[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12991-12993]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        CONGRESSIONAL TO-DO LIST

  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, the to-do list in the Congress, and 
especially in the Senate, is long and difficult. We have witnessed all 
of this year a determined minority to act as a set of human brake pads. 
The minority has tried to stop almost everything in the Senate, 
including providing extended unemployment benefits for those who are 
out of work during the country's deepest recession since the Great 
Depression. It is unbelievable to me.
  It seems to me everyone should understand that when we are in a deep 
recession, as we have been--and we are coming out of it--that is the 
time to extend unemployment benefits because it is necessary to do. Yet 
it, too, has gotten caught in this trap of saying no to everything.
  I wish to go over just a bit of the to-do list in the Senate. First 
and foremost, there is no question that one of the most significant 
challenges facing this country is debt and deficits. Everybody 
understands that. The question is, How do we deal with it?
  The President is criticized for describing what he took over, but it 
is pretty important. You go to a rental car dealership and they want 
you to look around and see what the car is like before you rent it, 
right? This President ran for President, but when he took over this 
economy, had he done nothing, not lifted a finger, the Federal budget 
deficit was going to be $1.3 trillion. On the first month of his 
Presidency, the economy he was left with had 680,000 people losing 
their jobs in that month.
  This economy was in steep decline. That is what he inherited. It is 
not my taking a half hour to describe what was wrong in the previous 8 
years, it is stating the obvious. What do we try to do about that?
  Well, the President has created this commission to try to address the 
deficits and debt that have come from this steep economic decline. When 
a country is experiencing a very deep recession, there is less revenue 
coming in. We were losing about $400 billion in revenue that we used to 
get. And then we have higher expenditures going out because we have the 
economic stabilizers that we pay for in order to help people during 
times of economic distress. So we had these unbelievable Federal budget 
deficits. That is not surprising. That will happen when there is a very 
steep economic downturn.
  But we can't, it seems to me, go into this with a structural 
imbalance, as we had, and then have a deep recession and have deficits 
explode and then not have a plan to deal with them. So the question is 
for all of us--the President and the Congress--what do we do?
  The President has created a high-level bipartisan commission to say: 
All right, come up with a set of recommendations by the end of this 
year of what we can do. What are the range of issues with everything on 
the table? Yes, discretionary spending, military spending, 
entitlements, all of it. What is the menu necessary to put this country 
back on track?
  In 2001, President Bush proposed very large tax cuts. I voted no on 
the floor of the Senate, and I said the reason I am voting no is that I 
don't think we should provide 10 years of very large tax cuts just 
because we had a surplus the last year of Bill Clinton's Presidency. We 
had a budget surplus--the first budget surplus we had in 30 years. They 
estimated that not only would we have a budget surplus that year, but 
we would have surpluses for the next 10 years.
  I said: Let's be a little conservative. What if something happens? 
What if we don't have the surpluses?
  They said: Don't worry about that; let's give large tax cuts--and the 
bulk of it, by the way, went to the wealthiest Americans. Without my 
vote, that passed. It did a lot of strange things.
  Among the tax cuts was a cut in the estate tax that took the estate 
tax over these 9 years down, down, down, and down so that this year we 
have a zero estate tax. Think of that. The estate tax in this country 
this year is zero. We have about 400 billionaires in

[[Page 12992]]

