, they are guardians of fiscal responsibility, after
taxing the middle class while passing capital gains and dividend tax
cuts aimed at the wealthy, after turning President Clinton's record
surpluses into President Bush's record deficits and doubling the
national debt to more than $11 trillion--$11 trillion. If we did
absolutely nothing, if President Obama did absolutely nothing, he will
have inherited a $1.2 trillion debt. I hear these voices now of fiscal
responsibility. Where were they when they were driving this enormous
deficit to the Nation?
Now, to top it all off, they added amendment after amendment that
added to the debt, and then they turned around, after adding to the
debt and complaining about it, and voted against the package because
they said it adds too much to the Federal debt. Only in Washington can
one believe that.
Finally, I hope our Republican colleagues are not of the belief that
by hoping this package does not succeed they will achieve political
victory because, in essence, they would be voting and betting against
an American economic recovery, against the American people's hopes and
dreams and aspirations to live a better life.
I fear, after reading some of the articles today, that is exactly
where they are: no plan to meet the economic challenges we have,
complain about the
[[Page S2204]]
plan that is there, and then ultimately find ourselves in a set of
circumstances in which they are betting against the American people and
this economic recovery. That is not only bad politics, it is pad policy
for the Nation. I hope they will see the light when it comes time to
vote.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho is recognized.
Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, first, let me say to my distinguished
colleague from New Jersey, I sincerely appreciate his passion about
this problem. I think everyone on this side of the aisle likewise feels
as passionately about the difficulties facing the American people
today. There is no one who believes this is not a problem. There is no
one here who does not feel the empathy every one of us should feel
about Americans who are losing their jobs and about Americans who are
underemployed.
There are over 92 percent of Americans employed, but there are over 7
percent who are not. The fact that 92 percent are employed in no way
denigrates the fact that we have a substantial and a high rate of
unemployment.
With all due respect to my colleague from New Jersey, he made
reference to the fact that there are people encouraging that we do
nothing. I don't know who that person is. I have not run into them yet.
It is not anyone on this floor that I know of.
I think this problem is so serious and I believe my Republican
colleagues believe this problem is so serious that it does not only
deserve something be done but that something major be done, something
aggressive be done, and something quickly be done.
With all due respect, I strongly disagree with his characterization
that there is anyone on this side of the aisle who hopes this plan does
not succeed. We pray every day that this package does succeed. It has
to succeed. If it does not, this country is going to be in very serious
trouble.
Let there be no mistake about it, this is clearly a Democratic plan.
The people who are saying this is a bipartisan plan are flat wrong.
This is a Democratic plan. I hope it works. I pray that it works. I
pray that we will be able to come out here one day in the very near
future and say congratulations to the Democrats for putting together
this package and putting it to work so that we turn this economy
around. The Democrats own this plan.
Having said that, I urge, and my colleagues on this side of the aisle
urge, that this is not just a single path that is going to take us out
of the problem we have. Indeed, it is going to take more than just
spending. Just spending has not worked in the past. It did not work at
the time of the Great Depression. It did not work for Japan in the
nineties. It did not even work for us last year when this Congress gave
$600 to every individual to go out and spend. It did not even put a
blip on the screen as far as helping the downturn in the economy.
The real problem, the systemic problem is the frozen credit markets.
It is not Government spending that is going to get us out of this
situation; it is the spending by the great American people, by the
great American consumer, by businesses large and businesses small. It
is their spending that will get us out of the deep hole we are in.
With all due respect to my good friend from New Jersey, I would like
to see as much passion about attacking the problem with the banking
sector and the frozen credit markets that we are seeing for this
spending of $800 billion which, when all is said and done, will turn
out to be $1.2 trillion when we include the interest that is going to
have to be paid.
I congratulate the good Senator for referring to the work done in the
housing sector. With all due respect, I urge it is not enough. This
Senate added an excellent provision to this particular package. It was
taken out when the conference committee met, and that portion that was
taken out reduced in half what needed to be done to help stimulate the
housing sector.
Mr. President, you heard my distinguished colleague from New Jersey
talk about the amount people will be able to use to go out and get a
home. It was reduced in the conference committee. It was cut virtually
in half. On top of that, it only allows for first-time buyers, which
just does not make sense. If we are trying to stimulate the housing
sector, why just first-time house buyers? Everyone should be given this
opportunity to go out and to purchase a new home or a previously
occupied home and should get the credit.
With all due respect, what this Senate did was taken out in the
conference committee. I would like to see the same passion as the other
two paths--that is, attacking the frozen credit market and the housing
sector--that we keep seeing from the other side as far as the spending
of this $800 billion.
I close with this. I asked this on the floor the other day: Why $800
billion? It is really important that history knows why America settled
on $800 billion. There is no doubt this is going to pass. The Democrats
will vote together on this. Three Republicans have shown they are going
to vote with them. And there is no doubt this is going to pass. But we
need, America needs, America requires an explanation of why $800
billion.
