[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Page 11166]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           DEFICITS AND DEBT

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I listened to the leaders today. I was 
thinking about Will Rogers, who once said: You could call me a hick or 
call me a rube, but the fact is, I would sooner be the person who buys 
the Brooklyn Bridge than the person who sells it. I was thinking of the 
fiction in that clever Will Rogers quote and some of the fiction I hear 
on the floor of the Senate.
  Everybody here understands--if not, they better understand quickly--
the dilemma of the unbelievable growth of deficits or debt for this 
country. It is unsustainable. There is no question about that. But it 
is interesting to me that just recently we have had the minority side 
of the aisle decide this is their life's calling despite the fact that 
this President, the day he was inaugurated and walked across the door 
into the White House, had this President done nothing but sleep for the 
next year, he inherited a Federal deficit of $1.3 trillion. This stuff 
about he said, we said, she said, they said, the American people aren't 
very interested in all that. What they are interested in is what caused 
this problem and who is going to step up and fix it.
  Let's talk about what caused this problem. What ran this country into 
the ditch and what has caused this unbelievable runup in debt? No. 1, 
early on in 2001, I and others stood on the floor when President Bush--
yes, President Bush; and I am not here just to tarnish his Presidency, 
I am here to talk about his record--said: We now have 10 years of 
expected budget surpluses. Let's do something with that money. 
President Bush had inherited a record budget surplus from the Clinton 
Administration. The new President took over and said: We have to have 
very big tax cuts to get rid of these surpluses.
  I stood on this floor and said: These surpluses don't exist yet. 
Let's be a little conservative.
  He said: ``Katy, bar the door,'' we are going to give this money 
away.
  Very big tax cuts, the largest benefits went to the highest income 
earners in the country. Then what did we experience? Very quickly, a 
recession, an attack against our country on 9/11, wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. Then we sent soldiers off to war and didn't pay for one 
penny of it. Everybody in this Chamber knows better than that. You 
don't fight a war by asking people to go risk their lives but we won't 
risk anything by asking the American people to pay for the cost of the 
war. We will just put it on the debt.
  As all this was going on, we had a bunch of new regulators who came 
to town from the new administration who said: It is a new day. We are 
going to have business-friendly regulation in this town. We won't look. 
We won't watch. We don't care what you do.
  As a result, we had an unbelievable outpouring of greed that ran this 
country into the ditch by some of the biggest financial enterprises in 
the country.
  I am not sure either side is much of a bargain for the American 
people these days. I understand that. But I don't think we ought to 
rewrite history. This President inherited the biggest mess since 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to the Presidency. That is a fact. Now 
we have to try to work together to figure out what we do about it. How 
do we deal with this? How do we respond to the burgeoning Federal 
budget deficits?
  By the way, some say: Let's make our stand by shutting down 
unemployment insurance for folks at the bottom, the folks who don't 
have a job, those people who have been told: Your job doesn't exist 
anymore; you are done; you are out of here. And we have about 20 
million fewer jobs than we need in this country. In the last 9 years, 
we lost more than 5 million jobs of people who work in the factories.
  Will Rogers also once said: I see where Congress passed a bill to 
help bankers' mistakes. You can always count on us helping those who 
have lost part of their fortune, but the whole history records nary a 
case where the loan was for the person who had absolutely nothing.
  And so it is in this Congress--hundreds of billions here and there in 
tax cuts and bailouts. But now it is about helping people with 
unemployment. That is where we make our stand, according to some. It is 
pretty unbelievable. We need to start working together to find common 
solutions. Describing where the other side is wrong is hardly a 
productive enterprise. It is pretty easy to do, in fact.
  That is not why I came to talk, but it does get tiresome trying to 
rewrite history here on the floor of the Senate. I am not suggesting 
one Presidency is good or bad. I am saying this President inherited a 
$1.3 trillion deficit. That is a fact. That doesn't come from me; that 
comes from the Congressional Budget Office. I understand, at least in 
part, why that happened. Some of us on the floor of the Senate did not 
support giving away tax revenues we didn't have. Some of us didn't 
support going to war without paying for it. I had that discussion. How 
about paying for some of this? The previous President said: You try to 
pay for it, I will veto the bill. Is it surprising, then, that we are 
deep in debt? Not particularly surprising to me. Those are not very 
thoughtful decisions.

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