The Budget

Floor Speech

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, this Friday we run out of the current--which is now the sixth continuing resolution--short-term continuing resolution which we have been operating under since the end of the fiscal year, which was September 30 of last year. We started a new fiscal year October 1. Judging by some of the rhetoric we have been hearing around here, one would think somehow it is these big, bad, evil Republicans who are trying to shut the government down by trying to get a bill passed that actually would reduce spending for the remainder of this fiscal year, which ends on September 30.

I remind my colleagues--and I know sometimes it gets a bit redundant--it is a fact that the reason we are here is because last year the Democrats in the Congress failed to pass a budget and did not pass a single appropriations bill. There was no budget passed last year for this fiscal year and not a single appropriations bill passed before the fiscal year ended September 30. Beyond that, we had a lameduck session where we were here, we were here after November's election until the Christmas holiday, and never did we have a budget considered on the floor, nor did we consider a single appropriations bill. The reason we are here is to finish the unfinished business of last year. This is last year's mess we are now cleaning up.

We think the voters in the election spoke pretty clearly and sent an imperative to the Congress: We want you to reduce spending.

We have been trying, as we have attempted to fund the government through the end of this fiscal year--September 30--to achieve some level of spending reductions. It started in the House of Representatives. They passed a bill that reduced spending by $61 billion over the previous year. It came over to the Senate. We had a vote on that bill to reduce and trim $61 billion, and it failed. The Democrats put a bill on the floor which would trim $4.7 billion from last year's spending level and which seemed to be completely divorced from reality as to how to seriously and meaningfully address the issue of spending and the debt and how to address the concern the American people have voiced this year over the $1.5 trillion deficits we are seeing and now we are going to see even longer since the President submitted his 2012 budget.

The reason we are here is to do last year's unfinished business; that is, getting runaway spending in Washington under control, starting to live within our means--something every family in America has to do, something every small business in America has to do.

Here we are again coming up against this Friday deadline because there is resistance to reducing by $61 billion the amount Congress spent the previous year. The $61 billion, if one looks at the total budget, represents a little under 10 percent. Even if one looks at it in terms of discretionary spending, that amount we are actually appropriating annually that is the smaller part of the budget in Washington, it is a small percentage. We are not talking about, relatively speaking, a lot of money. I think it is reasonable. I think the American people believe it is reasonable. Yet we are having this huge meltdown around here because we do not have the political courage to do what the American people have asked us to do.

Frankly, if we were to reduce spending by the amount the Democrats propose and we had a vote in the Senate, it would be about the equivalent of 1 day of the debt. In other words, in this year, the amount of debt we are going to rack up--the amount they were talking about trimming from the budget was the equivalent of 1 single day of the Federal debt--a little over $4 billion. It was not serious. Nobody can take it seriously by any objective measurement.

To put it in perspective, in the last 2 years, spending has increased by about 24 percent. This is non-national security discretionary spending. It increased 24 percent at a time when inflation was only 2 percent in this country. Discretionary spending was growing at more than 10 times the rate of inflation. It seems reasonable that we could go back to those 2008 levels, indexed for inflation, which is what the proposal passed by the House that was defeated in the Senate would do.

We have had lots of testimony from the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who said he expected we could face a debt crisis in the next 2 to 3 years. He said there is a 50-percent probability of that, in his opinion. We had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike Mullen, say that the biggest threat to America's national security is our national debt, which I think is a stunning statement coming from the highest ranking military official in this country. We have people saying there is the potential for a debt crisis, a 50-percent probability. We have this national security issue that is impacted by the level of spending and the level of debt. Then we have what I think, too, is an even more compelling argument because everybody talks about the need to grow the economy and create jobs, and yet this amount of spending and debt, according to most of the research that has been done, suggests we are costing ourselves as an economy about 1 percentage point of economic growth every year, which translates into about 1 million lost jobs. That is a significant, as I said, body of research that has been done that studied economies over the past half century or so and concluded there is a correlation between debt and economic growth when your debt-to-GDP ratio reaches 90 percent. We are there in the United States. We are well past 90 percent, and it is going to grow significantly more under the President's budget.

We cannot wait until tomorrow to do this. We have to attack this problem at every opportunity. Getting a vote on a continuing resolution that funds the government through the end of the year but does it at a reduced level of spending makes a lot of sense.

I do not know anybody who wants to see a government shutdown. We are here because there is unfinished business from last year. We have to get this budget passed, and we ought to do it in a way that is meaningful and serious and, I might add, reduces spending.

The President's budget, which he came out with a couple months ago and which starts the 2012 budget discussion, failed on every level to address the major challenges facing the country. Not only does he not deal with this issue of discretionary spending--and, frankly, he has been missing in action in that debate entirely--we have not heard from the administration about this issue. More important, his budget does nothing to address the big part of the budget--Social

Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--which constitutes today 55 percent of the Federal budget and will grow dramatically over time as the 80,000 baby boomers begin to retire. What he proposed in his budget is increased spending, increases in taxes, and about a $12 trillion increase in the Federal debt over the next 10 years. Nothing serious is done in terms of addressing spending, debt, or taxes.

