Congress Budget for the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2009

Floor Speech

CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2009 -- (Senate - March 11, 2008)

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I salute the leadership and the energy of the Senator from Michigan in this area. The Senator is clearly passionate about the economic issues we see across the country but those that particularly affect her State. There is not a person in this body who is not aware of how deeply she cares and how hard she fights for the people of Michigan. I am pleased to join her on the floor.

Last month we received the President's budget request for fiscal year 2009. I am a member, like Senator Stabenow, of the Budget Committee. This is the last budget we will receive from President Bush, and I think it is an opportune time to look at how this administration's policies have affected our economic circumstances and how average Americans will suffer as a result.

The Bush policies have generated what deserves to be known as and what I will call today, ``the Bush Debt,'' a legacy of indebtedness that will burden our children and grandchildren for generations to come and cost us the opportunity to help millions of Americans all over this country lead lives of promise, prosperity, and happiness. As I have traveled across my State, Rhode Islanders have told me over and over their stories about struggling to make ends meet--from seniors stretching fixed incomes to pay for prescription drugs and housing to working families trying to heat their homes and send their children to college. Yet President Bush in his budget for fiscal year 2009 has proposed deep cuts to Medicare, deep cuts to home heating assistance for low-income families, and deep cuts to Federal student aid, weakening access to citizens' basic needs.

The administration cites the need for fiscal discipline. The President says discipline is necessary to address our Nation's growing budget deficits. What the President does not say--and probably never will say--is that his own ill- advised, misguided policies created those record deficits. It did not have to end this way. But it did, and the President must bear the responsibility.

Seven years ago this January, George Bush stood on the western steps of this hallowed building and took his oath of office as President of the United States. In his first address to the Nation, George Bush pledged to call for responsibility and try to live it as well. After a divisive election, many Americans found comfort and hope in those words. On the budgetary front there was good reason for optimism on that cold January morning. After decades of deficit spending, bipartisan cooperation between President Clinton and a Republican Congress had set the Nation on its healthiest fiscal path in generations. After 28 straight years of multibillion dollar budget deficits, our Nation saw surpluses beginning in 1998. In President Clinton's last full year in office, we saw the largest budget surplus in our Nation's history--$236 billion.

The good budgetary news wasn't behind us. The month George Bush moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan accounting arm of Congress, projected we would see surpluses straight through the decade. These budget surpluses, the product of responsible governing--some might even say fiscally conservative governing--were projected to be enough to completely wipe out our national debt by 2009. Let me say that again: to completely wipe out our national debt by 2009. In other words, the hard work had been done. If President Bush had stayed the course of fiscal responsibility, he could have been the first President of the United States since Andrew Jackson in 1836 to govern a debt-free United States, an America with the power and the freedom to support its people as they sought new opportunities and new frontiers. Imagine that.

This President's fiscal year 2009 budget, instead of including debt service payments, could have requested significant funds for Pell grants, for LIHEAP, the badly needed overhaul of our health care system, bridge construction, investment in small and environmentally friendly business, and countless other valuable programs for ordinary Americans.

When President Bush took office, leading economists were debating the consequences of this great Nation debt free, standing tall in the world with no claim on it by foreign powers. But this President made a different choice. Instead of keeping our Nation on the path to economic security and prosperity, to new investments in our health care system, students, seniors, and veterans, the President who called for responsibility squandered away the surpluses he inherited, mortgaged our children and grandchildren's futures, and compromised the quality of working Americans' lives.

How can we measure the magnitude of the harm done to our economy and our people by this administration's decision to deviate from the responsible policies of President Clinton?

The first chart shows the budget plans of President Clinton as he left office and the budget formulated by President Bush. As you can see, the Clinton line, represented in blue, based on his levels of taxation and spending, has budget surpluses for every single year of this decade. In contrast, the Bush budget line, represented in red, has deep record-setting deficits in every year after 2001.

This next chart illustrates the value of the differences between the budget landscape planned by President Clinton and the one created by President Bush. As we can see, the difference between the two is a staggering $7.7 trillion. This number represents the fiscal harm President Bush has inflicted on our Nation. This number is ``the Bush Debt.'' It consists of a decade of foregone surpluses and new borrowing, much of it from foreign nations such as China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. We have even become a debtor nation to Mexico.

Mr. President, $7.7 trillion is more than double the amount of public debt when President Bush took office. Like most concepts of enormous size, this amount takes some thought to comprehend: $7.7 trillion is $25,000 owed by every adult or child in the United States, squandered surpluses and new debt created by this President.

