[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5159-5164]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               THE BUDGET

  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, this Friday we run out of the current--
which is now the sixth continuing resolution--short-term continuing 
resolution which we have been operating under since the end of the 
fiscal year, which was September 30 of last year. We started a new 
fiscal year October 1. Judging by some of the rhetoric we have been 
hearing around here, one would think somehow it is these big, bad, evil 
Republicans who are trying to shut the government down by trying to get 
a bill passed that actually would reduce spending for the remainder of 
this fiscal year, which ends on September 30.
  I remind my colleagues--and I know sometimes it gets a bit 
redundant--it is a fact that the reason we are here is because last 
year the Democrats in the Congress failed to pass a budget and did not 
pass a single appropriations bill. There was no budget passed last year 
for this fiscal year and not a single appropriations bill passed before 
the fiscal year ended September 30. Beyond that, we had a lameduck 
session where we were here, we were here after November's election 
until the Christmas holiday, and never did we have a budget considered 
on the floor, nor did we consider a single appropriations bill. The 
reason we are here is to finish the unfinished business of last year. 
This is last year's mess we are now cleaning up.
  We think the voters in the election spoke pretty clearly and sent an 
imperative to the Congress: We want you to reduce spending.
  We have been trying, as we have attempted to fund the government 
through the end of this fiscal year--September 30--to achieve some 
level of spending reductions. It started in the House of 
Representatives. They passed a bill that reduced spending by $61 
billion over the previous year. It came over to the Senate. We had a 
vote on that bill to reduce and trim $61 billion, and it failed. The 
Democrats put a bill on the floor which would trim $4.7 billion from 
last year's spending level and which seemed to be completely divorced 
from reality as to how to seriously and meaningfully address the issue 
of spending and the debt and how to address the concern the American 
people have voiced this year over the $1.5 trillion deficits we are 
seeing and now we are going to see even longer since the President 
submitted his 2012 budget.
  The reason we are here is to do last year's unfinished business; that 
is, getting runaway spending in Washington under control, starting to 
live within our means--something every family in America has to do, 
something every small business in America has to do.
  Here we are again coming up against this Friday deadline because 
there is resistance to reducing by $61 billion the amount Congress 
spent the previous year. The $61 billion, if one looks at the total 
budget, represents a little under 10 percent. Even if one looks at it 
in terms of discretionary spending, that amount we are actually 
appropriating annually that is the smaller part of the budget in 
Washington, it is a small percentage. We are not talking about, 
relatively speaking, a lot of money. I think it is reasonable. I think 
the American people believe it is reasonable. Yet we are having this 
huge meltdown around here because we do not have the political courage 
to do what the American people have asked us to do.
  Frankly, if we were to reduce spending by the amount the Democrats 
propose and we had a vote in the Senate, it would be about the 
equivalent of 1 day of the debt. In other words, in this year, the 
amount of debt we are going to rack up--the amount they were talking 
about trimming from the budget was the equivalent of 1 single day of 
the Federal debt--a little over $4 billion. It was not serious. Nobody 
can

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take it seriously by any objective measurement.
  To put it in perspective, in the last 2 years, spending has increased 
by about 24 percent. This is non-national security discretionary 
spending. It increased 24 percent at a time when inflation was only 2 
percent in this country. Discretionary spending was growing at more 
than 10 times the rate of inflation. It seems reasonable that we could 
go back to those 2008 levels, indexed for inflation, which is what the 
proposal passed by the House that was defeated in the Senate would do.
