Important Public Issues

Floor Speech

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I rise to speak about the issues that I think are most important to the American public. I appreciated the opportunity I had last evening, along with the Presiding Officer, to sit and listen to the President's State of the Union Address, which is an annual rite of passage where the President lays out his blueprint and his vision for the next year. In those remarks he did, as he did last year, touch on a number of themes that I think speak to issues that are important for the country to face.

Certainly, there were statements in that speech I agree with, in terms of the things he said we need to be focused on. There are some statements with which I did not agree. But in terms of the broader agenda, what strikes me about the speech is he talked about the need for tax reform, which is something I agree with. I think it is an issue of competitiveness. He talked about medical malpractice reform, which is something many of us have been trying to get to be part of the health care debate in this country for a long time. Unfortunately, that got left on the cutting room floor last year. He talked about strengthening Social Security and entitlement reform, also a critical priority if we are serious about getting spending and debt under control. He also talked about regulatory reform, looking at government reform and the types of actions we might be able to take to streamline or shrink or make more efficient the Federal Government. He also talked about the importance of enacting trade agreements, and I could not agree more. I think trade is a critical part of our economy. Export opportunities for businesses in this country would create

economic growth. It would create jobs. Unfortunately, again, those are trade agreements that have been stalled out here for some time in the Congress.

What strikes me about the speech is this. Last year, we heard a lot of the same themes. The President this year, I forgot to mention, talked about a 5-year freeze on spending. Last year, he talked about a 3-year freeze on spending. He talked about trade agreements 1 year ago. Many of those same themes were struck 1 year ago. Yet we have not seen the results of the rhetoric. What I would argue to the American people and to all my colleagues is, it is important that we judge people not by their rhetoric but by their actions. Don't watch what we say, watch what we do. I think that is true of anyone in public life. We all need to be judged by what we do and whether we are following through with what we say we are going to do.

So when the President talks about those priorities, I could not agree more. But, frankly, in order for any of those things to happen, it is going to take Presidential leadership. If we are going to do something on tax reform, if we are going to do something on entitlement reform, if we are going to do something about spending and debt, the President is going to have to step forward with bold proposals in order to accomplish that because bold things, big things, need to be done on a bipartisan basis.

The opposite example of that we saw a year ago, when the health care reform bill was being debated on the floor of the Senate. This is something that impacts literally one-sixth of the American economy. Yet you had a bill that passed the Senate without a single Republican vote. In fact, in most cases Republicans were not included, were not consulted, did not have input into that legislation. So you had a bill that literally impacts one-sixth of the American economy pass out of this Chamber on a party-line vote. That is historic. Because in most cases, if you look throughout our Nation's history, when this country needs to do big things, there is a bipartisan effort to try to get a bill that can attract broad bipartisan support.

So as much as I support many of the things the President said last night, I would argue that the proof is in the pudding. We are going to wait and see now whether his actions comport with his words because the talk about spending and debt rings hollow if, in fact, you are not willing to take on spending in this country, spending in our government, and willing to take on the issue of entitlement reform. In fact, notwithstanding the President's talk last year about a 3-year freeze on spending, we saw the largest buildup, the most massive expansion of government we have seen literally since the 1960s.

The health care bill is a $2 1/2 trillion new expenditure for the Federal Government when it is fully implemented, at a cost, I believe, to be much larger than that over time when you start seeing these costs pile up and more and more people shifted over into the government program.

Hopefully, we are going to have a vote here in the Senate. I believe we will have a vote. Our leader has indicated that we will get a vote on repealing health care reform. In my view, before this begins to get implemented, it would make sense to throw it overboard and start over and do this right and do it in a way that attracts bipartisan support and actually does something to drive down the cost of health care rather than increasing it because what we have seen already is what we predicted would happen; that is, insurance rates are going up, not down. The massive taxes on that bill, of course, get passed on, so consumers end up paying more for their health care, not less. I would argue that we are going to see some disastrous results from some of the pay-fors in the bill.

The so-called CLASS Act, which is another new entitlement program, is something that even the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, a Democratic chairman, a year ago when this was being debated, said is a Ponzi scheme of the highest order, something Bernie Madoff would be proud of. It has a tail on it that is going to create deficits in the outyears and make the financial fiscal picture we face even worse.

