Airport and Airway Extension Act of 2010--Resumed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise tonight to share some of my concerns about the package that has been negotiated between the President and the Republicans and has now been presented here on the floor of the Senate.

First, I wish to emphasize the size of the decision that is going to be made in the next couple of days. This deficit spending stimulus package is a $1 trillion package. Let's turn the clock back to the debate over the stimulus package we had in 2009. That stimulus was about $800 billion--only 80 percent of the size of this package. That stimulus had in it direct construction jobs across America. Every community, every county benefited from an increase in production. It also had the making work pay tax deduction. It had a host of small business tax deductions, and it had direct assistance to our States to enable them to meet some of the crises they were experiencing in health care and in education, so we could keep our schools across America open during this great Bush recession.

I have listened over the last year and a half to tremendous attacks on that stimulus package. Yet this is a much larger decision. This is a $1 trillion decision, and it is a package that much less thought has gone into. We have this package here on the floor, but we haven't actually gotten the paper in our hands as to what is in it. We have to rely on newspaper accounts as to what is going to be in it.

Tonight, in offices across this Nation, folks are trying to get it off the Internet, and they are going to be trying to analyze it and understand it. We know the basic outlines, and the basic outlines raise a significant number of concerns. I encourage our citizens to look at this package over the weekend and to share their concerns with their Congressmen and Congresswomen and certainly with their Senators.

This is a $1 trillion deficit. There has been a lot of talk on the floor not only about the stimulus last year but about the size of our national debt. This is a $1 trillion increase in our national debt. I would think that is something we would be tearing apart and looking at every part of it and asking if each dollar is being spent to the maximum effect. We should have amendments that say: Hey, we can create a lot more jobs if we spend these few million dollars over here rather than here, so that every dollar makes a maximum impact in putting America back to work. But not a single amendment is going to be allowed on this bill, as far as we are aware tonight. I believe that in a decision of this magnitude, there should be amendments that compare the effect of spending money here versus there and about what is going to have the greatest impact in a favorable way for America.

My good colleague from Vermont pointed out that this reduces the flow of resources into Social Security. I think we should have an extensive debate about coming to rely on the general fund, which is what the administration wants to do. They are going to substitute payroll revenue for general fund revenue. I think we should have a substantial debate about depending upon general revenue to supply funds to the Social Security fund.

Let me explain this. The approximately $120 billion that will flow into Social Security from the general fund under this program comes from borrowed funds. Those borrowed funds come primarily from China. So Social Security--a program for Americans in which we save our own money and invest that money so there can be a very modest steady income in the retirement years--now is going to rely upon borrowed funds from China. That is the American retirement plan? We should be debating that on the floor of the Senate, and it should be an extensive debate, not a debate in which cloture is going to be rushed on Monday and then have 30 hours split among 100 Members, because we are spending $1 trillion of deficit money under this plan.

My first main concern is that we are taking a step to greatly increase the national debt with this plan. My second concern is this plan 100 percent endorses the Bush tax structure that has so deeply damaged our Nation. Many of you will recall that when the economy grew under President Bush II, the living wages of working Americans actually failed to increase. The economy grew but the wages didn't grow for working Americans. In addition, we doubled our national debt.

That is what happens when we say we are going to create a plan that gives away our national treasure to the most affluent. We are going to do so in a manner that doesn't create living wage jobs, doesn't reward the productivity of American workers.

I am going to tell you that we made a major decision in about 1974, about the year I graduated from high school, and that was to adopt strategies, which failed, to link the productivity of American workers to their compensation. Up until that point in the postwar era, as our productivity as a nation grew, the financial success of our working families grew along with that increase in productivity. But since 1974, the tremendous, spectacular increase in the productivity and national wealth of our Nation has not been shared with the workers of our Nation. Is that the type of America we want, where many work to make this Nation a success and do not share in the reward? The Bush tax cut structure is the ultimate embodiment of that philosophy of carving off the national treasure for the very few.

I do not think our success as a nation should be measured by the success of our wealthiest families. I applaud them for their entrepreneurship. I applaud them when the strategies to create companies succeed. But it is up to us to create a structure that says, as the work product increases we are going to enable all families to thrive--not for a few to thrive spectacularly while everyone else stays on a level plain.

Back in my home community, the community in which I grew up, a working class community of three-bedroom ranch houses, so many children now consider it a success if they can simply afford to purchase their parents' home because it is only their parents' home, with the assistance from their parents, that they can afford on a working American family's salary because while the worker's share of the national income has not increased with productivity, housing prices have gone up enormously, making it harder and harder for a working family to afford a home.

Embodied in these Bush breaks that have so deeply damaged our Nation we have a very interesting feature, and that is that under this plan President Obama has proposed with the Republicans--it says we are going to extend breaks not just so the wealthiest can enjoy the same breaks on their first $1 million that others receive for the money they are earning up to $1 million, but bonus breaks on top of that.

