[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 76 (Thursday, May 4, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1523-S1525]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              The Economy

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, for the past 2 years, we have made 
historic, steady progress to strengthen the American economy. Under 
President Biden's leadership, we have successfully navigated one 
challenge after another, from the COVID pandemic to Putin's invasion of 
Ukraine, to supply chain snarls and persistent inflation.
  While America's economy has remained resilient in the face of these 
challenges, it is not invincible. We received a reminder of that just a 
few days ago when financial regulators took swift action to prevent a 
catastrophe.
  Over the weekend, Federal regulators seized a major bank that was 
teetering on the brink of collapse, First Republic, and sold it to 
JPMorgan Chase. These actions not only protected First Republic's 
depositors, they could have saved our economy from potential recession. 
Why do I say that? Well, First Republic was the third major bank to 
fail in 2 months. In fact, it was the second largest bank failure since 
2008. So think about what could have happened had regulators failed to 
contain the damage from First Republic's collapse. Today, we would be 
reading headlines about panicking investors, panicking depositors, and 
turmoil throughout the financial system. Thankfully, we avoided that 
outcome. It is because the Government had the good sense to step in and 
maintain confidence in the banking system.
  Now, Federal regulators stepped in to protect our economy when the 
crisis at hand was a bank with $229 billion in assets, but that $229 
billion bank asset pales in comparison to a much larger undertaking we 
are facing in Washington today--the future of America's $23 trillion 
economy.
  Right now, in the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker McCarthy is 
threatening our economy with the first-ever Federal debt default, the 
first time ever in our history. Let's put Speaker McCarthy's dangerous 
gamble in context.
  Just days ago, some of the smartest financial minds in the world were 
convinced that a $229 billion bank could be the difference between 
financial stability and financial calamity. Well, that $229 billion is 
a tiny fraction of the $23 trillion economy that Speaker McCarthy is 
gambling with.
  We are only weeks away from the deadline of June 1. That is when 
Secretary Yellen says America could default on our Federal debt. So 
every day the House Republicans refuse to perform the most basic 
responsibility of government--paying our bills--they are spreading 
uncertainty throughout the global economy. That uncertainty is 
dangerous and costly.

  Over the past few years, our Nation has emerged from the depths of a 
once-in-a-century pandemic; we have navigated one market disruption 
after another; and, today, we are finally moving in the right 
direction. But now, Speaker McCarthy, in the House, wants to throw all 
of that historic progress away. Why? To please the most radical members 
of his party. The debt ceiling proposal House Republicans passed last 
week is not a budget;

[[Page S1524]]

