The Budget

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I had the chance to sit in the chair this evening, before you came, and listened to people on both sides of the aisle talk a little bit about our debt and our deficit situation, the pending shutdown of the Federal Government. I shudder to think we might actually do that. But it may happen. I thought I might keep my senior Senator a little bit of company--the hour is late and the floor is empty--to have the chance to talk a little bit about how we see this from Colorado.

Like the Presiding Officer, I have had the chance to travel in one of the most beautiful States in the country over the last 2 years, 40,000 miles across the State of Colorado, having townhall meetings in red parts of the State and blue parts of the State and, believe it or not--and I know the Presiding Officer would believe it because he is talking to the same people I am talking to and, maybe more important than that, listening to the same people I am listening to--I think a fairly substantial consensus emerged out of those meetings.

By the way, in not a single one of those townhall meetings--not one in 2 years--no matter what part of the State I was in, would any self-respecting cable television producer want to put on cable TV at night. Because we do not scream at each other in Colorado. We have our differences. We have our disagreements. We have a lot of shared values, though, whether we are Democrats or Republicans, tea party members, Independents. We are about a third Republican, a third Democratic, a third Independent. That consensus that emerged from these meetings on our debt and our deficit is straightforward.

It is a three-part test for people in Colorado. The first is, they want us to come up with a comprehensive solution that materially addresses the fiscal challenges this country faces. They do not want a bunch of gimmicks. They do not want a bunch of talking points. And they do not want people in this Chamber or the Chamber on the other side of the Capitol spending their time scoring political points at the expense of the American people.

So the question they are going to ask, first, when the Presiding Officer and I go back there, I think, is, did you get to a comprehensive solution--not, by the way, did you fix it overnight? Because they know it cannot be fixed overnight. But can we be secure in the idea that we are not going to leave our kids and our grandkids what is today $15 trillion in debt and a $1.5 trillion budget deficit. Because all things being equal, we wish to allow our kids and our grandkids to not have their choices constrained by our inability to get anything done here in Washington. So that is the first test for people in Colorado.

The second test is, they want to know that any solution we come up with is one where we are all in it together, that everybody in America has the chance to make a contribution to solving this fiscal nightmare we face. They are not interested in pitting one group of people against another group of people. In fact, that makes them feel suspicious about what we are doing. They want to know we are all in it together, which brings me to the third commonsense Colorado point of view on this issue, which is they would like this--in fact, they will insist--the solution be a bipartisan solution. Because they do not have confidence in one party's ideas on this question. That is a lucky thing because we have a Republican-controlled House and we have a Democratic-controlled Senate, and the President is a Democrat. We cannot solve this problem in these times without it being a bipartisan solution. That is it.

If I can go home and say, we materially addressed the problem, we are all in it together, and it was a bipartisan solution, I think people would say: You guys have finally done something. We feel patriotic, as if we have done something useful for our kids.

As the Presiding Officer knows, there are people all over our State--local government officials--who are Republicans and Democrats who are making tough decisions about their budgets. I have an incredible amount of sympathy for what they are dealing with.

I had the great fortune, earlier in my career, to serve as the Chief of Staff for our now Governor, John Hickenlooper, when he was mayor of Denver. When John went into that office, and I went in as his Chief of Staff, we faced a huge budget deficit by Denver standards and we had to cut 11 percent of our expenditures. We met with people living all throughout the city and county of Denver. We sought their advice. We established a set of priorities. We passed it through a city council. And do you know what. Denver lived to fight another day. Our economy grew, and things were pretty good there for a while, until this current recession.

When I became superintendent of the Denver Public Schools--as the Presiding Officer knows, a district that year after year after year, for almost a decade, maybe even longer than that, was the poster child for cutting every single year; every year, people at other school districts would say: Thank God we are not the Denver Public Schools--every year, the Denver Public Schools would lose teachers to other districts that could afford to pay them more, and every year we cut and we cut and we cut as a district. When I became superintendent, one of the cases I made to the school board was: We have profound structural problems in our budget, and instead of approaching the budget in a way that diminishes the academic environment for kids, what we ought to be figuring out how to do is establish a set of priorities and build a public case to deal with the structural problems that exist in our budget.

Because of the good work of the school board--I should say, the courageous work of the school board--we were able to get that done. We were able to close schools for the first time in a long time. That is hard work. Those meetings were harder than health care townhall meetings, I can tell you that. We were able to deal with the pension liability that our district had. And we were able, year after year, to invest more money, not less, in our schools and in our classrooms. And now, under the current leadership there--which I think is doing an exceptional job--the district no longer is the poster child for anything except fighting hard on behalf of the children in the Denver Public Schools.

