Cut, Cap, and Balance Act of 2011-Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I rise today to speak to the issue the Senate is going to be considering for the next couple of days and ultimately voting on, it sounds like, possibly sometime on Saturday; that is, the cut, cap, and balance proposal that has been put forward by the House of Representatives.

The House passed this particular proposal the night before last. It is now pending under consideration in the Senate. What I would suggest to my colleagues in the Senate is this: It is the only proposal out there. It is the only plan we have to vote on.

It has now been about 813 days--I think is the correct number of days--since a budget was passed in the Senate. The Democratic majority has not submitted one for consideration here. We have not had votes on a budget. We have been operating without a budget. There is no plan.

The House of Representatives passed a budget earlier this year. It was criticized by many people here--Democrats--as being something they didn't want to support. There wasn't an alternative put forward by the Senate Democrats or by the President. The President did put a budget forward in his annual budget release earlier this year, but the Senate voted it down 97 to 0. There wasn't a single Member, Republican or Democrat, who voted in favor of the President's budget proposal. Why? Because it would have raised spending, raised the debt--almost doubled the debt over the next 10 years, and it would have increased taxes by over $1 trillion.

Overall, I don't think those are the elements you want to be in a budget. You want to reduce spending and put a plan into place that starts getting a trajectory in place that starts reducing the amount of debt we have. You certainly don't want to raise taxes in an economic downturn, when you are dealing with 9.2 percent unemployment. That is the only budget submission we have seen from the President.

As I said, there has not been anything in the context of the debt limit debate put forward by the Democrats in the Senate or by the President. The only proposal we have in front of us is the Cut, Cap, and Balance proposal passed by the House of Representatives. You can say the House arguably has done its work. They have put forward a plan that we need to act on.

To suggest for a minute that there isn't an alternative, that the Republicans are being unreasonable in all this, I think completely misses the point, because that is the only plan out there. If you don't like that one, where is your budget? We have had 813 days without a budget. We don't have a plan to deal with the debt limit. What we have to vote on and consider and debate today is the Cut, Cap, and Balance proposal.

That is significant for a number of reasons. One, I believe the way to deal with the crisis we have in this country today--a debt crisis that gets worse by the day--is to get spending under control. I believe fundamentally that the problem we have in this country is not a question of not enough revenue, it is a question of too much spending. The government has gotten too big, has grown too fast. It is spinning out of control, in the minds of most Americans. They want to see us rein it in and get government spending and debt under control.

Yesterday, I read this on the floor, but I want to read it again. Ironically, it is a letter I got from a Boy Scout in South Dakota who is earning his merit badge. He wrote me a letter and said this:

I feel that the Federal Government needs a balanced budget. If we don't, the debt gets larger each year. I feel that there are two solutions for this. In our house, we are careful to only spend what my mom and dad earn. That needs come first and what is left is for wants. Many times we were told no when we ask for something. With my allowance and lawn mowing money, I divide it between donations, saving, and spending. I can't spend more than I make.

I think there are a couple of very powerful observations in this statement. The first is, obviously, it is not lost even on this young American how important it is to live within your means, and that you cannot spend money you don't have. That is clearly a lesson he has already learned. We need to learn that in Washington, DC.

Second is how profoundly this issue impacts the next generation. If, in fact, we fail to act to get spending and debt under control and to put us on a sustainable fiscal course, the next generation is going to pay a powerful price for our irresponsibility.

I submit again to my colleagues this is fundamentally a spending issue. A lot of folks talk about the need for more revenue. The President talks about wanting more revenue. The majority leader just said the House is out of town and how that is terrible because revenue measures have to originate in the House. Many of us believe this can be solved without more revenue, that we don't have to raise taxes on the American people or American small businesses to solve what is inherently and fundamentally a spending problem.

If we want to balance the budget, we have to get spending under control. Five times since 1969 the budget was balanced in this country. In each case, the average amount we spent was just under 18.7 percent of our GDP, so that is kind of the benchmark for the five times in our history since 1969 when the budget has been balanced. The 40-year average of spending to GDP in this country is 20.6 percent. That is the 40-year average. The five times we balanced the budget, it was 18.7 percent of GDP. This year, we are spending 24.3 percent of GDP. If you look at the President's budget--and even what are, in my view, optimistic assumptions about economic growth--you are still looking at that sort of a course for the foreseeable future. With what I think are going to be the exploding costs of the health care bill that was passed last year, it could be much higher than that.

My point is this: If you can balance your budget at 18.7 percent Federal spending as a percentage of GDP, and we are spending at 24.3 percent this year, we are 30 percent higher in terms of what we spend than those times in which we were able to balance the budget. If you are talking about balancing the budget, it means getting spending under control, reining in out-of-control Washington spending.

For a long time, I have believed that we need not only what is proposed in the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill, in terms of an immediate reduction in spending, caps on spending in the future years, but also a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. That is something I have campaigned on my entire political career. I believe it is necessary.

Washington has not demonstrated in the past the political courage that is necessary to get spending under control. The consequence of that is we now have a Federal debt that is over $14 trillion, and we are actually talking about raising the borrowing authority of this country simply because we get further and further into debt every year. We are running $1 trillion deficits, and at that rate you are obviously going to continue to accumulate enormous amounts of debt. It means getting your budget balanced. We don't do that around here. Most States--49 of them--have some form of a balanced budget amendment that requires them to make sure their spending doesn't exceed the amount of revenue they have coming in. I think that is needed.

When I first got to the Congress as a freshman Congressman in 1997, there was a vote in the Senate on a balanced budget amendment. It failed by one vote. It needs two-thirds votes in the House and Senate, and then has to be sent to the States for ratification. If 38 States ratify, it would be added to the Constitution. We would have a requirement that the Federal Government balance its budget as so many States have to do every single year. Well, that vote in the Senate in 1997 failed by 1 vote. It got 66 votes in the Senate, which is 1 short of the 67 necessary to send it on to the House. At that time, I was a Member of the House of Representatives, and had the Senate passed it and sent it to the House, I believe we would have gotten a two-thirds majority in the House and been able to send it to the States.

What has happened in the last 15 years? At that time, the accumulated debt was $5 trillion. Today, it is $14 trillion. We have seen a $9 trillion increase in the amount of debt. I can't help but think that had we had a balanced budget amendment in place, we would be much better off today.

The cut, cap, and balance approach strikes at the very heart of the issue, which is that this is fundamentally a spending issue that needs to be addressed in the near term by cutting spending, capping spending in future years, and putting in place the mechanism that requires Congress to have the discipline to balance the budget for future generations. I hope we will get an affirmative vote when the time comes, and that my colleagues will support the measure I think will get this country back on a sustainable fiscal track and create prosperity for this generation and future generations, as well.

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

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