Setting Forth the Congressional Budget for the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2020 and Setting Forth the Appropriate Budgetary Levels for Fiscal Years 2021 Through 2029--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I rise today to let the American people know that there are some of us left in Washington--some of your representatives--who actually do care about the mounting debt.

We now have over $22 trillion worth of debt, and you ask yourself: Whose fault is this? How did it get so out of control? How did we accumulate so much debt that we are accumulating debt at $1.5 million every minute?

Under George W. Bush, the debt went from about $5 trillion to $10 trillion. Under President Obama, it went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. Under President Trump, it will go from $20 trillion to about $30 trillion.

So the debt is out of control, and you ask yourself: Why is no one doing anything about it? Whose fault is it?

Well, really, I think you can see that it is a bipartisan problem. Both parties are at fault. We have a debt now that exceeds $22 trillion. If you have ever seen usdebtclock.org, you can see the numbers spinning out of control.

Now, how would that apply to an individual? Each individual American in the country owes about $70,000 of that debt. Some people say: Well, it is so enormous; do deficits really matter?

In fact, I think it was one of the changes, when Republicans way back said that deficits don't matter. Well, it actually does matter. It matters to your budget each year because what happens is that as interest grows, it crowds out everything else.

In fact, interest right now is the fourth leading item in the budget, only behind Medicare and Social Security and defense. But if you look at interest on the debt, what is going to happen over the next decade or so is that interest is in the red, and you can see interest is climbing and will exceed, over time, both defense and also Social Security. So it is a real problem. As interest on the debt rises, it sort of crowds out all other spending.

So what are people doing about it? What are your Senators doing about it, and what are your Congressmen doing about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The Democrats control the House. Will they have a budget this year? So far, goose egg, no budget.

How about the Republicans in the Senate? Do they have a budget? Well, they did pass one out, but there is no plan of ever voting on it on the floor.

So what we will get to vote on today is my budget. My budget is called the Penny Plan Budget. What my budget does is that it cuts one penny out of every dollar.

(Mr. BOOZMAN assumed the Chair.)

It is interesting because as I see people come to Washington--and almost everybody who comes to Washington wants money--and I tell them: First of all, I have to tell you, we have no money. We are $1 trillion short this year.

People have such good causes. They say: Well, we want money for this disease or that disease.

I say: Well, wait a minute. What if we said that we will give you 99 percent of what you had last year? We will give you one penny less. So if your charity or disease or the thing you are concerned about got $100 million, next year you get $99 million.

Here is what is interesting. Most of these people are advocates for Federal money. They often advocate for the State government looking for more Federal money. I have yet to meet a person, liberal, conservative or independent, who doesn't say: Hmm, I get 99 percent of what I got last year, and everybody would get the same? We would spend 99 percent of what we spent last year, and it would be spread across every sector, every sector that the right or left wants? I say: Yes. We spend 99 percent, and if you do, guess what, the budget balances in 5 years--or at least it did until recently.

I have been proposing the penny budget for the last 6 or 7 years, and up until now it actually balanced in 5 years if you cut one penny out of every dollar, but guess what. The longer you wait, the more interest there is, the more of a burden of debt there is, and the harder it is to actually fix the problem. So this year, for the first time, we have to call it a two-penny plan. It still balances in 5 years, but we spend only 98 percent of what we spent the previous year.

What would happen? You will still have 98 percent of your government. Is there anybody in America who does not believe there is 2 percent waste? I think, if you did a survey of the American people, they would probably be more accurate than up here. There has to be 10-percent waste in these programs. We find it all the time.

I will give you two quick examples. We are spending $50 billion a year in Afghanistan, and even for those who advocate staying in Afghanistan for another decade or more--which I don't--we are spending money on wasteful things. We spent $90 million on a luxury hotel across from our Embassy. It was never completed. It is a shell of a building, and the Taliban can crawl into this building and shoot down into our Embassy. Now our soldiers have to risk life and limb to patrol an empty hotel that somebody ripped us off on for 90 million bucks and fled the country.

