[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 82 (Wednesday, May 12, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2478-S2480]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                    Tribute to Officer Tyler Franks

  We also pray for the recovery of those injured in the line of duty, 
like Prairie Grove Police Officer Tyler Franks, who was shot while 
responding to a domestic disturbance call last week. Thankfully his 
condition is improving, but we know he has a long road to recovery.
  By supporting policies to improve law enforcement training and 
resources, we can recognize the dedication and heroism so often 
displayed by these public servants and help make them more effective 
and safer at the same time.
  Over the past year, we have witnessed increased calls for defunding 
or abolishing police forces across the country. Instead of this 
misguided approach, we need to improve investments and resources for 
the men and women in blue. That is why it is important that Congress 
fund programs like the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant Program, which 
has proven vital to helping States and local law enforcement agencies 
purchase equipment and support much needed training for officers.
  We know there are more ways to ensure officers have the tools they 
need to enhance community safety and protect themselves so they can go 
home to the families they love and the support systems they rely on. 
That is why this week I will join Senators Inhofe, Brown, and Tillis to 
introduce the Law Enforcement Training for Mental Health Crisis 
Response Act. This legislation will help provide police with better 
strategies and procedures to respond to calls involving a mental health 
crisis.
  We also need to hold all those who perpetrate attacks against law 
enforcement accountable, so I urge my colleagues to pass the Protect 
and Serve Act. I am proud to support this legislation that will create 
Federal penalties for individuals who deliberately target local, State, 
or Federal law enforcement officers with violence.
  On behalf of all Arkansans, I thank all of our law enforcement 
officers for making sacrifices to keep us safe. I will continue 
advocating for improved tools, resources, and training for officers so 
they can prepare for unpredictable circumstances.
  Our safety and peace of mind come at a cost, and our police officers 
need our support and our gratitude for being the first ones to pay it. 
We honor them this week and every week for what they do and for what 
they represent.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                 Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 136

  Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, I rise here today, and I have been in the 
Senate a little over 2\1/2\ years, and I never imagined that I would 
have to drift back to my days at Wabash College, as I migrated from a 
biology major to a political science major and, thank goodness, to an 
economics major.
  In that time, I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be able to 
talk about macroeconomics because back then there were a couple of 
points of view. You had Milton Friedman, who was a disciple of monetary 
theory--that if you get too much out there circulating, your currency 
devalues and you get inflation. And then there was Keynes, who was a 
big disciple of the government, either through tax policy or spending. 
And, my goodness, how either one of them would react to what we are 
contending with today, I think it would give them some pause in terms 
of where we are at.
  This has nothing to do with the underlying policy goals. I am someone 
that comes from a State legislature in Indiana where we tackle things 
like infrastructure, defined there and then as roads and bridges. We 
came together. We actually paid for it through user fees, which we 
haven't done here since 1993. That is fuel taxes, which generally would 
be at least one thing you would look at when you want to spend a lot of 
money on infrastructure.
  So here we are today. We had a hearing a couple of weeks ago, and I 
will

[[Page S2479]]

