[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 1324-1325]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                               THE BUDGET

  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I look forward to the debate the Senator 
from Minnesota was discussing. I agree; just because we should and will 
have a civil debate doesn't mean we should not have that debate and lay 
out our differences of opinion very aggressively and passionately. I 
look forward to doing that.
  The good news today, while there is a lot of gloom and doom in 
certain corners, is that tax relief is on the way for working 
Americans. They deserve it. We have a tax surplus, $5.6 trillion in 
overpayment by the American people.
  Now, we will argue over exactly how that $5.6 trillion tax surplus 
should be used. We agree that Social Security should be set aside, put 
in a lockbox. If you listened to the campaign debate last year, you 
would have thought Vice President Gore came up with that idea. He needs 
to check with Senator Domenici and others who actually came up with the 
idea of having a lockbox on Social Security.
  We should continue to pay down the debt in an orderly way, as was 
suggested by Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, 
over a period of years, and we can eliminate it earlier than was 
indicated. We ought to do that on a steady basis. We can have 
additional investment in areas where we really need it--in education, 
in health care, even in defense.
  To the President's credit, he is saying in the defense area, let's 
take a look and see what our needs may be in defense; let's look and 
see if there might be someplace where we can save some money in defense 
while we clearly are going to have to do more in terms of having 
readiness and modernization and quality of life for our men and women 
in the military. We need to assess what we are going to need in the 
future. He is going about it in an orderly fashion. That is a good 
idea.
  There is no question that working Americans need some tax relief. You 
talk about breaks for the wealthy. What about the single educated young 
woman making $30,000 a year in the 28-percent bracket? That is not 
rich. We have these brackets now that force people into higher and 
higher brackets

[[Page 1325]]

at very low income levels. That is fundamentally unfair. We are talking 
about tax relief for all Americans across the board. It is very fair to 
do it that way.
  I thought we had fundamental agreement last year that we need to do 
something about reducing the marriage penalty. The President proposes 
that we double the child tax credit. I don't believe there are a lot of 
Democrats who are going to speak against that. He encourages more use 
of charitable contributions without being first penalized with taxes 
when you take some of your savings and put it into charity. He has a 
whole package of good ideas, and it is a very fair proposal because it 
is across-the-board rate cuts.
  There is another benefit here. We are not just talking about the 
fairness in the Tax Code; we are talking about the need for some 
economic growth incentives. Look at what President Kennedy did, what 
President Reagan did, and how much their tax relief was as a percentage 
of GDP. As a matter of fact, President Bush's proposals are actually 
below what the Kennedy-Johnson package provided for way back in the 
1960s. In each case, we had economic growth; we had an increase of 
revenue coming into the Federal Government.
  The problem was, in the 1980s, we had an insatiable spending appetite 
by the Democratically-controlled Congress that kept pushing up 
spending. Unfortunately, we could not convince President Reagan to veto 
more of those bills. I hope President George W. Bush will press 
aggressively for his proposal on tax relief. I know he is doing it. He 
is going today to have an event with a young woman in business to show 
how this tax relief would help her.
  As a matter of fact, we checked on a lady who was here a couple years 
ago, expressing concern about Government mandates and regulations and 
taxes, named Harriet Cane from the Sweetlife, a small restaurant in 
Marietta, GA. She had eight employees. She was struggling to make ends 
meet. She was doing more and more herself. She did the mopping, the 
preparation.
  Well, we checked with her to see how she is doing. Guess what. She is 
out of business. She said: What drove me out of business was a lot of 
things, but Government mandates and regulations and taxes contributed 
mightily to it. When she heard what President Bush is talking about, 
she said: That certainly would have helped me. For the young 
entrepreneur, this tax relief will be very positive.
  There is a fundamental difference. There are people here who think 
that any money we can take from people to bring to Washington, we have 
the brilliance on how it should be spent.
  I have a fundamental faith in the people to decide what they should 
do with their own money that they worked hard to earn. Now they are 
paying 28 percent, 15 percent, 33 percent, 36.5 percent. When you add 
it all up, you still have people in this country paying 40, 50 percent 
of everything they earn for taxes, to bring it to Washington so the 
brilliant Members of Congress and the bureaucrats can decide how they 
think it should be spent.
  I don't agree with that. I think the family can decide how to best 
spend money for their children's needs, whether it is buying clothes or 
a refrigerator, a different car, or a tutor for education. The same 
thing is true in education.
  States such as Minnesota put a lot of money into education. Other 
States don't put as much into education. Quality education is not 
consistent across this country, between States and within States, 
including my own State.
  My State has put a high priority on education. We are beginning to 
make progress. We are going to be paying teachers more. Our 
universities have been competing more aggressively for research money 
in physics, acoustics, and polymerscience.
  I still believe education should be run at the local level and 
decisions should be made there. I think we should have a program that 
leaves no child behind; we should improve reading, but we should also 
improve math and science skills.
  The Federal Government can help with that. By the way, not everybody 
even agrees with that. My predecessor--a Democrat, I might add--in the 
House and in the Senate thought there was a great concern about the 
Federal dollar and Federal control following the Federal dollar. I 
don't agree. I think we have a role to play in early childhood 
education and elementary and secondary and in higher education. We have 
been doing a better job in higher education than in elementary and 
secondary.
  I think money should be given to the States and the localities, local 
education administrators and teachers and parents, with flexibility so 
they can decide how to spend it. People in Washington don't like it. 
They want to tell you to spend it here, there, or somewhere else. 
Pascagoula, MS, might have different needs from Pittsburgh, PA. We may 
need more teachers, or maybe we need more remedial reading programs, or 
maybe we need to fix a leaky roof. But the Federal Government doesn't 
know what the priority is.
  We are going to have a good debate. I look forward to it. When I 
check with my constituents, the people working, paying taxes, pulling 
the load, people out in the forests who are being told, ``By the way, 
you can't cut trees anymore and you can't have roads to get to those 
trees,'' and people working in the shipyards or oil refineries, they 
are wondering what will happen. They don't have to have a national 
energy crisis. The problem is we haven't been producing more energy 
because we want to shut down our resources--coal, oil.
  Let's debate education and energy policy and we will get a result. I 
believe the American people will be better off when we get those done.
  If we don't have a budget plan of how to use this tax surplus, it 
will be spent by the Washington Government. That is a mistake. I think 
the working people deserve help. Should we be concerned about low-
income needs? Yes. We should address that in a variety of ways, and we 
are going to do that.
  Yes, I think it is time to get on with the debate. I commend the 
President for what he proposed. He will bring it up to the Congress 
Thursday. We will have a chance to study it. I am pleased that he said 
let's make the income tax cuts retroactive to the first of the year. I 
think that will be even more positive for the economy.

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