[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 102 (Wednesday, June 15, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2958-S2960]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




SETTING FORTH THE CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT 
FOR FISCAL YEAR 2023 AND SETTING FORTH THE APPROPRIATE BUDGETARY LEVELS 
         FOR FISCAL YEARS 2024 THROUGH 2032--MOTION TO PROCEED

  Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the United States has the largest economy in 
the world and also has the largest government apparatus in the world. 
This year, we will bring in $4.8 trillion and will spend about $5.8 
trillion, and yet we will have no budget this year. How inexcusable, 
how embarrassing it is for a country--the largest country in the world, 
the largest government in the world, the largest bureaucracy in the 
world--to have no budget. Is it any wonder that we are $30 trillion in 
debt?
  Most small businesses have a budget. Most businesses in our country 
have a budget and a prediction for what will come in and what will go 
out for the year, and this year there will be no budget. Not only will 
there be no Democratic presentation about it, there will be no 
Republican presentation as a party.
  So today I will introduce my budget. This is a budget that balances 
in 5 years. The reason we chose 5 years is that the constitutional 
amendment to the budget amendment--the constitutional amendment that 
would balance the budget--balances in 5 years. We voted on that 
amendment previously in this body, and the Democrats, in unison, 
opposed it. They were opposed to a balanced budget amendment to the 
Constitution. The Republicans were unanimous in voting for the balanced 
budget amendment, constitutional amendment. In that amendment, the text 
of it would balance the budget in 5 years. So you would think, if all 
50 Republicans are on record as being for a balanced budget amendment 
that balances in 5 years, that all 50 Republicans would be for a 
balanced budget, a budget that actually balances in 5 years.
  Now, why is it important to have a budget? Well, you ought to have a 
blueprint or a plan for what your government is going to do, so it is 
inexcusable not to have any budget at all.
  But also we have another problem that we are facing in our country: 
We are facing the problem of inflation. Every American is seeing it. 
You are seeing your gas prices go through the roof. You are seeing your 
prices at the grocery store going through the roof.
  Why do we have inflation? Well, inflation comes from debt. When the 
United States runs up a debt, it is sold. Foreign countries buy the 
debt, Americans buy the debt, but the biggest purchaser of our debt is 
the Federal Reserve.
  When the Federal Reserve buys the debt, do they buy it with money 
that they have sort of laying around? Do you go to the Federal Reserve, 
and some guy opens a big safe, and here is the money to buy the debt? 
No. The Federal Reserve doesn't have any money, so the Federal Reserve 
simply prints up the money and buys the American debt. But what does 
that mean? When the Federal Reserve prints the money to buy the debt, 
this floods the system with money. So we are flooded with money right 
now. In the last 2 years, we borrowed $6 trillion, so $6 trillion is 
entered into the system.
  When you look at the amount of money that is being created, there is 
a measurement of money supply called the M2. If you look at it on an 
annualized basis, it has been going up at 15 percent a year.
  So inflation is an increase in the money supply. It is an increase in 
the money supply because they are buying the debt. So it is all related 
to spending.
  It is inexcusable that we will have no budget this year. It is 
inexcusable that the projection is for a trillion-dollar deficit in 1 
year and yet there won't even be a budget plan. There will be no plan 
to try to make the deficit less or to try to manage our money.
  But with this debt comes inflation. We are suffering from the worst 
inflation we have had in 40 years. Who suffers the most from inflation? 
The working class, those who are on fixed income, those who are 
retired, they are getting creamed by this. People are spending over 
$100 filling up their gas tank now. This is a real problem.
  So a balanced budget is not an academic exercise. It is not something 
that is theoretical. Our deficit has real impacts. Our deficit is 
leading to inflation. So what I have proposed for the last several 
years is a balanced budget, a budget that balances gradually over 5 
years by having across-the-board cuts.

[[Page S2959]]