There are so many things about this bill that argue for us starting over and doing it right. But I want to say this morning, because I want to focus specifically on this issue of spending and debt, that much has been made of the fact that we are going to have a vote coming up. On March 4, the continuing resolution expires, at which point we will have to decide what we are going to do in terms of funding the government. I hope that debate or the lead-up to that vote sparks a debate about spending because if we don't start getting spending under control, this problem we have continues to snowball. We have a $14.3 trillion debt.

The other point I would make is there is another big vote looming sometime between late March and early May--in the April timeframe most likely--where we are going to have to raise the debt limit. We are already $14.3 trillion in debt as a nation, and we are going to have to extend the nation's borrowing authority above that so that we can finance the government. We have maxed out the credit card. We cannot do this any longer. We don't have the luxury of time. When we are facing a $14.3 trillion debt, much of which we owe to other countries around the world, we put ourselves at great peril. We put our economy at great peril.

I would argue it is a national security issue, and I am not the only one saying that. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike Mullen, said a few months back that the greatest threat to America's national security is our national debt. That is the top ranking military official in this country saying it is not the--when we talk about the greatest threat to America's national security, he could have talked about al-Qaida, he could have talked about the Iranian nuclear program, he could have talked about China, he could have talked about North Korea. But what did he say? The greatest threat to America's national security is our national debt. That speaks volumes about what we need to be focused on and what we as public officials here in the Senate need to devote our energies to.

So when we think about that, there are a couple of things that, obviously, we can do. I have advocated, as have others, that we go back to the 2008 spending levels because in the last 2 years, we have seen spending on the non-national security discretionary part of the budget increase by 21 percent, at a time when inflation in the overall economy is 2 percent. So the government has grown at 10 times the rate of inflation in the last 2 years.

When the President talks about freezing spending this year, he is, in my view, dealing with an issue that really--the only analogy I can use--is like closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out. We have a major problem. We had a dramatic runup in spending in the last 2 years, and freezing it now will enshrine and lock in to the baseline that massive increase in spending.

If we go back to the 2008 levels, it will be painful, but we don't have the luxury of not dealing with this now. It is going to be painful, but it is going to be necessary if we are serious about providing a better future for our children and grandchildren. The alternative is that we continue to run up these trillion-dollar, $1.5 trillion deficits year over year over year, adding significantly more to that debt and putting ourselves on a trajectory when I think our economy is in great peril in the future.

That is one aspect of it. We talk about the non-national security discretionary part of the budget. Of course, the national security part of the budget is already being scrutinized and scrubbed. The Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has made it clear that they are going to try to find savings and efficiencies in there to the tune--in fact, I think they have already determined they can save somewhere on the order of $150 to $170 billion in the defense budget over the next 5 years. But then you have this other part of the budget, the entitlement programs--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--which, of course, Medicare and Medicaid are driven by health care costs, and until we figure out what we are going to do on health care to rein that in, to get that cost under control, it is going to be complicated to try to fix. But that being said, I think that is what argues for actually putting remedies in place that will put downward pressure on health care costs, on utilization, so we can bring health care costs back under control.

There are a number of good ideas out there about how to do that. The debt commission made some recommendations, although most in the area of Medicare and Medicaid were largely cosmetic because they couldn't come to an agreement about how to fix health care. Social Security, on the other hand, is available. It can be fixed. I think the debt commission made a series of recommendations that I hope the President and his team will take seriously and come to the Congress. I think Republicans here in Congress are willing to work with him because that is something we can put on a sustainable path. We ought to do it, and we ought to do it now because the longer we wait, the worse the problem becomes.

So you have the entitlement issues, you have the non-national security discretionary spending--things that can be done, that this President, if he is willing to put his rhetoric into action and take leadership, can actually put up as a record of accomplishment for the American people. The alternative is that we continue to add to the $14.3 trillion debt.

I am not going to sit here and say for a moment that we are not all responsible for this. Obviously, there were previous administrations and previous Congresses. We have gotten where we are today because we did not make the hard choices when he should have, and now the choices become much harder.

I would also say that in the last 2 years, that debt has grown by over $3 trillion, largely because of a trillion-dollar stimulus bill that we borrowed from our children and grandchildren, which didn't do anything to create jobs but did add $1 trillion to the debt, and the health care bill, which, again, many of the costs of that we are going to see into the future, but it has a profound impact on the fiscal picture the country is going to be considering.

