[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12002-12003]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            THE DEBT CRISIS

  Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the majority leader, and I appreciate his 
courtesy, as always, in so many issues that come before the Senate.
  I wish to say a couple of things. One is fundamental, and that is 
that the crisis we face--and I think my Senate colleague from Tennessee 
would agree--is not the debt limit, it is the debt. It is the surging 
debt. The debt limit is Congress's power, and it says to the 
administration: You can't borrow any more money. We only authorize so 
much money to be borrowed. Like a 102-degree mark in our thermometer, 
it is not the thermometer that is the problem. It is the underlying 
fever that the thermometer indicates. So reaching the debt limit so 
soon after we raised it is an indication we have something unhealthy in 
our system that needs to be dealt with.
  Senator Reid has very difficult challenges before him. It is not 
easy. But as I like to remind him, he asked for the job and, hopefully, 
he can make progress at this point in time.
  But to raise the debt ceiling, the majority leader knows a couple of 
things must be done. He knows, one, the Republican Congress and the 
American people want to see changes in our spending. It is on a 
reckless path. We cannot continue on this path. So the idea is, 
shouldn't we change what we are doing that has put us in a situation in 
which 40 cents of every $1 we spend today is borrowed?
  This year we will pay $240 billion in interest on our national debt. 
Under the budget the President submitted to us--which was voted down, I 
will acknowledge, 97 to 0 in the Senate; but it indicates the debt path 
we are on--it would cause in the tenth year interest to be paid in 1 
year of $940 billion--a stunning figure. The Federal road program is 
about $40 billion. Federal aid to education is about $100 billion. We 
would be surging from $240 billion to $940 billion in interest on this 
rising debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office, our experts.
  I would note also that President Bush's last year was an 
extraordinary deficit of $450 billion--but President Obama's deficits 
have been $1,200 billion, $1,300 billion, and it is expected this year 
to be $1.5 trillion--$1,500 billion--in 1 year. These are the 3 years.
  In the first 2 years of President Obama's administration, his 
nondefense discretionary spending surged 24 percent. This does not 
count the stimulus of almost $900 billion that we sent out the door 
that was supposed to stimulate the economy.
  Speaker Boehner, and I think with the support of the American people, 
has said: Well, we can do a long time. We can do a fairly large 
increase in our debt ceiling to allow the country to continue to borrow 
or we can do a short one, but we in the House, in the Republican House, 
believe we have to confront our problems. So I would propose, and he 
has stated, that the House would vote to raise the debt ceiling but 
only to the extent to which spending has been reduced an equal amount.
  If you reduce spending enough over 10 years, you get an immediate 
increase in the debt ceiling of an equal amount now. If you reduce 
spending over 10 years a larger amount, you could increase the debt 
limit a larger amount. It has become a vehicle, an opportunity for the 
American people to understand how we are spiraling out of control, and 
how it is Congress that needs to figure out a way to rein this in. It 
is unsustainable, the path we are on. So this $1 increase in the debt 
ceiling for $1 reduction in spending kind of caught on. People seem to 
be going along with that. It seems to be fairly reasonable.
  Senator Reid claims he has a plan that would reduce spending $2.7 
trillion over 10 years and this would allow him to raise the debt 
ceiling about that amount, and this would allow us to, in effect, raise 
it enough that we would not have to talk about this again for almost 2 
years--about 22 months.
  Well, OK. That sort of seemed to meet what Speaker Boehner had 
suggested. But I am the ranking member of the Budget Committee. I have 
been a real critic of what has been going on. I have been predicting we 
were going to end up at the last minute and a bill was going to be 
thrown on the floor, and I was concerned it was going to be filled with 
gimmicks. It was not going to be honest, and we were going to be told 
if we do not pass it, the Republic is going to fall, and no matter what 
is in it, we have to pass it. And do not worry about it, trust us on 
these numbers.
  Unfortunately, that is where we are getting. Senator Reid, in his 
$2.7 trillion in claimed deficit reduction--about $1.2 trillion of that 
is savings from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, that has not 
ever been projected to stay at the current level of $158 billion a year 
for 10 years.
  Speaker Boehner, when he proposes to reduce spending for a shorter 
term, does not count savings from the declining war expenditure because 
that is not a baseline expenditure and we have never extended and 
planned to do that. We never planned to spend $158 billion a year in 
the next 10 years. This is inevitably going to drop. Some say it could 
go to zero, some say to $50 billion, saving $100 billion or a little 
more a year for the next decade. So the Budget Committee Republican 
staff calculates this is over $1 trillion in inaccurate estimations of 
spending reductions. It just is. It should not be counted. Speaker 
Boehner does not count it in his numbers.
  Senator Reid also claims $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction from 
spending caps by capping discretionary spending. Well, those caps are 
counted from a baseline that ignores the savings that were enacted in 
the full year CR that we did the year we are in.
  What happened was, we had a higher level of spending. There was an 
election last fall. A new Republican House was elected--huge numbers of 
people who were elected who said: We have to do something about 
spending. So we had a fuss over what our spending levels should be this 
year because we were operating not under authorization of 
appropriations bills but a continuing resolution, and that number was 
reduced. So the spending level for this year now is not the same as it 
was when the year began. The current level of spending is the number we 
ought to be talking about when we say we are going to save money. 
Correct? It should not be the number that was higher but has been 
abandoned and been reduced. That reduces the amount of legitimate 
claims in discretionary savings to less than $800 billion. Then he 
claims $100 billion in mandatory savings. But it is likely--from our 
staff looking at them--it would amount to no more than $60 billion.
  The bottom line is, we have looked at this a lot of different ways. I 
believe the numbers I am going to repeat to

