Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2010--Conference Report
Floor Speech
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2010--CONFERENCE REPORT -- (Senate - April 29, 2009)
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Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I would like to pick up where my colleague from South Carolina left off and talk a little bit about the need to have a budget agreement that reflects the will of the American people, to have Republicans and Democrats both engaged, involved in that, not only in Washington in the Senate but Republicans and Democrats around the country. What we saw in this budget was a certain number of amendments that were accepted on the floor of the Senate, Republican amendments, all of which were stripped out in the conference committee with the House--which many of us predicted. But there were lots of good amendments that addressed key, core issues.
We had amendments that addressed the issue of climate change, which the door is left open to in this budget. We had amendments that addressed issues such as the deduction for charitable giving, which was an amendment I offered on the Senate floor. It was adopted by a vote of 94 to 3. That was struck in the conference.
We had amendments that were offered that were designed to protect those with incomes less than $250,000 a year from having tax increases in the budget. That was an Ensign amendment. That was stripped out. So any Republican input or involvement in this budget process was nullified by the work of the conference committee, the Democrats who led the conference between the House and the Senate. So we are left with a budget that has been sanitized of any of those protections against higher costs for energy, against higher taxes, and a whole range of other things--protection against losing the deduction that is available to people, the tax benefit available to people for charitable giving, that being stripped away and used to pay for other things.
The budget essentially now is a Democratic budget. My colleague from North Dakota was here earlier talking about how these problems were all inherited; that the spending all occurred on the past administration's watch and now they are just trying to clean up the mess.
I have to point out to my colleagues in the Senate and to the American people that there are certain givens I think we all would subscribe to, one being the fact that we did have a $5.8 trillion debt at the end of the last administration. Many of us have acknowledged that Republicans didn't do a good enough job when we were in charge of keeping Federal spending under control. But that does not negate the fact that in the next 5 years that $5.8 trillion debt is going to double. In 10 years it is going to triple. In fact, if we go back in the annals of American history, go back starting at the time of the Revolutionary War through the last Presidency, that of President George Bush, from George Washington to George Bush, the accumulated debt over that entire time period will be equaled by the public debt that America will pile up in the next 5 years. It will be tripled in the next 10 years. That is a staggering number.
When you start looking at doubling of the public debt in a 5-year timeframe, tripling in 10 years, when at the end of the 10 years we have $7 trillion in debt or 82 percent of our gross domestic product that is composed of publicly held debt, we have not seen that kind of number since the end of World War II, since 1948.
I would daresay, with all due respect to my colleague from North Dakota who made the point that these are all problems that were passed on by the previous administration, that it was not the Bush administration that put on the table and passed a trillion-dollar stimulus bill. I think it is fair to ask the question, is this trillion dollars in stimulus spending going to be carried on and extended and considered part of the baseline so it will create obligations and liabilities for our Government in the future?
We talked about $1 trillion on the floor of the Senate that actually, according to the CBO, when asked the question, if the spending in this bill is extended and not terminated, how much would it cost, the answer was $3 trillion--with interest, over $3 trillion. That was not a Bush administration policy, nor is the fact that the Omnibus appropriations bill that was passed earlier this year, which had an 8.3-percent increase in spending in it, which was more than double the rate of inflation in this country, nor does this more recently passed budget--is the Bush administration responsible for that? This is the budget that was put forward by the new administration, that was passed in the Senate without a Republican vote. It went to conference where any amendments that were adopted on the floor of the Senate that had been offered by Republicans were subsequently stripped out.
This budget is a statement of priorities and reflects the spending choices that are made by the new administration and by this Congress. So we cannot blame the past administration for the trillion-dollar stimulus which, if those programs are extended in the future, end up being not $1 trillion but $3 trillion. We cannot blame the past administration for the more than double rate of inflation increase in spending in the annual appropriations bills we passed earlier this year, and we cannot blame the past administration for a budget, a $3.6 trillion budget, that increases nondefense discretionary spending by 8.9 percent this year and piles mountains of debt on future generations.
If we look at the deficits--just the 5-year, which we are limited to--earlier, I used some 10-year numbers. But the 5-year numbers on the deficits we are going to accumulate--2009, the current fiscal year, almost $1.7 trillion; 2010, $1.2 trillion; 2013, $916 billion.
Incidentally, this year, 2009, as a percentage of GDP, that deficit is 12 percent--12 percent of our GDP. The benchmark for getting into the European Union is you cannot have a deficit, as a percentage of GDP, that exceeds 3 percent. Some of our European brothers, I assume, with the bad economy, are in excess of that now too, but the point is we are going to have a 12-percent deficit to GDP ratio which is four times the benchmark for entering the European Union.
The debt as a percentage of our GDP, the debt held by the public, starts at 55 percent this year, goes to 61 next year, 64 the year after, 66 the year after that, 67 the year after that--in 2014, 67 percent of public debt as a percentage of GDP, and if you extend it out for 10 years, which we saw in the original budget blueprint, we are talking about a debt that is 82 percent of our gross domestic product. That is not something for which the past administration is responsible. These are decisions that have been made by the present administration and this Congress when it comes to spending the American taxpayers' dollars.
