[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 1762-1763]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         THE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET

  Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I wish to make some remarks about the 
President's budget, which was presented to us on Monday of this week as 
his annual proposal to Congress.
  Given our country's enormous fiscal challenges and the results of the 
2014 midterm election, I think there was hope among many of us that the 
release of this budget would be an opportunity for the President to 
work with us.
  There was a lot of talk about working with Congress, working 
together. The message from the November 2014 election was that the 
American people want Congress to get some things done. And by the way, 
what about the continuing deficit? Are we going to get back to this 
draconian knife held over our throats, where the budget continues to 
put us in a position where debt and deficit continue to be the plague 
which is going to have enormous, negative consequences on the future of 
this country?
  Given these enormous challenges, there was really hope the President 
with his last 2 years, would see as part of his legacy an opportunity 
to work together to put us on a sound fiscal path. But much like the 
coach of the Seahawks on the 1-yard line, the President chose to make 
the wrong call.
  In this case, in my opinion--and I think the opinion of many--the 
right call would have been a plan that actually puts us on a path for a 
balanced budget, addresses a skyrocketing mandatory spending burden and 
reforms our outdated Tax Code. These are, hopefully, ideas that both 
Republicans and Democrats could agree on. They would be in our national 
interest to move forward on. The time is now--with a Democratic 
President and a Republican Congress--to work together to achieve what 
Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill agreed to and what Bill Clinton and Newt 
Gingrich agreed to on welfare reform and on a number of other major 
initiatives that had been undertaken in Congress with support from both 
parties. They could be addressed.
  But instead of pursuing a path of consensus on these issues, the 
President comes forward with $2.1 trillion in additional tax increases 
over the next 10 years. Is there any end to the obsession the President 
has for raising taxes on the American people?
  All the debate at the end of the last cycle--the previous cycle 
before the last cycle--was over the fiscal cliff. Let's raise taxes on 
the richest people in America and the high earners, and that will 
address the problem of taxes. But we never could get to the spending 
issue.
  So if you like government to just keep increasing: Send your tax 
dollars to Washington, and we will spend it. That seems to be what the 
President had to say. Rather than looking at the dire consequences of 
not addressing these long-term problems, the President proposes to 
spend nearly $4 trillion in fiscal year 2016, a 7-percent increase from 
fiscal year 2015 and about $1 trillion more than what was spent in 
2008. The President wants to eliminate the very budget caps that his 
administration proposed and he signed into law in 2011.
  Well, it may be one thing to adjust those budget caps, particularly 
as it impacts our national defense and national security, but if that 
was done in conjunction with a larger proposal to address this out-of-
control mandatory spending, wasteful spending, and unnecessary spending 
that is taking place here in Washington, that would be one thing to 
consider.
  But this simply is just more of the same, going in the same 
direction, proposing unbalanced budgets each year, and adding more and 
more to our deficit and to our debt.
  The President likes to talk about his veto pen and, with the release 
of this budget, we can only conclude that pen only contains red ink. 
The President has taken a pass on the golden opportunity to move 
forward and work together. Instead, his budget takes us in the same 
direction we have been going in the past 6 years without any proposal 
to address it in any kind of serious way. I think it is imperative that 
we do that.
  Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office released its latest 
economic report and the findings were, once again, very sobering. This 
nonpartisan report warned that under current law our ``large and 
growing federal debt would have serious negative consequences, 
including increasing federal spending for interest payments; 
restraining economic growth in the long term; giving policymakers less 
flexibility to respond to unexpected challenges; and eventually 
heightening the risk of a fiscal crisis.''
  The CBO projects that the gross Federal debt is expected to raise 
another $10 trillion over the next decade. The report also says that we 
will spend down almost $800 billion of the Social Security Trust Fund 
over the next 10 years.
  Ten years from now, it is projected that spending on mandatory 
programs and interest on the debt will consume almost 94 percent of all 
Federal revenues, leaving far fewer funds for other important national 
priorities, such as strengthening our infrastructure, national defense, 
medical research, education, and any number of issues that could be 
dealt with on a national basis that would affect the future of this 
country. But it will not be able to be done because we have not taken 
these steps. Time is running out to make the tough fiscal choices now 
so future generations will not be saddled with an even higher burden of 
debt.
  I regret the President has yet to come forward with the serious 
intent of working with us to deal with one of our country's most 
challenging and most pressing problems with creative solutions. We will 
only be able to accomplish the results we need if we work together, as 
the President has said. But it takes his engagement if we are going to 
succeed.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
  Mr. WARNER. First, Mr. President, I commend my good friend, the 
Senator from Indiana, for his good work on laying out, with the Senator 
from Oregon, one approach on reforming the Tax Code and his willingness 
to look at this issue of our national debt.
  Let me echo, at $18 trillion--he cited some statistics--interest 
rates go up 1 percent. That is more than $120 billion a year off the 
top. That is more than we spend each year on the issues I am going to 
speak to--the Department of Homeland Security.
  The only issue I would raise with my friend is that we do need that 
grand

[[Page 1763]]

bargain. But no one who has looked at this problem hasn't said: You are 
not going to solve it without revenues being part of the mix. You have 
to do entitlement reform. But even with the so-called revenues from the 
fiscal cliff, let me just point out that we brought the country to the 
brink of unforeseen financial areas.
  To raise $600 billion, well, in the past few years we have had 
unprecedented one-time revenues from the Federal Reserve north of $400 
billion, $200 billion-plus that CBO counts as revenue from paybacks of 
Fannie and Freddie. We do not have the revenue streams. If we can get 
back to revenue streams from the late 1990s, revenue as a percent of 
our GDP, when the economy was booming and jobs were being created and 
there was bipartisan collaboration, I think that, combined with 
entitlement reform--to make sure Social Security and Medicare are truly 
sustainable for the next 50 years--there is a path there and I thank 
the Senator for his work.
  Mr. COATS. If I could ask the Senator from Virginia to yield for a 
response without yielding the floor, and I will yield right back to 
him.
  I wish to say that the perception of the public is that this is a 
partisan issue. It is not. The Democratic Senator from Virginia has 
taken a lead in this effort and committed an extraordinary amount of 
effort--only to come up short.
  I have been privileged to work with him and a number of Members from 
the other side of the aisle together with Republicans, and we see the 
need to work together on this. We have lacked one thing. We have lacked 
support from the executive branch. Until we have that, I don't believe 
we will be able to take serious steps forward in addressing this 
problem.
  But that is not something that can be defined as one party versus 
another.
  Most of us on both sides of this aisle have recognized the disastrous 
potential consequences of our not taking action. I appreciate the 
tremendous work the Senator from Virginia has done in leading this 
effort, and I know we both regret that we haven't achieved success.
  I thank the Senator, and I yield back.
  Mr. WARNER. I thank the Senator for his comments. We might agree or 
disagree on the role the President has played, but that still doesn't 
beg the fact that we need to continue our efforts in this body and in 
the body down the hall.

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