American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Floor Speech

AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT OF 2009 -- (Senate - February 05, 2009)

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Mr. WICKER. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. INHOFE. Yes.

Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I assure my colleagues that I will not take long to ask this question. I had hoped my friend from New York and my friend from Illinois would engage in a colloquy and not have left the Chamber.

Much was made in the discussion between the two Senators about the debt President Bush ran up during his administration. I don't know that it serves the debate very well to point fingers, but we might as well set the record straight for those of us who are paying attention.

Congress spends the money, will my friend acknowledge? It is Congress that spends the discretionary funds around here, and it is Congress that sets the spending on autopilot in terms of the mandatory spending. The President does not spend a penny without the consent of this Congress.

I hope my friend will also acknowledge that there was not one time during the 8 years of the Bush administration when our friends from the Democratic side of the aisle came forward with their budget proposal and proposed a budget that would spend less than was spent by the United States of America. In fact, in every instance, our friends on the other side of the aisle proposed budgets that spent even more than we actually spent in the end.

I just wanted to see if my friend agreed with that point. I thank him for allowing me to make that point.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, the answer to the question of the Senator from Mississippi is yes.

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Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I do want to speak on behalf of the McCain amendment and, regrettably, against the underlying legislation. We all understand the reason we are having this debate. Without exception every person in this Chamber is convinced we need to act to jumpstart our economy.

People across the country are facing hardship. More than 860,000 properties were repossessed by lenders in 2008, more than double the figure for 2007. American manufacturing is at a 28-year low. Mr. President, 1.9 million jobs were lost during the last 4 months of 2008. The economy shrank at a 3.8-percent pace at the end of the last calendar year, the worst showing in a quarter century. The unemployment rate now stands at 7.2 percent, 7.6 percent in my home State of Mississippi, with many States even less fortunate than mine.

These figures are a sobering reminder of how much we have at stake. But that is also why we need to ensure that we get this right. Part of the reason I voted against the bailout last September was that I thought it was rushed.

The Senator from Arizona acknowledged it was done in a hurry. We were told if we did not act in a matter of days, the world, as we knew it, might come to an end. I think there are many Members of this body who now wish we had taken more time to ensure that the TARP legislation was done right.

Let's learn from that experience. The bill we are debating this week is an unprecedented bill. Its magnitude is a staggering $1.2 trillion over 10 years. As a matter of fact, when I came over here to wait my turn, I was handed a legislative notice. Actually the bill now has a net impact on the deficit of $1.273 trillion, including $389 billion in debt service. That means the interest on this bill is almost four-tenths of $1 trillion.

I want to take a moment to put into perspective that amount of money. Many of us in the Chamber have heard these examples over the last few days, but they are worth repeating to the American people. I can assure my colleagues that the American people are beginning more and more to listen to this debate.

The entire Vietnam war had an inflation-adjusted cost of $698 billion. This bill is 1.2 trillion. Our involvement in Iraq has cost $597 billion. This one piece of legislation is over $1.2 trillion. FDR's New Deal, which many have tried to compare to this plan, pales in comparison, with an estimated 2009 inflation-adjusted cost of $500 billion, less than half the amount of this one piece of legislation in current dollars.

On top of this massive spending request, let's also remember we are being told, should this legislation pass, the President will then send to the Hill another $500 billion package to prop up the financial sector.

For those of us keeping score, that would be close to $2 trillion in spending when we factor in the cost of the interest. All of that is in addition to the $700 billion bailout bill passed last fall. It is hard to get a firm grasp of the magnitude of this spending.

I will say what other colleagues have said: If you began spending $1 million per day on the day Jesus was born, and you spent $1 million per day every day since that time until today, you would still not have spent anywhere near $1 trillion or, to put it another way, if you have $1 trillion in one-hundred-dollar bills, if you connected all of those one-hundred-dollar bills end to end, they would encircle the earth 40 times to get to $1 trillion.

Back in my home State of Mississippi, it has been reported that this package could mean $1 to $2 billion in projects for our State. What that means, though, when compared to the magnitude of the bill, is that as little as one-tenth of 1 percent of this spending would make it back to my State in projects.

One-tenth of 1 percent return is not a good investment for Mississippi taxpayers, and it is not a good investment for American taxpayers, essentially when, as the Senator from Texas pointed out, this money will have to be borrowed from China or other foreign governments, if we can persuade them to continue lending us the money.

It will need to be paid back by future generations. The Congressional Budget Office reported this week that the per-job cost of this plan, even if the jobs created are what we are being promised, the per-job cost of this plan is from $100,000 per job to $300,000 per job.

Now, when you take into consideration the fact that the average Mississippian earns $31,000 per year, it is hard for me to stand here and tell hard-working people back in my State that the most efficient use of their tax dollars is to spend up to $300,000 to create one additional job for Americans.

