[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 17858-17860]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                           PROJECTED SURPLUS

  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, I am very anxious to talk to my 
colleagues. I want to do it as much as I can in these days to come.
  As the previous speaker said, with whom I do not agree on policy, 
this is a momentous, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
  I have been here for 15 years. I was for 8 years before Governor of 
West Virginia where we faced things such as 21-percent unemployment, 
and things which are almost Third World in their statistical 
significance compared to what most of my colleagues had to deal with.
  Being able to look at a tax surplus or a projected surplus of a lot 
of money over the next number of years is a wonderful opportunity for 
the people of my State and for the people of my country.
  I have to say, though, the approach of the Finance Committee, on 
which I serve, voting a $792 billion tax cut is antithetical, to my 
thoughts, as to what is good for the country and good for the economy.
  I will start off by simply saying the obvious; that is, as one of the 
senior Members of the majority side of the Finance Committee said, 5 
percent of Americans pay 95 percent of personal income taxes, and 
therefore the money ought to go back to them. That is an odd way of 
thinking. That is certainly one way of thinking. It is obviously that 
Senator's way of thinking. It doesn't square with sort of the sense of 
fairness, equity, and distribution of equal opportunity in an economic 
sense as in other senses that I was brought up to believe in.
  We have projected--and I underscore the word ``projected''--a surplus 
of $1 trillion over the next 10 years. The central question is: How do 
we most responsibly spend this? I think it is a central question of 
historic importance.
  For me there is really only one answer; that is, to pay down the 
national debt.
  It is very hard for me to put into words the feeling of how far we 
have come since the mid-1980s when we used to have those talks with the 
Japanese, the structural impediment talks in which they would tell us 
what they thought we should do and we would tell them what we thought 
they should do and we never listened to each other. We, in fact, 
listened to them in 1993, and on our own, in a historic vote, made an 
enormous beginning, later fueled by the private sector, to balance the 
budget deficit. I didn't think that would happen when I was in the 
Senate. But we proceeded to take the action.
  I myself was assigned the responsibility of cutting $60 billion out 
of Medicare, which at that time was a great deal of money, and we 
proceeded to do that. But never in my wildest dreams did I ever even 
begin to think of the possibility that we might, in fact, be able to 
pay down the national debt--the national debt which under the Reagan-
Bush administration rose to

[[Page 17859]]

