American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
Floor Speech
AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT OF 2009 -- (Senate - February 09, 2009)
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Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I want to take issue with something that was said on the Senate floor earlier about this being rushed and that Republicans are blocking this or slowing this down or delaying this bill. I have to take issue with that.
If you think about the enormity of what we are dealing with, we are talking about spending $1 trillion of our hard-working American tax dollars. We have been on this bill literally since last Tuesday. So 4 days last week and today--it seems to me, at least by Washington standards, that is pretty much light speed for moving anything around here. So to suggest that somehow Republicans are blocking or delaying this bill is a complete misstatement of the facts with regard to anything historical in the Senate.
When you are dealing with big issues, when you are dealing with issues of consequence, the Senate typically takes a certain amount of time and considers amendments. We have had 26 rollcall votes on this bill, only 5 amendments have been accepted. Unfortunately, most of the amendments that have been voted on and been accepted are amendments that have added to the cost rather than reduced the cost. But the point simply is the 4 or 5 days of time in the Senate to spend $1 trillion. I said this before, but I will repeat it: $800 billion, which is the base amount of the bill, when you add in the interest costs of about $350 billion, it gets you up to almost $1.2 trillion. But I said this last week: Between the Revolutionary War and the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, we only, as a nation, borrowed, cumulatively, $800 billion. We are talking about borrowing $800 billion from future generations in this one piece of legislation.
This is historic. It is unprecedented. It is stunning in terms of the size and scope and scale, and it certainly ought to be given the consideration I think something of this consequence and magnitude to the American people deserves.
I think it could be said about this legislation: The more things change, the more they stay the same. I said before, when we saw this bill come over from the House, it was about $820 billion. It got added to in the Senate, got up to a little over $900 billion. Then this last week there was this big debate about we are going to be able to reduce its size; we are going to change some of the ways in which it is funded, make it more stimulative and more oriented toward job creation. But the reality is, in spite of all those statements to the contrary, we are faced with a bill today that is essentially larger than the bill that came to us from the House.
The so-called compromise, which was designed to cut extraneous wasteful spending from this bill, reduced the overall amounts in some specific categories, but it didn't eliminate the categories. We are now spending on the same types of wasteful nonstimulative items--we are just spending slightly less than we were going to under the original bill we had last week in front of us. In fact, compared, as I said, to the bloated House bill to which so many people across the country reacted negatively, we are actually spending more.
So the Senate bill, the so-called compromise, is actually not smaller but, rather, larger than the House bill.
Second, the same shotgun approach to funding programs that are not temporary and not targeted is being employed. So we continue to fund budget items that still reflect bad policy and bad precedent. We just do so a little less. Expansions of Medicaid, COBRA, the first ever foray by the Federal Government into school construction--they are all policy and precedent-setting changes from which it will be very hard to retreat.
Make no mistake about it, with this bill we start down a path to a bigger and more pervasive Federal role, thereby changing the traditional dynamic between the Federal Government and State and local government. I do not believe this is the bargain the American people thought they were getting.
Just where are we in this process, as we end up on the Senate floor this Monday afternoon? We still have a $800 billion bill, more than $800 billion. As I said earlier, it is larger than the House bill. The House bill came over at $820 billion. The Senate added to it, got it up close to $940 billion. It got cut back under the so-called compromise that emerged last week. But the compromise leaves us at a point where we are actually spending more, $827 billion, than the bill that originally came to us from the House, which was scored at $800 billion. Add in the interest: $1.2 trillion.
It really has not been reduced from the levels that most Americans found to be very disturbing about the House bill. In fact, the Senate bill is actually larger, not smaller, as I said before, than the House bill.
Second, it continues to be poorly targeted, spraying money at all kinds of programs, new and old, that have little hope of creating private sector jobs. We got the report from CBO last week which suggested, again, that there could be as few as 1.3 million jobs created from the previous Senate bill. My assumption, of course, is although this has been reduced--not by much--the overall job creation will be less under the so-called compromise than it was under the original bill introduced last week.
Third, it is not timely. Much of the job creation in here will take years, due to the number of new programs that are created which will require new bureaucracies to be stood up, regulations to be issued, and all the redtape that is attendant to the creation of new Government programs.
Fourth, it is not temporary. The mandatory funding in this bill will be added to the baseline, creating long-term spending programs and liabilities that are permanent. Let's not fool ourselves. Much of the spending in this bill is not going away.
Fifth, every penny is borrowed from future generations. There is no way we can get around what we are doing to our children and grandchildren. Not only are we handing them all this debt, according to CBO, passing this bill will cost us in GDP growth down the road, making it even harder for our children to experience the growth in the economy that will be necessary to retire this kind of debt, not to mention the inevitable increase in inflation and interest rates that come with greater Government borrowing.