I heard the President of the United States say earlier this week:
That is not just a number I pulled out of the air. I take him at his
word. If it was not just pulled out of the air, it was carefully
constructed with a formula. I want to see that formula. America wants
to see that formula. Historians are going to need to see that formula
because if it works, we are going to need that formula in the future
again someday. If it does not work, we need to look at that formula and
see if we can figure out why it did not work.
Somebody, please, deliver us that formula so we know how the number
of $800 billion was reached. It could be $50 billion. It could be $200
billion. It could be $600 billion. It could be $1.5 trillion. We don't
know. But if we have that formula, we Republicans can help fine-tune
that formula to either spend more if more needs to be spent based on
the formula or to spend less if less can be spent and if we can save
this money. We are strapping our children, grandchildren, and great
grandchildren with a horrendous debt. They are going to be paying this
back. The money will have to be borrowed probably from China. They are
the ones who usually put up the money for this. Future generations are
going to be working to pay back the Chinese Government $800 billion.
Future generations have the absolute right to know how this
administration and how the Democratic Party constructed a formula that
spent $800 billion. It is only fair.
Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a
quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. DURBIN. 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. DURBIN. Mr. President, I have been listening to the criticisms of
the recovery and reinvestment plan from the other side of the aisle,
and I have tried to put them into categories so I can address them and
consider them. The first complaint appears to be that this is an $800
billion stimulus package which will add to our deficit.
There is no question about the premise. The facts are right. It is
$800 billion, and it will add to our deficit. But I find it interesting
that the Republicans who are criticizing this come from the same party
which, over the last 8 years, saw America's national debt double from
$5 trillion to $10 trillion and they went along with all of it. When
the President wanted a war and did not want to pay for it, which added
to the debt of the country, they voted for it. The final cost was about
$800 billion, and it is still accumulating. When the President wanted
tax cuts in the midst of a weak economy, which added to the deficit--
and cuts that went primarily to the wealthiest people--his Republican
Party supported him and no questions asked.
In fact, the argument for many years was that deficits don't matter,
when President Bush was in the White House, during that 8-year period
of time. Now deficits do matter. It is an accumulated debt of America.
It has a lot of negative impact on our economy. But for a party which
ignored this reality for so many years to come and tell us now, in the
midst of the worst economic crisis in modern times, that
[[Page S2205]]
we have to be so careful of the deficit we cannot address this economic
crisis, is a little hard to take. That is the first point.
The second point is they criticize this package for costing too much,
when in fact on two separate occasions Republican Senators offered
amendments to this package which added to the costs dramatically. In
the Senate Finance Committee, the Republican Senator from Iowa offered
an amendment that added $70 billion in cost to this package. It passed
with the support of both parties, I will add. At the end of the day,
the package cost $70 billion more, and the Senator from Iowa said he
couldn't vote for the final work product because it was too expensive.
He had authored an amendment that added $70 billion in cost and then
said he couldn't vote for the package because it was too expensive.
Another Senator, from Georgia, added an amendment on the floor--I
thought it was a thoughtful amendment--that added in cost $11 billion
to $30 billion, by some estimates, to give incentives for people to buy
homes. It makes sense. We need help in the housing market. Yet this
added expense on the bill, this added amendment, which we adopted,
could not win that Senator's support. He too was critical of the final
product: It cost too much.
So it is hard to follow why so many Republican Senators are
criticizing the President's attempt to get this economy back and moving
forward, because they are saying it cost too much, when they introduced
and passed amendments which added to the cost of the package. It
doesn't follow.
And the third point, made by the Republican leader, who came to the
floor today and criticized the compromise--the final bill here that we
will consider probably tomorrow night--said they cut back on some of
the tax cuts for working families.
It is true. The President's original proposal was $500 for
individuals, I think it was up to $70,000 or $80,000 in income, and
$1,000 for families. Then when we had to cut back in the cost of the
overall bill to win the support of several Republican Senators, the
President offered to make a cutback in that area. So when we try to cut
back in the cost of the bill to win Republican support, we are
criticized for those cutbacks; and when the bill comes to the
committee, or to the floor, Republican Senators add amendments that add
cost to the bill and then tell us it costs too much. It is hard to
follow their logic. I can't.
I am glad that it appears, with our fingers crossed, that there will
be at least 60 Senators tomorrow when we vote on this bill that will do
something about the state of our economy. This President has inherited
the worst economic crisis of any President since Franklin Roosevelt's
in 1933. This situation is terrible. It is no Great Depression, thank
goodness, but it is terrible. We have lost jobs all over America--
500,000 jobs in the month of December--and 36,000 of them,
incidentally, in my home State of Illinois. That is 1,200 jobs a day we
have lost in my State in December, I am afraid a like number in the
month of January, and there is no end in sight.
