[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 51 (Wednesday, March 25, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3742-S3745]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               THE BUDGET

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, one of the encouraging things that 
happened in Washington this year is that the President sent us a budget 
that was more transparent and more open than previous budgets. It was a 
10-year budget instead of 5 years. It gave us a blueprint for the 
future in that way, the way we ought to be thinking about things. It 
included some things that had not been included before: the cost of the 
war; the so-called AMT fix--to address the millionaire's tax the 
Congress passed in the 1960s designed to catch 155 people who were not 
paying any taxes, but today will catch 28 million people, mostly 
middle-class Americans, unless we fix it; and what around here is 
irreverently called the ``doc fix,'' to deal with the mandated 20-
percent cut in what Medicare pays its physicians. That cut in physician 
payments is not going to happen, we know that, so the President 
included that in the budget. There was money for helping to fix the 
banks, to get the toxic assets out of the banks and get credit flowing 
again, get the economy moving again, and that was in the budget.
  On big issues like health care, the President said: Let's work in a 
bipartisan way. I invite the Congress to come up with a bill. Many 
Members of Congress said the same thing. The President held a health 
care summit earlier this month. I agree with the President we should 
try to reform

[[Page S3743]]

health care this year. Most Republicans agree with that, that we need 
to make it possible for every single family to afford health insurance. 
People who are losing their jobs today or were between jobs ever 
understand what difficulty this causes families. So that was 
encouraging.
  Now, I hear some very different sounds coming from around the 
Congress. It makes me wonder who is in charge here. I hear that instead 
of a 10-year budget, we may have a 5-year budget. The problem with the 
5-year budget is most of the problems in the 10-year budget are in the 
second 5 years. This budget spends too much, taxes too much, borrows 
too much. It doubles the debt in 5 years, the national debt, and it 
nearly triples the national debt in the 10-year period. So we need to 
know where we are headed with this budget, and we will not know if we 
just talk about the next 5 years.
  I hear that we are going to act like the so-called millionaire's tax, 
the AMT, is fixed. That is not fixed; we have to deal with it. The 
``doc fix'' to avoid cuts in physician payments? We are just not going 
to include that in the budget, so I hear. We are going to have to deal 
with that. We all know we are going to have to deal with that. We ought 
to put that in the budget. The cost of the war should be there. We need 
to recognize the first order of business in this country is to fix the 
banks and get credit flowing again.
  Secretary Geithner came forward with a plan on Monday that I hope 
works. At least for the first time we are beginning to address the 
central problem of what we do about the toxic assets in the banks that 
are causing the banks to freeze up and not loan, bringing everything to 
a halt. Get the toxic assets out and lending increases, houses begin to 
sell, jobs begin to be created again, people go back to work, the 
economy improves.
  So it was a very prudent thing for the President to put in his budget 
a $250 billion placeholder for the banks. He may need to ask us for 
that. In my view, I thought he should have asked us for it in January.
  I thought, instead of passing a $1 trillion stimulus bill, borrowing 
and spending money we don't have, that it would have been better for 
President Obama to do now as President Eisenhower did in 1952 when he 
said: I shall go to Korea. And he went to Korea. That was the issue 
then. It was not the only issue then, just like today there are lots of 
different things Presidents need to do. But Eisenhower said: I will go 
to Korea. He arrived there just a few days after Thanksgiving. He said: 
I will honorably focus my attention on the war until it is ended. The 
people elected him for that and he did that and he gained the 
confidence of the American people.
  I and most Americans have great confidence in this President. If 
President Obama, in the same way that President Eisenhower said he 
would go to Korea, says he will fix the banks and he will get credit 
flowing and he will honorably concentrate his focus on that until the 
job is done--I think we believe he can do that. So he was right to put 
the money in the budget, which I understand now may be coming out.
  So we have a budget that is not really a budget anymore. It is not a 
clear picture. While I have been very complimentary of the President 
for his straightforwardness in the budget, that does not mean I have to 
like what is in the budget because I do not. But before I get to that 
part of it, let me talk about the two things that concern me most about 
