[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 113 (Tuesday, July 26, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4889-S4892]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE BUDGET
Mr. THUNE. I am happy to cosponsor the legislation of the Senator
from Texas. She is absolutely right, there is no more deserving group
of people in this country than our military and we need to make sure
under no circumstance they are not paid, and her legislation would do
that. I hope we can get it to the floor and that it is acted upon very
quickly.
We are a week away now from the time in which we would have to
request additional borrowing authority in order for our Federal
Government to pay its bills. We have known it is coming for some time.
We know generally at least when that date is. It strikes me as most
Americans observe this debate, the thing they are probably most
concerned about is how this is going to impact them and their economic
circumstances. Frankly, I think all of us ought to be looking at this
with an eye toward how is this going to impact the economy. What is
this going to do to get people back to work and to grow the economy?
There has been a lot of discussion about that. The President made yet
another speech last night in which he tried to claim the high ground in
this debate. Frankly, I think the President has relegated himself to
the sidelines in this debate simply because many of the things he was
proposing to do as a part of this debt limit increase would be very
counterproductive when it comes to the economy. I would also add that
the President continues to sort of assign blame and blame the previous
administration for the circumstances in which we find ourselves and,
clearly, he inherited a difficult set of economic circumstances. I
think we would all concede that.
What I would argue is the President has made that situation worse. He
has made it much worse. If you look at since this President took
office, we now have 2.1 million more people unemployed than there were
when he took office. We have seen the Federal debt grow by 35 percent
since this President took office. The number of people receiving food
stamps today has gone up by 40 percent since this President took
office. He has added $11,000 to the debt of each individual in this
country since he took office. Gas prices are up. They increased almost
100 percent since this President took office. The cost of health care
has gone up 19 percent since this President took office despite
assertions during the debate on the health care bill last year that it
was actually going to reduce health care costs. We have seen all of
these economic circumstances worsen on this President's watch.
It strikes me as we look at this debt debate that we ought to be
thinking about what can we do to get out of this economic downturn. We
are growing at a very sluggish rate, a little under 2 percent. We have
unemployment that is over 9 percent, 9.2 percent. As I said, there are
2.1 million more people unemployed than when the President took office.
Clearly the focus of our discussions as we lead up to this vote on the
debt limit ought to be about the economy, getting people back to work,
growing the economy.
Frankly, I think there are a couple of things we have to do to get
out of the debt situation. One is we have to cut government spending.
Secondly, we have to get the economy growing and expanding again. So,
clearly, that ought to be the focus.
When I said the President, in his proposal--at least as it has been
reported because we haven't seen any proposal from him, but in the
reporting about his discussions with congressional leadership, it has
been suggested that the President has consistently advocated for more
revenues, more taxes, and, in fact, as recently as last Friday, when
there was still ``a big deal'' on the table--we were still looking at a
possibility of actually striking an agreement--the President upped the
ante even further. He moved the goalpost yet again. He wanted $400
billion more in higher taxes.
It strikes me, and I think most Americans right now, that the worst
thing we can do in an economic downturn and when we have 9.2 percent
unemployment is raise taxes. There isn't a tax I can think of that will
create a single job in this country. It would only make it more
difficult and more expensive for our small businesses to create jobs.
So that was a nonstarter. I think it became clear over time that it was
going to be a nonstarter despite the President's insistence that tax
increases be a part of whatever deal gets struck here.
As we find ourselves where we are now, I think it is important to
think about where we have come from and to look at the time that has
now passed and where we stand today. I think it is important to point
out, as we talk about budgets and we talk about spending and we talk
about debt, our job is to pass a budget. That is where it all starts.
We haven't passed a budget now in 818 days. In fact, the last time the
Senate approved a budget was back on April 29, 2009. So it has now been
818 days since the most recent budget was approved by the Senate.
So we are operating without a budget. Imagine how complicated it
would be for any State government, any business in this country, if
they continued to operate without a budget. That is what we have been
doing in Washington now for 818 days.
So January 6 of this year came around and we knew this debt limit
vote was coming and was out there. Secretary Geithner wrote to Congress
asking that the debt limit be increased. That was back in January. At
that time, the Obama administration was also pushing for a clean debt
limit increase; in other words, a debt limit increase that did not
include any kind of spending reductions or spending reform. He just
wanted a $2.4 trillion blank check to raise the debt by that amount.
