Press Stakeout With Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; Senator Jon Kyl; Senator Lamar Alexander; Senator John Ensign; Following The Weekly Senate Republican Policy Luncheon

Press Conference

Copyright ©2009 by Federal News Service, Inc., Ste. 500, 1000 Vermont Ave, Washington, DC 20005 USA. Federal News Service is a private firm not affiliated with the federal government. No portion of this transcript may be copied, sold or retransmitted without the written authority of Federal News Service, Inc. Copyright is not claimed as to any part of the original work prepared by a United States government officer or employee as a part of that person's official duties. For information on subscribing to the FNS Internet Service at www.fednews.com, please email Carina Nyberg at cnyberg@fednews.com or call 1-202-216-2706.

SEN. MCCONNELL: Well, good afternoon, everyone.

The principal thing on the minds of Republican senators today obviously is the budget debate coming up next week. As we have said repeatedly over the last few weeks, it spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much.

This week, we're talking about how much it borrows. This will put us into debt far beyond anything we've ever experienced in this country. The budget lays out a blueprint for doubling the national debt in five years and tripling it in 10 years.

As Senator Gregg, who's our leader on the Budget Committee, has said, we've never experienced anything remotely akin to this in our past. In fact, we're putting our children and our grandchildren in a completely and totally untenable position.

One final little factoid. This creates for us a higher deficit than Cuba's. This is not the kind of position we want to put the United States in.

With that, let me turn to Senator Kyl.

SEN. KYL: Thank you, Leader.

We all know that in our own lives, with our own family budgets, when we borrow too much, we get into trouble. The biggest part of our home mortgage payment is usually the interest, and we're very careful to make sure that we can pay that monthly payment. If we can't, then we're underwater. When we have a big credit-card debt, you know that the interest payments can begin to dominate our planning every month for our own individual budgets.

That's what happens with this monstrous budget that's been submitted by the president. It spends so much and ends up, therefore, borrowing so much that the borrowing costs alone become dominant in what the country owes. In fact, the debt that's accumulated just in this one budget exceeds all of the debt of the United States from our history in 1789 -- George Washington right on through George W. Bush.

And to put that in a -- in a concrete term, for those of you who understand how the budgets and spending in this country work, you know that by far and away the biggest part of our budget is the defense budget. That's where we have historically spent the most money. And if you compare that to the interest costs, just carrying the debt that we owe, in the 10th year of this budget, the interest is $806 billion and the defense spending is $720 billion. So you can begin to see in relative terms how the interest that we owe on all of this debt will literally eat up the federal budget over the course of the 10 years. When it exceeds the defense budget, you know that it's gotten too big. We do need to spend less and borrow less.

SEN. ALEXANDER: To hear Republicans characterize the Democratic budget as spending, taxing and borrowing too much is probably not new to those of you who've worked here for a while. But what we're trying to convey to the American people is how different this budget is, how alarmed we are about the blueprint it has for the future of this country.

We believe genuinely that it puts us on the path over 10 years for a very different kind of country -- one with less freedom, one with more government, one with extraordinary debt, and one which our children will have a very difficult time affording.

One way of describing it is the last Democratic president, President Clinton, raised taxes, but he raised taxes to balance the budget. This Democratic president is raising taxes to grow the government and increase the debt.

And as Senator Kyl said, by the 10th year of the budget -- and the president deserves credit for telling the truth about the budget, but the truth is very alarming -- by the 10th year, the interest on the debt is more than we spend on defense -- it's 10 times as much as we spend on education and 10 times as much as we spend on transportation.

SEN. ENSIGN: A couple of comments. I made this analogy a little earlier today, put it in slightly different terms. The average house in America, somewhere around $200,000. By the end of this president's budget, in 10 years, the average American will now have a credit-card debt that is equivalent to their house payment. That is unacceptable in America. I mean, when -- think about it. How many people can't afford their house payment today? And yet we're going to double that in -- for what they have to pay on their credit cards. There's, you know, around $67,000 per household today, and it -- it triples to about $200,000 per household in 10 years. That's why they're going to have this extra payment.