We built a $45 million gas station in Afghanistan. It was supposed to cost a half million, but 83 cost overruns later, it cost $45 million. Guess what kind of gas is pumped at this gas station, if you could ever get there to see if it exists--natural gas because somebody decided that the defense industry should be reducing the carbon footprint of the world, and we weren't supposed to be killing our enemies so much as reducing the carbon footprint of the world. So we built a natural gas station in Afghanistan.

The problem? They don't have any cars. The average income in Afghanistan is about $800 a year, and there are very few people who have cars, and of the ones who do have cars, none of them run on natural gas.

The examples go on and on.

We spent $2 million studying whether, when someone sneezes on the food in front of you at the cafeteria, you are more or less likely to eat the food. It took them $2 million to figure that one out.

This is throughout government. There is, at the least, 1 to 2 percent waste. There is probably 10 percent waste and just throwing the money-- it would almost be better just to burn the money.

What do we do? Who is saying anything about it? The media says no one is, and this is fake news--it is a lie--because when the tax cuts came around, I insisted the tax cuts be paid for. How many people voted with me? Eight Senators, all Republicans, not one Democrat.

So you ask yourself what are the Democrats for? Are the Democrats for balancing the budget? No, they don't care at all about the deficit.

Do Republicans care? Some do, most don't. So we are going to have a vote on my budget which cuts two pennies out of every dollar, balances the budget within 5 years, and then actually lets the budget grow at 2 percent a year for the remaining 5 years, and we would be a much stronger nation.

If we were to actually balance the budget and then let the country move forward and grow, once again, we would have the greatest confidence. The world would have great confidence in us again. If we don't do it, I think there is a real problem coming for us.

There is going to be a day within the next 10 years that interest will actually exceed $1 trillion. Right now we are spending $400 billion on interest. So it is a real problem. It is crowding out everything else, and it is becoming one of the largest items we have in the budget.

Why can't we get there? What seems to be the problem?

The first problem is math. They have us kind of--it is fuzzy. It is called Washington math. Washington math, if you read the Washington Post, they will say: Oh, no. It is not just cutting 1 percent; your budget is going to cut $10 trillion over the next 10 years.

Here is what the difference is. If we don't spend any more money-- last year, we spent $4 trillion. If we keep spending $4 trillion over the next 4 years, would that be cutting any money or spending the same amount?

Be careful what you answer. The Washington Post and the liberal media will tell you we have now cut $10 trillion if we keep spending the same amount over 10 years. Why? Because they are anticipating the curve of spending. The baseline of spending, this red line, is going up. Spending is going like this, but most people in their normal household income would say: I made $40,000 this year, and next year, if I make $45,000, that is an increase. The government would say: No, we anticipated your making $45,000 next year, so it is not an increase. They work it on a baseline that is elevated. So if we don't spend $10 trillion more next year than we did this year, over the next 10 years, they will say we have actually cut spending. This is a real problem.

For example, it is this dotted green line. We cut 2 percent a year over a 5-year period, and then we allow government to grow at 2 percent a year. People would say: Oh, well, it doesn't look like you are really cutting spending. That is the truth of the matter. Over a 10-year period, spending will increase 18 percent over where we are today, but the fake news media will report that we cut $10 trillion. This is not a rounding error. We say spending is going up 18 percent, and the fake news will say they cut $10 trillion in spending and orphans and widows and the older generation will be out on the doorstep, and there will be no more government. No. We are talking about a $4 trillion government that is still spending close to $4 trillion. What we will not let it do is go to $5 trillion over the next 10 years. This is eminently reasonable.

I have talked to people from the right, the left, and the center, and said: Can you live with 99 or 98 percent of what you spent last year? I have yet to have a person say that for the good of the country, why don't we do that. What would happen is, it would be a compromise.

Who drives the spending debate around here? Who drives that we need more spending? It is really both parties, but recently it has been Republicans. The Republicans say: We have to have more military spending. The Democrats say: We will give you more military spending if you give us more welfare spending. So all spending goes up. That is the compromise.