Well, we came to February of this year--of 2011--when it came time
for
[[Page S4890]]
the President to submit his budget to Congress. That budget seemed to
be in complete denial of the reality we find ourselves in today because
that budget would spend $46 trillion and add almost $10 trillion to the
publicly held debt over the next decade, as well as increase taxes by
somewhere on the order of $1.5 trillion, $1.6 trillion. So it had more
spending, more debt, and higher taxes at a time when we are in an
economic downturn, when we have high unemployment, and we have year
over year deficits that are adding massively to the debt in this
country. So the President's budget was met with a thud, as one would
expect, when it was presented to the Congress.
As we went on in the year, in March of this year--March 31 to be
exact--the Senate Republicans introduced a balanced budget amendment.
We recognized that in order for us to get our fiscal house in order, to
start living within our means, to quit spending money we don't have, we
have to have some kind of a discipline imposed on the Congress, a
requirement that we balance our budget every year, as do so many
States. There are 49 States in this country that have some form of a
balanced budget amendment in their constitution, some sort of
requirement that forces them to make their books balance at the end of
the year. So we introduced a balanced budget amendment, and we still
hope at some point to get a vote on that. That hasn't happened yet, but
that is certainly something we want to enter into this debate because
we think it is important not only to deal with the spending in the near
term, but also to come up with a solution in the long term, and a
balanced budget amendment would certainly accomplish that.
On April 11 of this year, Chairman Paul Ryan of the House Budget
Committee introduced his budget in the House of Representatives. Of
course, on April 13, right after the submission of that budget, the
President then gave a ``revised budget'' speech. It was interesting
because Congressional Budget Office Director Elmendorf later stated
that the CBO--the Congressional Budget Office--doesn't score speeches,
so they really couldn't attach any sort of numbers to the President's
speech because they don't score speeches. We have yet to see any kind
of an actual submission of a plan from the President prior to his
provisional budget submission, which, as I said, came in with higher
taxes, higher spending, and higher debt.
On April 15, in accordance with the schedule required under the
Budget Act, the House passed their budget. So the Republicans on the
Senate Budget Committee asked the President to submit a revised budget
based upon his speech. That revised budget was never submitted. We had
a House-passed budget. We had the President's sort of on the sidelines,
out of the debate, and then in May of this year Republicans on the
Senate Budget Committee--and I am on that Senate Budget Committee--were
told to expect a budget markup which never materialized. So we still
didn't have a budget in the Senate. The budget passed by the House of
Representatives was roundly criticized by the Senate and by Democrats
in Washington. But it is the only budget proposal--actual proposal--
that has been voted on and that we have literally seen in over 818 days
now.
We knew this vote on the debt limit was starting to get closer, so
discussions picked up in terms of having some meetings to determine how
we might proceed and what we might do to put a package in place that
would allow us to raise the debt limit, but do it with significant
spending reforms and spending reductions. Vice President Biden held his
very first meeting on May 5 of this year--2011--and those discussions
continued on for some time.
We also had on the floor of the Senate on May 25 of this year the
President's budget he submitted to Congress back in February. So we
actually had a vote on that. That vote was 97 to 0 in opposition to the
President's budget. There wasn't a single Republican or a single
Democrat in the Senate who said the President's original budget
submission was something they wanted to be associated with or wanted to
support. So not a single vote in the Senate for the President's
original budget submission.
So we continued on into June, and I think there was hope there would
be some agreement between the President and congressional leadership on
how to proceed with this debt limit vote that comes up ahead of us now
sometime next week. Those discussions continued, as I said, as recently
as last week and finally started to unravel and fell apart, at which
point it became clear we were going to need a solution and an answer.
So, again, the House Republicans put together and passed a proposal
called cut, cap, and balance which would have cut spending now,
immediately, capped spending in future years, and put in place a
balanced budget amendment which would ensure that in later years we
would have the kind of discipline that is so important and so lacking
in Washington. That was on July 19, 2011, when the House passed that
legislation.
So it came over to the Senate. We had a vote on it in the Senate on
July 22, last week, and the Senate Democrats voted to table the cut,
cap, and balance approach and denounced it as not a serious effort to
do anything about the fiscal circumstance in which we find ourselves.
