Establishing the Congressional Budget for the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2025 and Setting Forth the Appropriate Budgetary Levels for Fiscal Years 2026 Through 2034
Floor Speech
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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, families lose, and billionaires win. That is the Republican plan. It is a plan that slashes $1.5 to $2 trillion from programs that families depend on. And why? To fund tax cuts for the very richest Americans.
But that is not all the bad news because there are additional tax cuts for the best and richest in the country--the richest Americans-- and those are unpaid for, and that means debt.
How much more debt does this bill create? The current estimate--and the estimates keep going up--is $5.3 trillion of unpaid-for tax cuts over the next 10 years--$5.3 trillion--trillion with a ``t''--over the next 10 years.
But that is not all. Their plan provides for $37 trillion--at least $37 trillion--in additional debt over the next 30 years. This is a phenomenal, phenomenal number.
And, third, they say: We will tell the American people it adds no new debt; passing this bill adds no new debt.
That is quite a set of plans: slash programs for regular Americans, enrich the richest Americans, run up an additional $37 trillion in debt, and then lie to the American people and say it doesn't cost a thing.
It has become clear, over the last 2 days, about how Republicans are going to justify this. They say they are going to use section 312-- section 312--of the law. Section 312, they say, says that the cost of a program or the impact of a revenue cut through a tax giveaway to the wealthy only costs what the budget chair says it costs. Just take the chair's word for it.
This is the magic wand. It will add $37 trillion to the debt, but if the budget chair says it doesn't, then you just pretend it doesn't. It is kind of like the situation where the king wears the magic robes--at least he thinks he is wearing magic robes, but he is actually walking down the street naked because he doesn't have magic robes--in this case, again, lying to the public about the cost.
In the real world, you have real math. In this special new world under the Republican plan, you have the magic math.
This was not the vision that was laid out back 51 years ago, in 1974, when the Senate created, along with the House, the Budget and Impoundment Control Act.
That act had three pillars. The first pillar was that in a 10-year period, you have to decrease the deficit with the provisions that were in the bill. And then, every year after, in every category, it either has to be deficit-neutral or reduce the deficit according to the provisions that are in the bill.
Then it said we are going to use honest numbers. Before, there had been a lot of smoke and mirrors. There had been a lot of gimmicks. And people on both sides said: No, no, we don't want to do that.
Democrats and Republicans said: Let's use honest numbers. Let's create a Congressional Budget Office to give us impartial numbers so we can be honest among ourselves, have a real debate about any given policy provision or any particular revenue provision, and we can be honest with the American people because, otherwise, we will just keep running up more and more deficits while pretending we are not.
My Republican colleagues initially said: Do you know what? We will just put a clause into the budget resolution. It is called a scoring rule, and that scoring rule will simply say that we are going to say this costs nothing, that there is no additional debt.
A scoring rule has been used in the past. OK, it has been used in multiple years, but it was used to resolve little anomalies in tricky, little twists and changes in revenue bills or in policies' programs. It was always narrow. It always was honest about what it was trying to solve and explainable to the public. It was always consistent with the law, and it was always involving modest sums--modest by standards of the national budget.
Certainly, now, this scoring rule that had been proposed by the Republicans, it was not bipartisan. It was not narrow. It was not improving the budget. It, in fact, was lying about the budgeting. It was not consistent with the law. And it was massive--$37 trillion.
So my colleagues across the aisle, when we pointed this out, they said: Yes, we had better not do that. That is just wrong.
OK. Thank you. Thank you for deciding not to put in a scoring rule that was completely wrong and designed to destroy the budget process.
But now my colleagues across the aisle have said: We will use a different provision called section 312. We won't use the scoring rule. Instead, we are going to go in a different direction that says simply that the cost is what the chair of the Budget Committee says it is.
Now, I want to turn back the clock a little bit. I want to turn back the clock and point out that there were core principles in that 1974 bill, and they were driven by growing bipartisan concern about deficits and debt.
In the 1958 to 1968 decade, the average deficit was about $5 billion per year. That doesn't sound like much now, by our standards, when we are looking at $2 trillion per year, but it was a lot compared to the past. And folks said: Do you know what? That $5 billion per year over that 10 years exploded to an average of $20 billion a year in 1971 through 1973. Oh, my goodness, it quadrupled. We have got to get a handle on these deficits. We don't want to run up the debt--this fourfold increase in annual deficits adding to the debt.
So Democrats and Republicans came together, and they passed the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act. It created a superhighway for this special effort to reduce deficits--a superhighway; a super, filibuster- free highway.
Now, you all may remember Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Robert Byrd was always the fiercest defender of the filibuster. But he, along with 99 other Senators, said: We will create one exception, and that exception will be to reduce the deficit.
And it had these three pillars, which I will mention again. It has to reduce the deficit. The provisions of the bill have to reduce the deficit over the first 10 years. They have to be deficit-neutral in every category in each year after the first 10 years. And we have to use honest numbers.
And to have those honest numbers, we will create the Congressional Budget Office, an impartial body. We will no longer use smoke and mirrors, pretend that things don't cost money when they do cost money.
But then what happened? I will tell you. For 22 years, it worked pretty well. Then along comes the Gingrich revolution, the 1994 election. Now we have the 1995 through 1997 biennium. Some things happened then that, well, one maybe couldn't have foreseen. Maybe they could have. There was an effort to do a balanced budget amendment. It fell one vote short here in the Senate Chamber. It needed 67 votes; it only got 66.
Then there was: We will do a line-item veto--and that was passed. But that gave the power to the President to strike down any line.
The Supreme Court said: No, you can't do that. You can't delegate the power of the purse. The power of the purse belongs with Congress. So that fell.