The President has stepped up and said: We cannot let the American
economy slide into this spiral that is going to create so much hardship
for workers losing their jobs and businesses closing. We have to do
something. We need a solution. We can't stand back and watch the parade
go by. We have to step in and try to stop the negative impact of this
economic crisis.
Most Americans--in fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans--
believe the President is right in trying to solve this problem. He has
said, and they understand, this may not be a 100-percent solution. At
the end of the day, we may need to do more or something different. But
the alternative is to do nothing, and that seems to be the position of
many Senators who are opposing this. They want to wait. They want to
wait and see if this economy gets better or they want to return to the
old-time religion. What is the old-time religion? It is what we tried
last April. When the economy was softening, President George W. Bush
came to us and said: I know the solution. I know how to get us out of
this problem. It is a tax cut.
Well, if you have been around Congress for a while, you know that
when it comes to the Republican Party, the answer to every challenge,
every issue, every circumstance is a tax cut. We have a surplus. Is the
economy booming? Cut taxes. Do we have problems. Is the economy
cratering? Cut taxes. Well, tax cuts do have value, but in certain
circumstances they may not work effectively. And we found out last
April that our $150 billion package--and I think that was the number--
that President Bush asked for, enacted by the Democratic Congress,
didn't work. I believe it was $300 to individuals and $600 to families.
It may have helped an individual family put some money in savings or
pay off a credit card, but at the end of the day, when you step back
and look at the big picture--the macroeconomic picture--it didn't work.
The economy continued to slide downhill.
So the magic elixir of tax cuts, which we hear consistently from the
Republican side, even during this crisis, is one that has been tried
and failed.
We included tax cuts in this package in an effort to try to win over
some Republican votes. It didn't work very well. We got no Republican
support in the House and only three Republican Senators who stepped up
in the Senate and said they would support it.
What we are trying here is something that is dramatically different;
not just tax cuts for working families, which they need, but injecting
money into the economy. Why do we need to have the government spending
money in this economy? Because Americans are not spending enough of
their own money. We anticipate that this year Americans will spend
about $1 trillion less on goods and services than they ordinarily
would.
We have a gross domestic product of about $14 trillion a year. Well,
that is about 7 or 8 percent of it that won't be spent this year. And
when you cut back in that much spending, when people are not buying the
things they buy--refrigerators and cars and homes and clothing, and all
the rest--jobs are lost, businesses contract, and our recession gets
deeper. So the President said: Let's put this money into a stimulus or
recovery package that will inject new life into this economy and try to
get it moving forward again.
It turns out economists--conservatives, liberals, most economists--
have said it is worth a try. Historically, it has worked; we should do
it now. And the President went further. He said that our goal will be
creating or saving 3\1/2\ million jobs over the next 2 years. That is
an ambitious goal, and I hope we can reach it.
I know those on the other side criticize it. They say: You know what,
when you take the total cost of this bill and divide it into the number
of jobs, it is a fantastic amount of money for each job. But they have
forgotten one basic thing: That new worker in Illinois or in Iowa is
not only going to get a paycheck, that worker is going to spend the
paycheck. And when the worker spends the paycheck downtown, the people
who work at that shop have a job, too. And the people who work at the
shop with the job take a paycheck home, and they will go to another
shop and spend the paycheck. It moves through the economy over and over
again. So to argue that we are spending so much money for a single job
overlooks the obvious, overlooks Economics 101. I think I learned this
in Georgetown in one of the first classes. It is called the multiplier.
That says if I go out and spend a dollar at shop, then maybe 80 cents
of that is going to be spent by a worker there, and on and on. So the
dollar may turn out to be worth a lot more in terms of the economic
activity.
That is the President's goal, to create enough jobs and save enough
jobs to breathe life into this economy to start people moving forward
again with confidence in making purchases. That is the bottom line.
It also provides, this bill we are going to consider tomorrow, 40
percent in direct relief to working and middle-class families. I talked
about the President's tax cuts. He focuses on the working and middle-
class families. I think it is the right thing to do. It is about $400
an individual, $800 for a family. That will give them a helping hand.
It also doubles the renewable energy generating capacity of our
country over 3 years. Is there anyone who doubts the President's
position that if we are going to have a strong economy over a long term
we need to have more
[[Page S2206]]
energy independence, we need to have more renewable sustainable sources
of energy right here in our country? This bill, this stimulus package,
invests in energy for America's future--good energy, reliable energy,
energy that we do not have to bargain with OPEC to have in future years
to build our economy.
It invests $29 billion in the Clean Energy Finance Authority and
renewable tax credits. This is a way to encourage the renewable energy
sector. In my State of Illinois, in the State of Iowa and a lot of
other States, you see the wind turbines when you drive down the
highway. In one section of central Illinois are 240 wind turbines that
will generate enough clean electricity to supply the electricity needs
of Bloomington-Normal, a large--at least by Illinois downstate
standards--metropolitan area. More and more of these need to be built.
