[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 111 (Tuesday, July 27, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6303-S6304]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
By Mr. THUNE:
S. 3652. A bill to provide for comprehensive budget reform in order
to increase transparency and reduce the deficit.
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, we have been bombarded with some pretty big
numbers lately. Our total national debt recently topped $13 trillion.
In 5 years, it is expected to pass $20 trillion. This fiscal year
alone, the Federal Government plans to run a deficit of $1.4 trillion.
In other words, we are borrowing 41 cents out of every $1 we spend.
The numbers are mind blowing. We cannot even wrap our heads around
the immensity of these numbers that run into the trillions. But they
should be a very big red flag indicating that something--something--has
gone very wrong here in Washington.
The American people are struggling with high unemployment and a
difficult economy, trying to make ends meet. The American Government--
their government--ought to be doing what it can to balance its own
budget, not spending like drunken sailors in a way that will put the
future of many American families at risk.
I hear it in my State. I know most of my colleagues do. I hear it as
I drive around the country. There is a palpable fear that this enormous
burden of debt is going to crush us.
The Federal budget for 2010 is already 24 percent higher than it was
in 2008. How many families are able to increase their spending by 24
percent over a 2-year period? Congress has to realize what the American
people already know: Our current rate of spending is unsustainable.
There is an old saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you
tend to see everything as a nail. Well, this administration and the
Democratic leadership of Congress seem to think the only tool they have
is a checkbook and every problem can be solved with more money.
But all of this reckless spending is not solving the problems it was
meant to solve. If you recall, the trillion dollar stimulus was
supposed to create jobs and get the economy growing again.
Unfortunately, it has not worked that way.
Look at the latest jobs report for last month. We actually lost
125,000 total jobs across the country. Where I come from, that is known
as heading in the wrong direction. Look as the massive health care law
passed earlier this year. When the other side was jamming this bill
through the Senate, they said, even though it would cost $2.5 trillion,
it would actually bring down--down--our spending on health care and
lower the deficit over time.
In the past few weeks, however, we have gotten new estimates that the
law will cost billions more than was thought a few months ago. On top
of that, health care spending is expected to rise even faster as a
result of the law than if we had done nothing at all.
Time after time after time that is what we have seen: more spending,
more debt, and a bill we will hand to
[[Page S6304]]
our children--all because we cannot live within our means and we refuse
to make the tough choices we were elected to make.
The irresponsible spending and borrowing that is making our mountain
of debt bigger every day has to stop. Today, I am introducing a bill
entitled the Deficit Reduction and Budget Reform Act that will take the
first steps toward reining in our spending. It is high time we show the
American taxpayers we are responsible stewards not just of their tax
dollars but of the future of this country.
The goal here is to reform the budget process and to reduce our
structural deficits so we will live within our means. My proposal is a
three-legged stool that aims to support our country and economy while
reducing the burden our rapidly expanding government places on American
families and businesses.
The first proposal is to create a new standing joint committee of
Congress for budget deficit reduction. The committee would be required
to put forward a plan to cut the deficit by 10 percent every budget
cycle, and to do it without raising taxes. This would be Members of
Congress--both parties--taking responsibility and not punting the job
to outsiders.
This bill would then receive expedited consideration in both Chambers
of Congress. We have 26 committees and subcommittees in Congress that
are dedicated to spending tax dollars. We should have at least one
dedicated to saving tax dollars.
Second, to make sure those changes have a better chance of success in
practice, I am proposing additional reforms to the budget process.
Crucially, we would reform pay-go rules to prevent the double counting
of new revenues or reduced spending in trust funds for the purpose of
offsetting other expenditures.
When pay-go rules were set up earlier this year, they allowed for
these kinds of gimmicks that have been used over and over to subvert
the budget responsibility the rules were meant to impose.
More than $600 billion in trust fund offsets was used to pass the
health care reform bill, and an attempt was made to increase the per-
barrel tax for the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to offset other
unrelated measures. By preventing these changes from being used as an
offset under pay-go rules, this provision would end the practice of
double counting these spending reductions and revenue increases.
