[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 852-855]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          INVESTING IN AMERICA

  Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I listened closely to the speech given 
by the Senator from South Dakota about the deficit. I was thinking as 
he gave the speech that it was a good one, but I think a little bit of 
history is warranted at this moment.
  In the year 2000, 11 years ago, President William Jefferson Clinton 
was leaving office. We had gone through a period of budget surpluses. 
We were taking the budget surplus generated each year and buying more 
longevity in Social Security, as appropriate. It was a very positive 
situation. The national debt of America when President William 
Jefferson Clinton left office was $5 trillion. In other words, the 
accumulated debt of America from George Washington to the end of 
William Jefferson Clinton was $5 trillion. And as President Clinton 
left office, he said to President Bush: I want to give you, in the next 
year, a $120 million surplus in terms of what you can anticipate to 
happen in the next year. It was a pretty positive situation with a lot 
of job creation, businesses doing well, homes being built.
  Now fast forward from 2000 to 2008, 8 years later. Let's take a 
snapshot. What was the state of the economy? We were facing 
unemployment at record levels in numbers growing by the month. We no 
longer had a national debt of $5 trillion. Eight years later after 
President George Bush, that national debt was $12 trillion, more than 
doubled in an 8-year period. The obvious question is, what happened? 
Why were we doing so well 8 years before and had fallen so badly 8 
years later?
  We had two wars not paid for--we just added those to the national 
debt--in Iraq and Afghanistan. We had tax cuts even to the wealthiest, 
something that had literally never occurred in the history of the 
United States, and that added directly to the debt. We had programs 
unpaid for, signed by the President into law, very expensive programs, 
even in the area of Medicare. Accumulate those things with the 9/11 
occurrence and the downturn in the economy, and we saw our national 
debt go from $5 trillion to $12 trillion. Instead of President Bush 
leaving new President Obama a surplus for the next year, they 
anticipated a $1.2 trillion deficit as President Bush left office. That 
is what Barack Obama inherited 24 months ago.
  To hear some of the comments being made, one would think President 
Obama had created the deficit crisis. He inherited the deficit crisis 
from President George Bush. He said: The first thing we need to do is 
get the economy up and running. Republicans were virtually no help. 
Only three Republican Senators joined us in a stimulus bill which is 
now being mocked and criticized. But, in fact, one-third of the 
stimulus was in tax cuts, tax cuts to working families to help them 
through a recession. Another third was a safety net, unemployment 
insurance, as well as help to State and local governments. The final 
third was infrastructure, building roads and bridges and things across 
America for the economy. That is what the stimulus was.
  Did it bring us back in a hurry from our recession? No. But it 
stopped the decline in our economy, and we are bringing ourselves back 
now as more consumer confidence is being demonstrated than we have seen 
in a long time.
  I was a member of President Obama's deficit commission. For the 
record, I want people to know that that deficit commission originally 
was legislation. It was a statute. We were going to enact a law to give 
this commission the authority to come up with a report and force 
Congress to vote on it. Powerful stuff, with a lot of bipartisan 
support. When this powerful piece of legislation came to the floor of 
the Senate, seven Republican Senators who were cosponsors of the bill 
voted against the bill that they cosponsored, this effort to try to 
deal with our budget deficit in honest terms. After the bill failed, 
the President said: I will create one by Executive order. I served on 
it. It was Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson cochairing an effort with 18 
members. At the end of the day, 11 of us, including myself, signed on 
to the final report. I always added the caveat--and I think most 
would--that I don't agree with all of it, but I think it was the 
closest we were going to come to facing a terrible crisis.
  The crisis is this: Out of every dollar we spend in Washington, we 
borrow 40 cents. That is unsustainable. Whether we are using that 
dollar to build a missile or to pay for food stamps doesn't make much 
difference. We have to borrow 40 cents for every dollar we spend. Where 
do we borrow the money? One of our major creditors was in town last 
week, President Hu Jintao of China, a major creditor and a major 
competitor. Which takes me to the President's State of the Union 
Address last night.
