American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
Floor Speech
AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT OF 2009 -- (Senate - February 03, 2009)
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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, this is a very important debate for the American people. We have an economy that is struggling, we have a lot of people who are hurting, and I think in the context of that debate, it is very important that we remember these dollars we are spending are the American people's dollars. Yes, we want to be able to respond to the economic crisis the country is experiencing in a way that allows people to spend more money, that gets more money back into the hands of the American people, that will help grow the economy and create jobs, and provide the necessary incentives for small businesses to invest, but I think it is important at the outset of the debate that we give serious consideration and thought to what we are doing here and what we are talking about in terms of the dimensions and the scale of what we are talking about.
When we throw around numbers here in Washington, DC, when we talk in millions and we talk in billions, and in this case a trillion dollars, we treat it as if it is something abstract. I think it is sometimes important to boil it down so that we put in perspective the dimension, the scale, the scope, and the size of what is being talked about this week on the floor of the Senate.
I want to put up a chart that illustrates that very point. Imagine thinking about a trillion dollars, and putting it back to back or if you put a bunch of hundred dollar bills back to back on top of each other and asking people around the country how high that stack would go.
I am sure you would get a lot of varying answers. You would probably have some people say it might go 300 yards into the air. Some people might say: Well, it might go 5 miles into the air. But the reality is, if you took hundred-dollar bills and stacked them on top of each other, you would have a stack that goes 689 miles high, back to back to back. That is hundred-dollar bills. We are not talking about dollar bills, we are talking about hundred-dollar bills.
Mrs. BOXER. Will the Senator yield for a question on this point?
Mr. THUNE. I would say to the Senator, through the Chair, the Senator from California just had an opportunity. I would like to finish my remarks. Then I would be happy to yield.
Mrs. BOXER. Thank you. I will stay on the floor.
Mr. THUNE. The point I am making is, you have to sometimes illustrate this in a sometimes very graphic way to help us understand what we are talking about. So I would make my point simply again: Hundred-dollar bills stacked back to back to back, if you stacked them on top of each other, would equal 689 miles.
Now, another way of looking at this is, if you took hundred-dollar bills and wrapped them around the Earth at the Equator, in other words, you took hundred-dollar bills, not stack them on top of each other but wrap them side by side all the way around the Earth, if you can believe this, it would go around the Earth almost 39 times. That is 969,000 miles of hundred-dollar bills that would go around the Earth if you took a trillion dollars and broke it down that way.
That very simply puts into perspective what it is we are talking about. Someone else has described it this way: If you started spending a million dollars a day on the day Christ was born, and you spent a million dollars every single day up until today, you still would not have spent a trillion. That is the dimension of what we are talking about.
I remember when I was in business school, we had our little business analyst calculators that we used to do financial calculations. You could not even get to this. You could not even get to a trillion dollars on calculators back at that time. I hope, today, for purposes of doing economic calculations, because of the scale we are talking about, these calculators go that far.
But my point is, this is an enormous amount of money, an enormous amount of money. We are talking about $1.26 trillion of our children's and grandchildren's money over the next 10 years. I think there is a basic principle that all Members of the Senate should consider when we are spending our fellow citizens' hard-earned dollars. That principle is this: We should not spend money we do not have on things we do not need. Let me say that again. We should not spend money we do not have on things we do not need.
Families and business owners understand this principle. Unfortunately, it is a principle that has been lost and escaped our colleagues on the other side who have drafted this 700-page, trillion-dollar spending bill, which is filled with lots of Government spending that I think most Americans would characterize as wasteful. I am not saying all Government spending is bad. Government spending, if it is properly focused and highly scrutinized, may have some countercyclical impact. One example of that would be infrastructure spending that we use to improve our roads and bridges and provide access to clean drinking water, that can provide jobs in the short term, and can create economic opportunity in the long term.
The problem we have is this bill is laden with unfocused, unnecessary, and wasteful spending. Now, the stated goal of a stimulus proposal, as stated by, I think, Larry Summers earlier this year, was it should be timely, temporary, and targeted. I may not be saying these in the right order but basically timely, temporary, and targeted, basically three criteria, three metrics by which we would measure a stimulus proposal and whether it is effective and whether it works.
I would argue this particular bill is none of the above. It is slow, it is unfocused, and it is unending. It makes commitments way beyond the 1-year, 2-year window that we are talking about if we want to have an impact and create jobs with stimulus.
So even with a price tag that is greater than any previous stimulus package in the history of our country, the majority of the spending in this bill is not focused on job creation and fails to meet the job creation goals our President called for and I think the American public expects.
With record deficits in the near term, this bill, as drafted, is a mistake that I do not believe we can afford to make. According to the Congressional Budget Office, we have a $1.2 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2009, before any financial stabilization or stimulus measures are passed by this Congress.
Now, again, we are going to spend $1 trillion. I would point out what $1 trillion means. If you took hundred-dollar bills, you put them side by side, 969,000 miles, and that is the amount we are talking about spending. It is also the amount of the deficit in this particular fiscal year, fiscal year 2009. That is before, as I said before, any financial stabilization or stimulus measures are passed by this Congress. Frankly, we expect other requests to come forward in the area of financial stabilization.
To put the $1.2 trillion deficit into perspective, that is roughly triple the previous record of $455 billion that the deficit came to in fiscal year 2008. So it is important to note that already this deficit in fiscal year 2009 will exceed by almost three times the deficit in the year 2008. It is going to be over $1 trillion before we do any of these other things.
It is also important to note that the Congress, not the executive branch, has the constitutional authority to raise and to spend revenue; that is, the power of the purse, by our Constitution, falls to Congress. So if we are looking for a scapegoat in this whole fiscal imbalance, we need to look no further than the Halls of Congress.