what may be coming down the road and which I hope do not come. One of 
them is the idea that we would use the budget to pass a health care 
bill to transform the health care system and the American economy. The 
second is the idea that we would use the budget to impose a national 
sales tax on electric bills, gasoline prices, and all energy--in other 
words, to impose a cap-and-trade system on virtually the whole economy.
  We need to reform health care. We need to debate climate change and 
cap and trade. But we need to do it in the way the Congress is supposed 
to do it, not by slipping it through with 51 votes when we are supposed 
to be making a budget, just because we can do that.
  Think about that for a moment. The President has created this 
tremendously good environment for dealing with health care. He ran on a 
campaign: I am going to change the way things are done in Washington. 
People need to work across party lines to get things done on big issues 
that affect the country.
  That is what the President said. He is right about that. There are a 
lot of new Senators who were elected saying the same thing. There are a 
lot of Senators who have been here before, like me, who said exactly 
this--I am here to try to work across party lines to get results on big 
issues. There is not a bigger issue than health care, after we get 
through fixing the banks.
  The President had, as I mentioned, the health care summit at the 
White House--off to a much better start, this President, than President 
Clinton was when he tried to deal with the same issue early in his 
administration. The President also had a fiscal responsibility summit 
in February that I attended where health care was a major topic. We 
were all there, and various people got up and said: We need to work on 
this, do this together. The President wisely said: I am not going to 
send a proposal. I am going to let the Congress develop a proposal. We 
will work with you on these things.
  Well, all of a sudden, we hear that the health care plan might be 
coming through on the budget. How can we possibly do that? If the 
President and Senate Democrats try to use this arcane budget procedure 
to reform health care, it will be the Parliamentarian and his wonderful 
staff who will end up writing the health care bill.
  Health care is 17 percent of the American gross domestic product. 
These are big issues. Are we going to have a single-payer system? Is 
everybody going to have Medicare? Is anybody going to have a choice of 
a doctor? Is anyone going to have a choice of an insurance policy? What 
about the guaranteed costs? Will all Americans have the same kind of 
health coverage that Federal employees, including Senators, have? Is 
that a good idea? Will we give more permission to large employers to 
connect behavior to health care premiums so that we can have more 
prevention of disease? How much do we spend on people who are older and 
where we are spending more time?
  Mr. President, I do not believe there is another Republican speaker. 
I ask unanimous consent to speak another 5 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet) Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. The health care bill ought to be written by, as 
Senators Baucus and Grassley have said, the Health and Finance 
Committees, by the full Senate, with full participation. I mean, 
technically, you know, the Democratic majority can say: We won the 
election, we will write the bill. President Bush was Commander in 
Chief, and technically he could wage war in Iraq without the bipartisan 
support of Congress. But that helped him lose the support of the 
country. It damaged his Presidency. And it will do the same for 
President Obama if he is not allowed to continue on the path he began 
on, which is a bipartisan effort in the Congress to bring a health care 
bill this year.
  I mean, the Republican leader of the Senate, in his first speech, 
went to the National Press Club here in Washington and he said: Mr. 
President, I am ready to work with you across party lines on 
entitlements. The most explosive, runaway cost in Government is 
Medicare and Medicaid. And it is better to reform health care before we 
put reduced costs on Medicaid. If we just put caps on the existing 
system, it would blow up.
  So we are ready to do that. I don't know what more the Republicans 
could say to send this clear message: We are ready to work across party 
lines. And the President has said it himself. So why are we having this 
debate about whether to pass a health care bill as part of the budget. 
That is not right for the country, and it needs to stop today.
  The idea of passing a so-called cap-and-trade energy tax in the 
middle of a recession as part of the budget--that is equally unwise. 
This is a major new idea and proposal, to impose this national tax on 
the country that produces 25 percent of all of the money in the world 
and 25 percent of all of the energy in the world. And we have no idea 
what it would do. We do know one thing it would do: it would raise 
prices a lot. It would raise the price of your electric bill by a lot, 
and it would raise