America. I believe four of them have died in this year. This is the 
``Throw Mama From the Train'' year, as the title of the movie goes. 
This is the year when, if you have a lot of money and you are going to 
go, this is the year, I suppose, and those who are related to you might 
think there is divine providence here.
  Let me put up this chart. In today's newspaper, it says George 
Steinbrenner, the colorful owner of the New York Yankees, died. I 
didn't know George Steinbrenner, but he was quite an extraordinary man, 
I am sure--a successful businessman and a controversial owner of the 
New York Yankees. But he was also a billionaire. Today, the Washington 
Post talks about the fact that this year the estate tax is at zero, so 
his estate will have no tax obligation at all.
  Let me just observe that for the largest estates, most of the wealth 
comes from the appreciation of assets over the years and has never been 
taxed. So it has never had to bear a tax to send kids to school or 
build roads or provide for police or provide for our defense needs--
none of it. We have had four billionaires die this year. And we have 
this goofy process, which the previous administration created, to go to 
a zero estate tax this year and then spring back to an estate tax next 
year. It is just nutty.
  Do you want to know how to reduce the Federal budget deficit? How 
about fixing a few of these things. That ought to be on the to-do list. 
It is embarrassing, it seems to me, for those who understand fiscal 
policy and understand there is a responsibility for all Americans not 
just to be glad they are Americans, but also to participate in the 
things Americans have to participate in together, that that includes 
paying some taxes, yes, and some estate taxes. It is embarrassing that 
we have a zero estate tax for the wealthiest Americans at this point. 
That makes no sense to me.
  We have a proposed extension of the tax cuts for middle-income 
workers that comes from the 2001 tax bill that President Bush pushed 
through this Congress. One of my colleagues was on a show this Sunday 
and said: Well, we want to also give a tax cut to the top 2 percent of 
the American income earners. The moderator of the show said: That is 
going to cost 680-some billion dollars in lost revenue. How do you pay 
for that?
  My colleague, who talks about the Federal budget deficits a lot and 
the need to deal with them, said: We don't have to pay for tax cuts.
  It seems to me basic arithmetic books allow us to add 1 and 1 and get 
2--from time to time, at least. So we are going to deal with the 
Federal budget deficits by extending income tax cuts to the wealthiest 
Americans? We are going to deal with the Federal budget deficits by 
having a zero estate tax obligation for somebody who dies and has a 
billion or billions of dollars?
  What about the notion of going to war twice, in Iraq and Afghanistan, 
and not paying a penny for it? We have all of these gatherings to say 
goodbye--particularly in the National Guard--to a National Guard unit 
that will be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. We say Godspeed and be safe. 
When they come home, we say welcome home. We do everything except pay 
the bill. We send them to war, have them strap on ceramic body armor in 
the morning, walk in harm's way and get shot at. But this Congress 
doesn't have the courage to decide that we ought to pay for wars we are 
fighting. All of it has been piled on the debt.
  Some of us stood in this well and said let's pay for it, and we were 
told if we do that and try to pay for it, the President will veto it 
because we are trying to raise revenue. That is right, raising revenue 
to pay for the cost of sending America's men and women in uniform to 
fight for this country. It used to be essential, not optional. It was 
the moral and responsible thing to do. All of this has been charged and 
added to the debt. So the soldiers go fight and come home, and they 
will pay the bill as well. That makes no sense to me.
  I have described at great length the tax avoidance going on in this 
country. I described that some of the highest income earners get to pay 
15 percent carried interest. They get to pay some of the lowest tax 
rates, and that is not enough. Some of them are running them through 
tax haven countries and are playing deferred compensation games in 
order to avoid paying anything. They want all that America has to offer 
except responsibility to pay their taxes.
  That is true with some very large American corporations as well. The 
company that was drilling out in the gulf--the licensed company 
drilling for BP--Transocean had, I believe, 1,200 employees in Houston, 
TX, and 12 employees in Switzerland. What was the deal there? Well, 
they moved their home office to Switzerland, despite the fact that they 
just had a dozen employees there and they had 1,200 in Houston. Why did 
they do that? To avoid paying taxes, I assume.
  There is a to-do list. Maybe we can shut down some of these schemes. 
How about an estate tax for estates worth billions of dollars, or 
paying for the cost of war as our soldiers are asked to go fight it? 
Cutting spending--some come out here and talk about cutting spending. I 
support that--in the right way. We have a lot of areas where Federal 
agencies can tighten their belts. By the way, it is one thing to talk 
about it, it is another thing to do it.
  Some years ago, when I came to the Congress, there was $46 million 
allocated to build a new Federal courthouse in Fargo, ND. I said I 
thought that was outrageous. Yes, it is in my State, but I thought it 
was outrageous. I cut it to $23 million--from $46 million to $23 
million--in half--and the courthouse got built for $19 billion. That 
was in my State. I was critical of spending in my own State.
  I have come to the floor recently critical of what is being proposed 
to be spent on the small northern border ports of entry, which I think 
is an excessive amount of money. Yes, those are in my State as well. I 
think we all ought to take a hard look at Federal spending and look at 
where we can and should begin to make some cuts.
  Finally, when we talk about deficits--we talk a lot about budget 
deficits. But nobody talks much about the trade deficit. This morning 
there was a story: Trade deficit jumps to $42 billion, economists 
downgrade growth forecasts. I wrote a book about this several years 
ago. I described in that book, in great detail, what is happening: 
shipping jobs overseas, going in search of low-wage countries where 
they can move their production in order to produce and sell the product 
back in our country. All of that ratchets up this unbelievable deficit. 
We have had trade deficits in recent years, with $700 billion and $800 
billion in merchandise trade deficits. The budget deficit is money that 
we are going to owe to ourselves. We cannot make that case with the 
trade deficit. We owe that to other countries, and we are going to 
repay that with a lower standard of living in our country someday.
  This is not just about deficits, it is about jobs. When we run these 
kinds of deficits and see plants and factories closing in this 
country--5 million factory workers have lost their jobs because we see 
this unbelievable drain of jobs leaving our country in search of lower 
wages elsewhere. We have to address this, and we have to address it in 
the right way. I will talk about that at some point, on another day. It 
is not rocket science to understand that debt is debt and deficits are 
deficits. We have to address these issues.
  Now, one other point on this economy. I was on a program the other 
day on CNBC. They said: What about this notion that because of what you 
are doing on promoting additional regulations on Wall Street and other 
issues, you are antibusiness--you Democrats in Congress and the 
Democratic administration are antibusiness?
  I have heard a couple of CEOs say that. I said: You know, it is 
byzantine to me. If you want to run a big company in this country and 
do business here and look at something that is antibusiness, look at 
Wall Street and see what they did. See the cesspool of greed they 
created with a bubble of speculation that was unprecedented in the 
history of this country--selling and