Solar panels, using wind energy, geothermal sources, all of these are
clean, thoughtful, homegrown, and make us less dependent on energy
sources from overseas.
There is also a dramatic investment, $150 billion, in infrastructure.
Infrastructure is a generic word that does not paint a very specific
picture. We are talking about roads and bridges and highways. We are
talking about making certain that what we have in our State and States
across the Nation is in good repair and safe, and is expanding
opportunities for the economy to grow by building these roads and
bridges for the future. It is money well spent, as far as I am
concerned.
And health care, too. The first casualty for unemployed workers is
usually health insurance, so we want to help the families facing
unemployment with the costs of health insurance. That to me is money
well spent. These families need the peace of mind to know that if
somebody gets sick they have a doctor they can go to and a medical bill
that at least will get a helping hand to be paid.
There is $25 billion for school construction--no, not for new
buildings but modernizing schools. If you bring energy efficiency to a
school, it is going to reduce the cost to the school district and to
the property taxpayers who sustain that district.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional
5 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DURBIN. In addition to that, we are going to try to make sure
this bill moves us forward when it comes to health care. One of the
things we need to do in America, which we have done in the Veterans'
Administration, is start putting medical records on computers. The
importance of that is obvious to anyone who has visited a modern
hospital. You know if a doctor has access to all of your medical
records on computer, or a nurse, that they are more likely to make a
better diagnosis, come up with better treatment, save money in the
process and have a safer outcome. So if we are going to move toward a
health care system ready for this century, we need to bring the
Internet into the hospital room and into the hospital setting. This
bill makes the investment to do that. It is a critically important
investment and it is the starting point I think in moving toward the
health care system we need to provide for Americans.
There will be critics. Many of them want to do nothing, let the
economy solve its own problems. But most of them are not students of
history. The last President facing a major economic crisis, who said
let's ride it out, was Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover, a Republican
President during the Great Depression, said things will get better, the
economy will cure itself, the market is a miracle. Guess what happened.
More and more people lost jobs, more businesses failed, the stock
market cratered and Franklin Roosevelt rode to the rescue.
We have to understand that standing back and watching this economy
crater is unacceptable. This President was elected last November 4 to
bring real change to this town in the way we do business and real
change to this economy so we have a fighting chance for excellence in
the 21st century. I think he has the right approach.
Let me add another element. There is a big section of this bill that
demands accountability. All of us, whether we voted for or against
President Bush's attempts to help the economy--all of us were
frustrated at the end of the day that so few dollars could be accounted
for. We gave them $350 billion. At the end of the day we wanted an
accounting--those who voted for it and for the taxpayers. We couldn't
get it. We still don't know what happened to the money.
This bill is different. This bill not only is going to provide
inspectors general in each of the departments to watch the money as it
is being spent, accountability through the States and through the local
units of government, but Web sites as well for taxpayers to follow the
course of this bill. It is a new level of openness and transparency we
have not seen before and it is long overdue. I am glad it is there. I
think that kind of openness is what the American taxpayers want to see,
too.
They want solutions, they do not want political squabbling. They want
to have people working together here rather than like in the House of
Representatives, where no Republicans would even support the idea of a
stimulus package. They want accountability, transparency--so they know
their Federal tax dollars are being spent wisely--and they want honesty
too. This President has been honest from the beginning and he said: I
believe this will work. The best minds in the economy tell me this will
work. If it does not, we are going to try something that does. We are
going to be honest with you about the outcome here.
That is the best we can ask from our leaders, that they give it their
best effort, good-faith efforts to solve our problems and be honest
with us if they do not succeed. We need to succeed. There is too much
at stake here.
I have seen it in Illinois. We have seen it all across this country.
This particular proposal for Illinois is one I am excited about,
creating or saving 148,000 jobs over the next 2 years. We need it. As I
mentioned, we lost 36,000 jobs in December. We need to do something to
stop this outflow of jobs.
A making work pay tax cut of up to $800 will affect about 5 million
workers and their families in my State; 156,000 families are going to
be eligible for an American opportunity tax credit, which makes college
affordable. When I talk to college presidents, they tell me: I am
worried. Kids are coming into the dean's office and saying: Dad's
business is going down or Mom lost her job. I may not be able to finish
here.
Let's give these families a helping hand, a tax credit so these kids
can stay in school. If these young people end up dropping out of school
with a mountain of student loans and no degree, that's the worst
possible outcome. This will help us avoid it.
An additional $100 a month in unemployment insurance for those who
lost their job doesn't sound like much to most families, but for these
folks $100 means an awful lot.
We are providing funding sufficient to modernize 412 schools in
Illinois so our children have the labs and classrooms and libraries and
energy efficiency they need.
We are doubling the renewable energy generating capacity. I think
there will be more wind turbines that will be installed in my State.
