Congressional Record, Volume 158 Issue 70 (Wednesday, May 16, 2012)

[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 70 (Wednesday, May 16, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3183-S3222]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

S. CON. RES. 41, H. CON. RES. 112, S. CON. RES. 37, S. CON. RES. 42, S.
CON. RES. 44 EN BLOC--MOTIONS TO PROCEED

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the
Senate will proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following
concurrent resolutions, which the clerk will report.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

Motions to proceed to Calendar No. 357, S. Con Res. 41;
Calendar No. 354, H. Con. Res. 112; Calendar No. 356, S. Con.
Res. 37; Calendar No. 384, S. Con. Res. 42; Calendar No. 395,
S. Con. Res. 44.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, there
will be 6 hours of debate equally divided between the two leaders or
their designees, with the majority controlling the first 30 minutes and
the Republicans controlling the second 30 minutes.
The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, this is a consequential discussion
today. It is a question of the future economic policy of the United
States. That is what we are talking about here today. I just heard the
Republican leader say there is no budget. I don't know how to say this,
but sometimes I wonder if colleagues pay attention to what they are
voting on here. Last year in August we did not pass a budget
resolution; instead, we passed a budget law.
Anybody who has had 10th grade civics knows a law is stronger than
any resolution. A resolution is purely a congressional document. It
never goes to the President for his signature. A law has to pass both
bodies and be signed by the President. Last year, instead of a budget
resolution, we did a budget law called the Budget Control Act.
The Budget Control Act set the budget for the next 2 years, for this
year and next. More than that, it set 10 years of spending caps, saving
$900 billion. In addition, the Budget Control Act gave a special
committee the authority to reform the tax system and the entitlement
system of the country, and it said: If you come to an agreement,
special committee, your action cannot be filibustered. You have to go
right to the floor for a vote. And if you do not agree, there will be
an additional $1.2 trillion of spending cuts put in place.
The special committee did not agree, so that additional $1.2 trillion
of spending cuts is now the law, in addition to the $900 billion of
spending cuts. That is a total spending cut package of more than $2
trillion. That is the biggest spending cut package in the history of
the United States. For our colleagues to say there are no spending
limits in place--really? What is the Budget Control Act, then? It is a
law passed overwhelmingly in the Senate. It passed in the House. It was
signed by the President of the United States.
Why are they engaged in this diversion? I think I know why. Because
the last time our colleagues on the other side were in control, when
they had it all, the House, the Senate, the White House--from 2001 to
2006 they had both Houses of Congress, until 2008 they had the White
House, so of course nothing could be changed in terms of the policies
they put in place until we had a new President. And what happened when
they had total control and their policies were in place? Republican
policies led the United States to the brink of financial collapse. That
is what happened. Do you know what they want to do now? They want to go
back to those failed policies and do it all over again.
We cannot let them do that. That would be a disaster for this
country. It would be a disaster for the world's economy. I do not know
what could be more clear than when their policies were in place they
brought this Nation to the brink of financial collapse. I remember
those days. I remember being called to a special meeting in this
building with the leaders of the House and the Senate and the head of
the Treasury Department under President Bush and the Chairman of the
Federal Reserve, who told us if they did not take certain actions the
next day there would be a financial collapse in the United States
within days. I was in the room when the rescue for the major financial
institutions in this country was designed and we were told, late on a
Saturday night, if we did not reach agreement by the next day the Asian
markets would open Sunday night and they would collapse and our markets
would open the next Monday and they would collapse.
Barack Obama was not the President; George W. Bush was the President.
The Republican economic policies had been put in place in 2001, in
2002, in 2003, and those policies were still in place when we came
close to collapse. We do not forget.
Let's go back to what happened with the private sector jobs picture.
At the end of the Bush administration we were losing 800,000 jobs a
month. Now we are gaining 130,000 in the last month. In the months
before that, immediately preceding, we were gaining about 200,000 jobs
a month. We have had a gain, now that the economy has started to turn
around under this President, of 4 million jobs created in the private
sector.
There it is. The red line is the results of the last time the
Republicans controlled the policy here--job losses every month.
Finally, under this President things have begun to turn around. Instead
of losing jobs we are gaining jobs, and the same is true on economic
growth. On economic growth the record is very clear. In the last
quarter of the Bush administration the economy was shrinking at a rate
of almost 9 percent. You can see it there, that long red bar--the
economy in the last quarter of the Bush administration shrinking at a
rate of almost 9 percent. But that, too, has turned around under this
new President and we are now averaging economic growth of about 3
percent--a dramatic improvement.
But our Republican friends are not satisfied. They want to take us
back. They want to take us back to those failed policies that had the
economy shrinking at a rate of 9 percent, had us losing 800,000 jobs a
month. We are not going to support that. We are going to oppose that.
One thing the Republican leader got right is we are going to be voting
against going back to those failed policies that put this economy in
the ditch, that put us on the brink of financial collapse. He is
absolutely right. We are going to oppose that.
Our policies have begun to turn things in the right direction. Here
are the positive signs for the U.S. economy: 26 consecutive months of
private sector job growth; 11 consecutive quarters of real GDP growth;
unemployment rate down; manufacturing has expanded for 33 consecutive
months; consumer confidence is showing signs of improvement--in fact,
the last consumer confidence reading is at a 4-year high; U.S. auto
manufacturers that were on the brink of bankruptcy under the Bush
administration policies, the Republican policies, are now returning to
profitability; and State revenues are showing signs of improvement.

One way we can reality-test is how is our economy doing compared to
our major competitors. How are we doing compared to the Europeans? How
are we doing compared to Japan? How are we doing compared to the United
Kingdom? On every one of those tests the United States comes out on
top. Our economy is performing better than the European zone--all the
European countries combined. We are doing better than Japan. We are
doing better than the United Kingdom. This chart shows the story. Our
economic growth is the best, compared to our major competitors.
If there is any doubt that Republican policies had us on the brink of
financial collapse, we can look to the study that was done by Alan
Blinder, the former Deputy Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Mark
Zandi, who advised the McCain campaign on economic policy. The two of
them did an analysis of the Federal actions taken to deal with the
fiscal crisis and the financial crisis. Here is what they conclude:

We find that its effects on real GDP, jobs and inflation
are huge, and probably averted what could have been called
Great Depression 2.0.

When our friends attack the President and say he did not lead--
really? He averted a depression. He prevented a financial collapse,
because that is exactly where we were headed when the Republicans were
in control.
Zandi and Blinder went on to write:

When all is said and done, the financial and fiscal
policies will have cost taxpayers a substantial sum, but not
nearly as much as most had feared and not nearly as much as
if policymakers had not acted at all. If the comprehensive
policy responses saved the

[[Page S3184]]

economy from another depression, as we estimate, they were
well worth their cost.

That is exactly right. But what do our colleagues on the other side
want to do? They want to take us to extreme austerity. They want to
slam on the brakes, even while this economy is in a fragile recovery.
We do not have to wonder what would happen if we adopted the policies
they are presenting here on the floor of the Senate today. We do not
have to imagine it; we can just look across to Europe because they are
pursuing the policies that our colleagues on the other side advocate
here today. What is happening? We have kind of an experiment going on
because what our Republican friends are pushing for is being done in
Europe. What are they experiencing? Here is a column from the former
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, ``Austerity Is Strangling
Europe.''

[T]he direction of European economic and financial policy
must change, away from pure austerity toward growth. Greece,
Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Spain have made substantial
progress in stabilizing their finances. But the economic and
political situation in these countries shows that austerity
alone is not the way to resolve the crisis.

Do we have a problem with debt? Absolutely. Do we need to deal with
it? Absolutely. I was part of the Bowles-Simpson commission. I was part
of the group of six. I have spent hundreds of hours negotiating with
colleagues on both sides to get a result. But the answer is not extreme
austerity right now. Almost every economic analyst says if you do that
you will slam this country right back into recession. Again, we do not
have to look very far to find out if that is true, because Great
Britain has tried that approach. What have they experienced? Here is an
article from the Wall Street Journal on April 26: ``U.S. Slips Back
Into Recession.''
That is exactly the formula that is being presented by our colleagues
on the other side of the aisle today. Let's slam on the brakes. We are
going to put this thing right back in recession. Hey, they had their
chance. They ran the economic policy of this country for 8 years under
the Bush administration, and sure enough they had this country on the
brink of financial collapse. Now they want to return to those same
failed policies. What a mistake that would be.

We have heard the Republican leader say there is no budget; we have
no budget. As I indicated in the beginning of my remarks, we do have a
budget law that was passed last year. It is called the Budget Control
Act. Let me read from the Budget Control Act because maybe my
colleagues missed it when they were voting on it. Here is what it says
in two places:

The allocations, aggregates, and levels

Referring to spending levels--

set in subsection (b)(1) shall apply in the Senate in the
same manner as for a concurrent resolution on the budget for
fiscal year 2012.

Is that confusing? It says ``in the same manner as for a concurrent
resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2012.''
The identical language is repeated for 2013:

The allocations, aggregates, and levels set in subsection
(b)(2) shall apply in the Senate in the same manner as for a
concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2013.

That is about as clear as it can be. I might add, the Budget Control
Act, as I indicated earlier, is stronger than any resolution because a
resolution is purely a congressional document. It never goes to the
President for his signature. So the Budget Control Act that set the
budget for 2012 and 2013 has the force of law, unlike a budget
resolution that is not signed by the President.
The Budget Control Act also sets spending limits not just for 2 years
but for 10 years. It caps spending for 10 years, saving $900 billion.
It also provided the full enforcement mechanisms, including a deeming
resolution that allowed budget points of order to be enforced for the
appropriations bills that come in 2012 and 2013.
The Budget Control Act did something else. It created a
supercommittee, a reconciliation-like procedure to address entitlement
reform and tax reform backed up by a $1.2 trillion so-called sequester.
``Sequester'' is just a fancy word for more spending cuts.
The Budget Control Act that is the law said if the special committee
didn't reform the tax system, didn't reform the entitlement system,
that there would be another $1.2 trillion of spending cuts imposed on
top of the $900 billion. We all know the special committee didn't reach
an agreement, so that additional $1.2 trillion of spending cuts is in
place. That is a total of $2 trillion in spending cuts. That is the
biggest spending cut package in the history of the United States.
For our friends on the other side to say there are no spending limits
in place is just wrong. It is just wrong. We do have a problem. We have
a big problem. This chart talks about the spending and revenue of the
country over the last 60 years and tells us why we have a problem. The
red line shows the spending in the United States over that period. The
green line shows the revenues. We can see on the chart there is a big
gap between the spending and the revenue, and that is why we have
deficits.
Our friends on the other side like to refer to one part of the
equation. They just like to talk about spending. But the reality is
deficits are created by the gap between the revenue and the spending.
We can see on this chart we are at or near a 60-year high on spending.
We have come off the 60-year high a little bit, and we are at or near a
60-year low on revenue. We have to work both sides of the equation.
Again, we are at or near a 60-year high on the spending, and we are at
or near a 60-year low on revenue.
So what is to be done about it? The public says we ought to have a
balanced plan: 62 percent say the best way to reduce the Federal budget
deficit is a combination of additional revenue and spending cuts. Eight
percent say we ought to just increase taxes. Seventeen percent say just
cut programs.
I was part of the so-called Bowles-Simpson Commission. There were 18
of us; 11 of the 18 supported the conclusions that called for that kind
of approach--additional revenue but also additional spending cuts. That
is what the American people say we ought to do, but that is not what
our friends on the other side are proposing. They propose additional
tax cuts, to dig the hole deeper before we start filling it in.
Then they say: In addition to that, we will have Draconian spending
cuts because if we are going to have more tax cuts that primarily go to
the wealthiest among us, and we are trying to reduce the deficit, that
means we have to have even more spending cuts.
Let me just say that the budgets our Republican friends are going to
be offering today have something in common. Every one of them ends
Medicare as we know it. Every Republican budget offered today ends
Medicare as we know it. One of the Republican budgets being offered
today cuts Social Security by 39 percent. That is their answer. If we
are going to have more tax cuts for the wealthiest among us--and many
of them are not paying their fair share of taxes--and if we are going
to give them additional tax cuts, trillions of dollars in some cases in
these budgets they are presenting today, then how are we going to make
it up? Their answer is end Medicare as we know it, and that is in every
one of their budgets.
One of them has gone so far as to say: Let's cut Social Security
benefits 39 percent. We will be voting on that later today, and we will
see who stands behind that proposal.
Every Republican budget cuts taxes for millionaires by at least
$150,000 a year. Are you listening? Every Republican budget being
offered today cuts taxes for millionaires by at least $150,000 a year
on average.
Every Republican budget being offered today protects offshore tax
havens.
What are offshore tax havens? This is a picture of a building down in
the Cayman Islands. It is an Ugland House. It is a little five-story
building down in the Cayman Islands. That building claims to be the
home of 18,857 companies, and they all say they are doing business out
of that little building down in the Cayman Islands--18,857 companies.
They are not doing business out of that building. They are doing
monkey business out of that building, and the monkey business they are
doing is avoiding the taxes they owe in the United States.
Every Republican budget protects those offshore tax havens. The first
House Republican budget plan we will be voting on today is totally
unbalanced. There is no revenue. In fact, it

[[Page S3185]]

is a lot more tax cuts, $1 trillion of additional tax cuts for the
wealthiest in our country. They do cut some things other than taxes;
they cut health care by almost $3 trillion. They shift Medicare to a
voucher system which will end Medicare as we know it. They block-grant
for Medicaid, going right after the most vulnerable in our society:
children, the disabled, and those who have the least. They cut the
safety net for seniors, children, the disabled, which will increase the
number of uninsured by more than 30 million. They have large cuts to
education, energy, and infrastructure. Cutting education doesn't make a
whole lot of sense to me. Talk about eating your seed corn, that is it.

After our House Republican colleagues put out their budget, the
Catholic bishops said this in the Washington Post: Bishops say Ryan
budget fails moral test.
The House Republican budget authored by Mr. Ryan fails the moral
test. It certainly does.
Let's go to the next slide. This plan cuts discretionary spending $1
trillion beyond what the Budget Control Act did. If you look at
priorities, it kind of leaps out at you. Health care is cut by almost
$3 trillion. It goes from $12.7 trillion to $9.9 trillion.
Then we go to the question of education, where the United States is
already lagging. In fact, the United States ranks 25th out of 34 OECD
countries in math. We are 25th in math. In science we are 17th out of
34. So we are 25th out of 34 in math, and we are 17th out of 34 in
science. The budget from the House Republicans says to cut education by
25 percent; cut it from $77 billion to $58 billion. That is a 25-
percent cut in education under the House Republican plan.
We have all seen gasoline prices rising. We are thankful they have
been easing back in recent days. But, nonetheless, on May 14 gasoline
averaged $3.75 a gallon. What is the Republican answer to rising
gasoline prices? Well, let's cut those energy programs that are
designed to reduce our dependence on foreign energy. Let's cut them 60
percent. That is what the House Republican plan does. It cuts programs
to reduce our dependence on foreign energy from $4.7 billion a year to
$2 billion. That is a 60-percent cut in programs to reduce our
dependence on foreign energy.
If anybody has driven on the highways of America, we all know we have
work to do there. If we look at spending on infrastructure in our
country versus our major competitors, we can see China is spending 9
percent of its GDP on infrastructure: roads, bridges, airports, and
rail. Europe spends 5 percent, and the United States spends 2.4 percent
on infrastructure. We ought to do better than that.
So what is the Republican answer? On transportation funding, they cut
it 34 percent. They cut it 34 percent. I think we understand the
direction our Republican colleagues want to take this country, and it
is full speed in reverse. They want to go back to the failed policies
that put this country on the brink of financial collapse the last time
they were in charge.
We will hear our colleagues on the Republican side say we can't raise
any revenue. We can't raise any revenue, even though revenue is at or
near a 60-year low right now. If we look historically at what it has
taken to balance the budget, the last five times we balanced the
budget, revenue was at 19.5 percent to 20.6 percent of GDP. Under the
Republican plan, it never gets above 18.7 percent. So I don't think
they are very serious about balancing the budget.
Former Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg said this about
the need for more revenue:

[W]e also know revenues are going to have to go up, if
you're going to maintain a stable economy and a productive
economy, because of the simple fact that you're going to have
this huge generation that has to be paid for.

That is the baby boom generation.
Former Senate Budget Committee Chairman Domenici also said we need
more revenue. He said:

A complete deficit reduction plan--one that can gain
support from Republicans and Democrats--will need to combine
comprehensive spending cuts with structural entitlement
reform and new revenues . . . [A]dditional revenues will be
needed if we are serious about controlling our debt.

One of the issues that has become more and more clear in recent
months is that income disparity is widening in America. This shows,
since 1979, what has happened to the top 1 percent in terms of their
income and what has happened to the middle quintile and the lowest
quintile. Everybody else has been pretty much stagnant since 1979. The
top 1 percent has gone up like a rocket. I have nothing to be critical
about in terms of people doing well. We want everyone to succeed, not
just part of the population.
The hard reality is that since 1995, the effective tax rate for the
wealthiest 400 taxpayers in this country has been cut from about 30
percent to 18 percent. That is not fair. The Republican plan is to give
them more tax cuts. In fact, the House Republican plan on revenue
provides an additional $1 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest among
us by giving millionaires an average tax cut of more than $150,000 a
year. It does not contribute one dime of revenue to deficit reduction.
I want to end where I began. The last time our colleagues on the
other side were in charge, when they controlled everything here from
2001 to 2006 and the White House until 2008, their Republican policies
led the United States to the brink of financial collapse. The proposals
they are making here today are to take us right back to those failed
policies. We shouldn't let them do that. That would be a mistake for
our country and it would be a mistake for the world.
I thank the Chair and yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, the fundamental question we as a
Nation have to ask is: What are we going to do now? What are we going
to do for the future? What is our plan for the future? The problem we
have in this Senate is that the Democratic majority steadfastly and
adamantly refuses to lay out their vision for the future while
investing a considerable amount of time and effort in attacking anybody
who does. They even voted down their own President's budget, as bad as
it is--the most irresponsible budget ever submitted here, in my
opinion.
This is an odd situation we are in, and I will say that our country
has never been in more danger financially. Erskine Bowles and Alan
Simpson--Senator Conrad served on their committee--came before the
Budget Committee, of which I am the ranking member, and told us in a
signed statement--that this Nation has never faced a more predictable
financial crisis. In other words, the course we are on today is
unsustainable. They told us that. They told us it could happen within
as little as 2 years, and that was over a year ago that they gave that
testimony.
We are in the danger zone financially. I know a lot of people would
like to say it is not so, but it is so. Look at this chart. This chart
shows the total debt of the eurozone, including the U.K., and the
United States. Our debt exceeds that of the eurozone. We have a larger
debt than they do. My good friend Senator Conrad, who is such a fine
person, noted that President Bush presided over a period in which our
debt increased, and it did increase. The largest debt President Bush
ever had was $480 billion in 1 year, which was too large. President
Obama has never had a budget that was less than a $1,200 billion
deficit, and next year it will be over $1,000 billion again, according
to expert testimony. We are on an unsustainable path. So I would note
that our $15.5 trillion debt for the United States is greater than the
eurozone and the eurozone has a larger population than we do.
Let's look at this chart, which drives that number home again, in
case anybody is worried about it. I am. It shows the average debt per
person in the countries we have been reading about that are in
financial trouble, and it hits them sometimes surprisingly, and we
never know quite how it is going to hit. But look at this: The debt in
Spain, which we know is in a rocky financial position, is $18,000 per
person; Portugal, $19,000; France, $33,000; Greece, $38,000--Greece's
debt per person is $38,000, whereas the United States is $44,000. Yes,
we have a little larger economy, but this is the danger zone.
A few people were saying we could have a financial problem in 2007 as
a result of the bubble in housing. They

[[Page S3186]]

warned us that might happen. A lot of people said: Oh, no, not this
time; it is different; we have it under control. Yet we had a financial
crisis that we haven't recovered from yet. So I would say we do need to
take action.
We do not have a budget. If we have a budget, why did President Obama
comply with the United States Code and submit a budget this year? If we
have a budget, why did the House pass a budget? If we have a budget,
why did four different Democratic Congressmen and groups of Congressmen
submit budgets in the House? If we have a budget, why did Senator
Conrad seek to have a budget markup in the committee? He basically
said: Well, we may not bring it up on the floor, but the law says we
should have a budget and I am going to bring one up in committee. The
day before the committee met, the Democrats met in conference and told
him not to do it.
So we were expecting to have an actual markup of a budget presented
by the Democratic leadership and we didn't get it. Why? Senator Reid
said it would be foolish to have a budget--foolish. What did he mean by
that? Why would the Democratic leader, attacking Republicans this
morning, say it is foolish for us to produce a budget? Well, he said
that because he meant it would be foolish politically. It would be not
smart politically because the Democratic leadership in the Senate would
have to lay out a vision for the future and the vision they wanted to
sell and could agree on was one the American people wouldn't like. It
wouldn't be smart. They would reject it. We would add the numbers up
and see how much they actually want to increase taxes, how much they
are going to increase the debt, how much spending is going to increase.
That is not leadership. It is an utter failure of leadership.

In contrast, the Republican House produced a budget that changes the
debt course of America. It puts us on a sound financial path. One can
agree with it or disagree with it. We will have other budgets offered
today from the Republican side that will have substantial support, that
will change the debt course we are on, balance the budget in a certain
number of years, and put us on a sound financial path. I expect every
one of those budgets to be opposed by every Member on the other side of
the aisle. Again, it appears they will unanimously vote down President
Obama's budget and not offer one of their own, directly contrary to the
law.
I know the majority leader this morning said: Well, filibuster is our
problem. But we can't filibuster a budget. The Congressional Budget Act
is designed to ensure that a budget will be passed. The Congressional
Budget Act does not allow a filibuster. Only 51 votes are needed to
pass a budget, so why is it being mentioned? Because they prefer to
hide under the table and not stand up and be counted and not address
the greatest trouble this Nation has, which is our debt.
I see some of my colleagues here today, and I ask unanimous consent
to participate in a colloquy with my colleagues for up to 20 minutes.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I see Senator Blunt here, who was part
of the leadership in the House before he came to the Senate. I know he
has a deep understanding of these issues and the place we are in as a
Nation today. I also see Senator Thune from South Dakota, who is an
active member of the Budget Committee and part of the leadership here
in the Senate.
I am pleased to yield to Senator Blunt and ask him how he feels this
morning as we move forward today to bring up a series of budgets with
no plan from the majority party in the Senate.
Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I am embarrassed that we are not serious
about this issue. Senator Thune and I served in the House together
while the Senator from Alabama was leading in these budget fights in
the Senate, and we had a budget every year. We didn't always every
single year have a budget the House and the Senate could agree on, but
the House always had a budget and the Senate always had a budget. We
always complied with the 1974 Budget Act that says we have to have a
budget. It says we have to have a budget by April 15.
Frankly, we can't do our work without a budget. We can't get spending
under control without a budget. We can't appropriate the way we should
without a budget because the budget sets forth how much money we are
willing to spend on defense and how much money we are willing to spend
on military construction and how much money we are willing to spend on
energy. If we don't have that, we don't have a starting place.
I have all the respect in the world for our friend from North Dakota,
Senator Conrad, but to be the chairman of the Budget Committee and to
have to come to the floor and talk about what is wrong with the other
budgets that have been produced when his committee hasn't produced one
has to be frustrating for him, no matter how effective he seemed when
he was talking about what was wrong with the people who had a plan. It
is easy to find out what is wrong with somebody's plan, particularly
when one doesn't have any obligation, apparently, on their own part to
come up with a plan.
We remember when the White House was asked a few weeks ago, when
Senator Reid said the Senate will not have a budget and what their
position on that was, they said: We don't have a position on that.
The President submitted a budget. Why did the President submit a
budget if he doesn't want the Congress to act on a budget? The House
voted on his budget this year. It was 414 to 0. Not a single Democrat
or Republican in the House voted for the President's budget. Last year
we voted on the President's budget, as I assume we will again today.
Not a single Democrat or Republican voted for the President's budget
last year, and the position of the White House is they don't care. It
is an amazing situation to find ourselves in.
Whoever is in charge of the Senate in the future needs to have a
commitment to the American people that we are going to have a budget,
we are going to have an appropriations process, and we are going to get
this spending under control. We have maxed out the credit card;
everybody gets that. The Senator from Alabama showed this morning with
his chart the figures representing our debt relative to the countries
we sort of laugh at, how irresponsible they are--numbers that I think
we ought to look at pretty carefully. When our debt per person is
greater than the Greek debt per person--I haven't seen the front page
of a paper in a while that didn't have something about chaos in Greece
on it because they have let their government get bigger than their
economy can support. They have let their debt get bigger than the gross
domestic product of their country by almost two times, but now we have
exceeded our debt by--our debt exceeds our potential to produce goods
and services in a year for the first time ever. In fact, in the 3 years
we haven't had a budget, the debt of the country has increased almost
$5 trillion, as we have spent over $10 trillion in those 3 years
without a budget. It is unacceptable. Everybody here knows it is
unacceptable. And every American family, frankly, who thinks about it
knows it is unacceptable.

The Senator's fight, along with what I am sure has to be Chairman
Conrad's frustration to not have a budget, could not be a more
important topic for us to be talking about today or for the American
people to be asking the question: Why not? Why are you refusing to do
your job? I know nobody in this Chamber knows as much about the budget,
in my opinion, as the Senator does. Your frustration of where this does
not allow us to go to do the right things is as great as anybody's,
maybe greater than anybody's. But I think all of us know we should be
doing the right thing here, which is to obey the law, create a budget,
and have a budget that gets us to the place we know we need to get to,
where our economy, once again, is right-sized to our government or,
more importantly, our government is right-sized to our economy.
Mr. SESSIONS. Briefly, before I go to Senator Thune and get him
engaged in this discussion, based on the Senator's experience in the
budgetary process, I'm sure he is aware that about 60 percent of
Federal spending is mandatory entitlement spending. Does the Senator
think we can develop a long-term plan for the future that fails to
address that large portion that is growing faster than the other part
of the budget?

[[Page S3187]]

Mr. BLUNT. No, we cannot. Last year, for the first time ever, all of
the money that came in was less than the money that went out
automatically to these programs, where, if you meet the definition for
the program, you get the money. It is at 60 percent now. It has not
been that many years ago that it was at 50 percent. It was not that
many years before that it was at 40 percent.
So we have to deal with these issues because they lead us to an
inevitable place. Do we want to be Europe today a few years from now?
Surely not. Surely the answer is no. We cannot avoid that unless we
have a plan.
It is easy to talk about how bad the other plan is. But what we all
ought to be doing is coming up with a plan that gets us to where we all
know we need to be.
Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator.
I thank Senator Thune for his leadership and active participation in
this debate. I ask the Senator, what is on his mind this morning, as we
are heading for votes on four different budgets?
Mr. THUNE. I say to my colleague from Alabama, who is the ranking
member on the Budget Committee, I got on the Budget Committee in this
session of Congress and have been on it now for 2 years. We have not
written a budget either year. So it sort of begs the question about
whether the committee has any relevance around here anymore.
But to the point about spending and debt--we get down here and we
talk about it. I think it has been interesting. The former Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike Mullen--who up until several months
ago held that position--would come in front of Congress, in front of
congressional committees, and say the greatest threat to America's
national security is our national debt. There are a lot of external
threats the United States faces. The world continues to be a dangerous
place, with al-Qaida and the Iranian nuclear capability and China and
North Korea. You can go right down the list. But for the top ranking
military official in this country to come before Congress and say the
greatest threat to America's national security is our national debt
speaks volumes about what our priority ought to be. To think that we
here in the Senate now for over 1,100 days have not passed a budget is
pretty stunning in light of that reality; and also to say that somehow,
because the Budget Control Act last summer passed, we did not need a
budget misses the point.
The reason we had the Budget Control Act is because we did not pass a
budget. The Budget Control Act is what you get when you do not pass a
budget. You end up at the 11th hour having to put something together to
deal with the issue of the debt limit, which is what we were dealing
with at that time. It did put some caps on spending, but it does not do
anything to deal with the long-term structural challenges facing this
country, which is what a budget is designed to do.
The President submitted a budget this year, which would suggest he
thought we ought to be working on a budget. The chairman of the Budget
Committee, as my colleagues have mentioned, even called a Budget
Committee markup, where we went there and said: Bring amendments. We
went, we brought amendments, and we gave opening statements. We gaveled
it out and said we are not going to do it.
So here we are again on the floor of the Senate without a budget,
having to vote on other budgets presented by some of our colleagues,
the House of Representatives, which passed a budget this year earlier,
and the President's budget. To be fair, the President at least
submitted a budget. It was a terrible budget if you are looking at the
issues of spending and debt. In fact, I think the reason it got voted
down 414 to nothing in the House of Representatives is because it added
$11 trillion to the debt. It takes our total debt at the end of the 10-
year period to $26 trillion and spends $47 trillion over the next 10
years and raises taxes by $2 trillion in a very fragile economy. It was
a bad attempt, but at least it was an attempt. It was an attempt that
yielded zero votes in the House of Representative, and it will be
interesting to see if on the floor of the Senate today there will be
any Democrats who will vote for their President's budget proposal.
But the point the Senator from Alabama and the Senator from Missouri
make is a good one, and that is simply this: We have a responsibility
under the law to spell out what we would do to get this country on a
more sustainable fiscal path. That is something that is in the budget
laws that the Senator from Alabama pointed out. Yet here we go on, year
after year after year now--3 years in a row, over 1,100 days--without
the Senate doing its job and passing a budget. That is significant for
a lot of reasons, not the least of which is this is the fourth year in
a row where we are going to have a trillion dollar deficit. Under this
administration, you have the highest deficit, the second highest
deficit, the third highest deficit, and the fourth highest deficit in
history--4 consecutive years now of trillion dollar deficits.
But we are concerned about the economy. We need the economy to get
growing again, to expand, to create jobs. That helps address all these
things. What is interesting about it--and I know both my colleagues on
the floor are well aware of this--there is a lot of research that has
been done with regard to developed countries that start carrying these
high debt loads. All the analysis suggests when you get a debt-to-GDP
ratio of more than 90 percent, it costs you about a point to a point
and a half of economic growth every single year. Well, in our country,
a percentage point of economic growth means a million jobs. So our debt
to GDP--which is now over 100 percent--means it is draining our economy
of economic growth and, therefore, lots of jobs.
The Congressional Budget Office said about the President's budget, if
his budget were to be enacted, it could cost us up to 2.2 percent of
economic growth over the course of the next 10 years, which would
amount to 2.2 million jobs. So we know the President's effort was
not serious. He did at least put something out there. But we need a
serious discussion in the Senate about a budget that will put us on a
pathway not only to get spending and debt under control but to allow
the economy to grow and expand and get Americans back to work. That is
what is at stake here. That is why we believe we ought to have a
budget. That is why we are going to have an exercise today where at
least we get a chance to vote on some budgets as advanced by some of
our colleagues in the House of Representatives as well as here in the
Senate and the President's budget.