Finally, lest there be any confusion about the magnitude of what we are doing, let's remember again what $1 trillion represents. As I said before, more than the total amount of borrowing between the Revolutionary War and the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. The debt service alone on that amount of money, that amount of borrowing, is almost $350 billion over a 10-year period. The deficit for this fiscal year alone will exceed 10 percent of our gross domestic product, a level we have not seen since World War II.
I was a business student years ago. When we did financial calculations, we used a Texas Instrument Business Analyst II calculator to do our financial calculations.
That calculator would be inadequate to today's debate. There was not enough room on the screen to accommodate the number of zeros we are talking about.
This is serious business. We better get it right. This bill misses the mark. It spends too much, and it does too little. We offered lots of amendments last week to make it better, all of which were rejected. But I submit there is a better way. This bill has the votes to pass. We know that based on the agreement that was reached. But it is not too late to put the brakes on and actually sit down and work on a true bipartisan basis on a solution that sticks with the mantle of fiscal responsibility and actually would create jobs.
I hope my colleagues will defeat this bill and avoid making a mistake for which our children and grandchildren will pay for generations to come.
We know there are other installations of borrowing that are coming. We know the debate that was going to occur in the House last week on the first ever $1 trillion Omnibus appropriations bill was delayed because they didn't want to get it conflicted with the other $1 trillion we are going to be spending for stimulus. So we have a $1 trillion bill coming, an appropriations bill coming, a $1 trillion stimulus. We know the announcement is going to be coming tomorrow from Secretary Geithner about what their intentions are with respect to market stabilization and additional liabilities the country will acquire as a result of that effort. As my colleague from North Dakota earlier today noted, there is the Bloomberg story today about the trillions and trillions of dollars which Americans are being put on the hook for in the future.
We have lots of additional liabilities, obligations, debt that is coming down the pike. It is going to affect our children and grandchildren for generations to come.
There was something said earlier about Republicans do not have any ideas; they do not have any alternatives. We offered lots of amendments. I offered two substitutes last week----
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. THUNE. That would have improved this bill dramatically. But this bill is the wrong way to go, and I urge my colleagues to reject it.
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Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I want to come back to the one point I neglected to make earlier or did not have the time to make in my remarks; that is, even though I made the point that the House bill when it came over was at a certain funding level, $820 billion, the Senate compromise is $827 billion, and that actually the compromise is more costly than was the bill that so many people complained about as being pork laden when it came over from the House. There are those who are saying this bill is going to get bigger in the conference committee when the House and Senate get together to work out their differences.
I want to note what one of the Senators from Michigan said recently, and that is: I expect there will be some significant improvements over the package that comes out of the Senate. He said: There would be a push for more spending on infrastructure, education, and aid to the States.
The President indicated recently: ``I will be honest with you, the Senate version cut a lot of education dollars. I would like to see some of this restored.''
We talk about cuts in this program as if we are actually cutting something that already exists. We are talking about $1 trillion in new spending, an unprecedented amount of spending that has not been authorized. It did not go through regular order. Now we are actually talking as if somehow because the Senate bill, although as large as it is, larger than the House bill, is smaller than it was relative to where it was a week ago, which was over $900 billion, that somehow that bill has been cut, and that when we go in conference we are going to restore some of this money.
So I guess the only point I would make is, as this bill makes its way through the legislative process, we are not talking about a bill that is going to be smaller, we are talking about a bill that is going to be increasingly larger. I suggest when it goes to the conference committee with the House of Representatives, that this will not--if it is at 820 in the House and at 827 in the Senate--you can bank on it, that is going to be the minimum--it is probably going to get significantly larger.
As I said before, we believe there is a much better way of doing this. First, there was a great comprehensive approach last week put forward by the Senator from Arizona, which many of us supported, which invested in infrastructure, which addressed the housing issue, which many of us believe is central to our ability to emerge from this crisis, and which also appropriately targeted a lot of the stimulus toward job creation in the form of tax relief for small businesses, which, frankly, create most of the jobs in our economy, at least a good share. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the jobs in our economy are created by small businesses.
It also directed a lot of that particular approach and package to tax relief for middle-income families, putting more money into their pockets and allowing them to get out and to spend and to take advantage of something that might benefit them more than some government program that is going to be funded in Washington, DC, from which they probably will derive very little benefit.
So this is not getting smaller, it is getting larger at every step in the process. There are better ideas and better alternatives out there. This has been proven, at least by the CBO, to have very, I think, questionable ability to create jobs and also to do more long-term damage to the economy down the road. In their study which came out last week, it suggested that if in fact this stimulus bill was enacted, it would lead to lower GDP growth in the outyears.
I see some of my colleagues have arrived.
I yield the floor.
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