Trade Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Chairman Hatch and I will be managing this bill, and we want our colleagues to know that we are anxious to give everyone an opportunity to speak out on this extraordinarily important issue. If Senators who wish to speak come down and consult with the Finance staff--majority and minority--in our respective cloakrooms, we are going to work very hard to accommodate all of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

Here, in my view, is what this issue is all about. Fiscal battles in the Congress come and go, but nothing should ever be allowed to threaten America's sterling economic reputation, and this legislation will preserve it.

Without this agreement, the Congress is staring at a potential debt default--a debt default that would be literally days away, when the Treasury would lose its authority to borrow in order to make payments.

By now, I think a lot of Senators understand the disastrous consequences of default: housing costs shooting upward, retirement accounts shrinking, jobs disappearing, and consumer confidence dropping. We also understand that no one can get particularly thrilled by the prospect of raising the debt ceiling. Yet it is a job that must be done.

Our country is an economic rock in tumultuous seas, and we certainly have disagreements. Disagreements practically come with every news cycle and election. But what doesn't change is that our country pays its debts and we pay them on time. That is why this legislation is so important.

The bipartisan compromise reduces the threats of a potential government shutdown in December. When this becomes law, the pin, in effect, goes back in the grenade, where it belongs. That is positive news, as we look for some predictability and certainty, and we all hear from our businesses, our employers, and our citizens that this is so important.

Congress ought to look at this compromise, in my view, as a springboard to a full and productive debate over the budget in the upcoming 2 years. The fact is, last-minute deals have become too commonplace and they have left a lot of important policy reforms and policy improvements on the cutting room floor.

For example, with America's West getting hotter and drier each year, our broken system of budgeting for wildfires is in drastic need of improvement. The same goes for many programs and services that are a lifeline for rural America. Fortunately, this legislation lays the groundwork for the Congress to go back to having robust budget debates that can actually solve these challenges.

With my time this morning, I wish to address some specific elements of the bill, starting with what I see as several particularly constructive policies.

First, the legislation staves off the full brunt of the automatic budget cuts known in the corridors of Washington as sequestration. This policy was designed in effect to be painful from the get-go, and it would weaken Medicare, the lifeline for older people, and other domestic programs. It was supposed to be considered so god-awful that it would vanish 2 years after it began, but it continues to haunt budget debates to this day.

It is important that this legislation eases the burden by $80 billion over 2 years. That means more opportunities to invest in education, in medical and scientific research, in housing assistance, in public health, and more.

Second, this bipartisan plan is going to prevent a big spike in Medicare costs for millions of older people. Several weeks ago, the news came down that seniors were facing a hike in premiums and deductibles in Medicare Part B, the outpatient portion of Medicare, of potentially more than 50 percent. That would amount to an increase of hundreds of dollars--perhaps more--in a year when Social Security benefits are not expected to grow. From my years as codirector of Oregon's Gray Panthers, I can tell my colleagues that for many seniors living on a fixed income, that would have really hit them like a wrecking ball.

When we got those initial reports, several of my Democratic colleagues and I got together and introduced legislation that would fully shield older people from this huge financial hit. Following our work, the bipartisan compromise before the Senate includes a version of this important fix. It is not as generous as the proposal my colleagues and I introduced. There are questions about how it will affect the landscape a few years down the road. But, make no mistake about it, this approach goes a long, long way toward protecting seniors, particularly the dual eligibles--seniors eligible for Medicare and Medicaid--and this is a very important part of this legislation.

Third, the budget compromise takes an extraordinarily important step to shore up one of our country's most vital safety net programs: the Social Security Disability Insurance Program. Without a fix, what is called SSDI--Social Security disability insurance benefits--that workers have earned would have been slashed by 20 percent, and that 20-percent cut would have hit those affected very quickly.

This proposal is going to follow what has been a frequently used bipartisan approach of shifting funding within the Social Security Program to make sure that those who depend on this program are protected through 2022. I introduced legislation earlier this year, along with 28 of our colleagues, which would have gone further by guaranteeing that the program

remain solvent through 2034, but this compromise package strengthens the program for several years, and we will have a chance to come together--hopefully on a bipartisan basis--and go even further.