The fact is, this is the third year in a row where we have not
followed the law and gone through the process of getting a budget here
on the floor of the Senate. For our colleagues on the other side to
suggest it is not necessary simply because the Budget Control Act was
passed last summer not only is inconsistent with the law, but it begs
the point about why did the President submit his budget, why did they
call a Budget Committee markup in the first place? Clearly, somebody
around here thinks we ought to be doing our job. But we are not doing
it.
So I would hope, as we debate this issue today, at least we will put
in front of the American people the arguments we think need to be made
with regard to getting spending and debt under control, addressing the
long-term, the mandatory side of the budget my colleague from Missouri,
Senator Blunt, mentioned. That is where we know the money is. That is
what nobody wants to deal with. We keep squeezing a little bit more out
of the discretionary side of the budget. We have to take that on if we
are going to save Social Security and Medicare and reform these
entitlement programs. That is what a budget process would do. It does
not take 60 votes under the law. It takes 51.
To come down here and say Republicans will filibuster again is
completely out of whack with what we know to be the facts around here
and the law; that is, that it takes 51 votes to pass a budget and a
reconciliation bill that could possibly follow.
I appreciate the leadership of my colleague from Alabama as the
ranking member on the Budget Committee. I look forward today, at least,
for the chance for us to talk about a budget and what we ought to be
doing for the future of this country since we do not have a budget on
the floor of the Senate.
Mr. SESSIONS. I could not agree with the Senator more. I would note,

[[Page S3188]]

the reason we are here today is because a budget was not produced. The
Parliamentarian of the Senate ruled that a budget has not been produced
and, therefore, under the rules of the Budget Act, budgets that have
been filed can be brought to the floor. That is how we were able to
force the votes today.
Senator Thune, briefly--and I will also ask Senator Blunt, who is in
our leadership--isn't it a fact that what happened with the Budget
Control Act is that we had spent so much money, we had reached the
spending limit of America--the debt ceiling--and we had to have a last-
minute effort to reach an agreement; the Republicans insisted that we
had to reduce spending, and we got a reduction in spending from $47
trillion over the next 10 years to $45 trillion? You would have thought
that was going to bankrupt America--that we would spend $45 trillion
instead of $47 trillion.
That is not a budget. It was a limit on spending, and it was done
because Republicans said: We are not going to raise the debt limit
until you at least cut some spending. That is all that could be
accomplished. We avoided a crisis, but it was a pretty tense time.
Senator Blunt.
Mr. BLUNT. I would like to stay on this. Saying the Budget Control
Act is a budget--as Senator Thune mentioned, if that was the budget,
why did the President submit one? Nobody believes that is a budget. The
Parliamentarian said it was not a budget. But what it is--it would be
as if your family sitting down to decide what money you are going to
have to spend this year said: OK, we have X number of dollars. Let's go
out and spend it. That is no budget, particularly when you had to
borrow 40 percent of the X number of dollars you said you had. We are
borrowing 40 percent of the money we are going to spend. The only
number we have that we have agreed to is the maximum amount we will
spend, knowing we do not have anywhere near that number, and we have
not allocated that in any way.
That is no budget. Everybody knows that. Everybody also knows you
cannot get there unless you have a way to get there. Your family says:
OK, we have done the budgeting for the year. We decided if we borrow
almost as much money as we make, and we spend that somewhere, that is
our budget. We have not decided where we are going to spend it, we have
not decided how we are going to spend it, and we have not even decided
a reasonable way we are going to get it, but we said: Here is the
number we are going to spend. Now, family, let's all go out and start
spending and we will meet here later this year and see how it worked
out. It makes no sense at all, and everybody knows that.
Interestingly, we do not hear much about this. It is surprising to me
that every day there is not a story about why for the first time ever
for 3 years straight now the Senate has decided it does not have to do
the work the law requires it to do, as we dig this hole deeper and
deeper and deeper. The longer we wait, the more difficult the solution
is going to be. Every single day that passes, it is harder to solve
this problem than it would have been the day before. Now we have gone 3
years without a budget and apparently we are going to go through the
rest of this process without a budget. By the time we get to the end of
this year, we will be approaching that fourth year without a budget. It
is not as though this would be a good idea, the law says we have to
have one. And we should have one.
Mr. SESSIONS. Senator Blunt has been in the leadership in the House.
He is in the leadership of the Senate. Be frank with us. What is it
that would cause the majority party not to want to lead, not to want to
lay out a plan for the future, and attack anybody who does lay out a
plan? I know it is hard. We all know this is a tough thing. But doesn't
the Senator think a party that aspires to lead the Senate should,
instead of hiding under the table, stand up and say what they believe
we should do over the next decade financially?
Mr. BLUNT. I think the law even requires it. I think the leader on
the other side, the majority leader, has been pretty clear about it. It
is bad politics to have a budget, bad politics to tell the American
people officially what we are for, bad politics for our Members to have
to go on record saying what they are for.

The President submitted a budget. There are 54 Members of the
President's party here in the Senate. Fifty-one of them could pass this
budget. It would be the Senate-passed budget. Then you would go to the
House and say: OK, let's look at the House budget and the Senate budget
and see if we can agree on a budget.
But they actually have been pretty transparent. You have to give them
some credit for not trying to be different than they really are. They
said: It would be politically foolish for us to pass a budget because
then people would know what every one of the 51 of our Members is for,
and they would have to say what they are for.
My guess is that nobody in the majority will say they are for
anything today--not for the President's budget, not for any budget we
will submit. So you go home and say: I am not for any of that. You
can't accuse me of being for a bad plan because I am for no plan.
That is where we are.
Mr. SESSIONS. Well, we need revenue--they use that word but will not
explicitly say whom they want to tax except a very few rich. The
Buffett tax would produce about $4 billion a year when we have a $1,200
billion deficit.
I would note that Senator Manchin, a former Governor of West
Virginia, said in today's Politico that he would have been impeached if
he failed to produce a budget as West Virginia's Governor. He said:
Sure I have a problem with failing to offer a budget. As a former
Governor, my responsibility was to put a balanced budget forward.
Well, I see my colleague is here. I think our time is up. There might
be a couple of minutes for Senator Thune.
Mr. THUNE. If the Senator will yield for a minute, I assume in
Alabama and Missouri and I know in South Dakota our States pass
budgets. It can be done. You can balance your budget. It would be nice
if we had a requirement in the Constitution that would demand that the
way many of our States do. Certainly, there doesn't seem to be the
political will here to do it absent that. But it can be done, and hard
decisions have to be made. South Dakota went through it last year, made
some hard choices, our Governor, our legislature. Those are the types
of hard decisions that are going to have to made here, but it takes a
certain amount of political will and a willingness to make hard
decisions. As the Senator from Alabama and the Senator from Missouri
have both pointed out, there doesn't seem to be the willingness here to
make those hard votes.
As has already been pointed out, the leader on the other side has
said: What point is there in doing a budget? And the President of the
United States and his folks, when they were asked whether the Senate
ought to do a budget, said: Well, we don't have an opinion about that,
which I think is really ironic coming from the leader of the free world
about whether this country ought to have a budget to work with.
But that being said, as our time winds down here, to argue, as our
colleagues have, that we don't need one misses the point. The
Parliamentarian has ruled that the Budget Control Act was, in fact, not
a budget. We need to do a budget here in the Senate. More importantly,
the American people expect it and the taxpayers deserve it. That is why
we ought to be having a debate on what we are going to vote for today,
not what we are going to vote against.
It will be interesting to see if any of our colleagues on the other
side vote for any of the budget proposals we put forward today,
including the President of the United States; his budget will be voted
on along with several other Republican budgets. I have a feeling we
will be for some things. I have a feeling, as you said earlier, that
they are not going to be for anything.
Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, is the time up on this side?
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The time has expired.
Mr. SESSIONS. I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the use of
calculators be permitted on the Senate floor during consideration of
the motions to proceed to budget resolutions.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.

[[Page S3189]]

Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, I wish to go back to the point my
colleagues have made. It is fascinating to me. You did not hear them
talk for one moment about the substance of their proposals--not a
moment. Did you notice that? I wonder why that would be? I think I
know. It is because their proposals would take us right back to the
failed policies that brought this country to the brink of economic
collapse. That is what happened the last time they were in charge. They
controlled both bodies from 2001 until 2006, the White House until
2008. So none of those policies they put in place when they controlled
both Chambers could be changed. And where were we at the end of 2008?
Where were we? We were losing 800,000 jobs a month and the economy was
shrinking at a rate of 9 percent. And the proposals they have, the
substantive proposals they are making here today, take us right back to
those same failed policies.
It is no wonder you did not hear them saying one word about the
budget proposals on which we are going to be voting because they are
the same failed policies that put this country in the ditch. Instead,
what you hear them say is that we on our side have no budget.
Fascinating.
Well, let me just put up again what we passed last year in law called
the Budget Control Act.
Let me again read from that law. It says:

The allocations, aggregates, and levels--

Spending levels--

in subsection . . . shall apply in the Senate in the same
manner as for a concurrent resolution on the budget for
fiscal year 2012.

In the next clause, it makes the exact same statement for 2013, that
the Budget Control Act that was passed last year will serve in the same
manner as a budget resolution.
Earlier this year, pursuant to that law, I gave the appropriators,
which I am required to do under the law, what they could spend, and
here it is. I have this chart being blown up.
Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, $13,397 million; Armed Services,
$146,698 million; Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, $22,167 million;
Commerce, Science, and Transportation, $15,016 million; Energy and
Natural Resources, $5,276 million. It sounds kind of like a budget does
it not? Doesn't that sound kind of like a budget? Well, guess what, it
is a budget. It is in the Budget Control Act that we passed last year
instead of a budget resolution.
Again, anybody who has taken high school civics knows a budget law is
stronger than any budget resolution. Why would that be the case?
Because a budget resolution is purely a congressional document. It
never goes to the President for his signature. A budget law, by
definition, has to be signed by the President. So last year, instead of
a budget resolution, we passed a budget law called the Budget Control
Act. Pursuant to that law, I gave the appropriators--earlier this year,
before the deadline--their allocations, and I was just reading from
them. Finance, $1,337 billion; Foreign Relations, $28,640 million;
Homeland Security, $102,276 million; the Judiciary Committee, $18,545
million; Rules and Administration, $41 million. It sounds a lot like a
budget doesn't it? Because that is exactly what it provided. It
provided the spending limit this year and for next year. That is in the
Budget Control Act we passed in the Senate last year on a strong
bipartisan vote, passed the House of Representatives, and signed into
law by the President of the United States.
So when we hear over and over that there is no budget, no spending
limits for this year, it is just not so. There are spending limits for
this year. There are spending limits for next year. They are included
in the Budget Control Act, which is a law. It was passed. It was signed
by the President. That Budget Control Act limited spending for the next
10 years--put spending caps in place. Budget resolutions rarely have
spending caps for more than 1 year. The Budget Control Act had 10 years
of caps, saving $900 billion. That is the law.
I see the Senator from Michigan is on the floor--a very valued member
of the Budget Committee. Welcome to this debate. We have been hearing a
lot from the other side--interestingly enough, I want to say to the
Senator, almost nothing about the substance of their proposals. I
assume that is because they want to go back to the same failed policies
that put this country in the ditch we are still digging out of. All
they want to talk about is not having a budget resolution--not one word
that instead of a budget resolution, we passed a budget law, as the
Senator well knows, the Budget Control Act.
How much time will the Senator need?
Ms. STABENOW. I will use 7 minutes or so.
Mr. CONRAD. I will allocate the Senator 10 minutes.
Ms. STABENOW. I thank the Senator.
Madam President, first let me thank the chairman of the Budget
Committee, who I have to say is going to be sorely missed. In fact, I
am not sure we are going to let him go. I think we are going to lock
the doors to his office and not let him leave. He has been such an
incredible valued Member of the Senate and a leader for our country on
these issues.
It is absolutely true that what we are really debating is whether we
go back to policies that put us in the huge deficit ditch in which we
find ourselves or whether we continue to go forward as a country. We
need to keep going forward and going forward even more quickly
certainly. But in my State, we are seeing us begin to move forward,
with manufacturing coming back and innovation opportunities, and we
need to continue to push for that.
But let me stress as well what the chairman has said. We passed the
Budget Control Act by 74 votes in the Senate--74 votes, a bipartisan
vote--on August 2, 2011. It put in place the spending caps the chairman
talked about. It laid out something that, frankly, in my time since
being here starting in 2001, has been done differently and, frankly,
has a stronger basis for it because instead of just having something
passed by the House and the Senate, it was actually signed by the
President. It is law. It has the force of law, and it is in a situation
where it has even more impact than it would normally.
So, yes, we did not do the normal process. What we did was one better
than the normal process, which is the Budget Control Act. It did pass.
It did put in place the spending caps and set up, as you know, a
deficit reduction commission and a requirement on cuts that will take
place in January.
It is also true that what we do not have is a long-term plan. As the
chairman has talked about over and over again, we have to come together
on a long-term deficit reduction plan. So we agree on that. There are
many people who have talked about that, worked on various proposals.
The President has lead negotiations. Members in this body have. And
certainly the chairman of the committee has continued to lead those
efforts. And we need to get that done. But in terms of what we have on
a budget resolution that puts in place limits or caps, that has been
done.
Now, when we look at what is in front of us and the votes we are
going to be having today, it is very simple in terms of values. The
question is, Are you on the side of the middle class or on the side of
millionaires in this country?
You know, folks in my State, the middle class, feel as though the
system has been pretty much rigged against them. All they want is a
fair shot. We have families in Michigan struggling to make ends meet,
and they are struggling to send their kids to college. Over and over
again, they look at what is going on here and scratch their heads. And
why in the world would we continue to focus on things that help a
privileged few, those who have had the most benefits in the last
decade? Why do we continue to see policies like these budgets that, in
fact, focus on more tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and ask
middle-class families to sacrifice more and more? They shake their
heads and say: What is going on here? You guys just do not get it, what
is happening to the majority of families.
And what we are seeing once again is that rather than focusing on
jobs and bringing the economy back on track, bringing jobs back to the
United States, strengthening our ability to make things and grow things
in this country, which has to happen if we are going to have a middle
class and have an economy, what we see our colleagues on the other side
of the aisle do is wanting to double student loan rates

[[Page S3190]]

and eliminate Medicare as we know it in order to give another round of
tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. That makes absolutely no
sense.
Instead of spending our time passing jobs bills that we need to pass,
by the way, including the farm bill, which affects 16 million people in
this country when we talk about rural communities and agriculture and
food processing and all of our efforts on food policy across the
country, instead of doing that, they want to spend their time focusing
on something that will give more tax breaks to millionaires and ask
middle-class families one more time--just one more time--to sacrifice.
Folks in my State are saying we have had enough of this. What we
ought to be doing is our to-do list--stopping outsourcing and rewarding
companies that bring jobs home; helping responsible homeowners
refinance and take advantage of today's lower interest rates; cutting
taxes for small businesses that are creating jobs and investing in
their companies; continuing critical investments in clean energy
manufacturing for the future; passing a farm bill for 16 million
Americans whose jobs rely on agriculture and our rural economy; and we
should focus on helping our veterans coming home from the war find
good-paying jobs, thanking them for their service.
We have a lot to do. Instead, we are in the same old failed debate
that got us in the hole, that got us to the situation where there was a
crisis on Wall Street, that got us to the point where we lost millions
and millions of jobs in the past. Are we going to go backward or
forward? That is the question.
Right now, what are the differences when we look at the four
different Republican plans? They are very similar. Here are three basic
things that are the same. They all end Medicare as an insurance plan
and increase costs by thousands of dollars for seniors in our country,
which puts them back in a plan that is before 1964, where seniors would
have to try to find private insurance. Of course, as we get older, we
all spend more health care dollars; we need more health care, so costs
will be higher. It is tougher for older people to find affordable
insurance. That is why we created Medicare in 1965. They want to go
back prior to that time.
Second, they allow student loan rates to double. All the plans would
double the cost of that. I don't know about anybody else, but in
Michigan, where we are transforming the economy and going to advanced
manufacturing and new technology, we have folks in their forties and
fifties going back to school, and we have young people going to
college. They are not asking for more expense. The average student debt
in Michigan is about $25,000. They are not asking to add to that
anymore. All four of these proposals would do that--double the student
loan interest rate.
By the way, these are loans where people are taking out the money,
and they are responsible and they are paying it back. But they are
asking for help to make sure they can afford to be able to have those
loans, so they can dream big dreams and go to college and be
successful. I thought that is what our country was all about. When I
was growing up in the little town of Clare--my dad was sick when I was
in high school--if I hadn't had help with tuition and fees and
scholarship and loans, I would not have been able to go to college. The
great thing about our country is that a red-headed, freckled-face girl
in Clare, who folks didn't know--folks somewhere decided that maybe I
ought to have a chance to go to college. Because of that, I have had
tremendous opportunities in my life. We have a lot of young men and
women working hard every day who deserve the same opportunity. People
who lost a job and are going back to get training deserve the same
opportunity.
All four of these plans end Medicare as an insurance plan, increase
by thousands of dollars costs to seniors, double student loan rates,
and all of it is to make sure that we give more tax breaks to
millionaires and billionaires. I know at least one or more of these
plans adds $150,000, I believe, in average tax cuts. That is more than
the average person in Michigan makes in a year--or the average person
in America. We are saying to seniors, families, and students that we
want you to pay more so we can give another tax cut to the folks who
have already gotten the majority of the benefits in the last 10 years
economically.
Let me stress one more time before ending, I think this goes to the
values represented in these budgets. Do we want to say that retirees
and older people in our country have the opportunity to live long
lives? Social Security and Medicare are great American success stories.
They literally brought a generation out of poverty to live in dignity,
like my mom, who is almost 86, to a place where she is healthy and can
play with her grandkids because she had the opportunity to be in a
system called Medicare, and will be able to live longer. Those are good
things, good values, not bad values.
All four of these budgets--the Paul budget would end Medicare in
2014; the Lee budget would end it in 2017; the Ryan budget in 2023; and
the Toomey budget in 2023. I cannot imagine that Americans want to go
back to that system where seniors cannot count on the ability to have
their doctor and get their medicine and have the dignity of a long and
healthy life.
Madam President, I urge our colleagues to vote no on every one of
these resolutions which go backwards, and support our efforts to keep
America going forward and focus on those things that will make our
economic recovery even faster.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, we need to lay out a plan for the
future of this country. That is what this is all about. My colleague
just said vote no on all of them and keep going, don't go back. What I
hear being said--and there is no ambiguity about it--is let's keep on
the path we are on. This is good enough. Here is the letter: Let's be
happy. We are in Washington, and we are having fun, I caught a fish and
we had a party, send more money.
Isn't that what it is all about, isn't this what we are hearing from
the other side? Send more money. We will take care of things for you.
We don't have to cut anything. We are not on an unsustainable path.
Actually, we cut spending over the next 10 years from $47 billion to
$45 billion. Aren't we great. That is a huge increase over the current
level of spending; it increases spending every year under the Budget
Control Act--not nearly enough to change the debt course of the
country. But that is OK.
By the way, do you know what President Obama's budget does? It wipes
out the sequester. Before the ink is even dry on the Budget Control
Act, the agreement at the eleventh hour to reduce spending over the
next decade by $2 trillion, President Obama submits a budget in
February proposing to wipe out the sequester--all $1.1 trillion of it.
What kind of commitment do we have to control spending? Send more
money; that is the solution. Tax, spend, tax, spend. I wish it weren't
so. I wish I could say differently.
Well, let me ask this question: Do my colleagues not feel a
responsibility to tell the American people what their financial plan
for the future of America is? Do they have no responsibility? Do they
feel no sense of obligation, no duty? All they want to do is attack
anybody else's plan who is trying to save this Republic from financial
disaster--attack them because they might want to reduce spending
somewhere, and somebody might not like it because they didn't get quite
as much from the government as they got before. Are there no programs
that we are prepared to reduce or eliminate that are wasteful and not
worthwhile? Is there nothing in this government? Maybe we stop GSA from
having hot tubs in Las Vegas; maybe we ought to at least do that. How
about the TSA, which has warehouses with millions of dollars of
equipment in them that is not even being used? What about the $500
million Solyndra loan and other bogus loans to political cronies? And
evidence is coming out that there is more of that. Can't we cut that?
Or will they say that is anti-energy?

What they need to do is get off the backs of the energy producers and
allow more energy to be produced. It doesn't take taxpayer money to
produce more energy and have decent regulations. Do you know what they
do? They send checks to Uncle Sam. They pay royalties on offshore and
Federal lands. They pay taxes on the money they make. The people who
work at the oil companies pay taxes.

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That is the way you get money, not by just taxing somebody.
I think the American people fundamentally understand that a tax on
the rich is a tax on the private sector, and when you overtax the
private sector, you get less of it. It is the private sector that
creates the wealth that pays the taxes that allows us to distribute
money here and go back to our districts and act as though we are some
hero for returning people their money that we took from them, and we
want to be some specially credited person because we brought back some
bacon to our district. The American people understand this. They are
not happy about this.
The Budget Control Act is not close to what we need to do to put our
country on a sound path. It is not close. I have to say that the
President's budget undoes half of that. When I said the Budget Control
Act took spending down from $47 trillion to $45 trillion, President
Obama's budget that was submitted a few weeks ago would add $1.6
trillion back, so that would make it go from $45 trillion to $46
trillion in spending over 10 years.
This is the way they propose to operate this government. That is what
their plan is. Why won't they lay it out? Because they know the
American people will look at it and say: Good grief, that is not what
we want for this country. You guys have to get your house in order. We
expect you to cut some spending. We know there is waste, fraud, and
abuse in the capital. You better get busy.
All we hear from my Democratic colleagues is: Send more money. What
is particularly troubling is the suggestion that it is OK, we don't
have to make any changes. But we do. We do have to make changes.
Let me show you this chart. The changes will be difficult, but not so
bad as to have the country be damaged in any significant way. This is
where our spending level is today, $3.6 trillion. This is the next
decade under the Budget Control Act, where we cut spending. In that
late-night confrontation before the government was to shut down because
we reached the spending limit and could not borrow anymore money, an
agreement was reached to take $2 trillion out of spending over 10
years. That is what this chart is--after that cut had been put in
place. President Obama wants to wipe out half of it. So it would add $8
trillion in new spending. If you cut that to $6 trillion or $5
trillion, we would balance the budget. You would still show an
increase; it would just maybe be a $4 trillion or a $5 trillion
increase in spending instead of $8 trillion. We could make a big
difference there.
The path we are on is unsustainable. The path we are on leaves us in
the danger zone. The path we are on has led us to have more debt than
Europe and more per capita than any country in Europe, and it is
unsustainable. I am worried about this.
I am particularly worried that we don't have a sense in this body
that we have to make changes. We are going to have to look at the
entitlement programs. I have heard Senator Conrad say this repeatedly.
He served on the debt commission, and they said we have to do that.
Does the President propose any entitlement changes in his budget? No.
Are the Democratic Members of the Senate proposing entitlement changes?
No. Who is? Congressman Ryan has proposed entitlement changes. He is
prepared to defend them as being the kind of changes that will
preserve, protect, and sustain Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
We cannot allow entitlement spending to continue to increase at rates
four and five times the inflation rate. That is an unsustainable
spending course. When 60 percent of our budget is increasing at three
or four times the inflation rate, we are in big trouble, and we can't
tax our way out of that. That is just a fact. Upper income people are
going to have to contribute more to Medicare. They just are. We don't
have the money. We can't just make it up and act like that is not
reality. It is reality.
So I think the budgets we will see from this side will be attacked
viciously as wanting to kill these programs. They are not designed to
kill these programs. They are designed to put us on a financial path
where we can be healthy and prosperous and sustain the benefits we have
promised. But a big chunk of Medicare is paid for out of the General
Treasury of the United States, and people with big incomes ought to
contribute to some of that, and they can do that. We can do that as a
nation.
So, Madam President, I think it is rather odd that we have come to
the floor and called up--without debate, without opportunity to amend--
a series of budgets. Why? Because no budget has been produced in the
Budget Committee, and under the rules of the Senate members can bring
up a budget. We don't get to have amendments, but we can bring up one.
Under the Budget Act, the Budget Committee should have hearings, have a
markup, offer amendments, and bring the budget to the floor with a
guaranteed 50 hours of debate, unlimited amendments, and then final
passage within a certain time. That is the way it works. It guarantees
priority to a budget because the people who wrote the Budget Act in
1974 knew how important a budget was. They gave it priority. It can't
be filibustered. It can pass with 50 votes, with the Vice President--51
votes otherwise can pass the budget--because we need a budget, and we
should be seeking to do that.
To me, it is pretty frustrating to see our current situation. So I
guess I will conclude by asking: Does the majority party not feel an
obligation to tell the American people where they would like to lead
the country; and do they not, in a time of financial crisis, want to
lay out a plan they can rally behind and ask the American people to
rally behind to save our country?
It is an absolute fact this country has never, ever, ever, been in a
financial condition as severe as this one. We have never, ever faced
the long-term systemic debt threat we face today. We have never been on
a path so unsustainable. Never. Nothing close to it. This is a threat
to the future of America, and the party that aspires to lead the Senate
should lay out its plan. The President should be engaged. He should be
insisting we pass a budget that has some meaning and would change the
debt course of the country. Yet what do we have? Nothing but attacks on
Members of Congress who lay out plans that would actually do that.
They do not want to bring up a budget. Why? They say it is foolish.
It would be foolish for us. Yes, it would be foolish to reveal
ourselves. The American people might add up how many taxes we want to
increase. They might add everything up and say: Your plan doesn't
change the debt course. They may add things up and say: You spend too
much. So we don't want to do that. That would be foolish.
I have never seen a situation where, in a time of crisis, this Nation
has had a failure of leadership as great as we are seeing today. Now
maybe I don't get this. Maybe something is wrong with me. But I think
everyone who cares about the Republic should be prepared to stand and
vote on proposals to put us on the right path.
We are not on the right path today. We have a threat out there that
could put us in a financial crisis overnight. It could happen very
quickly. When that occurs, it will be too late to fix it.
We saw the warnings that led to the 2007 financial crisis. That was a
deeply damaging event--that crisis. We haven't gotten over it yet, and
we could have another one. Wouldn't that be terrible? These numbers
don't assume we have a recession. They have no real recession projected
in the numbers we will see. We need to avoid a debt crisis, another
financial crisis, as Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, on the debt
commission, told us to avoid. We need to do that, and we are going to
have some leadership on both sides of the aisle, I believe.
So, Madam President, I will reserve the remainder of my time, and I
yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from South Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, Senator Menendez is here to be
recognized for 10 minutes, and we can do that at this point.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Madam President, last year the Budget Control Act
became the law of the land, and it set discretionary spending limits
for security and nonsecurity spending for not just 1 year but for 2
years. It puts us on a

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path to reducing the deficit by more than $2 trillion over the next 10
years.
We now hear claims from our friends on the other side of the aisle
that we don't have a budget. I guess if one says say it often enough
people may believe it. But it seems our Republican colleagues have
selective amnesia about the Budget Control Act.
We have a budget. It is called the Budget Control Act, and it has the
force of law, which is more than we can say for any of the proposals
before us today. So today's debate makes me wonder if we are on a dance
floor instead of the Senate floor because we have already taken one
step forward and now it is two steps back.
These Republican proposals call for extreme cuts on the backs of
seniors, students, and the most vulnerable in our society without
asking any contributions from millionaires and corporations. That is
not fair, it is not balanced, and it doesn't reflect the priorities of
New Jersey's middle-class families.