There will be some happy farmers renting their plots of land for that
and some communities that will have cleaner energy sources.
This is a bill that looks forward. To those looking in the rearview
mirror of what we tried last year and want to try it again--we gave
them their chance and it didn't work. It is worth a try now. I am glad
three Republican Senators stepped forward and said they are willing to
give this President a chance. It shows the kind of bipartisan
cooperation we need more of.
I hope at the end of the day even more will vote for this and I hope
the next time we debate an important issue on the floor that more
Senators from both sides of the aisle will come together to solve the
problems the American people face and do the job they sent us here to
do.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa is recognized.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, we have seen a whirlwind of activity on
this so-called economic stimulus package.
We began by watching the partisanship in the House prevail, where the
[[Page S2207]]
House passed a package strictly along party lines. No House Republican
voted for it. And 11 Democrats joined the Republicans in voting no.
Then we had a mark-up in the Senate Finance Committee, the committee
that I am ranking member on. Over 200 amendments were filed. Some
amendments were agreed to, like the amendment I filed for a 1-year
alternative minimum tax ``AMT'' patch.
But many others, specifically Republican amendments, failed or were
never brought to a vote.
Unfortunately, there was a tacit agreement among the Democratic
members of my committee to vote no on any Republican amendment,
regardless of the merits. Those on my side of the aisle did not find
that very bipartisan.
Then a floor debate in the Senate ensued. It lasted a full week. I am
happy that the debate gave many Members on my side of the aisle an
opportunity to discuss how this legislation could be improved. I was
dismayed, however, on the process. For example, there were a number of
amendments that I filed that were never given a fair vote.
Bottom line, they were blocked. I was not the only Republican Senator
that got locked out of the process.
And speaking of process, let me briefly discuss how this conference
committee process worked. Or shall I say did not work. It was not a
conference that permitted bipartisan negotiations.
I have often used the following analogy to define bipartisanship. It
is an analogy that married couples can understand. That analogy comes
from the example of Barbara and Chuck Grassley going to buy a car. If I
buy the car and take it to Barbara that is not a truly marital
decision. If we both go to the dealership and agree on the car, then
that is truly a joint marital decision.
The same logic applies to bipartisan legislating. If Senator Reid
shows me a deal that has been done by Democratic conferees, which he
was courteous enough to do Wednesday morning, without my participation
as the leading Republican tax writer, that's not bipartisan. There is
no ``bi'' in that partisan.
So let no one be mistaken that this conference agreement is the
result of bipartisan negotiations. While Republicans were courteously
consulted at the member and staff level, we were never at the
negotiating table. Speaker Pelosi best described the bottom line on the
process.
She said: ``Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election.'' That
quote comes right out of the front page of the Washington Post, dated
Friday, January 23, 2009.
Now, one can argue that all that I have just described is water under
the bridge. We now have a conference agreement that both Houses of
Congress are on the verge of approving. I will be voting against the
package.
But before I cast my vote I wanted to take this time to applaud the
inclusion of specific proposals in this conference agreement that I
advocated for. While being locked out of the process, I am happy to see
that my commonsense proposals were ultimately included in this final
bill.
The first commonsense proposal is placing income limits on the
subsidy for COBRA benefits. As the provision was originally drafted,
which provided involuntarily terminated workers a subsidy to help pay
for their health insurance, there were no income limits on the
eligibility for the subsidy.
I want to remind my friends in the media that the House passed this
provision with no income limits. The Senate Finance Committee approved
this provision with no income limits. And the Nelson-Collins
substitute, which garnered 61 votes in the Senate, was passed with no
income limits.
That means if the original provision that cleared so many legislative
hurdles made it into law, Wall Street CEOs and hedge fund managers, who
made millions of dollars while running our economy into the ground,
would have received a taxpayer-funded subsidy to pay for their health
insurance.
In my opinion, this is outrageous. Just last week the Obama
administration released guidelines for capping compensation paid to
executives whose financial institution receives taxpayer dollars
through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The COBRA subsidy provision
was in clear contradiction to our President's policy.
During the Senate Finance Committee mark-up, however, I offered an
amendment that would have placed income limits on the eligibility for
the COBRA subsidy. When I offered my amendment, some Democratic
committee members rebuffed my efforts with trumped up charges that the
IRS would not be able to administer income limits. It appeared that my
Democratic friends on the committee, who voted in favor of the
chairman's mark, wanted to give the taxpayer-funded subsidy to Wall
Street CEOs and hedge fund managers. But in the end, Chairman Baucus
gave me a commitment to at least look at an income cap.
So I filed an amendment during the floor debate. And I continued
pressing the point both publicly and privately. I was disappointed that
my amendment was never given a fair vote.
Simply put, my amendment provided that if a worker who was
involuntarily terminated from their job earned income in excess of
$125,000 for individuals and $250,000 for families during 2008, this
worker would not be eligible to receive the subsidy.