Fourth, the budget package makes real progress on what is called complying with our tax laws--tax compliance. It is important to note that these are not tax hikes. This is a question of enforcing tax law so that when taxes are owed, they are actually paid.

In the tax compliance area, there are several important proposals that are going to crack down on taxpayers who seek to dodge their responsibilities and pass the buck to other Americans. For example, enforcing the tax laws with respect to large partnerships has been a challenge for some time. There are more than 10,000 of these complex businesses in our country. More than 500 of them have at least 100,000 partners. So there has not been an effective way to conduct audits under the current rules because the rules are basically decades old and haven't kept up with the times. In my view, the proposal before the Senate makes meaningful improvements. More taxpayers will pay what they owe instead of using sleight-of-hand approaches to dodge their responsibilities.

We all understand that the Tax Code almost boggles the mind in terms of its complexity. I think it would be fair to say there may be more work that goes into getting this policy right as it relates to partnerships and several of the other issues, and my colleagues and I on the Finance Committee intend to keep giving the scrutiny the partnership issue deserves on an ongoing analysis.

Those are four specific areas of progress in this compromise that staves off a risky budgetary battle.

I do feel it is important to share one of my concerns with the bill at this time, and it is a provision that really has little to do with the budget. It is called section 301, and it allows debt collectors to make robocalls directly to Americans' cell phones. Here is my view. Debt collectors should not be gifted broad permission to harass our citizens, particularly through robocalls, running up costly charges in many cases. The Federal Communications Commission has limits on the number and duration of calls, and they are not sufficient. In a healthier budget process, this kind of proposal would get weeded out. So I would like to say to our colleagues in the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans, that I am going to do everything I can to reverse this action in the weeks ahead.

Finally, in my capacity as ranking member of the Finance Committee, I wish to discuss how these fiscal agreements ought to be financed in the future. Medicare and Social Security absolutely cannot become the honey pots that Congress raids whenever it needs to pay for legislation. If we go around the country--to Oregon, to Illinois, to Georgia, to the Dakotas, to Texas--and we ask typical Americans what they want their representatives in Congress to do, protecting Medicare and Social Security is right at the top of the list. I hear it in every townhall meeting. I have had more than 700 of them in my home State. And I have to believe many colleagues in South Dakota and Illinois and elsewhere hear the same thing.

There is a longstanding tradition that says changes in Medicare policy should be for strengthening Medicare in the future. The same principle goes for Social Security. Yet, twice now, these vital programs have been used to fund budget deals, and Medicare sequestration is sticking around long past its original expiration date.

This legislation preventing a calamitous default is coming down to the wire. I would tell colleagues that this is a must-pass bill. I support it, and I urge Democrats and Republicans to do so as well.

I would also say as we talk about where we go from here that it is important to recognize that Medicare and Social Security must not be used as ATMs for other spending in the future. The bottom line has to be that the process of reaching a budget and keeping the lights on in this wonderful institution--the people's branch--keeping the lights on in the process of reaching a budget has to change. The Congress cannot continue to just go from crisis to crisis to crisis. It is our job as lawmakers, working in a bipartisan way, to set the right temperature in our economy with smart, forward-looking policies that help our businesses succeed and give everybody in America--I want to emphasize that; everybody in America--the opportunity to get ahead. It is pretty hard to do when we lurch from one crisis to another.

Let's use this legislation as an opportunity to get back to writing the budget in a bipartisan fashion through the traditional approaches that have been used in what is called regular order, pass this bill now so as to ensure that America's sterling economic reputation is intact, and then let's look to the future around some of the principles I have laid out.

Again, Chairman Hatch will be here in a bit. He and I, as the managers of the bill, want to make it clear we want to try to accommodate as many colleagues as we can, and we ought to be able to. I look forward to the remarks of the distinguished senior Senator from Illinois. I believe that before too long Chairman Hatch will be here as well.

With that, I yield the floor.

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