  We have had lots of testimony from the former Chairman of the Federal 
Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who said he expected we could face a debt 
crisis in the next 2 to 3 years. He said there is a 50-percent 
probability of that, in his opinion. We had the Chairman of the Joint 
Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike Mullen, say that the biggest threat to 
America's national security is our national debt, which I think is a 
stunning statement coming from the highest ranking military official in 
this country. We have people saying there is the potential for a debt 
crisis, a 50-percent probability. We have this national security issue 
that is impacted by the level of spending and the level of debt. Then 
we have what I think, too, is an even more compelling argument because 
everybody talks about the need to grow the economy and create jobs, and 
yet this amount of spending and debt, according to most of the research 
that has been done, suggests we are costing ourselves as an economy 
about 1 percentage point of economic growth every year, which 
translates into about 1 million lost jobs. That is a significant, as I 
said, body of research that has been done that studied economies over 
the past half century or so and concluded there is a correlation 
between debt and economic growth when your debt-to-GDP ratio reaches 90 
percent. We are there in the United States. We are well past 90 
percent, and it is going to grow significantly more under the 
President's budget.
  We cannot wait until tomorrow to do this. We have to attack this 
problem at every opportunity. Getting a vote on a continuing resolution 
that funds the government through the end of the year but does it at a 
reduced level of spending makes a lot of sense.
  I do not know anybody who wants to see a government shutdown. We are 
here because there is unfinished business from last year. We have to 
get this budget passed, and we ought to do it in a way that is 
meaningful and serious and, I might add, reduces spending.
  The President's budget, which he came out with a couple months ago 
and which starts the 2012 budget discussion, failed on every level to 
address the major challenges facing the country. Not only does he not 
deal with this issue of discretionary spending--and, frankly, he has 
been missing in action in that debate entirely--we have not heard from 
the administration about this issue. More important, his budget does 
nothing to address the big part of the budget--Social Security, 
Medicare, and Medicaid--which constitutes today 55 percent of the 
Federal budget and will grow dramatically over time as the 80,000 baby 
boomers begin to retire. What he proposed in his budget is increased 
spending, increases in taxes, and about a $12 trillion increase in the 
Federal debt over the next 10 years. Nothing serious is done in terms 
of addressing spending, debt, or taxes.
  It is a colossal failure of leadership not to take on what is the 
most compelling and profound issue that faces this country right now; 
that is, this huge cloud of debt that hangs over our economy and over 
our children's future. The President said recently he did not want to 
take a machete to this; he thought we needed to use a scalpel. What he 
is talking about doing I suggest does not even constitute using a 
toothpick. There is not anything in here that does anything to reduce 
spending or get serious about trimming the size of the Federal 
Government.
  What happened today? The House Republicans came out with a budget. Lo 
and behold, it is a budget that actually reduces spending by $6.2 
trillion over what the President's budget proposed or $5.8 trillion 
over what the Congressional Budget Office baseline suggests we spend 
over the next decade. It reduces debt by $4.4 trillion below the 
President's number, and it does it without raising taxes.
  The first argument we heard from people coming to the floor of the 
Senate--and I heard some of my colleagues earlier talking about, oh, 
this is going to be so awful; just think of the senior citizens. I say 
to my colleagues, according to the House budget proposal, senior 
citizens are not impacted. Senior citizens are protected from any 
changes in Social Security or Medicare, as are people age 55 and older. 
If you are a senior citizen today or you are someone nearing retirement 
age, you are not impacted by this budget. What it does is it makes 
reforms in these programs so that future generations of Americans will 
have those programs available to them when it comes time for them to 
retire. The fact is--we all know this--if we do not deal with these 
parts of the Federal budget, we are not serious about dealing with the 
future.
  This is a serious issue, it requires a serious solution, and it 
requires serious leadership. We have seen none of the above from the 
President or his administration or the Democratic leadership in 
Congress. So far, the only effort that has been made to address the 
issue of spending and debt and jobs and the economy is being done by 
the Republicans in the Congress.
  Considering the fact there is only one body of the Congress that is 
controlled by the Republicans--the House of Representatives; the 
Democrats control the Senate and set the agenda, and we have a 
Democratic administration, a Democratic White House--one would think 
that to do something of this consequence and magnitude, it would take a 
bipartisan effort. One would assume this would be a bilateral 
discussion that would be occurring between the White House and the 
Congress and not just the Democrats in Congress but the Republicans. 