I strongly believe we must get our Nation's fiscal house in order,
and I have always supported a fair and balanced approach to reducing
our deficits. But I cannot, in good conscience, support proposals in
which working families, seniors, and students must endure billions in
cuts while oil companies--making $1 trillion in profits over the next
decade--and billionaires are not asked to pay their fair share.
Supporters of the House Republican budget, introduced by Congressman
Ryan, justify their radical changes to Medicare and other programs by
saying: We simply can't afford it. But in the very same Republican
budget in which we can't afford that, we see an average tax cut of over
$\1/4\ million to millionaires, and that is on top of the six-figure
tax break they are already currently receiving from the Bush tax cuts.
At the same time Republicans propose to add thousands of dollars of
increased costs on the backs of middle-class seniors, they somehow find
the money for another tax cut for millionaires that is worth more than
four times the entire average household income of an American family.
People who have worked hard to build personal wealth should be
applauded for their success. At the same time, many of them are willing
to contribute to help the Nation in this tough economic time, if we
ask. We know from experience that asking a fair share from the
wealthiest and most successful, as we did during the Clinton era of
prosperity, will not break our economy. It just comes down to a matter
of fairness.
What we are seeing today is our friends on the other side of the
aisle taking yet another run at shifting our Nation's financial burdens
onto middle-class families, seniors and students, all while defending
special breaks for their special interests. How is that fair? How is
that balanced? It is not. And we can't let it stand.
Let's talk about the facts. Republicans are not only seeking to
repeal the affordable care act, but they are also dismantling Medicare,
Medicaid, and other vital programs. Under the Ryan budget, New Jersey's
health care system would be devastated. The Republican plan would cut
$39 billion in health benefits from New Jerseyans over the next decade,
leaving families unable to find care and doctors unable to provide it.
Their plan will throw upwards of 465,000 low-income families and
seniors off Medicaid, kick more than 70,000 young adults off their
parents' health insurance, and leave more than 3 million New
Jerseyans--including 877,000 children--worrying about whether they will
hit their lifetime benefit limit and lose coverage as a result.
For seniors, the Republican plan ends Medicare as we know it, leaving
retirees to worry about whether the system they paid into their entire
working lives will really be there for them when they need it. Their
plan would force seniors out of the Medicare they know and instead
provide an inadequate voucher they claim will cover the premiums for
private insurance. That claim, however, is false, leaving seniors with
an increase in out-of-pocket expenses of over $6,000 a year.
It also means immediately higher costs for the more than 126,000
seniors in New Jersey who have saved a combined $95 million on
prescription drugs because every one of these Republican budgets will
reopen the gap in prescription drug coverage we call the doughnut hole.
The Republican budget also means 1 million seniors in New Jersey who
have already accessed no-cost preventive health services, such as
cancer screenings, would now be forced to pay for those screenings out
of pocket. It also means 270,000 seniors and disabled individuals in my
home State who rely on Medicaid for services such as long-term care
will be kicked out of the system.
The most shocking about all of this is the radical Ryan budget seems
to be the least extreme of the Republican budgets. For example, Senator
Paul's proposal calls for Medicare to end abruptly on January 1, 2014,
while simultaneously decreasing Social Security benefits and raising
the eligibility age to 70. Senator Toomey's plan would force seniors
off Medicare and only provide a modest voucher to purchase private
coverage. It would slash Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion--$180 billion
more than even the Ryan budget calls for--and shift a massive and
untenable burden on the States while leaving millions of families
without coverage.
How is that fair and balanced? It is not, and we should reject these
proposals.
Here is another fact about the Ryan House budget. Instead of making
college more affordable, more accessible, and more achievable, the Ryan
budget will do the exact opposite. It will create additional obstacles
for students that could--according to a study by the Education Trust--
ultimately take Pell grants away from 1 million students. For those who
aren't kicked out of the system entirely, it will freeze the maximum
Pell Grant award, despite tuition costs rising far above the rate of
inflation. To add insult to injury, the Ryan budget would allow the
interest rate on subsidized Stafford loans to double--a debate that is
all too familiar to this body.
My Republican colleagues claim to support lower rates, but then they
filibustered them, and now they are proposing a budget that would allow
the interest rates to double. So for more than 60 percent of students
who receive Pell grants while also taking out loans, the Ryan budget is
a double whammy. Not only will they lose some or all of their Pell
grants, they will be forced to pay double the interest on their loans,
which will only increase with a reduction in Pell grants.
Today receiving some form of higher education is almost a
prerequisite for a 21st-century career. In fact, young adults with only
a high school diploma are almost three times as likely to be unemployed
and earn just over half as much as those with a bachelor's degree.
But even as the demand for college graduates in the workforce
increases, so have the costs of tuition, making higher education all
the more critical, as well as for the Nation to be the global leader
competitively. Yet it is more out of reach for millions of students if
we follow these plans. How is that fair? How is that balanced? It is
not, and it just shows the misguided priorities that are behind these
proposals.
Middle-class families can't afford it. Seniors can't afford it.
Students can't afford it. That is why we can't afford to let it happen.
Madam President, I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, just to respond to my friend, the
ranking member of the committee--and I have a lot of respect for the
ranking member. The truth is on the larger issue we are not all that
far apart. The larger issue is, as a nation, we are on an unsustainable
course. This is as clear as it can be, and we have to deal with it. We
have a difference with respect to what we have right now. I believe we
do have a budget in place for this year and next year. The place where
I would agree with the gentleman is we don't have the longer term plan.
The problem is, Are we really going to get all sides to get off their
fixed positions right before a national election? That is a matter of
judgment. I don't believe that it is going to happen.
I was part of the Simpson-Bowles Commission. In fact, Senator Gregg
and I were the ones who got the Commission appointed, and he and I were
2 of the 11--five Democrats, five Republicans, one Independent--who
voted in favor of the long-term plan that Bowles-Simpson put before the
American people that would have reduced

[[Page S3193]]

the debt from what it would otherwise be by more than $4 trillion.
Depending on what baseline you use, even more than that. That is the
minimum we need to do.
I actually tried to convince the Commission to do $5.6 trillion. That
was my proposal to the Commission, a $5.6 trillion package of deficit
reduction and debt reduction. Why did I pick that? We could balance the
budget in 10 years if we did.
But I do want to go back to this question about whether we have a
budget right now, for this year. I say, with respect, I believe it is
very clear we do. The Budget Control Act--not a budget resolution but a
law--said very clearly the allocations, aggregates, and levels of
spending shall apply in the Senate in the same manner as for a
concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2012. That
identical language follows for 2013.
So pursuant to the Budget Control Act, in April I provided to the
appropriators and the authorizers these budget allocations for
appropriations: For security discretionary budget authority for 2013,
$546 billion; for nonsecurity discretionary budget authority, $501
billion. That is a total, onbudget, of $1,040,000,000,954; mandatory
spending, $815 billion, $671 billion, for a total of
$1,862,671,000,000.
Then to the authorizing committees, I went through some of these
numbers previously. The Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, $13,397
million; on entitlements for that same committee, $124,580 million; on
Armed Services, $146,698 million; on Banking, Housing, and Urban
Affairs, $22,167 million.
Again, I could go through every committee, but there it is. The
appropriations spending limits have been provided to the appropriators.
The authorizing committees have been given their designations. So for
this year and next, it is clear we have spending limits put in place.
What we don't have is the longer term plan. That is where I would agree
with the gentleman. The question is, Is there any prospect of the two
sides coming together, getting off their fixed positions right now? I
doubt that very much.
Madam President, Senator Paul is here and he has this time.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Madam President, we are currently borrowing $50,000 a
second. We borrow $4 billion a day, and we are borrowing over $1
trillion every year.
The situation has gotten out of control, and I think the situation of
our deficit and our country threatens our country. In fact, I think it
is the No. 1 threat to our national security, and our security as a
nation is this overwhelming burden of debt.
Many economists have said this burden of debt is actually causing us
to lose 1 million jobs a year. It crowds out private investment because
we have to take care of financing this enormous debt.
Amidst all of this, we have rules in place. There is a Budget Act
that we have had in place since the 1970s that requires that this body
put forward a budget. The problem is we have no budget and have had no
budget for 3 years.
Now, one would say: How can this be when we have a law that says the
majority party has to have a budget, and yet we have no budget? They
are in defiance of the law. Then if you were to come to us and say you
want money spent on X item, we can't even do anything about it because
there are no appropriations bills. If we don't have a budget, we don't
have appropriations bills, and we can't alter up or down the
appropriations bills because we don't have a budget to go by.
In fact, every bit of spending we do here is in defiance of our own
rules because we are supposed to compare the spending bills to the
budget, and we have no budget.
Many of us have been promoting something new--this would be a
balanced budget amendment to the Constitution--because we don't seem to
be doing a very good job balancing the budget. When you have less money
coming in, you spend less money. Every American family has to do this.
Why can't Washington simply spend what comes in? It shouldn't be that
complicated. But they aren't obeying their own rules, so I think we
need stronger rules. That would be an amendment to the Constitution
that says we must balance the budget.
We had a vote on it. Forty-seven of us on our side of the aisle voted
for it, and no one on the other side voted for it. Our balanced budget
amendment to the Constitution would require that the budget balance
within 5 years. In that vein, our office has put together a budget that
does balance in 5 years, and it actually, over a 10-year period, would
reduce the deficit by $2 trillion. Ours is the only budget that will
balance in 5 years and begin paying down the debt over 10 years.
Right now, Congress has an approval rating of 11 percent. Maybe that
has something to do with the fact that we aren't doing our job. We
aren't passing a budget, much less a balanced budget amendment. If
people vote for our budget, we would balance in 5 years and begin
paying down the debt. I think the stock market would be ecstatic to
hear this.
How do you do this? In order to balance the budget, we have to tackle
entitlement reform. Currently, Social Security is $6.2 trillion short
of money. The taxes people pay into Social Security are less than what
we pay out. Social Security is essentially insolvent.
You ask: Well, how come my check keeps coming?
Your check will always keep coming. As the bankruptcy grows deeper
and deeper, your checks will come--they won't buy anything. You are
already seeing this at the pump. Gasoline prices have doubled. Is it
because gas is more precious? No. It is because the value of the dollar
is shrinking. The value of the dollar is shrinking because we print all
this new money to pay for this massive debt. It is unsustainable, and
one way or another it is going to come to a head.
Will it come to a head through the destruction of our currency paying
for this debt? I don't know, but we certainly need a budget. Ours will
be a budget that balances in 5 years. People say: Why don't you
compromise with the other side?
We will, but they have to have a budget. If ours balances in 5 years
and the other side will promote one that balances in 10, compromise
would be 7\1/2\. But if the other side doesn't have a budget or if the
other side has a budget--the President put forward a budget, and we
will vote on that too. His never balances. So we have infinity for
their side, and we have 5 years on our side. How do we get halfway from
infinity to 5 years?
If we are going to compromise, they have to come to the table. We
have to engage in a debate. Entitlements are 65 percent of the budget.
They call it mandatory spending, and nobody wants to do anything about
it. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid is 65 percent of the budget. If
we don't tackle entitlement reform, we can't fix it. We have a proposal
on the table.
Social Security reform, we fix Social Security. The way we fix it is
we gradually let the age of eligibility rise to 70 over about 20 years,
and we means-test the benefits--not on the current people but on the
next wave. My generation will have to wait longer. Why? Is it because
we want to change things? No. It is because we are living longer. We
all have a longer life expectancy, and then we had smaller families.
This isn't anybody's fault. It is not the Democrats' fault and it is
not the Republicans' fault. We just had a bunch of large families born
after World War II. They are all retiring, and each subsequent
generation had less children. It is a demographic fact. Combine that
with the fact that we are living longer, and we have to make changes.
But we have a proposal on the table. We will fix Social Security. How
do we compromise if the other side will not come up with a proposal?
Social Security is $6 trillion in the hole. Medicare is $35 to $40
trillion in the hole. We have a solution. We will give every senior
citizen in the country the same health care plan I have. The same
health care plan that every Senator and Congressman has, we are willing
to give it to them. Do you know whose idea this was? Senator John Kerry
from Massachusetts, a Democrat. We have taken his idea and put it
forward, but we can't get anybody on that side to talk to us. They have
given up. It is an election year. They are not going to do anything
this year. They didn't do anything last year.
So we haven't done anything to fix entitlements. We have done nothing
to

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fix Social Security, nothing to fix Medicare. How do you compromise
with a side that has no proposition, that won't put anything forward?
But we have a 5-year plan that balances in 5 years, and we fix Social
Security. We save Social Security in perpetuity--which, I laughingly
say, is a long time.
We also fix Medicare. We save Medicare. Medicare is facing a $35 to
$40 trillion deficit, and we are willing to save it. But the other side
has to come to the table, and nobody is showing up to debate these
issues. No one is proposing any budget on the other side. No one is
proposing any entitlement reform.
In our budget we save Social Security, we save Medicare, and we go
one step further. We have tax reform that would help the country and
would make it fair.
Some on the other side say, well, let's get rid of all those
loopholes for special interests. We do it. We do a flat tax: 17 percent
for all businesses, 17 percent for all personal. You get to deduct your
kids and your house, and that is it. No other deductions. No other
special interest exemptions. No other special credits for any special
business or special enterprise. A flat 17 percent for everybody. We
would see a boom in this country like we have never seen if we would do
it.
What would compromise be? Maybe the other side wants 25 percent, and
I want 17 percent, and we go in the middle and we do 22 percent. That
would be compromise. But how do we compromise with the other side when
there is no budget? There is no entitlement reform proposed from the
other side. There is no tax reform proposed from the other side. How do
we compromise if there is no other side?
If the other side has decided not to show up this year--if this year
is going to be a waste of time and everybody is going to just run for
office, maybe we shouldn't be paid this year. Maybe you shouldn't pay
your Congressman, maybe you shouldn't pay your Senator this year if we
are not going to have proposals from both sides.
This means we should be talking about entitlement reform, talking
about tax reform, talking about budgets, and there would be give-and-
take.
The only way to get give-and-take in our country is people need to
show up for the debate. We need to do our job. Why is there not a
committee in Washington, not any committee--why is there not any
committee meeting every day on how to fix Social Security? Nobody is
talking about it. Why is there no committee discussing Medicare reform
meeting every day, Republicans and Democrats, talking, figuring out a
way out of this? There is no such committee.
Why is there not a committee on tax reform, discussing how we could
make our Tax Code simpler and make it easier for people to figure out
and make the rates lower so we could spur the economy? Every time we
have lowered tax rates, unemployment is cut in half. When we had an
upper rate of 90 percent and Kennedy lowered it to 70 percent,
unemployment was cut in half. When Reagan lowered the top rate from 70
percent to 50 percent, unemployment was cut in half. When Reagan
lowered it again from 50 to 28, unemployment was cut in half.
But we as a country have to decide that we do not want to punish rich
people, that we do not want to go out and punish corporations. We work
for these people. We want them to do better. The oil and gas industry
employs 9.2 million people and pays $86 million a day in taxes. We want
them to do better. Let's not punish them with more taxes and
regulations. Let's make their taxes lower and their regulatory burden
lower so they can drill for more oil in our country and employ more
people in our country. These are the decisions we have to make as we go
forward.
We have a budget that can balance in 5 years. It is what our country
needs. I think people would react, and the marketplace in particular
would react in a tremendous fashion if we would move forward and vote
for a budget.
The Republicans will have four or five budgets presented. Some of
them balance in 5, some of them balance in 8, some of them balance in
28. But we are at least trying. We are showing up and we are presenting
budgets that would balance at some finite period of time. I tell people
if it is never going to balance, it should not even be presented. If it
is not going to balance in your lifetime--if you say it is going to
balance in somebody else's lifetime when somebody else is going to be
here in Congress--you have abdicated your responsibility. We can do
better than this. The American people expect us to do better than this.
The American people expect us to show up and do our job.
We will today vote on these budgets. What I ask of the American
people is: Look and see how your Representatives vote. Look and see how
your Senators vote. Look and see whether your Senators believe in
balancing the budget or if they think it doesn't matter; we will just
print up more money.
But realize if their answer is to print up more money, if their
answer is deficits do not matter, if that is their answer, I want you
to get mad and I want you to get angry and I want you to get even.
Every time you go to the gas pump and pay $4 for gas I want you to know
why gas prices are rising. Not because gas is more precious but because
your dollar is less valuable, and that is because of the massive debt
we run and the irresponsibility up here that nobody is willing to
tackle it.
There are some on our side willing to make the tough decisions. Is it
easy to stand here and say to the people in Kentucky and the people in
America that the only way to save Social Security is letting the age of
eligibility rise? Do you think that is popular? Do you think I am
saying that to pander and try to get votes? I am saying that is because
it is the only thing that is going to save Social Security, the only
thing that will save our country, is we have to make difficult
decisions. I think that is what needs to happen.
People need to say: Are you willing to make the tough decisions? Are
you willing to stand up and say this is how we would fix Social
Security; this is how we would save the system; this is how we would
correct this deficit that is dragging us all down?
One side is willing to do that. I am willing to do that and I hope my
fellow Senators will today consider voting to balance the budget.
I yield my time.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, we are waiting for a number of Senators
who have sought time. They will be coming to the floor and we will hear
from them momentarily.
Let me say Senator Paul is sincere. One place I agree with him is
that the country has to face up to our deficit and debt situation. As I
indicated earlier, I was part of the Simpson-Bowles commission. We
agreed to, and voted on, significant reforms, spending cuts, but we
also used some additional revenue to have a balanced plan.
I believe that has to be the test for any of the proposals that are
made here. As I see the proposals coming from our Republican colleague,
they flunk that test because they are not balanced. There is nothing on
the revenue side. In fact, in all of their plans, there are deep
additional tax cuts aimed at the wealthiest among us. None of the
Republican plans have less than a $150,000 tax cut, on average, for
people with earnings of over $1 million a year.
Senator Paul's plan is truly radical. He didn't mention a lot of the
elements, but his plan includes massive tax cuts for the wealthiest
among us. He scraps the entire tax system and goes to a 17-percent flat
tax. That is a massive tax cut for those of us who have higher income--
massive tax cut. I can tell you it would be a massive tax cut for my
family.
He also cuts discretionary spending, education, and energy, by huge
amounts. I will go into that in a bit. He cuts health care by almost $4
trillion.
He replaces the current progressive system with a 17-percent flat
tax. He eliminates the estate tax--eliminates it. He eliminates taxes
on capital gains and dividends--eliminates them. My goodness, think
about what that would mean. People such as Warren Buffett would pay
almost nothing in taxes. The richest people among us would pay almost
nothing in taxes, because he eliminates taxes on capital gains and
dividends.

But he is not so generous when it comes to lower income people. He
raises taxes on lower income people by ending the earned-income tax
credit and the child tax credit. He eliminates it.

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Perhaps most stunning, his answer to saving Social Security is to cut
the benefits 39 percent. The plan does not include a dime of revenue
for Social Security. That is what Senator Paul has before this body.
Really? Is that what we should do? Massive tax cuts for the wealthiest
among us and make up for it by cutting Social Security benefits 39
percent. That is the Paul plan. He increases the retirement age three
times faster than the Fiscal Commission plan and he shifts to something
he calls ``progressive indexing'' for those earning above $33,000,
which cuts their benefits even deeper over time.
I respect his desire to do something about deficits and debt, but the
answer is not massive tax cuts. Eliminate the estate tax? Eliminate
capital gains taxation? No taxes--wow. Warren Buffett should send him a
thank-you letter. And cut Social Security 39 percent?
I can go into the other details. He cuts energy dramatically. He cuts
education. What is his education cut? I think we have it there. We will
go into the specifics of the massive cuts so we can have more tax cuts
for the wealthiest among us, trillions of dollars, and then cut Social
Security 39 percent. That is breathtaking. We will see how many
colleagues are going to stand up and support that in a vote later
today.
Senator Durbin is here. I thank him very much for his involvement. He
has not only served on the Simpson-Bowles commission but also served on
the group of six and has spent literally hundreds of hours trying to
find a way on a bipartisan basis working together to come up with a
plan that is balanced and fair, to get us back on the track and save
trillions of dollars on the debt. I applaud him for it. He has shown
enormous courage and also extraordinary energy trying to get our
country back on track.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Illinois.
Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I thank Senator Conrad. Let me say the
retirement of Senator Conrad from North Dakota is a great loss to the
Senate and to the Nation. We have only six or seven months left to do
something significant. It will be easier to do it when Kent Conrad is
working with us. I hope we can achieve it.
I also want to say for those who have come to the floor over and over
to say it is time for a budget resolution, it bears repeating that we
passed the Budget Control Act, which is a law. A resolution is just
that, a resolution passed by the House and Senate, recommending our
spending levels. A budget law passed by Congress, signed by the
President, has the force of law and it in fact is going to determine
our spending levels for the next year. The people who come to the floor
and say isn't it about time we had a budget resolution so we knew what
we were going to spend next year--we do. We passed it on a bipartisan
basis. In fact, the Republican Senate leader voted for it, so it was
not as though it wasn't a bipartisan effort, it was all the way, and
the President signed it and it guides our spending.
Let me speak for a moment about those ``thrilling days of
yesteryear,'' as they used to say on the old radio serial, going back
to 2001, if you can stick with me for a minute. That was the last time
the United States of America had a balanced budget. Who was President
at the time? It was President Clinton, who left that budget for
President Bush. That represented, I think, two or three successive
years of balanced budgets.
I said to my staff: Take a look at the last time our budget was in
balance, take a look at today, and compare spending and revenue between
those two periods of time. I think the Senator from North Dakota told
me once something like 19.6 percent of GDP in that year of balance was
being spent, 19.6 percent was being raised in revenue, and there was
the balance.
Now we have drifted to the point where I think spending is around 24
percent, is that close? And the actual revenue is down to 14 percent.
The 10-percent delta equals the deficit.
But in specifics, what has happened in that period of time? Thanks to
Senator Inouye, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, here is a
chart which tells the story. The blue line, of course, this bar,
represents the spending and revenue in fiscal year 2001, the last time
we had a balanced budget, and the red bar represents fiscal year 2012.
I asked them to compare it and here is what we found. The security in
there represents, of course, military spending, primarily military
spending. In the period of time we were last in balance until today we
have seen roughly a 60-percent increase in military spending--
understandable, two wars, all the buildup that has been part of it--OK?
A 60-percent increase.
Now let's take a look at nondefense spending. That would be
everything from medical research, building highways or helping to build
highways, education, basic health care. What has happened in real
dollars since we were last in balance in that nonsecurity discretionary
spending? Flat. Zero increase. But if you listen to the debate over the
last 2 years here, you would think it was all the increase--all the
increase we have seen in our deficit is attributable to these
nonsecurity programs. Those are the ones we have been cutting away at.
I think they represent 12 percent of the budget. We keep cutting away
all these nondefense programs but they have not added to our deficit
since we last were in balance.
Now look at mandatory programs. Mandatory programs, obviously
Medicare and programs such as that, have seen an increase of about 30
percent because yesterday 10,000 Americans reached the age of 65, today
10,00 more, and tomorrow 10,000 more, and for the next 18 years 10,000
a day. Boomers have arrived. After paying into Social Security and
Medicare for a lifetime they walk up to the window and say now it is my
turn. It is understandable.
The demographics are growing for those who are covered by these
mandatory programs, and the costs have been growing right along with
them--a 30-percent increase.
Take a look at revenues, compared with when we were last in balance.
Revenues have gone down 13 percent. Senator Conrad and I were on the
Bowles-Simpson commission and 18 of us sat there for a year-plus and
listened to all this testimony about everything. Here is where we came
down. He and I both voted for it. We believe the premise of the
Simpson-Bowles commission is the right premise--everything must be on
the table. Everything.
What do you mean by everything? Spending cuts must be on the table,
both on the defense side and the nondefense side. In addition, we have
to put the entitlement programs on the table. My friends, we cannot
ignore this conversation. We are 11 or 12 years away from Medicare
going bankrupt. We have to have a serious conversation about this, and
we have to look seriously at the question of revenue.

We cannot ignore the fact that we have seen a decline in the revenue
coming into the Federal Government since we last had a budget
imbalance. We have to put all that on the table. I added another part
that fits right into the revenue conversation, the Tax Code. This is
not Holy Writ. The Tax Code is a compilation of laws passed over a long
period of time that takes about $1.2 trillion out of the Treasury every
year for deductions and credits and exclusions and special treatment.
They asked us at one of these meetings about the Tax Code: What do
you think is the most expensive provision in the Tax Code that takes
the most money out of the Treasury? I said, mortgage interest for sure.
Wrong. The most expensive is the employers' exclusion of health
insurance premiums. So imagine when we get into the debate about tax
reform and the first item up is the biggest item up, employers'
exclusion of health insurance premiums. Imagine that conversation. If
we say your employer can no longer take the full deduction, what does
it mean to you as an employee in terms of your out-of-pocket expense,
in terms of your health insurance coverage? So I am not going to
suggest tax reform is an easy exercise. It is hard, but it has to be
part of the conversation.
Here is where we come down: We are having an exercise today, which is
not worthless, it is important. It is an exercise in discussing the
budget. What Senator Conrad has spelled out are different visions of
things. What we find coming from the other side of the aisle is
primarily talk about more tax cuts--particularly for the higher income
people--in the belief that that is how you

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spark an economy and get it to go. I disagree with that premise. I
think the way to move this forward is for working families and middle-
income families to have more spending power. I don't believe we can
give more money to the richest people in America and expect the economy
to take off.
Also we find that many of the entitlement programs, which have now
become critical safety net programs, are victims of the budget
resolutions that come to the floor. I cannot imagine what life would be
like for 40 million Americans on Social Security with a 39-percent
cut--as Senator Paul suggested--in Social Security benefits. Too many
of these people are living on their Social Security checks and barely
getting by. A 39-percent cut is cruel and unrealistic. I don't think it
is going anywhere. And the notion from others that we can keep cutting
taxes from the highest income categories, let me say, we will never
balance the budget doing it. Never. If we don't balance the budget, we
could jeopardize our economic recovery.
We have a cliff we are going to face on December 31. It is a big
deal. I cannot remember a time when I have been in the House or Senate
when so many things are going to happen in one day. But on December 31,
all of the Bush tax cuts expire on the highest income levels as well as
the lower and middle-income levels. For example, I think the 10-percent
tax rate goes away, and the child tax credit is cut in half. All of
these things mean more taxes for every American paying into income tax.
Secondly, we are going to see the end of the payroll tax cut--the 2-
percent cut we have had for 2 years that the President put in place.
I could go through the litany. The bottom line is this: We need to
start that honest conversation about the deficit now, and we need to
put something on the table ready to be discussed. The group of eight--
there are four Democrats and four Republicans--has been meeting for a
long time. We are trying to put together a bill, something that could
actually become law. I don't think it is the last word, but it may be
the first word in the debate. If we cannot get anything done before the
election, let's hope that the day after the election we can put this on
the table and say: Here is our starting point. Let's solve the problem
on a bipartisan basis, put everything on the table, and do it in a
thoughtful, balanced way.
I think that is what the American people are looking for. They really
are. They are beyond the charades of: Oh, this won't touch me, let's
hit somebody else. I think everybody realizes we are in the soup
together. If we come out of this together, think about where we will be
as other Nations around the world are struggling to survive
economically. I could go through the list in Europe, but we know it
well. We don't want to put ourselves even close to that position.
The debt ceiling expires December 31, or soon thereafter. If we do
not renew the debt ceiling, America will have defaulted on its debt for
the first time in history. That is totally irresponsible. It is an
invitation for the downgrading of our credit rating and the upgrading
of the interest rates we pay and the upgrading of the deficit we owe. I
hope the statements made by the House Speaker in the last couple of
days don't reflect the position of his party when it comes to the debt
ceiling. That would be a totally irresponsible act in terms of our
economy.
I will join Senator Conrad today in voting against the budget
resolution that has come to the floor. But I will say this: I am glad
we are having this conversation. We need to have more of them, and we
need to have a bipartisan effort with both parties to make sure we deal
with the current spending in a responsible way. And equally important,
we need to find a way to get past the December 31 cliff in a way that
will build the economy and not take away from it.
I yield the floor.
Mr. CONRAD. I thank the Senator for his leadership and the
extraordinary effort he has made to get us back on track. I thank him
for supporting Simpson-Bowles and the group of six that is now the
group of eight. Senator Durbin has spent hundreds of hours in good-
faith negotiations to bring both sides together so we actually get a
result and not the political charade that so often goes on around here,
but serious solutions to serious problems.
Senator Wyden is a very valuable member of the Budget Committee and
is here on the floor. No Senator has proposed more serious solutions to
America's problems than Senator Wyden, and he has done it without the
benefit of having a committee staff that he controls. He does it based
on his own hard work and the work of his office staff. He has proposed
major tax reform, major health care reform, and he has done it in a
bipartisan way. In many ways, I think he has set an example for
everybody in this Chamber.
How much time does the Senator need?
Mr. WYDEN. Approximately 12 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Franken). The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, without turning this into a bouquet-tossing
contest, I want Senator Conrad to know how much I appreciate his
leadership. I also want to make sure people understand the record. If
the Congress had passed the bipartisan proposal the Senator put
together on the budget with Senator Judd Gregg, the Conrad-Gregg
proposal--a Democrat joined with a Republican--in 2010 we could have
forced an actual effort to put together a comprehensive tax reform and
spending agreement. As we know--and I don't need to go over the
history--some of the sponsors of the proposal were not even willing to
go along. But I think it is important that the country understand we
have to do this in a bipartisan way. If Senator Conrad and Senator Judd
Gregg had prevailed in 2010, we could have forced actual spending
reductions and tax reform in a bipartisan effort. I sure wish we had
proceeded with it. And as one who supported it, I still think that
would have been preferable.

For 7 years before being elected to the Congress, I had the honor of
serving senior citizens. I ran the Senior Citizens Legal Aid Office, I
served as the public advocate on our State's nursing home board, and I
taught gerontology at several of our universities.
What I enjoyed most was the personal contact I had with senior
citizens as a voluntary board member of our senior nutrition program.
It is known as Loaves and Fishes, and through it I could bring meals to
seniors at their homes on a number of occasions as part of the Meals on
Wheels Program. Meals on Wheels is one part of government that truly
understands the connection between the heart and the head. It touches
the heart because I saw when we bring a nutritious meal to seniors, we
can spend time visiting with them at home. Often they will tell us that
we are the only visitor they will have during that day. It causes us to
use our head and a sharp pencil. We can see without Meals on Wheels, as
sure as the night follows the day, some of those seniors are not going
to be able to stay in the community. They will end up needing
institutional services, and those services are more costly. And, of
course, seniors will often be less happy with those kinds of
institutional programs.
I bring up Meals on Wheels today because several of the proposals
that are offered by colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not
going to be bipartisan because they substantially cut the part of the
budget that funds Meals on Wheels. Through our research we specifically
found that in several instances it will be between 17 and 59 percent in
just the upcoming year.
Putting Meals on Wheels at risk like that defies common sense. I have
already indicated from a compassion standpoint alone it warrants
support. But even if Meals on Wheels doesn't grab your heart the way it
does for me, it certainly ought to get the attention of your head
because it is the kind of program that lets seniors have more of what
they want, which is to be at home at less price to the taxpayers. It
defies common sense to not be bipartisan in terms of approaching
something like Meals on Wheels.
I think what is common sense is what Chairman Conrad and other
colleagues have touched on, and that is tackling the big issues in a
bipartisan way. Certainly when it comes to Medicare, that is what is
needed. I would only say, having worked in this area, we ought to start
with the fact that we are looking at--I am not the first to describe
this--a demographic tsunami. For the next 20 years we are going to

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have 10,000 seniors turning 65 every single day--10,000 seniors turning
65 every single day.
Fortunately, we have made a commitment in this country to those
senior citizens, and it is called the Medicare guarantee. That is the
commitment we have made to older people. It is a commitment to good
quality, affordable health care. And if absolutely nothing is done, it
is a commitment at risk. If nothing is done, the Medicare guarantee is
in peril. My own sense is that if nothing is done, Medicare--as Senator
Conrad pointed out, it is already facing cuts with sequestration--will
face a steady diet of benefit cuts and cost shifting until we do not
recognize the Medicare guarantee as it stands today. That is
unacceptable to me. It ought to be unacceptable to every Member of the
Senate.
As Chairman Conrad has noted, Medicare reform is going to have to be
bipartisan. The reason I believe that is that if it is not, much like
we saw with health care reform, if it is done on a partisan vote, as
soon as the ink is dry on the signature of the passed bill, the other
side will move to undo it or repeal it or radically alter it. I say the
Medicare guarantee is too important for that, and that is why I, with
other colleagues on both sides of the aisle and the help of the
chairman, have been working to get bipartisan Medicare reform ready and
teed up for enactment at the first possible opportunity. It is outlined
on my Web site, Bipartisan Options for Reform. I am interested in
working with every colleague here in the Senate to pursue it.
Here is what it is going to take: First and foremost, it will protect
the most vulnerable seniors, what are called the dual eligibles, which
are seniors who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. The
protections for those dual eligibles must be ironclad.
Unfortunately, a number of the offerings we are going to see from
colleagues on the other side do not ensure ironclad protections for
these vulnerable seniors--the dual eligibles--and by block-granting
Medicaid, they put at risk the most vulnerable seniors, the seniors who
need nursing home care that is paid for by Medicaid, and since Medicaid
is a Federal-State program, by block-granting it, we put at risk the
most vulnerable seniors. That is certainly not in line with what people
will see on my Web site that outlines bipartisan approaches on which
Democrats and Republicans can come together for Medicare reform.
The second part of Medicare reform is to ensure that we protect
traditional Medicare. Traditional Medicare mandates that the government
pay doctors and other providers for services, as well as providing
private sector choices that have to offer coverage that is at least as
good as traditional Medicare. By doing that, we force traditional
Medicare and the private choices to hold each other accountable. It is
going to be pretty hard to protect traditional Medicare and its
purchasing power with some of what we are going to see later this
afternoon that actually proposes to end traditional Medicare within the
space of 2 years.
Third, Medicare reform--and we went into this in a very good hearing
that was held in Chairman Conrad's Budget Committee--is going to
require comprehensive consumer protection. I have been involved in this
since the days when I would go visit senior citizens and they would
bring out a shoe box full of health insurance policies that weren't
worth the paper on which they were written. It was a Medigap scandal
that we finally fixed in 1990. I have seen how these rip-off artists
try to exploit our seniors. So at Chairman Conrad's hearing we talked
about comprehensive consumer protections and specifically ensuring that
any Medicare reform would have to have a strong risk-adjustment program
so that if, for example, any network of health care providers or an
insurer took mostly healthy people, their contribution from the
government would be far less than the contribution that would be
afforded for a program that took a greater number of older people with
health challenges.
So I bring this up only by way of saying I am committed to bipartisan
Medicare reform. I think Medicare is really sacred ground. It can only
be preserved and protected by ensuring that we take the steps I have
just outlined--three or four of them this afternoon--which ensure that
we put seniors and their well-being before ideology and politics. This
afternoon we are going to hear several alternatives offered by
colleagues from the other side of the aisle that, in my view, don't do
that, don't meet that test. In effect, we are going to be dealing with
ideology rather than the kinds of principles I have outlined here today
that I think can win support from colleagues on both sides of the aisle
and that people can see on my own Web site have attracted the support
of influential Republican voices.
So we have a test to meet. It is a test that builds on a bipartisan
approach to a program that is sacred--I ask unanimous consent for 1
additional minute.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. WYDEN. --and that is built around a Medicare guarantee that must
be protected and preserved. A number of the proposals we will get from
the other side this afternoon don't meet that test.
I want colleagues to know that I am committed to working with them to
produce what America wants in this Congress; that is, bipartisan
Medicare reform that ensures that this very special program prospers in
the days ahead. We are up to it. We are up to it if we build on the
bipartisan example Senator Conrad started years ago with Senator Gregg.
With that, I yield the floor.
Mr. CONRAD. I thank the Senator. I thank him for the extraordinary
work he has done on the Budget Committee. I thank him for the
extraordinary work he has done as an individual Senator to propose
bipartisan tax reform, bipartisan Medicare reform, and the kinds of
thoughtful solutions we so desperately need.
I see Senator Lautenberg is here. We are glad to have the Senator.
How much time would the Senator like?
Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I ask for recognition from the
Presiding Officer to move ahead with my statement.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I wish to inform the Senator from New
Jersey that Senator Alexander is scheduled to be here at 12:30 or
thereabouts, so if the Senator could consume about that amount of time,
we can make this all work.
Mr. LAUTENBERG. We will give the Senator a good greeting.
Mr. CONRAD. I thank the Senator.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, one thing we know is that a budget
isn't just a collection of numbers, it is an expression of principles
and priorities and direction.
While I have the floor, I will take a moment to say to our friend and
colleague from North Dakota that he has been one of the strongest
chiefs of the Budget Committee. I sat on the Budget Committee for a
long time. I think it is fair to say, Republican or Democrat, the
Senator from North Dakota deserves the thanks and respect from
everybody here for the detail and for the arduous task he took on to
make sure our budgets were clear. No matter how often the challenges
came, Senator Conrad would stand and give the background and give the
details that got him to a point of view, and we are grateful, and we
will certainly miss his presence here.
The budgets the Republicans have put forward today confirm their true
priorities.
I had a good business career before coming to the Senate, and I
remember that during the Second World War we raised taxes on high
incomes and on excess profits because the country needed the revenues.
We needed to make investments.
Again, the budgets the Republicans have put forward today confirm
their true priorities. What are they? They really are pushing, working
hard to make sure people who make millions can get tax breaks. It is a
little hard to understand, with the shortages we have and needing to
invest in more programs, that they are worried about those who make
more than $1 million a year. I have had a good business career, and I
want to make sure our country is strong, and I want to make sure my
contribution is included among those who should be paying.

