Shared Sacrifice in Resolving the Budget Deficit-Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President I would observe the current Presiding Officer has had the misfortune of being in the chair whenever I am coming down to speak, so I appreciate his patience.

Today, congressional leaders are meeting with the President of the United States to discuss what can be done to reduce the Nation's out-of-control deficit, to deal with our unsustainable debt, to get America back to work and help grow our economy. I congratulate the President for convening this meeting, which will probably be one of the last chances we will have to deal with this deadline of August 2 to deal with the debt limit--a situation wherein we have maxed out our Nation's credit card. Forty-three cents out of every dollar the Federal Government spends today is borrowed money, making the deficit worse and not better and making the debt worse and not better. This is the chance to kick the habit of out-of-control spending here in Washington.

I appreciate the fact the President has moved from his initial position wherein he advocated for Congress to simply raise the debt limit without putting Washington and Congress on a spending diet. I appreciate the fact he has moved in his position. I read today in the daily newspapers that he is putting a lot of things, including Social Security reform, on the table, together with other entitlements. I hope this represents a change of position, a change of attitude, and the President and our negotiators will seize this opportunity to do the kind of grand bargain that will put America back on to a more solid fiscal path. Every child born in the United States today--while being one of the luckiest people in the world being born in the United States of America, but at the same time being burdened--every child born today will be burdened with $46,000 for their share of the national debt. That is simply wrong and we all know it.

Unfortunately, there has been a lot of discussion about the White House and some of our Democratic colleagues wanting to raise taxes as part of this grand bargain. Indeed, I think that is the notion behind this sense-of-the-Senate resolution the majority leader has introduced, which is targeted at millionaires and billionaires. The sense-of-the-Senate resolution the majority leader wants us to vote on says it is the sense of the Senate that any agreement to reduce the budget deficit should require that those earning $1 million or more per year make a more meaningful contribution to deficit reduction.

Unfortunately, this is not real legislation. This won't change anything. This is a sense of the Senate. This is a resolution, which I think is a missed opportunity to actually deal with the issue rather than pretend as though we are treating it seriously.

When the White House proposes that working families and small businesses, among others, suffer a $400 billion tax increase over the next 10 years, it strikes me that in one sense this is like a diet where a person says, I am going to give up dessert. I am not going to eat dessert. But then that person binges on the buffet. In other words, it is not real. It is not going to work.

To put this in perspective, the Federal Government is currently borrowing $4 billion every day this year. So

actually raising taxes in this amount--while this only amounts to 10 days of what Washington spends--raising taxes by $400 billion over 10 years, as we can see, won't make a serious dent in the deficit and the debt, and they are very serious job-killing proposals as well. It strikes me as common sense to say if we want more jobs, we make it easier to create jobs. If we want less jobs, we make it harder to create jobs by raising taxes, by excessive regulation, and other obstacles to job creation. The irony is that I am not confident our friends on the other side who propose tax increases as part of this grand bargain actually want to use that increased revenue to pay down the deficit and the debt. To the contrary, I fear what they want to do is continue spending at the current levels. So it is kind of a shell game, saying we are going to cut $2 trillion but we are going to raise taxes by $2 trillion. What does that mean? Unless that $2 trillion in additional revenue is used to pay down the debt, it means it is a wash and government and Washington continue business as usual. I don't think the American people want us to continue doing business as usual. I think they want us to listen to them and to mend our ways.

Let me give a context for how nonserious some of the proposals are, including out of the President of the United States. All of a sudden he focused last week on this depreciation schedule for corporate jets. Depreciation is a normal part of the Tax Code which says if one uses something in a business, one can basically write it down over time. It won't surprise us to find that if a person did that, if a person did what the President said--eliminate depreciation of corporate jets--it would generate about $3 billion in revenue to the Federal Treasury over 10 years--$3 billion over 10 years. But to get a sense of what a minuscule contribution that would make to solving the problem, consider what our annual deficit is. This is in 1 year. This is what $1.5 trillion looks like. It has 12 zeroes; a 1, a 5, and 11 zeroes after the 5. That is our annual deficit.