The other thing -- point to make about this budget, it was mentioned, the interest on the debt. In 2019, it's almost 10 times more that we'll spend on interest on the debt than we spend on education. This president talked about getting his priorities right. It doesn't sound to me that we should be paying higher in interest payments than we spend on educating, you know, children in the United States. That's a priority that's way out of whack.

And lastly, when the president said -- and he says this literally every day. Listen to his statements. He said he is attacking the deficit. Well, you know, last time I checked, you don't go attack -- go out and attack waving a white flag, and that's what he's done with this deficit. He's waving a white flag of surrender on the deficit because they're just spending and spending and spending, and saying, "You know what? We're just going to pass that on to our children and let them handle the battle of actually tackling the debt and the deficit."

SEN. : I guess the -- the point we're making is that it is the economy, Mr. President, and the administration's budget goes in all kinds of different directions, into health care, and energy taxes and all these things that add to that level of borrowing. And the CBO report that came out last week was especially sobering because it -- it found that they had overstated, in terms of their economic assumption, the amount of revenue they were going to bring in, and that the spending was going to continue to be at unprecedented levels.

And so the deficits pile up. The amount of borrowing piles up to -- at the end of the 10 years, the public debt as a percentage of GDP gets up to 82 percent. And that assumes a debt -- a public debt of $17.3 trillion, and today we're looking at $5.8 trillion.

So when we say that it doubles in five years and triples in 10 years, that is what the CBO is saying; that these budget predictions and these economic assumptions that are in the president's budget would do to the economy.

And so it is -- it is an issue of it borrowing too much, and my colleagues have summarized that quite well. But another way of putting it into perspective is that we have a credit card -- the federal government's credit card is maxed out. And the finance charges that we're now paying are going to be paid by future generations to the point that, over that 10-year period, $4 trillion in additional interest payments is an additional $52,000 per family in this country -- per household -- and that's just attributable with the interest, the finance charge associated with the level of borrowing that's called for in this budget.

So it does borrow too much, and it's -- this is going in way too many different directions. It is the economy, Mr. President, and we hope that the administration will begin to focus more on that and less on all these other things that just add to the credit-card debt that America's children and grandchildren are going to have to pay.

Q (Off mike.)

SEN. KYL: That question really ought to be put to Judd Gregg or other members of the Budget Committee. I would just note that I think the first thing that Judd would say is that, unlike the president's 10-year outlook on the budget, by making it five years and reverting to the kind of scoring that has been done in the past, masking the true cost of the budget, they have made it look smaller when, in fact, it is just as big as -- as the president's numbers over the 10-year period indicate that it would be. So I think you have to analyze what they did in order to get those numbers down.

It's exactly correct, the AMT, the position fix and those -- and those sort of things. Exactly.

Q (Off mike) -- Secretary Geithner -- (off mike) -- to unwind non-bank institutions like AIG. I'm wondering what -- (off mike).

SEN. MCCONNELL: Well, let me just say this. The president's chief of staff was really quite candid when he said -- and I'm paraphrasing -- a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The budget we're talking about basically doesn't have anything to do with how we got here, which was both a financial system crisis and a housing crisis.

I haven't got a particular reaction to the secretary of the Treasury's announcement, but I will at least give him credit for dealing with -- trying to deal with the problem that we've all felt needed to be dealt with. That's the real issue, and at least he's grappling with that.

In terms of the details of it, I would defer to any of my colleagues who may have a high level of banking expertise. But at least he's dealing with the -- with the subject that has a chance to get us out of this economic trough that we're in.

Q But which -- (off mike)?

SEN. MCCONNELL: We need to be dealing with the financial system and housing. That's how we got into this situation, and that's how ultimately we'll get out of it. The budget, however, is a spending spree and a taxing spree and a borrowing spree related to levying a $3,100-per-family energy tax -- a light-switch tax -- on every American family, raising income taxes. It -- it is not an appropriate way to address what -- you know, the problem that we have, which is our financial system and our -- and our housing markets.

Okay, thank you.

Q Thank you.

Source