it is a MAGA manifesto. It is a ransom note to the American people: 
Either suffer the disastrous consequences of debt default or face 
devastating cuts in services and programs that millions of Americans 
rely on every day.
  I just left a hearing in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Health 
and Human Services. Appearing before that committee was the National 
Institutes of Health. This is the premier medical research Agency in 
the world. Of the 500-plus new prescription drugs, they are responsible 
for almost all of them in basic research. Just this week, we had a 
dramatic announcement in Chicago by Northwestern University in its 
doing medical research. And I am going to try to say this properly as a 
liberal arts-trained lawyer when I get into medicine and science. But 
they have finally found a way to successfully breach the blood-brain 
barrier. What does it mean? We had two of our most famous Senators in 
modern times--Ted Kennedy and John McCain--both pass away because of 
glioblastoma--brain cancer. The Presiding Officer understands that 
personally more than any other Member of this body. We watched as they 
went through surgery, which was the only technique that could be used 
on this brain cancer, in an attempt to remove the tumor and all of the 
cancer cells. Well, naturally and unfortunately, that process is not as 
good as it should be. Tumor brain cells remained and, ultimately, took 
their lives.
  Well, now these doctors at Northwestern have found a way to breach 
this blood-brain barrier so that they can apply chemotherapy drugs to 
the brain directly. It is a dramatic development that could have 
applications as well when it comes to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. That 
was discovered this week because of an NIH grant, a National Institutes 
of Health grant--millions of dollars to these researchers that could 
transform the way we treat brain cancer in America as well as 
Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
  So what does Speaker McCarthy want to do with the budget of this 
Agency, the National Institutes of Health? He wants to cut it by 20 to 
25 percent. That is an outrage to think that we would forestall the 
research that could save lives and alleviate suffering across America 
and the fact that our leadership and the world of medical research 
would be jeopardized because of gamesmanship by Speaker McCarthy on the 
issue of the debt ceiling.
  His proposal for a budget--if you want to call it that--is a MAGA 
manifesto. They don't care. They are determined to preserve the Trump 
tax cuts at any expense. When you look at cutting 20 to 25 percent from 
medical research, it is true that they will go to the extreme.
  What would debt default look like?
  Well, it would wipe out also trillions of dollars in savings of 
families across America, and the 401(k)s would take a beating. It would 
kill millions of jobs and force businesses to grind to a halt, and it 
would send our economy into a recession.
  Does Speaker McCarthy believe that any of us were sent to Washington 
to achieve that goal?
  Defaulting would send interest rates soaring, making costly credit 
cards and mortgages even more expensive. It is a nonstarter, but so is 
accepting any of the destructive cuts that I have described.
  Their MAGA manifesto would cause needless suffering all across 
America. It would hurt virtually everybody in this Nation except the 
top 1 percent, which would have their Trump tax cuts preserved.
  To start, this Republican bill would decimate funding for America's 
veterans--eliminating 80,000 jobs in the Veterans Health 
Administration--and threaten housing and food security for them as 
well.
  This proposal would also wipe out 30,000 law enforcement and Border 
Patrol jobs.
  Next week, we have got a watershed event occurring on the border. I 
am sure the Presiding Officer is aware of it as he represents the State 
of New Mexico.
  The question is, What is going to happen when we eliminate title 42? 
Are we going to have an onslaught of thousands of people seeking asylum 
in this country, and are we ready for them?
  I have heard many Members of the Senate from the other side of the 
aisle suggest they are unhappy with the situation. I am, too, but we 
need to respond to it in an orderly, direct fashion. Defunding Border 
Patrol agents is a ridiculous outcome, and to think that Speaker 
McCarthy would defund Border Patrol agents in this country at this 
moment in history is just nonsensical.
  I would just say that, when it comes to the defunding of the police 
and Border Patrol agents, it is a bad idea even if it comes from the 
Republican Speaker.
  If this proposal became law, I might add--the proposal by Speaker 
McCarthy for his budget--we would also cut 1 million senior citizens' 
Meals on Wheels. What does this program do? For many of our elderly 
citizens, particularly those who are in a compromised medical state, 
this is the only social contact they have each day--perhaps with the 
mailman as well. That is it. To eliminate this Meals on Wheels in order 
to preserve the tax cuts from the Trump administration is just unfair.
  Let me tell you what the cuts would mean in my State of Illinois.
  The Republican proposal would force 13,000 children in our State to 
lose childcare and preschool. It would strip food assistance from 
55,000 women, infants, and children. Does that make any sense at all? 
It would threaten the medical care for more than 186,000 veterans in 
Illinois, and 50,000 seniors would lose their Meals on Wheels in my 
State.
  Yesterday, my office heard from the Greater Chicago Food Depository--
a food bank that is one of the best. It provides meals to seniors and 
families. Here is what one of their staff members said:

       These proposed cuts are coming at a time when the need 
     we're seeing in the community is as high as it was during the 
     beginning days of COVID. Families are really struggling.