[[Page S3744]]

the price of your gasoline at the pump by a lot. That may not be as 
much of a problem today as it was a year ago. When gas goes back up to 
$3 or $3.50, you can be sure there will be plenty of people worrying 
about it. And when they hear that a national energy tax applied to 
gasoline, to fuel, has the effect in the first several years of raising 
the price of gasoline but not reducing the carbon that causes climate 
change, they are going to be really mad about that because they will 
say: Then why did you do that? I care about climate change, they may 
say, but why would you impose a remedy on me that raises my price but 
doesn't do anything about the carbon I am worried about?
  Some might say: Well, what we should have done is have a low-carbon 
fuel standard that would gradually kick in, give the economy a chance 
to adjust, so that we can, for example, be driving electric cars which 
we can plug in at night using power generated by existing nuclear 
plants and coal plants. We don't have to build one new power plant, not 
one new coal plant, not one new windmill for the purpose of charging 
these new electric cars. So we could have a low carbon fuel standard, 
plug our plug-in cars in at night, and that would be a better result 
than putting a big, new national sales tax on the economy in the middle 
of a recession.
  There are a lot of questions about this proposal even if we weren't 
in a recession. Creating a big slush fund here in Washington--nothing 
more dangerous than that. You saw that with the stimulus bill. Put a 
trillion dollars out here, and Congress goes crazy. Everybody has an 
idea about what to do. We can all spend money. And if we bring all of 
this money in here, Congress will find a way to spend it. And I 
guarantee, it is a lot of money. This tax would raise $60, $80, $100 
billion a year and bring it to Washington. The President says: Well, we 
ought to give most of it back to the people. Well, which people? In 
what way? Why not all of it? That should be a debate.
  Should this tax be economy-wide, if we ever have it? Why not do as I 
have suggested and just put a cap and trade on power plants--that is 40 
percent of carbon--and a low-carbon fuel standard on fuel--that is 
another 30 percent. So why do you need an economy-wide cap and trade to 
affect small business and farms and manufacturing?
  And then who gets all of the money raised from this energy tax? A lot 
of the big companies came up to Capitol Hill when they first heard 
about this cap and trade proposal. They saw a lot of money coming into 
Washington and they thought they might get free allowances to produce 
carbon. But now the President wants to spend all of that money, and the 
companies are not so sure they like the idea anymore.
  What about offsets? Offsets are a racket. You know, they have become 
a racket. Somebody saves a little carbon in Madagascar. Well, you get 
credit for it in the United States. There is not much of a way to 
police that, and it is not a very good idea.
  This carbon tax, this national sales tax, goes all the way to 2050. 
So it takes $60, $80 $120, $150 billion a year out of the economy--
maybe not doing everything it's expected to do--in the name of dealing 
with climate change.
  Well, the first thing is, imposing this new tax in the middle of a 
recession is a supremely bad idea.
  Second, that doesn't mean we have to stop our efforts to deal with 
climate change and clean air. In fact, we can accelerate our clean 
energy efforts. They begin with the 2005 Energy bill. I see the ranking 
member of the Energy Committee on the floor, Senator Murkowski. She was 
a major part of that, and she will be a major part of this debate as we 
go along. But we can promote conservation and efficiency without having 
a national tax on every electric bill.
  As Al Gore has said, buildings are 40 percent of carbon. So let's go 
to work on that. I know that in Tennessee we waste more energy than any 
other State. We have the highest use per capita of electricity. If we 
just changed 12 lightbulbs in each house, we could save the equivalent 
