[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 6744-6745]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        GREATEST FINANCIAL RISK

  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I am concerned about the financial 
status of our country. We are clearly on an unsustainable spending 
path. The people are rightly furious with their Congress. We should, as 
they well know, never have gotten ourselves in the financial situation 
we are in today, where we are projected to have a deficit this fiscal 
year, of $1.5 trillion--the largest deficit the country has ever had--
on top of deficits of the last 2 years of $1.2 trillion and $1.3 
trillion.
  We are on a path to doubling the entire U.S. debt in less than 4 
years. In the next 3 to 4 years we will double the entire debt of the 
United States. We are on an unsustainable path, as every witness who 
has testified in recent years before our Budget Committee has stated. 
It is an unacceptable situation.
  There was a shellacking in the last election of people, the big 
government folks. We have not even had a budget in 2 years--in 735 days 
we have not had a budget. The Budget Act requires the Congress to pass 
a budget by April 15. The House has done theirs. The Republican House 
has passed a budget, a historic budget. The Democratic Senate is now 
talking about commencing hearings on Tuesday. I hope we have a good 
hearing. Maybe we will.
  I just say that our members, the Republican members of the Budget 
Committee, asked our chairman to do as the House did and make public 
their budget in advance of the hearing so it can be examined--it is a 
complicated document, hard to examine, and it takes some time and 
effort--and not just plop it down the day the hearing starts. I have 
been informed that business as usual will continue--unlike what the 
House did in having a document out early. They will bring out a budget 
that day, and I guess we will commence to try to vote on it.
  I don't think that is a healthy way to succeed. We are facing the 
greatest financial risk, maybe, this country has ever faced. The 
President appointed a fiscal commission--we call it the debt 
commission--cochaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who were 
appointed by the President. They wrote a document and presented it to 
us with their remarks, which said this Nation is facing the most 
predictable economic crisis in its history. In other words, they are 
saying the path we are on is so unsustainable that it is easy to 
predict that we are facing and heading toward a financial crisis.
  There is no higher duty or responsibility for Members of the Congress 
of the United States than to protect the people of this country from a 
foreseeable danger. When asked by Chairman Conrad when we might have 
such a crisis, Mr. Bowles said it could be 2 years, a little less or a 
little more. We could have a financial crisis like the one Greece had, 
or another recession, a surge of inflation, or a surge in interest 
rates. Senator Simpson, cochairman of the commission, said he thinks it 
could be 1 year.
  The S&P bond evaluators warned that they could downgrade our debt. In 
fact, Moody's, in December, warned that they could reduce the rating of 
the American debt in less than 2 years. We are in a serious 
unsustainable position. We haven't even had a budget. Well, the 
President is required by law to submit a budget. Every President does.
  I asked, when he made his State of the Union Address, that he would 
address and discuss the danger we are in, why the Nation needs to 
reduce spending, why it is not some partisan brouhaha but a real threat 
to the future of the country, and why it is that we must take steps to 
pull back. He really did not do that in his State of the Union Address. 
He talked about investments and more investments.
  Then I asked that he produce a budget that helps get us over the 
unsustainable path. I was never more disappointed in the President's 
budget. He claimed it would save $1 trillion over 10 years. How much is 
that? Well, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which 
objectively analyzes these things, the deficit will increase, at the 
rate we are spending, over the next 10 years, $14 trillion.
  What is saving $1 billion? Not nearly enough to get us off the 
unsustainable path. The debt commission recommended a $4 trillion 
reduction in spending, which was not enough, either. This was his own 
commission that he appointed. That was not enough. But at least the 
numbers were fairly honest. The President's numbers, unfortunately, 
were not even honest.
  The Congressional Budget Office analyzed his budget, and they 
concluded that it would not reduce the projected increase in debt by $1 
trillion, from $14 trillion to $13 trillion. What CBO said was that it 
was worse. It would add to the debt $2.7 trillion over the CBO 
baseline. I said at the time that it was the most irresponsible budget 
ever presented. Maybe someone can find somewhere in the distant past a 
more irresponsible budget. But when we know we are facing debts and 
interest rates the likes of which we have never seen before, we need to 
recognize that we need to make changes. His budget did not change. For 
example, his budget called for a 10.5-percent increase in educational 
funding. It called for a 9.5-percent increase in the Energy Department. 