  These are the families who Speaker McCarthy would abandon with his 
MAGA manifesto. And for what purpose is he doing this? I will tell 
you--to keep tax cuts for the wealthiest people and the most profitable 
corporations in place--another windfall for the well-off.
  We can and should debate our spending practices for the year to come, 
but this is not it. This is not the place to do it, and this is not the 
time to do it with the debt ceiling looming. Right now, we have one 
responsibility--to maintain the reputation of the United States of 
America in upholding the full faith and credit of standing behind our 
debts and making our payments. That is our constitutional duty. The 
path forward is clear. We need a clean bill for the debt ceiling, and 
then we can debate the issue of the budget and appropriations.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican Whip.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, as I begin, I want to talk about another 
subject here in a moment, but I also want to react to what the Senator 
from Illinois said with regard to the debt limit.
  I think it is important to point out, as folks on the other side and 
the White House talk about the need for a ``clean debt limit''--in 
other words, a debt limit that increases the amount of borrowing 
without anything whatsoever attached to it--that in 7 of the last 10 
debt limit debates, there were budgetary or policy items that were 
negotiated and attached--in 7 of the last 10 debt limits. Many of those 
were insisted upon by the Democrats at the time. In fact--I pointed 
this out yesterday--President Biden, when he was Vice President back in 
2011, made statements that he couldn't understand how anybody could not 
understand the importance or the need to negotiate on a debt limit 
increase and other policy matters related, hopefully, to spending and 
debt.
  It seems to me, at least, that a debt limit debate presents an 
opportunity to actually do something about the debt and to address the 
issue of spending. There have been a number of good suggestions made in 
a bill that has been sent over to us from the House of Representatives 
about how to do that--about how to save money, how to make government 
more efficient, reallocate, reprioritize how we spend money, and, 
hopefully, reduce the amount of debt that we actually have going 
forward and, perhaps, the need to again raise the debt limit.

[[Page S1525]]

  It seems like every time we have this conversation, everybody laments 
the fact that we have to do this and that we have this huge debt. Well, 
one way to address that would be to actually have a conversation about 
what we might do to reduce the debt in the form of spending reforms and 
budgetary changes that could address both the spending and the debt 
issue. So 7 of the last 10 times, that has happened, and in many cases, 
it has been instigated by the Democrat leaders, including Senator 
Schumer.
  One other observation about that--because I think it is important--is 
you talk about spending and debt. Think about just the absolute 
aggregate levels that we are now dealing with in terms of debt. I make 
this point because, back in 2010, the amount that we spent annually on 
interest on the debt was a little under $200 billion; and in 2022, last 
year, the amount that we spent on interest on the debt--in other words, 
just to finance the debt, to pay the interest on the amount of 
borrowing that we have in this country--was $475 billion. So, in that 
time period from 2010, we went from paying a little under $200 billion 
a year in interest on the debt to $475 billion a year in interest on 
the debt. That is a 142-percent increase. That is going to go up 
dramatically, as we all know, because interest rates are going up. So 
now the cost of borrowing is increasing dramatically. In fact, over the 
next 10 years, the estimate is that 50 cents out of every dollar that 
we borrow will go toward nothing but paying the interest on the debt.
  So, when you are $31 trillion in the hole--$31 trillion in debt--it 
seems logical to me--and I think it does to most Americans because they 
have weighed in on this, if you believe any of the polls--to address 
the issue of the debt as you are raising the debt limit, which is 
precisely what the House leadership in the House of Representatives did 
when it passed a bill last week and sent it to the Senate for 
consideration, including a number of spending reforms that would reduce 
not only the amount of spending that we have but also the amount of 
debt significantly. It would reduce the amount of debt over that time 
period by about $500 billion. It is actually significantly higher than 
that--several trillion dollars over the next 10-year period. That is a 
significant amount of money. The amount of interest saved is about $500 
billion. The total amount of savings on the debt is about $4.5 
trillion.
  So they are making an earnest effort at addressing what is a highly 
colossal problem for our country if we don't start reining it in and 
getting it under control. And I think it behooves the U.S. Senate to 
consider--and the President as well--what we might do to address 
spending and debt instead of declaring, as the Democrat leader did 
about the House bill, that it is dead on arrival in the Senate. There 
are a number of ideas in there that, I think, should be supported by 
both sides and that are meaningful in terms of what they do, obviously, 
by the amount that they would save.
  But 50 cents out of every dollar borrowed over the course of the next 
10 years--in each of the next 10 years--would be used for nothing more 
than to pay interest on the debt, which today--or as of last year, 
2022--is already $475 billion each and every year. There are 55 percent 
of the American people, including 58 percent of Democrats, who think 
that, before we raise the debt limit, we ought to do something to put 
some restraints in place--some budgetary restraints--that control the 
amount of spending in this country and, therefore, the amount of 
deficit and debt that we rack up.