We didn't get a chance to debate it and get to an up-or-down vote. We
had a tabling motion and a vote on a tabling motion by the Democratic
leader and as a consequence it was defeated. So we don't have anything
yet in place that would deal with the debt limit coming up ahead of us
next week.
So that is where we are today. As I said, the House Republicans have
again taken the leadership and put forward yet another proposal, and I
expect they are going to vote on it sometime later this week, perhaps
as early as tomorrow. We evidently now have before us something the
Senate leadership, Senator Reid, has put forward we may end up having a
vote on this week. But somehow, some way, we have to get to where we
solve this before next Tuesday.
I am not among those who believe it is an option for us to get past
next Tuesday and then try and figure out what happens next. I believe
we need to act. We need to act in a way that is responsible, but we
need to act in a way that addresses the real issue, which is not the
debt limit but the debt.
I wish to point out when the President originally requested--and I
think he reiterated that request in April--a clean debt limit, there
was an assumption that Congress would just give him a $2.4 trillion
increase in the debt limit without any kind of attempt to rein in the
real problem, which is the debt.
So we have been consistently advocating to try to get spending
reductions, spending reforms into this equation. The President has
consistently advocated in favor of tax increases. To him, this is
defined as a revenue problem, not a spending problem. Most of us see
this as a spending problem. When we have spending as a percentage of
the entire economy that is literally at the highest level since World
War II, we have, fundamentally, a spending problem. It cannot be
resolved by raising taxes on small businesses; it needs to be resolved
by cutting spending.
When we cut spending, I believe we will also put in place the
confidence the economy needs to start picking up and growing again, and
we will get the other component, the other element that is so important
to getting out of this mess; that is, an expanding, growing, vital
economy that is creating jobs and creating greater prosperity for the
American people.
So this is where we are. We are in the last week. I think the
President is essentially missing in action. His proposal to raise taxes
which he talked about again last night in his speech is old news. It is
yesterday's news. We know that is not going to pass in the House of
Representatives, and it probably wouldn't pass in the Senate. Right
now, the simple math is we have to be able to pass something by next
Tuesday. We have to put something forward that can secure 217 votes in
the House of Representatives and 60 votes in the Senate.
Some of us maybe aren't going to like certain elements of what is
going to be put forward. But what I can tell my colleagues is, we have
come a long way in terms of steering this debate away from the
President's original budget proposal which, as I said, doubled the debt
over 10 years, massively increased spending, massively increased taxes,
and from the point where the President was asking for a
[[Page S4891]]
debt limit increase devoid of any spending cuts or spending reforms--
simply a $2.4 trillion blank check that would allow him to raise the
debt limit--to a time where we are actually talking about significant
reductions in spending both in the near term and in the long term.
Whether the proposal that passes the House this week ends up being what
we ultimately vote on in the Senate, it is the only viable option out
there.
The President doesn't have a plan. He never has had a plan. The
Senate Democrats don't have a plan. They haven't had a budget in 818
days and have yet to put forward anything until, as I said, this most
recent idea Senator Reid came up with. But we are up against the clock.
We need to get this done. The American people expect us to get it done.
The market expects us to get it done. Not doing so would put at great
risk our credit rating and our ability as a great nation to function
and to attract the type of credit we need to keep our government going,
unfortunately.
I hope in the end what comes out of this is some reforms that will
put us on a path where we are starting to take that debt down, where we
are not literally borrowing over 40 cents out of every dollar this
government spends. That is where we need to end up.
But for now at least we have to get a measure in place by next week
that doesn't raise taxes in a way that would hurt the economy; that
gets discretionary, nondefense spending, and, for that matter, defense
spending under control in the near term and puts in place a process by
which we can get a result on reforming entitlement programs and dealing
with what we call the mandatory part of our budget.
So that is where we came from. It has been an interesting path to get
here, but there is a lot of revisionist history that gets put forward,
and I wish to remind my colleagues where we came from because I think
it is important and informs the decisions we will make today.
For the President to suggest for a minute that somehow the House
Republicans are to blame for where we are today is not consistent--in
fact, it is completely contradictory--with the facts. It is the House
Republicans who passed a budget on time back in April. It is the House
Republicans who passed a plan last week, a cut, cap, and balance plan
to deal with this debt limit. It is the House Republicans who tomorrow
who will vote on yet another proposal put forward after the President
upped the ante last week and made it clear that the only way he would
accept a deal would be with significant tax increases on the American
people and the American economy at a time when we can ill-afford it.