The President says to solve this annual deficit, we need to raise $3 billion in additional revenue from corporate jet owners. Obviously, it is a drop in the bucket. But it is even worse when we look at the debt. The deficit, of course, is the difference between what the Federal Government brings in and what it spends. Right now it is spending about $1.5 trillion more each year than it brings in, in revenue. That is the deficit. But the accumulation of those deficits represents the debt. This is how much red ink our Federal Government is spending--or where we find ourselves--and that is $14 trillion. This is the number the President wants us to raise--$14 trillion. That is like the max on a credit card. If a person is spending too much money, that person bumps up against the credit card limit. The President, in essence, rather than cutting back on spending and making sure we are paying our bills we already owe, wants to raise it so the Federal Government can spend more money.

As I mentioned, this $14 trillion in debt boils down to $46,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. So when the President gives a press conference--and I can't remember how many times he mentions chartered jets--but he talks about $3 billion in revenue over 10 years, it is a drop in the bucket when dealing with a 1-year deficit, or a deficit each year, currently of $1.5 trillion, or a $14 trillion debt. So the fact is we cannot get there from here, even if we did what the President said. It is not serious. It is not honest. It is not candid in terms of what we need to do to get our country back on a solid fiscal pathway.

So let's talk about Federal tax reform. There has been a lot of discussion about that, where we want to take the Tax Code with all of its multiple provisions and get it on the table and take a look at it to make sure it is, in my view, flatter, fairer, and simpler. But right now, the fact of that according to the Committee on Joint Taxation, 51 percent--that is a majority of American households--paid no income tax in 2009. Zero. Zip. Nada. No income tax was paid by 51 percent of the households in America in 2009. Actually, to show how out of whack things have gotten, 30 percent of American households actually made money from the tax system by way of refundable tax credits, the earned income tax credit, among others. So 51 percent of American households paid no income tax in 2009, but 30 percent actually made money under the current system. According to the Internal Revenue Service, the top 10 percent of wage earners in America paid 70 percent of total income taxes.

The top 5 percent of income earners in America paid nearly 60 percent of income taxes, and the top 1 percent paid 38 percent of income taxes.

So what is the President talking about and what is the majority leader trying to--what point are they trying to make when they suggest we pass a sense-of-the-Senate resolution saying that millionaires should ``make a more meaningful contribution to the deficit reduction effort''? What is their point? Is their point that we ought to raise taxes on people who are already paying taxes? Is their point that we should expand the pool of people who do not pay any income tax or should we perhaps expand the pool of people who actually benefit from cash transfers, payments as a result of a refundable tax credit?

Well, I think it is pretty obvious we need tax reform. I am skeptical that we have time between now and Secretary Geithner's stated deadline of August 2 to do what we need to do and to repair and fix our broken tax system. But I think this helps put in context the frankly cynical suggestion that somehow we could solve the problem if we just go after the fat cats and the corporate jet owners. If we just make the millionaires and billionaires pay more money, it will all be all right. Well, I think the American people are smarter than that. When confronted with the facts, I think they can readily conclude and will readily conclude that the system is broken and needs to be fixed. We do not need a bunch of smoke and mirrors and phony arguments about class warfare. That is not going to solve the problem. We need to solve the problem.

Well, let's look at the President's economic record. I know there have been some press reports about that the President said we are making a comeback. I think he called this summer ``the summer of recovery,'' if I am not mistaken. But, in fact, we know the President's policies are actually making things worse.

All you need to do is look at the number of people who are unemployed in America. There were 12 million people unemployed on his inauguration day. Now it is almost 14 million. Almost 2 million more Americans are unemployed. Is that making things better? No. It is making things worse. And we know there are a lot of people who are taking minimum-wage jobs and other jobs not up to their full potential because they want to provide for their families, so we call those people underemployed. That would make that number even higher. When the President was inaugurated in January of 2009, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. Today, it is 9.1 percent. That is a 17-percent increase. In other words, unemployment is worse today than it was when the President was sworn in.