But none of that seems to be occurring, and there does not seem to be 
any interest on the part of the President in stepping forward and 
putting a plan forward that actually does reduce spending, that 
actually does deal with this massive debt, and that actually gets 
serious about putting people back to work, growing the economy, and 
creating jobs. His budget, as I said, increases spending by $400 
billion, increases taxes by $1.5 trillion, and adds somewhere on the 
order of over $12 trillion to the Federal debt. That is the President's 
budget.
  The Republican budget that was put forward today--and I am sure we 
are not going to agree with every aspect of it, but at lease it is a 
serious, meaningful effort--reduces spending by $6.2 trillion over the 
President's number and $5.8 trillion below what the Congressional 
Budget Office says it will spend over the next decade. It reduces debt 
$4.4 trillion more than what the President has put forward, and it 
actually gets government spending as a percentage of our gross domestic 
product under 20 percent, which is where our historical average has 
been for the last 40 years. That is what we have been looking at. It 
takes on these issues.
  Whether one likes the approach or not, please at least let's have a 
discussion about it. Let's have a debate and let's have a proposal put 
forward so that we have something we can actually have a discussion 
about because so far all we have is a one-sided discussion. The 
Republicans have led the debate about how to deal with the 
discretionary part of the budget we are dealing with in this continuing 
resolution, and the Republicans have the only proposal that has been 
put forward that deals with the long-term issues of Social Security, 
Medicare, Medicaid, and tax reform, which, by the way, is an important 
issue to our competitiveness and our ability to grow the economy and 
create jobs. All those issues are addressed in the budget put forward 
by the House.
  What has been put forth by the administration is not serious. These 
are serious times that require serious leadership and serious solutions 
by the President of this country, and we are not getting that out of 
the White House, nor are we getting it out of the Democratic leadership 
in the Senate. I

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hope that will change. I hope my colleagues here in the Senate will 
recognize and the President will recognize we can't afford to wait any 
longer.
  We have added over $3 trillion to the Federal debt in the first 2 
years of this President's administration, and that number, as I said, 
will grow by about $12 trillion over the next decade. The interest 
alone that we will pay by the year 2015 will exceed what we spend on 
national security. We will spend more on interest on the debt than we 
actually spend on the defense of this country. That is the trajectory 
we are on. We cannot afford for the future of our children and 
grandchildren to stay on that trajectory. We have to change the 
direction we are headed in this country and it starts now.
  So I give great credit to our House colleagues. I hope we will be 
able to get to a meaningful discussion here in the Senate about how to 
get spending and debt under control, how to grow the economy and create 
jobs, and how to rein in the size of the Federal Government. It seems 
that, here at least, a lot of my colleagues must be very comfortable 
with spending over 25 percent of our GDP on the Federal Government 
because that is where we are today. As I said before, the 40-year 
average is down in the 20- to 21-percent range, which is where the 
House Republican budget would take us. I think it is a good starting 
point. It should trigger, I hope, a discussion in this country.
  But I certainly hope as well that the other side, the Democrats here 
in the Congress and White House, would engage the debate, would enter 
this discussion. Please, put forward an alternative, instead of coming 
out here and attacking, and particularly attacking in a way that is 
misleading and misinforming. Senior citizens are not impacted by this 
proposal that was put forward today. If you are 55 years or older, you 
are not affected by this. You keep the programs you have today. What 
this does, in a meaningful way, is to reform those programs so that 
they are available to future generations of Americans. We have a moral 
obligation to them to take the steps necessary to provide a future that 
doesn't saddle them with a mountain of debt.
  By the way, that debt has grown from about $1,900 per person in 1970 
to $44,000 per person today. Under the President's budget, 10 years 
from now, it will be $88,000 per person. That is what we are doing to 
the future of our children and grandchildren unless we take steps to 
change our direction.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet). The Senator from Indiana is 
recognized.
  Mr. COATS. I thank the Chair.
  (The remarks of Senator Coats pertaining to the introduction of S. 