What Republicans do not seem to care about in their budgeting is
seniors, children, and middle-class Americans. At a time when our
economy is

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fighting against strong headwinds and too many Americans are out of
work, the Republicans are offering the same old prescriptions: tax cuts
for the rich and austerity for everyone else.
Now, I have seen this country of ours through adversity many times,
and I have seen it come out stronger on the other side. But our
recoveries have never been spurred by starving the middle class while
giving tax breaks to the wealthy. Prosperity has never trickled down
from the wealthy few. Prosperity has always grown up from a broad
middle class. We can't build a building starting with a chimney, and we
can't build a society's strength by starting from the top. It has to
have a foundation at the bottom that is strong and has the ability to
support the needs of our total society.
But a strong middle class depends on a first-rate educational
system--and forgive the personal annotation here for a moment more.
When I got out of the Army--I was a high school graduate. I enlisted
when I was 18, and I was lucky. I was able to get an education paid for
by the government. I was one of 8 million soldiers--service people--who
got our education paid for virtually because of the fact that we had
served in the military. As a result, half of those who were in
uniform--8 million out of 16 million--got a college education.
I can tell my colleagues that it enabled me, working with two
colleagues, to start a company that the three of us founded, a company
that took years and years to build. Slowly and energetically it began
to develop. Today that company produces the labor statistics every
month for the worldwide knowledge of what is happening with working
people, what their wages are, what employment is like. The name of the
company is ADP. We have 50,000 employees now. We were three poor boys
with nothing going for us except the willingness to work hard, and that
is the value. What did we get? It was determined that was the greatest
generation. Why? Because an education was given to so many who could
learn but didn't have the ability to get to college.
What we need is a society with affordable and accessible health care
and a tax system where everyone pays their fair share.
The Republican budgets include vicious cuts to the middle class. Just
look at what they do to education. They slash funding for education by
$19 billion. They want to do that now when we desperately need the
skills and the knowledge that education brings and the opportunity for
invention and creation. They want to take away $19 billion. That is not
going to help us get out of the hole we are in.
The Ryan budget coming from the House of Representatives would cut
education, as I pointed out, by $19 billion. They don't want us to see
the specific programs they cut, but let's look at the devastating
consequences if their cuts were distributed evenly.
I don't know whether Head Start is a familiar operation in our
country, but it is one of the most valuable. I believe there are about
a million children who participate in the program. Look at the face of
this child, looking through a narrow prism. There are 200,000 of these
children who will be told: Stay home. There is no room for you. We
can't afford to pay for you.
I recently went to a Head Start school in New Jersey and I met the
children. I am such a professional grandfather that all little kids
look beautiful to me. I met the children. What they were learning was
that learning is fun. Words mean something. Pictures mean something.
They were prepared, when they got to kindergarten or first grade, to
say that learning is good.
I met a child there. The children lined up to greet me. This is a
school that is bilingual.
I said: What is your name?
The little boy standing in front of me said: My name is Julio.
So I put my hand out to shake his hand, and he pushed it aside and
instead he wrapped his arms around my legs and gave me a hug. All the
little kids who followed thought he was the leader, so they all gave me
hugs. It was one of the best days I have had, to see what happens when
we treat these little kids to an opportunity to learn. Imagine slashing
funding for a program that will help children learn how to learn.
These cuts are shortsighted. They are cruel. Ten million college
students could see their Pell grants cut by more than $1,000 in 2014--
very painful.
With less support and rising costs for higher education, young people
would be forced to take on more debt in order to attend college because
we see college tuition is going up rapidly across the country.
The Republican budgets address student debt too. They would let the
interest rate on the new student loans double, increase by twice. It is
an outrage. Why are Republicans putting obstacles in front of young
people seeking an education? I never would have been able to attend, as
I said, Columbia University without that government help for me and the
services that ADP provides. It enabled me to cofound one of America's
most successful companies. The investment this country made when we
came home from World War II helped to create the momentum and direction
of this country with decades of prosperity.
But instead of offering a helping hand to this generation of
students, the Republican proposals close the door in their faces.
Government investments in science, technology, and medical research are
cut by more than $100 billion over the next 10 years. Medical research
funding alone could take a hit of nearly $6 billion by 2014.
What does that do? It delays research on new treatments for diseases
such as cancer, childhood asthma, and juvenile diabetes. Imagine
telling a parent of a sick child that we could not help find the money
to help him get back with his friends out in the play yard or the
schoolroom or going to school on a regular basis. Is that where America
wants to be? Right now we are finding across the country that there is
a greater likelihood that autism will enter into a family's
difficulties with a child being born with autism. How can we say no
when we see, in my State alone, that 1 in 29 male babies has autism?
That is a plague. That is a terrible statistic.
Then we want to talk about cutting back on health research? In their
budgets, instead of helping seniors retire with dignity, Republicans
have proposed to end Medicare as we know it, giving seniors a voucher
instead of guaranteed care. If that voucher cannot cover the cost of
needed medical services, Republicans say: Hey, too bad; you are on your
own. We have heard comments from them saying: Well, so what if you are
poor. It does not matter.
I look at this chart that says: ``Ends Medicare As We Know It To
Provide Tax Cuts For The Wealthy.'' They want to say that to people who
need the care, who are fortunate enough now under present conditions to
be able to have long-term care with a disease that is terminal.
The Republican plan would also cut Medicaid. Medicaid is a program
for those less able to provide for themselves because of low income or
no income. The Republican plans also want to cut that by more than $800
billion over 10 years. Medicaid provides vital resources such as
pregnancy services for expectant mothers and nursing home care for
seniors.
We created Medicare and Medicaid because it was decided in this
country as a society that we have to be there for seniors and the poor
when they get sick. But now the Republicans are proposing to break that
promise. They seem to do it without shame.
Republicans are not even exempting the hungry from their cuts. They
would eliminate food stamps for up to 10 million Americans over the
next decade.
In their obsession with austerity, they cut through far more than the
fat in the budget. They cut into the bone.
Many on the other side--and I do not say all; a lot of people on the
other side are good people concerned about their constituents,
concerned about what happens--but many on that side say balancing the
budget is the mission, the only mission. And in order to do it, they
want to make sure that includes a high priority for tax breaks for the
millionaires.
We could reduce our deficit if we required the wealthiest among us to
pay at least the same tax rate as middle-class Americans on all of
their income. But, instead, a Republican budget would give millionaires
an average tax cut of almost $400,000 a year. Their

[[Page S3199]]

plan shreds the safety net for seniors and the poor while padding the
mattress for the rich.
I ask my colleagues, please get your priorities straight. America
needs your help across the board. Your families, your neighbors, your
State, all need your help. Millionaires do not need more tax cuts, and
they certainly should not get them at the expense of seniors, children,
and the middle class.
With that, I yield the floor.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I thank the Senator.
Senator Alexander is next. I wonder if we could enter into a quick
time agreement to get the next Senators slotted. That might help us
manage the floor, I would say to my colleague, Senator Sessions.
Mr. SESSIONS. Right. I believe Senator Toomey is here and would be
prepared to go next after Senator Alexander.
Mr. CONRAD. We have Senator Reed slotted in between.
I wonder if we could propose--I say to Senator Alexander, how much
time would you like?
Mr. ALEXANDER. Well, Mr. President, what I wish to request is--
Senator Coons and I were hoping to introduce a piece of legislation on
another matter and talk about it. I think, given the focus on the
budget here, I am going to suggest to Senator Coons, who will be coming
here at 12:45, that we just mention our bill. If he could have time to
do that, and then we would stay focused on the budget, and we will talk
about the other matter tomorrow.
So what I wish to do, if I may suggest, is ask that I have 5 minutes
to speak on the budget and maybe 5 minutes to speak on the other
matter, for Senator Coons to be recognized for 5 minutes, and that
would take all of the time I would ask for.
Mr. CONRAD. The problem is, we are oversubscribed by that. It is
difficult to--we have not been yielding for things that are not budget
related, I would say to the Senator. So I wonder if it would be
agreeable if the Senator would take 5 minutes on the budget, we come
back to Senator Reed, if he could take 5 minutes on the budget, and
then we go to Senator Toomey for 15 minutes on the budget because he
has a substantive budget alternative that deserves additional time.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I think that is a reasonable request. I
wonder if I might ask on behalf of Senator Coons that if he should come
to the floor during that period, he be recognized for 1 minute to
simply stand up and say he was planning to do this, but we will defer
the introduction of our bill until tomorrow out of respect for the
budget discussion.
Mr. CONRAD. I appreciate that very much.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Alexander be
recognized for 5 minutes on the budget, Senator Reed of Rhode Island
for 5 minutes on the budget, then Senator Toomey for 15 minutes on the
budget, and if Senator Coons comes after that point he be recognized
for a minute on a separate matter, and then we come back to Senator
Whitehouse for 8 minutes. If we could lock those in I think that would
help all Members.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, am I now recognized for 5 minutes?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President. Please let me know when 30
seconds is remaining.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair will do so.

Foreign Student Legislation

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Senator Coons will come to the floor in
a few minutes. He and I have been working together on legislation that
many Senators on both sides of the aisle support.
Very simply, it pins a green card on the lapel of any foreign student
who is involved in science, engineering, technology graduate programs
who gets a degree and who wants to stay in the United States and work.
What we would like for them to do, instead of going home to create the
next Google in India or China or some other country, is to stay here
and create it here.
The legislation has broad support. It is a recommendation of the
American Competes Act which I worked on and many others did in 2005 and
2007. We will come to the floor and talk about that tomorrow. But I
wanted to salute Senator Coons for his leadership on this issue and
recognize it.
Now I will turn to the budget with my remaining time.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently said the
worst mistake President Obama made was not embracing his own fiscal
commission's recommendations to reduce our debt by $4 trillion over the
next 10 years.
Today, our national debt is more than $15.6 trillion, which is nearly
$1.9 trillion higher than it was when the fiscal commission released
its recommendations and $6.4 trillion higher than when President Obama
was sworn in. In January 2013, the first thing the next President will
have to do is to ask the Congress to increase the debt ceiling. The
fundamental problem is that Washington does not know how to balance its
checkbook.
The President has proposed a budget that raises taxes by $1.9
trillion over the next 10 years and still spends more than it takes in
every year, instead of endorsing the fiscal commission's
recommendations--or any other plan to address our Nation's fiscal
crisis. According to the Congressional Budget Office, under the
President's budget, interest on our debt will triple over the next 10
years, and by 2022 we will be spending more in interest than we spend
on national defense.
This is an irresponsible proposal, and instead of playing politics we
should be working together on a plan to address the debt, which is the
most urgent problem facing our country and, according to former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, the biggest
threat to our national security.
The Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission plan, the Domenici-Rivlin plan,
and the Gang of Six proposal all offer bipartisan blueprints for how to
address it. Each of these proposals would reform the Tax Code and
restructure entitlement spending--the main source of our dangerous
Federal debt--so that seniors can count on Medicare and Social Security
and taxpayers can afford them.
Mandatory entitlement spending, which is 58 percent of the Federal
budget, is growing at nearly 3 times inflation and bankrupting our
country. Discretionary spending, which funds our national defense, our
highways, our national parks, and National Laboratories, is only 36
percent of the Federal budget and is growing at the rate of inflation.
Focusing our budget cutting on discretionary spending is just a way for
Congress--to use the President's words--to kick the can down the road.
The real work is reducing the growth of mandatory spending.
Although the Senate is not debating its own budget resolution, going
1,113 days without passing a budget, we are debating several proposals.
I do not agree with every one of these, but I do support the House-
passed budget because it is a serious proposal to cut out-of-control
spending and help solve our fiscal crisis.
I will also support the proposal offered by Senator Toomey. Even
though it cuts nondefense discretionary spending to 2006 levels, which
I believe is too low, it reforms mandatory entitlement spending, it
closes tax loopholes, it lowers tax rates, and it would save Medicare
for future generations.
Senator Toomey and I have also discussed the possibility of allowing
States to have the option of choosing per capita caps on their average
Medicaid expenditures per beneficiary as an alternative to traditional
block grants, and I am encouraged by these discussions.
Last August, I supported the Budget Control Act because it was an
opportunity to take an important step in the right direction.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 30 seconds remaining.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President.
The House-passed budget and the budget proposed by Senator Toomey are
opportunities to take the next step after the Budget Control Act. I
look forward to working with them to adopt a responsible budget that
grows the economy and reduces our debt.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.

[[Page S3200]]

Student Loan Interest

Mr. REED. In 46 days, the interest rate on subsidized student loans
will be doubled. Zeroing in on these budgets that are before us, all of
them seem to support the essence of the Ryan budget, which is to allow
this to happen. In fact, the Ryan budget in the House not only allowed
a doubling of student interest rates, it also recommended eliminating
the in-school interest subsidies for student loans, putting middle-
class families at a particularly severe disadvantage.
We have 46 days to stop this increase on the interest charges to
middle-income students. We have to act. We have seen denial, delay, and
disruption. We have not seen the cooperation we need to help students
and families throughout this country.
The budget before us not only allows this interest rate to double,
but it will also, through its tax policies, favor the wealthiest and
not those who are struggling in the middle simply to get ahead or
simply to stay where they are. One of the other interesting aspects of
the proposal is that as we look at this student rate interest doubling,
my colleagues on the other side have said: We will fix it. We are for
fixing it. But, again, ask yourself: If they are for it, why are they
voting for several budgets today that would, in fact, support the
doubling? It seems to be an incongruity I cannot understand.
In addition to that, they said: Well, if we are going to go ahead and
stop this doubling of the rate, let's do it by paying for it with the
prevention fund, which is a program in health care that I think, over
time, is not only going to help families all across this country, but
it is going to begin to do what we have all said we have to do, bend
that cost curve for health care.
Instead of a debate about how to pay for this in a responsible way--
and we are certainly open to proposals if they have them, other than
this prevention fund, which I think is a nonstarter--they have
suggested that our proposal, which is to close an egregious loophole in
the Tax Code, is somehow a tax increase or somehow does not do the job.
But Politifact, which is an objective body that looks at these various
charges, has evaluated one claim that, in fact, our offset is a tax
increase. Here is what they say:

Actually, the bill changed tax rules only for S-
corporations, and only on professionals like lawyers and
accountants who could be taking advantage of the tax code to
avoid paying payroll taxes. The Democrats took the additional
step of saying the rule change would only apply to
individuals who reported more than $200,000 in income.
The bill's intent was to close a loophole on people who are
avoiding payroll taxes, taxes that they are supposed to pay
anyway.

The Republican criticism ``gives the impression that all kinds of
mom-and-pop operations might be subject to new, additional taxes, when
actually the bill is aimed squarely at high-income professionals who
are taking advantage of a loophole.
The claim was rated by this organization as false. We are closing a
loophole that benefits the wealthy and some of the most powerful
interests in this country in order to allow middle-income families to
send their children to school. I cannot think of anything more sensible
or anything more fair.
I will just return to the final point about these budgets. As I read
them, they, by and large, echo the Ryan budget, which allows for a
doubling of the interest rate on students and does other things that
will harm middle-income and middle-class people all to benefit the
wealthiest through additional tax cuts. That is not good fiscal policy,
not good educational policy. It is not good policy for the growth of
this country, to invest in education, and it is not fair. I would hope
that we would reject them.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I rise to join my colleague, Senator
Alexander, in briefly making reference to a bill which we introduced
today and which we will speak about in more detail on the Senate floor
tomorrow.
At the moment, the Senate is engaged in an important and purposeful
debate on the budget. I support Chairman Conrad and his leadership of
our Budget Committee. We will cast a series of other important and
difficult votes on budget matters later today. But I take 1 minute to
say that at a time when there is not enough bipartisanship, I am
grateful to Senator Alexander for his leadership and for working with
me on an issue that will, I hope, move forward--the debate on how we
make the promise and the opportunity of America open to more real job
creators.
The record shows that a significant number of the most innovative and
fastest growing companies in America were founded by immigrants.
Immigrants have long contributed significantly to our culture, to our
strength, and to our competitiveness. I think this particular bill,
which opens a new class of visa for students from outside the United
States who would pursue master's or doctoral programs in STEM, is an
important step forward.
There are many other issues in immigration we need to resolve. There
are many other elements we need to reform. But I am grateful for the
chance to work with Senator Alexander on this bill and will address it
further tomorrow.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of New Mexico). The Senator from
Pennsylvania.
Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I rise to speak on the budget resolution I
have introduced and on which we will have a vote later today, at least
on a motion to proceed. I want to start with underscoring the magnitude
of the challenge we face. We have a full-blown crisis that awaits. It
could arrive at any moment virtually if we do not change the course we
are on.
The deficit we have in 2012, $1.3 trillion, is the fourth consecutive
year with a deficit of over $1 trillion. We are now routinely running
deficits that are 7, 8, 9 percent of GDP. Of course, every year we run
a deficit, the excessive spending over the tax revenue has to be funded
by more borrowing. So we have the mounting debt that is now at stunning
levels. For much of the post-war era, after the big repayment of debt
after World War II, the national debt fluctuated somewhere around 40
percent of our total economic output.
Today our actual debt held by the public is 73 percent of our total
economic output, and that is just the publicly held debt. That does not
include the liabilities within the government, which, if you add that,
is up to 100 percent of our total economic output. This has never ended
well for a country that last chose to run up massive deficits and
massive debt. I would argue that we are seeing exactly how this
typically plays out. We are seeing it across the Atlantic in Europe
where countries are a little further down this road than we are today,
having run big structural deficits for longer than we have, and having
accumulated more debt as a percentage of GDP than we have thus far.

We see what has happened, especially in countries such as Greece
where it is particularly acute, and other countries, especially on the
periphery of Europe, that arguably are not terribly far behind. This is
completely unsustainable, and I think what we are witnessing today on
the Senate floor is that there is one party in this Chamber that is
addressing the problem. There is one party that is proposing very
specific solutions.
It is perfectly reasonable to have objections and disagreements with
any number of elements in my budget resolution or Senator Paul's or
Senator Lee's or the Ryan budget. But what I do not understand is how
the majority party, the party that is actually in control of this
Chamber, can think that it is OK not to have an alternative, not to
offer a vision, not to offer a solution to the biggest problem we face
as a nation and one that is imminent; one that if left unaddressed
certainly will result in a crisis. It is just a question of when.
So I think this is an unacceptable abdication of responsibility. But
that is where we are. I would argue that what got us into this problem
is too much spending. Look at the numbers. They speak volumes. Since
2000, Federal spending has more than doubled. We took spending, which
was as recently as 2007 only a little over 19 percent of our total
economic output, and grew that to 24 percent of our economic output.
That is a tremendous surge, not just in the absolute dollars in
spending but in the relative size of spending relative to our economy.
President Obama's budget is not a serious attempt to deal with this.
It was

[[Page S3201]]

put on the floor of the House of Representatives and got precisely zero
votes. It failed 414 to 0, meaning not a single Democrat wanted to vote
for the President's proposal. I can understand why. The President's
proposal is to increase spending, increase taxes, and increase debt.
The President's proposal claims to level off debt as a percentage of
GDP for a brief time but then starts to grow again. The reason the
President absolutely refuses to offer a budget resolution that solves
this problem is because he refuses to deal with the real underlying
driver of this, which we all know are the big entitlement programs.
The current structure of these programs is unsustainable. If anyone
doubts it, look at what CBO has shown us and has told us. By 2021, 9
years from now, if we take three categories of Federal spending: the
Social Security Program, interest on our debt, and health care
entitlements, those three things combined will consume almost 90
percent of all of the revenue we can realistically hope to collect, if
the last several decades are any indication of what we are going to
collect.
How could it possibly be that we would continue down this path where
those three categories are going to consume virtually the entire
budget? I would also observe it is a simple matter of arithmetic that
no significant Federal Government program can grow faster than the
economy for very long because everything has to be paid for by the
economy. In fact, it has to be paid for by some fraction of the
economy. If we have a big program that is consistently growing much
faster than the economy, well, it will consume everything. Then these
programs will collapse, and then what are we going to do?
Rather than waiting for that day to come, some of us are proposing
specific solutions for this problem. Medicare is growing much faster
than the economy. Medicaid is growing, arguably, at least two times as
fast as the economy. Other mandatory health care programs, if President
Obama gets his way, will grow even faster.
This is all completely unsustainable, and we are going to fix this
problem. The question is whether we fix it while we have this window of
time, when we are still able to borrow the massive sums that we are
borrowing, or will we wait until we have a full blown crisis, the bond
market shuts us down, and then we have sudden Draconian and very
disruptive and painful decisions to make.
I would rather do this while we have this moment, change the course
we are on, and establish a sustainable fiscal path. So I have submitted
a budget for the second consecutive year that puts us on a path to
balance. My budget balances within the 10-year historical window of the
budget resolutions. It actually balances in the eighth year and runs a
very modest budget surplus in the ninth year.
I do that in part by reducing the total level of spending relative to
GDP as compared to the alternative budgets, specifically the
President's alternative or CBO's. I cannot compare it to the Senate's
Democratic alternative budget because that does not exist. We have no
idea what the Senate Democratic proposal is, but I have one.
So I will elaborate on that a little bit. My proposal is that we get
spending down to about 18.3 percent of GDP. That is about the same
level revenue has been historically, which thereby brings our budget
into balance. Some of my colleagues have suggested there are Draconian
spending cuts that will get us there. Well, let me be very specific
about what spending cuts are necessary to achieve this.
In 2013, spending in my budget is 2.9 percent below what it is in
2012, which means the Federal Government will spend--under my budget,
it would spend 97.1 percent of everything it spent the previous year.
People can decide whether that constitutes Draconian cuts.
Now, here is the amazing thing. After that, on average, over the 10-
year window, my budget calls for Federal spending to increase--in fact,
to increase at about a rate of 3 percent per year nominally. See, this
is my point. This is a solvable problem. All we need to do is cut out
some of the excess, restructure certain programs, and allow the
government spending to grow. It just cannot grow quite as rapidly as it
is currently projected to do.
If we get that under control, we can put ourselves on a sustainable
path.
Another part of this is to have policies that maximize economic
growth. I mean that is an important goal in and of itself, but it is
also a path to restoring balance because stronger growth generates more
revenue for the Treasury.
Well, my budget would do that without raising taxes. What I would do
is have progrowth tax reform. That is comparable in spirit and in the
right direction. It goes to all of the bipartisan commissions that have
looked at this, whether it is Simpson-Bowles or Rivlin-Domenici or any
of the others. I know there is broad bipartisan consensus on the
principle that we would have stronger economic growth if we simplified
the code, broaden the base on which we apply taxes, and then apply
those taxes but at lower marginal rates. That is what my budget calls
for. It should not be all that controversial to move in this direction
of tax simplification, lowering marginal rates, and offsetting the lost
revenue by reducing the value of deductions and loopholes and
writeoffs. That is what my budget asks for.
There are a couple of areas that I think are important where there is
bipartisan support for elements within my budget. One is, the President
of the United States suggested in his budget that very wealthy senior
citizens contribute a little bit more for the Medicare benefits that
they obtain. Some means testing already occurs within Medicare. But I
happen to agree with the President that it is reasonable, especially
under these circumstances, to ask the wealthiest members of our society
to pay a little more for the benefits they are getting from the
government.
So my budget adopts the President's proposal of expanding means
testing, expanding the contribution we would ask from the wealthiest
Americans for their Medicare benefits.
I also include in my budget long-term reform for Medicare that makes
it more viable. This has been much maligned despite the fact that one
of our Democratic colleagues, Senator Wyden, supports this approach as
well.
I wish to emphasize that this is a different plan than what it was
last year. Last year there was a criticism that any premium support
model that establishes the amount of money given to seniors to purchase
health care at a fixed dollar amount was a flawed approach because what
if health care costs rose more rapidly than that amount could afford to
pay for? That is a valid concern.
There is a different dynamic, a different mechanism in the House-
passed budget, and in my budget, and I think it is part of the reason a
Democratic Senator has embraced this, and Alice Rivlin, a former senior
member of the Clinton administration, supports this. You set the
premium based on the second lowest bid for the health care services we
want to provide, thereby ensuring that a senior citizen would have
enough money to purchase that plan. Not only that but we go further and
include the traditional fee-for-service Medicare system to which
seniors are currently accustomed--we include that as one of the plans
that could bid. So it is absolutely the case that any senior citizen
who wanted to stay with the traditional fee-for-service Medicare
Program could do so under the reform plan.
I happen to believe that in an innovative marketplace, there will be
more attractive options. I happen to know that under this system, a lot
of seniors--my parents included--have to wait forever to see a doctor,
and part of the problem is the dysfunctional system we have now. It is
already costing us access and quality in health care.
I think this reform will make Medicare a better program for the
people who need it. Yes, we will ask the wealthy to pay a little more
for it. That is reasonable. Those seniors who want to stay in
traditional Medicare can do that too. In the process, you can put this
on a sustainable path. It has some bipartisan support. Mr. President,
we don't really know the extent of that because our Democratic
colleagues refuse to put a budget or mark up a budget in committee,
present one on the floor.
I will close with this request, which is to vote for the motion to
proceed.

[[Page S3202]]

Let's get on to my budget and have a debate about this, and let's see
where people are. I don't know how we are ever going to reach the
compromise we need to reach to put us on a sustainable path if one
party is consistently putting out a whole range of ideas and the other
party refuses. How do you negotiate with somebody who doesn't have a
position? How do you have that discussion?
I don't know how many of my Democratic colleagues agree with the
President of the United States and my own thought that we ought to ask
wealthy seniors to pay a little more for Medicare benefits. If we get
on the bill, we could have a debate and have amendments. I think this
is too big and too important an issue not to address. The way to
address it is to vote yes on the motion to proceed to get on a budget
resolution, and then let's have that discussion and let the American
people see it. Let's take their ideas and all of the ideas we have and
see if we can make some progress.
There is an unambiguous fact that I want to underscore. There is one
party showing up at this debate--the three Republican Senators who are
proposing budget resolutions, comprehensive documents that address the
entitlement reform we need, the discretionary spending limit we need,
and the tax reform that will help grow this economy and generate the
revenue we need. We have done that. As I say, it is perfectly fair and
legitimate to criticize any aspect of any of that, but I think there is
an obligation especially of the majority to offer its view, its
alternative.
I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of this motion to proceed and
allow us to get on with addressing the single most pressing problem
facing our country, which is restoring a fiscally viable path that
allows us to have strong economic growth.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I think we allocated 8 minutes to Senator
Whitehouse.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
Mr. CONRAD. That was part of a unanimous consent agreement so that we
could manage the time on the floor better. We have, I say to the
Senator, 60 minutes left on our side. I think they have 100 minutes
left on their side. We have seven Senators left.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Eight minutes just about works, from the math.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the chairman, Senator Conrad, for his
leadership on this important issue.
I would note for the record that with the conclusion of Senator
Toomey's remarks, following Senator Reed, I think for the first time in
the history of the Senate we had back-to-back presentations by two
separate Senators who were graduates of LaSalle Academy in Providence,
RI--noteworthy, perhaps, in Rhode Island.
I did note in his remarks his references to the magnitude of this
challenge, to the full-blown crisis he perceives, to the completely
unsustainable nature of our outward debt, that this is too big and too
important not to address, and that this is the single most pressing
problem our country faces--all of which might lead one to conclude that
this would be the most important thing they would pursue. Yet we know
it is less important to them to address our debt problem than it is to
protect oil and gas subsidies for Big Oil at a time when their profits
are unprecedented; it is less important than protecting tax loopholes
that allow high-income individuals to incorporate themselves and avoid
paying FICA taxes; it is less important to them than protecting special
tax rates that allow people making $100 million a year to pay a lower
tax rate than a family making $100,000 a year. So it seems that when
you actually look at practice--what their priorities are--this isn't
quite the priority they claim it is.
I agree there are other priorities we face as a country. This July,
unless we move quickly, student loan interest rates will double, which
will hurt our economy, our growth, and it will hit families across this
country. We brought forward a plan to keep those rates down, but our
colleagues filibustered it. Our Nation's highway program will expire
next month, jeopardizing millions of jobs. We voted overwhelmingly on a
bipartisan basis to reauthorize the highway bill and move forward on
it, only to have our bipartisan highway bill stalled by House
Republicans. Republicans may talk about jobs, but they are busily
stalling the most important jobs bill we have. That stalling and delay
will cost jobs because of the summer building season in so many of our
States.