It called for a 10.5-percent increase in the State Department. It 
called for a 60-percent increase in spending for the Transportation 
Department, without any real source of revenue to pay for it, in order 
to have a monumental new program to build high-speed rail and other 
items. We do not have the money. The inflation rate is not above 3 
percent, and we are getting double-digit increases when the country 
cannot afford the path we are on. It is unbelievable, really.
  After taking great heat from objective observers, the President made 
a speech. He had a paragraph or two in this speech about the reason we 
need to have some restraint and reduce spending and why we could not 
just invest, invest, invest, why we needed to restrain spending. That 
was in his speech. At least he acknowledged it a little bit, although 
it was not the detailed, serious engagement of the American people in a 
discussion as to why we cannot continue at the pace we are on. It was 
not sufficient to my way of thinking. Maybe I am biased. I do not think 
so. I do not think he has done that.
  In fact, when the Republicans in the House proposed reducing spending 
this year, he steadfastly opposed it. We have a pattern with the 
President. He says he is for doing something about the debt path we are 
on. He opposes any specific action that actually makes a difference in 
that regard. Then, finally, when they were dragged kicking and 
screaming into saving $300 billion over 10 years, the President took 
credit for it as if it was his idea when they have been opposing it all 
along.
  The Democratic leader here proposed a $4 billion reduction in 
spending, which was nothing. I am worried about where we are heading, 
how serious we are.
  The Senate Republican budget staff has looked at the President's 
speech and tried to see what is in it and see where we could go from 
there. What they found is that it does not reduce spending by $4 
trillion. His framework, as he called it, to reduce the deficit by $4 
trillion would actually grow the deficit by $2.2 trillion above the 
Congressional Budget Office baseline.
  The American people deserve an honest, fact-based budget. Instead, 
the

[[Page 6745]]

President's deficit speech was the biggest gimmick yet. An analysis of 
the President's April 13 speech exposes the falsity of the claim that 
this new framework would result in a $4 trillion reduction in the 
deficit. The announcement reveals that the President's framework is 
simply a rhetorically repackaged version of the budget he submitted on 
February 14, a budget that the CBO estimated could actually worsen our 
deficits by $2.7 trillion.
  The committee staff has concluded that the President's framework, 
compared to the current CBO baseline, would now worsen the debt by $2.2 
trillion over 10 years. The President's speech is a sleight-of-hand 
process that creates the impression of bringing new deficit reduction 
measures to the table without actually doing so, leaving us at bottom 
with the original flawed proposal, only presented in language that 
seems to be new.
  Here is how the process worked in the speech and how we analyzed it. 
I believe this is a fair analysis of it.
  One, he offers the same proposals in his framework as his formal 
budget submission but uses new language.
  Two, he assumes savings from his February budget that the 
Congressional Budget Office has already found to be bogus. He continues 
to assume savings that the objective Congressional Budget Office says 
are not legitimate savings. If you score savings in your budget, you 
can claim you made savings when you have not. We have seen that time 
and time again. In fact, it is one reason this government is in so much 
debt.
  CBO, by the way, is a bipartisan group, but its leaders are selected 
by the Democratic majority. They have the majority. This is a group who 
is not hostile to the President, but they have rejected many of his 
claims of savings.
  Three, it calculates the savings over 12 years. Everybody has been 
talking about 10 years. He submitted a 10-year budget. To make his 
numbers look better, he extends it to 12 years and claims more savings 
than otherwise would be the case if you are comparing apples to apples 
and oranges to oranges--a 10-year budget.
  He adds long-term savings from the just-passed continuing resolution. 
He claims credit for the spending reductions the House of 
Representatives forced on us. Some said it was not nearly enough. That 
is really true. They had proposed saving about $800 billion over 10 
years. By the time Democratic resistance had gone forward and the 
President had resisted, we ended up with only about a $300 billion 
savings over 10 years. He claims credit for that in his numbers.