727 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced 
Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. COATS. I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. HAGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mrs. HAGAN. Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues on both 
sides of the aisle to join together to prevent an irresponsible 
government shutdown.
  The American people did not elect us to shut down the government.
  Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate must 
tighten the Federal Government's belt, just like Americans are doing 
every day at their kitchen tables.
  As we all know, our escalating national debt is our country's most 
pressing problem. Our country's current fiscal course is simply 
unsustainable.
  In just the last 10 years, our Federal debt has risen from roughly a 
third of our gross domestic product to nearly two-thirds of GDP in 
2010.
  Based on the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates, 
without proactive action by Congress, that percentage will continue to 
increase over the next 10 years, with public debt expected to reach 90 
percent of GDP in 2020.
  Meanwhile, nearly half of our current debt is owned by China and 
other foreign creditors.
  It is time for Congress to work together to chart a new bipartisan 
course that puts our fiscal house in order.
  Before coming to the United States Senate I served for 10 years as a 
State senator in the North Carolina General Assembly.
  I served as the cochair of the Budget Committee, and I can tell you 
that crafting a budget is never easy. There are always difficult 
choices, and both sides have to make sacrifices.
  As a Budget cochair, I worked for 5 consecutive years to ensure that 
North Carolina's budget was balanced, that we still made critical 
investments in our communities while eliminating unnecessary spending.
  It takes cooperation across party lines to meet fiscal challenges and 
to ensure government is both leaner and more effective.
  We need bipartisan cooperation this week to prevent a Federal 
Government shutdown, which is an irresponsible outcome.
  Keeping the government functioning for the American people is 
Congress's core responsibility.
  We must come together to cut spending and support critical 
priorities, such as education, that strengthen our economy and support 
economic development in North Carolina communities and in communities 
across America.
  And while I believe we all share the common goal of reducing our 
Nation's deficit, we should remember that our most troubling economic 
challenges cannot be solved in 1 year alone.
  That is why I am concerned by some of the cuts passed by the House.
  The House proposal would result in the loss of some 21,000 North 
Carolina jobs and decimate important education priorities, like 
Headstart and investments in historically Black colleges and 
universities.
  Nearly one in five African Americans who earn an undergraduate degree 
has a diploma from a historically Black college or university. North 
Carolina has 10 4-year HBCUs, more than any other state in the country.
  Funding through the Department of Education allows these institutions 
to strengthen programs and provide critical services for students who 
are often among the first in their families to attend college.
  The House would cut funding for HBCUs by nearly a quarter below last 
year's level, a cut that would have a disastrous impact on these 
institutions and their students, while not even scratching the surface 
of our current deficit.
  In addition, by insisting on dozens of divisive policy riders, House 
Republicans are disrupting our ability to chart a pragmatic and 
responsible fiscal course for the country. We cannot take our eyes off 
the ball.
  The President's bipartisan fiscal commission, cochaired by North 
Carolina's own Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson, made 
important progress in beginning to diagnose and attack the root causes 
of our Nation's fiscal crisis.
  The bipartisan work of the fiscal commission is evidence that common 
ground is possible.
  Reducing spending will absolutely be a part of any comprehensive 
solution, but we must begin to have a broader discussion to create 
meaningful deficit reduction.
  For that reason, I am supporting S. 211, the Biennial Budgeting and 
Appropriations Act, which was introduced by my colleagues Senator 
Isakson and Senator Shaheen.
  This bill would take the Washington-as-usual politics out of the 
budgeting process.
  The bill changes the budget process from the current, annual spending 
debate to a 2-year, deliberative process that allows us to work 
together on commonsense cuts coupled with sensible investments, similar 
to what North Carolina, which balances its budget every year, already 
does.
  Right now, Congress rarely passes the 12 government funding bills by 
the end of the fiscal year, and this year we have been operating on 
short-term fix after short-term fix. A biennial budgeting process is 
part of the long-term

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solution we need to remove partisanship from the budget. The status quo 
is unacceptable.