[[Page 12993]]

buying things that had no value, wagering rather than investing, using 
exotic instruments such as credit default swaps and much more, and 
planting loans out there for homeowners who could not repay them--
giving a $780,000 home loan to somebody making $18,000 a year, creating 
liars loans, saying: Come and get a loan from us, and you don't have to 
disclose your income. It is called a no-doc loan. Come and get a loan 
from us, and you don't have to disclose your income or pay any 
principal the first year--or come and get a loan from us, but don't 
tell us your income, don't pay any principal the first year, or any 
interest, and we will make the first 12 payments for you.
  Then what would they do, Countrywide mortgage? They would take these 
loans, pay big bonuses to the people who put the loans out there--the 
brokers--and wrap them into securities and sell the securities up to 
hedge funds, investment banks, and they were all making massive 
profits. Then we had others who would look at these securities and make 
credit default swaps--wagers on whether these bonds would be good.
  What was going on in this country is unbelievable. The whole thing 
was a house of cards, and it came collapsing down. Now we decide we are 
going to put regulations in place to say: You cannot do that anymore. 
You damn near ruined this country's economy, and we won't let you do it 
anymore.
  One of the top manufacturing CEOs in this country said it is 
antibusiness--the administration is antibusiness. It is not 
antibusiness to put into place effective, tough regulations to say: Do 
business the right way. If you do what you have been doing, we are 
going to put handcuffs on you because it almost ruined this country's 
economy.
  It is not antibusiness to insist that business be done in the right 
way, when in the basement of the SEC four companies came in to get the 
SEC, in the last decade, to change the rules so they could go from 12 
times leverage to 30 times leverage, and they did it with almost no 
notice from everybody, with all these handshakes that go on.
  When that goes on and regulators say: You know what. Don't worry. It 
is going to be a new business-friendly place. We won't look. Do what 
you want. We don't care--when that all happened and it caused the near 
collapse of the American economy and our way of life, we have a right, 
it seems to me, without being called antibusiness, to say there needs 
to be effective regulators and regulations to make sure this doesn't 
happen again.
  Fifteen years ago, I wrote the lead story for the Washington Monthly 
magazine, and the title was ``Very Risky Business.'' That was the lead 
story in the Washington Monthly magazine that I wrote 16 years ago.
  What was it about? It was about banks in America trading derivatives 
on their own proprietary accounts. I said then that we just as well put 
a blackjack table in their lobby. That is just gambling. We ought not 
allow it. We know who is going to pick up the bill--the American 
taxpayer.
  It was 11 years ago on the floor of this Senate that I stood up and 
opposed repealing the laws from the Great Depression--Glass-Steagall 
and others--that were put in place to protect our country, that 
separated banking from securities and prohibited certain practices that 
led to the Great Depression. Then, all of a sudden, it is time to 
modernize; that is old-fashioned. The proposal to repeal those laws 
went through here like a hot knife through butter. Eight of us voted 
no--eight of us. I stood on the floor of the Senate and said: I think 
within a decade we are going to see massive taxpayer bailouts. I did 
not have a crystal ball; I just felt this was an unbelievable mistake.
  The fact is, we have a right and a responsibility to put together 
effective regulatory mechanisms that will prevent this from happening 
again. I understand there are interests out there that will howl so 
loud, you will hear them coast to coast. It does not matter. This is 
about what is best for the American people, what is best for this 
country's economy to expand and create jobs once again.
  The to-do list, as I indicated, is fairly lengthy. I have not touched 
a number of issues. The most important point, obviously, is to find a 
way to create new jobs.
  As I indicated, it is like a bathtub where you have a faucet and a 
drain. The faucet is, we need to try to create conditions in which new 
jobs will be created. How do we do that? We give people confidence 
about the future. It is hard to have confidence when you take a look at 
the economic circumstances of this country right now. If people are 
confident, they do things that manifest that confidence and the economy 
expands. That is our responsibility to do.
  Even as we try to provide more confidence, that means tackling tough 
issues that will give people a feeling that they can expect a better 
future, can make investments, can hire people. That is part of the 
faucet--to put new jobs into this economy. We also need to plug the 
drain. Every single day, we have jobs leaving for China and elsewhere 
in search of cheap labor. I have spoken about that many times as well. 
As I said, I have written a book about that.
  We need to work on all of those issues, and jobs has to be issue No. 
1. It is the most important issue. It makes everything else possible 
for the American people. Right now, as I speak, there are millions and 
millions of people who are out of work. Million Americans have lost 
their jobs just in the manufacturing area in the last 8 years. We are 
short somewhere perhaps in the neighborhood of 18 to 20 million jobs in 
this country. We have to get the engine moving again. We have to get 
opportunities to expand jobs all across this country. There is a lot to 
do to make that happen.

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