Gas prices. We all know what has happened to gas prices. They have gone through the roof. People are having to deny themselves other discretionary expenditures because they simply have to have the gasoline to be able to drive to work, drive the kids to school, or take care of their daily business. The fact is, when the President was sworn in, gasoline prices were $1.85. Well, wouldn't it be great if gas prices were $1.85 today? Instead, they average $3.58. That is almost a 100-percent increase in gasoline prices since President Obama put his hand on the Bible and was sworn in as President of the United States. It is a 94-percent increase.

Then we were talking about the Federal debt. The Federal debt when the President was sworn in--some people will tell you: Oh, it is all about President Bush and fighting two wars that were not paid for. It is about the Bush tax cuts and other things. Well, I agree there is bipartisan blame when it comes to our national debt, but we ought to link arms and work together to try to solve the problem rather than continue to make it worse. The Federal debt when President Obama was sworn in was $10.6 trillion. Today, it is $14.3 trillion. It is 35 percent worse. The debt has gone up by 35 percent since President Obama was sworn in.

I mentioned this factor earlier. As shown on this chart, this is what every American citizen owes in terms of their share of the national debt. When President Obama was sworn in, it was $34,000. Today, it is 46,000. So, congratulations, everyone within the sound of my voice owes $11,000 more to the national debt since President Obama became President of the United States.

Then there is health insurance. We have had a lot of debate about health insurance costs. We were told that if we just passed this giant health care bill, health insurance costs would go down, we would fix problems, and we would make sure more people had access to health care. Well, since President Obama became President, health insurance premiums have gone up by 19 percent--19 percent. Did he make it better or did he make it worse?

Well, we need to unburden the economy from higher taxes, excessive regulation, and all the sorts of obstacles that get in the way of small businesses--the primary job-creating engine in our economy--doing what they do best; that is, growing the economy, creating jobs. If our friends across the aisle want more tax revenue, well, the best way to get more revenue is to get more Americans back to work so they pay taxes rather than remain unemployed, losing their homes because they cannot pay their mortgages. That is how we ought to increase revenue, not by raising rates, not by some of these silly class-warfare arguments that seem to target unpopular sectors of the economy.

And, yes, we need to increase exports to create more jobs. We can do that by ratifying the outstanding trade agreements without adding unnecessary spending to them.

And, yes, when it comes to energy policy, the high price of gasoline--which has gone up 94 percent since President Obama became President of the United States--we can open more domestic energy reserves, more American natural resources, rather than continue to have to import it from places abroad that are not necessarily our friends or which may be in political turmoil or even war, such as Libya. So if we had a rational national energy policy where the EPA, rather than looking for excuses to deny us access to things such as the natural gas discoveries we have found in Texas and around the country--if we had a way to take advantage of and did, in fact, take advantage of more domestic energy production, it could help us put more Americans back to work and help us reduce our dependency on energy from abroad and help bring down this price to one that does not break the backs of the average working families.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I have a correction. My staff told me I undercounted $14 trillion. I asked ahead of time, but we actually got the number wrong. The number I have on the chart is actually three zeros too few. So just to make sure the record is correct, that is 12 zeros after the ``14.'' That reflects our national debt. I would like to say I made the mistake and it was actually lower, but it actually is much higher, which I think reinforces my point.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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Mr. CORNYN. Well, Mr. President, responding to my friend from Alabama, the number, I am advised, is roughly $3 billion in additional revenue to the Treasury, and that would be over 10 years. But, as you can see, it is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the deficit for 1 year, which is $1.5 trillion, and the national debt of $14 trillion.

I apologize, I am not used to dealing with numbers that big, which demonstrates that these numbers really have kind of lost their meaning here. I remember Everett Dirksen being quoted as saying: A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money.

The fact is we are not talking about millions, we are not talking about billions, we are talking about trillions. I think most people's minds have a very difficult time conceiving of how big a number that is.

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