American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
Floor Speech
AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT OF 2009 -- (Senate - February 04, 2009)
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AMENDMENT NO. 238
Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I wish to speak to an amendment that I introduced and filed and was made pending at the desk earlier today. What that amendment will do is eliminate new Government programs that are created by the proposed $1 trillion stimulus legislation that is before the Senate today.
Earlier yesterday, I presented some information about the size and scope of this legislation and tried to put in very visual terms the immense amount of money we are talking about when you start looking at $1 trillion. It is $900 billion, but when you add interest on top of this--$340 billion, $350 billion in interest--you have $1.2 trillion in new spending included in the stimulus bill. I say that because I think it is important to point out that is not the end; it is, frankly, the beginning.
We know for a fact the Omnibus appropriations bill--the sort of catchall appropriations bill we didn't complete last year--is going to be coming before the Congress, before the House first and then before the Senate. For the first time ever, that is going to exceed $1 trillion. So we have $1 trillion in the catchall appropriations bill. We expect at least a request from the administration for additional TARP authority--emergency funding to provide stabilization to the financial markets--to the tune of several hundred billion dollars. We don't know exactly what it will be, but we know it will be in the multiples with respect to hundreds of billions of dollars. We also have a supplemental appropriations bill that will be coming shortly after that to fund the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
My point simply is this: This is trillions of dollars of spending. This is a spending spree that is unprecedented even in this city, which is known for spending lots of money on lots of programs. What this amendment attempts to do is to put a little bit of restraint on some of that spending in the stimulus bill. Granted, many of us believe there are some things we should be doing, some steps we should be taking that would help the economy to recover, that would stimulate the economy and create jobs. Regrettably, the stimulus bill that is in front of us goes way beyond that.
The President's top economic adviser suggested when this whole debate began that whatever we do in terms of stimulus, it should be temporary, it should be targeted, and it should be timely. Much of what is included in this bill is none of the above. In fact, it is slow and unfocused and unending. So I am attempting, with this amendment, to say that new programs that are created in this bill have to have been authorized by February 1 of this year. In other words, earlier this week. So if there is not an authorization for this new program--and we would ask OMB to make that determination--that spending would be knocked out of the bill, essentially.
The whole purpose of the amendment is, again, to say that if we are going to do something that is meaningful in terms of stimulating the economy, it should be temporary and it should be targeted and it should be focused. Much of the spending that is in this bill is anything but that. History has shown, time and again, when you put new programs on the books, you almost always take a long time to get those programs off the ground. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office has examined this issue and they offered this insight:
Brand new programs pose additional challenges. Developing procedures and criteria, issuing the necessary regulations, and reviewing plans and proposals would make distributing money quickly even more difficult--as can be seen, for example, in the lack of any disbursements to date under loan programs established for automakers last summer to invest in producing energy-efficient vehicles. Throughout the Federal Government, spending for new programs has frequently been slower than expected and rarely been faster.
Again, that is the Congressional Budget Office. Given the current state of the economy, we simply can't afford to enact costly new programs that have little hope of making any real meaningful impact now, when the American people need it the most.
There may be programs in this proposed legislation that are worthy of support--I am not arguing that point--but surely not under the guise of economic stimulus. There are new programs that are created that will add to the size of this, and many of us have reacted to the size of it. As I have said already, we know for a fact there is going to be a lot of additional spending coming down the pike that we are going to be asked to consider. But adding to that $1 trillion for something that arguably does not create economic stimulus, does not create jobs, seems to me to be the wrong direction in which to head.
My amendment would simply prevent any new funding under the economic stimulus plan from going toward new programs that were not authorized before February 1 of this year--2009. As I said before, the amendment calls on the Office of Management and Budget to determine if a program was authorized before February of 2009. If the program fails to meet that standard, the program will not receive funding from the economic stimulus proposal.
Now, I would argue that this is a very commonsense proposal that protects the taxpayer and ensures funds are spent in a timely and effective manner. That isn't to say--and I will repeat myself--as I said earlier, that many of these programs are not worthwhile and, frankly, we ought to consider them. But we ought to do it under the regular order and procedures that we have in the Senate. We ought to have committee action, we ought to have hearings, we ought to have the necessary oversight, and we ought to be able to put these things on the floor where they can be debated. We have a process for doing that.