[[Page 12003]]

you today will be sustained in any competitive argument about it. I 
believe these are honest and true numbers. The bottom line is that the 
total real savings that are proposed by the Reid plan are not $2.7 
trillion but $1 trillion. If you do $1 trillion in savings, and you 
raise the debt limit by $1 trillion, then that would extend to 6 or 8 
months or so into early next year, which is, I suggest, where we ought 
to be. Because this amount of savings--$1 trillion--is nowhere near 
what we need to do to get off the debt course we are on.
  As Senator Corker indicated, most of the financial experts tell us we 
need at least $4 trillion in savings, not $1 trillion. So if we are 
just going to get $1 trillion so we can vote in this crisis period to 
raise the debt limit before August 2 so the checks can go out and 
everybody can be paid and the government can operate--and I hope we can 
do that; we need to do that--but if all we are going to get is $1 
trillion, this is just an interim step. This is not a real fix at all, 
but it is an interim step. If so, we need to be right back on this 
issue soon. That gives us an opportunity to do so early next year or 
late this year because we have not solved the problem.
  Mr. President, $1 trillion is not enough. Madam President, $4 
trillion is not enough. Depending on how you calculate the debt that 
has been projected to accrue over the next 10 years, it is somewhere 
between $9 and $13 trillion. So $1 trillion is not going to do anything 
to change the disastrous debt course we are on.
  By the way, the President--I want to say this because he was pretty 
tough last night blaming Republicans for all kinds of problems. Let me 
say, the Republican House passed--and I voted for in the Senate--a 
budget for 10 years that changes the debt course of this Republic. It 
puts us on a sound financial path. It reduced spending by as much as $6 
trillion over 10 years. It even reduced taxes to create more economic 
growth and make us more competitive in the world marketplace. It was a 
thoughtful, long-term, serious budget that would do real, positive 
things for America.
  The Senate has not passed a budget, not had one marked up in the 
Budget Committee. The leadership here in the Senate refused to allow it 
to happen. Senator Reid said it would be foolish to pass a budget. We 
have gone now over 2 years without a budget. It is unthinkable in the 
debt course we are on--how disastrous it is, how unsustainable it is, 
how unlike anything that has ever happened in our history--to have this 
kind of debt path and we do not have a budget.
  The President said a few weeks ago: Well, I have a plan that cuts $3 
trillion. Is it like Senator Reid's $2.7 trillion plan? It was never 
made public. It was never spelled out. If he has a $3 trillion plan to 
cut spending, well, let's see it. Maybe we could extend the debt limit 
more, if he is going to cut $3 trillion in honest numbers. If he has 
those numbers, as he says he has--in between attacking Republicans for 
causing all the problems--let's see them. Maybe that would be a basis 
for something.
  But I suspect it is no more accurate than this plan because when the 
President proposed his budget, as the law required him to do, early in 
the year, he said: My budget calls on us as Americans to live within 
our means and to not increase the debt, when according to the 
Congressional Budget Office, the lowest single budget deficit that 
would occur under his 10-year budget would be $750 billion--nowhere 
close to a balanced budget--and in the out years that deficit would be 
going up. So I will challenge the President, if he has a $3 trillion 
plan, let's see it.
  Some people say we need to raise the debt limit for a longer period 
of time and we cannot afford to have a short term increase. They say 
this is somehow a wrong thing to do, and so forth. I would point out to 
my colleagues, it is not unusual at all. A $2.7 trillion increase in 
the debt--if that were to occur--would be very high. It would be a 19-
percent increase in the current debt limit, putting the debt limit 50-
percent higher than when President Obama took office. It would be the 
largest debt increase in history, the fourth debt limit increase during 
President Obama's tenure in office, the fourth time it has been raised. 
So this is not unusual.
  I warned from the beginning that if we skirted the legislative 
process in favor of closed-door White House meetings and so forth, we 
would find ourselves in the eleventh hour with gimmick-filled 
legislation being rushed through a panic-driven Senate. This is not 
responsible governance from our leadership here in the Senate.
  As I feared and as I have just described, the majority leader's bill 
has not achieved close to the promised savings he says it would. From 
the $2.7 trillion in cuts claimed, the troop-spending cuts in the 
proposal are closer to $1 trillion over 10 years--less than a third of 
what was advertised--while he is asking for a nearly $3 trillion 
increase in the debt limit. Spending cuts next year would be only $3 
billion less than the enacted amount for 2011. This falls short of the 
idea that a dollar in cuts should accompany a dollar in debt limit 
increase. Senator Reid's proposal is structured in a way that is 
clearly designed to further degrade and undermine the budgetary process 
of the Senate, and it allows the majority not to have to come forward 
and produce a budget plan.
  Given the late hour, rather than rush through legislation to the 
President--the largest debt ceiling increase in history--we should 
pursue a more responsible approach, a short-term extension with real 
cuts through the immediate time period the extension covers, not 10 
years down the road. Then, using the extra time we have, Congress 
should pursue a binding framework, such as the cut, cap, and balance 
plan, to bring these gimmicks to an end and to alter our debt course. 
We should try the one thing we refused to do from the beginning: open 
hearings, regular order, and a real legislative process and public 
participation.
  I yield the floor.

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