of a nuclear power plant. That would be a smart thing to do. Let's 
start with conservation and efficiency. Let's electrify half of our 
cars and trucks. We can do that because the automobile companies are 
building the cars and trucks. Let's plug them in at night when the 
electricity is cheap. We don't have to build one new power plant, the 
Brookings Institute says.
  Three, let's make solar power cost competitive with power from fossil 
fuels. We have been really miserly about energy research and 
development, and we ought to be bending over backward to put money 
wisely to make solar costs competitive, as the National Academy of 
Engineering says, to find a way to capture carbon from existing coal 
plants, to find ways to reprocess nuclear waste.
  While we are worrying about carbon, why don't we set as a goal to 
build 100 new nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is 20 percent of our 
electricity, but it is 70 percent of our carbon-free, nitrogen-free, 
sulfur-free, and mercury-free electricity. Why are we going slow on it?
  So we would say no to higher taxes, higher prices, and more 
subsidies--certainly not in the middle of a recession--and yes to more 
conservation, more efficiency, more nuclear power, more electric cars, 
and more research and development on solar, advanced biofuels, nuclear, 
and carbon capture. That is a pretty good agenda for dealing with clear 
air and climate change, and it doesn't impose an unwise, multibillion 
dollar national tax on electric bills in the middle of a recession, 
which would hurt the economy.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
a couple of letters. One is a letter from a number of Senators--looks 
like more than two dozen--opposing using the budget reconciliation 
process to expedite passage of climate legislation. A second letter 
comes from the Republican members of the Committee on Environment and 
Public Works. It objects to collecting $646 billion in new climate 
revenues from the American people in the middle of a recession.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                                      U.S. Senate,
                                   Washington, DC, March 12, 2009.
     Hon. Kent Conrad,
     Chairman, Committee on Budget, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC.
     Hon. Judd Gregg,
     Ranking Member, Committee on Budget, U.S. Senate, Washington, 
         DC.
       Dear Chairman Conrad and Ranking Member Gregg: We oppose 
     using the budget reconciliation process to expedite passage 
     of climate legislation.
       Enactment of a cap-and-trade regime is likely to influence 
     nearly every feature of the U.S. economy. Legislation so far-
     reaching should be fully vetted and given appropriate time 
     for debate, something the budget reconciliation process does 
     not allow. Using this procedure would circumvent normal 
     Senate practice and would be inconsistent with the 
     Administration's stated goals of bipartisanship, cooperation, 
     and openness.
       We commend you for holding the recent hearing, entitled 
     ``Procedures for Consideration of the Budget Resolution/
     Reconciliation,'' which discussed important recommendations 
     for the upcoming budget debate. Maintaining integrity in the 
     budget process is critical to safeguarding the fiscal health 
     of the United States in these challenging times.
           Sincerely,
         Mike Johanns; Robert C. Byrd; David Vitter; Blanche L. 
           Lincoln; George V. Voinovich; Carl Levin; Johnny 
           Isakson; Evan Bayh; Christopher S. Bond; Mary Landrieu; 
           James E. Risch; E. Benjamin Nelson; Lamar Alexander; 
           Robert P. Casey, Jr.; Michael B. Enzi; John McCain; Tom 
           Coburn; Jim Bunning; John Barrasso; John Ensign; Bob 
           Corker; James M. Inhofe; Chuck Grassley; Roger F. 
           Wicker; Mike Crapo; Susan M. Collins; Thad Cochran; Kay 
           Bailey Hutchison; Mark L. Pryor; Lisa Murkowski; Pat 
           Roberts; Saxby Chambliss; Sam Brownback.
                                  ____

