Congressional Budget for the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2010--Resumed

Floor Speech

CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2010--Resumed -- (Senate - March 31, 2009)

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, let me start this morning by commending Chairman Kent Conrad for his leadership of our Budget Committee and especially for the hundreds of hours he and his staff have dedicated to getting this budget done and accommodating both the priorities and concerns of so many of us in this body. Putting together a budget is never an easy process, but I believe our chairman has achieved a good balance that will set us on a course to both reducing our deficit and investing in the areas that we know will make us stronger in the future--energy, health care, and education.

I know that in addition to his work on this budget, this is a particularly difficult time for the State of North Dakota and the families and businesses there. I want to say to Chairman Kent Conrad, who will be on the floor shortly, that all of our hearts go out to him and his State as they struggle with these horrific storms that are going through his area.

A budget is a statement of priorities. Ours is very clear: We put the middle class first, and we get our country back on track by investing in our future.

To be clear, we have inherited some very great challenges. We now face the worst economic crisis in generations. Since December 2007, we have lost 4.4 million jobs, including 2.6 million of those in the past 4 months. So before we consider where we are going, it is important to talk a little bit about where we have been.

For weeks now, my friends on the other side of the aisle have been bemoaning deficits and debt with not a moment of consideration for their own record on those issues. Back in 2001, Republicans controlled the full power of our Government. Under the leadership of President Bush and Republicans in Congress, record surpluses created under President Clinton became record deficits. These Republican deficits grew and grew and now today add up to trillions of dollars in new debt that is going to be shouldered by future generations of Americans.

With this perspective, I hope our Republican friends will start acknowledging and owning up to the fact that we now have two choices. Choice 1 is to continue down the Republican deficit path, no investments in our future, a widening gap between the rich and the middle class, and more massive deficits. Choice 2 is represented in the budget before us today: improve the economy by investing in energy, education, and health reform so that we as a country are stronger in the future; cut taxes for our middle class and address the deficit so that our children do not bear the burden of bad decisions today.

After 8 years of the Bush administration's shortsighted budgets and misplaced priorities, we are now working with President Obama to invest in our needs and to chart a new course for America. We are choosing a new path.

The American people deserve an economic plan that works for everyone in this country. Our budget makes responsible choices that will help get this country's economy rolling again. I came to the floor today to talk about a few of those priorities and choices we have made.

We face pressing transportation needs across our country, and maintaining and creating new infrastructure is key to this country's economic strength.

Just a couple of months ago, the American Society of Civil Engineers issued its annual report card on the condition of America's infrastructure, and the results were very dismal. The leading experts on the state of our Nation's infrastructure have reduced the grade point average of our entire system of roads and bridges and mass transit to a D--that is ``D'' as in dog. Our Nation's roads also got a D-minus since a third of our major roads are considered to be in poor and mediocre condition, and more than a third of our urban highways are congested. American families today spend about 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, and that is costing our economy almost $80 billion in lost productivity each and every year. These roads are in every one of our States. It is time to fix them.

As we are all aware, the available funding balance in the highway trust fund is falling rapidly. Thankfully, in our budget the transportation reserve fund will provide the mechanism that will allow us to reform our transportation financing system and provide the kinds of spending levels in the upcoming Transportation authorization bill that are going to be necessary to maintain our highways and our transit systems. Fixing our transportation is about getting our economy strong, but it is about safety as well. I think all of us remember when that Minnesota bridge went down. We do not want to see that again. It is time to fix our roads and our transportation. This budget takes a major step forward.

Second, education. We all know and we all say that education is the key to our future strength. In this new global economy we exist in, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity; it is a requirement for success. We will not recover and be strong in the long term unless we both create jobs and make sure America's workers have the education and skills to fill those jobs we create. So this budget invests strongly in education and in ensuring that American students do not fall behind as they make their way into this global marketplace.

This budget helps retrain America's workers for careers in high-growth and emerging industries such as health care or renewable energy or energy-efficient construction so that those workers can stay in the middle class. We increase Pell grants and make tax credits for tuition permanent. We want all students to achieve a postsecondary education, whether it is through a registered apprenticeship or through a community college or university, and this budget helps take us in that direction.