So I hope as we proceed into this week--and the days are numbered--we
will get a piece of legislation on the floor of the Senate that can
secure the 60 votes necessary for us to avoid having to meet that
trigger next week and to do something that would address the long-term
issue of spending and debt, get spending under control, and actually,
in my view, put the conditions in place that would enable economic
growth and job creation in this country; so we can cut spending and
grow the economy, which, in my view, are the two elements we need to
put the country back on a better path.
So with that, I ask my colleagues to work with us this week against
this deadline to get in place a solution to this problem that deals
with the fundamental issue; that is, the issue of Washington's
overspending, and start to rein that in.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet). The Senator from Nebraska.
Mr. JOHANNS. Mr. President, I want to start out today by
complimenting the Senator from South Dakota. He has gotten it
absolutely exactly right. I wish to associate myself with the comments
he has made.
We are 7 days away from literally a crisis in our country. We are
down to a point where it is getting even difficult to try to figure
out, with the timelines naturally built into the process, how you get
from here to there in 7 days, and yet that is what faces us.
Last night, like many Americans, I watched and listened to the
President and listened to Speaker Boehner. I must admit, when it comes
to the comments made by the President, I do not understand where he is
coming from. He talks about higher taxes and more revenue when the
reality is, at this late date, he is the only one talking about that.
I have been one of those people who has said for a long time we
absolutely need to engage in a process of reforming our Tax Code. It is
too complicated. It is almost an antigrowth piece of work. I am anxious
to work with my colleagues. But with 7 days left to try to suggest
there will be a massive amount of new taxes does not make any sense.
That is not in the Reid plan. It is not in the Boehner plan. Yet there
it is.
Well, here we are. We are literally 7 days away. As I said, as I
watched those comments last night, it looked to me like campaign
rhetoric. It looked like positioning for the next election. It looked
like class warfare. What it did not look like to me was Presidential
leadership. Yet our creditors around the world are watching this debt
limit debate unfold, and they are as shocked as all of us are by the
lack of leadership coming out of the White House.
This weekend, the President was presented a bipartisan approach. I
found it reassuring over the weekend to know that our leaders in the
Senate here were talking and trying to work their way through this
terribly complicated issue, very difficult issue. I thought with that
kind of effort, when an approach was presented to the President, he
would naturally embrace the approach. With only 1 week left, that made
the most sense to me. Yet, surprisingly, the President rejected the
approach. The reason? Well, the reason is, as he has said so many
times, the President does not want to have to deal with increasing the
debt limit next year during his campaign for a second term.
I find that shocking since last night, when he addressed the Nation,
he expressed great concern about our debt limit negotiations being in a
stalemate. Yet he could have used that opportunity by accepting the
bipartisan proposal that had been presented to him a day or so earlier.
He had the opportunity to show the type of leadership our country needs
and is crying out for, but he decided to reject the plan and retreat to
political talking points.
The President also said he would veto Speaker Boehner's approach to
raising the debt limit for 7 months, claiming it kicks the can down the
road--claiming that is what it would be.
Let's look at that. Let's examine what the President is trying to
convince this Nation of. Over the last 25 years, Congress has increased
the debt limit 31 times. Mr. President, 22 of those 31 times were for
less than a year. Yet the President claims he will veto anything not
extending into 2013? It defies logic to decry our debt and then veto
anything unless it allows more record-setting debt. That is exactly
what he is pledging he will do: veto anything less than the largest
debt limit increase in the history of the United States of America--the
largest.
His last debt limit increase in January was the largest in history at
that point--$1.9 trillion--yet instead of hitting the brakes and
saying, ``Whoa, time out, this is getting us in trouble,'' the
President is doubling down, demanding yet another record-setting budget
buster.
Who does the President think is going to pay off all this debt? It
will be our children and our grandchildren. Passing multiple trillion-
dollar debt limit increases without addressing our addiction to
spending does far more to kick the problems down the road. It sends the
problems over the cliff, in fact. Yet, despite this reality, the
President continues to accelerate, as we get closer and closer to the
cliff. The President recently said this:
The only bottom line I have is that we have to extend the
debt ceiling through the next election, into 2013.