Let me give you a sense of that. The amount of the tax break that is given to everyone who earns their first $1 million is about $43,000. Let's round it off: $40,000. Under this plan, those families earning over $1 million receive an average of an additional bonus of $100,000 per taxpayer, a $100,000 bonus to the most successful families in the country. That is pretty generous. That is enormously generous. Are we going to be generous with our working families? Unfortunately, no. Under this plan a family earning in the vicinity of $40,000 to $50,000 gets about $1,700. A family that earns $40,000 or less gets somewhere in the nature of $1,000. So $1,000 for a working family versus $43,000 plus a $100,000 bonus for our wealthiest families in America.

Let's see, $1,000; $143,000. There is very little to those who are building the success and wealth of our Nation through the productivity of our workmanship, and a whole lot to those who are spectacularly wealthy already.

The structure of the capital gains tax under this proposal and the structure of the estate tax add to the impact of the income tax brackets I was just describing. If you add it all up, and if you have been spectacularly successful through this recession, then you can count on a whole lot of help, generous gifts from Uncle Sam. If you have been struggling and you are earning near minimum wage, or maybe you are working 60 hours a week, three jobs, each 20 hours earning a minimum wage, you get about $1,000 under this plan. That sort of reinforcement of the fundamental disparity between working families and those who are best off is not healthy for America. That does not build the financial foundation so families can afford to give their children substantial opportunities.

The America in which I grew up, the vision of my father and mother's generation was that we would have an America with opportunity for every family. We are leaving that vision behind with this bill.

Let me turn to my next main concern. The $1 trillion package is designed to be a stimulus. But has it been designed well, to spend every tax dollar in a smart way? There are many folks in this Chamber who say they are fiscal conservatives. I am a fiscal conservative because I believe every dollar needs to be spent in a smart way. Let's test this.

Parts of this package get an A, and parts of this package get an F. The part that gets an A is unemployment insurance. This is important and fundamental to our families. We have always had the philosophy that when there are no jobs to be had, when people cannot get a job through no fault of their own, we are going to extend unemployment benefits to help families through that rough time. We have always done it, Democrats and Republicans, until this year when our Republicans have turned their backs on working families and said: Not now. We will not support extending support unless we take it away from some other important part of the budget. But, they said, we will support $100,000 bonuses without taking anything away from anyone else.

That unity of support for our working families during hard times disappeared this year. That is too bad. That is a tragedy.

The fundamental premise has been, by my colleagues across the aisle: We are going to hold those families hostage to get a $100,000 bonus on top of avery generous basic tax break for the wealthiest, hold working families hostage for a lot of help for the very few at the very top. Those bonus tax breaks are rated dead last by the Congressional Budget Office in creating jobs in this Nation. Unemployment assistance is rated at the top, the most effective way of creating jobs in this Nation--and it should be in any package. It should be extended and has been extended in a bipartisan manner in the past until this year when, unfortunately, it seems that my colleagues across the aisle became all about the few and not about helping families when there are no jobs.

There is great irony in this because we don't have jobs in this Nation because of the great Bush recession created by my friends across the aisle. First of all, they deregulated the retail mortgages, and they allowed predatory loans. Those predatory loans meant, according to the Wall Street Journal, 60 percent of the families in America who qualified for a basic, amortizing, inexpensive, prime mortgage were steered into subprime mortgages. Then my good friends said: Let's let Wall Street do whatever it wants in packaging these mortgages. Let's end the oversight and let's end the caps on leverage. So they created securities; that is, packages of mortgages. And they sold the rights to those packages. Those securities were doomed to blow up when the predatory features of the mortgages kicked in after 2 years and interest rates jumped from 4.5 percent to 9 percent.

We have been dealing, since I came into office in the Senate, with the tremendous economic bomb produced by the Bush policies, the great Bush recession that created the unemployment so that people cannot get jobs. Now the same folks who created that disaster are saying: We are not going to help those who are being hurt by the disaster we created. It is like setting your house on fire and then cutting off the water to the fire hose.

If my Republican friends are so determined to adopt the very worst job-creating strategy, we should take it out of this bill, or at least have a debate on this floor of the Senate about whether we put it in the worst strategy or move those funds over here to the best strategy or to some other good job-creating strategy. Maybe all the features don't need to be As or A-pluses. But we have the Republican F plan because it is the worst as rated by the CBO. We have the Democratic A plan, support for the uninsured--it should be in here.

What about some of the other things? One of the very best ways to get our country going is low-cost loans to create energy-saving renovations in homes and buildings. It creates a tremendous number of jobs for dollars spent because it is a low-cost jobs program, not a grant program. It is ranked very high in the number of jobs it creates. We have a construction industry in this country that would love to go to work, and we have three bills sitting here before the Senate.

We have the HOME Star bill for families to do energy saving renovations to their home. We have the Building Star bill to allow commercial buildings, office suites, industrial site buildings to be improved in energy renovation. The loans are paid back through the energy savings. So it creates a long-term positive in terms of the energy strategy of this Nation. It works very well for the families, very well for the businesses, and puts the construction industry back to work. That is the type of program we should be weighing against the F plan--that is from A to F, F for last, F for failure, F in CBO's analysis for the worst job-creating plan, which is what the Republicans have forced into this package.

