[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 864-865]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         DEBT CEILING EXTENSION

  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, last week the Senate passed legislation 
that had already been approved in the House that extended the debt 
ceiling until late this summer. It was the right thing to do. It was 
the right thing to extend the debt ceiling of our Nation because it 
allows us to pay the bills we have already incurred. There is not one 
dime of new spending that is authorized under the legislation we 
approved. My only regret is that we did not extend it for a longer 
period of time, giving greater certainty to the financial markets.
  If we were ever to violate the debt ceiling, the consequences would 
be that the taxpayers of this country would have to pay more for the 
obligations of our Nation in interest costs. It would permanently 
damage the reputation of this Nation as far as our ability to pay our 
bills. It would be counterproductive to everything we are trying to do 
to help the taxpayers of America. It was the right thing for us to do, 
to extend the debt ceiling, but we still have a lot more work we need 
to do.
  Our current accumulation of debt is not sustainable. We cannot 
continue to spend what we are spending today and collect what we are 
collecting today in revenue and sustain the fiscal integrity of the 
United States. We spend too much and we do not bring in enough revenue. 
That is the issue we need to address. It was not addressed in the debt 
ceiling. The debt ceiling should have been extended. But we now need to 
deal with the fundamental problem that our spending and revenues are 
not in line.
  We could talk about the cause of how we got here. We could talk about 
how the Congress reduced tax revenues while we were at war, a policy I 
spoke out against and voted against. But our responsibility is to 
figure out how we go from where we are today, with budget deficits that 
are not sustainable, to how we can bring our country into better fiscal 
balance. We need a balanced approach. We need an approach that looks at 
spending, looks at revenues, that acknowledges that job growth is, 
first and foremost, our objective. We have to create more jobs in our 
economy--more people working, less people needing governmental 
services, more people paying tax revenues; all that helps generate the 
growth in our economy.
  We have to protect the middle class. The middle class has been 
particularly vulnerable during this slowdown in our economy from which 
we are now recovering. It has to be real, what we come up with. That 
means it really does deal with the deficit problems of this country and 
should be long term. I think all of us are tired of these short-term 
extensions. They may avoid an immediate problem but they do not give 
the type of predictability that is necessary for our economy to take 
off and grow.
  If you are an investor, it is tough to invest if you do not know the 
ground rules, if you do not know what the Tax Code is going to look 
like, what the Federal budget is going to look like. How do you invest 
in expanding a plant to deal with expanded Federal needs when you don't 
know what the budget is going to be? How do you deal with the Tax Code 
if maybe you want to develop an energy company when you do not know 
what the tax provisions are going to be for that operation? We need to 
give predictability. Therefore, long-term solutions are better.
  And it needs to be truly bipartisan. I was here on New Year's Eve at 
midnight. I saw the Democrats and Republicans come together in a true 
compromise that I think put the Nation's interests first rather than 
our partisan interests. I would have wished to see us do things a lot 
differently than in that agreement, but it was bipartisan, we 
compromised, we listened, and did it in the best traditions of the 
Congress.
  I wish to take us back 2 years ago when we started to struggle with 
how we would deal with our fiscal problems. President Obama appointed 
the Simpson-Bowles Commission, and we know a lot about that. They made 
their recommendations. Some of the recommendations' specifics were 
pretty controversial, but I think as to the overall framework of the 
Simpson-Bowles recommendations--the amount of additional revenue we 
need to bring in, the types and parameters of the spending cuts--I 
think there was general national agreement that that was the framework 
which would allow us to move forward in the best interests of our 
economy. I point out in the last Congress the Democrats on the Senate 
Budget Committee adopted that approach as our framework to move 
forward. I think that is what we need to look at.
  Let me make a couple of points, because I have listened to a lot of 
my colleagues come to the floor and talk about how we have not made 
progress, that our deficits are too large. We have made progress. We 
have. We have gotten about halfway there. Simpson-Bowles was somewhere 
between $4 and $5 trillion of deficit reduction over a 10-year period. 
We are about halfway there. We have about $2.5 trillion we have gotten 
done. We got that done because we passed the Budget Control Act, and 
the Budget Control Act put in lower caps on discretionary spending on 
the domestic side. That is now the law of the land. Over $1 trillion of 
deficit reduction was accomplished because of the Budget Control Act.
  We did another $1 trillion of deficit reduction on New Year's Eve, 
the fiscal cliff agreements that brought in more revenue by making 
permanent the 39.6-percent tax rate for high-income taxpayers and 
bringing in some additional spending cuts. That is real.
  My colleagues say we still have these large deficits and they are 
larger than they were before, but if we did not do the Budget Control 
Act and we did not do the fiscal cliff agreements, the deficit would be 
much higher. Again, using some common baseline, such as Simpson-Bowles 
did, we have done about half of what, if you agree on the framework of 
Simpson-Bowles, we need to do. We have to get more done; we are not 
there yet. The revenues of this country traditionally have been about 
19 percent of our economy. That is what it was under President Clinton 
when we balanced the Federal budget. We actually had surpluses. Our 
economy was growing. There was job growth. We were moving in the right 
direction.