Here is the thing that drives me crazy about what is going on in the conversation we are having now about this shutdown. There is no way any superintendent of schools in Colorado or any school board in Colorado or any city council or any mayor--from the biggest city to the smallest town--would show up to work and say: We might close the government 2 weeks from now. It is an option for us that we will not pick up your trash 2 weeks from now or plow the streets--we still get snow in Colorado at this time of year--or plow the streets 2 weeks from now. We are going to close down.

It would not occur to anybody working in a local government in our State to say they were going to do that. Do you know why? Because people would become unglued, unhinged. They would say: We hired you to do a job. Work it out. We are doing our jobs--or we are looking for jobs--we don't have time to solve these problems. You were hired to do this job. Work it out. Come to an agreement. Don't come home and tell us you are shutting the government down, you are not going to pick up the trash, you are not going to plow the snow, you are not going to educate our kids.

The idea that as a superintendent--I got in trouble when I closed school for snow once--once. It turned out to be a great decision because it was one of the worst blizzards we ever had, but it could have gone the other way, because people rely on us to do the work we are supposed to do. They have plans. The idea that at a time when we are fighting wars all across this globe, at a time when there are governments and countries that are trying to seek an economic advantage over the United States of America in a global economy that has shrunk the way ours has shrunk, that we would say to ourselves: We are going to pause, we can't even keep the government open in this democracy, I think would reflect terribly not on the American people and not on our democracy, but on this institution of government.

There is a reason why we are in the basement as an institution in terms of polling. Why should people have confidence in an institution that cannot actually even keep running in the short term? I think it is important, based on the conversation I heard tonight here on both sides of the aisle, for the American people to understand this debate about this government shutdown is not a debate about our deficit and our debt, not really. It has been about scoring political points.

What I want to say is I hope and I would encourage the leadership on both sides of the aisle here, the leadership in the House, and our President to find a way to work it out and to make sure we keep this government open. I think closing it sends entirely the wrong message. I know there are people on both sides of the aisle here who believe that. I hope people do absolutely everything they can do between now and the end of this week to make sure we send a message that we are not as dysfunctional as we appear to be. Because I think this place ought to meet the standard that people at the local level of government are held to in our State.

No business would say: I don't know, maybe we will close for 2 weeks or close for a month. They are figuring out how to invest and grow even in this challenging economy. We should be doing the same.

Mr. President, you and I were in a meeting this morning. We started today at 8 o'clock in the morning, with 33 Senators, Republicans and Democrats, who came together to hear some very thoughtful observations about how important it is we come to a comprehensive solution to deal with our deficit and to deal with our debt. We heard an important presentation about how there is no silver bullet here. There is no easy way to solve any of this.

But perhaps the least painful way to think about it is with the most comprehensive plan--which, by the way, is the intuition of people in Colorado, as I said earlier today. It gave me great confidence that there were a bunch of Republicans and a bunch of Democrats in a room listening to this message and willing to work together in a bipartisan way.

I was very fortunate to draft a letter that Mike Johanns from Nebraska, a Republican, cosigned with me that called on the President to engage--after this period we are having a discussion about right now with closing the government or keeping it open or whatever it is we are going to do--asking the President to engage in a conversation that is comprehensive that says: You know what. We know this is going to involve cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and military. We know this is going to involve reform of our entitlements. We know it is going to involve reform of our Tax Code as well.

Senator Coats from Indiana was out here today with a lot of commonsense ideas around how our Tax Code doesn't drive innovation, competition and growth and he is right about that. There is a lot of work to be done, and I have every confidence it can happen. That letter we wrote turned out to have 64 signatures on it. Sixty-four people signed that letter. That is more than the 60 required to pass a piece of legislation. That is a majority of the Democrats in the Senate. It is a majority of the Republicans in the Senate. I know it is just a letter, but it reflects what I believe to be true about what people in this body believe, which is that we can solve this issue. We can solve this problem, but we are only going to be able to do it if we do it together. We are only going to be able to do it if we get to a place where we are no longer as concerned about winning political points as we are about actually addressing the problem. I have confidence we can do it.

Someone said to me today: You seem to be a guy who feels as though the Senate is dysfunctional. You have a reputation for believing the Senate is dysfunctional. I will confess there are days when I wonder, and there are days when I feel as though it is dysfunctional. But on this set of issues, I think the Senate can shine. On this set of issues, I think this is the place where leadership can take hold and where we can create a bipartisan solution. The people of Colorado, and I think the American people, expect us to do everything we can to get this done.

