[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 11 (Wednesday, January 26, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S249-S252]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
IMPORTANT PUBLIC ISSUES
Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I rise to speak about the issues that I
think are most important to the American public. I appreciated the
opportunity I had last evening, along with the Presiding Officer, to
sit and listen to the
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President's State of the Union Address, which is an annual rite of
passage where the President lays out his blueprint and his vision for
the next year. In those remarks he did, as he did last year, touch on a
number of themes that I think speak to issues that are important for
the country to face.
Certainly, there were statements in that speech I agree with, in
terms of the things he said we need to be focused on. There are some
statements with which I did not agree. But in terms of the broader
agenda, what strikes me about the speech is he talked about the need
for tax reform, which is something I agree with. I think it is an issue
of competitiveness. He talked about medical malpractice reform, which
is something many of us have been trying to get to be part of the
health care debate in this country for a long time. Unfortunately, that
got left on the cutting room floor last year. He talked about
strengthening Social Security and entitlement reform, also a critical
priority if we are serious about getting spending and debt under
control. He also talked about regulatory reform, looking at government
reform and the types of actions we might be able to take to streamline
or shrink or make more efficient the Federal Government. He also talked
about the importance of enacting trade agreements, and I could not
agree more. I think trade is a critical part of our economy. Export
opportunities for businesses in this country would create economic
growth. It would create jobs. Unfortunately, again, those are trade
agreements that have been stalled out here for some time in the
Congress.
What strikes me about the speech is this. Last year, we heard a lot
of the same themes. The President this year, I forgot to mention,
talked about a 5-year freeze on spending. Last year, he talked about a
3-year freeze on spending. He talked about trade agreements 1 year ago.
Many of those same themes were struck 1 year ago. Yet we have not seen
the results of the rhetoric. What I would argue to the American people
and to all my colleagues is, it is important that we judge people not
by their rhetoric but by their actions. Don't watch what we say, watch
what we do. I think that is true of anyone in public life. We all need
to be judged by what we do and whether we are following through with
what we say we are going to do.
So when the President talks about those priorities, I could not agree
more. But, frankly, in order for any of those things to happen, it is
going to take Presidential leadership. If we are going to do something
on tax reform, if we are going to do something on entitlement reform,
if we are going to do something about spending and debt, the President
is going to have to step forward with bold proposals in order to
accomplish that because bold things, big things, need to be done on a
bipartisan basis.
The opposite example of that we saw a year ago, when the health care
reform bill was being debated on the floor of the Senate. This is
something that impacts literally one-sixth of the American economy. Yet
you had a bill that passed the Senate without a single Republican vote.
In fact, in most cases Republicans were not included, were not
consulted, did not have input into that legislation. So you had a bill
that literally impacts one-sixth of the American economy pass out of
this Chamber on a party-line vote. That is historic. Because in most
cases, if you look throughout our Nation's history, when this country
needs to do big things, there is a bipartisan effort to try to get a
bill that can attract broad bipartisan support.
So as much as I support many of the things the President said last
night, I would argue that the proof is in the pudding. We are going to
wait and see now whether his actions comport with his words because the
talk about spending and debt rings hollow if, in fact, you are not
willing to take on spending in this country, spending in our
government, and willing to take on the issue of entitlement reform. In
fact, notwithstanding the President's talk last year about a 3-year
freeze on spending, we saw the largest buildup, the most massive
expansion of government we have seen literally since the 1960s.
The health care bill is a $2\1/2\ trillion new expenditure for the
Federal Government when it is fully implemented, at a cost, I believe,
to be much larger than that over time when you start seeing these costs
pile up and more and more people shifted over into the government
program.
Hopefully, we are going to have a vote here in the Senate. I believe
we will have a vote. Our leader has indicated that we will get a vote
on repealing health care reform. In my view, before this begins to get
implemented, it would make sense to throw it overboard and start over
and do this right and do it in a way that attracts bipartisan support
and actually does something to drive down the cost of health care
rather than increasing it because what we have seen already is what we
predicted would happen; that is, insurance rates are going up, not
down. The massive taxes on that bill, of course, get passed on, so
consumers end up paying more for their health care, not less. I would
argue that we are going to see some disastrous results from some of the
pay-fors in the bill.
The so-called CLASS Act, which is another new entitlement program, is
something that even the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, a
Democratic chairman, a year ago when this was being debated, said is a
Ponzi scheme of the highest order, something Bernie Madoff would be
proud of. It has a tail on it that is going to create deficits in the
outyears and make the financial fiscal picture we face even worse.
There are so many things about this bill that argue for us starting
over and doing it right. But I want to say this morning, because I want
to focus specifically on this issue of spending and debt, that much has
been made of the fact that we are going to have a vote coming up. On
March 4, the continuing resolution expires, at which point we will have
to decide what we are going to do in terms of funding the government. I
hope that debate or the lead-up to that vote sparks a debate about
spending because if we don't start getting spending under control, this
problem we have continues to snowball. We have a $14.3 trillion debt.