People say we don't compromise. Hey, we are spending money, and these guys compromise every day, and it is at your expense. It is why the deficit is so big.

What about a different compromise? What if the right and the left said military is important--the left said, social welfare is important, but you know what, for the good of the country, let's spend 99 percent of what we spent last year on these programs or 98 percent. It could be done, but it takes resolve, and the American people need to know that those who are in charge are not doing anything about this.

Now, some will argue, and the fake news media has argued, well, it is all about the tax cut. Republicans don't care about the deficit because they cut taxes. Well, that is actually not true. We actually had more revenue last year than the preceding year, even though we did cut taxes. So we had $14 billion more in taxes but $127 billion more in spending.

So the problem is a spending problem. Of all of our spending, which is about $4 trillion in spending or a little bit more, about two-thirds of that spending is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. We don't ever vote on any reforms to these programs. These are called the entitlements, and nobody has any bills. There are no bills coming forward to look at the entitlement spending.

Why is this a problem? The remaining third of government spending is half military and half welfare. If you eliminated the military spending completely and eliminated welfare spending completely, entitlements still drive the deficit.

So what do we have to do? We have to make some tough choices. I was very honest with the people who voted for me. I told them, look, we are living longer, and we have less kids, so the demographics of Social Security and Medicare don't work. The main reason Medicare and Social Security is short is because we have smaller families. Your great- grandparents had a lot of kids, your grandparents had less kids, you had less kids, and your kids today are having less. So we have less and less young people and more and more old people. It is a demographic imbalance. That is why Social Security is short, and that is why Medicare is short, but you can fix them both easily.

You have to gradually raise the age when we begin taking Medicare and Social Security. We already did it in Social Security. We did it under Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. A conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat in 1983 came together and said: We are running out of money. What do we do? They actually did raise the age from 65 for Social Security very gradually to 67. I haven't heard one person debating it since. Everybody accepted it and said: Look, in order to keep these programs intact and not bankrupt the country, we have to do this.

This is what Democrats and Republicans should do now: Come together and say Social Security is $7 trillion short. Medicare is $35 trillion to $40 trillion short. If you do nothing, they are both going to implode. If you want these programs and you want them to continue, you have to do something. Very gradually raising the age at which people start Medicare and Social Security has to be done. You can either do it now and do it very gradually, a month or two a year over a 20-year period, or you can wait until they are completely bankrupt.

If you wait until Social Security is completely bankrupt in 2034, what happens is everybody has to take a 25-percent cut, but if you do it very gradually, you will never have to have these cuts. It just means that everybody will have to wait a little bit longer to get there.

It is important that we do have budgets. We have this enormous debt of $22 trillion. We are adding $1 trillion dollars each year. Yet the Senate will not vote on a budget this year, other than my budget, and the House, controlled by Democrats, will not vote on a budget either. So you have both Houses really not tending to their duty.

Now when we have a vote for the balanced budget amendment, everybody turns out in force and votes. In 2012, we had a vote in this body, and every Republican voted to balance the budget in 5 years--an amendment to the Constitution that would require 5 years. Yet the Republican budget that is coming out of committee never balances. So we kind of give lip service to this idea. When people are at home campaigning, they pound the table and say: We are going to stop the deficits. We are going to be the frugal party--and guess what. Neither party has been very good with your money.

It is because they are afraid. They get elected, and they become afraid that they will be unelected if you tell them the truth.

I think we live in a time where it is the opposite now. People want someone to tell the truth--the emperor has no clothes. Social Security spends more money than comes in. If we don't admit these truths and have a discussion about them and if we are so occupied yelling at each other over elections and who did what during the last election--have you heard any discussion on television, have you seen one television program talk about Social Security going bankrupt, $7 trillion short; Medicare going bankrupt, $35 to $40 trillion short?

Have you heard any news program or have you seen anything on the news--right, left, or center--that actually talks about our problems? No, it is yack, yack, yack about election this and election that. People are still unhappy with the results of the election, when in reality maybe we should talk about some of the difficult problems that confront us.