  The Republicans are fixed on one particular area. They believe the 
sum and substance of all that we do in Washington should be focused on 
the deficit. I think the deficit is critically important. I voted for 
the deficit commission report. We have to do things that are unpopular 
and we have to do them in a sensible and timely way. But it isn't the 
whole story. What the President tried to remind us last night is that 
we also have a great American economy. We have to ask ourselves: Will 
that economy be able to compete in the world of the 21st century? How 
will we do against competitive nations such as China and Japan and 
Germany? Those were questions asked by the President last night.
  I have heard many Republican Senators and Congressmen since say those 
investments, that spending, we don't need. What we need is to focus on 
the deficit.
  I think the President got it right. The President is calling for 
balance, responsible deficit reform, and investment in America that 
makes a difference in who we are and what we can be. The President 
talked about the Sputnik moment, long before the Presiding Officer was 
born, the Sputnik moment, October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union 
launched the satellite Sputnik into outer space. It scared us to death. 
Here this nemesis of the United States in the Cold War, the Soviet 
Union, with the capacity to develop a bomb that could destroy major 
parts of America, was now in outer space and we were not. They had a 
missile that launched a satellite. It was a tiny little thing, about 
the size of a basketball. It circled the Earth. At that time in October 
of 1957, a chill set in on Capitol Hill when people got to thinking, 
maybe we are not as good as we thought when it comes to math and 
science and education, if the Russians beat us into outer space.
  Congress did something in 1958 in response to that that was historic 
and considered radical at the time. Congress came up with something 
called the National Defense Education Act. It was the first time in the 
history of the country when we had offered college loans to those other 
than veterans, and it was a program that was going to reach across 
America and try to put more young people in college. Did it work? Look 
at the numbers. In 1940, 15 percent of college age students went to 
college, about a half a million students in college. In 1958, we 
started the loan

[[Page 853]]

programs. By 1960, the number of college age students in college had 
grown to 3.5 million. Two years later I was one of them.
  Now fast forward 10 more years to 1970. By 1970, 7.5 million students 
in America were in college. Forty percent of college age students were 
going to college. The investment of this government into the National 
Defense Education Act and student loans democratized higher education, 
dramatically increasing the number of students in colleges and 
universities, and not only prepared us for a man on the Moon and NASA 
but prepared our economy for more important things to come.
  Let me give an example. When Sputnik was circling the globe, our 
scientists were sitting there upset and frustrated that the Russians 
were the first in space. Up in Baltimore, there were two scientists at 
a laboratory, and they decided they would try to track the Sputnik 
satellite. The Russians, in order to prove they were actually doing 
something, were emitting a signal from this satellite, this little 
basketball-sized satellite. These scientists said: Let's see if we can 
find that signal, the frequency. They did. Then they used--and I will 
get lost here in a hurry because I am a liberal arts lawyer--the 
Doppler effect to determine where the satellite was circling the globe 
and its speed. They told some people at the Department of Defense what 
they had found. The Department of Defense challenged them and said: If 
you can tell us where the satellite is and how fast it is moving, could 
you reverse that equation? We would like to know if we had a satellite 
in outer space whether we could figure out where your radio receiver 
was. So they did the calculations and did the work, and they determined 
it.
  The purpose in asking the question was so that we could reach a point 
in national defense when, if the Russians launched a missile with a 
bomb on it toward the United States, we could tell where it came from 
and launch one in return. We did this calculation, and we started the 
development of this in 1958, where we could figure out where the 
receiving station was on Earth, if there was a transmitting satellite. 
If it sounds as if it might have led to something, it did. It led to a 
situation today where I can carry in my pocket a BlackBerry which has a 
GPS. GPS came out of that calculation. Now someone can basically 
determine where Durbin is by where his cell phone is. That has become 
common technology and science, but it was research by the Federal 
Government that led us 50 years later to this moment.