While numerous issues accompany this line of thinking, let's hit some
high points.
Our national debt is more than $14 trillion, and the President is
requesting to increase it to $16 trillion--the largest in our Nation's
history. So why is the bottom line only about the length of the
extension, not about spending reductions that put our country back on
track?
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Unfortunately, the President's only fundamental concern is how do we
kick this past the next election. Above all else, not good policy, not
what is best for our citizens, but the No. 1 goal is how to get past
the next election. This is, unfortunately, his bottom line. Simply
astounding that the campaign of hope and change has become such
business as usual. Simply raising the debt ceiling absent any
meaningful spending reforms will not work.
Now we find ourselves in one heck of a mess. With about a week to go,
the latest in the debt limit saga is a proposal that was introduced
last night by Senator Reid. But here is why this latest plan has so
many problems. Policywise, it does not hold together. The plan claims
$1 trillion in savings from reductions in troop forces. These savings
assume the troop surge extends into perpetuity, which never was the
plan. So it assumes savings from stopping spending that was never
scheduled or even requested. It is like reaching into the air and
grabbing savings. Essentially, this plan counts savings that were
scheduled to happen.
Second, the plan counts $400 billion in interest savings on that
savings relative to the troop money that was not going to be spent, was
not asked for. In other words, not only does the plan count nonexistent
savings, it then compounds the policy problem by counting nonexistent
interest savings on that savings. You simply cannot count savings that
were never intended to happen.
We are dealing with a ticking timebomb here. We have rating agencies
saying: My goodness, your debt is so out of control that unless we see
a plan, we will not be fooled by the gimmicks. Yet this policy approach
does not hold together. You see, the rating agencies, justifiably so,
want to see real budget savings that actually help to improve our
balance sheet.
We are at a critical time in our Nation's history. With 1 week left,
the American people are yearning for bold leadership, not another shell
game. Heated rhetoric and charged accusations are not going to fix the
fiscal situation.
I stand ready to work with my colleagues on a solution, and I urge
the President to do the same. Let's quit defending what is
indefensible; that is, worrying about getting the can kicked down the
road past the next election, and let's try to figure out how best to
address this.
There was a plan that came out recently. It was a plan dubbed from
the Gang of 6, and the Presiding Officer and I have had some interest
in that plan. But we all acknowledge it is going to take time to put
that plan in place, to debate that plan, to bring it to the floor, to
do the things that are necessary. We have to take action now. I am a
part of a group that says: Look, let's take a long hard look at that
plan. Let's see if that is the plan we can move down the field to
success.
But we have just 7 days left. We need to face the reality that 7 days
from now we will be within hours of hitting our debt ceiling.
Incidentally, to those who are arguing: No, it is not August 2, well,
if it is not August 2, it is close to August 2. We are facing a real
problem where there will not be enough money to pay the bills.
Many say: Pay the interest on the debt. Make sure you get that done.
I am not opposed to that. I do not want to default on our debt. But
that means we have about 50 cents on the dollar in August, according to
a cashflow statement done by the Bipartisan Policy Group, and that
means that 50 percent of those out there who would otherwise receive
some type of payment from the Federal Government will not get it
because there simply is not enough money to pay the bills.
So what does Speaker Boehner's plan do?
Well, it is a plan that is realistic. It says, look, we have to come
to grips with where we are in the next 7 days or we can simply suspend
rational thought, believe that the record-breaking debt increases to
accommodate record-setting debt are somehow a plausible course. It is
not.
I am more apt to believe the President's own words. When the debt
limit increase was $781 billion to raise our borrowing authority to $9
trillion, then Senator Obama was in the place where we are in today,
deciding on whether he would vote for a debt ceiling increase, and he
called the situation then a ``failure of leadership.'' He went on to
say ``increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and
internationally.''
Well, we were at $9 trillion then, an unforgivable amount of money.
Today we are at $14.5 trillion, and the steam engine is firing away,
building up more and more debt.
Senator Obama's words were as truthful then as they are today. Yet
now he has done a 180. His Presidency has hit the turbo booster when it
comes to record debt.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. All time reserved for the Republicans has
expired.
Mr. JOHANNS. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
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