[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Pages 8978-8980]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            ECONOMIC POLICY

  Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, to the millions of Americans who are 
struggling to find jobs or make ends meet, this is simply stating the 
obvious, but I rise, a decade after we were told the Bush tax cuts for 
the wealthy would stimulate the economy and create jobs, to say they 
have done neither. A decade of the Bush tax cuts have proven what we 
knew from the beginning; that they disproportionately benefited the 
wealthy, shifted wealth, did nothing for the middle class, and nothing 
trickled down.
  The tax cuts exploded the debt and continue to be an economic burden 
that has been twisted into a Republican mantra, an ironic rallying cry 
for what clearly is a failed economic policy. Yet adherence to the tax 
cuts for the wealthy is a Republican political litmus test, no matter 
how clear the evidence is that they have failed to deliver on the 
promise.
  We again hear our colleagues on the other side of the aisle pursuing 
their ``my way or the highway'' approach to legislating. This time they 
are protecting these failed tax policies in the current debt limit 
negotiations, and they are putting tax cuts for millionaires ahead of 
poor seniors in nursing homes.
  These are the very same tax cuts for millionaires that helped get us 
into this fiscal mess, and they should most certainly be on the table 
to help us get out. It is like my Republican colleagues have thrown a 
lavish dinner party for the past decade and now they want us to pick up 
the check. What we are saying is: Let's go dutch and share the tab.
  Ten years later, it is abundantly clear that tax cuts for the wealthy 
are nothing more than an ideological and political pivot point, not a 
sustainable economic policy. Our Republican colleagues use this failed 
notion as a one-size-fits-all for political sleight of hand for all 
economic circumstances: tax cuts in bad times, tax cuts in good times, 
tax cuts in all types of economic circumstances. That is not policy, it 
is a convenient bumper sticker slogan.
  Our Republican friends on the other side come to the floor prepared 
to end Medicare as we know it. They come to the floor prepared to slash 
government to the bone. But they are unwilling to even entertain 
revisiting this failed economic policy, unwilling to consider adding a 
single penny to the revenue side of the equation by limiting this blind 
giveaway to those who need it the least. They will not entertain asking 
the wealthiest to be part of the solution for America, and I believe if 
asked, they would be. They would not put tax cuts on the table but have 
made ending Medicare, as we know it, the centerpiece. They told us from 
the beginning that wealth will trickle down, tax cuts will lift all 
boats, those who get the benefit of the cuts will do what is right for 
America and its people and create American jobs for American families. 
Well, the facts do not suggest such an altruistic outcome. Tax cuts for 
the wealthy have turned out to be the greatest failed jobs program in 
American history. All of the grand promises aside, all of the rhetoric 
about job growth and economic stimulus, all of that lofty rhetoric 
aside, just 3 years after the Bush tax cuts in June of 2004, we lost 
almost 1 million jobs, more than 300,000 jobs a year for each year of 3 
years.
  The fact is this economic policy did not stimulate job growth at 
home, but it did create job transfers abroad. Factories closed, jobs 
went overseas, services were outsourced. The rich got richer and tax 
cuts produced no jobs in America for 3 years. None. In April of 2003, 
almost 2 years after the tax cuts were passed, President Bush stood 
before the American people and said:

       These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits 
     to middle income Americans. By speeding up the income tax 
     cuts, we will speed up economic recovery and the pace of job 
     creation.

  He called the tax cuts ``a victory for fairness and a vote for 
economic growth.''
  The fact is the Bush tax cuts coincided with the most anemic economic 
expansion of the postwar period. It exploded the deficit and the debt 
and concentrated wealth at the top unlike any concentration of wealth 
since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. This, in addition to two 
wars unpaid for in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new entitlement program 
passed by Republicans unpaid for, and a marketplace that instead of 
being a free market was a free-for-all market created the excesses that 
brought us to the culmination of 2008's incredible economic challenge 
to this country on the verge of a potential new depression and drove so 
much of the debt the Nation faces today.
  For all the rhetoric from the right, the Bush tax cuts have been the 
greatest failed jobs program and the most ineffective economic stimulus 
effort in our history, succeeding only in creating a new class of 
super-rich in America.
  Let's talk about this shift in wealth from the last decade. As much 
as my Republican colleagues tried to twist themselves into knots and 
jump through elaborate hoops to disprove the obvious, the facts are 
clear. Ten years later and the Bush tax cuts have disproportionately 
widened the income gap to a point today where the wealthiest 1 percent 
of households in this country owns almost 40 percent of all private 
wealth in this country, more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of all 
Americans combined. Think about it. The wealthiest 1 percent of 
households in this country owns 40 percent of all private wealth, more 
than almost all of the rest of us combined. That is an extraordinary 
shift in wealth in the 10 years since the tax cuts were enacted that 
has cost this Nation $2.5