over $4 trillion. I can't contemplate amounts of that sort. So I 
couldn't possibly contemplate the results of eliminating amounts of 
that sort.
  But we have a chance to do that. We have the chance to do it by the 
year 2014 and 2015.
  People talk a lot about taxes around here. To me, the greatest tax 
will come if we pass the Republican tax package, if we ``give'' the so-
called ``middle-income worker'' that kind of tax advantage because I 
think it is false. In my State, where the average income is around 
$30,500, I think the average mainstream worker would end up losing $500 
or $600 a year because interest rates would go up on car payments, on 
home loans, on education loans, on credit cards, and all of those 
things. Interest rates would go up because we know from what Greenspan 
said they would. They would probably go up by about 1 percent.
  I think the average people in the State whom I represent would end up 
paying much more under the Republican tax cut plan than they would if 
we opted to retire the debt because in that case, I think interest 
payments would go down, and those same people--having watched in 
wonderment what is or is not going on in Washington--would benefit from 
the results of two things: Not only lower interest rates, which would 
affect them up to where they are fixed, but they would also benefit 
from an economy.
  I try to contemplate this in my mind. Come the year 2010 or 2011 when 
the world really begins to understand that America is dead tracked on 
the idea of elimination of the national debt, what would happen to the 
national economy?
  My mind can't even bring that into consideration, except it is filled 
with scenes of incredible entrepreneurial activities by people who are 
willing to take risks, people who emerge from the hollows of West 
Virginia, from the deserts of Nevada, from all kinds of high plains of 
the Northwest, or the northern middle west, and start doing all kinds 
of things which they have never dared do before base interest rates 
were there to do it, where money is available, capital is available, 
and there is a sense of optimism in America, and what I have seen in 
the last 8 years becomes almost a memory in terms of the optimism and 
the incredible success and energy of that kind of new economy.
  To me, paying off the national debt does two things:
  One, it guarantees the economic future of the people whom I 
represent, who elect me to represent them; and it guarantees the 
economic future of the entire country for perhaps a generation or two 
to come because we will have done something impossible--eliminate the 
budget deficit, and then eliminate the national debt.
  How would the markets respond to that? How would human nature respond 
to that? I only glory to contemplate what that might mean.
  Second, I want to pay down the national debt because I don't want to 
spend money. I don't want to spend money on a whole lot of new things. 
I want to make sure that something called Social Security--the money 
for that--and something called Medicare --the money for that--is there 
in the meantime, until those programs run out of money in a number of 
years, as all of that money will be going into those trust funds, 
building up and guaranteeing the future of Medicare and Social 
Security. That is a matter not of the energy of the American economy 
but the depth of the American commitment, the social contract that we 
made both with respect to Social Security and Medicare, both of which 
are going to need our attention and which need more funds. They would 
have the funds under a system wherein one concentrated on paying down 
the national debt.
  In the Finance Committee, I originally was for a tax cut of only $250 
billion. I am for that today. That was a different tax cut from 
anything we are considering. I worry very much about Americans not 
saving. I like the idea of Government matching any American who put a 
certain amount of money into a savings account; in other words, to 
encourage something which we do worse than any other people in the 
world, and that is to save money, putting money in the bank--not only 
for one's own future but for the capital markets.
  I want to see that. I want to see the marriage penalty tax eliminated 
so it does not become more expensive to get married, it becomes less 
expensive to get married. If we put up a bill that had no tax cut at 
all, I would be tempted. I don't know, in the final analysis, if I 
would vote for it, but I would be tempted.
  I believe in paying off the national debt. I think the consequences 
of that are enormously exciting. Not contemplating the numerical 
``joust'' we play with each other over millions and trillions of 
dollars, the simple fact is that by the year 2014 or 2015 there would 
be virtually no national debt remaining--less than 1 percent. That is 
the single most exciting public policy event I can contemplate since I 
have served in the Senate. My fear is that Congress is going to figure 
this out but that Congress is going to figure it out too late, after it 
has already done the damage.
  I regret our failure so far to seize this once-in-a-lifetime 
opportunity to pay off the national debt. I regret it for my State. My 
State is the oldest State, so to speak, in terms of population. It has 
actually surpassed Florida. That would naturally bias me in terms of 
Social Security and Medicare. If I were from another State, I would 
feel the same way, I believe.
  Social Security has lifted two-thirds of Americans out of poverty. 
Does one turn one's back on this? People voted for the $792 billion tax 
cut. But $2 trillion of the surplus already belongs to Social Security. 
That is not on the table. Of the $1 trillion remaining, that can only 
happen if we do draconian domestic cuts. I don't mean adding new 
programs. I mean taking tremendous numbers of billions of dollars in 
every single area for years and years and taking away from what we are 
already doing.
  I care passionately about veterans' health care as I have watched the 
veterans' health care system deteriorate in a variety of ways across 
this country. We are not talking about increasing veterans' health care 
costs. We are talking about tremendous cuts in those we already have.
  Many Members have discussed the fact that a young mind is formed by 
the time it is 3 years old, the importance of Head Start, the 
importance of the Older Americans Act, the importance of low-income-
housing heating, housing, enterprise zones, law enforcement, the 
military. All of these receive enormous budget reductions that would 
sustain themselves over a number of years. Over half a trillion cut 
from present spending in fiscal year 1999; the same on through fiscal 
year 2002 and beyond that. CBO doesn't even choose to figure what 
happens after 5 years. They say they have never done it before so why 
should they do it now. I think that is an amazing way of thinking. That 
is what they say.
  If we spend $792 billion on a bunch of tax breaks now before we even 
know that the money is for real and that it will absolutely be there, I 
cannot in conscience, for the people I represent, believe that Medicare 
and Social Security will be anything under the great strain of reducing 
benefits. I cannot bear to have that happen. I don't think anybody 
should tell you otherwise.
  I understand it is very easy to talk about a $792 billion tax cut. It 
is wonderful to sit in the Finance Committee and have people say we 
ought to do this or that about ethanol and this or that regarding 
helping different people, different groups. Sometimes people voting for 
the bill got all kinds of things implanted in the bill. That was nice. 
I am sure they were good things.
  How does that compare to the real possibility of setting America 
virtually free economically, establishing our economic dominance for 
all time by retiring the national debt? Think how the markets would 
respond to that. Think how capital overseas would flow into our 
markets, further enabling us to go out and build an even stronger 
America, close the digital divide, to give everybody an equal 
opportunity--

[[Page 17860]]

not guaranteeing that everybody succeeds but guaranteeing everybody has 
at least a chance to succeed.
  I cannot allow NIH, Head Start, or education programs to take the 
tremendous reductions from their current level of funding by the 
Federal Government that would be required under the Republican tax cut. 
It is phenomenal to me that people have not focused on this consequence 
of that $792 billion tax cut, a tax cut basically for the rich who 
already have it, who have already gained by the system, who have 
already gained through the last 8 years by the stock market increase.
  What about the people who are working hard and who would receive a 
$188 tax increase compared to a $700 or $800 tax increase for people 
who are very wealthy? I ask my colleagues to think about fairness. I 
ask my colleagues to think about the consequences of a $792 billion tax 
cut, and I ask my colleagues above all and finally to think about the 
absolutely extraordinary power of what would happen in this country if 
we actually reduced the national deficit to virtually zero--deficit and 
then debt. We can do both. Therefore, we shouldn't do the Republican 
tax cut.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. I ask unanimous consent to proceed as in morning business 
for 15 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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