One thing that has not been urgent has been to pass a budget. Why is
that? Well, it is because we already have one. This whole exercise
today rests on a false premise. The false premise is that we have no
budget. Last summer Congress passed and the President signed into law
the bipartisan Budget Control Act, which sets binding discretionary
spending levels for a decade and establishes budget levels for the
current fiscal year and next, which our appropriations committees are
now working under--Republicans and Democrats together. But you would
not know this when listening to Senate Republicans. Instead of focusing
on real issues, where real jobs are at stake, they are wasting a day of
floor time on extremist tea party budgets. They also plan to force a
vote on what they describe as the ``Obama budget.''
I plan to vote against all of the motions to proceed for the simple
reason that we already have a budget in place that we voted on and
agreed to for next year. Today's votes are nothing more than a
Republican attempt to promote a radical and unwelcome agenda of
slashing middle-class programs while protecting and enlarging tax
giveaways for the ultrarich.
Let's make no mistake about what this would do to middle-class
families. The House Republican budget would start by cutting taxes for
big corporations and the ultrarich, adding $4.6 trillion to our
national debt. To pay for these extra tax cuts, the Republicans would
decimate programs on which regular American families at some point in
their lives come to rely. They start by ending Medicare as we know it.
Beginning for workers who retire in 2023, the House Republican budget
would make it a voucher system, which, according to the nonpartisan
CBO, will add an estimated $6,000 in annual out-of-pocket costs for
each retiree by 2050. In Rhode Island, the average annual Social
Security benefit is about $13,600. It is hard to imagine how future
seniors living on a fixed Social Security income will be able to
maintain health care coverage with that kind of extra cost dropped on
them individually. At the same time that they would slash Medicare, the
House Republican budget gives those making over $1 million per year an
average tax cut of over $150,000.
If you are getting older or you are a working family and you are
going to need Medicare one day, you will get an end to Medicare as we
know it. If you are making over $1 million, you get an average tax cut
of over $150,000. Those are not real priorities for the people I
represent in Rhode Island.
It doesn't stop there. They repeal the affordable care act, which
would reopen the doughnut hole. The affordable care act has helped
nearly 15,000 Rhode Islanders save an average of $554 each last year
just by closing the doughnut hole partway, and soon it will be all the
way. That made a difference to people such as Olive in Woonsocket,
whose husband fell into the doughnut hole last July. Thanks to the new
law, they saved $2,400. Under the House Republican budget, they would
be stuck paying that $2,400 as an out-of-pocket cost to the big drug
companies.
The radical House budget would slash funding for Pell grants, and it
would increase interest on student loans. We have all heard people say
here that they don't want to encourage the increase in student loan
rates we are facing. But while they say that, they, of course, are
filibustering our effort to do that. In their budget, they build in the
increase in the interest rate. So they speak from two notions.
The House budget requires only $1 trillion in additional and
unspecified cuts, and that will be Draconian. Senator Paul's budget,
which we may take up today, would also slash middle-class programs,
including Social Security. He includes an eventual 39 percent cut to
Social Security benefits and would end Medicare for all seniors in
2014. If you want to put an end to Medicare in 2014, the Paul budget
looks like a really great opportunity for you. But that is not what I
think anybody really

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wants in this country. I think almost every American wants to see
Medicare strengthened and supported.
We should move on from this unnecessary budget messaging exercise and
resume our work to keep student loan rates down and support good-paying
highway jobs--bills that are being delayed that we need action on now.
When we turn to a real debate about deficit reduction, I hope my
colleagues will unshackle themselves from the tea party and put forward
a budget that doesn't put Big Oil subsidies ahead in priority of taking
care of our real budget problems. They have to get over putting the
priorities first of protecting Big Oil subsidies.
With that, I yield the floor.
Mr. CONRAD. I thank the Senator from Rhode Island. I thank him for
his contributions on the Budget Committee. I don't think there has been
any stronger voice for fundamental health care reform along the lines
of dealing with the system we currently have that, by most accounts, is
costing us hundreds of billions of dollars and not adding to the
quality of health care. Nobody has been a stronger voice on the Budget
Committee or off of it on that subject. I appreciate the Senator's
leadership.
We have Senator Wicker next. Does the Senator have an estimate as to
how much time he may consume?
Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I have been told I have 10 minutes
allocated, and I shall use probably less than that allocation.
Mr. CONRAD. Very well. Senator Wicker.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
Mr. WICKER. I thank the Chair for recognizing me and I appreciate the
time.
I want to agree with my friend from Rhode Island to this extent: He
said this debate is based on a false premise. And I agree with him in
this respect. This is not a reality debate about a budget resolution.
These are show votes. These are messaging votes we have today.
One can argue all he or she wants that we have a budget in place that
we voted on last year, but there is no getting around 2 U.S.C. 631,
which is the budget law of the United States of America, passed back in
1974. That budget law requires Congress each year to pass a budget
resolution. As a matter of fact, it says on or before April 15 of each
year, Congress completes action on a concurrent resolution on the
budget.
The last time this Senate did that was in 2009. We missed the April
15 deadline in 2010, the leadership of this body missed that deadline
in 2011, and they missed it again this year. It has been that long
since this body, under the leadership of my friends across the aisle,
have complied with the explicit terms of the Federal statute and
brought a budget to full consideration on the floor.
What we will have today is debate on five concepts. I am happy to
vote for some of them, and will certainly vote against others, but make
no mistake about it, this is not the process called for by the Federal
statute and it doesn't comply with the law and doesn't serve the
purposes of advancing public policy in the United States of America. We
are long overdue for a real budget debate that puts something in place.
As I mentioned a moment ago, we have passed the 3-year mark now--
1,100 days--since Senate Democrats fulfilled one of their basic
obligations, as I mentioned, laid out in Federal statute. A recent
column in the Washington Times pointed out that the iPad had not yet
even been introduced when the last budget was passed on the floor of
this Senate. But since that time, in 3 years, Federal spending has
topped a staggering $10 trillion.
Every day our country's debt grows closer to $16 trillion. This is
money my generation will not be able to pay. We have our pages here on
the floor. Even their generation will not be able to pay off this $16
trillion in debt. It will be left to their children and grandchildren.
Annual deficits continue to soar, adding to that debt--over $1 trillion
each year during President Obama's time in office--even though the
President promised in 2009 he would cut the deficit in half during his
first term, a promise that certainly has not been fulfilled. Instead,
his latest budget relies more on spending, new taxes, and accounting
gimmicks, and it leaves insolvent entitlement programs without
meaningful reform.
I noticed the previous speaker stated he would not be voting for
President Obama's budget proposal. I think it is because it is such a
false and weak proposal. I expect the Obama budget today would get the
same response it got on the floor of the Senate during these messaging
votes last year when it failed to get a single vote. As I understand
it, it failed to get a single vote in the House of Representatives. Not
one Republican or Democrat in the House of Representatives earlier this
year was willing to step forward and embrace the Obama budget proposal,
and it got a big fat zero when it was put to a messaging vote in the
House of Representatives. So we are watching a disastrous trajectory
and we need to change it now.
Families, businesses, and organizations in my home State of
Mississippi, and in every State across the country, know the importance
of having a sensible budget and living within that budget; likewise,
taxpayers deserve to see a blueprint of where their money is going and
how much will be spent. Washington must be held accountable.
We heard talk on the other side of the aisle about priorities that
our Democratic friends wish to see enacted. The Democratic majority in
the Budget Committee needs to bring those priorities forward. They need
to wrap them up in a budget resolution and bring them to the floor.
That is the one thing we are not seeing today--a proposal by the
Democratic majority.
It only takes 51 votes to pass a budget. There is no two-thirds rule
on a budget resolution. There is no filibuster on a budget resolution.
My Democratic colleagues, many of whom are dear friends of mine, have
53 Members in this caucus. They have the votes. We know a budget is
required every year. Yet with a 53-vote majority, and with only 51
votes required, they do not bring a budget to the floor for us to
consider so we can know what their budget priorities are.
There are plenty of excuses from across the aisle for not complying
with the clear mandate, but there is no excuse. It is inexcusable that
the majority party in this Chamber refuses to fulfill this statutory
responsibility when the warning signs of fiscal calamity are at our
doorstep.
You know, it is no wonder our popularity rating as a Congress is down
around 10 or 11 percent when this Federal statute explicitly requires
us to do this by April of each year and we do not do it. It is no
wonder we are held in such low regard by the public. Inaction
ultimately bequeaths a burden of debt to our children and
grandchildren.
We certainly cannot blame the inaction on an absence of ideas. As has
been stated by my friend from Rhode Island, we have five proposals
before us today. President Obama's will probably get zero votes. The
House Republican blueprint will be considered, and budgets from
Senators Lee, Paul, and Toomey. Yet the Senate Democrats, regrettably,
stay on the sidelines. They have the votes, but we do not have their
proposal on the floor--one they are willing to put forward and tell the
American people they own.
My friend the budget chairman has suggested the upcoming election
stands in the way. In April he said:

This is the wrong time to vote in committee. This is the
wrong time to vote on the floor. I don't think we will be
prepared to vote before the election.

I want to make it clear, I have the highest affection and regard for
the chairman of the Budget Committee, but I do believe what he is
saying, in other words, is that we have a job to do, we have a law to
comply with, but we are not going to bring it up at this time because
of political concerns. I think political concerns are keeping our
friends on the other side from saying where they stand on the budget
issues. I think political concerns are keeping them from making the
hard choices.

I can imagine the American taxpayer would like to know when will be
the right time for the Senate to begin complying with Federal law and
the right time for a budget that takes fiscal responsibility seriously.
They know kicking the can down the road will not make the debt problem
go away.
I noticed recently our Commander in Chief told a Russian leader that
after

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the election he would have more flexibility on a national security
issue--the issue of national military defense. He said, I need to have
some time, because after the election I will have more flexibility.
Please pass that along to Vladimir. I suppose my friends on the other
side of the aisle believe they will have more flexibility on spending
issues and budget issues and taxation issues after the election.
The truth is Republicans and Democrats have differences on a number
of issues, but that should not deter a concentrated effort to lower the
deficit and curb runaway spending. I hope this week we can focus on
constructive dialogue. I would have hoped we would have an honest
process and do what is right and necessary to put this country's fiscal
house back in order.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
Mr. CARPER. I thank the Chair.
Mr. CONRAD. If I may, if the Senator could do his presentation in
about 8 minutes, we have six speakers left and we have 50 minutes.
Mr. CARPER. I will be happy to do so.
Mr. CONRAD. I thank the Senator.
Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, in listening to the presentation of my
friend from Mississippi, I am reminded of the words of Harry Truman
when he said something to the effect: The only thing new in the world
is the history we forgot or never learned.
I want to go back in history. I want to go back about 15 years. We
had gone from 1968 to 1997 and never balanced a budget. All those
years--almost 30 years. Then President Clinton said to Erskine Bowles,
his Chief of Staff, figure out a way to maybe negotiate a balanced
budget deal with Republicans in the House and in the Senate and see
what kind of deal you can get. So Erskine went out and negotiated and
came up with a deal. It was the deficit reduction deal that lead to not
one but three balanced budgets by the end of that decade. Interestingly
enough, half of the debt reduction was on the spending side and half
the debt reduction was on the revenue side.
Now fast forward to 2001, a new President, a change in
administration, and as far as the eye could see not just balanced
budgets but plenty of black ink--surpluses as far as the eye could see.
Eight years later, we had another change in administration, and a new
President was handed over a $1 trillion deficit, the worst recession
since the Great Depression, and we are still trying to dig our way out
of that. When we tried to pass legislation here to create a deficit
commission a couple of years ago and failed--we were short of votes,
and our Republican friends who had cosponsored that measure, as I
recall, ended up not voting for it--this President used his own
executive powers to say we are going to have a deficit commission and
he asked Erskine Bowles to head it up, along with Alan Simpson, a
former Senator and deficit hawk from Wyoming.
There were 18 good people, including some from this Chamber, who went
to work on a real deficit reduction plan--Democrats and Republicans--
and 11 out of the 18 ended up voting for this kind of plan. It was not
a 50 50 deal on deficit reduction, but $3 on the spending side for
every $1 on the revenue side, with $4 trillion to $5 trillion in
deficit reduction over a 10-year period of time.
As my friend mentioned, we are seeing a lot of different ideas. We
have a bunch here on the floor. The administration submitted their
budget as well, and, frankly, none of them come close to being as good
as Bowles-Simpson. Alice Rivlin has done good work. Pete Domenici, our
former colleague here in the Senate from New Mexico, has done a good
one. But in the end, they all come back to pretty much the same place.
Bowles-Simpson says we are going to raise $1 in revenue for every $3 on
the spending side.
The grand compromise was Democrats agreeing to entitlement programs
reform--not to get rid of them but make sure they are going to be
around for our children and grandchildren. And on the revenue side, we
actually raise revenues by reducing the rates on the individual side
and the corporate side, and we eliminated by half the so-called ``tax
expenditures'' in the Tax Code--tax credits, tax reductions, tax
loopholes, tax breaks. We got rid of about half of them.
So the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission plan enjoys the support of
almost half the Senate--almost half the Senate. Pretty much an equal
number of Democrats and Republicans. We have a budget in place right
now. We have a budget in place for 2012. We have a budget that is going
to be effective for 2013. Right now, we are seeing a deficit reduction
of $600 billion in defense spending implemented over a 10-year period
of time. Right now, we are seeing a deficit reduction of $600 billion
in domestic discretionary spending implemented over a 10-year period of
time. And if we don't come up with an agreement, such as Bowles-
Simpson, we will see $600 billion more of deficit reduction on the
defense side, another $600 billion on the nondefense side, and some
entitlement program changes as well.
A much better plan than doing that--even though that adds up to about
$2 trillion worth of deficit reduction for this year and the coming
fiscal year--is the kind of comprehensive balanced plan we have been
given by the deficit commission. My hope is, at the end of the day,
when we have the opportunity to debate here--later this year, when the
elections are behind us--people will actually turn around and say,
let's try to figure out the right thing to do, and then do it. This is
the right thing to do. In the meantime, let's not waste the next 6, 7,
or 8 months.
I would suggest to my colleagues to join the bipartisan efforts of
people such as Tom Coburn and myself and others, Senator Conrad and
Senator Grassley and others, and to join us in going to work on a to-do
list provided to us by GAO, the Government Accountability Office. That
to-do list is just full of ways to avoid wasting money, and it includes
ways to save money by reducing improper payments. We are down from $119
billion last year to $115 billion this year, finally heading in the
right direction, reducing fraud in Medicare and Medicaid.
Some very good stuff is being done there to help reduce the fraud
losses. We have all this surplus property, a lot of which we don't
need. The idea is to get rid of that, and we are beginning to do that.
We have too many bad information technology projects and too many
information processing centers. We are getting rid of a bunch of those
we don't need. There is actually some good work that is beginning to be
done. We can do more, and we ought to do more.
Lastly, I would suggest we ought to consider making the President's
rescission powers real. Senator McCain and I and about 40, almost 45,
Democrats and Republicans have proposed that we make the President's
rescission powers real. The President could sign an appropriations bill
under current law, send us proposals to rescind or reduce spending
within that appropriations bill that he has just signed into law, and
we don't even have to vote on the rescission. We don't even have to
take it up or look at it. For the most part, we don't. What John McCain
and I and almost half the Senate, Democratic and Republican, have said
is, when a President signs an appropriations bill into law and sends it
to us, he can send us a rescission message as well that we have to vote
on, we actually have to vote on it. And it doesn't affect taxes. It is
not a deal that affects entitlement programs but on appropriations, and
we would try this for 4 years.
With a simple majority, we literally vote on the President's
proposal. If it doesn't get a simple majority in the Senate--51 votes--
or a simple majority in the House--218 votes--then it goes away. But at
least we have to take responsibility to be held accountable to vote on
it. The President would perhaps have some extra responsibility and the
opportunity to make meaningful reductions.
Mr. President, how am I doing on time?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 30 seconds.
Mr. CARPER. I want to close and say to my friend, Senator Conrad, I
know the Senator, as much as I, favors Bowles-Simpson, and I want to
thank the Senator for the work he is doing in bringing attention to it
again and saying this is still the best plan in the room. I think it is
still the best plan out there.
So the idea is when we get to the day or the week after the election,
we will be ready to move and to take it up and,

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hopefully, to embrace and endorse large parts of it.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I thank the Senator, and I thank him for
his leadership on these issues. Nobody has been more serious about
getting deficits and debt under control than the Senator from Delaware,
Mr. Carper.
Mr. President, how much time would Senator Grassley like to use?
Mr. GRASSLEY. Ten minutes or a little less.
Mr. CONRAD. Perhaps we can ask for a unanimous consent request to
lock in these next Senators so people know who is waiting.
Mr. GRASSLEY. I am not prepared to speak for our side.
Mr. CONRAD. We can do it. We have been doing this and I think it
works out well.
So I ask unanimous consent that Senator Grassley be recognized for 10
minutes, followed by Senator Cardin for 8, followed by Senator Crapo
for 10 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Iowa is recognized.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, adopting a budget for the country is one
of the most basic responsibilities and fundamental functions of the
Congress.
The Budget Act of 1974 requires Congress to adopt a budget by April
15 each year. It is a requirement that this Senate majority has ignored
time and again. In fact, the Senate hasn't adopted a budget since April
29, 2009.
More than 3 years have passed since the Senate last adopted a budget.
During that time, more than $4 trillion has been added to our Nation's
debt. In President Obama's Presidency, we have added $5 trillion to the
national debt.
So we are in the midst of the fourth consecutive year of $1 trillion
deficits. All the while, the Senate Democratic majority has failed to
propose a budget blueprint that would lay out their priorities for
deficit reduction, economic growth, and a path to balance. It is no
wonder, then, our Nation is driving toward a fiscal cliff of deficits
and debt. There is no one in the Democratic leadership willing to take
hold of the wheel of this vehicle.
In February, President Obama released his budget. The President's
2013 budget would expand the scope of government by spending more
money, increasing taxes on job creators, and continue on the path of
enormous deficit and record debt.
While President Obama claims his budget will create an America built
to last, the only thing his budget builds, it seems to me, is higher
deficits and debt--a bigger and more intrusive government and economic
decline for future generations.
During the past 60 years spending has averaged about 21 percent of
GDP. Over the 10-year window of President Obama's budget, spending
never gets below 22 percent. In dollar terms, spending goes up from the
present $3.8 trillion to $5.8 trillion in the year 2022. So it is very
clear President Obama is built to spend.
President Obama's budget is also harmful to our fragile economy
because it would impose a $1.9 trillion tax increase. Maybe the
President's purpose in imposing this huge tax increase is an effort to
reduce the Nation's debt. Unfortunately, that is not what he has
planned in his budget. He wants to spend every dollar.
His budget runs deficits totaling $6.4 trillion over the next 10
years. Debt held by the public increases from 74.2 percent of our
economy today to 76.33 percent in 2022. Of course, we need to remember
that the historical average since World War II has been about 43
percent of the economy.
If people believe President Obama is putting us on a path to fiscal
sustainability, I would suggest that they look at the annual deficits
over the next 10 years. They never drop below $575 billion, and they
actually go up at the end of his budget, rising to $704 billion in
2022. President Obama's budget puts America on the course of deficits
and debt as far as the eye can see into the future.
The President also took a pass on proposing any real changes to our
entitlement programs, which are a real driver of future deficits and
debt. Again, he is absent from the discussion. He has no solution. He
has chosen not to lead. But where is the leadership from the Senate
majority? Where is their budget? Why have they not proposed a budget in
more than 3 years?
The budget chairman has said repeatedly that we already have a budget
in place for this year and even for next year. The chairman and
majority leader believe the Budget Control Act was a budget resolution.
The Budget Control Act is not a budget. President Obama clearly agreed
when he proposed his budget. House Republicans and Democrats alike
agreed when they voted on seven budget resolutions offered by both
Republicans and Democrats. The Democratic leadership in the Senate
stands alone in their belief that the Budget Control Act was a budget
resolution. Is it because they have no ideas on how to balance the
budget, contain out-of-control spending, grow the economy, or create
jobs?

If the Democratic majority can't muster the will to present their own
budget, why don't they offer President Obama's budget?
I am sure we will hear the argument that the resolution our side is
offering is not a fair depiction of President Obama's budget. That is
the rhetoric we will likely hear so that they can vote against it. The
fact is they are going to vote against it for one reason, just like a
year ago; that is, because it is President Obama's budget. They don't
want to be on record voting for any budget. That will be the most
remarkable outcome of today's exercise.
We are going to vote on five different budget proposals. Three are
being offered by Senate Republicans, one is Budget Chairman Ryan's
budget, and the final resolution is President Obama's budget. Not only
have Senate Democrats failed to even propose a budget, they will likely
vote in lockstep against each of the five budget proposals.
We are likely to see Senate Democrats come to the floor one by one
and cast roughly 265 votes against the consideration of any budget. Is
that leadership? Is that conviction? They are in the majority. When it
comes to proposing and supporting a budget, they are the party of no
and the party of obstruction. Democrats are the party filibustering
consideration of budget blueprints. My friend, the budget chairman, was
quoted recently as saying:

This is the wrong time to vote in committee. This is the
wrong time to vote on the floor. I don't think we will be
prepared to vote before the election.

How many more trillions do we need to add to the national debt before
it is time to vote on a budget resolution? If now is not the time to
lead, propose bold solutions and take action, when is?
The American people are going to pay a heavy price for the
unwillingness and inability of the Senate majority to lead and to offer
solutions. Once again, the Senate majority and its leadership and
President Obama are content to be absent from the discussion. Three
years without this sort of debate is proof of that. There are no
solutions; there is no leadership. There is only failure and punting
until after the next election.
We have a moral obligation to offer serious solutions for today--most
importantly for future generations.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, the budget document is a very important
document.
It speaks to the priorities of our Nation, and it gives instructions
to our committees to report out legislation consistent with that of the
budget resolution. It gives instructions to the Appropriations
Committee to pass appropriations bills and to other committees as it
may affect revenues or mandatory spending.
We have that budget document for the fiscal year that begins October
1 of this year. That was included in the Budget Control Act which
passed this body by 74 votes. It has the force and effect of law.
So our appropriations committees know the numbers for the
appropriations bills for the year that begins October 1, and the other
committees know what the requirements will be. The question is whether
we should have a longer term commitment on dealing with our budget
problems.
We do need a bipartisan, credible program that involves not only the
Democrats and Republicans in the Senate,

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but also the Democrats and Republicans in the House, and the President
of the United States. We need to avoid sequestration, and we need the
predictability for our economy and for those who act upon our actions
to know what the rules will be. We need to have a responsible plan to
deal with the long-term deficit that is balanced and fair, that
involves more revenue and spending cuts, that allows our recovery to
continue, and is bipartisan.
I compliment Senator Conrad for his leadership in giving us an
opportunity to move in that direction. I think Senator Conrad showed
tremendous leadership on behalf of the Democratic members of the Budget
Committee to forgo bringing forward a partisan budget and instead said:
Let's take a look at a long-term budget that can get bipartisan
support, that has been tested, that has been out there, and that is
called Bowles-Simpson.
We are talking about the broad outline. A budget document gives broad
instructions to the committee. It is the so-called macro numbers. I
think the chairman has provided us the leadership on that issue. But do
not get confused, we have a budget for the fiscal year that begins
October 1. We have it earlier than we have ever had it, and it has the
force and effect of law.
Each of the four Republican plans that we will be voting on moves us
in the wrong direction to accomplishing those goals. They use almost
all of the spending cuts that are included in these budgets for
additional tax cuts. It benefits primarily those who do not need an
additional tax cut. The House Republican budget would provide $1
trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, giving millionaires
an average tax cut of $150,000. At the same time, that budget would ask
our college students to pay more by allowing interest rates on their
loans to increase, and they would ask our seniors to pay more by paying
more for their Medicare benefits.
They have it backward. Those who have sacrificed the most during
these economic times under Republican budgets would be asked to pay
more. Those who have benefited the most during that period of time
would get additional tax cuts. That is not what we should be doing. It
would hurt our economic recovery.
It is irresponsible to make the types of cuts that are in the
Republican budget that deal with American innovation. Take a look what
it would do for basic research in this country, which I hope we all
agree is necessary for America to continue to lead the world in
innovation. In my own State of Maryland I look at the jobs we created
in the biotech field, through cybersecurity. Basic research is
critically important to advance those job opportunities and economic
opportunities for America. It would reduce our commitments to building
our infrastructure--our transit systems, our roads, our energy grids.
If we are going to be competitive, we need to rebuild America to meet
the global challenges.
It would reduce our commitments in education. An educated workforce
is America's future. Investing in our children is what we should be
doing. The quality of K 12 would suffer, even pre-K--what they do with
Head Start--and I already mentioned the cost of student loans in
postsecondary education would go up. For our seniors, they would be
thrown into a voucher program in Medicare at the mercy of private
insurance companies and asked to pay more when they are already
overburdened by the costs of their health care.
Under the Toomey budget, they would block-grant Medicaid, throwing
that burden onto our States. Our children and families would suffer.
Under the Paul budget, Social Security benefits would be reduced on
average by 39 percent. Social Security is a vital lifeline for the
people of this country. Turning it into a program that becomes a
political football is not what we need for this country. For our
students, the cost of a college education would be increased.
We need to put forward a credible plan to reduce the deficit. We need
to do this--and we have done it before. When Bill Clinton was President
of the United States and I was serving in the House of Representatives,
we passed a plan that balanced our Federal budget and actually created
a surplus. How did we do it? We did it through a balanced approach. We
did it through cutting spending and raising the revenues so we paid our
bills. What were the results? Our economy took off, creating millions
of jobs. That is what we need to do again.
How do we get this done? Let's get working together. Let's have
Democrats and Republicans work together in order to come up with a
balanced approach that has spending cuts and those who can afford to
pay more should be paying more because it is not fair to future
generations for us to spend money today and ask our children and
grandchildren to pay for it tomorrow.
Let us protect the programs that are important for economic growth,
for the dignity of our seniors, and for the welfare of our children. It
starts with rejecting the extreme partisan budgets that our Republican
colleagues are offering on the floor. I urge my colleagues to reject
those budget resolutions.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho is recognized.
Mr. CRAPO. Mr. President, I appreciate the efforts by our Republican
leader, Mitch McConnell, and by the ranking member of our Senate Budget
Committee, Jeff Sessions, to give the Senate a chance today to do its
job. It has been more than 3 years since the Senate has passed a
budget, almost 1,100 days, $4 trillion in increased debt since we last
had a budget. Yet it seems as if the current majority are the only ones
who do not think passing a budget is part of our job.
I have to stop here for a moment and commend the chairman of the
Senate Budget Committee, Senator Conrad. I know he has fought mightily
to get a budget to this floor. But the politics he faces have not
allowed him to do so. As of today, for 1,100 days we have not been able
to see a budget proposal reach the Senate floor from our committee.
I have worked with Senator Conrad long and hard and will continue to
do so, trying to get a broad, bipartisan solution brought forward. But
today we need to take action on the Senate floor. Everyone else has a
budget. The President has offered a budget. The House Republicans have
offered a budget. The House Democrats have offered a budget. The Senate
Republicans have introduced several budgets, which we will vote on here
today.
Every American family and every American business has to develop a
budget. Previous Congresses, including those that enacted the
Congressional Budget Act last year, clearly saw the importance of
Congress enacting a budget every year. In fact, it was that
congressional budget act that we were able to get in place last year
that put into effect the mechanism we are employing today which says if
the majority party leadership fails to bring a budget forward by the
statutory deadline, then any Senator has the right to call for
consideration of any budget on the Senate Calendar.
Let's look at the budgets we will be voting on today. First we have
the President's budget. At a time when our national debt is more than
$15.6 trillion, well more than 100 percent of our gross domestic
product, the President's budget seemingly makes no acknowledgment of
the dramatic and predictable fiscal crisis we face. Instead of
embracing the comprehensive work of his own fiscal commission, the
Bowles-Simpson commission on which I served, or any of the other key
bipartisan proposals that are available such as the Ryan-Wyden proposal
or the Domenici-Rivlin plan or even coming up with a true reform plan
of his own, the President's budget regrettably remains within the old
discredited framework of trying to tax and spend our way into
prosperity.
The President's budget would raise taxes by $2 trillion. This is in
addition to the $1.2 trillion of tax increases in the health care law
which are just beginning to take effect and will continue to roll out
over the next few years. Perhaps even more remarkable, the President's
budget actually increases spending by $1.2 trillion more than current
law. So another $1.2 trillion in new spending, another $2 to $3
trillion in new taxes, no structural entitlement reform, and no
discretionary spending reform.

Even though it is widely acknowledged that the current paths of our
entitlement programs are unsustainable

[[Page S3207]]

and even though they are on track to soon become insolvent, the
President's budget has no comprehensive reforms to our entitlement
programs--none. The modest amount of health care savings he does
propose would not even be enough to offset the extension of the doc fix
or the other increases in the health care spending he proposes.
This is a dangerous approach, and it should be noted that this budget
failed by a vote of 0 to 414 in the House. Yet we have no other pending
proposal from the other side to consider.
Today the Senate will also have an opportunity to reject the
President's approach to the Federal budget, and I expect it will do so,
just as it did last time. Because the Democratic majority here in the
Senate has failed to produce their own budget, we will also have the
opportunity to vote on some important budget proposals offered by the
House Budget Committee chairman and by our own colleagues here in the
Senate, Senators Toomey, Paul, and Lee. Each of these proposals would
include true comprehensive reforms to our entitlement programs to
prevent the impending insolvency and to protect the programs for
current and future generations, and would put us on a sustained pathway
to balancing our Federal budget.
These budgets also call for comprehensive tax reform which takes us
out of the old paradigm of Congress debating whether to raise or cut
taxes and, instead, these proposals would each in their own way
dramatically streamline the Tax Code, reduce the tax rates, and unleash
significant economic growth in our economy. A byproduct of this robust
economic growth would be an increase in revenues to help us deal with
our pending debt crisis.
I again commend the chairman, Senator Conrad, for his effort to bring
forward a comprehensive plan, a solution--one that originated with
Bowles-Simpson on which he and I sat and one which has then been worked
on by the so-called Gang of Six for a significant amount of time now to
improve and bring forward, and one which the chairman is prepared to
move when the opportunity is available. I have encouraged him to do it
now. I believe we ought to have it on the floor today for this debate.
But whenever the time becomes available, it is a proposal such as this
that we need to be dealing with. We need to develop the bipartisan
support that is necessary to pass it.
What is it? First of all, as we worked on the Bowles-Simpson
commission, we made some basic decisions. We concluded that spending
was the major problem--that is where the major part of the solution
should be--but that revenue was also critical to the solution and that
growing our economy was an important part of anything Congress should
do. We first discussed putting together a strong approach to
entitlement reform, structural entitlement reform. We put strong
spending caps in place and we made clear that our spending patterns in
the Federal budget would be brought under control. In addition,
recognizing the importance and need for strong growth, we concluded
that our Tax Code must be reformed and not on the traditional
battleground of whether to raise taxes on one group or lowering taxes
on another but in a complete paradigm shift to focus on the reforming
of both our corporate and individual tax codes.
If you went about trying to create a Tax Code that was more unfair,
more complex, more expensive to comply with, and more anticompetitive
to our own American business interests, you would be hard pressed to do
it different or worse than we have done with our own Tax Code. We
concluded that we ought to reform that code to develop a strong,
dynamic tax code for America to go forward with. That is why we
proposed broadening the base, reducing the rates, and reforming the way
we tax in America by simplifying our Tax Code and making America a
strong, powerful, and robust economy as it historically has been.
Then we put together what is critical for any plan to succeed, and
that is an enforcement mechanism. Congress has a perfect record of
violating its own budgets. Congress has a record of ignoring the
budgets, simply getting 60 votes to waive the Budget Act whenever
Congress wants to spend in excess of a budget. Literally in every
budget for the last two decades or more, Congress has done so;
Republican or Democratic, the Congresses have done so. What we put
together in our negotiations was an enforcement plan that would keep
Congress within the walls of the budget we adopt. It would have a
series of points of order to protect against the declaration of
emergencies unjustifiably and would then force even emergency spending,
that usually is conducted outside the budget, to be done in the face of
a sequestration backed up by 67-vote points of order on the floor of
the Senate. This kind of strong enforcement is also critical to what we
must do to protect our Nation.
We need a comprehensive plan, we need to have entitlement reform, we
have to have discretionary spending reform, and we need to have budget
enforcement that is solid. We need to strengthen our revenue stream and
enforce our Tax Code by lowering taxes. That gives American businesses
the opportunity to compete aggressively across the globe.
If we do so, we will see a strong revenue component to our reform
measures, and we will see strong growth coming out of the fact that we
put together effective spending controls. But we have to get there. We
have to do it.
I appreciate the opportunity to work with Senator Conrad as we try to
put this kind of broad, comprehensive reform package together and build
bipartisan support for it. But I am very discouraged still that we
cannot get a budget proposal onto the floor of the Senate that we can
work on.
I also appreciate the leadership of Senator McConnell and Senator
Sessions, who have given the Senate the opportunity today to debate
this issue and have votes, at least, on meaningful proposals that move
us down the path I have discussed, and put us onto a pathway for
economic prosperity and growth for all.
America is at a terrible crisis point. Our national debt is now
exceeding over 100 percent of our GDP and threatens our economy. We
must take action. We cannot let another year go by without adopting a
budget on the floor of the Senate.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cardin). The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. I would say to Senator Boxer the situation we find
ourselves in is we only have 34 minutes left on our side. I will yield
7 minutes to Senator Boxer.
Senator Murray is here now.
Mrs. BOXER. I will wait.
Mr. CONRAD. We have a situation in which our time is rapidly
fleeting. They have much more time left on their side than we do on
ours.
Could the Senator do her presentation in 7 minutes?
Mrs. MURRAY. I will attempt to do my best.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator
Murray be allowed to speak for 7 minutes followed by Senator Boxer for
7 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Washington is recognized.
Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I wish to thank Senator Conrad for his
leadership on this issue. At the end of last week, the Republicans in
the House of Representatives passed legislation that continues their
mad dash away from the bipartisan Budget Control Act and reflects the
upside-down priorities that are guiding their party and stands
absolutely no chance of passage in the Senate.
I think it would be very helpful at this point to remind my
colleagues of the recent history that has brought us to this point.
In August of last year Democrats and Republicans came together, and
we agreed to the Budget Control Act to cut spending and put in place a
process for additional deficit reduction. The purpose of that
bipartisan agreement was to move toward serious deficit reduction and
to give some consistency to the Federal budget so the American people
would not be threatened with a government shutdown every few months.
That bipartisan deal sets the levels for next year's discretionary
spending, which allows Congress to do its jobs and work to allocate
Federal resources toward investments in jobs, infrastructure,
innovation, maintaining our commitment to our servicemembers and their
families, and protecting and supporting the middle-class families and
so much more.