But that is what our own budget office tells us this bill will do. That is not the best use of American taxpayer dollars. We need to get this right. The American people deserve a maturely considered plan. As Thomas Jefferson reminded Americans in his day: Delay is preferable to error. Let's not rush into doing this the wrong way because generations of Americans, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, will pay for our mistake.

It has been pointed out on this floor today, and it is worth mentioning again, that we Republicans are not alone in expressing grave, profound concerns about the enormity of this spending plan and the effect that it will have on the United States.

President Clinton's former Budget Director, Alice Rivlin, agrees. She recently testified we should not rush to spend the amount of money this bill will spend on projects with slow spend-out rates.

She said:

Such a long-term investment program should not be put together hastily and lumped in with the anti-recession package.

And hastily put together is what this program is.

Alice Rivlin, President Clinton's Budget Director, went on to say:

The risk is that the money will be wasted because the investment elements were not carefully crafted.

These are the words of the Budget Director under President Bill Clinton.

Now, $1 trillion is a terrible thing to waste; $1.273 trillion is a terrible thing to waste. Members of the news media understand this too. The Washington Post's David Broder, who has covered Congress for more than 40 years, a respected journalist, wrote on Sunday regarding this plan:

So much is uncertain, and so much is riding on it that it is worth taking time to get it right.

Yet we are told we need to vote this evening. We need to try to vote today or tomorrow on this, the largest spending bill ever in the history of the United States. In order to get it right, this package needs to be laser focused on getting workers back to work, getting our housing market out of the gutter, and doing so in a way that does not waste taxpayer dollars.

The Democratic leadership in this Congress said only recently that this package should be targeted, temporary, and timely. I could not agree more. Unfortunately, as this package stands today, it could more accurately be described as slow, unfocused, and unending. Americans have real concerns over some of the spending contained in this package: $20 million for the removal of fish barriers; $70 million to support supercomputing activities for climate research; tens of millions to spruce up Government buildings in Washington, DC; $25 million to rehabilitate off-road ATV trails; $600 million for new Government vehicles; $150 million for honey bee insurance. The list goes on and on.

My friend from New York said, a few speakers back: If you want to take this pork out, take it out. We can take it out with his vote and with the votes of his colleagues, but we cannot do it alone. If he says take it out, and he will join us in doing that, then we are getting somewhere.

These projects may have merit, but what do they have to do with creating jobs immediately? There is a process for considering those types of projects, and this emergency stimulus package is not that vehicle.

I was pleased to hear the President speak recently acknowledging the good ideas Republicans have and saying he wants to make sure Republican ideas are incorporated in this package. So what are those ideas and why do I support the McCain substitute?

First, we need to trim the unnecessary spending that doesn't immediately put people back to work. Second, this package needs to get right to the housing problem because housing is what caused the situation we are currently in. Then let's focus more on targeted tax breaks for the working class and for the job creators, the small businesses. The President initially said 40 percent of this package should be made up of tax cuts. Regrettably, we are no longer close to that goal.

Senator McCain has proposed an alternative plan that does all of these. His substitute plan costs half as much, thankfully, and offers focused spending and effective tax cuts. It eliminates the 3.1-percent payroll tax for all American employees for 1 year. It lowers the two lowest marginal tax rates for 1 year.

We also need to accelerate depreciation for capital investments made by small businesses for 1 year. We need to improve tax incentives for home purchases. We need to improve early investment in national defense and military infrastructure priorities, jump-starting the economy while making Americans safe, and mandatory deficit reduction after two consecutive quarters of economic growth greater than 2 percent.

If the stimulus package works and the economy begins to grow for 6 months in a row, then we need to rein in this unbelievably large spending bill, declare victory, and then start working on a plan to pay for it. We also need to establish an entitlement commission to review Social Security and Medicare.

I was delighted yesterday when the Isakson amendment was agreed to, doubling the current first-time home buyer tax credit to $15,000 and expanding it to cover all properties and home buyers. It is a small start--it is nowhere near the place we need to be--but I congratulate the Senate for taking that step.

This is an important debate, perhaps the most important debate we will have this year. The President was right when he said that Republicans have good ideas. I hope, as the President said, we can incorporate those ideas into this legislation. I hope we can make this package much smaller and much more targeted to jobs and housing. That is what more American people are beginning to say as they are becoming familiar with the details of this plan.

If we pass anything close to the current proposal and go to conference with the House, does anyone really believe the final product will be less expensive? If we pass the McCain proposal and cut in half the price tag of this bill and go to conference with the House, it is my hope and prayer that conference committee can report a package we can support in an overwhelmingly bipartisan manner, that can bring about confidence in the American people and make us all proud.

It is time to redirect this package. We need to make it targeted, timely, and temporary. We need to do it today. We have an opportunity to strengthen this legislation so that it doesn't waste taxpayer money, so that it actually puts people back to work quickly and puts families back into homes and Americans back to work. The American people deserve to have us do this right.

I yield the floor.

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