It is a colossal failure of leadership not to take on what is the most compelling and profound issue that faces this country right now; that is, this huge cloud of debt that hangs over our economy and over our children's future. The President said recently he did not want to take a machete to this; he thought we needed to use a scalpel. What he is talking about doing I suggest does not even constitute using a toothpick. There is not anything in here that does anything to reduce spending or get serious about trimming the size of the Federal Government.

What happened today? The House Republicans came out with a budget. Lo and behold, it is a budget that actually reduces spending by $6.2 trillion over what the President's budget proposed or $5.8 trillion over what the Congressional Budget Office baseline suggests we spend over the next decade. It reduces debt by $4.4 trillion below the President's number, and it does it without raising taxes.

The first argument we heard from people coming to the floor of the Senate--and I heard some of my colleagues earlier talking about, oh, this is going to be so awful; just think of the senior citizens. I say to my colleagues, according to the House budget proposal, senior citizens are not impacted. Senior citizens are protected from any changes in Social Security or Medicare, as are people age 55 and older. If you are a senior citizen today or you are someone nearing retirement age, you are not impacted by this budget. What it does is it makes reforms in these programs so that future generations of Americans will have those programs available to them when it comes time for them to retire. The fact is--we all know this--if we do not deal with these parts of the Federal budget, we are not serious about dealing with the future.

This is a serious issue, it requires a serious solution, and it requires serious leadership. We have seen none of the above from the President or his administration or the Democratic leadership in Congress. So far, the only effort that has been made to address the issue of spending and debt and jobs and the economy is being done by the Republicans in the Congress.

Considering the fact there is only one body of the Congress that is controlled by the Republicans--the House of Representatives; the Democrats control the Senate and set the agenda, and we have a Democratic administration, a Democratic White House--one would think that to do something of this consequence and magnitude, it would take a bipartisan effort. One would assume this would be a bilateral discussion that would be occurring between the White House and the Congress and not just the Democrats in Congress but the Republicans. But none of that seems to be occurring, and there does not seem to be any interest on the part of the President in stepping forward and putting a plan forward that actually does reduce spending, that actually does deal with this massive debt, and that actually gets serious about putting people back to work, growing the economy, and creating jobs. His budget, as I said, increases spending by $400 billion, increases taxes by $1.5 trillion, and adds somewhere on the order of over $12 trillion to the Federal debt. That is the President's budget.

The Republican budget that was put forward today--and I am sure we are not going to agree with every aspect of it, but at lease it is a serious, meaningful effort--reduces spending by $6.2 trillion over the President's number and $5.8 trillion below what the Congressional Budget Office says it will spend over the next decade. It reduces debt $4.4 trillion more than what the President has put forward, and it actually gets government spending as a percentage of our gross domestic product under 20 percent, which is where our historical average has been for the last 40 years. That is what we have been looking at. It takes on these issues.

Whether one likes the approach or not, please at least let's have a discussion about it. Let's have a debate and let's have a proposal put forward so that we have something we can actually have a discussion about because so far all we have is a one-sided discussion. The Republicans have led the debate about how to deal with the discretionary part of the budget we are dealing with in this continuing resolution, and the Republicans have the only proposal that has been put forward that deals with the long-term issues of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and tax reform, which, by the way, is an important issue to our competitiveness and our ability to grow the economy and create jobs. All those issues are addressed in the budget put forward by the House.

What has been put forth by the administration is not serious. These are serious times that require serious leadership and serious solutions by the President of this country, and we are not getting that out of the White House, nor are we getting it out of the Democratic leadership in the Senate.

I hope that will change. I hope my colleagues here in the Senate will recognize and the President will recognize we can't afford to wait any longer.

We have added over $3 trillion to the Federal debt in the first 2 years of this President's administration, and that number, as I said, will grow by about $12 trillion over the next decade. The interest alone that we will pay by the year 2015 will exceed what we spend on national security. We will spend more on interest on the debt than we actually spend on the defense of this country. That is the trajectory we are on. We cannot afford for the future of our children and grandchildren to stay on that trajectory. We have to change the direction we are headed in this country and it starts now.

So I give great credit to our House colleagues. I hope we will be able to get to a meaningful discussion here in the Senate about how to get spending and debt under control, how to grow the economy and create jobs, and how to rein in the size of the Federal Government. It seems that, here at least, a lot of my colleagues must be very comfortable with spending over 25 percent of our GDP on the Federal Government because that is where we are today. As I said before, the 40-year average is down in the 20- to 21-percent range, which is where the House Republican budget would take us. I think it is a good starting point. It should trigger, I hope, a discussion in this country.

But I certainly hope as well that the other side, the Democrats here in the Congress and White House, would engage the debate, would enter this discussion. Please, put forward an alternative, instead of coming out here and attacking, and particularly attacking in a way that is misleading and misinforming. Senior citizens are not impacted by this proposal that was put forward today. If you are 55 years or older, you are not affected by this. You keep the programs you have today. What this does, in a meaningful way, is to reform those programs so that they are available to future generations of Americans. We have a moral obligation to them to take the steps necessary to provide a future that doesn't saddle them with a mountain of debt.

By the way, that debt has grown from about $1,900 per person in 1970 to $44,000 per person today. Under the President's budget, 10 years from now, it will be $88,000 per person. That is what we are doing to the future of our children and grandchildren unless we take steps to change our direction.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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