Some Members of this body asked me why I set these limits at $125,000
and $250,000. It is simple. When candidate Obama was campaigning to be
President Obama, he continually said that he wanted to raise taxes on
families making over $250,000 a year. Why? Because then, candidate
Obama felt that these people are too ``rich'' to pay lower taxes.
So it logically followed that if these families are too ``rich'' to
receive a tax benefit in the form of lower taxes, are these people not
too ``rich'' to receive a taxpayer-funded subsidy for health insurance?
I applaud the inclusion of income limits for the COBRA subsidy.
Although, the income limits are set at $145,000 and $290,000, I am
happy that my work was the reason it was added during the conference
committee.
The second proposal included in this final conference agreement is
something that is of vital importance to workers who have been
displaced by trade. I am talking about the temporary reauthorization of
the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act, or TAA.
At the beginning of this year, I engaged with Chairman Baucus and our
counterparts on the Ways and Means Committee, Chairman Rangel and
Ranking Member Camp, to see if we could work out a compromise to
reauthorize the trade adjustment assistance programs that we could all
support.
That engagement led to weeks of intensive negotiations. They were not
easy negotiations. But they were truly bipartisan and bicameral
negotiations. And they resulted in a compromise that I am proud to
support.
That is the way the process should work. I wish the rest of the
provisions in the conference report had been developed in such a
bipartisan way. If they had, we would have seen more Republican support
for this conference report.
Hopefully, the majority will not repeat the partisan process that
produced this conference report.
I want to highlight some of the reasons why I support our compromise
on trade adjustment assistance.
The fact is, the current trade adjustment assistance program is not
doing enough to help American workers. It is outdated, overly rigid,
and fails to incorporate appropriate oversight and accountability at
the State and Federal level.
Our compromise addresses each of those concerns.
First, it extends the benefits of the program to service workers.
Services now account for almost 80 percent of our economy. It doesn't
make sense to exclude service workers from eligibility for trade
adjustment assistance if they lose their job due to trade.
If a call center in the United States is closed and the operation
moved to India, for example, those workers are not currently eligible
for trade adjustment assistance. Our compromise changes that.
But it does so in a way that preserves the requirement that there be
a causal link between trade and the loss of a job. Our compromise
treats manufacturing workers and service workers the same, if trade
contributed importantly to the workers' job loss, then they may be
eligible for adjustment assistance.
We also improved the program by interjecting much more flexibility,
so
[[Page S2208]]
that individual workers are empowered to decide for themselves how best
to respond if they lose their jobs.
Workers can choose between full-time and part-time training, or full-
time work with limited wage insurance. Trade-impacted workers can even
take advantage of training and case management services before they
lose their jobs.
Our compromise increases the funding for worker retraining to
accommodate these expansions in the pool of potentially eligible
workers and the array of benefits that are made available to eligible
workers.
But it does so in a way that protects against inefficient spending of
taxpayer dollars. For example, for the first time, we have capped
funding for administrative expenses at an amount equal to 10 percent of
training funds. I insisted on that.
In addition, our compromise requires changes in the way the Secretary
of Labor allocates and distributes funds, so that States that do not
need additional funds are not building up their kitties at the expense
of States that need those funds now.
We also require States to implement control measures to ensure that
the data they collect and report is accurate and timely. The Department
of Labor needs accurate data in order to administer the trade
adjustment assistance program efficiently.
And we require the Department of Labor to collect and post the data
on the Department's Web site, to increase transparency and make the
information more readily accessible to the public.
I am confident that the compromise legislation that it have helped to
craft will provide immediate and long-term benefits for workers in Iowa
and across the United States.
Separately, our compromise reauthorizes the trade adjustment
assistance for firms program, and it improves and reauthorizes the
trade adjustment assistance for farmers program.
The farmers program was enacted as part of the Trade Act of 2002, and
it has not operated as planned.
We have made it easier for farmers to demonstrate that they are
eligible for benefits under the program, and we have redirected those
benefits to focus on developing and implementing business plans to
better adjust to imports.
We also established a trade adjustment assistance for communities
program to help entire communities respond to the pressures of
globalization. One component of that program is a new community college
and career training grant program which I have been working to develop
over the past few years.
This is a timely, targeted, and temporary grant program to help
educational institutions develop and offer the most appropriate courses
to retrain trade-impacted workers.
The program will improve and expand the educational opportunities
available to eligible workers. It is an investment in the long-term
competitiveness of the American workforce.
Mr. President, I have already noted that our compromise is the result
of a bipartisan effort that reflects the work of four offices.
There are portions of the amendment that I might have done
differently if it were solely up to me.
But that is the nature of compromise. And the overall policy embodied
in this amendment is a good one that will do a lot of good for a lot of
Americans, in Iowa and across the United States.
Equally important, if we enact this amendment into law, it will help
unlock the trade agenda so we can progress with other important
priorities.
