Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2010--Continued
Floor Speech
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2010--Continued -- (Senate - July 07, 2009)
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CAP AND TRADE
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, like many of my colleagues, last week, over the Fourth of July break, I spent much of the week traveling in my State of South Dakota. Many of my colleagues were in their individual States and probably heard a lot from their constituents about what they perceive to be the challenges facing our country's economy. First and foremost is jobs and the economy.
I think there is a real concern--and rightly so--about in which direction the economy is headed and what are the things Congress ought to properly be focused on, and I think that discussion is always informed by the American people by commonsense realizations. One realization is that you cannot spend money you don't have. That is something I think the American people get very clearly, largely because that is their reality. They cannot spend money they don't have. They have to live within a budget. The same is true with many small businesses. The second realization is that when you borrow money, someday you have to pay it back. You cannot continue to borrow endlessly and rack up more and more debt. At some point, there is an end to that. Certainly, that is true for family budgets and small business budgets. The only place it is evidently not true is in Washington, DC, where we continue to borrow and spend and put massive amounts of borrowing and debt upon future generations. Even most State governments--mine included--have balanced budget amendments that require them in any given year to make sure the revenues they take in match up with expenses. If they don't do that in South Dakota, the legislature has to stay until the budget is balanced. So most Americans, as they observe what is happening in Washington these days, are increasingly concerned by the massive amounts of spending and borrowing and, frankly, the taxes they perceive to be in their future as well.
One of the things that is clear to me in doing parades and public events over the Fourth of July break is how much people picked up on the debate about the cap-and-trade bill, which is a national energy tax on the American people. It passed in the House a little over a week ago--before the break--by a seven-vote margin. There was big pressure to move it very quickly and jam it through the process. It was over 1,200 pages long. One amendment was 300 pages long. There weren't many Members of the House--before the bill passed--who had an opportunity to review it and study it closely to determine what the ramifications will be on their constituents if the bill passed. Yet it did. It was a very close vote. At some point, it will be considered by the Senate.
The one thing we know, at a minimum, is that we can debate about how much or how big the cost of that bill will be, but we do know it is going to impose significant increases in costs on the American public for power, whether it is electricity, fuel, natural gas, or home heating oil--the things the American people depend upon every single day for their very existence. They are going to see the cost of those things go up if this cap-and-trade bill passes. We have seen different estimates by different organizations. The most recent one was done by the CBO, which concluded that it will have a $700 billion impact. I think that if you reduced it to a per-family cost, it ends up being several hundred dollars a year in increased rates that they are going to pay. I argue that it will be much higher for people in the Midwest, where I come from, because of the way we derive our power. Most of it comes from coal-fired power. It is true that we get a good amount in South Dakota and other States around us get even more from those sources. There will be additional costs imposed upon the people in the Midwest, where the people on the west or east coasts may not see their costs go up as much. This will disproportionately impact people in the heartland, but everybody's electricity costs and fuel costs are going up if this passes.
The American people are asking: OK, if you are going to put a massive new tax on us with a new energy tax, what kinds of benefits do we derive? I think there is increasing concern and questions being raised about whether the environmental benefit that would be derived as a result of this massive new tax on energy in this country would be in any way close to the cost that would be associated with it. I think most Americans have concluded that it will not. Most of the data bears that out. Other countries in the world are not going to participate in this system, and America will be unilaterally implementing this regime, if passed, and the Americans will pay the costs for little benefit.
There are many ways you can get reduction in carbon emissions, and we are all looking for ways to reduce pollutants in the atmosphere. You can give incentives and drive investment in certain directions, and we could make more use of nuclear power, which is clean, green energy--something we do very little of relative to our counterparts in other parts of the world. France gets 80 percent of its power from nuclear energy. There is no reason why the United States could not turn to that clean, green energy source, as well as renewable energy sources that we have an abundance of in my part of the country, such as wind energy. If you put in incentives and drive investment in that direction, you can achieve the same ends without putting the big cap, top-down government mandate on the American economy at an enormous cost to the American consumers.
HEALTH CARE
That is the issue, I would say, probably as much as anything else I have heard people talk about, but not far behind it was this notion that the government is now going to take over one-sixth of our economy because of the legislation that is moving through the Congress right now that would ``reform'' our health care system.
It is, I guess, no surprise to most Americans that we spend a lot on health care. Most of us would like to see us spend less on health care. Many of us think we can do that, that we can get costs under control, that we can do it through reforms that preserve what is good about the American health care system, that doesn't copy what is happening in other places around the world, Europe being an example, where care is rationed, where people don't have access to the types of therapies and treatments because the government decides what procedures are going to be covered, which procedures are cost-effective.
Those are decisions made by government. In this country, those are decisions made by patients and doctors, by physicians, by health care providers and those they serve. We believe that is a basic relationship we ought to preserve when we talk about reforming our health care system.
But most Americans are very concerned that the government may take over one-sixth of the American economy and run it, imposing the government in the place of, as I said before, what has typically been a relationship between physicians and patients.
What I would argue is that whether it is the issue of new energy taxes on the American consumer, whether it is the issue of the government taking over the health care system in this country at a minimum cost of $1 trillion--there was a CBO Congressional Budget Office report that came out recently that said the new plan the Democrats are unveiling may only be $600 billion, but it also doesn't include many of the most costly parts of the plan that we expect the Democrats to put on the floor of the Senate at some point in the not too distant future.
I will simply say again that based on the feedback I got from people across this country and people across South Dakota in particular over the break, the government takeover of health care in this country is something with which they are very uncomfortable, and they don't want to pay trillions of dollars in new taxes to make that possible.
If you talk about the amount of spending that is going on, the amount of borrowing we are doing from future generations, I think most Americans come back to those two basic principles I mentioned earlier, what I call our sort of commonsense conclusions that the American people come to. One is, you cannot spend money you do not have, and they see Washington doing that every single day; that when you borrow money, at some point you have to pay it back. And there is borrowing going on here right now like there is no tomorrow.
The health care entitlement program, if passed, would be a minimum of $1 trillion in new spending and would either have to be financed by tax increases, by revenue raisers the economy is going to pay for at a time we can least afford it, or by borrowing at a time when we are running over the next decade at least on average $1 trillion a year in deficits.
We cannot continue on this path. It is unsustainable. I believe the American people are coming to that realization. I hope the Senate will put the brakes on this energy tax, will put the brakes on this massive rush to take over one-sixth of our economy by taking over the health care system in this country.
I believe as the American people start to weigh in to this debate those of us in Washington who are in positions to make some of these policies and shape some of these policies will be getting an earful, and I hope so because we need to put the brakes on this massive takeover of the health care system, and we need to put the brakes on this cap and trade, this energy tax imposed on the American people, if it is passed in the Senate as it was a week ago in the House of Representatives.
I hope we can stop those things. I hope at least we can bring some sense to the debate about health care that does reform our system, that does get costs under control, that does not allow the government to get in the way of making decisions that rightfully ought to be made by patients and their doctors.
I yield the floor and yield back the remainder of my time.
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