  When I started introducing this budget several years ago, you could 
simply freeze spending, and if you froze spending, we would grow out of 
the deficit. By 5 years, by not increasing spending, you would have a 
balanced budget. That was rejected by all the Democrats and about half 
of the Republicans.
  So then we went another year or two, and spending increased. As 
spending increased and got worse, a freeze would no longer balance the 
budget in 5 years, so we introduced the Penny Plan. The Penny Plan was 
to cut 1 percent a year for 5 years, and it would balance. But still 
the Congress ignored my admonition on this, and the spending got worse.
  In the last couple of years, it has had to have been increased by a 
two-penny plan, meaning a 2-percent reduction in spending each year for 
5 years would still lead to balance in 5 years. But Congress once again 
has ignored that.
  So last year when we introduced the 5-year plan to balance the 
budget, it was called the Five Penny Plan. You had to reduce spending 
by 5 percent each year for 5 years.
  This year, it has gotten even worse. The $6 trillion spending spree 
of the last 2 years when they locked down the economy and basically 
bankrupted almost every business in the country--when that occurred, 
there was massive spending, massive debts, and now, this year, in order 
to balance the budget, it would take a 6-percent cut.
  But I would like to put this in perspective. If you ask people in 
Washington, their heads explode because they could never conceive of 
ever reducing spending. In fact, spending hasn't gone down really ever 
in real terms in recent history because the government grows and grows 
and grows. Your economy may shrink, your income may shrink, you may be 
unemployed, but the government gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
  So if we want to tame government, if we want to get government to 
live within its means, if we want government to balance its budget, it 
would take some work. People in Washington seem to think, oh, it could 
never happen, but if you talk to a business man or woman who has ever 
been through a recession or ever been through tough times, they will 
tell you that sometimes a business has to reduce by 10 percent, 20 
percent, 30 percent, to live within their means.
  What we are calling for here is not no government. We are not even 
calling for a minimal government. What we are calling for is a 
government that lives within its means. Right now, living within its 
means would be a government that brings in $4.8 trillion, which is how 
much tax revenue comes in, would spend $4.8 trillion. So still the vast 
majority of things the government does, it could still continue to do, 
but it would have to spend less. We would have to have real restraint 
in spending.

  The best way to perceive it is this: Imagine the thing that you want 
from government that you think is so popular, nobody could touch. Let's 
take for example research for cancer or research for Alzheimer's 
disease, something that so many people advocate, so many people are 
emotionally charged with.
  Well, when people come to Washington and they ask me about ``I have 
this'' or ``My parents have this, and I want research money to go to 
this,'' what I typically will say to them is ``You know we are out of 
money. You know that we have this massive deficit, and it has led to 
this great inflation that is across the land. What if we told everybody 
that they had to have a little bit less?'' They look at me and they say 
``Well, what would that mean?'' and I say ``Well, let's say that your 
research project--the cancer research or the Alzheimer's research--got 
$100 million last year. In order for all of us to tighten our belt, in 
order for all of us to balance the budget so we can be stronger, in 
order to tame the inflation that is eating us alive, you would get $94 
million next year.''
  So we are not talking about sort of eliminating whole facets of 
government; what we are talking about is everybody would have to deal 
with less.
  There is so much waste throughout government. You look at the 
National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation is one of 
the most wasteful Agencies in government.
  You go back 50 years, and you look at William Proxmire. In the early 
1970s, William Proxmire began giving an award called the Golden Fleece 
Award. What he would give an award for was wasteful spending, and 
almost always, it came to the National Science Foundation. One of the 
first ones he gave an award for was $50,000 to discover what makes 
people fall in love. He just thought it was ridiculous that we would be 
spending money on that, and I agree. But it didn't get better; it got 
worse.
  The National Science Foundation has never had a reduction in its 
money. It always gets more money. This year--and this is why this is a 
bipartisan problem--the Republicans and Democrats got together, and we 
nearly doubled the income or nearly doubled the appropriations for the 
National Science Foundation.
  What are some other kinds of great research coming out of this 
organization?
  Well, they did a study to see whether or not selfies make you happy. 
So if you take a selfie of yourself smiling and then look at it later 
in the day, does that make you feel better about yourself? That would 
cost a little over a million dollars.
  They did a study also on the mating call of male Panamanian frogs. 
They said: Well, we want to know whether the country frogs have a 
different mating call than the city frogs. As someone who comes from 
the country, I can tell you there is a different mating call in the 
country than there is in the city. But that cost us about half-a-
million dollars.
  Another study was $2 million to find out if the person in front of 
you sneezes on the food in the cafeteria, are you more or less likely 
to take that food?
  Another study was three-quarters of a million dollars, studying 
whether or not Japanese quail, on cocaine--whether or not they are more 
sexually promiscuous when they use cocaine.
  I mean, the studies go on endlessly.
  So what did Congress do? Instead of telling them: Why don't we give 
them one penny less; why don't we give them 99 percent of their budget, 
or this year why don't we give them 94 percent of the budget, instead 
we gave them 200 percent of their budget. Do you think the National 
Science Foundation is going to be more frugal now that we have nearly 
doubled their budget?