  I hope we can continue to work across party lines, this week and 
moving forward, on a bipartisan, comprehensive plan for the Nation's 
budget that tackles, head on, our mounting debt.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of Colorado). Without objection, it 
is so ordered.
  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I had the chance to sit in the chair this 
evening, before you came, and listened to people on both sides of the 
aisle talk a little bit about our debt and our deficit situation, the 
pending shutdown of the Federal Government. I shudder to think we might 
actually do that. But it may happen. I thought I might keep my senior 
Senator a little bit of company--the hour is late and the floor is 
empty--to have the chance to talk a little bit about how we see this 
from Colorado.
  Like the Presiding Officer, I have had the chance to travel in one of 
the most beautiful States in the country over the last 2 years, 40,000 
miles across the State of Colorado, having townhall meetings in red 
parts of the State and blue parts of the State and, believe it or not--
and I know the Presiding Officer would believe it because he is talking 
to the same people I am talking to and, maybe more important than that, 
listening to the same people I am listening to--I think a fairly 
substantial consensus emerged out of those meetings.
  By the way, in not a single one of those townhall meetings--not one 
in 2 years--no matter what part of the State I was in, would any self-
respecting cable television producer want to put on cable TV at night. 
Because we do not scream at each other in Colorado. We have our 
differences. We have our disagreements. We have a lot of shared values, 
though, whether we are Democrats or Republicans, tea party members, 
Independents. We are about a third Republican, a third Democratic, a 
third Independent. That consensus that emerged from these meetings on 
our debt and our deficit is straightforward.
  It is a three-part test for people in Colorado. The first is, they 
want us to come up with a comprehensive solution that materially 
addresses the fiscal challenges this country faces. They do not want a 
bunch of gimmicks. They do not want a bunch of talking points. And they 
do not want people in this Chamber or the Chamber on the other side of 
the Capitol spending their time scoring political points at the expense 
of the American people.
  So the question they are going to ask, first, when the Presiding 
Officer and I go back there, I think, is, did you get to a 
comprehensive solution--not, by the way, did you fix it overnight? 
Because they know it cannot be fixed overnight. But can we be secure in 
the idea that we are not going to leave our kids and our grandkids what 
is today $15 trillion in debt and a $1.5 trillion budget deficit. 
Because all things being equal, we wish to allow our kids and our 
grandkids to not have their choices constrained by our inability to get 
anything done here in Washington. So that is the first test for people 
in Colorado.
  The second test is, they want to know that any solution we come up 
with is one where we are all in it together, that everybody in America 
has the chance to make a contribution to solving this fiscal nightmare 
we face. They are not interested in pitting one group of people against 
another group of people. In fact, that makes them feel suspicious about 
what we are doing. They want to know we are all in it together, which 
brings me to the third commonsense Colorado point of view on this 
issue, which is they would like this--in fact, they will insist--the 
solution be a bipartisan solution. Because they do not have confidence 
in one party's ideas on this question. That is a lucky thing because we 
have a Republican-controlled House and we have a Democratic-controlled 
Senate, and the President is a Democrat. We cannot solve this problem 
in these times without it being a bipartisan solution. That is it.
  If I can go home and say, we materially addressed the problem, we are 
all in it together, and it was a bipartisan solution, I think people 
would say: You guys have finally done something. We feel patriotic, as 
if we have done something useful for our kids.
  As the Presiding Officer knows, there are people all over our State--
local government officials--who are Republicans and Democrats who are 
making tough decisions about their budgets. I have an incredible amount 
of sympathy for what they are dealing with.
  I had the great fortune, earlier in my career, to serve as the Chief 
of Staff for our now Governor, John Hickenlooper, when he was mayor of 
Denver. When John went into that office, and I went in as his Chief of 
Staff, we faced a huge budget deficit by Denver standards and we had to 
cut 11 percent of our expenditures. We met with people living all 
throughout the city and county of Denver. We sought their advice. We 
established a set of priorities. We passed it through a city council. 