  I say that because the President was trying to make that point last 
night. When it comes to the future of our economy and where we will be 
and whether we will be competitive, we need to invest--it is not a bad 
word, it is a good word--in our country: in people so they have the 
education and training, so they can compete; in businesses so they have 
basic research and the kind of incentives for innovation so they can 
move forward in growing their businesses and increasing the number of 
employees; and in building the infrastructure of America that makes a 
difference.
  There was a company a few decades ago that became very popular named 
Lands End. Most people know it. It has since sold to Sears. They own it 
today. But when Lands End was thriving, it was located in a small town 
in Wisconsin. A lot of people wondered how they could run a big mail 
order operation out of a small town in Wisconsin. The answer was they 
had put together enough infrastructure that it worked. There were 
enough highways and enough ways to provide their product by mail and 
other delivery all around the United States.
  Now we are in a new generation of challenges. That generation is 
calling for technology. The President talked about advancing the 
technology of computer reach to make sure we have high speed computer 
accessibility across the United States. That technology, innovation, 
and education is going to build a platform for us to be competitive. I 
think the President got it right. We deal honestly with the deficit, 
but we don't do it so quickly that we make the recession worse. And we 
invest in our people so that we are ready to compete in the 21st 
century.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I thank my colleague from Illinois for 
his as usual right-on-the-money words about the President's speech. I 
anticipate eagerly the speech of my colleague from Rhode Island who 
graciously yielded to me.
  I rise to commend President Obama on the pitch perfect State of the 
Union he delivered last night. His speech was smart and balanced, 
forward thinking, and unabashedly upbeat about the future of our 
country.
  Fundamentally, the President spoke about the need to preserve the 
American dream, to bequeath its promise to the next generation as our 
parents bequeathed it to us. The American dream is very simple. It 
means there is a strong likelihood that you will be doing better 10 
years from now than you are doing today and an even greater likelihood 
that your children will be doing better than you did.
  Many people in America think that dream is in peril today. Some 
people even fear that America is in decline, that our greatest period 
of prosperity is behind us. To these purveyors of gloom and doom, to 
those who are sour and dour and think America and its government can't 
do anything right, the President sent a clear message: You could not be 
more wrong about America. We are and will remain the most economically 
vibrant, the most culturally vibrant country in the world, with the 
best system. We are the only country on Earth that tells a young man or 
woman, 12 or 13 or 14 years old, whether their family has been in this 
country 12 or 6 generations or whether they are a new immigrant, you 
can achieve the stars. No other country has that. That is a precious 
part of our birthright that remains alive and well today, as we see in 
the successes of so many.
  It is true that we live in a much different world today than the 
generation that preceded us. The rules have changed, and it is tougher 
to get ahead. Unemployment is unacceptably high, and the competition 
for jobs is real. The middle class feels squeezed. But, as the 
President said, this should not discourage us. It should challenge us.
  Last night, the President explained how we can rise to that 
challenge. He outlined how we can outinnovate, outeducate, and outbuild 
the rest of the world, tapping the creativity and imagination of our 
populous.
  He urged us to invest in clean energy technology and other cutting-
edge industries and challenged us to put a million alternative-fuel 
vehicles on the road by 2015. Thanks to the ingenuity of researchers 
such as those at the GM fuel cell facility in Honeoye Falls, NY, I 
believe we can achieve this ambitious goal. I am also hopeful we can 
take up and pass clean energy legislation in the months ahead.
  The President also called on Congress to reform No Child Left Behind 
in order to restore America's global leadership in education. I am 
particularly pleased that the President enthusiastically endorsed a 
permanent extension of the $2,500 college tuition tax credit I authored 
2 years ago. I would like it to be even higher, to go to $3,000 this 
year.
  It is no secret that much of our Nation's infrastructure is in 
disrepair and that too many Americans do not have access to high-speed 
Internet or high-speed rail. For America to stay ahead of our foreign 
competitors, we need to improve the ways in which we transport people 
and information.
