[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 206 (Tuesday, November 30, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8811-S8812]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
LEGISLATIVE SESSION
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NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2022--Continued
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate will now resume legislative
session.
Mr. KING. Thank you, Mr. President.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lujan). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Build Back Better
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, our Democratic colleagues in the House
and, to some extent, here in the Senate have talked about how the so-
called Build Back Better legislation is popular, but I think the main
reason it is popular is because, frankly, many Members of Congress and
certainly the public at large don't know what is in it. So I would like
to spend just a few minutes talking about that.
First of all, there is the size of the bill. Originally, the Budget
Committee chairman, the Senator from Vermont, floated a $6 trillion
spending bonanza. This, of course, was on top of about $5 trillion we
spent last year in a bipartisan fashion dealing with the COVID-19
pandemic. But, of course, this $6 trillion more was designed to be
passed with a pure party-line vote through the reconciliation process.
After some pushback, the $6 trillion figure that Chairman Sanders
proposed was cut back to 3.5, and now our colleagues in the House and
elsewhere are touting a new pared-down bill which spends only--and I
underline the word ``only''--$1.75 trillion. I dare say that is a
number that none of us can fully comprehend given its magnitude, but it
has become--sort of rolls off our tongues like everybody understands
what a trillion dollars is like everybody knows what a million is or a
thousand or a hundred or ten dollars. But it is an enormous number.
As our colleagues have slimmed and trimmed this bill to reach a
pricetag that could get consensus in the House, some of their favorite
provisions have fallen off the chopping block. They realize that
programs like free college actually cost a whole lot of money. So to
live within this new number, which I will talk about in a moment,
Democrats in the House kept cutting and cutting, but they found--
instead of real cuts, they found another solution to their problem of a
topline. What they have basically done is to create the illusion of a
lower pricetag without making any real, substantive, long-term cuts.
How do you do that? Well, it is the old-fashioned way; it is called
budget gimmicks.
Rather than remove these expensive programs entirely, they chose to
create a number of arbitrary cliffs, sunsets, and expirations. That
way, they could pretend to pass these bills at a lower cost with the
tacit promise to continue them at another time and on another day.
One example of this was the expanded child tax credit. Our Democratic
colleagues originally crafted this as a temporary measure in their
partisan bill that became law in March, just 8 months ago. The first
payments had barely gone out the door when they decided to call for
making those temporary provisions permanent in the BBB, the so-called
Build Back Better bill. Our colleagues knew that a permanent extension
and expansion would have been far too expensive to meet their topline,
so they pretended to cut it by making it a temporary extension.
Earlier drafts of this bill would have extended this policy through
2025. As time went on, the pricetag was still too high, so it was
scaled back to a 1-year extension. But the truth is, nothing has really
changed. Calls to make the expansion permanent have not gone away. I
have seen no indication that our colleagues across the aisle are
content to let this extension expire after just 1 year.
The same is true of the earned income tax credit, which also was
expanded in March. A number of our colleagues have spoken here on the
Senate floor about the need to make this expansion of the earned income
tax credit permanent.
But the not-so-temporary extensions don't end there. This bill
extends the Affordable Care Act's premium tax credits through 2025,
which our colleagues claim will enable more Americans to afford
healthcare coverage. But at the same time, this bill cuts funding to
safety net hospitals and States that did not expand Medicaid. If their
goal was to expand access to low-income individuals under the Medicaid
Program, their bill cuts that funding to safety net hospitals in States
like mine that did not expand Medicaid. These cuts specifically target
hospitals that treat underinsured and uninsured patients.
In short, our colleagues are manipulating the budget process in a way
that appears to extend access to healthcare while at the same time cuts
funding to our most vulnerable patients--all in the cause of pushing
America closer to a single-payer system, something like Medicare for
All. I have no doubt that our colleagues across the aisle will, if
possible, not let these temporary provisions expire.
In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, though, ``The closest thing
to eternal life on earth is a [temporary] government program.''
We have seen this movie before, time and again. It is smoke and
mirrors. It is budget gimmickry. It is starting new programs and
claiming to cut them off after a year, knowing that, inevitably,
Congress will be tempted to extend them much, much longer.
Well, before this bill comes to a vote in the Senate, I hope our
Democratic colleagues will agree with me that we need to know precisely
how much this bill will cost the American people. We know that our
colleagues across the aisle have struggled to try to make a $6 trillion
bill appear to be a $3.5 trillion and now a $1.75 trillion bill, but I
don't think anybody is really fooled or confused. Because they have
strategically chosen start dates, sunsets, and expiration dates to make
it appear that these programs cost less, we know that eventually, if
they have the votes, they will be extended through eternity.
Our colleagues gamed the Tax Code to partially fund the bill while
handing out massive tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires. I am
glad to see the chairman of the Budget Committee say that we really
shouldn't be focused on tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires in
blue States and cities like New York or San Francisco, which is exactly
what the Democratic bill tries to provide--tax cuts to millionaires and
billionaires in blue States.
This bill is really chock-full of inconsistencies. It claims to
extend access to healthcare while cutting off access to Medicaid or
some of the safety net programs in States like mine. It claims that,
well, we are going to tax the rich folks while at the same time
providing
[[Page S8812]]
tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires in blue States by lifting or
eliminating the SALT deduction--the State and local tax deduction--
which allows taxpayers, these millionaires and billionaires in blue
States, to deduct their State and local taxes, which means not only do
they get a tax cut, but the rest of us end up subsidizing them because,
in order to get the revenue needed, that means regular working folks
are going to have to pick up the gap.