[[Page 865]]

  Our revenues have dipped to about 15 percent of our economy, so we 
are not anywhere near having as much revenue as we need in order to 
have a balanced approach that allows for job growth. And, yes, our 
spending is too high, particularly on what we call the mandatory side. 
We agree with that. If you look at our health care costs in this 
country, they are much higher than those of any other nation in the 
world and we do not have the health results that would demonstrate why 
we are spending so much more. We need a more efficient system. That is 
why a lot of us supported the Affordable Care Act, because we see in it 
delivery system reform that will make our health care system more 
efficient, bring down the cost of hospital care by reducing 
readmissions, bring down the cost of hospital care by reducing hospital 
infection rates, bring down the cost of high-cost interventions by 
dealing with people with complicated issues, multiple issues, in a much 
more managed way; using health technology more efficiently; using 
preventive care to actually reduce health care costs. We know early 
intervention saves lives, saves costs, and when you bring down the cost 
of health care you bring down the cost of Medicaid, you bring down the 
cost of Medicare, and you help our budget get into better balance.
  We also believe we can save money in the military. The baseline for 
military spending assumes the high level of military operations in 
Afghanistan. Well, our troops are coming home. I think we can now 
safely assume that our Active military needs will not be at the high 
levels they have been over the last decade, and that will save money. I 
personally think we need to look at a BRAC-like process for our 
international military facilities, as we did for our domestic military 
facilities. All of that can save money.
  So what do we need to do? We need to get together, Democrats and 
Republicans, on a balanced approach. We need to do it in the month of 
February because on March 1 these automatic cuts, known as 
sequestration, take effect. The automatic cuts were put in during the 
Budget Control Act as a way to get us to act. None of us wanted to see 
across-the-board cuts to both our domestic and our military budgets; we 
didn't think that made a lot of sense. After all, some programs are 
more important than others, and we should make the hard choices. We 
should not be using an across-the-board cut.
  We need to come together. As I have indicated, there are areas in the 
spending where I hope we can come together so we can make our system 
more efficient, particularly on the delivery of health care. There are 
certain reductions we can make in the overseas contingency accounts in 
our military.
  On the revenue side, we have brought out areas where there are 
loopholes and shelters in our Tax Code. We can do a better job. It is 
interesting that the top 1 percent of the taxpayers of this country 
receive 25 percent of the benefits on what is known as tax 
expenditures. I heard my colleagues come to the floor and talk about 
how we have to bring down the cost of spending. Well, yes, we do spend 
through appropriations bills, but we also spend through tax 
expenditures, which are provisions we put in the Tax Code to give 
breaks to some--not all--of our constituents. When we add up all those 
tax expenditures, it comes to $1.2 trillion a year. That is what the 
tax expenditures come to. That is larger than our entire discretionary 
spending. We are spending more through the Tax Code than we are through 
appropriations bills. We can certainly find some savings in those tax 
expenditures, and we can use that in a balanced approach to be able to 
avoid the across-the-board cuts and get our budget back into better 
balance. That is where we need to move as a Congress and as a nation.
  It is important for us to take timely action. Let me underscore that. 
We need to act in February. We don't want to go through the uncertainty 
of what sequestration means. I have talked to a lot of businesspeople 
who depend on Federal contracts. Will that contract be let? They don't 
know. We need to give predictability so that our economy can take off.
  I hope we all put our Nation's fiscal interests ahead of any of our 
partisan objectives, and that means listening to each other. Democrats 
and Republicans need to listen. My colleagues on the Republican side of 
the aisle have made some good points in regard to mandatory spending. 
My colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle have made some very 
valid points about the need for revenue. I hope we will listen to each 
other, resolve our differences, and put a proposal forward that brings 
our Nation back to a stable fiscal future, which will allow us to 
create the types of jobs we need by investment and fiscal prudence so 
our economy can continue to lead the world. We need to act in a 
responsible, balanced, bipartisan, and timely way.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.

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