[[Page S3208]]

That was the agreement we came to. Speaker Boehner shook on it,
Minority Leader McConnell shook on it, Majority Leader Reid signed it,
joined many of my colleagues in voting for it, and then President Obama
signed it into law. It became the law of the land. I would add it is
binding and replaces and carries more weight than a budget resolution.
It makes the budget resolutions we are debating today nothing more than
political theater.
Senate Democrats fully intend to honor our word and stick to the
bipartisan budget levels for next year, and Senate Republicans in our
Appropriations Committee, including the minority leader, recently voted
to stick to those levels as well. I was disappointed that less than 9
months after we shook hands on that deal House Republicans turned right
around and broke it. They put appeasing their extreme base ahead of the
word they gave to us and the American people. They demonstrated clearly
that a deal with them isn't worth the paper it is printed on.
Despite House Republicans reneging on the deal, the Budget Control
Act is the law. It is signed, and we have so many challenges ahead of
us as a nation we cannot afford to relitigate bipartisan deals every
time members of the extreme end of the Republican Party make some noise
in a meeting. House Republicans are not only trying to relitigate that
Budget Control Act, they want to pretend it never happened.
As part of that deal, in addition to the $1 trillion in discretionary
spending cuts, a joint select committee on deficit reduction was formed
to reduce the deficit by at least an additional $1.2 trillion. In fact,
if they couldn't come to an agreement, the bipartisan Budget Control
Act put in place automatic spending cuts, or sequestration, which
spread evenly across defense and nondefense spending.
We all knew at the time the sequestration was not the ideal way to
reduce spending, but we wanted to have that in place so that painful
cuts were prominent and would help both sides to come to a bipartisan
compromise.
I was called on by the majority leader to cochair that committee with
Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling, and I am proud of that
committee's hard work. I was extremely disappointed in the end that
committee was not able to come up with a bipartisan deal.
I want to be clear--because this is very relevant today--we weren't
able to get a deal because Republicans refused to even consider tax
increases on the wealthiest Americans. The talks fell apart around that
issue and that issue alone.
I came to the table with many of my colleagues with proposals for
serious compromises on spending and a willingness to move forward with
smart changes to strengthen entitlements. We knew many of these
compromises would be painful, but we were willing to put them forward
to get to a bipartisan deal and a balanced deal. But as much as we
offered, we couldn't get our Republican colleagues to give an inch when
it came to taxes on the wealthiest Americans and the biggest
corporations even though the rich are paying the lowest tax rates today
in generations. They were fundamentally opposed to any plan that would
call on the wealthy to pay a penny more in taxes.
In poll after poll Americans overwhelmingly say they want to see a
balanced approach to tackling the deficit and debt that puts everything
on the table, including revenue. Every single bipartisan group that has
come together to tackle this--from Simpson-Bowles, Domenici-Rivlin,
Gang of 6--has included a balanced approach that reduces spending and
raises revenues. That is the only real and fair way to tackle this
challenge, and it simply doesn't make any sense to solve this problem
with cuts alone.
So as we watch House Republicans rolling back the automatic cut they
don't like and acting as though the bipartisan Budget Control Act never
happened, I say to them today what I said to the Republicans in the
joint select committee: We will not allow the debt and deficit to be
reduced on the backs of our middle-class and most vulnerable Americans
without calling on the wealthiest to contribute as well. It is not
fair, it is not what the American people want, and it is not going to
happen. We are facing these automatic cuts because Republicans continue
to protect the rich above all else. Unless that changes before the end
of the year, our country is going to have to face the consequences of
intransigence.

Republicans in the House of Representatives are not only acting as
though the BCA never happened, they are highlighting the moral and
intellectual bankruptcy of a party that allows itself only to think in
terms of cutting, shrinking, eliminating, and never in terms of
investing and growing and fairness. The legislation they passed would
roll back sequestration for next year by simply taking funding from
programs middle-class families and the most vulnerable Americans count
on and shifting it to defense. They want all of the deficit reduction
from the Budget Control Act without any bipartisan compromise or shared
sacrifice.
Since they refuse to consider raising taxes on the wealthy, the only
way they can increase spending on defense is by absolutely devastating
critical government investments in our families and in our future.
According to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, the House legislation would not only roll back
sequestration on the defense side, it would increase overall defense
spending by over $8 billion.
And while they may say they are rolling back the automatic cuts on
non-defense spending too, this report shows House Republicans are
slashing these programs almost three-quarters of the way to what would
be cut under sequestration.
Since they need to find a way to pay to undo the automatic cuts they
don't like, their bill cuts even deeper into programs millions of
families across America count on.
According to that same CBPP report, the Republican legislation would
cut food assistance to the most vulnerable families, Medicaid, the
Children's Health Insurance Program, and block grants for States to run
programs to help families and workers get back on their feet.
So House Republicans are actually increasing defense spending,
protecting the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations, and
throwing the entire burden on the backs of middle class families and
the most vulnerable Americans.
That's not just bad policy, it is simply wrong.
If Democrats were willing to accept a wildly imbalanced deficit
reduction plan to avoid the automatic cuts, we would have done that in
the Joint Select Committee. But we didn't then, and we won't now.

Any bipartisan deficit reduction plan, whether the goal is to reduce
the deficit in a better way than the sequesters or to put our country
on sound fiscal footing over the long term, has to be balanced. It has
to be fair. And it has to work for middle class families across
America. That means responsibly cutting spending. It means making sure
entitlement programs that seniors and the most vulnerable families
depend on are strengthened and secured for the next generation. It
means examining where we can save money on the defense side. And it
means raising revenue from the wealthiest Americans and biggest
corporations who are paying close to the lowest levels in generations.
Because budgets aren't just numbers on a page. They aren't just about
charts and formulas and trajectories. Those are important but budgets
are also about real people, with real lives. They are about investments
in our families, our communities, and our economy. They are about the
kind of country we want to be now and in the our future. And above all,
budgets are about the choices and priorities of a nation.
Democrats are willing to make compromises. We are willing to have
those tough conversations and come to the difficult agreements we know
are necessary. We are willing to put everything on the table.
And I truly hope Republicans decide they are ready to do the same and
end their commitment to protecting the rich from paying a penny more in
taxes. Because while so many families continue to struggle, I think
it's more than fair to ask the richest Americans to pay their fair
share.
While we scour programs that so many middle class families rely on
for

[[Page S3209]]

fat to trim, I think it makes sense to scour the tax code in just the
same way and eliminate the egregious loopholes that the wealthiest
Americans and biggest corporations take advantage of.
And while oil and gas companies are making record profits, I think it
just makes sense to end the handouts they get every year from U.S.
taxpayers.
So Democrats stand ready to work with Republicans on this. But what
House Republicans did last week has moved us in the wrong direction,
and makes it even harder to get to the bipartisan deficit reduction
deal they say they want.
So I urge them to end this partisanship.
Stop allowing a small and extreme minority of members to dictate
policy for an entire chamber of Congress. Stop protecting the
wealthiest Americans from sharing in the sacrifices so many Americans
are making every day, and to truly work with us to get this done for
the American people.
As soon as that happens, Democrats stand ready to get to a balanced
and bipartisan deal.
The choices we make as a body in the coming months will affect every
single American. As we have said from the start, we will put everything
on the table, but that word is ``everything.'' We cannot come to a
solution in America unless everybody contributes and there is shared
sacrifice. That is the principle we have been fighting for, it is the
one we will continue to fight for, and that is what the American people
want. I am proud to stand with my party to continue to fight for that.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California is recognized.
Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I rise to say that it is stunning to see
the Republican Party running away from a bill they supported and a deal
they cut. The deficit reduction deal was led by Senator Conrad. The
Budget Control Act is the law of the land. Instead they are offering up
a series of budgets that I believe will destroy this country.
Why do I say that? Because they destroy the middle class and they
give to the millionaires and the billionaires. That is a recipe for a
third world nation, the haves and the have-nots. I hope the American
people wake up and pay attention because a budget is a statement of who
we are as a people.
I was proud to serve on the Budget Committee. I wish I was still on
there, but I had other options for my State. I decided to leave the
Budget Committee and go on the Commerce Committee. That is one tough
committee, and we are going to miss Senator Conrad. His leadership is
exemplary, and he has explained why the replacement budgets the
Republicans have offered are unworkable. Some of them don't even make
any sense.
This is serious business because one of them did pass the House. Not
only did it pass the House, but then they passed another law, and we
call it reconciliation, which is dangerous in what they did. They stood
with all of their heart, with all of their soul, with all of their
power and their fervor to fight for the 1 percent. They are fighting
for the millionaires, the multimillionaires, the billionaires, and the
trillionaires; that is who they are fighting for. They are giving them
back an average of $150,000 a year. Over the 10-year period that
average millionaire can write a big kiss to the Republicans if this
ever becomes law because they would get back $1.5 million over the 10-
year period.
How do they pay for this largess? How do they pay for this warm,
fuzzy hug to the people who have everything? They cut the heart out of
the middle class. I will give some examples. They would allow student
loan rates to double so students would have to pay not a 3-percentage
point interest rate on their student loans but over 6 percent.
They will cut the heart and soul out of America's infrastructure. Did
you ever look at the construction industry lately? Well, there are 1.4
million unemployed construction workers. We need to make sure they are
building the roads, highways, and the 70,000 bridges that are
deficient. Half of our roads don't meet the standards. We need to
rebuild America, as the President said--not Afghanistan, not Pakistan.
Thank you very much. Iraq? The blood of our people is on the ground
over there. It is time to spend that money here as our President has
said.
They continue all that war spending, they add to that war spending,
and they expect everybody else to stand back and quietly accept a
doubling of their student loan rate and a cut in the transportation
program.
They end Medicare, period. They are going to turn it into a voucher
system, and our elderly are going to have to negotiate to try and find
a way to pay for health insurance, and it will cost them thousands of
dollars more.
One of these budgets actually cuts Social Security by 39 percent.
Imagine a Social Security recipient living on $18,000 getting a cut of
almost 40 percent.
So this is what they are doing, I say to my colleagues. They
eliminate the Department of Education. They eliminate the ability for
many people to pay for their energy assistance in the winters. They
walk away from alternative energy, which is going to free us from
foreign oil and make us safer. That is what they do, and they do it all
in the name of tax breaks for the people in America who--I am very
proud of them. They made it. In my State, a lot of those folks who have
made it have written to me and said: Senator, we want everybody to have
the chance we had.
The only passion of Republicans is for those who have. They practice
Robin Hood in reverse. In one of the budgets, they even--I think it is
the Ryan budget--tax the poorest people. They tax the poorest people.
They raise taxes on the poorest people, and they cut taxes on the
richest people. Robin Hood in reverse. Isn't that sweet? Isn't that
kind? Not. So they bring America to its knees. They walk away from the
Budget Control Act. Do we know why they don't like it? Because it
forces spending cuts across the board. I don't like that, but we are
serious about deficit reduction.
In my closing remarks I will say this: In the last 40 years, one
party balanced the budget. In the last 40 years, one party created a
surplus. That happens to be the Democratic Party and a Democratic
President named Bill Clinton. How did we do it? We met each other
halfway. We said that when we are faced with a crisis, we have to put
everything on the table and everybody makes a little bit of a
sacrifice. It is no big deal. We ask the people who have the most to do
a little more, and we find ways to cut spending. That is what we did in
the Clinton years. Do we know what happened? We created I think 23
million new jobs. We created 23 million new jobs. We balanced the
budget, we created a surplus, and now we have to listen to the
demagogues over there lecture us about how to balance the budget.
Wrong. We know how to do it. They don't know how to do it. All they
know how to do is stand up and attack our President when our President
inherited this terrible deficit from George W. Bush, who took a
surplus--Bush did--and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can
see. And we were losing--I ask unanimous consent for 30 additional
seconds.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mrs. BOXER. We were losing how many jobs a month? We were losing
800,000 jobs a month when our President took over. The country was
falling apart.
He saved the auto industry--it is back on top--when others said: Let
them go bankrupt. He started the job creation. It is not good enough,
but I will tell my colleagues one thing: If we are going to make it
better, we better start working together.
Let's live by the Budget Control Act that is the law of the land, and
let's use that time to find a long-term solution, as we did in the
Clinton years.
Thank you very much. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I wish to make a reference to the Budget
Control Act. One of my colleagues said we are running away from the
Budget Control Act. I would suggest that is not accurate. In truth, the
Budget Control Act was a cap on spending, and the Republicans have
proposed that we spend less than that, as any economist would tell us
we need to do because it wasn't sufficient.
The difficulty arises, however, when we consider what President Obama
proposed with regard to the Budget Control Act. It is amazing. In
August President Obama signed the Budget

[[Page S3210]]

Control Act as an agreement to raise the debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion
in exchange for reducing spending by $2.1 trillion. He signed that, it
went into effect, and it is the current law today. But when he proposed
his budget in January of this year that we will vote on later today--
and I expect it will not get a single vote, and it should not--
President Obama's budget wiped out half of those savings. So $1
trillion of those savings were wiped out, and he replaced it with
almost--he added more spending in addition--Mr. President, I am having
a little trouble thinking here.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate will be in order. The Senate will
suspend for a moment.
The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. So I think the dramatic event that has gone
unappreciated is that the President's budget eviscerates the Budget
Control Act and puts us back on full speed tax and spend.
I see my colleague Senator Enzi is here, a senior member of the
Budget Committee who has been involved in so many important issues. He
is an accountant, a small businessman, and he understands the real
world and the value of a dollar. I yield to Senator Enzi.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I thank the ranking member of the committee
for all of his work on this issue and the suggestions he has as to the
importance of what we are doing today.
I rise today to discuss our Nation's budget situation and the budget
proposals we will vote on later today. While I am pleased that my
colleagues have put forth a number of good ideas, this debate is long
overdue.
The Congressional Budget Act sets a statutory deadline of April 1 for
the Senate Budget Committee to report a budget resolution and a
deadline of April 15 for completion of a congressional budget. Despite
these statutory deadlines, it has been more than 3 years since the
Senate passed a budget, and the majority party once again refuses to
debate this important topic through the normal budget process. We did
not mark up a budget in the Senate Budget Committee, and we have not
been given the opportunity to offer amendments to any of the budgets
that are before us on the Senate floor. That is disappointing.
With a national debt approaching $16 trillion, and it is hard for me
to even say $16 trillion--I saw a kid with a t-shirt that said,
``Please don't tell him what comes after $1 trillion.'' With $16
trillion in debt, we cannot afford to continue operating without a
budget that is a blueprint to put the country on a sustainable path in
both the short term as well as the long term, and we better be looking
at that long term as well.
We cannot continue to simply spend money we don't have without a plan
to get our spending under control. We are so bad on spending that we
are taking 10 years' worth of revenue to pay for 2 years' worth of
projects, and those are projects that will continue after that. I don't
know what we do after the 2 years. How far out can we borrow money that
may not even come in because it might not even be budgeted? A budget is
supposed to do just that--it is supposed to put spending under control.
But instead, for the third year in a row, it looks as if the Senate
majority will refuse to pass a plan to help fix the fiscal crisis we
face.

In the 3 years since the Senate majority passed a budget, our country
has spent approximately $10.4 trillion. We have accumulated around $4.5
trillion in gross debt, which translates to an additional $15,000 for
every man, woman, and child--$15,000 for every man, woman, and child--
which brings it up to about $49,000 total for every man, woman, and
child. Since we last adopted a budget, we have spent more than $626
billion on net interest payments to service the debt alone. These are
unsustainable levels of spending. Yet the majority continues to ignore
the problem and refuses to take these numbers seriously and consider,
much less pass, a budget.
The majority argues that we have a budget in place because of the
passage of the Budget Control Act, which also governed our spending in
fiscal year 2011. But if that truly governed what we are doing, why did
the President even submit a budget to us? If that was the budget, he
shouldn't have gone to all the effort to put his own budget together.
But he felt he needed to put a budget together.
In fiscal year 2011, the government brought in slightly more than
$2.3 trillion in revenue. At the same time we collected $2.3 trillion,
we spent $3.6 trillion. In other words, we overspent by $1.3 trillion.
That is more than 50 percent of the revenue we were expecting. We are
on pace for another $1 trillion deficit this year. The Budget Control
Act may include some spending limits, but with record trillion-dollar
deficits, the Budget Control Act cannot replace an actual budget that
puts in place long-term spending cuts and helps get our country back on
the path to balance. Again, if that Budget Control Act really took care
of everything, the President would not have needed to submit a budget.
He did.
I applaud the President for appointing a deficit commission. We tried
to pass that as a bill. It came close, but it didn't make it. He saw
there was a need, and he appointed a commission. The commission was
cochaired by Erskine Bowles and Senator Alan Simpson. They painted a
pretty bleak picture for our country. More than a year and a half has
gone by since they painted that bleak picture, and it has gotten worse,
not better. I really expected at the State of the Union that year that
the President would have painted the same bleak picture he had been
handed by the deficit commission. It was scary. It is now scarier. But
he didn't. Instead, he gave us another stimulus budget. I think if he
had painted the bleak picture in the State of the Union that was handed
to him by the deficit commission, if he had painted that same picture
and not placed a solution out there but painted the picture so America
would understand where we are with the debt and the deficit--if he had
done that, he could have come out with a budget that was parallel to
what Simpson-Bowles had, and I think we would have had a solution over
a year ago.
We have a nearly $16 trillion debt that keeps growing. It is
unaffordable, and we need to make a change. What will happen if we
don't act and if we don't cut spending? We won't be able to afford the
military we need. People will have drastically reduced Social Security
checks. Roads won't be fixed. All of our money will go toward paying
interest on the debt.
People shouldn't doubt that this is real. There were riots in the
streets in Greece when their government was forced to deal with the
realities of debt. In the United States, we owe $49,000 for every man,
woman, and child. In Greece, they only owe $39,000 and had to make
drastic cuts, and they had riots in the streets. Now they have stepped
back with the recent elections and are trying to turn away from the
reality of their debt. Does that sound familiar?
I have news for my colleagues. Our debt per person, as I mentioned,
is more than Greece's debt per person. It is more than Italy's debt per
person. In fact, the United States owes more than all of the Euro
countries and the United Kingdom put together.
My Republican colleagues and I have put forth a series of budgets
that would help to improve the fiscal situation. I drafted legislation
that would reduce spending by 1 percent per year until we reach
balance. By reducing spending by 1 percent, we can achieve balance by
fiscal year 2017. That is a 1-percent reduction per year to 2017, and
most of the people I have talked to--and I have talked to a lot of
people in Wyoming and some other places around the country--have said 1
percent is not bad. One percent is definitely not bad if we compare it
to the possibility of a 19-percent cut when we step off the cliff.
The House of Representatives passed a budget last year that cut
spending by $5.8 trillion. This year the House passed a second budget
that would reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion, in comparison to the
President's budget over the next decade, which does nothing to improve
the short- or long-term economic outlook of the country. In fact,
President Obama's budget would make things worse.
Senator Toomey has put together a detailed budget plan that would
balance the budget within 8 years. It would enact corporate tax reform,
and it would adopt important changes to

[[Page S3211]]

the entitlement programs that are the drivers of the Nation's
unsustainable debt.
Senator Paul has put forth a budget that would balance within 5
years. Of course, it eliminates four departments and reduces spending
by $8 trillion over the next 10 years. It seems radical, but we are
facing a cliff, and he is willing to put a budget out there.
Senator Lee has also introduced a budget that balances our budget by
fiscal year 2017 by cutting spending by $7.1 trillion over the next 10
years, and it, too, reforms Medicare and Social Security.
Why do we have to reform Medicare? Well, in the health care reform
bill we took $\1/2\ trillion out of Medicare. It was already going
broke but, don't worry, we put in a special panel that will tell where
cuts can come from each and every year, and if we don't suggest
different cuts, those go into effect without a vote of the U.S. Senate.
The only places they can cut are doctors, hospitals, nursing homes,
home health care, and other providers. If you do not have a doctor, I
do not think you have much medical care.

There are going to have to be reforms in Medicare. We have already
forced that. For Social Security, there are not as many people working
now as will soon be on Social Security, and that creates problems. I do
not agree with everything that is included in these budgets I have
mentioned, but I want to commend my Republican colleagues for making
tough choices and putting forth solutions.
While they have been doing that, President Obama and the Senate
majority have ignored the problem and refused to acknowledge the need
to cut spending. They have demonized Republicans and suggested it is
our intention to harm seniors, poor people, and children. One
advertisement showed a picture of House Budget Chairman Ryan pushing an
elderly woman off a cliff. That kind of rhetoric does not help
anything, that rhetoric is over the top, while their solutions have
been nonexistent.
Last year, President Obama's budget was such an empty proposal that
it failed by a vote of 0 to 97 in the Senate. In the House this year,
his latest budget failed by a vote of 0 to 414. I suspect it may face
the same fate when it is considered later today--the same one they
voted on. Not a single Member of either party was willing to support
the President's budget proposal. How is that for leadership?
In some of the countries that have a parliamentary form of
government, they have heard about these votes and are terribly shocked
because in their country it would call for a special election and a new
Prime Minister.
We will be voting on five budgets later today--four from Republican
Members and President Obama's budget. Absent from the discussion is a
budget produced by the Senate majority that is shirking their
responsibility to govern.
We are in too serious a situation to continue ignoring the budget
problems we face. At a time when the national debt breaks down to more
than $49,000 for every person in Wyoming and across this country, we
cannot afford to continue business as usual. We cannot continue punting
the tough decisions simply because the tough decisions might impact our
reelection campaigns. The decisions that are painful today will be even
more painful in the future.
We talk about pay-fors here when people want to do a new program or
continue an old program with additional expenses, but we better start
including the debt. Our debt is greater than the value of everything we
produce in this country in a year. That is the gross national product.
The debt is greater than the gross national product. There are a lot of
stories about what happens when your debt gets greater than the gross
national product, and none of them is good.
I have heard from a lot of people in Wyoming about the national debt
and the lack of a budget for more than 3 years. While they have
differing viewpoints on the best solution, they have one common
message: Do something. Do something, and do it as soon as possible. I
am concerned that, after votes, we will end up in the same place we
started--without a budget and without a fiscal plan to get our Nation's
debt and deficit in check. I do not know about you, but it is keeping
me up nights.
Some of my colleagues have offered plans to make that happen. Those
who control the Senate appear content to sit on the sidelines and
criticize. While that happens, we continue to add trillions of dollars
to our national debt. I would encourage my colleagues on the other side
of the aisle to think about what that means to future generations and
join us in finding a plan to fix our fiscal woes.
I know that is what they are thinking about because I have been in
meetings off of the Hill where they have talked about this same thing.
But we have to solve it; we cannot just talk about it. We cannot give
it lip service when we are off of the floor and excuse it when we are
on the floor.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, before Senator Enzi leaves the floor, he
made reference to the fact that in the European parliamentary system,
when a Prime Minister proposes a budget that fails, that would be cause
for collapse of the government and a new election.
He also correctly recalled how the deficit commission that was
appointed by President Obama came back with a number of recommendations
that would have gone far farther than the President's budget in dealing
with our debt course.
But I would ask the Senator about that moment he mentioned, after the
debt commission reported, when the President came before the joint
session of Congress to give the State of the Union. Was the Senator
surprised and disappointed that the President virtually ignored the
debt commission and did not take the opportunity to explain to the
whole audience of the American people that we are on an unsustainable
course that could lead to financial catastrophe?
Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I was both surprised and disappointed. I
thought he had a unique opportunity, and it had been handed to him on a
platter that he designed. He appointed these people, and they put a lot
of hours into it, including the Senator from North Dakota, who is here
on the floor, and came up with a plan. It was not a pleasant plan by
anybody's imagination. It was an important plan by everybody's--well,
evidently not everybody or we would have adopted it by now. But it had
some critical things in there that should be taken care of, that should
be considered in a budget, and should have leadership coming from the
White House. That is where leadership on budgets happens.
I remember being in the Wyoming legislature. We have a requirement
that you have to balance the budget each and every year, and we do
that. If you find out there is going to be a deficit before the
legislature meets--and they only meet for 20 days in the budget year--
if you know about it before that time, then the legislature has to make
those cuts. One of the things I noted was when we made the cuts, the
people in the administration picked out something that was painful and
made that cut so the constituents out there would say: Oh, that really
hurt. Those stupid legislators picked the wrong things. Well, it was
not the legislators who picked the wrong things. It was the people in
charge of each of those trying to make sure the legislature felt pain.
If that deficit is noted outside of the time of the few days that the
legislature meets, then the Governor has to make the cuts. Virtually
everybody in the administration worked for the Governor. So when he
made the cuts, they took the priorities and they chopped off the lowest
priorities, so it was not noticeable around the State, and it works out
well. That is leadership. That is tough leadership because the Governor
does not like to have to be the one who is held up for all the scrutiny
of what is spent.
That is what the President has to do. That is the President's job, to
get this budget back in balance. There are some examples around the
world where, when they put the budget on a path to balancing, the
economy comes up.
Mr. SESSIONS. Yes.
Mr. ENZI. That gives people a little bit of confidence of what can
happen. Right now, there is not a lot of confidence around this
country, so the economy is dropping. But a good budget, that follows a
plan, that gets us in

[[Page S3212]]

fiscal stability, would make a huge difference for this country and
stimulate business.
Mr. SESSIONS. I could not agree more. I do believe the debt course we
are on, which is unsustainable--every expert and the witnesses who come
before the Budget Committee on which Senator Enzi and I serve have told
us it is unsustainable, and if we get off of it and tighten our belts
and do things such as Governor Bentley in Alabama is doing, Governor
Christie has had to do, Governor Brown is now facing in California--
they let that State go so far out of control, it is going to be
difficult to bring it back--but they have to make tough choices. If we
do that, I believe we will get some positive impact on the economy from
the confidence that restores.
I say to Senator Conrad, I see Senator Lieberman is here. I would be
willing to yield if you are ready to use some time now.
Mr. CONRAD. Could I say to my colleague, we have 17 minutes left on
this side. We have four Senators left to speak. The Senator has, I
think, probably 54, 53 minutes left--something like that.
So I say to Senator Lieberman, if you could take about 4 minutes, if
that would work for you.
Mr. LIEBERMAN. I was hoping for 4 \1/4\ minutes. OK. I will do my
best.
Mr. CONRAD. Sold.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I will yield 4 minutes to the Senator
from our side.
Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Senator.
Mr. SESSIONS. He will have a flat 8 minutes.
Mr. LIEBERMAN. That is very generous of my friend.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota
and the Senator from Alabama.
I have been listening to some of the statements that are being made.
They are quite sincere. They are quite interesting. But I am afraid, in
the end, they are not going to signify very much except good
intentions.
We have ourselves in a position here where we all know the country
has a terrible problem. We are spending a lot more than we are bringing
in. The simplest way to explain it is, the last time I looked--I think
I am still close on this--revenues of the Federal Government are about
15 or 16 percent of gross domestic product and the spending of the
Federal Government is about 25 percent of gross domestic product. There
you have a yawning, enormous deficit, which adds up now to a long-term
debt of over $15 trillion.
We cannot go on like this and be a great country. We cannot go on
like this and have any hope of economic recovery. I happen to agree--I
should say in gratitude for the extra time Senator Sessions has given
me--I happen to agree with the last thing he said. I think--and I am
not alone; I think some people on both sides feel this--the best thing
we can do for our economy and economic growth is to adopt a bipartisan
long-term program that will reduce and hopefully eliminate our debt.
Why? Because it will restore confidence in the American economy.
We all know that jobs do not come from government. They should not
come from government or in government. Jobs that people want, need,
come from the private sector. The last time I looked, the private
sector--American business--was sitting on somewhere between $2 trillion
and $3 trillion of liquid assets that they are not spending. Why aren't
they spending it? They have very little confidence in the future--not
just confidence about how the economy is going to be, but what we are
going to do, what the government is going to do.
I think if we adopted a long-term bipartisan debt reduction program
that gave them some sense of security about what taxes and spending
policies were going to do for some years ahead, they would start to
invest that $2 trillion to $3 trillion again, and that would create
hundreds of thousands of jobs that people desperately need, who are
trying so hard to get back to work.
Look, basically we know what we have to do to make this happen. To
state it bluntly, it has to be a combination of tax reform and
entitlement reform. We have to raise revenues so they get back up to
18, 19, 20 percent and we have to bring spending down--most of the
spending increases are coming from entitlements--to about 18 or 19
percent of GDP so we can be in balance. It is not very mysterious how
we are going to do this. But the political will is not there now to
make those tough decisions.
Today is a classic moment. We have these budget resolutions that are
before us as a matter of privilege. They are privileged matters. I have
wanted to vote to proceed to some of them just to get on the subject
matter, hoping that maybe the door would be opened for direction to
various committees to come back with long-term solutions, as I have
talked about.
We all know the Bowles-Simpson model is the one we are going to
eventually get to. The question is, how close do we get to the fiscal
cliff--or has our country gone over the cliff, falling down--and,
finally, we rush in here and in a panic rescue it with something like
Simpson-Bowles?
The closest Senate proposal that would do what we need to do is the
one my friend from North Dakota has tabled in the Budget Committee. I
wish we could vote on it. I do not know how many votes we would get,
but I wish we could at least start the process.
I know everybody says we are going to come back after the election
and there is going to be a burst of courage, I guess because the
election is over, and we are going to do the Simpson-Bowles tax reform
and entitlement reform. What I am sort of hearing in the wind around
here is, do not count on it. I hope so. Senator Conrad and I, it is
going to be our last couple of months on this particular stage. There
is nothing I know he would like more to be part of, and I can tell you
nothing I would like more to be part of, than doing a bipartisan, long-
term debt reduction program.
But I am fearful that it is asking an awful lot of the system in a
short period of time, and the tendency will be to protect us from
falling off the cliff by extending everything that is going to expire
at the end of the year: stopping the sequestering, stopping the end of
the Bush tax cuts. I hope I am wrong. I know there are some bipartisan
groups that I have been part of that are working to get ready for that
point.
That is important work, because it cannot spring out of nowhere. But
our country's future is at stake, the future of the greatest economy in
the history of the world, because of our irresponsibility is the only
thing I can say, and we have been part of it. I take blame for part of
it. We are not doing what the country needs us to do.
I am going to vote against the motions to proceed, because each of
them, the proposals before us do not achieve anything near what we need
to do in terms of a balance--entitlement reform, tax reform.
I do want to say one other thing which I hope we can get to soon. To
say the obvious, but sometimes it is important to say it, the existing
budget process has broken down. It does not work. It is not related to
the reality of the economic or political times we are in. So the budget
process does not work. Let me cite a couple of statistics. Not since
early in 2009 has the Congress managed to actually pass a real annual
budget resolution. I know the Budget Control Act does some of the
things a budget resolution would do, but not all of them, and it does
not do what the Budget Reform Act of 1974 called on us to do.
Listen to this. Only four times in the last 35 years--four times in
35 years--have the appropriations bills been completed prior to the
beginning of a new fiscal year. What business or what other government
entity could operate like that?
The last time Congress successfully passed all of the appropriations
bills prior to the beginning of a new fiscal year was 1996. We know it
because we have been here. Over and over again, Congress slides from
one temporary short-term appropriations bill to the next, months into
the fiscal year, until we finally throw it into one big hodgepodge,
which is not responsible government, and a lot gets hidden in it.
I want to raise the question--I know my friends on the Budget
Committee have thought about it. I sense my time is up. I wonder
whether we need a commission to take a look in a short period

[[Page S3213]]

of time, 6 months, at the budget process we are following now and make
recommendations for a new process that will work. Maybe it is a lack of
political will and an inability to take on these tough issues now, but
maybe it is the process, and maybe that is something sooner than later
we can work together on.
I thank Senators Conrad and Sessions for allowing me to speak as long
as I was able to.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I would share something that was in last
week's Wall Street Journal, because it deals with an issue that is
important and not to be dismissed, and that is should we begin to make
reductions in spending today. I think Mr. Barro provides some real
valuable insight to that.
With regard to Senator Lieberman, I do think that the budget process
can work. It should be able to work. But it will not work if we do not
try to make it work. Under certain circumstances, it is hard to get a
bipartisan budget if you do not have everybody together. So maybe it is
worth examining whether we can make improvements there.
But Mr. Barro deals with this question. He writes:

He continues. These are the developed countries in the world, OECD
countries.
He goes on:

Two interesting European cases are Germany and Sweden, each
of which moved toward rough budget balance between 2009 and
2011--

That is after the financial crisis--

while sustaining comparatively strong growth--the average
growth rate per year for real GDP for 2010 and 2011 was 3.6%
growth for Germany and 4.9% for Sweden. If austerity is so
terrible, how come these two countries have done so well?
The OECD countries most clearly in or near renewed
recession--Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and perhaps Ireland
and the Netherlands--are among those with relatively large
fiscal deficits.