And do you know what. Denver lived to fight another day. Our economy 
grew, and things were pretty good there for a while, until this current 
recession.
  When I became superintendent of the Denver Public Schools--as the 
Presiding Officer knows, a district that year after year after year, 
for almost a decade, maybe even longer than that, was the poster child 
for cutting every single year; every year, people at other school 
districts would say: Thank God we are not the Denver Public Schools--
every year, the Denver Public Schools would lose teachers to other 
districts that could afford to pay them more, and every year we cut and 
we cut and we cut as a district. When I became superintendent, one of 
the cases I made to the school board was: We have profound structural 
problems in our budget, and instead of approaching the budget in a way 
that diminishes the academic environment for kids, what we ought to be 
figuring out how to do is establish a set of priorities and build a 
public case to deal with the structural problems that exist in our 
budget.
  Because of the good work of the school board--I should say, the 
courageous work of the school board--we were able to get that done. We 
were able to close schools for the first time in a long time. That is 
hard work. Those meetings were harder than health care townhall 
meetings, I can tell you that. We were able to deal with the pension 
liability that our district had. And we were able, year after year, to 
invest more money, not less, in our schools and in our classrooms. And 
now, under the current leadership there--which I think is doing an 
exceptional job--the district no longer is the poster child for 
anything except fighting hard on behalf of the children in the Denver 
Public Schools.
  Here is the thing that drives me crazy about what is going on in the 
conversation we are having now about this shutdown. There is no way any 
superintendent of schools in Colorado or any school board in Colorado 
or any city council or any mayor--from the biggest city to the smallest 
town--would show up to work and say: We might close the government 2 
weeks from now. It is an option for us that we will not pick up your 
trash 2 weeks from now or plow the streets--we still get snow in 
Colorado at this time of year--or plow the streets 2 weeks from now. We 
are going to close down.
  It would not occur to anybody working in a local government in our 
State to say they were going to do that. Do you know why? Because 
people would become unglued, unhinged. They would say: We hired you to 
do a job. Work it out. We are doing our jobs--or we are looking for 
jobs--we don't have time to solve these problems. You were hired to do 
this job. Work it out. Come to an agreement. Don't come home and tell 
us you are shutting the government down, you are not going to pick up 
the trash, you are not going to plow the snow, you are not going to 
educate our kids.

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  The idea that as a superintendent--I got in trouble when I closed 
school for snow once--once. It turned out to be a great decision 
because it was one of the worst blizzards we ever had, but it could 
have gone the other way, because people rely on us to do the work we 
are supposed to do. They have plans. The idea that at a time when we 
are fighting wars all across this globe, at a time when there are 
governments and countries that are trying to seek an economic advantage 
over the United States of America in a global economy that has shrunk 
the way ours has shrunk, that we would say to ourselves: We are going 
to pause, we can't even keep the government open in this democracy, I 
think would reflect terribly not on the American people and not on our 
democracy, but on this institution of government.
  There is a reason why we are in the basement as an institution in 
terms of polling. Why should people have confidence in an institution 
that cannot actually even keep running in the short term? I think it is 
important, based on the conversation I heard tonight here on both sides 
of the aisle, for the American people to understand this debate about 
this government shutdown is not a debate about our deficit and our 
debt, not really. It has been about scoring political points.
  What I want to say is I hope and I would encourage the leadership on 
both sides of the aisle here, the leadership in the House, and our 
President to find a way to work it out and to make sure we keep this 
government open. I think closing it sends entirely the wrong message. I 
know there are people on both sides of the aisle here who believe that. 
I hope people do absolutely everything they can do between now and the 
end of this week to make sure we send a message that we are not as 
dysfunctional as we appear to be. Because I think this place ought to 
meet the standard that people at the local level of government are held 
to in our State.
  No business would say: I don't know, maybe we will close for 2 weeks 
or close for a month. They are figuring out how to invest and grow even 
in this challenging economy. We should be doing the same.