The other point I would make is there is another big vote looming
sometime between late March and early May--in the April timeframe most
likely--where we are going to have to raise the debt limit. We are
already $14.3 trillion in debt as a nation, and we are going to have to
extend the nation's borrowing authority above that so that we can
finance the government. We have maxed out the credit card. We cannot do
this any longer. We don't have the luxury of time. When we are facing a
$14.3 trillion debt, much of which we owe to other countries around the
world, we put ourselves at great peril. We put our economy at great
peril.
I would argue it is a national security issue, and I am not the only
one saying that. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike
Mullen, said a few months back that the greatest threat to America's
national security is our national debt. That is the top ranking
military official in this country saying it is not the--when we talk
about the greatest threat to America's national security, he could have
talked about al-Qaida, he could have talked about the Iranian nuclear
program, he could have talked about China, he could have talked about
North Korea. But what did he say? The greatest threat to America's
national security is our national debt. That speaks volumes about what
we need to be focused on and what we as public officials here in the
Senate need to devote our energies to.
So when we think about that, there are a couple of things that,
obviously, we can do. I have advocated, as have others, that we go back
to the 2008 spending levels because in the last 2 years, we have seen
spending on the non-national security discretionary part of the budget
increase by 21 percent, at a time when inflation in the overall economy
is 2 percent. So the government has grown at 10 times the rate of
inflation in the last 2 years.
When the President talks about freezing spending this year, he is, in
my view, dealing with an issue that really--the only analogy I can
use--is like closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten
out. We have a major problem. We had a dramatic runup in spending in
the last 2 years, and freezing it now will enshrine and
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lock in to the baseline that massive increase in spending.
If we go back to the 2008 levels, it will be painful, but we don't
have the luxury of not dealing with this now. It is going to be
painful, but it is going to be necessary if we are serious about
providing a better future for our children and grandchildren. The
alternative is that we continue to run up these trillion-dollar, $1.5
trillion deficits year over year over year, adding significantly more
to that debt and putting ourselves on a trajectory when I think our
economy is in great peril in the future.
That is one aspect of it. We talk about the non-national security
discretionary part of the budget. Of course, the national security part
of the budget is already being scrutinized and scrubbed. The Secretary
of Defense, Robert Gates, has made it clear that they are going to try
to find savings and efficiencies in there to the tune--in fact, I think
they have already determined they can save somewhere on the order of
$150 to $170 billion in the defense budget over the next 5 years. But
then you have this other part of the budget, the entitlement programs--
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--which, of course, Medicare and
Medicaid are driven by health care costs, and until we figure out what
we are going to do on health care to rein that in, to get that cost
under control, it is going to be complicated to try to fix. But that
being said, I think that is what argues for actually putting remedies
in place that will put downward pressure on health care costs, on
utilization, so we can bring health care costs back under control.
There are a number of good ideas out there about how to do that. The
debt commission made some recommendations, although most in the area of
Medicare and Medicaid were largely cosmetic because they couldn't come
to an agreement about how to fix health care. Social Security, on the
other hand, is available. It can be fixed. I think the debt commission
made a series of recommendations that I hope the President and his team
will take seriously and come to the Congress. I think Republicans here
in Congress are willing to work with him because that is something we
can put on a sustainable path. We ought to do it, and we ought to do it
now because the longer we wait, the worse the problem becomes.
So you have the entitlement issues, you have the non-national
security discretionary spending--things that can be done, that this
President, if he is willing to put his rhetoric into action and take
leadership, can actually put up as a record of accomplishment for the
American people. The alternative is that we continue to add to the
$14.3 trillion debt.
I am not going to sit here and say for a moment that we are not all
responsible for this. Obviously, there were previous administrations
and previous Congresses. We have gotten where we are today because we
did not make the hard choices when he should have, and now the choices
become much harder.
I would also say that in the last 2 years, that debt has grown by
over $3 trillion, largely because of a trillion-dollar stimulus bill
that we borrowed from our children and grandchildren, which didn't do
anything to create jobs but did add $1 trillion to the debt, and the
health care bill, which, again, many of the costs of that we are going
to see into the future, but it has a profound impact on the fiscal
picture the country is going to be considering.