Then the Republican caucus in charge said: We are going to, instead, do a big tax bill giving enormous benefits to the richest Americans.
Then they said: You know, the problem with that is the Democrats won't work with us. They won't give us 60 votes to do that. Oh, I know, they said, we will do a nuclear option. We will repurpose the deficit- decreasing bill from 1974 and say that it can be used in order to actually increase deficits with tax cuts.
And they succeeded. They had the votes. They repurposed the bill. They blew up the first pillar of those three pillars. That first pillar was the reconciliation process, this special process created in 1974 that can only be used to reduce deficits in the first 10 years.
They blew it up and said: OK. Nuclear option. We have reinterpreted the rule. It can be used to increase deficits.
Well, that was a huge, huge damage to the goal of reducing deficits, and deficits have gone up ever since.
When that happened--when that happened--there was a big protest on the floor. The first Budget Committee chair who passed the reconciliation bill consistent with decreasing deficits was South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings. He said:
The whole idea of reconciliation--and I am giving you firsthand history: It is honest as the day is long--was to, by gosh, to cut back on the deficit.
That is what it was for. So the Republicans blew up that pillar, all designed to reduce the deficits, and, instead, repurposed it for increasing the deficits. Pillar No. 1 drops.
But, at the same time, the second pillar, that no increase in deficits could occur after 10 years, was sustained by the Chair sitting and presiding over the Senate, and that was Senator Daschle.
Senator Daschle said--well, actually, he asked the question. He was asking the question of the Republican Chair.
He said:
If this reconciliation bill does not find a way to end or offset its tax cuts in the years beyond 2002--
That is beyond 10 years--
would the bill violate the Byrd rule?
And the Presiding Officer responded:
Yes, it would.
So the second pillar, no deficits in any category beyond 10 years, was preserved--until now.
That was in 1996, and here we are, 29 years later. Now there is a goal to destroy the second and third pillars of the 1974 bill.
I must say, this is extremely extraordinary and disturbing that my Republican colleagues, who run on fiscal responsibility, destroyed the first pillar of the special system to reduce deficits in 1996, and tonight, they are proposing to destroy the second and third pillars.
In that second pillar, no deficits beyond year 10; every category, every year has to be deficit-neutral or reduce the deficit.
We can compare that to the law that has just been put forward--or the guidance that has just been put forward. We can look at year 11, the instructions that go in every category--year 12, year 13, year 20, year 100. It goes on forever, into the future, and the Republican bill guidance fails the Byrd test.
Now, the Byrd test really gets applied in a second stage of the reconciliation process. We are in the budget resolution that sends instructions to committees. Those committees will send back specific revenue provisions: increase this revenue here, reduce it there, proceed to add this policy program, reduce this policy program. When it comes back, every category--that is, every title--of the reconciliation bill, in every single year, by the Byrd rule, has to be deficit-neutral or decrease the deficit.
So we will have that debate, but we will have that debate when the reconciliation bill comes back from committee to this floor because my Republican colleagues decided to postpone that debate by taking the scoring rule out of their proposed budget resolution and said: We will kick it down the road to the next stage.
And, certainly, we will be here, fiercely defending the deficit- reducing vision of pillars 2 and 3--pillar 2: no deficit in any category or any title of the bill beyond year 10; and pillar 3: use honest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. That pillar has survived since 1974. We even put that pillar into law specifically in 1985 in a bipartisan way. We wanted to emphasize how important that was.
Just think about how much more important this process of deficit reduction, special rule of the reconciliation bill, is today than it was back in 1974. In 1974, the debt-to-GDP ratio: 23 percent. Tonight, in 2025, it is 100 percent. It is equal to the entire gross domestic product of the United States. In 1974, the annual deficit was about $6 billion. Today, it is $2 trillion. In 1974, total debt: $475 billion. Today, it is $37 trillion.
Now, consider this: All of the debt run up over the last 249 years since the Declaration of Independence, right now, is just a little bit less than $37 trillion. In this single bill--this single bill-- Republicans are saying we will add $37 trillion more--at least that much. When the numbers really come out, we expect it to be higher, but $37 trillion more to the debt. That is a much bigger burden on the future.
And what do the economists say about that bigger burden? They said it will increase interest rates that families have to pay on their mortgage and on their car loan since it will decrease the capital available to private industry and slow down our economy.
This magic math goes by the name of ``current policy baseline.'' It sounds very academic, but it is essentially the big lie.
Consider this: You sign a contract to rent a home for a year, and renting that home costs $2,000 per month so you know you are going to have to pay $24,000 over the year. And at the end of the year, you say: You know what, I am going to renew that agreement to rent this apartment. And your spouse says: You know what, that is going to cost us another $24,000 in rent.
And you say: No. I am using the Republican magic math. It won't cost a single dime because we will just pretend that a year ago we had planned to rent the apartment for a second year; and therefore, it is no more than we thought we would pay a year ago--except a year ago you said you were only going to rent the house for a year. In other words, it is a big lie.
It is the very smoke and mirrors, the very gimmicks that Democrats and Republicans came together and stopped back in 1974. Fifty-one years ago, we said this game of lying to the public has to end. But tonight, my Republican colleagues are saying that game will continue if they have their way.
Well, we say they must not have their way. We are going to stand up and say no to families lose and billionaires win. We are going to say no to magic math that lies to the American people about the cost of their bill, driven by massive tax cuts to the richest Americans.
It is a simple request: honesty and integrity. We should not be engaging in a big lie, and Democrats will have no part of it. We are going to be honest about what every provision of the reconciliation bill costs. We are going to be determined to make sure that the Byrd rule stands.
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