  Mr. President, you and I were in a meeting this morning. We started 
today at 8 o'clock in the morning, with 33 Senators, Republicans and 
Democrats, who came together to hear some very thoughtful observations 
about how important it is we come to a comprehensive solution to deal 
with our deficit and to deal with our debt. We heard an important 
presentation about how there is no silver bullet here. There is no easy 
way to solve any of this. But perhaps the least painful way to think 
about it is with the most comprehensive plan--which, by the way, is the 
intuition of people in Colorado, as I said earlier today. It gave me 
great confidence that there were a bunch of Republicans and a bunch of 
Democrats in a room listening to this message and willing to work 
together in a bipartisan way.
  I was very fortunate to draft a letter that Mike Johanns from 
Nebraska, a Republican, cosigned with me that called on the President 
to engage--after this period we are having a discussion about right now 
with closing the government or keeping it open or whatever it is we are 
going to do--asking the President to engage in a conversation that is 
comprehensive that says: You know what. We know this is going to 
involve cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and military. We 
know this is going to involve reform of our entitlements. We know it is 
going to involve reform of our Tax Code as well.
  Senator Coats from Indiana was out here today with a lot of 
commonsense ideas around how our Tax Code doesn't drive innovation, 
competition and growth and he is right about that. There is a lot of 
work to be done, and I have every confidence it can happen. That letter 
we wrote turned out to have 64 signatures on it. Sixty-four people 
signed that letter. That is more than the 60 required to pass a piece 
of legislation. That is a majority of the Democrats in the Senate. It 
is a majority of the Republicans in the Senate. I know it is just a 
letter, but it reflects what I believe to be true about what people in 
this body believe, which is that we can solve this issue. We can solve 
this problem, but we are only going to be able to do it if we do it 
together. We are only going to be able to do it if we get to a place 
where we are no longer as concerned about winning political points as 
we are about actually addressing the problem. I have confidence we can 
do it.
  Someone said to me today: You seem to be a guy who feels as though 
the Senate is dysfunctional. You have a reputation for believing the 
Senate is dysfunctional. I will confess there are days when I wonder, 
and there are days when I feel as though it is dysfunctional. But on 
this set of issues, I think the Senate can shine. On this set of 
issues, I think this is the place where leadership can take hold and 
where we can create a bipartisan solution. The people of Colorado, and 
I think the American people, expect us to do everything we can to get 
this done.
  There are two conversations going on simultaneously, and I thought it 
was important to point out that one is about the very short-term 
issue--what we are going to do with this continuing budget. By the way, 
no one in Colorado would stand for the idea that you don't pass a 
budget in the year you are in, but that is another Washington cultural 
artifact we ought to get rid of. But that is distinct from the 
comprehensive discussion we need to have around here on our deficit and 
our debt. At the end of the 2-year discussion I was having, and the 
beginning of a new discussion now with Colorado, it became pretty 
straightforward what people want, not just on the debt and deficit but 
other things they are concerned about, that we ought to be turning our 
attention to, instead of having this back and forth about whether we 
are going to keep the government open. It ought to be assumed we are 
going to keep the government open.
  We just came off the first decade in the country's history when 
median family income fell. It was lower at the end of the decade than 
it was at the beginning of the decade. It has never been true before in 
the United States. For families in Colorado, that means they are 
actually earning less at the end of the decade than they were at the 
beginning. But their cost of higher education has gone up by more than 
40 percent. Their cost of health care has gone up by more than 100 
percent over that period of time. We have created no net new jobs in 
the United States or in Colorado since 1998. People would like to see 
that turned around.
  People would like to see us working together on a Tax Code that 
drives innovation to make sure we don't have regulations that 
unnecessarily stifle economic growth. They would like to see that.