As a nation, we have to change the way we think about preparing young people for careers today, starting with making education work better. This current economic crisis has cost us dearly.

Every weekend I go home to Washington State, I hear about another business closing, another family who has lost their job, another senior citizen who does not know how they are going to make it. So we all know that if we make changes and we make smart investments, that is how we are going to move our country forward again and give confidence back to the American people that we are a strong country. Investing in education is one of those smart investments. We do that in this budget.

Our health care system--something we all talk about--is broken. We know it needs real reform. Today, we have a historic opportunity to finally tackle that challenge. These investments we make in health care are not luxuries; they are essential to our future strength. That is why we need to prioritize the health profession's workforce and access to quality health care in our rural areas, and we have to ensure that preventive measures are given priorities so that American families are not left with giant bills for expensive care down the road.

Some critics of this budget argue that now is not the time to tackle health care reform. I believe that is very shortsighted reasoning. There is a direct connection between our Nation's long-term prosperity and developing health care policies that stem the chronic bleeding in business and in our State and national budgets across the country.

Mr. President, there was a recent editorial in the Everett Herald, a hometown newspaper in my State, that made this point, and I want to read it to you. It says:

Yes, the economy is the most urgent challenge. But our broken health care system and addiction to oil threaten to become our long-term undoing.

They're all intertwined. Failing to find solutions to our long-term problems will likely stunt future economic expansions, creating longer and deeper downturns.

That is not something any one of us wants to see, which brings me to our next investment. As we are all aware, energy issues are some of the most pressing facing our Nation today. Our dependence on foreign oil has left us beholden to other nations as middle-class families have paid the price at the pump. By making renewable energy a priority in this budget, we can reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy in the future and help create green jobs here at home and leave a cleaner environment for future generations. These are smart investments in this budget.

In an issue near and dear to my heart, I commend both the committee and President Obama for finally making our veterans a priority in this budget process. Our men and women in uniform and their families have served and sacrificed for our Nation. After years of being underfunded and overshadowed, this budget finally does right by them. I again commend Senator Conrad, the budget chairman, and President Obama for putting this issue forward.

This budget is finally honest with the American people about the cost of war, not just by paying for veterans care but by paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on budget, for the first time since they started--over 6 years ago.

I also wish to note that this budget meets our commitment to nuclear waste cleanup in my State and across the country. Workers at Hanford Nuclear Reservation and residents of that community sacrificed many years ago to help our Nation win World War II. Hanford and those other sites are now home to millions of gallons of waste. Our Government needs to live up to its promise to clean them up, and this budget rightfully does that.

Let me talk a minute about agriculture because agricultural production is the largest industry for many States across the country, as it is in my State, with farming and ranching. Protecting our agricultural sector is critical to our economy, to our environment, and to our quality of life. We need to work to keep our rural communities strong and to ensure a bright future for all our farm families. Production agriculture--such as Washington State's wheat farming--is a very volatile business and a workable safety net, such as in the farm bill, is vital to the security of our family farms.

I have long supported the Market Access Program, which provides funds for our producers to promote their products overseas and expanding international markets. These are critical for our agricultural communities today as they try to compete in a global economy. Especially in these difficult economic times, when our foreign competitors are trying to limit our market access with high tariffs, the last thing we should be doing is cutting programs such as the Market Access Program, which will help our growers in a competitive global marketplace. As we work to get our country back on track, I am going to continue to find ways to support one of the staples of our economy and that is our agricultural community.

America has paid dearly for the Bush administration's failure over the last 8 years to invest in our country and to invest in our people. We don't have to tell that to the American people today. They are waking up every single day and seeing rising health care costs, pink slips, a crumbling infrastructure and bills and mortgages they can't afford to pay. We tried it the other way for the last 8 years. Now it is time to invest in America again. It is time to give our middle class a break and it is time for honesty and it is time for bold decisions.

This budget that Senator Conrad and the Budget Committee have brought to all of us to consider today isn't perfect, of course--no budget is--but what it does do is extremely important. It invests in our future--our future, America's future--and puts this country back on track.

I wish to thank Senator Conrad, again, and his committee for working so hard to bring this budget forward to us, and I look forward to supporting it when we pass it later this week.

I yield the floor.

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