Without amendments to this package, we cannot have that debate. There is a tradition of saying the Senate is the world's greatest deliberative body. Don't we have to have amendments to do that? Don't we have to have a debate on where to put different pieces of this puzzle to do that? I have been advocating for a guaranteed way to make sure the minority and the majority get to have amendments on this floor.

I happen to be a member of the majority right now, but I will be a member of the minority down the road--if I am here long enough, and I guess that is a big if--because the pendulum swings back and forth. But to be accountable before the people of this Nation, amendments have to be offered and debate has to be held and votes have to be taken and that is not being done on this bill as far as we know.

I know there is a possibility. I praise leaders of both sides in advance if they work out a deal that everyone can offer their amendments, or even a modest number of amendments on both sides.

Because that is the way it should be on the floor. That is what I have been advocating, that we have regular order that allows amendments. But I am afraid that Monday will come, that a deal will not get worked out, and we will not have the ability to have that debate, will not have the ability to be transparent before the American people in where we stand.

My good colleague from Vermont has shared a concern I also share; that is, the payroll tax being cut off, snuffed out as a supply of Social Security, that our retirement plan that we pay for ourselves is being changed to a retirement plan financed by China.

So the national debt, $1 trillion--that is a concern. The structure of the Bush tax breaks that so deeply damaged our Nation over the last decade being extended into the next decade is a major concern, as is the poor design of the stimulus where every dollar has not been tested against its ability to create jobs at a time we desperately need jobs, and the change in our funding of Social Security, and it is dependent upon Chinese funds. Those items need to be debated. They are profound concerns. Maybe there are answers that make sense. I look forward to hearing such answers, if they exist. I would like to see those answers tested through amendments offered on this floor.

I have an amendment I would like to see offered on the floor. I have an amendment that says: Take the $100,000 bonus breaks for the wealthiest 2 percent and instead dedicate that to Social Security. Let's make sure our seniors who need basic support in their retirement are well-secured before handing out $100,000 bonus breaks to the very few. Well, I do not know if that would pass on this floor. I do not know where people would stand. But I know people should have to declare where they stand so the voters can decide if they like it or not, so the voters can call and say: We would encourage you to vote this way or that way.

The other thing I like about that particular approach is it says: If we are going to reduce the payroll tax in the short term to create jobs, we are going to do something else to make sure our Social Security does not depend on funds from China. I would like to see that debate.

I would like to see the energy tax credits debated. They are not in this package as of now, as far as we know. Energy tax credits pay us back in a number of ways. The first is that currently we import a tremendous amount of oil from the Middle East and from Venezuela, from Nigeria, from places that do not necessarily share our national outlook. A lot of that money ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations.

Military security analysts now say this is the first set of wars we are in right now--the first wars in which we are funding both sides. And how are we doing that? Through our energy policies which send funds to countries that then pass on funds to terrorists. That is not smart. It makes more sense to free our energy here at home.

I will tell you something else. In addition to increasing our national security and spending those dollars here at home on energy we create ourselves, red, white, and blue American energy, that keeps those dollars here in our communities, and when those dollars stay in our communities, they create jobs in our communities. It means families get jobs, and they spend the money from those jobs in these communities. So it cycles through into the retail stores, into the grocery markets, keeping those dollars here creating jobs rather than shipping them overseas for oil.

It does another thing as well; that is, it reduces our energy consumption from abroad, which largely means shifting from oil to clean sources. And those clean sources will put less carbon dioxide in the air. That means we do a much better job being good stewards of our planet.

So energy tax credits encourage clean energy, keep jobs here, improving our national security and being good stewards of the planet. Why don't we have that debate on the floor of this Senate before we send this bill back to the House?

Another colleague has amendments that say: OK, we are going to vote on a trillion-dollar stimulus package that creates a trillion-dollar debt. Shouldn't we tie it to some kind of trigger for fiscal responsibility that will kick in maybe 24 months out so we do not head recklessly down a path into extraordinary debt that deeply damages our Nation even further?

So fiscal responsibility--tie some fiscal responsibility measures to this package. That is a good idea. I applaud my colleague from Oregon who has raised that idea, Senator Wyden, who has done a lot of work on how we can create fiscal responsibility tied to a package going through now. It will say something to the international financiers that this short-term deficit spending is going to be marked by substantial fiscal discipline, and that in itself may serve other things, such as keeping the interest rate low that we pay, so fewer of our dollars go out in interest.

These ideas, these amendments deserve a debate on this major decision facing this body over the next few days.

I will close by saying that I am deeply concerned--deeply concerned--about the deficit and the debt. I am deeply concerned about the Bush tax breaks that have done so much damage and are being extended into the next decade. I am deeply concerned about the poor design of the stimulus, deeply concerned about Social Security being made dependent upon borrowing from China, deeply concerned that this package is being put together and may not have the opportunity to have the debate over elements that should be debated because if they do not stand up on the floor of the Senate in debate, they do not belong in this package.

So with that, I say to our friends across the Nation, you have a few days only to weigh in. Please do weigh in. Let us hear your voice. Let us consider your views. And let us fully deliberate on this package before we pass it.

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