  They would like us to break our reliance on foreign oil from the 
Persian Gulf. Even before what has happened in the Middle East and in 
Libya occurred in the last month or so--even before that--people were 
saying to me: Michael, we don't think it makes much sense for us to be 
buying oil from the Persian Gulf. We don't understand why we have an 
energy policy that requires us to ship billions of dollars a week to 
the Persian Gulf to buy oil when we could be investing that money 
developing our energy resources here in the United States. That is work 
we could be doing together in a bipartisan way.
  As the President knows, I have a passion for public education, as do 
the people who are living in Colorado, and they know we are not getting 
the job done there either. We have before us the reauthorization of No 
Child Left Behind, but somehow we can't move that forward. Teachers and 
kids and principals and moms and dads all over our State are expecting 
us to get that work done. We have to find a way to educate our kids for 
the 21st century economy that hopefully we will build for them, and we 
are not getting the job done.
  As I said on the floor the other day, if we look at this question 
from the perspective of poor children living in our home State of 
Colorado or all across the United States of America, and if we think 
about this room we are in right now and the fact that there are

[[Page 5164]]

 100 desks that don't belong to 100 Senators because they belong to the 
American people but where 100 Senators sit and work, if these desks 
reflected the odds of poor children living in our country succeeding 
educationally, things would look pretty grim in here. Forty-two out of 
the one hundred chairs in this place would be occupied by a child 
living in poverty--42. By the time our children in poverty got to the 
eighth grade, only 16 kids would be reading at grade level. That is 
four and four, four--that is about 16 desks. The rest of this Senate 
Chamber would be full of children who couldn't read at grade level in 
the eighth grade today in the 21st century in the United States of 
America. By the time our poor children would be graduating from 
college, only nine would be graduating from college--these two rows and 
that chair right there. The rest of this Chamber would have no college 
degree. In a global economy requiring that as a pathway to the middle 
class, to meaningful participation in the democracy, to meaningful 
participation in this global economy, 91 people in this place would be 
shut out because they were born into a ZIP Code that is poor. Those 
odds look pretty wrong to the kids who are living in those 
neighborhoods.
  I have spent a lot of time with our kids in those neighborhoods, not 
just in Colorado but all across the United States of America. They 
think we have already made a promise to them, that they live in a land 
of opportunity that is going to reward their hard work, and if they 
stick with it, they are going to end up with a college degree. That is 
what they believe. We may have made that promise, but we certainly 
haven't followed through on that commitment.
  Why should that matter to us? Some people look at that and say: Well, 
it is someone else's problem. I don't need to worry about it. McKinsey 
has done a study that shows us that the effect of those outcomes is to 
create a permanent recession in the United States. The effect of that 
dropout rate creates a permanent recession in the United States. That 
actually is about the same as the recession we just went through, which 
means if we are concerned with economic growth in the United States, we 
need to concern ourselves with the educational outcomes our kids in 
poverty are facing. If we are concerned with income inequality in the 
United States, we need to be concerned with the outcomes I just 
described.
  Last year, the top 1 percent of income earners in this country earned 
23 percent of the income--almost one-quarter of the income. The last 
time that was true was 1928. That doesn't lead me to conclude that 
somehow we should redistribute it, but it does lead me to conclude that 
we ought to fix our education system so more people have the chance to 
put themselves and their families into the middle class.
  We can't afford in this country to repeat the decade we just went 
through. We can't afford to have an economy where median income is 
falling. We can't afford to have an economy that is not creating jobs. 
We can't afford to carry a debt and deficit burden that at some point 
the capital markets are going to look at and say: We are not financing 
you anymore. We can't afford to fail to educate children in this 
country just because they are poor. I also think we can't afford to 
have an energy policy that commits us to a dependence on oil in the 
Persian Gulf. I think the people of Colorado and across this country 
are expecting us to do our jobs, just as they are doing their jobs.
  I say again, I hope the leadership of both parties, working in good 
faith, can keep this government open, and I hope we can move on to a 
broader and more comprehensive conversation around debt, around 
deficit, around our economy, and around the education of our kids.

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