Then we would add teeth to the budget by making it a binding joint
resolution signed into law by the President. This would force the
administration and Congress to work more closely together, and Congress
would have less flexibility to violate the nonbinding resolutions we
currently use.
My legislation would also establish a biennial budget timeline to
give Congress more time for oversight and to determine whether our
spending is doing what it is supposed to do.
I will simply point out that it seems to me the way we do the budget
process currently is broken. In the last 34 years, I think there have
been 4 times when all of the appropriations bills have been passed by
the Congress on time, according to schedule. If you look at the number
of budgets that have been passed here in the past few years, there have
been a lot of years when we have not passed budgets at all.
It seems to me it would make sense--in an even-numbered year, when
there is an election going to be held--that we ought to do oversight,
that we ought to be looking at ways to save taxpayer money rather than
spend taxpayer money. Then we could do the budget in the odd-numbered
years, after an election, so we have an opportunity to do the
appropriations bills and go through the budget process in the odd-
numbered year, so when the even-numbered year comes around again we are
not consumed with trying to spend money to attract some constituency to
vote for us in an election year, but, rather, we are focused on
oversight and on ways we could actually save the taxpayers money as
opposed to spending it.
So a biennial budget process, budget timeline, is something this bill
would also do. When Congress inevitably resorts to pork-barrel politics
that inflates our budgets, we need a legislative line-item veto to
allow the President to cut them out and to send a more responsible
budget back to Congress for an up-or-down vote. Governors of most
States, including my State of South Dakota, have some kind of a line-
item veto. The President ought to have that power as well.
Third, on top of these vital systemic changes, we need to take
control of the government's outrageous spending. My bill would impose a
10-year spending freeze to cap the Federal Government's discretionary
spending at the level it was in fiscal year 2008, adjusted for
inflation. I said earlier that between 2008 and 2010, Federal spending
had increased 24 percent, at a time when inflation in this country was
about 3.5 percent. If we take that baseline back to that 2008 level and
index it for inflation every year for the next 10 years, we can save
the taxpayers literally hundreds of billions of dollars.
Beyond that freeze, we should end the failed stimulus program and
reclaim any money remaining unspent and unobligated and apply it to the
Federal debt.
Those are not the only possible answers, and many are not new. Many
of these are ideas my Republican colleagues and I have proposed and
that we fought for in the past. We will keep fighting for them because
they are the kinds of things we need to do to break the back of this
budget problem we are fighting.
The government's current level of borrowing, this out-of-control
spending, and this amount of taxation are too much for our economy and
our taxpayers to bear. What may be even more troubling is the point
that was made by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike
Mullen. He said the biggest threat to our national security is our
debt, not al-Qaida, not Iran's nuclear program, not Russian spies, but
the debt Congress itself has created.
It does not have to be this way. My plan is a responsible approach
that takes prudent but manageable steps to get our spending under
control and to start to draw down our debt. It provides concrete
savings of nearly a trillion dollars, and it puts in place a framework
to help us save trillions more over time.
It is easy to say: I will be responsible tomorrow, but first I want
to spend a little more today. Well, there will always be something that
seems important to spend tax dollars on, and if we keep taking that
same old approach that the other side has been pushing since they took
control of Congress in 2007, we will be waiting for fiscal
responsibility forever.
Tackling our outrageous national debt is not a priority we should put
off until the long term, after the debt has gone up even higher and
higher and higher than it is today. It needs to be a priority now.
I will also note that we cannot afford the old trick where the
President calls for spending cuts in theory but then happily signs
congressional spending bills that do not save a dime. We have to move
beyond the same old political games and the same old phony rhetoric. We
need real commitment to making a real difference.
There is another old saying that the definition of insanity is doing
the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The
President and the Democratic leadership of Congress want to keep doing
the same thing over and over: borrowing money, spending too much, and
then borrowing even more.
But thinking that somehow with all that borrowing and spending we
will buy our way out of the hole we are in, that is insanity. In
reality, all we are doing is digging ourselves deeper and deeper into
debt.
I am going to conclude by urging my colleagues to take up this
legislation I am introducing and to take that first crucial step to
fiscal responsibility. The American people expect us to take our debt
seriously, and it is high time we lived up to that expectation.
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