  But this is the kind of great ideas that are coming out of Congress, 
and this one turned out to be a bipartisan idea. All of the Democrats 
and half the Republicans voted to nearly double the size of the 
National Science Foundation. So you will get more waste, more abuse, 
and more debt.
  The thing is, we bring in a lot of money. We bring in $4.8 trillion. 
Could we not simply spend what comes in? Part of the problem also is 
most of the bills are not read. Most of the appropriations bills come 
in here at the last moment, are 2,000 pages, and no one gets to read 
them until hours beforehand.
  And so what they do is they have renewed programs year after year. 
There is a process up here where we authorize spending. So one 
committee is supposed to say, is the spending working, and then the 
other committee appropriates the money. We don't even bother to 
reauthorize these things. We just keep reappropriating the money year 
after year.
  Someone will have this great idea and say, well, we need to do 
something about homelessness, and everybody will say, well, that is 
such a well-meaning--they intend to do it, and they will do it. But 
nobody looks up the fact that we already have 80 other programs doing 
the same thing.
  Nobody ever looks at whether the program is working. Nobody ever 
figures out whether anything that we are spending on money is viable 
and doing us any good, and so it just adds up.
  People come and say: Oh, well, this is something we have to do. We 
have to send $40 billion to Ukraine. Where does it come from? If you 
really think it is such a great idea, why don't we have a Ukraine war 
tax? Why don't we do $500 per taxpayer, and you would have enough for 
Ukraine. No, they just want to add it on the tab.
  But it is worse than that. It is so irresponsible that the party in 
charge will produce no budget. So we have nearly $5 trillion coming in; 
nearly $6 trillion going out the door, and there will be no budget. It 
is inexcusable.
  We have the largest economy in the world. We have the largest 
government

[[Page S2960]]

in the world, and we will have no budget this year. So what I have done 
and will continue to do is to produce a budget that balances in 5 
years; this is consistent with the balanced budget amendment to the 
Constitution.
  And the other reason we do 5 years is that some people have come 
forward in the past and said that we will balance it in 10. It becomes 
so long and unbelievable with the cuts in years 9 and 10 that they 
never happen; that it really hasn't become a good document even when 
budgets are put forward.
  I think if we were to balance our budget, I think we would be a 
stronger Nation. It is the way we would combat inflation. If you see 
the people representing the party in power, the Democrats, you see them 
on TV, they are scratching their heads; they have no idea. They are 
like we have tried everything. But they don't even understand the 
problem. They have no idea where inflation is coming from.
  Inflation comes from debt. When the Federal Reserve buys the debt, 
that creates the inflation. Because the Federal Reserve has no money, 
the money is printed up, and the money floods the system.
  But it is also part of a bait and switch. These are people who run 
for office and say: We will bring you free things. We will bring you 
baubles. We will bring you manna. We will give you free stuff. We all 
instinctively know that nothing in life is really free.
  So the free stuff that they are going to bring to you is paid for 
through inflation.
  So we have to get away from this. We have to get to the point where 
we say that we are smarter than this. When a politician calls you up 
and says: Give me your Social Security number and I will send you a 
thousand dollars, that is what this is. It is an internet scam. It is a 
phone scam.
  They are asking for your vote by saying: We are going to give you 
free stuff. There is no free lunch. There is nothing in life that you 
will get without working. But what we have done is political parties 
and politicians--sometimes in both parties--offer free stuff to people. 
But right now we are paying the penalty. We are paying the piper. We 
are paying the inflation tax.
  And the inflation tax is a tax because we have overspent. Inflation 
will continue to get worse until we begin to reduce the debt. You have 
got to quit digging the hole. We have this massive hole of debt, and we 
have to quit digging the hole deeper. So this budget will be a budget 
that balances in 5 years, and I recommend a ``yes'' vote.


                           Motion to Proceed

  And with that, I move to proceed to Calendar No. 397, S. Con. Res. 
41.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Smith). The clerk will report the motion.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       Motion to proceed to Calendar No. 397, S. Con. Res. 41, a 
     concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget 
     for the United States Government for fiscal year 2023 and 
     setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal 
     years 2024 through 2032.


                             Vote on Motion

  THE PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
  Mr. PAUL. 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. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Montana (Mr. Daines), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran), the 
Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey), and the Senator from 
Mississippi (Mr. Wicker).
  The result was announced--yeas 29, nays 67, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 228 Leg.]

                                YEAS--29

     Barrasso
     Blackburn
     Braun
     Cassidy
     Cotton
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Grassley
     Hagerty
     Hawley
     Hoeven
     Hyde-Smith
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Lankford
     Lee
     Lummis
     Marshall
     Paul
     Risch
     Romney
     Rubio
     Scott (FL)
     Scott (SC)
     Sullivan
     Tuberville

                                NAYS--67

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Blunt
     Booker
     Boozman
     Brown
     Burr
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Collins
     Coons
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Feinstein
     Gillibrand
     Graham
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hickenlooper
     Hirono
     Inhofe
     Kaine
     Kelly
     King
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Lujan
     Manchin
     Markey
     McConnell
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Ossoff
     Padilla
     Peters
     Portman
     Reed
     Rosen
     Rounds
     Sanders
     Sasse
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Shelby
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Thune
     Tillis
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warnock
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden
     Young

                             NOT VOTING--4

     Daines
     Moran
     Toomey
     Wicker
  The motion was rejected.

                          ____________________