I think the No. 1 threat to our national security is our debt. I am not alone. Admiral Mullin, who was Chief of Staff under President Obama, said the same thing. There are people in the military who understand that maybe our military mission is so big that our military can't keep up with it. If we are going to have troops in 50 of 54 African countries, if we are going to have troops in every Middle Eastern country, and if we are going to have large bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, yes, maybe we don't have enough money.

Our Founding Fathers said you only go to war when Congress votes on it. Recently, there has been a rattling of sabers over Iran. We are tightening the screws on Iran and not letting them sell oil to anyone. They are getting their back up and tensions are flaring. Well, the Constitution says very clearly that you don't go to war with anybody-- including Iran--unless you ask Congress for permission.

The President does not have permission to take us to war. Many people don't realize this. The Founding Fathers specifically didn't want to give that power. In fact, it was Madison who said that the executive is the branch most prone to war; therefore, we have, with studied care, vested the power to go to war in Congress. Yet we live in a time in which Presidents of both parties take us to war. President Obama began and continued the war in Syria, in Libya. President Trump has continued those things on both sides of the aisle. But it is not just whether it is good or bad foreign policy; it is extraordinarily expensive. We are bankrupting the American people. We are borrowing money at a million and a half dollars every minute. Really, this is sort of a crummy gift to the next generation. It is like: Oh, by the way, you are lucky. You are going to be inheriting the national debt, and you will be paying for it.

Kids already realize they are inheriting this college debt. It is difficult to pay college debt. As you look at this and you look at the individual share, here is 2015--about $58,000 per person with the debt. But look at what it is doing over time. It is pyramiding. The debt is beginning to explode because we are just doing nothing to rein it in.

Whenever we have a vote on trying to do something about the debt, as we did when we passed the tax cut--I introduced a budget motion that said the tax cut should be paid for with spending cuts. We got eight Republicans. I introduced another motion that said we should use budget reconciliation--fancy words for a majority vote--to actually rein in the spending and entitlements. I got four votes.

There aren't enough people up here. The people up here don't seem to care about the debt. They just think, oh, we will just pile it on, and we will be fine. But we are hollowing out the country. When people talk about hollowing out the country, the one thing is the debt.

We superficially are doing quite well at this point, but there will be a day of reckoning. There will be a day of reckoning on which the government will have to make a decision, and the decision becomes to print more money to pay for the debt, at which time the country loses the value of its currency.

It is happening in Venezuela. Do you know what the inflation is down there? It is 130,000 percent. The money is worthless as soon as they print it. You have to be paid a couple times during the day because if you start working at 8:00 in the morning, by 5:00 in the evening, the money is worth less and less. It virtually has no value.

We have to decide. Do you want something for nothing? Do you really believe we can give you free college? Do you think it is really free? Do you think nobody is going to have to pay for it? Do you think we can give you free healthcare? Do you think we can give you a free car or a free cell phone? No. Somebody pays for it. If we don't pay for it through taxes, we just pile on the debt, and we are destroying the country with it. Most people sort of know this instinctively. There is no ability to have something for nothing. You have to work for it.

The thing is, if we go on and on and say we are just going to keep piling on the debt, the day of reckoning is coming, and when it comes, a once great country could be dragged down by this mountain of debt that we have.

Today my budget will be put forward. It is the Penny Plan budget. The Penny Plan budget is now basically the two-penny budget because it no longer balances in 5 years if we cut one penny. But if we cut two pennies, meaning that next year, we would spend 98 percent of what we spent this year--is there anybody in America who thinks the government and the people who receive stuff from the government couldn't live on 98 percent?

When I ask people in my office who actually work in the private sector, they say yes. Many times in their career, there was a downturn in sales, and they had to take less money or less income--some people said significantly less--or they had to cut back on their family expenses. Do you know what government does? The opposite. If we go into a recession, there is this leftwing, egg-headed idea that we should spend more money, that we should go further into debt and start lavishing out money instead of--when you are not selling things and things aren't doing as well, you cut back on your consumption. You cut back on things.