cite him in a moment. Robert Reich was in there, and I threw that 
question at him: How could we have come so far from Keynes' economics 
and Milton Friedman, which has controlled the dynamic of this country, 
its monetary policy, and its fiscal policy, until just recently?
  Then comes along the Modern Monetary Theory, a new approach to 
macroeconomics. This theory proposes that governments can spend however 
much they want, go into debt as much as they want, and have these 
structural trillion-dollar deficits that would work nowhere else. It 
only works now because we are the only reserve currency. Being the only 
reserve currency, people come to us with their currencies, and that 
keeps our interest rates down. That doesn't acknowledge that there are 
places like China, which will be a larger economy than ours and lends 
us money currently.
  In places like China and most other places across the world--unless 
you were Greece, Italy, maybe Spain and Portugal, which kept the euro 
from being a prominent currency because they lived beyond their means--
you cannot, just because you can get by with it in the short run, 
continue to do things into the mid and long term without consequences.
  This fanciful theory has found its way out of the faculty lounge and 
into the halls of Congress. Considering that President Biden has 
proposed another $4 trillion in spending. There is $1.9 trillion that 
we have recently done--a done deal--borrowing every penny of it. We 
have not raised taxes. That is a false argument too. With the amount of 
taxes that you could raise, you wouldn't even cover part of our day-to-
day trillion-dollar deficit. It adds to our debt.
  When I got here, I think it was around $20 trillion. Soon it is going 
to be over $30 trillion. And listen to this: World War II was the 
highest debt we ever had as a country. We were savers and investors 
then. Now we are consumers and spenders. They paid that off. We had 
basically no debt until the wars came along that we financed by 
borrowing, not paying for it. Then, 2008 and 2009 came along, and that 
looks like chump change compared to what we are doing now.
  Now we had an approach to one of the biggest challenges we have ever 
had as a country, navigating through COVID, and of course we did things 
that basically needed some new idea how to justify it--Modern Monetary 
Theory. It is a recipe for hyperinflation and continued higher 
deficits. By the way, the trillion-dollar deficit without any COVID, 
just in its own momentum forward, is going to be $1.5 trillion in 4 to 
5 years.
  I am not surprised the big spenders in DC have latched on to a theory 
that tells them it is OK to spend irresponsibly and hike taxes. They 
may not acknowledge that pre-COVID we were in a pretty good place. We 
were raising wages. Senator Sanders and I would share that. We need to 
raise wages in places, but you can't do it through the government. That 
is not the productive economy. Everything that the government gets 
comes from the productive economy.
  I am surprised there has not been more pushback because it is a 
flawed economic theory. When I asked Robert Reich about it, he 
dismissed it: Well, it is too new. It is too novel. I can't really talk 
about it.
  That shouldn't be the foundation upon which you are having your 
spending plans laid out currently.
  What it is, in my opinion, is a bunch of malarkey that is embraced 
because we want to spend like drunken sailors. Coming through a crisis, 
we can't do that. We have already done that. What we did in a 
bipartisan fashion in 2020 probably made sense. Continuing that 
forward, you can't base it upon this new idea that debt, deficits don't 
make any difference. It is kind of like a kid coming up with a modern 
dietary theory that says it is OK to eat cookies for every meal. It 
wouldn't work.
  Many noted economists from across the political spectrum have warned 
that the implementation of the Modern Monetary Theory will pose a 
danger to the economy, and this wouldn't be center and right 
economists. Let's listen to a few of them.
  The Secretary of the Treasury and Director of the National Economic 
Council, Lawrence Summers, back in the Clinton years, and Federal 
Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who has been OK with accommodating some of 
it--he said that is not a new theory that you can rely upon. Even Paul 
Krugman, whom we know that generally he would be eating this up, he has 
reservations, and not to mention a host of others. I just told you what 
Robert Reich said when he dismissed it as something too new to comment 
on.
  Now, Secretary Janet Yellen discussed Modern Monetary Theory's idea 
that interest rate payments can be handled by the central bank buying 
the debt back in 2019, calling it ``a very wrong-minded theory because 
that's how you get hyper-inflation.''
  Joel Griffith, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, summed 
it up well when he wrote:

       There is no free lunch. We will pay either through the 
     visible burden of direct taxation, the hidden tax of 
     inflation, or higher borrowing costs.

  I said earlier that we are the only reserve currency. Interest rates 
are starting to go up. The Chinese could do things that could knock 
interest rates up two to three points quickly if they decided to take a 
different point of view. There is a lot of danger in living in the 
moment because you don't feel any of the pain that will inevitably come 
in the future, and it is not far out
  The acceptance of Modern Monetary Theory would lead to higher 
deficits and higher inflation. The underlying policy in terms of higher 
wages, trying to do things to improve the lot of Americans, that is 
fair game for discussion. Just don't mislead them, putting all that 
debt on our kids and our grandkids. That would be like running a 
business, running it into the ditch, going to your banker, and thinking 
that you could get a loan. You would be laughed out of the office if 
you tried to do it 2 years in a row. That is now standard operating 
procedure with trillion-dollar deficits built into the system, not to 
mention this.
  The Senate must abandon this fundamentally flawed, irresponsible 
economic model in favor of mainstream fiscal and monetary frameworks 
that work everywhere else. The European Union, a recent example, headed 
to be a reserve currency, and even Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy 
have found that they can't do that and get by with it.
  Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous 
consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be 
discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. 
Res. 136. I further ask that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble 
be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and 
laid upon the table.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I find 
this resolution somewhat odd, if I may say so. There are enormous 
crises facing our country and the world. The fact that we are spending 
time on the floor of the Senate to condemn a proposition or a theory 
does not seem to me to be the best way to be spending our time.
  And the implication--and I think the Senator from Indiana made this 
implication--that the President of the United States is objecting to 
raising taxes is simply not factual.
  The President has come forward with some very specific tax proposals, 
but his proposals are not meeting much support on the other side of the 
aisle because he is saying that he doesn't want to raise taxes on 
anybody in this country earning less than $400,000 a year, but he does 
want to raise taxes on some of the wealthiest people in America and 
some of the largest corporations that today may be paying zero in 
Federal income tax. And he shares a concern that many of us share and 
that Warren Buffet reminds us of, that the effective tax rate for the 
billionaire class is actually lower than it is for working families.
  The President's view, which I share, is that this Congress must 
address the enormous crises facing working families, and that is 
rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, making sure that our kids have 
quality childcare and pre-K, that we have to address the existential 
threat of climate change, and we have to address many of the other 
problems facing working families, and one way we do that is demanding 
that