The deficits for these six countries for 2010 and 2011 were 7.9
percent of GDP. Germany and Sweden did not raise taxes but cut
spending. He goes on to say:

Every time heightened fiscal deficits fail to produce
desirable outcomes, the policy advice is to choose still
larger deficits--

Borrow, tax, and spend. He goes on to say:

If, as I believe to be true, fiscal deficits have only a
short-run expansionary impact on growth and then become
negative, the results from following this policy are
persistently low economic growth and an exploding ratio of
debt to GDP.

Japan, he goes on to note, ``once a comparatively low public-debt
nation, apparently bought into the Keynesian message many years ago.''
That is the ``spend'' message. ``The consequences for today is a ratio
of government debt to GDP around 210 percent, the largest in the
world.''
I ask unanimous consent to have that article printed in the Record
because I think it helps give us some guidance that at some point
bringing spending under control and tightening our deficit clearly
would achieve more financial benefit than continuing to borrow and
spend or create new taxes that depress the economy.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

[From the Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2012]

Stimulus Spending Keeps Failing--If Austerity Is so Terrible, How Come
Germany and Sweden Have Done so Well?

(By Robert J. Barro)

The weak economic recovery in the U.S. and the even weaker
performance in much of Europe have renewed calls for ending
budget austerity and returning to larger fiscal deficits.
Curiously, this plea for more fiscal expansion fails to offer
any proof that Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) countries that chose more budget stimulus
have performed better than those that opted for more
austerity. Similarly, in the American context, no evidence is
offered that past U.S. budget deficits (averaging 9% of GDP
between 2009 and 2011) helped to promote the economic
recovery.
Two interesting European cases are Germany and Sweden, each
of which moved toward rough budget balance between 2009 and
2011 while sustaining comparatively strong growth--the
average growth rate per year of real GDP for 2010 and 2011
was 3.6% for Germany and 4.9% for Sweden. If austerity is so
terrible, how come these two countries have done so well?
The OECD countries most clearly in or near renewed
recession--Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and perhaps Ireland
and the Netherlands--are among those with relatively large
fiscal deficits. The median of fiscal deficits for these six
countries for 2010 and 2011 was 7.9% of GDP. Of course, part
of this pattern reflects a positive effect of weak economic
growth on deficits, rather than the reverse. But there is
nothing in the overall OECD data since 2009 that supports the
Keynesian view that fiscal expansion has promoted economic
growth.
For the U.S., my view is that the large fiscal deficits had
a moderately positive effect on GDP growth in 2009, but this
effect faded quickly and most likely became negative for 2011
and 2012. Yet many Keynesian economists look at the weak U.S.
recovery and conclude that the problem was that the
government lacked sufficient commitment to fiscal expansion;
it should have been even larger and pursued over an extended
period.
This new point is dangerously unstable. Every time
heightened fiscal deficits fail to produce desirable
outcomes, the policy advice is to choose still larger
deficits. If, as I believe to be true, fiscal deficits have
only a short-run expansionary impact on growth and then
become negative, the results from following this policy
advice are persistently low economic growth and an exploding
ratio of public debt to GDP.
The last conclusion is not just academic, because it fits
with the behavior of Japan over the past two decades. Once a
comparatively low public-debt nation, Japan apparently bought
the Keynesian message many years ago. The consequence for
today is a ratio of government debt to GDP around 210%--the
largest in the world.
This vast fiscal expansion didn't avoid two decades of
sluggish GDP growth, which averaged less than 1% per year
from 1991 to 2011. No doubt, a committed Keynesian would say
that Japanese growth would have been even lower without the
extraordinary fiscal stimulus--but a little evidence would be
nice.
Despite the lack of evidence, it is remarkable how much
allegiance the Keynesian approach receives from policy makers
and economists. I think it's because the Keynesian model
addresses important macroeconomic policy issues and is
pedagogically beautiful, no doubt reflecting the genius of
Keynes. The basic model--government steps in to spend when
others won't--can be presented readily to one's mother, who
is then likely to buy the conclusions.
Keynes worshipers' faith in this model has actually been
strengthened by the Great Recession and the associated
financial crisis. Yet the empirical support for all this is
astonishingly thin. The Keynesian model asks one to turn
economic common sense on its head in many ways. For instance,
more saving is bad because of the resultant drop in consumer
demand, and higher productivity is bad because the increased
supply of goods tends to lower the price level, thereby
raising the real value of debt. Meanwhile, transfer payments
that subsidize unemployment are supposed to lower
unemployment, and more government spending is good even if it
goes to wasteful projects.
Looking forward, there is a lot to say on economic grounds
for strengthening fiscal austerity in OECD countries. From a
political perspective, however, the movement toward austerity
may be difficult to sustain in some countries, notably in
France and Greece where leftists and other anti-austerity
groups just won elections.
Consequently, there is likely to be increasing diversity
across countries in fiscal policies, and this divergence will
likely make it increasingly hard to sustain the euro as a
common currency. On the plus side, the differing policies
will provide better data to analyze the economic consequences
of austerity.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I would share a few thoughts in general
about where we are. Our colleagues on the Democratic side have said
they want more taxes. They have not told us what taxes, how much, and
where they would be. But they have told us that. Senator Conrad has
said that.
He has also been open and bold about the need to cut spending. So he
wants more tax increases than I would like and he wants substantial
spending cuts, but that is his view. He stated it publicly. But I will
have to say, that is not the position of the Democratic majority in the
Senate because they have refused to put it on paper.
Senator Conrad was going to have a Budget Committee mark up. We were
going to mark up a budget. He was going to lay out a plan. I guess it
would be somewhat ``Simpson-Bowlesish.'' But it was not offered because
the leadership and I suppose the members of the Democratic Conference
agreed that they do not want to be on record. They would rather do like
last year. And what happened last year?

[[Page S3214]]

They voted against the Toomey budget; they voted against the Ryan
budget; they voted against the Rand Paul budget; and voted against the
President's budget.
They wiped their hands. They did not vote for anything to cause any
pain to anybody. And presumably they thought that was better than
actually being engaged in leading and telling the American people what
they planned to do to change the debt course we are on. That is the
deal.
Well, I would say a couple of things. If I were talking to a group of
American citizens today, I would say this: Do not send one more dime to
Washington, DC until they show you a budget, how they are going to
spend it. I mean, why should they? We get in trouble; we overspend; we
place the Nation at risk. And all we want to say is: Send more money.
You cannot cut, we are going to throw people into the streets, and push
older people off the cliff in a wheelchair.
No, I do not think so. I think the American people need to hold this
Congress, this government, to account. They need to say, we are not
sending you any more money until you get your house in order. And we
are not paying for hot tubs in Las Vegas. We are not throwing away $500
million on a Solyndra loan project that never had a chance to succeed
and was benefiting cronies of the White House. We are not going to pay
for the TSA to have warehouses filled with millions of dollars in
equipment not being used.
You do not have your act together. We want you to get your act
together. We want to see some management. We want to see some
leadership. Who is the top manager in America? It is not the chairman
of the Budget Committee, or the ranking member of the Budget Committee,
it is the Chief Executive. The President heads the executive branch.
Every Cabinet member, subcabinet member, sub-sub-sub cabinet member
works for the President.
We had a situation where it has become clear that for over a year,
people illegally in the country earning money are filing income tax
returns and gaining as much as $4 billion a year in child tax credit
money, a direct payment from the United States for children who do not
even live in the country.
The Inspector General for the U.S. Treasury Department said this
should have been ended, and the IRS is not ending it. Congress ought to
pass a law about it. The House has done so. This Senate has not acted.
Those are the kinds of things that are happening. I would think the
President of the United States, as soon as he learned that, would say:
Stop it today. If you care about the money of the American people, if
you care about the fact that we are now spending about $3.6 trillion
dollars a year, taking in $2.3 trillion a year, so a deficit of $1.3
trillion.
Oh, they say that President Bush increased the deficit. And he did.
But the highest deficit he ever had was about $450-some-odd billion.
The last 3 years under President Obama, the deficits have averaged over
$1.3 trillion a year. Next year, beginning September 30, the next
fiscal year, it is projected to be over $1 trillion again.
This is an unsustainable course. We are looking here for some reality
and leadership. I think it is a stunning, amazing development when we
have the President of the United States at a time of financial systemic
crisis and danger who has the opportunity to lead, who does not lead,
who has an opportunity to tell the American people why we need to
change the course we are on, the fact that it is going to take some
belt tightening and some pain and some sacrifice--not so much, but
some.
We are going to have to do it. And if we do it, the country will be
on a good path. We can save this country. We can avoid a debt crisis
that could happen to us, because indeed our debt per person in America
is higher than that of Greece, higher than that of any other country in
Europe. We are in a dangerous area. We need to get off of it. I am
amazed the President has not led.
I think it is a development of the most stunning nature that he
would, as the law requires, submit the budget he submitted. It is
irresponsible. It did not get a single vote in the Senate last year. It
went down 97 to 0. It was voted down 414 to 0 in the House this year. I
suspect in an hour or so it will go down again on the floor of the
Senate by unanimous vote. That speaks a lot. That says a lot, indicates
the sad state of affairs which we are in.
It is deeply disappointing.
I see Senator Lee from Utah here, who is a new Member of the Senate.
If Senator Conrad doesn't have an objection, I will yield to him and
note that Senator Lee campaigned throughout his State. He talked to
thousands of people. He was elected in this last cycle. He felt the
mood of the people of his State and America, their concern about the
debt course we are on. He has worked extremely hard and has laid out a
proposal that he would like to explain and ask us to support.
I thank the Senator for his leadership and his commitment and his
hard work since he has been in the Senate.
Mr. CONRAD. Might I inquire of Senator Lee, how much time would the
Senator require?
Mr. LEE. Ten or twelve minutes.
Mr. CONRAD. Can we have an agreement for 15 minutes? Is that
reasonable?
Mr. LEE. Yes.
Mr. CONRAD. And if the Senator completes his statement before then,
he can yield back--either way.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, the true greatness of our Nation lies in the
power and promise of the American dream. Unfortunately, for many
individuals and families, this dream has become a national nightmare.
Without the clear priorities and accountability of a budget, we
continue to careen toward the economic cliff, with our massive debt and
trillion-dollar deficits threatening the prosperity of Americans from
every walk of life. To put it simply, we must change course.
Restoring the American dream will require more than clever bumper
sticker slogans. While optimism is an important part of the American
dream, hope simply is not a strategy for the kind of course correction
our country desperately needs.
Doing nothing is no longer an option, although this President and
this Congress have attempted, by not having a budget, to convince the
American people that doing nothing is somehow the only option. Ignoring
our broken entitlement programs, maintaining our complex Tax Code, and
pretending we don't have a spending problem ensures that our economy
will never truly recover and that the American dream will not be
restored.
The good news for Americans is that many of us do have solutions to
confront and correct the country's most pressing challenges. In today's
debate and discussion, the Nation has seen that changing course and
balancing our budget doesn't have to take 30 years, nor does it have to
require the kinds of drastic cuts that could devastate America's most
vulnerable citizens.
As we conclude this debate, I remind my colleagues of the old adage
that ``you can make excuses or you can make progress, but you cannot
make both.'' Given the gravity of our current situation, we should also
recognize that our present path is unsustainable. A course correction
is coming; the question we will be held accountable for answering is
whether that correction comes by choice or as a consequence of making
excuses and doing nothing.
The Saving the American Dream Plan, which I have proposed, puts us on
a sustainable and affordable path toward economic growth. It reforms
our Tax Code to make paying taxes a simple, transparent, and equitable
process that regular people can perform on their own. It empowers
families to save by making savings tax free, which in turn lowers their
tax burden in a way that helps them and our economy. It establishes a
single tax rate. It eliminates the payroll tax, helping all Americans--
especially those at the lowest income level--and it abolishes the death
tax permanently. Under this plan, Americans will no longer be forced to
navigate the complex web of countless loopholes--for people who don't
need them--contained within a tax code that is longer than the works of
Shakespeare.
In addition to placing an enormous burden and imposing immense
uncertainty on our people, such a tax system hides the true size and
cost of government. This plan is simple, and it provides certainty for
individuals and for businesses.

[[Page S3215]]

Opponents of reform will play petty politics and prey on false fears
about the government's ability to help the helpless. They claim that
any course correction in entitlement or social service spending will
damage the social safety net. The truth is that doing nothing will
absolutely and completely destroy the safety net. If we do not change
course, the collapse of safety net services for our most vulnerable
Americans is certain, and it is certain to hurt most those who have the
least.
This plan saves Social Security by transitioning to a real insurance
plan that provides income security for seniors and prevents sudden
poverty as a result of unforeseen events. The affluent elderly, such as
Warren Buffett, will see a decrease in benefits. This plan will allow
people like Mr. Buffett to help in a way that is actually good for our
economy and job creators.
The Saving the American Dream Plan also ends the government takeover
of health care and puts dollars and decisions back into the hands of
families and individuals and their doctors. Just like school choice
allows parents to make sure their kids don't get stuck in a failing
school system, this plan ensures families don't get stuck in a failing
health care system.
Finally, this plan acknowledges that we have a spending problem and
works to reduce the size of government, eliminate waste, lower the
future burden on taxpayers, encourage productive economic activity, and
enhance individual liberty and choice. It reins in spending by a total
of $9.6 trillion over 10 years when compared to President Obama's
budget and by $7.1 trillion as against the CBO baseline.
Supporters of the status quo will have every excuse as to why this
budget or that budget won't work, but now is the time to stop making
excuses and start making progress. Today we will vote on five budget
proposals, but this is only the beginning of the discussion. I can say
confidently that Republicans have done a tremendous amount of work to
craft proposals to begin to change our course and move our country in
the right direction, in a sustainable direction.
The President's budget reflects the status quo: Do nothing, keep our
complex Tax Code and broken entitlement programs, and ignore spending.
As for Senate Democrats, for 3 straight years they have refused to
participate in this discussion except to criticize ideas they don't
like. Leadership is what leadership does. For the past 1,113 days, our
country has suffered from a lack of leadership.
I ask my colleagues, if you cannot vote for these budget plans today,
will you at least do the right thing for the country and put aside
election-year politics, show true leadership, and work with us to
explore and implement real solutions? We cannot stand by the status
quo. We cannot decide by default to do nothing. The American people
expect more, and they deserve better.
We need every American to join us in finding the solutions that will
enable us as a nation to change course. The Saving the American Dream
Plan is about empowering individuals to define their own dream and
ensuring they have every opportunity to make that dream reality.
This is the greatest civilization the world has ever known--not
because government made it great but because Americans continually
reject the status quo, choose to change course when needed, and demand
economic freedom, while ensuring individual liberty and the right to
pursue happiness.
This budget preserves the clear priorities and accountability we must
have to jump-start the economy, create real jobs, strengthen the safety
net, and restore the American dream.
I thank the Chair.
Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I would like to echo what so many of my
colleagues have already explained: that voting on a budget today would
serve no purpose. We keep hearing from our friends on the other side of
the aisle: ``We haven't passed a budget in a thousand days.'' While
this is technically true, this is a technicality without a difference,
and ignores one essential detail: we passed something else which, for
all intents and purposes, accomplishes exactly the same thing as a
budget the Budget Control Act of 2011.
First let's look at what a budget resolution actually is. According
to the Congressional Research Service, a budget resolution:

sets forth aggregate levels of spending, revenue, and public
debt. It is not intended to establish details of spending or
revenue policy and does not provide levels of spending for
specific agencies or programs. Instead, its purpose is to
create enforceable parameters within which Congress can
consider legislation dealing with spending and revenue.

A budget resolution is a document intended to guide Congress, and
never goes to the President for his signature. The Budget Control Act
actually went much further than a budget resolution--it actually set
spending caps for the next 10 years and put them into law--a law signed
by the President. The spending caps alone produce $900 billion of cuts.
In addition, the Budget Control Act created the Super Committee and,
because the committee failed to produce a deficit reduction plan, the
Act calls for automatic cuts--through a so-called ``sequestration''--of
an additional $1.2 trillion.
So Congress has passed over $2 trillion in spending cuts--the biggest
package of spending cuts in American history. Yet some of my colleagues
are now calling on Congress to also pass a budget resolution, despite
the fact that the Budget Control Act has the force of law, and has
spending caps, whereas a budget resolution has none of that and in
fact, the Budget Control Act states clearly that it ``shall apply in
the same manner as for a concurrent resolution on the budget.
In addition, the Budget Control Act is something that we all agreed
to. This legislation passed the Senate and the Republican-controlled
House with wide margins. And this was not a deal that we passed years
ago that we have somehow forgotten about--we passed the Budget Control
Act less than 10 months ago. These budget resolutions diverge greatly
from the deal that we all agreed on. We passed that legislation to
avoid a debt default, to give us some certainty. But here we are 10
months later, rehashing much of the same debate.
Going through the motions of considering a budget resolution would
not be a productive use of our time. Procedural rules require that we
spend up to 50 hours on a budget resolution. And on top of that, they
force us into a ``vote-a-rama'' on all amendments that are offered. So
that means that we would lose a week or 2 on an exercise that is moot
because we already have budget caps. That is time we would not have to
focus on things that will provide needed help to my Minnesota
constituents: creating jobs, helping small businesses, keeping interest
rates low on student loans, and passing a long-term highway bill.
But instead, the minority is insisting that we spend precious time
debating whether or not we should pass a budget resolution. And so here
we are with five pending budget resolutions, and it is hard to tell
which among them is the most detrimental to our country, because they
are all very dangerous.
Senator Paul's proposal eliminates the U.S. Departments of Education,
Energy, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development and turns important
safety net programs like child nutrition and Medicaid into block
grants, resulting in their funding being slashed.
Most of the proposals fundamentally change Medicare from a program
that guarantees health care to seniors to one that gives seniors some
money--but not enough money--to buy health insurance in the private
market. This breaks the promise we have made to Americans--that if they
work hard and pay into the system, their health care will be covered
when they retire.
Yet these massive cuts to programs which benefit millions of
Americans seem designed to bankroll new tax cuts that benefit only the
wealthiest few. The Urban Institute and Brookings Institution's joint
Tax Policy Center estimates that Senator Toomey's proposal gives people
making more than a million dollars a year an average tax cut of
$92,000. And that plan looks reasonable compared to Senator Paul's,
which not only cuts the top tax rates in half for wealthy Americans but
increases taxes on working families.
And all the while, these plans would sacrifice programs that assist
children, seniors, and the poor in favor of those tax giveaways to the
wealthy. That is how these plans can be summarized. If there were a
reason to vote on these proposals, which I do not think there is, then
they would all deserve our full-throated opposition.

[[Page S3216]]

But, as we have pointed out repeatedly, passing a budget resolution
is simply not needed after we have already passed spending caps in the
Budget Control Act. That would be about as productive as asking for
someone to draft up blueprints after they already had built your house.
Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, our Nation faces enormous and worrisome
fiscal challenges. There is no question we must reduce our budget
deficit in the medium-term and prepare for a longer-term future in
which an aging population stresses Medicare and Social Security funds.
And we face, at the beginning of January, the prospect of automatic,
unprioritized, and unwise budget cuts that would do tremendous harm to
just about every program in the government, from domestic programs to
our military, and would in the process threaten our economic recovery.
The way to address those enormous challenges is by coming together to
address the sources of our budget deficit. The solutions must include
prudent, prioritized spending cuts. They will undoubtedly include
reforms to entitlement programs to ensure their long-term viability.
And, as just about any objective observer has repeatedly pointed out,
the solutions must include restoration of revenues lost to the Treasury
through unjustified tax cuts for the wealthiest and unjustified tax
loopholes.
Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to address these
areas--even in painful ways that have a real impact on programs about
which we feel strongly. President Obama has repeatedly reached out to
Republicans in trying to craft a bipartisan agreement that deals with
spending, entitlements and revenues. Senator Conrad and many others on
this side of the aisle have said they will work with our Republican
colleagues to deal comprehensively with the deficit.
Rather than seeking compromise, Republicans seem determined to draw
uncompromising lines in the sand. Today we will vote on extreme budget
proposals that would sacrifice vital programs like education,
transportation and research in order to protect tax breaks for
millionaires and billionaires.
The Republican proposals before us today demonstrate that our efforts
to deal constructively with the deficit have so far fallen on deaf
ears. Rather than offer prudent, thoughtful spending cuts, these
proposals would gut programs that Americans have repeatedly told us to
preserve. Rather than recognize the obvious fiscal reality that revenue
must be part of the equation, these proposals demonstrate a continued,
ideologically motivated refusal to even consider what must obviously be
part of any serious attempt to address the deficit. Rather than reform
entitlement programs so we can maintain our commitment to seniors,
these proposals would upend that commitment.
Perhaps the clearest statement of all of Republican intentions is the
budget passed in the House, one of the proposals we will vote on today.
This budget eliminates the decades-long guarantee of health care for
our seniors, replacing Medicare with a voucher program that would cause
skyrocketing out-of-pocket costs for seniors.
There is more. The Ryan budget proposes to cut billions and billions
from domestic programs, but gives us no specifics as to how those cuts
would be accomplished. It proposes almost no specific spending cuts,
though it promises massive savings. We can see just how devastating
these cuts would be if we assume, in the absence of specific proposals,
that they would be distributed evenly across the budget. If that were
the case, we would lose more than $100 billion in funding over the next
decade for science, including the search for new cures and other new
technologies. We would have space for 2 million fewer Head Start
students to get a jump on their education. More than 9 million college
students would lose $1,000 in Pell grant funding to afford college.
This budget would slash spending to educate our children and to train
our workers. It would cut funding to support new sources of energy and
to protect our national parks and historic sites, and for environmental
protection and other natural resource programs. It would slash funding
to pave our roads and bridges and meet other transportation needs.
And the Ryan plan does not address what budget experts of all
ideological stripes tell us we must address: the need for additional
revenues. Rather than restore revenue, this budget is premised on the
notion that high-income earners haven't gotten enough in tax cuts--and
so it slashes the top tax bracket.
If you are not willing to address revenues, you are not serious about
addressing the deficit. The Ryan budget and the other Republican
proposals before us fail that test. I hope we can dispense with these
proposals and get to the challenging work of dealing with the deficit.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, Senator Harkin is here, and Senator Harkin
needs about 4 minutes; is that right?
Mr. HARKIN. Yes.
Mr. CONRAD. How much time do we have?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Thirteen minutes 20 seconds.
Mr. CONRAD. On the other side?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Twenty-four minutes 46 seconds.
Mr. CONRAD. This might be a useful time to get another consent. If we
can have Senator Harkin for 4 minutes, how much time does Senator
Johnson need?
Mr. JOHNSON of Wisconsin. Not more than 10 minutes.
Mr. CONRAD. OK. I ask unanimous consent that Senator Harkin speak for
4 minutes and Senator Johnson for 10 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I wish to address these budget proposals
in one context. First of all, we have to dismiss the so-called Sessions
budget that is supposedly the Obama budget--it is not. That is not even
serious. Beyond that, we have four Republican budgets. Here is the one
thing people have to keep in mind, especially now: Each one of those
budgets will double the interest rate on student loans beginning on
July 1 of this year--every single one of them.
We were here in the last couple of weeks trying to bring up a bill to
prevent those interest rates from going up, to keep it at 3.4 percent
rather than going to 6.8 percent. The Republicans filibustered that. We
could not even bring it up for discussion, debate, and amending. But
the Republicans kept saying, oh, they want to keep the interest rate at
3.4 percent. Well, quite frankly, I don't see how they can say that and
then vote for each one of these budgets because each one that will be
voted on in about an hour and a half, if it passes, will double the
interest rate on student loans on July 1. At the same time, they
continue to filibuster our bill to even bring it on the floor. My
friends on the other side of the aisle are telling students across the
country they don't want to see the interest rate double, but their
budget has it.
Our former colleague and now the Vice President of the United States
Joe Biden, when he was a Senator, said something I think very savvy one
time: Don't tell me what you value; show me your budget, and I will
tell you what you value.
Mr. President, my friends on the other side may say in public that
they want to prevent the student loan rate hike, but their actual
budget tells a very different story. Likewise, their ongoing filibuster
of our Stop the Student Loan Interest Rate Hike Act tells a different
story. Again, they have blocked us from proceeding to the bill. If we
had proceeded, we could have had a serious discussion about how we pay
for it. They could have offered amendments that we could have voted on.
Instead, they chose to obstruct the entire process, and yet repeatedly
on this floor Republicans, one after the other, came up and said they
want to stop the increase in interest rates from going from 3.4 percent
to 6.8 percent. Don't tell me what you value; show me your budget. I
will give them credit for this: They have shown us their budget, and in
it is a doubling of the interest rate on student loans beginning July
1.
I want to be clear that anybody who votes for any one of these
budgets is voting to double the student loan interest rate on July 1
regardless of what may be said, regardless of crocodile

[[Page S3217]]

tears that may be shed on interest rates and what is happening. The
budgets we are voting on today tell the true story: Republicans are
willing--not only willing, but they are going to, if they vote for
these budgets, double the interest rates on student loans beginning on
July 1. There is just no getting around that, and that is a shame.
We have to stop that interest rate hike on July 1. That is why it is
important to vote down these proposed budgets this afternoon.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin is recognized.
Mr. JOHNSON of Wisconsin. I ask unanimous consent to speak for no
more than 10 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Merkley). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. JOHNSON of Wisconsin. Mr. President, before I start talking a bit
about the budget of my friend Senator Lee, I want to respond to the
comments of the Senator from Iowa in terms of interest rates.
Instead of talking about student rates, let me talk a little about
America's average borrowing cost. Certainly, what I have done is delved
into the budget and taken a look at the history, and from 1970 to
1999--over that 30-year period--the average borrowing cost in the
United States was 5.3 percent. By the way, that was when America was a
far more creditworthy nation, when our debt-to-GDP ratio ranged from
about 40 percent to 67 percent. Now our debt-to-GDP ratio is over 100
percent.
Over the last 3 years our average borrowing cost has been kept
artificially low, at 1.5 percent. So my concern is by not seriously
addressing the problem, by not actually passing a real budget that
starts reining in the growth in government, we are going to go from
that 1.5 percent and revert back to that average mean borrowing cost of
5.3 percent. If we do, that 3.8-percent differential would add $600
billion to $700 billion per year to America's interest expense, and
that would crowd out 60 to 70 percent of all discretionary spending.
That is the interest rate that I am concerned about.
That is the day of reckoning I am concerned about, when global
investors look at the United States and say: You know what. We are not
going to loan you any more money. Or what is more likely to occur, they
will say: We will loan you money but at a far higher rate.
Having made that statement, I would like to talk a little about the
budget of my friend, Senator Lee, and the things I like about it. One
of the things I like to do is take a look at history. I know a lot of
us say we don't have a tax problem, and we don't. It is not that we tax
the American public too little, it is that we spend too much. And this
is some pretty graphic proof.
This reflects our 10-year spending levels. From 1992 to 2000, the
Federal Government spent a total of $16 trillion over that 10-year
period. Over the last 10 years, from 2002 to 2011, the Federal
Government spent $28 trillion.
Now, the debate moving forward is--according to the just released
Obama budget--the President would like to spend $47 trillion over the
next 10 years. The House budget would spend $40 trillion. I guess what
I like about Senator Lee's budget is that he would come in and spend
about $37 trillion and put us on a more aggressive path toward fiscal
sanity. While we hear about Draconian cuts all the time, one doesn't
have to be a math major to realize that moving to $37 trillion, $40
trillion, or $47 trillion is not a cut from $28 trillion. All we are
trying to do is reduce the rate of growth.
The other thing I like about Senator Lee's budget can be illustrated
in terms of this chart, which shows the total Federal debt. I started
this chart in 1987, the tail end of Ronald Reagan's administration,
when our total Federal debt was $2.3 trillion. I want to point out that
it took us 200 years to incur $2.3 trillion. Of course, last year, in
the debt ceiling agreement, this Congress gave the President the
authority to increase our debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion. We will go
through that in less than 2 years. That is a problem.
Of course, if we take a look at President Obama's budget, we can see
how quickly our national debt has increased. But according to President
Obama's budget, in the year 2022 our total Federal debt would be $25.9
trillion, up $10 trillion from what it is today. Senator Lee's budget
would result in a total debt of about $19.1 trillion. Even more
importantly, he stabilizes and then reduces a very important metric,
our overall debt-to-GDP ratio. That is what investors take a look at in
terms of our creditworthiness.
The other thing I like about Senator Lee's budget is by 2022 it will
reduce Federal spending to 17.8 percent of the size of our economy. If
you are like me and you think the root cause of our economic problem is
the size, the scope, and all the rules and regulations, all of
government's intrusion into our lives and the resulting cost of
government, this is the key metric: How large is the Federal Government
in relationship to the size of our economy?
Currently, the Federal Government takes 24 cents of every dollar that
is generated by our economy. If we add in State and local governments,
total government in the United States consumes 39.2 percent. Put
another way, 39 cents of every dollar filters through some level of
government.
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't find government
particularly effective or efficient. To put that in perspective, for
example, the cost of government for Norway last year--one of the
European-style socialist nations--was 40 percent. For Greece, it was 47
percent. Anybody hear of Greece recently? That economic model is
collapsing.
This is why Senator Lee's proposal is important. If we take a look at
spending and revenue generation over the last 50 years, we can see
spending from 1959 through 2008 averaged 20.2 percent. Over the last 3
years we have increased that to 24 percent. Revenue generation has been
18.1 percent over that same time period.
By the way, as much as our friends on the other side of the aisle
want to punish success and increase the top marginal tax rates, the
problem with that is it simply doesn't work. During my lifeline, the
top marginal tax rates have been 90 percent, 70 percent to 50 percent
to 28 percent, 35 percent, 39.6 percent, and now back to 35 percent. In
all that time period the average tax receipts--the maximum amount the
Federal Government could extract from our economy--has averaged very
tightly around that mean of 18.1 percent.
If we ever have any chance of living within our means, we better get
Federal spending down to about that level. That is what Senator Lee's
budget does.
So, again, I thank my friend Senator Lee, as well as Senator Toomey,
and Senator Paul for putting forward serious proposals. I thank all
Republicans in Congress who are actually voting for something because,
Mr. President, Republicans are proving we are willing to be held
accountable to the American people by putting a plan on the table and
showing the American people what we would do to try to get our fiscal
house in order.
With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I will not take more than a few minutes, as
I have explained to the senior Senator from North Dakota. I appreciate
his courtesy, and I ask unanimous consent that my statement be made as
in morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Withought objection, it is so ordered.
(The remarks of Mr. Leahy are printed in today's Record under
``Morning Business.'')
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, before he leaves, I want to say that the
Senator from Vermont has done an incredible job on the Violence Against
Women Act. He has put together a bipartisan coalition, and I would like
to second his words that the House pass our bill. It is a careful
compromise, and it is a delicately crafted compromise.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Will the Senator suspend? How much time does
the Senator from North Dakota yield to the Senator from New York?
Mr. CONRAD. How much time do I have remaining?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is 4 minutes remaining.
Mr. CONRAD. I give the Senator 3 minutes.