Chief among those is implementation of the Colombia trade agreement,
which is my top trade priority.
And then we need to turn to our other trade agreements with Panama
and South Korea as well.
We need to level the playing field so that our exporters, service
suppliers, and farmers can increase their sales to foreign countries.
It is more important than ever.
We have had a social compact on trade for over 45 years.
One side of that compact is to address them of trade-displaced
workers, and we are doing that with the compromise I have helped to
negotiate on trade adjustment assistance.
The other side is to open up new markets for U.S. exports. That was a
driving principle when President Kennedy established the Trade
Adjustment Assistance program.
President Obama should hold true to that principle by doing
everything he can to create new export opportunities, starting with
implementation of our pending trade agreements.
A pro-growth trade agenda should be integral to our economic recovery
strategy. I stand ready to work with the President and my colleagues on
both sides of the aisle to accomplish that.
Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, the conference report for H.R. 1, the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, includes provisions
that would modernize and expand the trade adjustment assistance program
to reflect today's economy. This has been my highest trade priority. It
has been the priority of workers and labor unions. And it has been the
priority of the business community. We all recognize the importance of
passing a TAA bill that helps American workers, firms, farmers and
communities.
Earlier this week, I received letters of support from the following
groups: AFL-CIO; Change to Win; United Auto Workers; United
Steelworkers; Trade and American Competitiveness Coalition with over 50
businesses; and the Information Technology Industry Council. I ask
unanimous consent that a few of these letters of support be printed in
the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Change to Win,
Washington, DC, February 11, 2009.
Hon. Harry Reid,
Senate Majority Leader,
Washington, DC.
Hon. Mitch McConnell,
Senate Minority Leader,
Washington, DC.
Hon. Nancy Pelosi,
Speaker of the House,
Washington, DC.
Hon. John Boehner,
House Minority Leader,
Washington, DC.
Dear Congressional Leaders and Conferees: Change to Win's
seven affiliated unions and more than six million members
urge you to include the Baucus-Grassley-Rangel-Camp Trade
Adjustment Assistance amendment in the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act conference report.
This amendment will bring many long-needed improvements in
the TAA program, such as extending assistance to workers in
services-related industries, increasing access to wage
insurance and health insurance benefits, and expanding
training. This bipartisan, bicameral compromise is an
important part of our economic recovery and should be
incorporated into the recovery package.
Sincerely,
Christopher Chafe,
Executive Director.
____
February 9, 2009.
Hon. Harry Reid,
Senate Majority Leader,
Washington, DC.
Hon. Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House,
Washington, DC.
Hon. Mitch McConnell
Senate Minority Leader,
Washington, DC.
Hon. John Boehner,
House Minority Leader,
Washington, DC.
We, the undersigned companies and associations, urge you to
include the Trade and Globalization Adjustment Act of 2009 in
the conference report for H.R. 1, the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act.
We applaud Chairman Baucus, Ranking Member Grassley,
Chairman Rangel, and Ranking Member Camp for their tireless
bipartisan, bicameral efforts to craft the Trade and
Globalization Adjustment Act of 2009. Their hard work has
created a good compromise package that will be a significant
improvement over existing law, offering more flexible
training opportunities so workers can transition into new
careers in a dynamic 21st century economy.
We support the Trade and Globalization Adjustment Act of
2009 and hope you will include it in the conference report
for the American Recovery and Investment Act.
Sincerely,
Abbott; American Chemistry Council; Applied Materials,
Inc.; Auto Trade Policy Council; Bechtel Corporation;
Business Roundtable; California Chamber of Commerce;
Cargill, Incorporated; Caterpillar Inc.; Chevron.
Cisco Systems, Inc.; Citi; Coalition of Service
Industries; CompTIA; Corning Incorporated; Eastman
Kodak Company; Emergency Committee for American Trade;
FedEx; Financial Services Forum.
Grocery Manufacturers Association; Hewlett-Packard
Company; IBM Corporation; Information Technology
Industry Council (ITI); Intel Corporation;
[[Page S2209]]
Microsoft Corporation; National Association of
Manufacturers; National Foreign Trade Council; National
Electrical Manufacturers Association; Ohio Alliance for
International Trade.
Oracle Corporation; Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America; Pyramid Mountain Lumber;
Retail Industry Leaders Association; Software &
Information Industry Association (SIIA); Sun
Microsystems; Sun Mountain Lumber; TechAmerica;
Telecommunications Industry Association.
The American Business Council; The Association of
Equipment Manufacturers; The Boeing Company; The Coca-
Cola Company; The Dow Chemical Company; The General
Electric Company; The McGraw-Hill Companies; The
Stanford Financial Group; United States Council for
International Business; United Technologies
Corporation; UPS; U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Wal-Mart
Stores, Inc.; Whirlpool.
____
International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace &
Agricultural Implement Workers of America,
Washington, DC, February 10, 2009.
