Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2008--Conference Report

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008--CONFERENCE REPORT -- (Senate - May 17, 2007)

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I thank the chairman for his comments and would just say I think the Conrad budget goes a long way to restoring fiscal sanity in the Federal Government, but also allows for an opportunity for the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, to get behind two fixes to the critical domestic issues of our time, and those are health care and taxes.

I think if you listen to the technical lingo over the course of the debate--and the Senator from Missouri, now the Presiding Officer of the Senate, comes from the campaign trail, and we are glad to have her because she has just been through the debate in her State--the people in Missouri or in my State of Oregon do not talk about pay-go and fire walls and reserve funds and that kind of technical Washington lingo. They do talk an awful lot about what is going to be done to fix health care and what is going to be done to fix taxes.

One of the reasons I am so supportive of this Conrad budget is, it really does lay the foundation for the Congress to get serious about tax reform and serious about health reform. One of the areas Chairman Conrad has zeroed in on as it relates to taxes, for example, has been this problem of tax havens and tax scams. There is an opportunity as a result of this budget to come together in a bipartisan way and fix the taxes. If you are serious about closing the tax gap, the hundreds of billions of dollars that we can't collect--and Chairman Conrad and Chairman Baucus have been working hard to try to approve measures to make it easier to collect that money--you have to fix the tax system and simplify it.

I have offered a proposal, the fair flat tax, that would allow for just that kind of effort. Others here in the Senate have ideas as it relates to tax reform. The point is, the Conrad budget makes it possible for the Senate to come together on the tax issue and fix this code.

Chairman Conrad has talked about the scams. He has talked about the tax
havens and about the hundreds of billions of dollars we are losing. I have a proposal, the Fair Flat Tax Act, that would deal with it. There are other proposals in the Senate that would beef up the collection of these billions of dollars that are lost in the tax gap. The Conrad budget lays the foundation for tax reform.

I would say to my colleagues, we have had more than 14,000 changes in the Tax Code in recent years. It comes out to three changes in the Tax Code for every working day, three for every single working day. The tax system is broken in this country. We are laying the foundation in this proposal for a tax system based on simplicity: a one-page 1040 form and progressivity, where we are fair to those who are vulnerable in our society, but also reform that is sensitive to the question of holding down rates for all so that everyone would have a chance to get ahead.

In addition to taxes, which I think the Conrad budget deals with in a responsible fashion, the legislation allows for a bipartisan effort in this Congress to fix American health care, with a reserve fund that is established and would allow for bipartisan health reform efforts. Senator Bennett of Utah and I are offering the first bipartisan effort in 13 years to fix American health care. Everybody would be covered, which is essential, because if you don't cover everybody, those who are uninsured shift their bills to those who are insured. We also fix the broken private marketplace.

Right now, we have an awful lot of insurance companies that cherry-pick, that take just healthy people and send sick people over to government programs more fragile than they are. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars through the Federal Tax Code disproportionately rewarding the most affluent in our country and also promoting inefficiency. Senator Bennett and I are very hopeful that this year, not in 2009, not after the next Presidential election but this year, the Senate will come together on a bipartisan basis. We have the Healthy Americans Act, other Senators have other proposals, but the Conrad budget lays the foundation for fixing health care in this session of Congress.

I also believe as a result of the letter that 10 Senators sent--5 Democrats and 5 Republicans--to the President, indicating that we want to work in a bipartisan way, that if this budget passes, and if the White House will join the effort that Senator Bennett and I are advocating in the Healthy Americans Act and the 10 Senators have outlined in their letter to the President--which very much mirrors what Senator Bennett and I are talking about--we can get action on health care in 2007.

Finally--and I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the Senator from New Mexico in allowing me to speak before him--let me mention that Senator Conrad has included in his budget a provision that is critical to the survival of timber-dependent communities in my State and around the country. His budget includes a reserve fund to provide for extension of the Secure Rural Schools Act, also known as the county payments program. This law provides funding for schools, roads, and other essential services in hundreds of resource-dependent communities around the country. This is a survival issue for many in rural America. Without county payments, rural communities around this country are telling us they are going to vanish from the map. These communities, in my view, should not be turned into sacrifice zones.

I am hopeful the extension of the county payments law will be addressed during the conference on the emergency supplemental spending bill. Earlier this year, 74 Senators voted to include an extension of the county payments program, and we were very pleased to have the support of Senator Domenici, who has been involved in this discussion and also the additional program, the Payment in Lieu of Taxes Program, which we have included in this legislation.

We have spoken to the majority leader, Senator Reid, who has assured me he will do everything in his power to include county payments when the new version of the supplemental spending bill comes out of conference. If that doesn't happen, we are going to make this an effort on every single vehicle in this Congress. Our bipartisan group is going to try to get this support for county payments legislation done as soon as possible.

We believe it ought to be done along the lines of what 74 Senators have already voted for, and it ought to be done in the supplemental spending bill that is going into conference. But if it doesn't happen, we are going to try to make it happen on every single vehicle that comes before the Senate because of its extraordinary importance to our communities.

I thank Chairman Conrad for making the inclusion of a county payments reserve fund in the budget so as to provide a backstop so that there would be another option to extend county payments quickly, if for some reason it doesn't happen in the budget.

In closing, I would urge colleagues to support this budget, especially because of the foundation it lays to tackle the two biggest domestic issues of our time, health care and taxes. There are certainly major issues that come before us, with Iraq obviously being the issue of paramount importance as it relates to the international front, but the big issues at home are fixing health care and taxes. The Conrad budget allows Democrats and Republicans to come together on both of those.

This is a budget that responsibly allows the Senate to address the critical issues, do so in a responsible way, and I urge the passage of this budget.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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