[[Page 8979]]

trillion in revenue with about 40 percent of the benefits going to 
households with incomes over $380,000. Yet our friends on the other 
side say no to a single mother who sits up in the middle of the night 
with a sick child wondering if she can afford to take that child to the 
doctor, praying she can afford the medicine that child needs and still 
put food on the table, hoping she will be able to keep her job and her 
health care plan.
  All that wealth at the top and Republicans have said no to a young 
student who needs a Pell grant so he or she can get the education they 
need to succeed. All that wealth at the top and Republicans have said 
no to a mom-and-pop grocery store owner who cannot get the capital they 
need to make repairs or expand. Our friends on the other side have 
looked into the eyes of that mother, that student, that store owner and 
said, no; no to health care, no to education, no to small business 
capital. They even said no to extending unemployment benefits, but 
asking the wealthy to pay their fair share is off the table. The one 
thing they have said yes to is ending Medicare as we know it and 
leaving seniors to fend for themselves.
  I have been visiting senior centers in my home State of New Jersey. I 
just came from, earlier today, to hear thoughts on the current budget 
discussions of Medicare. A typical 65-year-old at these meetings under 
the Republican budget proposal would pay an additional $7,000 by the 
year 2022. Right now over 140,000 seniors in New Jersey are paying more 
for their medications because they fall into that doughnut hole.
  Under the Republican plan, those New Jersey seniors will pay an 
additional $80 million for prescription drugs next year, and by 2020 
seniors currently in the doughnut hole will pay an additional $1.6 
billion. Nationwide nearly 4 million seniors will pay $2.2 billion more 
for prescription drugs in 2012 alone under the Republican plan, a plan 
that would end Medicare and would also force at least 1 million seniors 
to pay over $110 million more for annual wellness visits in 2012. Then 
turning to Medicaid, looking to turn that into a block grant program, 
the Republican plan could cost America more than 2 million private 
sector jobs over the next 5 years and threaten our economic recovery.
  That is not all. Nationwide the Republican plan could cut more than 
$503 billion in Medicaid funding for seniors, for the disabled, 
including lifesaving nursing home care, leaving us with the 
uncomfortable and unanswerable question I pose to my Republican 
friends: What will those fellow Americans do? Where will they go? What 
happens to them under the Republican budget plan? These are people, not 
budget numbers. What happens to them?
  Something is wrong with that picture of America. It is not the 
America I know. Something is fundamentally wrong when we let seniors 
fend for themselves and enact policies that lead to inequalities in 
income and wealth that are the most skewed since the Gilded Age and the 
Great Depression. How many years are we going to buy into the failed 
negotiation of trickle-down voodoo economics that reward the winners 
and leave the middle class behind?
  We all know we need to cut wasteful spending, we all know we need to 
balance the budget, and we have done it before. It wasn't that long ago 
that, in fact, during another Democratic administration we had budget 
surpluses as far out as the eye could see. How quickly we forget the 
day Bill Clinton left office he handed the incoming President a $236 
billion surplus with a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion over the next 
10 years. When President Bush left office, he turned a $236 billion 
surplus into a $1.3 trillion budget deficit with projected shortfalls 
of over $8 trillion over the next decade and handed the new President, 
President Obama, an economy headed off the cliff.
  Now our Republican colleagues want to go back to the same failed 
policies. They want to give more tax cuts to millionaires and 
billionaires, continue subsidies to Big Oil while they end Medicare as 
we know it and gut Pell grants and all that they mean to our economic 
future. They insist on tax cuts that will cost $700 billion on the 
revenue side over the next 10 years and trillions more by slashing tax 
rates for the wealthy and the powerful.
  Those making more than $1 million a year will see a windfall of 
$125,000 each from the tax cuts and tens of thousands of dollars more 
for proposed tax rate cuts while people in my home State lose $34 
billion in health benefits and 400,000 New Jerseyans end up without 
health coverage at all. They want to shift the balance to millionaires 
and billionaires while making Draconian cuts to health care benefits 
for seniors.
  Cuts do not reflect our value as a people or as a nation. Even a 
majority of tea partiers think it is a bad idea according to recent 
polls. I am reminded that our distinguished Republican colleagues are 
symbolized in their party by an elephant, a large animal that never 
forgets. Our Republican colleagues have forgotten what Vice President 
Cheney told America on national television as he was waging two wars, 
both unpaid for. He said, ``Deficits don't matter.'' Vice President 
Cheney: ``Deficits don't matter.''
  Well, Republicans have apparently forgotten President Bush's own 
words on April 16, 2001, about the benefits of favoring the wealthiest 
Americans:

       Tax relief will create new jobs. Tax relief will generate 
     new wealth, and tax relief will open new opportunities.