Hon. Nancy Pelosi,
Speaker, House of Representatives, Washington, DC.
Hon. Harry Reid,
Majority Leader, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC.
Dear Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid: This week the
House and Senate are expected to have a conference on the
proposed American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The
UAW wishes to share with you and the other conferees our
views on several important provisions in this legislation.
The UAW strongly supports the core elements of the House
and Senate bills, including the provisions that would:
Give tax relief to 95% of working families, amounting to
$500 for individuals and $1,000 for couples;
Increase spending on infrastructure, energy efficiency, and
health care information technology;
Provide fiscal relief for states and localities through an
increase in FMAP and other mechanisms; and
Extend assistance to the unemployed through an extension
and expansion of UI benefits and COBRA.
We believe these initiatives will create millions of jobs
and provide an immediate stimulus for our economy, while also
helping to alleviate the impact of the current recession on
the most vulnerable Americans. Many of these measures also
represent important investments that will lay the basis for
long-term economic growth.
The UAW applauds the inclusion of provisions in the House
and Senate bills that would encourage investment in advanced
technology vehicles and their key components, while also
providing assistance to the struggling domestic auto
industry. This includes funding for advanced battery
manufacturing, the purchase of fuel efficient vehicles by the
federal government, and the purchase and manufacturing of
plug-in hybrids, as well as monetization of banked tax
credits and restoration of the tax deduction for interest and
taxes related to the purchase of vehicles. We urge you to
retain these provisions in the final conference report.
In addition to these elements, the UAW urges you to include
in the final conference report:
The stronger Buy American language in the Senate bill;
these provisions will help to ensure that taxpayer funds are
used to create jobs for American workers and to stimulate the
U.S. economy, rather than being sent overseas;
The TAA reform package that has been agreed to by Senators
Baucus and Grassley and Representatives Rangel and Camp;
these historic reforms will provide vital assistance to
workers who have lost their jobs due to trade, and correct
numerous longstanding deficiencies in the TAA program;
The more expansive provisions in the House bill that would
provide health care to more laid off workers both through an
expansion of Medicaid and through a 65% subsidy under COBRA;
and
The provisions in the House bill that would provide greater
spending for school construction and assistance to states and
localities; in addition to generating jobs and boosting the
economy, these measures would provide important investments
in education and other vital social programs.
The UAW believes it is critically important that Congress
act quickly to approve the proposed American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act. Thank you for considering the points
discussed above as you fashion the final conference report on
this legislation.
Sincerely,
Alan Reuther,
Legislative Director.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I have always been a steadfast supporter
of Federal funding for museums and the arts in New York and across the
country. When I voted in favor of Senator Coburn's amendment No. 309 to
H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, I thought the
amendment was only targeted to casinos and golf courses and was not
aware it also included museums and other cultural centers. The arts
community knows they have had--and will certainly continue to have--my
full support.
Mr. REID. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. REID. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call
be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Merkley). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. REID. Mr. President, the papers from the House will be here
momentarily, within the next few minutes. Senator McConnell and I have
spoken a number of times during the day. We believe it is fair that
Members have an opportunity to study this big document. The basic
document people have already read but, of course, that is what the
conference is about. They change things. So this should be here in a
short time. This will give Members all night to look at this. Senator
McConnell and I talked a few minutes ago. We will come in tomorrow at a
reasonable hour, spend all day debating this. This would give people
the opportunity to read all the papers. Then we would vote sometime
late tomorrow afternoon or in the early evening. I have talked to
Senator McConnell. He has been certainly more than fair. As everyone
knows, Senator Kennedy is ill. He came here earlier this week, and it
would be to his health advantage not to have to come back tomorrow.
Senator McConnell has agreed that is, in fact, the case. It doesn't
change the vote count, but it means we can set a definite time which is
very helpful.
In addition, Senator Brown's mother died. The celebration of his
mother's life starts tomorrow. Senator Brown has agreed to leave for, I
don't know what it would be called in his religious belief, a viewing,
and people will come and greet his family. It is a very large extended
family. They will do that. That would be completed around 8 tomorrow
night. So we are going to keep the vote open for Senator Brown until he
arrives tomorrow night. This is not the first time we have done this.
I have announced we will hold our votes to 15 minutes, plus we give
Members 5 minutes' leeway. After that, the vote is closed. But we have
always said that on a close vote, we would keep the vote open until
everything is done. Everyone understands that when one's mother dies,
we have to be a little more understanding of the situation. This is
very difficult for Sherrod Brown to go home because he has to turn
right around and come back here the same night. He is going to fly here
and fly back the same night so he can be at the funeral Saturday
morning. I appreciate Senator McConnell and all Senators working toward
doing this. We will come in at some reasonable time and enter a
unanimous consent request that I am confident will be granted so we can
do this. We are going to close shortly and come back in the morning at
an agreed-upon time with the minority leader.
____________________