[[Page S3218]]

Mr. SCHUMER. I thank my colleague for the time.
Again, I want to compliment the Senator from Vermont and agree with
him and hope we can move the bill forward.
But, Mr. President, I am here to talk about the budget. All afternoon
I have heard my colleagues on the other side of the aisle repeat over
and over that we haven't passed a budget. As my friend from North
Dakota knows, that is clearly not the case.
Last August, President Obama signed a budget for this year that
reduces the deficit by $2 trillion. It is called the Budget Control
Act. It was passed 74 to 26, bipartisan, with many Republicans voting
for it on August 2, 2011.
Despite what we hear on the floor today, after the Budget Control Act
passed, several Senate Republicans, including Senators Grassley,
Alexander, and Collins, admitted it constitutes a budget. So watching
this debate on the Senate floor is a sort of through-the-looking-glass
experience. We are watching our colleagues call for something they
acknowledge already happened and they supported. This is nothing more
than petty politics. We should be focused on jobs and the economy.
Instead we are forced to spend hours debating something that already
happened. It doesn't make sense.
But let's put that aside for a moment and look at the extreme plans
we are voting on today. The only real differences between the four
Republican budgets--the only real difference between the four
Republican budgets--is how quickly they race to end Medicare as we know
it. The Republican budgets all cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans
and leave the middle class to foot the bill. They all allow student
loan rates to double. They all provide tax breaks for millionaires and
billionaires. And they all put the middle class last instead of first.
When I first examined the Ryan budget passed by the House GOP this
year, I thought it was the height of irresponsibility. But now that we
have seen three other Republican budgets, we know they make the Ryan
budget almost seem reasonable by comparison, and that is no small feat.
I have nothing against the wealthy. I am glad they make money. That
is the America way. God bless them. Many are living the American dream.
But in order to keep that dream alive and get our country on firmer
fiscal footing, I think we need a little shared sacrifice. The bottom
line is any budget that jeopardizes the middle class while filling the
pockets of the wealthy with greater tax breaks is ultimately untenable
and will never pass the Senate. While we are certainly open to
compromise, Democrats will not tolerate an assault on the middle class.
It isn't fair and it isn't right.
We hope the coming debate will yield a sound serious agreement. But
if it doesn't, Democrats are happy to take this contrast of priorities
into November because we know we have the high ground.
I thank the Chair, and I yield my remaining time back to my friend
and colleague from North Dakota.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the Budget Control Act is not a budget,
it is just a containment of spending. A clever attempt was made to make
it look like a budget, but it is not a budget. If it was a budget, why
did the President submit a budget this year? Why did the House pass a
budget? Why were four budgets produced in the House by Democratic House
Members?
In today's Politico, an article quotes Senator Lieberman, who just
spoke and who caucuses with the Democrats.

I don't think [Democrats] will offer their own budget and
I'm disappointed in that.

Senator Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, said he would have been
``impeached'' if he had failed to produce a budget as West Virginia's
Governor, though he conceded there are differences with the State
budget process.

Sure I have a problem with [failing to offer a budget]. As
a former governor, my responsibility was to put a budget
forward and balance it, so anyone who comes from the
executive mindset has a problem with that. I don't care if
you're Democrat or Republican.

``A problem with that'' means a problem with not having a budget.
Senator Mark Pryor, a Democrat from Arkansas:

The budget process is just not working around here. We've
had three years with President Obama where we're not able to
get a budget resolution passed.

That 3 years includes this one.
So we don't have a budget, we have a spending cap. And our Democratic
colleagues--bless their hearts--have been whining that the House
proposed a budget that came below the Senate's Budget Control Act caps
in some areas, so they say that was breaking the budget.
I would just advise them that when they vote on the President's
budget--and I assume they will all vote against it; they did last
year--the President's budget wipes out half the savings in the Budget
Control Act.
The President signed the Budget Control Act last August to raise the
debt ceiling. We agreed to cut spending $2.1 trillion--not nearly
enough, but we cut that and it was a decent step forward in the right
direction, and the President proposes a budget this year that takes
half of it out. Give me a break. There is no sense of wanting to have a
budget, to adhere to one, and to contain spending. What do they want?
More taxes.
The President said, ``The Buffett rule will help stabilize the
debt.'' That is what the President said; that is, tax increases on the
rich would help stabilize the debt. Well, the Buffett tax would raise
about $4 billion a year. This year the deficit will be $1,200 billion,
not $4 billion. That is not going to fix it. It will be $1,200 billion,
and the Buffett rule would raise about $4 billion a year. What kind of
responsible leadership is that, for the President of the United States
to be traveling this country at a time when we have never faced a more
significant financial threat to America--we never, ever have been on a
debt course as dangerous as the one we are on today. It is systemic. It
is deep. We have to make serious changes, and he goes around saying the
Buffett rule is going to stabilize the debt? He also said his budget
last year would lead us to balance when the lowest single deficit year
in 10 would be a deficit of $748 billion.
So I don't know what kind of leadership we are getting. It is not
good leadership. It is worse than no leadership because when a budget
is prepared with great effort by Congressman Paul Ryan in the House,
and his budget will actually change the debt course of America and
minimize the pain we all have to suffer and create some growth and
prosperity, the President invites him over to a conference, sits him
down there, and then attacks it, and he has been attacking the budget
ever since. Why is this? Why will not our colleagues support any
budget?
I fully expect my Democratic colleagues to vote against all of these
budgets and not vote for one. Think about that. They will vote against
four, not vote for one. Well, because you don't have the fingerprints
on anything that results in cutting spending, nobody that benefits from
spending is going to be mad with you. Everybody who wants more money
and doesn't want to have a dime reduced in the take they get from the
taxpayers' trough and the debt we borrow--they don't have any reduction
in that, and then they can't be mad at me. But that is not a
responsible course.
This is not a little matter. This is what Admiral Mullen, the former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said just 2 years ago:

The biggest threat we have to our national security is our
debt.

In an important statement by 10 former Chairs of the Council of
Economic Advisers, who served in Republican and Democratic
administrations, they wrote in March of 2011:

At some point, bond markets are likely to turn on the
United States, leading to a crisis that could dwarf 2008.

Bond markets will turn. That is what they have done on Greece.
The Simpson-Bowles Commission's Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, in
testimony to our committee, said:

This nation has never faced a more predictable financial
crisis.

The same thing as the Council of Economic Advisors said: You are on a
debt path that is unsustainable.
Chairman Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve--always cautious
about what he says--talking about the Congressional Budget Office's
projections of surging debt year after year, says:

[[Page S3219]]

The CBO projections, by design, ignore the adverse effects
that such high debt and deficits would likely have on our
economy. But if government debt and deficits were actually to
grow at the pace envisioned by this scenario, the economic
and financial effects would be severe.

And I recall at one point he said in his testimony: You see these
debts being projected out there year after year, surging at this high
level? You are never going to get there.
What he meant was that we would have a financial crisis before that
happened.
I would say to my colleagues, this is a time of challenge for the
Senate and the Congress of the United States. Will we rise to the
challenge and actually do something? We can talk about it. We can have
secret meetings and secret meetings and secret meetings. That is not
fixing it. We can have these last-minute decisions, like last summer
when the government was about to virtually shut down because the debt
limit had been reached, and reach some secret agreement that is brought
up on the floor for a vote and is not very well written. Or we can do
what the law requires. In the United States Code, the Congressional
Budget Act of 1974. It requires that we pass a budget. We can't
guarantee exactly how it will all come out, but we ought to attempt to
comply with the law, at least. We haven't attempted to do that.
I am worried about our future. I am worried about where we are
heading. And I do think the American people have a right to be upset
with us. They are not happy with us. They should not be happy with us.
When their Congress has allowed this country to reach a state where we
are taking in $2.3 trillion and spending $3.6 trillion, when 35, 40
percent of what we spend is borrowed money, the American people have a
right to be unhappy about that. They absolutely do. We are not
protecting their interests, their children's interests, their future,
or the economy.

And it is stunning to me that the leader of the free world, the
President of the United States, the Chief Executive, isn't pounding
away at the Congress to bring spending under control and to reduce the
debt we have. Instead, he seems to never want to talk about it. He only
talks about investments--more investments.
In fact, that budget he produced this year, what did it do to the
spending levels we agreed to last August? Before the budget control
agreement of last August, the U.S. Government was on path to spend $47
trillion over 10 years. What it effectively did was it reduced that
spending to $45 trillion--still substantially more each year than we
are spending now. There is growth every year under that proposal--too
much growth, too much debt. But it was a step. So this year when he
proposed his budget, he proposed spending another $1.4 or $1.5
trillion, new, on top of that. After he signed the agreement that we
would cap spending at $45 trillion, this would take spending up to
$46.6 trillion again, almost $47 trillion, where we were before the
agreement was reached. Now, that is not responsible leadership. And he
had a big tax increase. Tax and spend--that is what that budget is. And
the American people shouldn't be happy with us.
It was noted also that Senator Harkin said, well, this isn't the
President's budget, that Senator Sessions offered some joke, or
something to that matter. But it is the President's budget. It has the
numbers in it that the President had. They directly reflect the
President's request. If any Senator wants to come forward and show any
number we put in there that is different from the President's numbers
when he laid out his budget, then I would like to see it. Maybe we
could correct it. But I don't think there is an error. I think we
scrupulously followed the President's budget proposal request, and when
people vote on it, they can know they are voting exactly on what he
proposed. I don't think anybody will dispute the numbers we have in the
budget.
Also, I note that some of our Democratic colleagues are not happy
about having no budget produced by the Democratic side. They feel bad
about it, and I understand that. But I would have thought we would have
had some Members come down and complain about it, to say that they
didn't think the Democratic leadership, the Democratic conference
should have blocked Senator Conrad and the Budget Committee from having
a budget, that they should be handling this differently. But we haven't
had that, so I guess everybody is basically happy on the Democratic
side not to have to cast any tough votes.
Mr. President, how much time is remaining on this side?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 4 minutes.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, as we come to a conclusion of this
debate, Senator Harkin said something that was pretty insightful. He
said: Show me your budget, and I will show you what you value.
Refuse to show me your budget, I will say, and I can say you are
refusing to show what is important to you.
One of the things that has been brought up is the war costs. The war
on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan has been expensive, no doubt about
it. Last year the total for both wars over 10 years reached $1.3
trillion--10 years--both wars. That was the deficit last year alone,
$1.3 trillion. This year the war costs are declining. The year we are
in, we are spending $118 billion on the war. Our deficit will be $1,200
billion. So eliminating all war costs would be less than 10 percent of
the amount of our deficit.
I say that so we understand what has happened. Over 50 percent of our
spending is in mandatory entitlement programs--Medicare, Medicaid,
Social Security, food stamps, retirement benefits. Those are huge and
they are increasing at two, three times the rate of inflation. That is
what puts us on an unsustainable course.
The President's budget goes against everything the experts said,
against the debt commission he appointed, and refuses to confront these
surging entitlement costs. That is a disappointment because we have
nothing from the other side on how they would deal with them.
But the Members on this side have offered budgets, and Congressman
Ryan offered a budget. They do begin to deal with this painful but
difficult situation concerning the entitlement programs. I note the
Budget Control Act they have been calling a budget had nothing to do
with over 50 percent of the budget. It did not deal with those
expenditures, it did not deal with the entitlements. That is another
reason it is not a budget. It is a cap on discretionary spending. That
is all that was. It was a step in the right direction but not a budget
plan that would help us have a prosperous future.
This is an important day. I think it will cause the American people
and all of us in Congress to confront the reality of a danger we face
from debt. No matter how we vote this day, this next hour--even if we
vote in what I think is the wrong way--hopefully this whole process
would have caused all of us to confront the reality of the danger to
the American Republic, the growing debt.
I would say from my experience it will be tough to deal with it, but
I absolutely believe we can. It is not outside of the possibility and
ability of this country to reverse our course. The kind of cuts we will
need to have will not be such that will damage in any significant way
the strength and health of America.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator has expired.
Mr. SESSIONS. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I would ask Senator Sessions, if I might,
for 2 additional minutes because of the time Senator Leahy consumed?
Mr. SESSIONS. I appreciate that and will agree to those 2 additional
minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. CONRAD. I thank the Senator for his courtesy.
Mr. President, the place we agree is we have a long-term problem for
this country that we must address. I attempted to lay before the Budget
Committee, and did lay before the Budget Committee, the Bowles-Simpson
plan. It is the one plan that has had bipartisan support. I hope before
the year is over that we can go back to it because I think it holds the
greatest potential.
A key difference Senator Sessions and I have is whether we have a
budget for this year and next. I believe it is clear we do. The Budget
Control Act that passed last year says that the allocations and
spending levels set ``shall

[[Page S3220]]

apply in the Senate in the same manner as for a concurrent resolution
on the budget.'' That is for both 2012 and 2013.
I believe our Republican friends want to focus on that because they
do not want to focus on the specifics of their budget plans. Recall,
the last time they were in charge, when they controlled everything--the
House and the Senate and the White House--the Republican policies led
us to the brink of financial collapse. The proposals they are advancing
today are a return to those failed policies. Remember what happened
when they were in charge. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month and the
economy was shrinking at a rate of almost 9 percent a year. That is why
they do not want to focus on the substance of their plans.
Let's focus on the substance for a moment. Every Republican budget
ends Medicare as we know it. One Republican budget cuts Social Security
benefits by 39 percent. Every Republican budget cuts taxes for
millionaires by at least $150,000 a year. And every Republican budget
protects offshore tax havens.
I have shown on the floor many times a picture of this little
building in the Cayman Islands that claims to be the home of 18,857
companies. It is not their home. They are not doing business out of
this little five-story business in the Cayman Islands. They are doing
monkey business. The monkey business they are doing is avoiding the
taxes they owe. Every Republican budget protects this scam. That should
not be allowed to continue.
I hope my colleagues reject these proposals. I hope we will vote no,
and then get onto the serious business of a bipartisan plan to get
America back on track, the Simpson-Bowles plan that I presented to the
Budget Committee.
I yield the floor. I believe all time has expired?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
The question is on the motion to proceed to S. Con. Res. 41.
Mr. SESSIONS. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The yeas and nays were ordered.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, we have 1 minute on each side?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the President's budget is now before us.
Last year it failed in this body 97 to 0. It failed in the House, the
budget that he offered this year, 414 to 0. I expect it will receive no
votes today. That is a stunning development for the President of the
United States in his fourth year in office, to produce a budget for the
future of our country at a time of fiscal danger, great financial and
economic danger to our country, to not receive a single vote.
Maybe somebody will vote for it. Let me tell you why we should not.
It does not change the debt course. It violates the budget agreement
the President signed and Congress passed last year, by increasing
spending over that level by $1.5 trillion. It throws off another $1.8
trillion in tax increases, essentially using tax increases to offset
new spending programs, not to pay down the debt. It is the most
irresponsible budget submitted. I urge my colleagues to vote no.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator has expired. The
Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, this is the budget. This is what Senator
Sessions has presented as being the President's budget. Do you see a
difference? This is what Senator Sessions describes as the President's
budget. This is the President's budget. I think it is readily apparent,
there is a big difference between the President's budget, which I hold
in my hands, and what Senator Sessions has presented as being the
President's budget. This is not the President's budget, so of course we
are not going to support it. It is not what the President proposed.
I yield back our time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
The yeas and nays have been ordered.
The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant bill clerk called the roll.
Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Klobuchar). Are there any other Senators
in the Chamber desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 0, nays 99, as follows:

[Rollcall Vote No. 97 Leg.]

NAYS--99

Akaka
Alexander
Ayotte
Barrasso
Baucus
Begich
Bennet
Bingaman
Blumenthal
Blunt
Boozman
Boxer
Brown (MA)
Brown (OH)
Burr
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Chambliss
Coats
Coburn
Cochran
Collins
Conrad
Coons
Corker
Cornyn
Crapo
DeMint
Durbin
Enzi
Feinstein
Franken
Gillibrand
Graham
Grassley
Hagan
Harkin
Hatch
Heller
Hoeven
Hutchison
Inhofe
Inouye
Isakson
Johanns
Johnson (SD)
Johnson (WI)
Kerry
Klobuchar
Kohl
Kyl
Landrieu
Lautenberg
Leahy
Lee
Levin
Lieberman
Lugar
Manchin
McCain
McCaskill
McConnell
Menendez
Merkley
Mikulski
Moran
Murkowski
Murray
Nelson (NE)
Nelson (FL)
Paul
Portman
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Risch
Roberts
Rockefeller
Rubio
Sanders
Schumer
Sessions
Shaheen
Shelby
Snowe
Stabenow
Tester
Thune
Toomey
Udall (CO)
Udall (NM)
Vitter
Warner
Webb
Whitehouse
Wicker
Wyden

NOT VOTING--1

Kirk

The motion was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There will now be 2 minutes of debate equally
divided prior to a vote on the motion to proceed to H. Con. Res. 112.
The Senator from Alabama.
Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, at a time when our Nation has never,
ever faced a deeper, more dangerous systemic debt threat than we face
today, the Republican House, under the leadership of Congressman Paul
Ryan, has produced a budget that would change the debt course of
America, create economic growth, put us on a path to financial
stability, and do the things that a responsible budget should do. The
President's budget utterly failed in that regard and has gotten no
support. This budget will do the job.
People can disagree with this or that portion of it. I think this
budget is a historic step in the right direction for this great
Republic, and I urge my colleagues to support it.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, this budget plan, the House Republican
plan, ends Medicare as we know it. All the while, it provides $1
trillion of additional tax cuts to the wealthiest among us. It gives
millionaires, on average, an additional tax cut of $150,000 a year. In
addition, it cuts health care by $3 trillion and increases the number
of uninsured in our country by 30 million people.
I urge my colleagues to reject this budget proposal.
Mr. HARKIN. Would the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. CONRAD. Yes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
Mr. HARKIN. Does this budget permit the interest rates on student
loans to double on July 1?
Mr. CONRAD. It does.
Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Senator.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 41, nays 58, as follows:

[Rollcall Vote No. 98 Leg.]

YEAS--41

Alexander
Ayotte
Barrasso
Blunt
Boozman
Burr
Chambliss
Coats
Coburn
Cochran
Corker
Cornyn
Crapo
DeMint
Enzi
Graham
Grassley
Hatch
Hoeven
Hutchison
Inhofe
Isakson
Johanns
Johnson (WI)
Kyl
Lee
Lugar
McCain
McConnell
Moran

[[Page S3221]]

Murkowski
Portman
Risch
Roberts
Rubio
Sessions
Shelby
Thune
Toomey
Vitter
Wicker

NAYS--58

Akaka
Baucus
Begich
Bennet
Bingaman
Blumenthal
Boxer
Brown (MA)
Brown (OH)
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Collins
Conrad
Coons
Durbin
Feinstein
Franken
Gillibrand
Hagan
Harkin
Heller
Inouye
Johnson (SD)
Kerry
Klobuchar
Kohl
Landrieu
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lieberman
Manchin
McCaskill
Menendez
Merkley
Mikulski
Murray
Nelson (NE)
Nelson (FL)
Paul
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Rockefeller
Sanders
Schumer
Shaheen
Snowe
Stabenow
Tester
Udall (CO)
Udall (NM)
Warner
Webb
Whitehouse
Wyden

NOT VOTING--1

Kirk

The motion was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There will now be 2 minutes of debate equally
divided prior to a vote on the motion to proceed to S. Con. Res. 37.
The Senator from Pennsylvania is recognized.
Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, the vote we are about to cast is on a
motion to proceed to the budget I have introduced, one of the important
features of which is within the customary 10-year budget window this
budget would balance. It does not happen overnight. It takes 8 years to
get there. But it does, in fact, balance, and it does it by essentially
containing the rate of growth in spending. Only in the first year is
there a spending cut, and that is less than 3 percent. Every year
thereafter spending grows in this budget, but it grows a little more
slowly than the alternative. It grows at a sustainable pace so that
with normal economic growth we will reach a balance within 8 years and
a modest surplus thereafter.
It does call for some of these structural entitlement reforms we
need. Specifically, it would call for adopting the bipartisan Medicare
reform plan that I would remind everyone permits senior citizens to
continue to choose the traditional fee-for-service Medicare they have
now--if that is their choice--but it does make other options we think
would be more cost effective available as well.
It also adopts the President's recommendation by asking the
wealthiest Americans to pay a little more for the Medicare benefits
they enjoy. It asks for tax reform that we all know we need to generate
economic growth, and it puts our budget on a sustainable path.
I urge Members to vote in favor of this motion.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, this is another unbalanced plan. There
is very little in the way of revenue to reduce deficits and debt but
deep spending cuts in priorities such as education and energy. In fact,
this proposal cuts discretionary spending $1 trillion below the Budget
Control Act, which cut $900 billion. In addition, this cuts $3 trillion
in health care by ending Medicare as we know it and by block-granting
Medicaid, holding hostage those who are the most vulnerable among us,
children and the disabled.
I urge my colleagues to resist this proposal.
Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, will my colleague yield for a question?
Mr. CONRAD. I am happy to yield.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
Mr. HARKIN. Does the Toomey budget we are about to vote on increase
student loan interest rates on July 1 from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent?
Mr. CONRAD. It does permit that.
Mr. HARKIN. Well, I hope every Senator who votes on this knows, if
they are voting for this budget, they are voting to double student loan
interest rates on July 1.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Mr. CONRAD. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 42, nays 57, as follows:

[Rollcall Vote No. 99 Leg.]

YEAS--42

NAYS--57

Akaka
Baucus
Begich
Bennet
Bingaman
Blumenthal
Boxer
Brown (MA)
Brown (OH)
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Collins
Conrad
Coons
Durbin
Feinstein
Franken
Gillibrand
Hagan
Harkin
Heller
Inouye
Johnson (SD)
Kerry
Klobuchar
Kohl
Landrieu
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lieberman
Manchin
McCaskill
Menendez
Merkley
Mikulski
Murray
Nelson (NE)
Nelson (FL)
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Rockefeller
Sanders
Schumer
Shaheen
Snowe
Stabenow
Tester
Udall (CO)
Udall (NM)
Warner
Webb
Whitehouse
Wyden

NOT VOTING--1

Kirk

The PRESIDING OFFICER. There will now be 2 minutes of debate equally
divided prior to a vote on the motion to proceed to S. Con. Res. 42
introduced by the Senator from Kentucky, Mr. Paul.
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Madam President, like the previous three Republican
budgets, this budget is silent on student interest rates. Anyone who
asserts otherwise for good political theatre should know that it is
untrue. This budget has nothing to do with student interest rates. I
think we should have a debate on a little higher plane.
We are borrowing $50,000 a second. We are borrowing $4 billion a day,
over $1 trillion a year. While America burns through a century of
wealth, the President fiddles. The President's friends fuss and they
produce no budget.
This budget balances in 5 years. It saves Social Security. It saves
Medicare. It reforms and simplifies the Tax Code. I urge my colleagues
to act now and vote for a budget that balances. Do something to save
America from this looming debt crisis.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota is recognized.
Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, this plan has massive tax cuts for the
wealthiest among us. This plan cuts discretionary spending $2 trillion
below the Budget Control Act that cut $900 billion. This plan ends
Medicare in 2 years. This plan repeals health care reform. Thirty
million more people would be uninsured.
Perhaps most stunningly, this plan cuts Social Security benefits 39
percent. One can say it balances, but it balances at an extraordinary
cost. And the cost is borne by those least able to bear the cost. I
urge my colleagues to reject this plan.
Mr. HARKIN. Would the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. CONRAD. I would be happy to.
Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I ask the same question of the
distinguished chairman: Would this budget have the interest rates
double on student loans on July 1 from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent?
Mr. CONRAD. Well, it is hard to see how it would not. Let me say, in
education, it cuts education 59 percent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There is a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Whitehouse). Are there any other Senators
in the Chamber desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 16, nays 83, as follows:

[[Page S3222]]

[Rollcall Vote No. 100 Leg.]

YEAS--16

Barrasso
Coburn
Crapo
DeMint
Enzi
Hatch
Johnson (WI)
Lee
McConnell
Moran
Paul
Risch
Sessions
Shelby
Thune
Vitter

NAYS--83

Akaka
Alexander
Ayotte
Baucus
Begich
Bennet
Bingaman
Blumenthal
Blunt
Boozman
Boxer
Brown (MA)
Brown (OH)
Burr
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Chambliss
Coats
Cochran
Collins
Conrad
Coons
Corker
Cornyn
Durbin
Feinstein
Franken
Gillibrand
Graham
Grassley
Hagan
Harkin
Heller
Hoeven
Hutchison
Inhofe
Inouye
Isakson
Johanns
Johnson (SD)
Kerry
Klobuchar
Kohl
Kyl
Landrieu
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lieberman
Lugar
Manchin
McCain
McCaskill
Menendez
Merkley
Mikulski
Murkowski
Murray
Nelson (NE)
Nelson (FL)
Portman
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Roberts
Rockefeller
Rubio
Sanders
Schumer
Shaheen
Snowe
Stabenow
Tester
Toomey
Udall (CO)
Udall (NM)
Warner
Webb
Whitehouse
Wicker
Wyden

NOT VOTING--1

Kirk

The motion was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. REID. Mr. President, if I can have everyone's attention, we have
one more vote this evening. The Republican leader and I have worked out
something tentatively--I think we will be able to put it in writing in
just a few minutes--where we will have two votes tomorrow at noon on
the two Fed nominees.
I think most people know I moved last night to the FDA bill. I hope
we won't have to file cloture on that and that we can just move to it
and start the amendment process. That is what the people want, that is
what we want, and that is what we are willing to do, so I hope we can
do that. It is a wide-ranging bill, extremely important for the
country, with relevant amendments. There are a lot of them to do, so I
hope we can have an agreement to that effect.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will now be 2
minutes of debate equally divided before the vote on the motion to
proceed to S. Con. Res. 44 introduced by the Senator from Utah, Mr.
Lee.
The Senator from Utah.
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I remind my colleagues of the old adage that
you can make excuses or you can make progress but you cannot make both.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, the Senator deserves to be heard.
Mr. LEE. I remind my colleagues of the old adage that you can make
excuses or you can make progress but you cannot make both--at least not
simultaneously.
Our current course is unsustainable. Maintaining the status quo will
inevitably impair our ability to fund everything from defense to
entitlements. So sticking to this course isn't the solution. It can't
be the solution. And if followed as a solution, it will have an impact
that will prove devastating to America's most vulnerable populations.
It is for exactly that reason I have proposed this budget--a budget
that balances within 5 years, a budget that simplifies the Tax Code, a
budget that puts health care decisions back into the hands of
individual families, individuals themselves, and their doctors, where
those decisions properly belong.
We don't have much time. We have to get this done. I urge my
colleagues to support this budget.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, this budget proposal has the most serious
mistakes I have seen in 26 years of dealing with budgets in this
Chamber. This budget starts with an $8 trillion mistake on the size of
the deficit.
I have put up the calculation. This budget has Federal revenues of
$27.5 trillion, budget outlays of $37.2 trillion, for a difference of
$9.750 trillion. But it claims deficits of $1.750 trillion. That is an
$8 trillion mistake.
No. 2, it has a $5.7 trillion mistake with respect to budget
authority. If we add up the individual budget function totals, they are
$5.7 trillion less than the aggregate budget authority totals in what
is being offered by the Senator.
No. 3, this requires some committees to cut more spending than they
have available to them in their resources. For example, the HELP
Committee is instructed to save $2.7 trillion, and they only have $510
billion available to them to cut.
This budget is shot full of basic fundamental mistakes. It should not
even be considered as a budget on the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Mr. LEE. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 17, nays 82, as follows:

[Rollcall Vote No. 101 Leg.]

YEAS--17

Barrasso
Coats
Coburn
Crapo
DeMint
Enzi
Grassley
Hatch
Inhofe
Johnson (WI)
Lee
Moran
Paul
Risch
Sessions
Thune
Vitter

NAYS--82

Akaka
Alexander
Ayotte
Baucus
Begich
Bennet
Bingaman
Blumenthal
Blunt
Boozman
Boxer
Brown (MA)
Brown (OH)
Burr
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Chambliss
Cochran
Collins
Conrad
Coons
Corker
Cornyn
Durbin
Feinstein
Franken
Gillibrand
Graham
Hagan
Harkin
Heller
Hoeven
Hutchison
Inouye
Isakson
Johanns
Johnson (SD)
Kerry
Klobuchar
Kohl
Kyl
Landrieu
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lieberman
Lugar
Manchin
McCain
McCaskill
McConnell
Menendez
Merkley
Mikulski
Murkowski
Murray
Nelson (NE)
Nelson (FL)
Portman
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Roberts
Rockefeller
Rubio
Sanders
Schumer
Shaheen
Shelby
Snowe
Stabenow
Tester
Toomey
Udall (CO)
Udall (NM)
Warner
Webb
Whitehouse
Wicker
Wyden

NOT VOTING--1

Kirk

The motion was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the motion to
reconsider is considered made and laid upon the table.

____________________