[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 60 (Thursday, May 5, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2702-S2703]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              THE DEFICIT

  Mr. REID. In regard to the comments made by my friend the Republican 
leader, as I listened to him, I picked up about three or four points 
that I think are fairly obvious. One is, do not touch the tax cuts for 
the rich; No. 2, do not touch the tax cuts for the rich; and No. 3 is 
that they want to go after entitlements. The largest, of course, are 
Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.
  We know the Ryan budget calls for privatizing Medicare. Even the 
Republican majority leader today is quoted in the papers as saying that 
we are going to have to back off that. I am paraphrasing that, but 
everyone can read it. It is on the front page of the Washington Post 
newspaper. But the Ryan budget has a number of ways of saving money. 
The most significant way of saving money is to destroy Medicare.
  The fourth point, after recognizing that, as my friend the Republican 
leader said, we need to go after entitlements, is, don't tax the rich.
  We on this side of the aisle realize we have some problems with 
spending and we have to do something about it. The problem is not as 
much about spending as it is about deficits. What are we going to do 
about these deficits that accumulate every year?
  Well, we have some experience from recent years on how to handle 
that. During the last 4 years of the Clinton administration, we were 
spending less money than we were bringing in. We were retiring the 
national debt. In fact, the criticism came from a number of important 
economists that we were retiring the debt too quickly, that we had to 
back off that. Well, when President Bush took office, he took that to 
heart. At the time he took office, there was about an $11 trillion 
surplus over 10 years. He took care of that. In fact, when President 
Obama took office, that had been evaporated. It had evaporated. We lost 
8 million jobs. It evaporated because we had two wars, all paid for 
with borrowed money. We had all of those tax cuts paid for with 
borrowed money.
  So on this side of the aisle, we want to do something to rein in 
these deficits, and we have had experience. We know how to do that. One 
of the things we did during the Clinton years was unique, but we did 
it, and it was hard. We had something called the pay-go rules. Without 
any Washington inside jargon, what this means is that if you have a new 
program, you have to pay for it. You either have to pay for it by 
taking other programs and getting rid of those or raising revenue in 
some way. We did that in the Clinton years. When President Bush took 
office, his Republican colleagues here in the Congress worked with him 
and got rid of those rules. That is why we had everything that was 
unpaid for, and, in fact, ``unpaid for'' is an understatement. It was 
all borrowed money.
  So we know there is a problem with deficits, and we want to work on 
those.
  Today at the Blair House, there is a meeting. I have appointed a 
couple of people to represent the Democrats in the Senate: Senator 
Inouye, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Senator Baucus, 
chairman of the Finance Committee. The other three leaders in the 
Congress have appointed people. They are going to meet and talk 
seriously about ways of reducing the yearly deficits we have.
  I would hope one of the things Vice President Biden talks about with 
them--I am confident it will be--is that we don't need to talk about 
spending caps; we need to talk about deficit caps. We have to be able 
to work toward reducing these staggering debts by looking at 
everything.
  I am like most everybody here in this body; we do everything we can 
to protect these brave men and women who are in the military. But the 
Government Accountability Office told us in a report recently filed 
that there is $100 billion a year in the Pentagon that is wasted--$100 
billion. When asked in a hearing how many private contractors the 
military has, they said: We don't know. Upon further questioning, they 
said: Well, it is between 1 million and 9 million people who are 
contractors. There is a lot of fat in this. These are the same people 
who, during the Iraq war, from the hearings conducted by Senator 
Dorgan, were using wads of hundred-dollar bills to play football. We 
can save a lot of money by looking at domestic discretionary spending, 
military spending, and doing a better job of making our tax system more 
fair.

  To show how unfair our tax system is today, we tax the American 
people about $1 trillion a year--a lot of money--but we give tax breaks 
to corporations and individuals of $1.1 trillion. The point is we give 
more in tax breaks than we have as revenue in this country. We ought to 
change all this. My friend, who is the Presiding Officer, and I see my 
friend from Utah who will be the ranking member of that important 
committee, the Finance Committee, are going to have to work together to 
make this tax system more fair.
  I appreciate my Republican friend talking about all the things we 
need to do, but one thing that is very clear that he doesn't want to 
touch is the

[[Page S2703]]

tax cuts to the rich. It is very clear he doesn't want to do anything 
to deal with the tax cuts to the rich, and he wants to go after 
entitlements--and he said so this morning--which are Medicare, Social 
Security, and Medicaid.
  We have a lot of work to do. The only way we are going to work our 
way through this is on a bipartisan basis. It is the only way we can do 
it. The heavily Republican House has to recognize that, the Democrats 
in the Senate have to realize that, and the President has to realize 
that. And he does. That is why he has convened this bipartisan meeting 
at the Blair House today, conducted by the Vice President of the United 
States.

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