What does it mean to finance a $14.3 trillion debt? Well, it means this: We spend so much on interest that next year the amount we spend on interest will equal the amount we spend on national security. Think about that. The entire security budget to defend this country, that amount of money will be equalled by the amount we spend on interest to finance the debt, and that continues to explode in the years ahead. If for some reason we were to have a runup in interest rates, if something happened in the economy, which, with inflation starting to take off a little bit, generally interest rates would follow that--and at some point in the not too distant future, we could see interest rates tick up. Well, we have been able to manage our debt by the way we financed it and the short-term borrowing. If you saw interest rates reset and go up, it would have an even more profound impact on the amount we pay to finance that debt and the amount we make in interest payments.

Every child in America today under the age of 18 owes $114,000 because of that debt, and 6 years from now it will be $196,000. What are we doing to future generations when we saddle them with this enormous debt and put them in a position where they are going to be faced with a lower standard of living and a lower quality of life than what we have experienced simply because we did not have the courage to make the hard decisions that were necessary to get this situation under control.

So I would suggest to my colleagues and to the President after his speech last night that this is not about talk. It is not about rhetoric. It is about action. It is about what the American people asked us to come here and do. I think there were three messages coming out of the election last fall: The American people want us focused on jobs and the economy, they want us focused on spending, and they want us focused on debt.

We are going to have an opportunity in the next few months, when the continuing resolution expires and we look at the issue of funding the government into the future, to deal with the issue of spending When we get to the debt limit vote that will come up sometime this spring, we will have an opportunity to talk about the debt. But it ought to generate and spark a serious effort here in the Congress, not a cosmetic one, not a superficial one, not one where we provide lipservice but where we are serious about reining in spending--not just non-national security spending but also looking at the long-term issues that are going to affect this country's balance sheet well into the future, and those are our entitlement programs. It is going to be tough stuff. It is not easy to do this.

I can't help but think that if we had made some of these hard decisions a few years ago, we wouldn't be in the situation we are today. I came here as a freshman Congressman back in 1997. One of the first votes we had--big votes, I should say, on the floor of the House of Representatives at the time--was a vote on a balanced budget amendment, something that I think 38 States have. Our State of South Dakota has a balanced budget amendment, which means our legislature and Governor can't go home until they balance the budget. That vote passed. It takes two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate and 38 States to ratify to get a constitutional amendment approved. We got a big, larger than two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives at that time. It came to the Senate, and it failed by one vote. Now, 67 votes here is the magic number to get the two-thirds threshold. It got 66 votes in the Senate 14 years ago.

I can't help but think how much better out financial picture would be today had we taken that step back in 1997 and put a balanced budget amendment--enshrined that into our Constitution and imposed a discipline on the Congress that hasn't existed. Clearly, for politicians here in Washington, it is too easy, when it comes down to making hard choices, to take the easy way, to hand the bill to our children and grandchildren. It is time to stop.

We cannot afford this any longer. We are at $14.3 trillion and adding $1 trillion every single year.

So this is going to require tough decisions, hard decisions. But I believe this is a great country with great people. We have met big challenges before. I think the American people are ready to step forward and deal with this challenge. I think they are looking for political leadership to do that, to join them in that quest. As I said before, Presidential leadership is critical. It is going to take leadership here in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

We cannot afford to kick the can down the road any farther, to punt the ball to the next generation. It is not fair to them. For generations in this country, we have had a sort of guiding principle; that is, one generation sacrifices so the next generation can have a better life. We may be the first generation that turns that ethic on its ear and asks the next generation to sacrifice because we have not been willing to live within our means.

So I hope we can muster the courage that is necessary, and I am going to do everything I can to continue to shine a light on this issue when we get into these budget debates. I, frankly, have a series of budget reforms. I think that, absent a constitutional amendment, we ought to be putting some statutory reforms in place that would force downward pressure on spending.

I have a bill that calls for a 2-year or biennial budget where we budget in one year, in the odd-numbered year, and in the even-numbered year we do more oversight. So when people here are running for reelection, instead of worrying about how to spend more money to curry favor with a particular constituency, we will be doing oversight and looking at how we can save money for the next generation. So I would like to get a debate on that. I think we ought to make the budget resolution we pass here binding and give it the teeth and the force of law which it does not have today. I think there are a series of prescriptions that would be worthwhile for us to not only entertain but hopefully implement to really take seriously the challenge that is before us.

I thank the chair for the time, and I look forward to engaging in a debate about spending and about debt and how to better create jobs in this economy for the American people, which is what I think they want us focused on. I hope it will be not just rhetoric but action that follows.

I yield the floor.

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