The best evidence of this maneuvering is the fact that there is not a
single year over the next decade in which each tax provision would be
used at the same time. Let me say that again. Of all of the gaming in
the Tax Code, the fact is, under the proposal by the House of
Representatives--that we at some point will consider here--the fact is
there is not a single year over the next decade in which each of these
tax provisions would be used at the same time. This is nothing but
gimmicks and sleight of hand accounting.
In my previous life, I was the Attorney General of Texas. We had
something called the Consumer Protection Division. If anybody in the
private sector would falsely advertise, like the Federal Government and
Congress are trying to do in this so-called Build Back Better bill, we
would go after them with a vengeance for defrauding consumers.
Unfortunately, that doesn't apply to Congress. I wish it did.
We often talk, at least intermittently, about needing to know what is
in a bill before we actually vote on it. At one time or another,
Senators on both sides of the aisle have griped about voting on
thousand-page bills that were completed just hours before the vote.
Knowing the true cost of this legislation is no different. Before
voting on it, we have the duty to understand how it will impact our
debt and deficits and how big of a bill the American people will be
stuck with.
There is also this ugly animal rearing its head called inflation.
Seventy percent of the public said--I think in a recent public opinion
poll I have seen--that inflation is eating away more and more of their
income and is actually reducing their standard of living. It is a
silent tax on working families. I would think that, if we are concerned
about the welfare of those families, we ought to be very concerned
about making inflation worse by pouring more and more money into our
economy, chasing fewer and fewer goods and services.
That is part of the problem now. There is so much money sloshing
around as a result of the spending by Congress--much of it associated
with COVID-19, but not all of it. Some of it is with the American
Recovery Act that was passed with the $1.9 trillion in the early days
of the Biden administration. But the truth is inflation is eating our
lunch, and we should not be making it worse by spending a lot more
money, as our Democratic colleagues are proposing we do in the
Build Back Better bill.
So we need a cost estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, the
official scorer of these spending bills, because we know that what we
have seen so far is full of gimmicks, tricks, phony cliffs, phony
expiration dates, as I have said, and is, basically, a misleading of
the public and Congress into knowing what exactly is in this bill and
how much it will cost.
Well, the cost estimate provided by the CBO, we know, given these
phony assumptions, is not an accurate statement of the true cost of the
bill. This isn't a reflection of the folks who work at the CBO but of
the scoring rules they must follow. So, despite the fact that our
Democratic colleagues have explicitly said that temporary programs will
be extended at the first opportunity beyond the terms laid out in the
bill, the Congressional Budget Office has to play along and act like
that is true, but we know it is not true.
Fortunately, there are groups on the outside that have conducted
their own analysis. Assuming all of these phony cliffs and expiration
dates and the 1-year creation of programs that will later be extended,
they don't have to buy this sort of smoke-and-mirrors approach to the
budget. These groups have conducted their own analyses and have told us
what they think the true cost of this $1.75 trillion bill, so-called,
that passed the House will be.
For example, the budget experts at the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School of Business have analyzed this legislation as if these
temporary provisions would be made permanent, which, I think, is the
safest assumption to make. So, instead of $1.75 trillion, they have
pegged the cost as close to $4.6 trillion over 10 years--more than 2\1/
2\ times the amount the Democrats have claimed.
Then there is the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that
thinks that the number could even be a few hundred billion higher than
that. They estimate the true cost of this bill, now claimed to be $1.75
trillion, to be approximately $5 trillion. This is a massive, massive
jump from what the Democrats have said the cost of this bill will be.
Even one of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle has
acknowledged that this is disingenuous--and I would just use the word
``false''--advertising. The true cost of this legislation is much
closer to Chairman Sanders' original $6 trillion request than the so-
called scaled-back proposal of the current bill.
Before this legislation comes to the Senate floor, we need to see a
true cost estimate based on reasonable assumptions, not a fairy tale
scenario. It defies all common sense to vote on a bill without knowing
how much it is going to cost ahead of time.
To this end, last week, I sent a letter to the leaders of the
Congressional Budget Office and of the Joint Committee on Taxation
requesting an updated estimate based on more reasonable assumptions. If
the temporary provisions of this bill are extended--and I fully expect
them to be if our Democratic colleagues have the votes to do it--this
legislation will cost a whole lot more than what the American people
have been told; and we need to know, as close as we can, exactly how
much that will be.
Well, it is obvious what is going on here. These not-so-temporary
provisions won't expire in a year or 4 years or 10 years. We need to
operate under rational assumptions that our Democratic colleagues, when
the chance is provided to them, will make these programs permanent and
come up with a true and honest score for the bill. If this legislation
is all of a sound investment as our Democratic colleagues claim, they
shouldn't have anything to be afraid of.
We do have a duty, I believe, as Members of Congress, in voting on
legislation of this magnitude, to know what we are doing before we are
asked to vote on it. I don't think anybody, really, should have
anything to be afraid of, unless they are afraid of a true accounting
as opposed to the smoke and mirrors we see so far on this phony,
gimmickry bill.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
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