What does it mean to finance a $14.3 trillion debt? Well, it means
this: We spend so much on interest that next year the amount we spend
on interest will equal the amount we spend on national security. Think
about that. The entire security budget to defend this country, that
amount of money will be equalled by the amount we spend on interest to
finance the debt, and that continues to explode in the years ahead. If
for some reason we were to have a runup in interest rates, if something
happened in the economy, which, with inflation starting to take off a
little bit, generally interest rates would follow that--and at some
point in the not too distant future, we could see interest rates tick
up. Well, we have been able to manage our debt by the way we financed
it and the short-term borrowing. If you saw interest rates reset and go
up, it would have an even more profound impact on the amount we pay to
finance that debt and the amount we make in interest payments.
Every child in America today under the age of 18 owes $114,000
because of that debt, and 6 years from now it will be $196,000. What
are we doing to future generations when we saddle them with this
enormous debt and put them in a position where they are going to be
faced with a lower standard of living and a lower quality of life than
what we have experienced simply because we did not have the courage to
make the hard decisions that were necessary to get this situation under
control.
So I would suggest to my colleagues and to the President after his
speech last night that this is not about talk. It is not about
rhetoric. It is about action. It is about what the American people
asked us to come here and do. I think there were three messages coming
out of the election last fall: The American people want us focused on
jobs and the economy, they want us focused on spending, and they want
us focused on debt.
We are going to have an opportunity in the next few months, when the
continuing resolution expires and we look at the issue of funding the
government into the future, to deal with the issue of spending When we
get to the debt limit vote that will come up sometime this spring, we
will have an opportunity to talk about the debt. But it ought to
generate and spark a serious effort here in the Congress, not a
cosmetic one, not a superficial one, not one where we provide
lipservice but where we are serious about reining in spending--not just
non-national security spending but also looking at the long-term issues
that are going to affect this country's balance sheet well into the
future, and those are our entitlement programs. It is going to be tough
stuff. It is not easy to do this.
I can't help but think that if we had made some of these hard
decisions a few years ago, we wouldn't be in the situation we are
today. I came here as a freshman Congressman back in 1997. One of the
first votes we had--big votes, I should say, on the floor of the House
of Representatives at the time--was a vote on a balanced budget
amendment, something that I think 38 States have. Our State of South
Dakota has a balanced budget amendment, which means our legislature and
Governor can't go home until they balance the budget. That vote passed.
It takes two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate and 38
States to ratify to get a constitutional amendment approved. We got a
big, larger than two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives at
that time. It came to the Senate, and it failed by one vote. Now, 67
votes here is the magic number to get the two-thirds threshold. It got
66 votes in the Senate 14 years ago.
I can't help but think how much better out financial picture would be
today had we taken that step back in 1997 and put a balanced budget
amendment--enshrined that into our Constitution and imposed a
discipline on the Congress that hasn't existed. Clearly, for
politicians here in Washington, it is too easy, when it comes down to
making hard choices, to take the easy way, to hand the bill to our
children and grandchildren. It is time to stop. We cannot afford this
any longer. We are at $14.3 trillion and adding $1 trillion every
single year.
So this is going to require tough decisions, hard decisions. But I
believe this is a great country with great people. We have met big
challenges before. I think the American people are ready to step
forward and deal with this challenge. I think they are looking for
political leadership to do that, to join them in that quest. As I said
before, Presidential leadership is critical. It is going to take
leadership here in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
We cannot afford to kick the can down the road any farther, to punt
the ball to the next generation. It is not fair to them. For
generations in this country, we have had a sort of guiding principle;
that is, one generation sacrifices so the next generation can have a
better life. We may be the first generation that turns that ethic on
its ear and asks the next generation to sacrifice because we have not
been willing to live within our means.
So I hope we can muster the courage that is necessary, and I am going
to do everything I can to continue to shine a
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light on this issue when we get into these budget debates. I, frankly,
have a series of budget reforms. I think that, absent a constitutional
amendment, we ought to be putting some statutory reforms in place that
would force downward pressure on spending.
I have a bill that calls for a 2-year or biennial budget where we
budget in one year, in the odd-numbered year, and in the even-numbered
year we do more oversight. So when people here are running for
reelection, instead of worrying about how to spend more money to curry
favor with a particular constituency, we will be doing oversight and
looking at how we can save money for the next generation. So I would
like to get a debate on that. I think we ought to make the budget
resolution we pass here binding and give it the teeth and the force of
law which it does not have today. I think there are a series of
prescriptions that would be worthwhile for us to not only entertain but
hopefully implement to really take seriously the challenge that is
before us.
I thank the chair for the time, and I look forward to engaging in a
debate about spending and about debt and how to better create jobs in
this economy for the American people, which is what I think they want
us focused on. I hope it will be not just rhetoric but action that
follows.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Illinois.
Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, how much time remains in morning
business on the minority side?
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. There is 6 minutes 47 seconds
remaining.
Mr. DURBIN. I ask unanimous consent to reserve that time. I do not
believe there is another Republican Senator on the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. DURBIN. I ask unanimous consent to begin the Democratic side of
the morning business.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
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