There are lots of programs that are included in the stimulus bill which, I would argue, don't meet that criteria. They aren't stimulus because they are not targeted, they are not timely, and they are not temporary. They are, in fact, creating new programs which, as I said earlier, the Congressional Budget Office has told us sometimes take a very long time to roll out. I think any of us can speak from experience on that point; that whenever we create any sort of a new Federal program, we have agencies that have to interpret it, regulations have to be promulgated, in many cases we are setting up new bureaucracies and people have to be hired and it makes no sense to me whatsoever for us to, in the context of an economic stimulus bill, start talking about new programs.
I would also say the whole purpose of this exercise, in my opinion at least, is job creation. It is to get the economy back on track and recovering and creating jobs. We have been losing jobs. The economy is hemorrhaging and a lot of people are hurting throughout the country. What they don't need is more spending on Government programs in Washington, DC. What we ought to be doing, on the other hand, is getting more money into the hands of the American people so they can spend it--more incentives for small businesses to begin to invest and create jobs because that is what they do best. In fact, two-thirds to three-fourths of all the jobs created in our economy are created by small businesses.
Now, $900 billion, the principal amount--and with interest it is over $1
trillion in new spending--is proposed in the stimulus legislation. If you divide that by the number of jobs that are proposed to be created--somewhere around 3 million--that comes out to $300,000 per job. The average annual wage in my State of South Dakota is under $30,000 a year. It is very difficult to explain to a constituent of mine in South Dakota how the Federal Government proposes to spend $300,000 of their tax dollars to create one job at a time when we are handing the largest burden of debt to the next generation in American history.
Many of these jobs that are proposed are Government jobs. The Government can create Government jobs, and many of the spending programs in this bill do put money into Federal agencies which create Government jobs but at an enormous cost. I will use the example of the State Department, where it is over $1 million--I think $1.3 million, something to that effect--per job created. That doesn't seem to be a very good use of taxpayer dollars, and it doesn't get us the bang for the buck everybody has been coming to the floor and talking about.
As I said, it is a straightforward amendment. All it simply says is: No new Government programs created in the stimulus. If that program was not authorized by February 1 of this year, then any funding for it in the economic stimulus proposal would be denied.
It is a commonsense proposal that does protect the taxpayers, ensures the funds will be spent in a timely and effective way, and that we focus on keeping jobs out there in the economy, putting people back to work. It is not spending on new Government programs in Washington DC which, however well intended, needs to go through a normal regular order process where Members of the Senate have an opportunity to evaluate those at the committee level and go through all the appropriate oversight that we normally include when it comes to create a new Government program.
Frankly, I do not think creating new Government programs, in the first place, is the way to do this, but at least this amendment brings some semblance of sanity to a bill which, as I said, is sort of a shotgun approach. It throws money at all kinds of different programs in hopes it will do something to stimulate the economy--knowing full well, I believe, that many of these are not going to be stimulative but on the other hand are creating new programs that people have wanted for a long time but have never had the opportunity.
That is not what this is about. This economic stimulus debate ought to be focused on creating jobs and getting the economy on the pathway to recovery.
That is the amendment. I encourage my colleagues to support it. I think it is very straightforward, very commonsensical, and, hopefully, it will meet with the approval of the majority of the Members of the Senate.
I yield the floor.
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AMENDMENT NO. 238
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There will now be 2 minutes of debate evenly divided on the Thune amendment. The Senate will be in order.
Mr. THUNE. Madam President, what my amendment very simply says is that any of the funding in this bill that was not authorized as of February 1 of this year could not be funded under the bill. The point very simply is that, in order for a stimulus to be effective, it has to be timely, it has to be targeted, it has to be temporary. Funding in this or programs in this that are created that are new programs are going to be none of the above. It is going to take a long time, as we all know, to get regulations in place and create the bureaucracies. All these programs that are new programs included in this legislation are going to take a very long time to implement and, therefore, I do not believe ought to be considered stimulus and they ought not be funded as a part of this stimulus bill.
My amendment simply says any program that was not authorized as of February 1 of this year will not be funded under the stimulus bill. It is a way of trimming the cost of this bill back and doing something that actually I think eliminates a lot of the extraneous spending that is included in the bill. I urge my colleagues to support it.
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