         U.S. Senate, Committee on Environment and Public Works,
                                   Washington, DC, March 19, 2009.
       Dear Colleague: The President's 2010 Budget proposal 
     contains a risky, ill defined new energy tax that has the 
     potential to continue the economic recession for many years 
     to come. We are writing this letter to alert you to this 
     situation and ask that you join us in a budget resolution 
     amendment to strike any such provision.
       Specifically, the President's 2010 Budget proposal asks to 
     collect $646 billion dollars in new ``Climate Revenues'' from 
     the American people. The government will collect these new 
     revenues through a cap and trade scheme in which 
     ``allowances'' are sold to the highest bidder. The government 
     won't tax consumers directly, but it will impose new costs on 
     energy producers and users who will in turn pass those higher 
     costs on to consumers, which will result in higher 
     electricity bills, gasoline prices, grocery bills, and 
     anything else made from conventional energy sources. In 
     short, consumers will feel as if they are paying a new tax on 
     energy.

[[Page S3745]]

       The stated price tag for this new energy tax is $646 
     billion, yet recent news reports indicate that administration 
     officials are privately admitting their program will actually 
     generate between ``two and three times'' this amount of 
     revenue, or between $1.3 trillion and $1.9 trillion, However, 
     these numbers represent only the cost from 2012 through 2019. 
     The budget summary describes the energy tax extending at 
     least through 2050. At the 2012 through 2019 average annual 
     rate, families and workers would face through 2050 between 
     $6.3 trillion and $9.3 trillion in higher energy taxes.
       On the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, we 
     have had experience with these types of proposals. We, and 
     the full Senate, debated a proposal by Senators Boxer, 
     Lieberman and Warner that the sponsors themselves indicated 
     would generate $6.7 trillion from consumers. As you may 
     recall, the Senate defeated this proposal, in part because 
     the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that 
     by 2050 it would annually cost the average family $4,377 and 
     raise gasoline prices $1.40 per gallon. Experts estimated it 
     would kill up to 4 million jobs by 2030. As you can see, a 
     $4,377 per family total cost or a lost job would greatly 
     outweigh any $800 per family payroll tax break offered by the 
     administration.
       The budget resolution is not the right place for the 
     careful bipartisan dialogue we need to get these issues 
     straight, or to fully account for the legitimate concerns of 
     energy consumers, economists, and industry. While the budget 
     resolution the Senate will debate is not yet available, we 
     will offer an amendment to strip any climate revenue 
     provision it contains. We urge you to be ready to join our 
     efforts to resist the erosion of proper democratic 
     principles.
           Sincerely,
     Senator James M. Inhofe,
       Ranking Member.
     John Barrasso,
       U.S. Senator.
     David Vitter,
       U.S. Senator.
     Mike Crapo,
       U.S. Senator.
     Christopher S. Bond,
       U.S. Senator.
     George V. Voinovidh,
       U.S. Senator.
     Arlen Specter,
       U.S. Senator.
     Lamar Alexander,
       U.S. Senator.

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Senator Byrd, our senior Member of this body, wrote 
the budget legislation that created the reconciliation process. He has 
told us that. He has reminded us of that. He talked about how he sat in 
his office for 10 days and did it to get it right. This is what he 
said:
  I was one of the authors of the legislation that created the budget 
reconciliation process in 1974. I am certain that putting health care 
reform and climate change legislation on a freight train through 
Congress is an outrage that must be resisted.
  That is Senator Robert Byrd, the senior Democrat, the senior Senator 
who wrote budget reconciliation.
  Senator Conrad, Senator Baucus, Senator Dorgan, Senator Carper, and 
many others have said basically the same thing: We agree. Don't use the 
reconciliation to ram through health care reform.
  So let's take the budget in the next 10 days, let's debate it, let's 
have our differences of opinion, but then let's follow the President's 
wise beginning on health care and reform it this year in the way he has 
suggested and the way he campaigned on. And let's take the energy issue 
and the climate change issue and let's look carefully at how we have 
the right clean energy strategy, which some of us believe is different 
from just taxes and high prices and more subsidies.
  As far as the budget in general, we believe it spends too much, it 
taxes too much, and it borrows too much. If I could conclude with only 
one example of how that excessive borrowing will hurt the economy and 
hurt the country--an example that helps to illustrate why this 10-year 
budget the President set is a blueprint for a different kind of 
country, one with less freedom, one with more Government, and one which 
our children cannot afford--if there were any one example of why that 
is true, this would be it: It would be the amount of interest on the 
debt we will be paying in the 10th year of the budget sent by President 
Obama.
  In that year, interest on the debt will be $806 billion. The amount 
of spending on defense by the Federal Government in that year is 
projected to be $720 billion. So we will be spending more on interest 
than we do on defense.
  Federal spending on education in that year would be $95 billion. So 
we would be spending eight times as much on interest as we would on 
education.
  In the 10th year of the budget, $100 billion is allocated for 
transportation spending by the Federal Government on things like roads 
and bridges that need to be fixed--we agree on that, and we would like 
to have the money to do it. But we will be spending on interest alone 
eight times what we will be spending on transportation.
  When I was Governor of Tennessee, we were a low-tax, low-debt State. 
The reason we did not have much debt is because for every penny we did 
not have to pay in interest, we could pay it for a teacher's salary, we 
could improve a prenatal health care clinic, we could build a road, we 
could have a center of excellence at the university. So low debt means 
more money for the things we really want to have to invest in this 
country to make it a better place.
  The President's budget is straightforward. Give the President credit. 
The attempts by Congress to make it gimmicky and less transparent are 
deplorable. The idea of trying to pass a health care reform proposal 
that affects 17 percent of the economy and to impose a national sales 
tax on the entire energy system during a recession is a bad idea.
  What we should do is take this 10-year budget, whittle it back to 
size so it doesn't spend so much, doesn't borrow so much and doesn't 
tax so much and move ahead with a blueprint that maintains our freedom, 
that limits our Government, that preserves choices and that our 
children and grandchildren can afford.
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________