  As the analysis demonstrates, the framework in his speech offered no 
new proposals beyond the dangerously flawed February budget. Even if he 
used their own estimates that have been discredited by CBO, the 
framework still falls an astonishing $3.2 trillion short of what the 
deficit commission he appointed recommended.
  Perhaps this is why the White House has been unwilling to heed the 
call of the Senate Budget Committee Republicans. We wrote the 
President. He has a huge staff over there who works every year on 
producing a budget. We said: If you made a speech now and if you 
changed what you had in your budget, translate that into a new budget 
and send it to us. We had that done in the past a number of times. They 
refuse. Why? Because a speech is more generalized, it is harder to 
score, it is harder to analyze, and when you put it into actual print, 
it can be analyzed, the numbers can be totaled, the deficits can be 
calculated, and you find out whether it actually does anything 
worthwhile. They refuse to do it.
  As it stands now, we have no plan to have any real reduction of the 
deficit we are facing from this administration or the Democratic 
Senate, let alone a framework to reduce it by $4 trillion. But they 
pretend it is so, and that is offensive. The American people are not 
happy about it. They know this Senate and this Congress have a 
responsibility under the law and under any morality and decency to 
produce a budget that says what we are going to do with their money the 
next year and how much deficit we are going to incur, how much debt we 
are going to increase. They have a right to see that. All we have seen 
is a pushback and lulling and talk of that kind.
  So we are heading to it. We are heading to a budget situation in the 
committee next week. I hope we will. And I think Senator Conrad, our 
Democratic chairman, will submit a budget better than the President's 
budget. Surely it will be. I cannot imagine it will not be 
substantially better than the budget the President has submitted. But 
the question is, Will it be enough? They have already blamed Paul Ryan 
and the House Budget Committee as being Draconian, ideological, and 
unreasonable with their budget which would reduce spending $6.2 
trillion in honest numbers that they have laid out and defended 
publicly, which actually confronts some of our long-term spending 
entitlement programs and tries to get them on a rate of growth not 
quite as high as it currently is. They are trying to bring this country 
into a financially sound position.
  I do not think the House budget probably goes far enough in the first 
10 years to bring our debt under control, but it is an honest, 
respected document that every objective commentator has praised. Mr. 
Bowles himself said: If you disagree with Mr. Ryan's budget, at least 
it is honest, and you need to put your own out there with the same 
degree of honesty as he did. Mr. Bowles was President Clinton's Chief 
of Staff, the man chosen by President Obama to head his fiscal 
commission.
  This will be perhaps the most important budget in decades--maybe 
ever--because our debt situation is deep. It is not easy to get out of 
the fix we are in. A lot of it is driven by long-term commitments we 
have made that are unsustainable. We have to confront that honestly and 
find out how to deal with it in a way that is fair and just.
  They say: We cannot cut spending. We need more money for education, 
10.5 percent. The State Department needs more money, 10.5 percent. The 
Energy Department needs more money, a 9.5-percent increase--this year 
they are proposing, commencing with the October 1, 2012, budget. That 
is the number the President has submitted. We do not have it.
  I ask some of the Members of this body to call Governor Cuomo in New 
York or Governor Christi in New Jersey or Governor Bentley in Alabama. 
He just announced he was having to reduce spending by 15 percent, 
prorate the spending for the rest of this fiscal year by 15 percent. I 
feel as though that is a message that has been lost in this body.
  I see my colleague Senator Klobuchar here. I wanted to share these 
remarks this morning.
  I believe the Vice President is meeting with some people--House and 
Senate Republicans and Democrats today. Maybe it will be budget No. 3, 
and maybe the Vice President can fix something. I hope they gave him 
the responsibility and the freedom to make a decision, or have they 
told him he cannot cut spending in any significant way? I don't know 
what they will tell the Vice President, but hopefully something will 
come out of that and maybe we can get on a better procedure.
  At this rate, at this point in our process, we are not in a good 
position. I am worried about it. Hopefully, we can reach some 
agreement. If not, we are going to fight it out on the floor of the 
Senate, of the House, and in conference committee. We are going to 
change the debt course of this Nation because the American people are 
going to demand it.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The senior Senator from Minnesota is 
recognized.

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