We have a great country. We shouldn't let it get away from us. I don't think there is any way in the world we could not move on and become a stronger nation if we would try the Penny Plan. Like I said, people should pay attention to this because all these representatives-- at least on the Republican side--go home and say they are for balanced budgets, but they are not really for balanced budgets if they vote for budgets that never balance.

The budget by Republicans coming out of the Senate committee never balances. The budget from the Democrats hasn't even made it out of committee. There probably will be no vote in the House or the Senate on the budget. Neither one of them ever balances. It is in the Republican rules that we are supposed to advocate for a budget that balances in at least 10 years. Now we are putting forward budgets that never balance.

Look at what the deficit has done. The red is what has already occurred, and the pink is what is to come. Most of this is driven by entitlements. You will hear that as an argument. Particularly in the Republican caucus, they will say: Yeah, it is all driven by entitlements. We need to do something about entitlements.

Then you put forward a bill. I have a bill. I have a bill to reform Social Security by gradually letting the age go up a month or two a year over the next 20 years. I also would means test the benefits, meaning that wealthier people would receive a little bit less Social Security. People would say: Well, I don't want to do that. If you don't, the whole system is going to implode. So can't we go ahead and just do it now and do it in the least painful sort of way?

Do you know how many people I have on my bill? I think there are four people brave enough to put their names on a bill that would gradually allow the Social Security age to go up. But if you talk to people quietly, even on the other side of the aisle, they will admit to you that, yeah, we ought to do something, but nobody ever does anything. The other side says: We will do it only if you raise taxes on the wealthy. We already have a progressive Tax Code.

Interestingly--a lot of people don't know this--our Tax Code in America is more progressive than Scandinavia's. You have heard some of the clamor for socialism. They want Swedish socialism. Well, we have higher taxes on the wealthy than they do in Sweden. In fact, in Sweden, in Denmark, it is the opposite, actually--the middle class and the poor are more heavily taxed than in our country.

When you look and you hear people say ``Well, Sweden and Denmark--why don't we become Denmark? Let's give everybody paid leave, free paid leave. Let's give the uncle of the baby free paid leave. Let's give everybody--the grandparents need paid leave. It is all going to be free,'' well, guess what, they do stuff like that in Scandinavia, but everybody pays a 25-percent sales tax. It is not free. Everybody pays a 25-percent sales tax in Scandinavia.

In addition, the income tax in Denmark--and many of the other countries are similar--is 60 percent at $60,000. Do you want to buy a car in Scandinavia? Do you wonder why these people are freezing, riding their bike all winter long? There is a 200-percent tax to buy a car. If you want to buy a $30,000 car, you have to have $60,000 up front to pay the government, and then you need another $30,000 to buy the car.

It is not free. There is no free lunch. When people say that government can provide you all these things, they can only do it by either taxing you or borrowing. Right now, we are doing it mostly through borrowing.

The reason I think it is probably destined to get worse over time is we have gradually taken people off the tax rolls. Really, below $50,000, there is a very minimal amount of income tax being paid. In fact, those who are in the top 10 percent pay almost all of the income tax in our country. People say: We need to stick it to the rich; the rich aren't paying their fair share. Guess what. The top 10 percent pay 87 percent of the income tax. Almost all of the income tax is paid by the top 10 percent. If you go to the top 50 percent--that is $75,000 and above--it is well over 90 percent. Ninety-six or ninety-seven percent of the income tax is paid for by people who make $75,000 and above.

There is a young socialist on the other side who says: We need a special tax on the rich, on those who make $10 million a year. You have heard this. Even Republicans are saying: Well, yeah, let's stick it to the rich. Let's get those filthy rich people.

Let's say you do it, put a 70-percent tax on those who make $10 million. Well, let's do the math. What does it bring in? Let's say they all continue to work, and let's say they all pay their taxes and don't move to another country. That will bring in $50 billion. That sounds like a lot of money. How much would Medicare for All cost? Sixty trillion dollars. All right. The tax brings in $50 billion. The spending proposal for just Medicare for All is $60 trillion. For the Green New Deal, add another $10 trillion. Their spending proposals are so big--no one can even define them within a few trillion dollars because they are so enormous.

