Our Budget Process

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. TILLIS. Thank you, Mr. President.

I thank my colleague and friend from the great State of Georgia for taking a leadership position to really cleanse the dysfunction and the problems that are going on.

Mr. President, Senator Perdue is only a 2-year politician. His tenure in the Senate is actually only 2 years. He has spent all of his time in business. He spent time in business, where you didn't keep your job if you couldn't balance your budget. You didn't keep your job if you couldn't make the difficult decisions year to year--making payroll, making strategic investments, and doing the kinds of things good business leaders do. That is what he has done all of his life. Now he finds himself in the U.S. Senate, where that is almost the exact opposite of what we do.

We just had passage of a continuing resolution today for a few weeks because we can't come to terms on long-term spending measures. Over a dozen bills passed out of appropriations with strong bipartisan support and within the constraints of the bipartisan budget, and now we can't get them passed. Why is that a problem? Because when you have the world's largest and most complex entity that has ever existed that can't figure out how much money it is going to spend or commit on more than about a 12-month cycle--and sometimes only a few months--how on Earth can you save money and make long-term investments? We were in a committee hearing yesterday where we heard that right now it takes an average of 15 years from the concept of a new satellite to the time we are launching it into space. How on Earth can we make those long-term investments when we can't even be clear on what we are going to be spending money on but for every 12 months? This is a threat to our national security. This is a threat to our economic security.

This is a threat to the security of every man and woman in the United States because they can't rely on the government to provide businesses or individuals with any kind of certainty whatsoever.

It is tough to make budget decisions, but they need to be made. I know a little bit about this because I was speaker of the house in North Carolina in 2011. We had a budget crisis. We had a $2.5 billion debt and 6 months to solve it. Unlike the Federal Government, where you can run up a deficit every year--it is now almost $20 trillion--most States, with the exception of maybe one or two, have a constitutional obligation to balance the budget, so we did it.

What was the result of providing that long-term certainty? Living within our means and actually having a transparent and decisive budget process. We had one of the greatest economic turnarounds in any State in the Nation in the last 5 years.

Being decisive and making the tough decisions accrues a benefit to the business community, accrues a benefit to every man and woman who lives in the United States, and it actually settles the global economic condition more than most people know.

At the end of the day, let's start doing our job. Let's not just create a budget like we did, a bipartisan budget, set it on the shelf, and then pass several appropriations bills and kill them on the floor.

That is what is going on here, and I think my freshmen colleagues think it is time--there are a lot of people who put posters up here saying ``Do your job,'' but they are failing to do their jobs by preventing us from doing one of the most important things we can do--make the tough, long-term fiscal decisions that are necessary for this great Nation.

I say to Senator Perdue, thank you for allowing me to speak.

I thank Senator Perdue for bringing up this very important subject.

We need to stay in front of this and recognize that doing our job is tackling this budget crisis, tackling the uncertainty that we, by failing to do our jobs, are placing on every hard-working American and business in this country.

With that, I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source