How did we move from the path of surpluses away from the promise of wiping out our national debt to trillions of dollars in new national liabilities? One would hope this administration could at least justify the Bush Debt by pointing to borrowing policies that improved average Americans' lives. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, this dramatic change of course stems largely from two of this President's many poor decisions over the past 7 years: first, tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy at the expense of the less fortunate and, second, the President's endless, misguided, unpaid war in Iraq. In the same inaugural address in which he called for responsibility, President Bush vowed to reduce taxes, even though the American economy was booming in the 1990s, under tax levels set by President Clinton which were low by both historical and international standards.

The irony, of course, is that President Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were the height of irresponsibility. Because these massive tax cuts were predominantly directed at high-income families rather than low-income families, many Americans most in need of assistance were shortchanged. These extravagant tax cuts are weighted heavily toward the wealthiest Americans. In fact, 71 percent of the value of the tax cuts in 2009 will go to the wealthiest fifth of Americans, with a staggering 28 percent of the value of the tax cuts going to the top 1 percent and almost nothing at all going to the lowest earning fifth, families who earn $15,000 a year or less. This is George Bush's idea of fair tax cuts. And President Bush's insistence on forcing through these cuts without making up for the lost revenue, to defer that pain to later administrations and later years, was not only cowardly leadership, but it left our budget in precarious straits. The Bush tax cuts cost a staggering $1.9 trillion and account for 25 percent of the $7.7 trillion Bush Debt measured from the start of the Bush presidency through 2010, when the tax cuts are set to expire.

Every American knows the importance of balancing his or her own household budget. Every American knows the struggle of keeping spending in line with income, making sure there is enough money to pay for clothing, food, home heating, college tuition, and maybe a little for vacation or going out to the movies. Most Americans do a good job of balancing budgets but not President Bush. Rather than living by his inaugural pledge of responsibility, President Bush preferred to score political points by delivering massive tax cuts to his wealthiest supporters. He chose not to remain on a responsible fiscal path and instead put this country under the crushing burden of a multitrillion-dollar debt, the Bush Debt.

These tax cuts, while a large slice of the Bush Debt pie, are unfortunately not the whole story. There is also a large spending component to the Bush Debt, driven principally by the war in Iraq. By the end of this year, the price tag for the war in Iraq will have exceeded $600 billion. Even if we are successful in pressuring this President or the next President to begin redeploying our troops, American taxpayers will still have spent at least $740 billion on this misguided war by 2010.

Even if the next President gets us quickly out of Iraq, as I hope she or he will, we will be paying costs related to this war for years to come. We must care for our veterans and for the families of fallen soldiers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of medical care, disability payments, and compensation for the families of fallen soldiers will cost between $10 billion and $13 billion in the next 10 years alone. We have a moral obligation to take care of the brave men and women who sacrificed their youth, health, limbs, and sometimes their lives to serve their Nation. These are costs, however, that we need never have had to bear. While they pale in comparison to the personal cost incurred by service members and their families, these monetary costs are nonetheless significant, and they will affect America's security for decades to come.

Like all debt, the Bush Debt requires interest payments. Every day Americans make interest payments on mortgages, car loans, student loans, or credit cards. According to President Bush's proposed budget for fiscal year 2009, next year alone, America will owe $260 billion in interest on the Bush Debt. Two hundred sixty billion in interest payments equates to $857 to our creditors in Japan, China, and Saudi Arabia for every man, woman, and child in the United States, next year and the year after that and long into the future.

To make matters worse, if you can believe this--hold on to your hat--the Bush administration is borrowing the money to make the interest payments, further adding to the debt. Imagine if we could take the $7.7 trillion Bush Debt off budget and set up a separate revenue system to make the interest payments--to feed the beast. Then every taxpayer would see we are doing something about this unprecedented debt. We should consider forming a commission, a Bush Debt repayment authority, to study the possibility of bringing the Bush Debt off the budget to show the American people how much this President has cost them, to pay the Bush Debt down responsibly over time, the way Government often steps in to pay down a disaster debt responsibly over time, and to show our children and grandchildren that we were not all cowards pushing our costs onto them.

This enormous interest payment isn't an abstract idea dreamed up by economists. This $260 billion is precious cash flow that could otherwise be spent improving our health care system, building new schools, repairing our roads and bridges, or helping our businesses compete against foreign competition.

Individual Americans may not be writing $857 checks to Japan or China or Saudi Arabia, but each one of us pays a steep price for the Bush debt--a price that is already evident in the President's budget for this year.

The budget request that included $260 billion for interest payments also included tough talk about belt tightening. The President proposes to hold discretionary spending growth to 1 percent--effectively a cut since the consumer price index grew 4.1 percent last year.

His budget plan slashed funds for low-income heating assistance; the COPS Program, which keeps police officers on the beat to protect local communities; Federal student aid programs, which help young people afford a college education; and community development grants, which provide badly needed assistance for low-income families and small businesses. The President's budget also calls for tremendous cuts in Medicare and Medicaid over the next 5 years--cuts that would surely affect medical care for American families.