So you have a stimulus bill which is a trillion dollars, and then again, as I said earlier, if those programs are extended in the future, it ends up being in excess of $3 trillion; you have an Omnibus appropriations bill that passed earlier this year that increased at more than twice the rate of inflation and a budget which increases nondefense discretionary spending in front of us today by 8.9 percent and adds, over the next 5 years, about $5 trillion, $5.5 trillion to the Federal debt. Those are decisions that are being made real-time.
A lot of my colleagues on the other side have a sort of Bush administration phobia. They want to talk about everything that has happened before. Well, there comes a point at which you own these decisions. Decisions have consequences, and there are consequences of the decisions that are being made here.
A lot of people believe that if we continue this rate of spending and taxing and borrowing, in the future, if we continue to pile up the interest on the debt--again, incidentally, at the end of the 10th year, we will spend more on interest on the debt than we actually spend on national defense, about $4 trillion over the course of the next 10 years in interest on the debt, or $52,000 for every household in America. That is just the interest on the debt.
A lot of people think the level of borrowing is going to lead inevitably to higher inflation down the road and therefore higher interest rates and all kinds of other bad economic outcomes that will put this Nation's economy in peril and make it more difficult for us to recover.
So if we are going to have a debate here in the Senate about this budget resolution and the conference report that came out, it should be about what is in front of us, not what has happened in the 8 years previous, because this budget is a budget that was presented and submitted by this administration, adopted by this Congress, adopted here in the Senate without a single Republican vote, then went into conference with the House of Representatives where any Republican amendments which were agreed to on the floor of the Senate, many of which got big votes: Well, just let them go ahead, vote for this stuff. We do not want to put out bad votes against these good amendments; we will strip them in the conference with the House. So those amendments, all of them, were stripped out. So we now have in front of us a budget that includes or makes possible the prospect of a climate change or the carbon tax proposal being done through reconciliation.
The Senator from North Dakota put out a statement that says: Assume that reconciliation will not be used for changes in legislation related to global climate change. Well, that is really nice, but it is a statement. The amendment that was offered by the Senator from Nebraska, Mr. Johanns, which was adopted here on the floor of the Senate, which got 67 votes, was binding, basically said that reconciliation would not be used for climate change legislation. It got an overwhelming vote here in the Senate. A lot of Democrats voted for it. It got stripped in the conference committee, which opens the door to a cap-and-tax proposal that, by some estimates, could cost the average family in this country over $3,000 a year in higher electricity costs. That is not a previous administration issue. This is a real-time budget. This is a real-time issue. These are decisions that are being made by the current administration and the current Congress, make no mistake about it.
The final point I wish to make is that in the context of this--and they have been coming down and saying: There is really no tax increase in this. Well, there is. Taxes are going to go up on a lot of people. Well, they may say it is high-income people, but there are a lot of small businesses that are going to be captured under that net. This is not just going to hit the high-income people because a lot of small businesses that are organized as LLCs or subchapter S's or in some way that allows the income they derive from their small business to flow through to their individual tax return are going to pay higher income tax rates. Instead of paying at 33 and 35 percent, they are going to pay at 40 and 42 percent. Taxes are going to go up on capital gains. Taxes are going to go up on dividends. There are tax increases in there, there is no question about that, and the American people are going to find that out very soon.
The other thing that did not happen in this budget, in this whole sort of pursuit of new Government spending--and there are reconciliation instructions in here for health care reform which can be very costly to the economy and which there is no way of paying for in the budget. It is just assumed at that point that they will come up with the revenue source for that. But you have a health care reconciliation instruction, a climate tax reconciliation instruction, all of which could cost the economy enormous amounts of money, and yet nothing was done in the budget to deal with the fundamental issue that is driving these deficits and this debt for years and years into the future, and that is entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. All of these programs on the mandatory side of the budget that continue to drive Government spending, to drive deficits and drive debts well into the future, there is nothing that is done to reduce the overall cost of these mandatory spending programs, these entitlement programs, or to reform them.
The President said we need to reform these and look at all of these entitlement programs. Well, this budget does nothing of the sort. All it does is increase spending, increase taxes, and add mountains and mountains to the public debt--a debt that we hand off to future generations.
So I hope my colleagues will reject and vote down this conference report. It would have been better, it would have been a much improved product had some of the amendments my colleagues on the Republican side had adopted when it was debated here in the Senate been retained in the conference committee. But they weren't. They have been struck, all of them struck, many of which passed by large margins. As I said, I had a couple of amendments on the floor, one with 89 votes and another was 94 votes. You would think, when the Senate makes that kind of statement in support of a particular amendment or policy, you might want to think about retaining that in the conference. Those were struck. The amendment by my colleague from Nebraska, Senator Johanns, which got 67 votes, which directed the conferees not to use reconciliation for climate change legislation, was struck from the conference report.
That is unfortunate. This could have been a better budget. It wouldn't have been a good budget because it still spends too much, taxes too much, and borrows too much, but it certainly would have been improved had some of those amendments been retained.
So I urge my colleagues to vote against this, and I hope, now that this budget is going to pass here and we start doing appropriations bills, that this Congress will get serious about controlling Federal spending, about
doing the serious work that is necessary to get our fiscal house in order. We cannot afford to continue to pass on these mountains and mountains of debt to future generations. It is not fair to them, and it is not fair to the American taxpayer. It is high time we started focusing on this issue and did something about it.
I yield the floor.
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