In fact, in the last couple years--the Democrats regained the Congress back in 2007, the Federal deficit has ballooned from $160 billion or 1.2 percent of our gross domestic product in 2007 to over $1 trillion or 8.3 percent of our gross domestic product this year, in fiscal year 2009.
Now, if we include just the additional spending for this proposal before us, the 2009 projected deficit, I am talking about now stimulus and the deficit as I mentioned earlier that is already projected for 2009, it would increase to $1.43 trillion, almost $1.5 trillion, in deficits or, put another way, about 10 percent of our gross domestic product.
I have to remind my colleagues that we are still very early in the year. We have almost 9 months left in this fiscal year to spend even more of our children's and grandchildren's tax dollars. The Congress is soon going to consider an omnibus spending bill for the remainder of 2009.
We also will have to consider a war supplemental bill and the potential of additional bailouts for the financial sector and we are told that request may be coming as early as next week.
Without a question, we are going to end 2009 in perhaps the worst financial condition the Nation has ever seen. In fact, the last time we had a single-year deficit that the GDP ratio was over 8 percent was the year 1945, during the height of World War II.
Now, for comparative purposes, the European Union, the Federal deficit there that we have this year of 10 percent, if you add the stimulus in, would not even be good enough to get into the European Union. According to European Union rules, member nations have to have a budget deficit of 3 percent or less. Our Federal deficit this year will be three times higher than the maximum threshold to get into the European Union.
Of course, European countries are also dealing with the same contractionary forces that we are dealing with in this country, which are driving up their collective deficit to GDP ratios to record highs. But even with those factors and influences in those economies, the Euro zone's collected deficits will only reach 4.7 percent in 2009. That is 4.7 percent of their gross domestic product, which will be less than half the U.S. total.
When you talk about being faced with such unsustainable deficits, Congress, I would argue, has to carefully analyze any and all deficit spending. Any additional Government programs that are financed with more deficit spending need to meet the highest standards of job creation and return on taxpayer investment.
Unfortunately, the spending bill we have before us contains a long list of Government programs that fail to meet that standard. I can start to go down the list--I will not go through the entire list because it would take too long--$1 billion for the Census; $20 billion for the removal of small- to medium-sized fish passage barriers; $400 million for STD prevention; $25 million to rehabilitate ATV or recreational vehicle trails; $34 million to remodel the Department of Commerce headquarters in Washington, DC; $70 million to support supercomputer activities for climate research; $208 million for disconnected youth; $1.2 billion for summer employment; $246 million in tax breaks for Hollywood filmmakers; $6 billion so bureaucrats in Washington can enjoy the benefits of green technology.
I happen to be one who supports green technology. I think we ought to be moving in that direction. But we also have many opportunities, energy bills we have made on a regular basis around here, in order to engage in how we invest to be moving our country in a green direction.
These programs do not create jobs. They hardly justify a $1.2 trillion debt on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren.
So I would encourage my colleagues, as we go through the debate this week to scrutinize every line item in this 700-page bill and ask themselves if these provisions will create jobs and justify making record deficits even worse. We should not spend money we do not have on things we do not need.
Over the next few days, several amendments are going to be offered to strike or replace wasteful spending items in this bill. I would call on my colleagues to consider these amendments with an open mind and a clear understanding of the dangerous consequences of a trillion-dollar mistake. A trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste.
What we are talking about, as I mentioned in terms of the dimensions of this, if you look at hundred-dollar bills side by side, 38.9 times it goes around the Earth at the Equator. That is what I am talking about.
Mrs. BOXER. Would the Senator yield for a question?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California is recognized.
Mrs. BOXER. I am astounded by this new-found fiscal responsibility I hear from the other side of the aisle. I wish to ask my friend a question: Do you know what the debt was when Bill Clinton left office and George Bush took over and there was a Republican Congress? Do you know what it was at that time?
Mr. THUNE. I would say I am not sure I know the answer, but I am sure I am going to hear it.
Mrs. BOXER. The debt was $5.7 trillion when George Bush and the Republicans took over. I will say to my friend, not to ask him a question, the debt today is $10.1 trillion; a doubling of the debt was brought to you courtesy of the Republicans.
Does my friend know--I am sure he does--that when Bill Clinton left office, we had a surplus in our budget. We not only did not have a deficit, we had a surplus. My friend knows what George Bush left us with--hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of debt.
So for him to stand up now that the people are suffering and struggling and they need jobs and become the Herbert Hoover of current day times, I think it is hurtful to the American people. I say to my friend: Why is it that my friend now is suddenly talking about debt and did not discuss it when the Republicans were in charge?
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from California for her question. I think we can all talk about what has come before, what has happened in the past. Frankly, there are lots of reasons why we are in the situation we are in.
But I would remind my colleague from California that the President of the United States does not appropriate a single penny; that is done by the Congress. That is done by the Congress. We in the Congress have created this problem. Now, arguably it has happened under Republican Congresses, it has happened under Democratic Congresses. But the point is, we are here talking about spending an additional trillion dollars on the top of a historic amount of debt that we have in the country and deficits that this year are going to be $1.2 trillion. That is without adding in the stimulus. That is without talking about the financial stabilization request that is going to come later. That is without the omnibus spending bill, which is for the first time, I might add, going to be over $1 trillion, and that is without the supplemental bill that will be coming our way later this year.
This Congress is talking about going on a spending spree that is unprecedented in American history. Yes, we can all point to the mistakes that were made in the past, but I am here to talk about today my concern for the future and what we are doing in the future, to future generations and our children and grandchildren, when we impose this kind of burden on them.
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