  He was right about one thing; it created new wealth and new 
opportunities--all of them at the top. But show me the jobs. Show me 
the new opportunities for middle-class families. Show me what it did to 
keep our economy on track and protect hard-working families from losing 
their homes in mortgage schemes and hedge fund gambles that stole the 
wealth of middle-class families taking us to the brink of economic 
ruin.
  Let's look at the simple facts about the Bush tax cuts 10 years 
later. The top one-tenth of 1 percent of American wage earners, those 
earning more than $3 million a year, received an average tax cut of 
$520,000 each--far more than most American families dream of making--a 
tax cut more than 450 times larger than the meager tax cut of an 
average middle-class wage earner. Those earning over $3 million 
benefited from lower tax rates on capital gains; lower tax rates on 
dividends, and lower marginal rates for the top two tax brackets.
  From 2002 to 2007, the top 1 percent of American wage earners enjoyed 
65 percent of the total income gains during that 5-year period. In 
those 5 years nothing trickled down. In fact, real hourly earnings fell 
by almost 2 percent for men in the bottom 10 percent of wage earners. 
It fell one-half of 1 percent for men in the middle of the 50th 
percentile but increased almost 3 percent for men in the top 10 
percent. Nothing trickled down.
  If the Bush tax cuts were designed as a stimulus, they failed again. 
Moody's has said making the cuts permanent would generate only 35 cents 
in economic activity per dollar they cost.
  Under the American Recovery Act, the payback would be $1.17 for every 
dollar of the Making Work Pay credit and $1.38 for the child tax 
credit. Clearly, the stimulus effect of the Bush cuts was not a 
stimulus at all. As far as the debt is concerned, from 2001 to 2010 the 
cuts added $2.6 trillion to the debt, 50 percent of the total accrued 
during that 10-year period. The fact is the Bush cuts averaged out to 
lower revenue levels as a share of the economy than any previous decade 
since the 1950s, even as we have America's sons and daughters in two 
wars waging abroad, unpaid for. The extension of the cuts in the 
December tax bill is projected to decrease revenues by $432 billion, 
from 2012 to 2021, making the total costs more than $5 trillion over 
the next decade. Yet Republicans will not put any of that $5 trillion 
on the table, not even the tax cuts for millionaires, but they will 
happily end Medicare as we know it and kick poor seniors out of their 
nursing homes. This is something we cannot let happen.
  So, Mr. President, as I have said before on the floor of the Senate, 
in their ideological haze they seem to have lost sight of the real 
people whose lives

[[Page 8980]]

would be affected by the choices we make. The Republican vision of 
America is about the bottom line. It seems to me they failed to realize 
that budgets are not just about numbers, budgets are about people, 
their hopes, their dreams, their expectations for a better life for 
themselves and their children. They are about the promise of this 
country and the dream we have come to expect, the vision we have of 
safe, clean, vibrant communities in which to raise our families.
  Budgets are a reflection of our values, not a faceless calculation of 
pluses and minuses just to reach an arbitrary number regardless of the 
impact on middle-class families looking to get back to work and pay the 
bills. All of us have a budget. Maybe it is not a formal budget, but we 
all have one. On the revenue side we have what we earn from gainful 
employment, investments, interest on savings. On the flip side we have 
our expenses, mortgage payments, groceries, utilities, and we have our 
contributions perhaps to our church or synagogue or donations to a 
favorite charity or a worthy cause. These are expressions of our 
personal values, just as the Nation's budget is an expression of its 
collective values.
  We may not always think of the budget in those terms, but we should. 
It is about our values. The Bush tax cuts enacted a decade ago are 
antithetical to the values that we as a people and nation have. Middle-
class families and seniors should not be left to pay the tab for a 
decade of lavish tax cuts that did nothing but make millionaires 
richer. Those tax breaks helped us to get into this mess, and they 
certainly should be on the table to help us get out of it. If we do 
that, then we have the wherewithal to do what we did once again under 
President Clinton: Balance the budget for the first time in a 
generation, create record surpluses, low unemployment, low interest 
rates, low inflation, and the greatest peacetime economy in over a 
generation. Those are the choices before the Senate and the country, 
and I hope we can get our colleagues to understand the right choice on 
behalf of the Nation's progress and prosperity.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.

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