There are two conversations going on simultaneously, and I thought it was important to point out that one is about the very short-term issue--what we are going to do with this continuing budget. By the way, no one in Colorado would stand for the idea that you don't pass a budget in the year you are in, but that is another Washington cultural artifact we ought to get rid of. But that is distinct from the comprehensive discussion we need to have around here on our deficit and our debt. At the end of the 2-year discussion I was having, and the beginning of a new discussion now with Colorado, it became pretty straightforward what people want, not just on the debt and deficit but other things they are concerned about, that we ought to be turning our attention to, instead of having this back and forth about whether we are going to keep the government open. It ought to be assumed we are going to keep the government open.

We just came off the first decade in the country's history when median family income fell. It was lower at the end of the decade than it was at the beginning of the decade. It has never been true before in the United States. For families in Colorado, that means they are actually earning less at the end of the decade than they were at the beginning. But their cost of higher education has gone up by more than 40 percent. Their cost of health care has gone up by more than 100 percent over that period of time. We have created no net new jobs in the United States or in Colorado since 1998. People would like to see that turned around.

People would like to see us working together on a Tax Code that drives innovation to make sure we don't have regulations that unnecessarily stifle economic growth. They would like to see that.

They would like us to break our reliance on foreign oil from the Persian Gulf. Even before what has happened in the Middle East and in Libya occurred in the last month or so--even before that--people were saying to me: Michael, we don't think it makes much sense for us to be buying oil from the Persian Gulf. We don't understand why we have an energy policy that requires us to ship billions of dollars a week to the Persian Gulf to buy oil when we could be investing that money developing our energy resources here in the United States. That is work we could be doing together in a bipartisan way.

As the President knows, I have a passion for public education, as do the people who are living in Colorado, and they know we are not getting the job done there either. We have before us the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, but somehow we can't move that forward. Teachers and kids and principals and moms and dads all over our State are expecting us to get that work done. We have to find a way to educate our kids for the 21st century economy that hopefully we will build for them, and we are not getting the job done.

As I said on the floor the other day, if we look at this question from the perspective of poor children living in our home State of Colorado or all across the United States of America, and if we think about this room we are in right now and the fact that there are 100 desks that don't belong to 100 Senators because they belong to the American people but where 100 Senators sit and work, if these desks reflected the odds of poor children living in our country succeeding educationally, things would look pretty grim in here. Forty-two out of the one hundred chairs in this place would be occupied by a child living in poverty--42. By the time our children in poverty got to the eighth grade, only 16 kids would be reading at grade level. That is four and four, four--that is about 16 desks. The rest of this Senate Chamber would be full of children who couldn't read at grade level in the eighth grade today in the 21st century in the United States of America. By the time our poor children would be graduating from college, only nine would be graduating from college--these two rows and that chair right there. The rest of this Chamber would have no college degree. In a global economy requiring that as a pathway to the middle class, to meaningful participation in the democracy, to meaningful participation in this global economy, 91 people in this place would be shut out because they were born into a ZIP Code that is poor. Those odds look pretty wrong to the kids who are living in those neighborhoods.

I have spent a lot of time with our kids in those neighborhoods, not just in Colorado but all across the United States of America. They think we have already made a promise to them, that they live in a land of opportunity that is going to reward their hard work, and if they stick with it, they are going to end up with a college degree. That is what they believe. We may have made that promise, but we certainly haven't followed through on that commitment.

Why should that matter to us? Some people look at that and say: Well, it is someone else's problem. I don't need to worry about it. McKinsey has done a study that shows us that the effect of those outcomes is to create a permanent recession in the United States. The effect of that dropout rate creates a permanent recession in the United States. That actually is about the same as the recession we just went through, which means if we are concerned with economic growth in the United States, we need to concern ourselves with the educational outcomes our kids in poverty are facing. If we are concerned with income inequality in the United States, we need to be concerned with the outcomes I just described.

Last year, the top 1 percent of income earners in this country earned 23 percent of the income--almost one-quarter of the income. The last time that was true was 1928. That doesn't lead me to conclude that somehow we should redistribute it, but it does lead me to conclude that we ought to fix our education system so more people have the chance to put themselves and their families into the middle class.

We can't afford in this country to repeat the decade we just went through. We can't afford to have an economy where median income is falling. We can't afford to have an economy that is not creating jobs. We can't afford to carry a debt and deficit burden that at some point the capital markets are going to look at and say: We are not financing you anymore. We can't afford to fail to educate children in this country just because they are poor. I also think we can't afford to have an energy policy that commits us to a dependence on oil in the Persian Gulf. I think the people of Colorado and across this country are expecting us to do our jobs, just as they are doing their jobs.

I say again, I hope the leadership of both parties, working in good faith, can keep this government open, and I hope we can move on to a broader and more comprehensive conversation around debt, around deficit, around our economy, and around the education of our kids.

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