President Bush is asking for more money to continue his misguided war in Iraq, more money to service the debt he created, and more money to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, but less money to help the millions of people all across this country who need health insurance or food for their families or better schools for their children or a home they can afford. Those are not the correct priorities for America, President Bush.

What if President Bush had never cut rich Americans' taxes or taken us to war in Iraq? What if the fiscally responsible policies of the Clinton administration had continued to the present day? What if our public debt had been paid entirely by the end of next year, leaving us free to invest in our people and our future? What if there were no $7.7 trillion Bush debt and no $260 billion in interest payments next year? What could this country--the land of opportunity and possibility--be doing with an extra $260 billion a year?

Well, for just $5 billion--or 2 percent of the interest cost of the Bush debt in 2009--we could provide health insurance to 3.8 million more children through the Children's Health Insurance Program--the very initiative President Bush vetoed last year. Actually, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, we could provide health insurance to every uninsured American--adults and children--for $173 billion. So well within the amount of money we will need to spend next year to service the Bush debt, we could completely cover every American with quality health care.

There are many other worthy programs we could fund with the remainder of the $260 billion interest payment. Our Head Start Program, which
helps prepare preschool-age children from low-income families to succeed in kindergarten and beyond, currently has barely enough resources to cover half of the 2 million children who are eligible. The remaining 1 million children could be covered for an additional $7 billion.

Pell grants, named after my distinguished Senator from Rhode Island, Claiborne Pell, help college students afford the steep costs of their education. We made progress last year in increasing funding for the Pell Grant Program, but Pell grants only fund a small fraction of tuition for many students. It used to fund about half of the tuition. It has slipped to less than a third today. We could double every single Pell grant next year, raising the maximum grant to over $8,400, for $18 billion.

With the remaining $62 billion in our ``world without Bush,'' we could bring up to code 95 percent of the structurally deficient and functionally obsolete bridges in the country, with all the work and jobs that would entail. My home State of Rhode Island has the unhappy distinction of having the highest percentage of structurally deficient bridges in the country. But following the tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis last year, there is a renewed awareness of the urgency of updating our national transportation infrastructure. That $62 billion covers 95 percent of our Nation's deficient bridges and funds those repairs in fiscal year 2009. What about the other 5 percent? Well, we will have another $280 billion in Bush debt interest payments coming up in 2010. We could spend it--if we could--to fix those bridges.

Another year of tragic lost opportunities. We will make annual interest payments of this magnitude until a future President takes on the daunting challenge of paying down the principle of the national debt left for us by President Bush.

Well, that is quite a list: cover every uninsured American with health insurance, fully fund the Head Start Program, double each and every Pell grant, and repair our deficient bridges. Sadly, we do none of that. We use that money to pay the interest on the Bush debt. We will be making payments for the Bush debt for decades into the future.

An often ignored yet critical aspect of the Bush debt is the effect interest payments have on our national security--the very interest the administration purports to be advancing through its misguided war in Iraq. This chart illustrates the point.

To service the Bush debt, we have borrowed more money from foreigners, more money from other nations, such as China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, under George Bush than under all 42 of his predecessors combined. The result of this foreign borrowing is that a large portion of the interest payments we make gets sent overseas, supplementing the income of foreigners and allowing foreign nations to invest in their economies and infrastructures. If not for the Bush debt, that money could be invested here at home, helping to grow American businesses and generate income and strength for our own future generations. Instead, the Bush debt has helped, and will continue to help, boost the Chinese economy at the cost of our own. The Bush debt will send trillions of dollars to foreign nations over the coming years, giving them even more dollars to buy up our American businesses.

When the Presidency of George W. Bush comes to its long-anticipated end on January 20, 2009, it will leave in its destructive wake trillions of dollars in debt owed to other nations, many of which do not have America's best interests at heart. This administration will leave behind an America whose standing in the world and whose regard among its fellow nations has been weakened and degraded by a war that seems to have no end--a fiscally weakened nation, a borrower, with a falling economy, struggling under the Bush debt.

Worst of all, this President will leave behind millions of Americans who, had this administration merely stayed the course of fiscal responsibility chartered by President Clinton, would be far better off than they are today. They would be, starting in 2009, in a debt-free United States that could afford to assist working families with the costs of a college education, to overhaul our health care system, to repair our crumbling infrastructure, to invest in small and green businesses, and to improve the lives of average Americans in countless other ways.

We cannot ignore the Bush debt. While George Bush starts packing for his retirement on his Texas ranch, those of us who care about the future of our Nation--the future of our children--must work toward undoing the damage this President has done.

Mr. President, I submit that we need to see the Bush debt as a serious national problem, a fiscal, economic, and national security threat, and engage in a solemn and serious way, as the trustees of our national welfare, to confront the Bush debt.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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