Realize what I said before: The deficit is driven by what you already have. You have Medicare for senior citizens. It is $35 trillion short. If you were $35 trillion short, does it make sense to now expand Medicare to everyone? So what we have is Medicare for Some, Medicare for senior citizens. It is $35 trillion short, and they want to expand it to everybody.

Also, realize they want to ban insurance. There will be no insurance companies and no insurance through your employer. Right now, there are 180 million people who have health insurance. Do you think it is going to be a very pleasant transition to having everybody on the government insurance? Where is the money going to come from?

These proposals are ludicrous on their face. We face mounting debt and deficits from what we have. This should be a no-brainer. These people should be laughed out of polite society. No one who is intellectually honest should listen to these people. There is really no reason for them to be in the discourse because they are so completely out of touch with reality. We have so much debt from what we are already trying to give you through Medicare and Social Security. These people want to double, triple, and quadruple that. It doesn't work. It is a recipe for disaster.

As you look around the world, as people get more and more in debt and there is more and more spending, look what happens. Look what happens as we approach socialism around the world. If you look at the examples of socialism from the last century, it is a history of famine and genocide--Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, Maduro. It doesn't work.

We actually live in the best time ever to be alive in the history of the world. Does that sound excessive? It is absolutely true. In 1800, 80 percent of people lived in extreme poverty. When I was born in the 1960s, it was down to a third of the people who lived in extreme poverty, $2 a day or less. It went from 80 percent to a third. In the span of my lifetime, it is under 10 percent. I am not talking about America; I am talking about the whole world. Less than 10 percent of the people live in extreme poverty now. You have to ask yourself why. How did we get here? Was it just an accident? Was it a fluke? Were we born with oil under the ground, and all of a sudden we got rich?

For some nations, sometimes that could be true. Look at Venezuela. They have more oil under the ground, more oil deposits than any other country in the world, and socialism took the richest country in the world and made it the poorest country in the world. They are eating their pets in Venezuela. They are starving. The average person has lost 20 pounds. What does that have to do with the budget? They got overextended. Their deficit became massive even in the face of oil revenue.

People say America is a rich country. Yes, we are a rich country, but we are overextended. I don't want our country to be Venezuela. When the President said America will not become a socialist nation, I took that at face value. If we don't want to be a socialist nation, we can't keep piling on the debt.

What I have today is a proposal. We will see if anybody chooses it. My prediction is that not one Democrat will vote to balance the budget. They vote to hike all your taxes a million percent, which would kill the economy, and they would say: Oh, that is how we balance the budget. But they will not vote to cut any spending. They will not vote to even control spending.

My budget over 10 years actually slowly increases spending over time. We keep it steady, and we cut it 1 or 2 percent for 5 years, and then we allow it to grow at 2 percent. We could do that and be a stronger country, but we have to examine the failures in history. We have to examine what has happened under socialism, Big Government, and debt in other countries and decide whether we want to go that way, decide whether we are going to simplistically say: Gimmee, gimmee, gimmee. I want something for nothing, and there is no reason I should have to work for it. It is just not fair unless you give it to me.

Realize there will be a price. There is no such thing as a free lunch. There is no such thing as something for nothing.

I offer this budget to the American people, and I hope you will watch all your representatives vote. Not one Democrat will vote for it, but over half the Republicans won't vote for it either. They will say: It is too dramatic. We can't cut spending that much.

One penny out of a dollar is what I have been proposing for 5 years. I usually get 15 to 20 votes. Now we have had to go up to two pennies for every dollar because nobody is really doing anything to cut spending, and spending is still exploding. So this is called the Two Penny Plan budget now. It would be 98 percent of last year. We would spend 98 percent next year of what we spent this year. I think the American people would support it.

I hope the American people will pay attention today to how people vote. I urge my colleagues to vote for the Penny Plan budget. Cloture Motion

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