  Since the days of Henry Clay, with the internal improvements, when 
our Nation builds infrastructure, economic growth follows, and this has 
clearly always been a government function. The President clearly 
understands this fact and spoke to it last night.
  The President did not just focus on growing jobs, the economy, and 
middle-class paychecks last night. He showed an acute awareness of the 
need to rein in Federal spending to get our Nation's fiscal house in 
order. I echo his call to consolidate or eliminate unnecessary 
government programs and to revisit and revise regulations that have 
long

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outgrown their usefulness. Of course, we need to find a balance, but I 
am confident that more can and will be done to make our government more 
agile and efficient.
  The President had the right blend: Yes, cut out the waste, even 
eliminate wasteful and inefficient and duplicative programs, but do not 
throw out the baby with the bathwater or, as he said, do not throw the 
engine off the airplane when the plane is overweight. So the 
combination of growth, investment in our future, and innovation, with 
fiscal moderation and reining in waste, is just pitch perfect for the 
American people.
  Lastly, I applaud the President for addressing one of the most 
critical matters facing the country: our broken immigration system. As 
you know, I have championed comprehensive immigration reform for some 
time, and the President seemed to endorse many aspects of the approach. 
He likes the approach, bipartisan, that Senator Graham and I put 
together. He has told us that on several occasions. So I look forward 
to working with him as well as my colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle as we map a path to comprehensive reform in the 112th Congress.
  Some pundits and handicappers said Congress seemed subdued, even 
restrained last night. Well, if last night's speech did not seem like 
the usual partisan pep rally, that is because it was not. The 
President's speech was not meant to appeal to Democrats or Republicans 
or even Independents. It was meant to appeal to Americans. In that, the 
President succeeded overwhelmingly. The fact that we sat together side 
by side, Democrats and Republicans, was a fine fit with the President's 
appeal to the whole of America, not to one side or the other.
  The address last night embodied so many of the values and ideals that 
unite us as Americans. It displayed the kind of optimism we relish, 
thrive on, and believe in. It was a great speech, a wonderful moment of 
comity. I expect this moment will not fade soon, and I hope so too.
  I yield the floor for my colleague from Rhode Island.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I compliment my distinguished 
colleague from New York on his remarks. I would like to add a few 
observations of my own, but first I want to echo very much what he 
said. What the President did last night was to point a finger toward 
the future, and some people were just capable of seeing the finger. But 
for most people, they saw where he was pointing, and he has pointed us 
toward an important future for our country. These are the issues we are 
going to have to address in the decades ahead, and we have to be 
prepared now. I want to touch on about three areas he pointed to. The 
first, of course, is infrastructure. I am not the only person in 
America who has noticed our crumbling infrastructure. Everybody who 
drives on our roads, everybody who goes across our bridges, everybody 
who has been to our water and sewage plants knows we have underinvested 
in those areas for decades.
  As the President pointed out last night, America's own engineers give 
America a D for the status of our infrastructure. The Environmental 
Protection Agency has estimated that we have $662 billion in total 
capital needs for clean water and drinking water investments over the 
next 10 years--$662 billion that we need to put into our water and 
water treatment system in the next 10 years. By contrast, in the so-
called stimulus bill, we put in $6 billion; 1 percent of what we need. 
We have a lot of work we still have to do to make sure America has the 
clean water treatment and drinking water it needs.
  The infrastructure question is not just about infrastructure the 
Romans could have built. It is not just about roads and bridges and 
waterworks. The President referred to a Sputnik moment many years ago 
and President Kennedy's drive to get us up into space and to accelerate 
our space program.
  When President Kennedy pushed to put a man on the Moon within 10 
years and bring him safely home, what that delivered was not just a man 
on the Moon. What it delivered was the technology that allowed a 
company called COMSAT, a public-private corporation, to put up into 
space the satellite technology that became the infrastructure of our 
modern communications system. That was done because of that call to 
action.