[[Page S2480]]

the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.
  When we talk about resolutions condemning something--I am not, again, 
sure why we are condemning a particular theory--we might be today 
thinking about condemning the actions of the Republican Party in the 
House of Representatives today. They got rid of a Member of their 
leadership for the crime of suggesting that that party should not 
maintain a big lie implying that Donald Trump won the election. Shall 
we condemn that? I think that is worth condemning.
  I think we might want to condemn the fact that we have more income 
and wealth inequality today in America than at any time since the 
1920s. Let's condemn that. Maybe we want to condemn the fact that every 
scientist who has studied the issue tells us that climate change is a 
threat to our Nation and the world, and we have done virtually nothing 
to lead the world in addressing climate change. Let's condemn that 
inaction.
  Let's condemn the fact that in the richest country in the history of 
the world, we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any 
major country on Earth. How about condemning that?
  Let's condemn the fact, maybe, that half of our people are living 
paycheck to paycheck. Let's condemn the fact that we live in a country 
which has institutional racism.
  We can go on and on. There are a lot of things to condemn, but I 
don't know that it is in the best interest of the U.S. Senate to be 
condemning a particular economic theory.
  You don't like it, argue against it. That is fine. But I don't know 
that we have to spend our time condemning it.
  So with that, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
  Mr. BRAUN. Madam President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
  Mr. BRAUN. So I don't disagree with what Senator Sanders said in 
terms of policy that needs to be debated, but a classic tactic when you 
are focusing on how you are going to pay for something is to change the 
subject. And whatever you think about what happened over in the House 
of Representatives, whatever you think about the other issues, this is 
about being honest with future generations and where has that worked 
and been a good end result.
  When it comes to some of the taxation part of it, that is a 
smokescreen because even if you raise all the revenue they are talking 
about with those taxes--and I am a believer that corporations should 
pay their fair share. Multinationals that flatten their tax rate, that 
is different from many C corps, many corporations. But the dishonesty 
in that argument is that you couldn't cover even 20 percent of our 
existing structural deficit. So you need to be honest.
  If you want to do this, ask your kids, ask your grandkids if they are 
willing to put that burden on them. And there is no theory out there, 
other than this which is being used as a current rationalization, that 
would make that ever have a pleasant outcome.
  Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, if I could respond?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
  Mr. SANDERS. I am not sure--the Senator from Indiana suggested a 
moment ago that the President was not interested in raising taxes, and, 
of course, he has a very specific proposal to raise taxes.
  And I would suggest to my colleague from Indiana that if we want to 
talk about the burden on our kids and on our grandchildren as a result 
of the national debt, maybe we should also be discussing the fact that, 
under the last administration, a massive tax break was given to the 
very wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations. We 
were told that that tax plan would pay for itself, but, in fact, it 
will result in almost $2 trillion in additional national debt, and 
virtually all of those benefits went to the people on top.
  So all that I am saying is, we can argue taxation; we can argue 
economic policy; we can argue why we are the only major country on 
Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people; we can argue why we 
are paying, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription 
drugs; we can argue why we have a political system that allows 
billionaires to buy elections--a lot of things that we could be talking 
about, but I am not sure that it is in the best interest of the Senate 
to be condemning a particular economic idea that some economists have 
brought up.
  Mr. BRAUN. Madam President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
  Mr. BRAUN. I know we have a vote coming up, and I won't belabor it.
  I think the basis for maybe a good conversation, because we are not 
going to solve it today, is when it comes to the tax package that was 
put through in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017--and I would have some 
authority on this, Senator Sanders. I spent 37 years in the trenches 
running a small business that ended up being a larger company. Three of 
my kids run it with a good young executive team--the American dream. 
And my observation was that we had kind of hit the sweet spot.
  And the CBO, which actually put that original cost of $1.5 trillion--
$150 billion per year, over 10 years--said that we were actually 
generating record revenues pre-COVID and that they could have revised, 
and still might, that trajectory.
  I think if we are going to go forward, you have to realize that there 
is a limit to anything you can do through government. And when you try 
to raise taxes, you have to be honest about it. Over 50 years, 
regardless of what the tax rate has been, the economy has generated 
about 17 percent of our GDP with tax revenues because when they are 
high, there is less economic activity. You actually find a sweet spot, 
like we did with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and the economy was 
proving it pre-COVID.
  Mr. SANDERS. Madam President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.