Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, we have been bombarded with some pretty big numbers lately. Our total national debt recently topped $13 trillion. In 5 years, it is expected to pass $20 trillion. This fiscal year alone, the Federal Government plans to run a deficit of $1.4 trillion. In other words, we are borrowing 41 cents out of every $1 we spend.

The numbers are mind blowing. We cannot even wrap our heads around the immensity of these numbers that run into the trillions. But they should be a very big red flag indicating that something--something--has gone very wrong here in Washington.

The American people are struggling with high unemployment and a difficult economy, trying to make ends meet. The American Government--their government--ought to be doing what it can to balance its own budget, not spending like drunken sailors in a way that will put the future of many American families at risk.

I hear it in my State. I know most of my colleagues do. I hear it as I drive around the country. There is a palpable fear that this enormous burden of debt is going to crush us.

The Federal budget for 2010 is already 24 percent higher than it was in 2008. How many families are able to increase their spending by 24 percent over a 2-year period? Congress has to realize what the American people already know: Our current rate of spending is unsustainable. There is an old saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail. Well, this administration and the Democratic leadership of Congress seem to think the only tool they have is a checkbook and every problem can be solved with more money.

But all of this reckless spending is not solving the problems it was meant to solve. If you recall, the trillion dollar stimulus was supposed to create jobs and get the economy growing again. Unfortunately, it has not worked that way.

Look at the latest jobs report for last month. We actually lost 125,000 total jobs across the country. Where I come from, that is known as heading in the wrong direction. Look as the massive health care law passed earlier this year. When the other side was jamming this bill through the Senate, they said, even though it would cost $2.5 trillion, it would actually bring down--down--our spending on health care and lower the deficit over time.

In the past few weeks, however, we have gotten new estimates that the law will cost billions more than was thought a few months ago. On top of that, health care spending is expected to rise even faster as a result of the law than if we had done nothing at all.

Time after time after time that is what we have seen: more spending, more debt, and a bill we will hand to our children--all because we cannot live within our means and we refuse to make the tough choices we were elected to make.

The irresponsible spending and borrowing that is making our mountain of debt bigger every day has to stop. Today, I am introducing a bill entitled the Deficit Reduction and Budget Reform Act that will take the first steps toward reining in our spending. It is high time we show the American taxpayers we are responsible stewards not just of their tax dollars but of the future of this country.

The goal here is to reform the budget process and to reduce our structural deficits so we will live within our means. My proposal is a three-legged stool that aims to support our country and economy while reducing the burden our rapidly expanding government places on American families and businesses.

The first proposal is to create a new standing joint committee of Congress for budget deficit reduction. The committee would be required to put forward a plan to cut the deficit by 10 percent every budget cycle, and to do it without raising taxes. This would be Members of Congress--both parties--taking responsibility and not punting the job to outsiders.

This bill would then receive expedited consideration in both Chambers of Congress. We have 26 committees and subcommittees in Congress that are dedicated to spending tax dollars. We should have at least one dedicated to saving tax dollars.

Second, to make sure those changes have a better chance of success in practice, I am proposing additional reforms to the budget process. Crucially, we would reform pay-go rules to prevent the double counting of new revenues or reduced spending in trust funds for the purpose of offsetting other expenditures.

When pay-go rules were set up earlier this year, they allowed for these kinds of gimmicks that have been used over and over to subvert the budget responsibility the rules were meant to impose.

More than $600 billion in trust fund offsets was used to pass the health care reform bill, and an attempt was made to increase the per-barrel tax for the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to offset other unrelated measures. By preventing these changes from being used as an offset under pay-go rules, this provision would end the practice of double counting these spending reductions and revenue increases.

Then we would add teeth to the budget by making it a binding joint resolution signed into law by the President. This would force the administration and Congress to work more closely together, and Congress would have less flexibility to violate the nonbinding resolutions we currently use.

My legislation would also establish a biennial budget timeline to give Congress more time for oversight and to determine whether our spending is doing what it is supposed to do.

I will simply point out that it seems to me the way we do the budget process currently is broken. In the last 34 years, I think there have been 4 times when all of the appropriations bills have been passed by the Congress on time, according to schedule. If you look at the number of budgets that have been passed here in the past few years, there have been a lot of years when we have not passed budgets at all.

It seems to me it would make sense--in an even-numbered year, when there is an election going to be held--that we ought to do oversight, that we ought to be looking at ways to save taxpayer money rather than spend taxpayer money. Then we could do the budget in the odd-numbered years, after an election, so we have an opportunity to do the appropriations bills and go through the budget process in the odd-numbered year, so when the even-numbered year comes around again we are not consumed with trying to spend money to attract some constituency to vote for us in an election year, but, rather, we are focused on oversight and on ways we could actually save the taxpayers money as opposed to spending it.

So a biennial budget process, budget timeline, is something this bill would also do. When Congress inevitably resorts to pork-barrel politics that inflates our budgets, we need a legislative line-item veto to allow the President to cut them out and to send a more responsible budget back to Congress for an up-or-down vote. Governors of most States, including my State of South Dakota, have some kind of a line-item veto. The President ought to have that power as well.

Third, on top of these vital systemic changes, we need to take control of the government's outrageous spending. My bill would impose a 10-year spending freeze to cap the Federal Government's discretionary spending at the level it was in fiscal year 2008, adjusted for inflation. I said earlier that between 2008 and 2010, Federal spending had increased 24 percent, at a time when inflation in this country was about 3.5 percent. If we take that baseline back to that 2008 level and index it for inflation every year for the next 10 years, we can save the taxpayers literally hundreds of billions of dollars.

Beyond that freeze, we should end the failed stimulus program and reclaim any money remaining unspent and unobligated and apply it to the Federal debt.

Those are not the only possible answers, and many are not new. Many of these are ideas my Republican colleagues and I have proposed and that we fought for in the past. We will keep fighting for them because they are the kinds of things we need to do to break the back of this budget problem we are fighting.

The government's current level of borrowing, this out-of-control spending, and this amount of taxation are too much for our economy and our taxpayers to bear. What may be even more troubling is the point that was made by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike Mullen. He said the biggest threat to our national security is our debt, not al-Qaida, not Iran's nuclear program, not Russian spies, but the debt Congress itself has created.

It does not have to be this way. My plan is a responsible approach that takes prudent but manageable steps to get our spending under control and to start to draw down our debt. It provides concrete savings of nearly a trillion dollars, and it puts in place a framework to help us save trillions more over time.

It is easy to say: I will be responsible tomorrow, but first I want to spend a little more today. Well, there will always be something that seems important to spend tax dollars on, and if we keep taking that same old approach that the other side has been pushing since they took control of Congress in 2007, we will be waiting for fiscal responsibility forever.

Tackling our outrageous national debt is not a priority we should put off until the long term, after the debt has gone up even higher and higher and higher than it is today. It needs to be a priority now.

I will also note that we cannot afford the old trick where the President calls for spending cuts in theory but then happily signs congressional spending bills that do not save a dime. We have to move beyond the same old political games and the same old phony rhetoric. We need real commitment to making a real difference.

There is another old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The President and the Democratic leadership of Congress want to keep doing the same thing over and over: borrowing money, spending too much, and then borrowing even more.

But thinking that somehow with all that borrowing and spending we will buy our way out of the hole we are in, that is insanity. In reality, all we are doing is digging ourselves deeper and deeper into debt.

I am going to conclude by urging my colleagues to take up this legislation I am introducing and to take that first crucial step to fiscal responsibility. The American people expect us to take our debt seriously, and it is high time we lived up to that expectation.

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