  It is not just our communications system that is core infrastructure, 
as well as our roads and our bridges and our waterworks, it is also our 
information technology system, particularly in health care. When we 
build a robust health information infrastructure--so that as an 
American you are no longer carrying your cardboard file-covered records 
from appointment to appointment, no longer having to explain who you 
are and what you have and what medications you are on and why you are 
there for the umpteenth time because the doctor has not seen your file 
because it is not available to him electronically--when we fix all that 
so your pharmacy, your specialist, the laboratories you go to, the 
hospital, if you have had to visit one, are all connected to your 
primary care provider who is directing the care for your condition, 
that is a piece of infrastructure that, like our health care 
infrastructure, will enable enormous growth in the private sector.
  That is what infrastructure does. Roads are not valuable because 
people go out with picks and shovels and bulldozers and asphalt pavers 
and make them. They are valuable because once they are made, commerce 
runs across them and the private sector expands. That is just as true 
of communications and information technology and broadband and our 
energy grid. We need to invest in infrastructure, and we need to think 
about our modern infrastructure, not just the infrastructure the Romans 
could build.
  The other point the President made that was critically important is 
that American manufacturing is not now competing on a level playing 
field with our foreign opponents. Many people have said this was a very 
``America first'' speech; that the President seemed more nationalistic 
than he has been before. I suspect that is because in his years as 
President, it has been driven home to him how many disadvantages our 
foreign competition puts our manufacturers at. It is not fair. It 
creates immense disabilities for them and real handicaps, and we have 
to put American manufacturing back on a level playing field with their 
competitors around the globe.
  I can go to the Cranston Print Works Company in Rhode Island, which 
is one of the last remaining vestiges of the vaunted Rhode Island 
textile industry. It was Rhode Island's textile industry that started 
the industrial revolution. Rhode Island's textile industry propelled 
Rhode Island to have more millionaires per capita than any other State 
in the country. Now it has winnowed away, winnowed away, and companies 
such as Cranston Print Works that has been able to hang on and survive 
and be successful keenly know how bad the disadvantages are.
  You could have their CEO, George Shuster, give you a speech about how 
in almost every dimension of their operations they are at a 
disadvantage, and very often a disadvantage that America has created, 
against their foreign competition. I just want to mention one.
  I have introduced the Offshoring Prevention Act because if George 
Shuster were to take his facility in Rhode Island and move it overseas, 
he could choose the year he declared his profits and defer them to the 
most advantageous tax year. When he stays in Rhode Island, he has to 
declare his profits in that year no matter what. There is no reason on 
Earth we should reward an American company that moves its processes 
overseas with a tax deferral advantage that they do not get when they 
are here at home. My Offshoring Prevention Act would prevent that.
  The last thing I want to say--because I see my distinguished 
colleague from Arizona on the Senate floor and I want to make sure I 
leave him time--is just a word about our long-term debt. I was 
immensely gratified the President took

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a firm position to defend Social Security. We who are familiar with the 
actual facts know that Social Security has never contributed a dime to 
our deficit, never contributed a dime to our debt, and that it is 
solvent for more than a quarter century ahead of us. It is not an 
immediate problem, and with very small adjustments it can be never a 
problem.
  In States such as Rhode Island and New York, and I suspect Arizona as 
well, we have people who count on Social Security. Social Security 
gives us freedom. Social Security gives our seniors freedom from want 
and freedom from fear. It gives them freedom from privation and freedom 
from poverty. It gives the younger generation freedom to pursue their 
own dreams, knowing their parents will have a dignified old age because 
of Social Security, and they can take risks and seek opportunities they 
would never otherwise be able to take if they knew they were the only 
support for their parents in their old age, if the only thing that 
stood between their parents and penury was them. Thankfully, Social 
Security gives that liberty to young people across this country, as 
well as the freedom it gives to old people. So I am delighted he took 
this stand and that Social Security will not be improperly thrown under 
the bus of the important debt and deficit reduction work we need to do.
  With that, I will yield. I see, again, Senator McCain on the Senate 
floor. He is a distinguished Senator and a great friend, and I do not 
want to take time from him.
  I yield the floor.

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