The Budget
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I wish to continue the comments along the line of our distinguished Republican leader and talk about the President's proposed budget that was released today.
Unfortunately, the President's budget proposes more debt, more spending, and higher taxes. It is bad news for job creation and for America's job creators and portends nothing good; indeed, only does it portend ominously for our country getting back on the right economic track and creating the kind of growth that will generate jobs and prosperity.
The President's proposed budget again ignores his own bipartisan fiscal commission, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, which concluded in December of 2010 that America faced ``a moment of truth'' because we simply had spent more money than we were taking in for too long and had accumulated too much debt, which was killing economic growth and threatening to turn us into a Western European country, which we see today that the eurozone is in jeopardy.
One week from today, millions of Americans will celebrate President's Day, our national holiday that honors all our Commanders in Chief. But this year, President Obama will share a distinction that no other President has ever had: He has proposed a budget that dwarfs all the debt accumulated over more than 22 decades by all his predecessors.
When President Obama took office in January 2009, the national debt was about $10 trillion or, broken down for every man, woman, and child in America, about $33,000, something that neither political party could be particularly proud of.
Today it is far worse: more than $15 trillion, an increase of more than 50 percent in 3 years. Under this budget proposal that the President released today, Federal borrowing will never stop. The national debt will more than double to $26 trillion or $75,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Simply put, the President's proposed budget makes it worse, not better.
We all know we can't keep this up. The sad part is the President understands this too but simply refuses to provide the leadership necessary to put us on the right path.
We have heard it before, but I will repeat it. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike Mullen, said the debt is the biggest threat to our national security. How could that be? It is because, as Admiral Mullen knows and we are now learning, when we live in fiscally constrained times, some of the first cuts that occur are to the Defense Department. In fact, while the Defense Department incurs roughly 20 percent of discretionary spending, it has so far been planned for 50 percent of the cuts, increasing the national security risk to every American.
After promising the American people he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, the President's most recent plan means America will have an annual deficit of more than $1 trillion for every year of his Presidency. That is right, $1 trillion of deficit for each of the 4 years of his first term in office. This is unprecedented and dangerous. It is dangerous to our prosperity and to our Nation's future.
While the President seems to be unwilling to come to grips with the nature of our debt crisis, my constituents in Texas understand that the national debt poses very real security risks because they are already beginning to see the cuts that are occurring or are planned in our national security spending. My constituents in Texas are also concerned, in a State that happens to be growing faster than almost any other part of the country, that the threat of higher taxes discourages the people to whom we look to create jobs, to start new businesses.
Rather than have a comprehensive review of our Tax Code, as the Simpson-Bowles Commission proposed, this budget proposes to target certain industries, such as the domestic oil and gas industry, despite rising prices at the pump. The White House seems oblivious to what would happen to the jobs that are generated by this industry and all the revenue the government would lose if we outsource even more of our energy production to foreign Nations.
The President appears to feel like small businesses are undertaxed because the so-called millionaire's tax he has proposed will hit many small businesses that we depend upon to create jobs. Indeed, as Senator McConnell just acknowledged, it was only December of 2010 when the President himself agreed to extend expiring tax provisions because, as he stated, higher taxes would be the last thing we would want to do during a fragile economic recovery because we know it will serve as a wet blanket; it will be a disincentive on job creation.
We need a serious discussion on tax reform. The Simpson-Bowles Commission made a responsible proposal--not perfect but a good start. But the President has simply ignored the recommendations of his own bipartisan commission since those recommendations were made in December of 2010.
The President's budget also proposes about $1.9 trillion in new taxes, as I indicated. The good news, from my perspective, is that we already had a number of votes last year on these kinds of tax increases, and the Congress has rejected them. The bad news is these assumed tax increases help mask the true size of the deficits in the President's proposed budget and will do damage to any hope of sustained job creation.
Then there is the phony accounting, the gimmicks. Unfortunately, all we have to do is look at the Gallup poll to see in what regard Congress is held; and it is the kind of gamesmanship and the gimmicks in this budget which contribute to people's cynicism about their elected officials and about their government.
What does the President do? He says we are going to save money from future war spending, and we are going to use that as an offset for new spending and to reduce the deficit. But I have to observe, that is cynical at best. His budget is claiming artificial savings from money that never would be spent in the first place for wars that hopefully will never be fought. But he is saying, because we will not fight this unspecified war, then we are going to take that savings as if we would and save it and offset it to try to balance the budget.
Even this gimmick cannot hide the fact the President wants to continue the record-level stimulus spending that began on his watch. You will recall Christina Romer, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told us if we just pass this $787 billion stimulus bill, unemployment will never go above 8 percent.
If we go back and look at those same charts and what they say about the first quarter of 2012, they project unemployment at 6 percent. Obviously, that stimulus failed to meet its own projections, and what President Obama wants us to do is more of the same and to spend more borrowed money.
The vacuum of leadership that starts at the White House extends, unfortunately, to this Chamber, a Senate led by Majority Leader Reid, in which he has no plans to present a budget for the third year in a row. Even before the President released his budget, the Senate majority leader already told the American people the Senate will ignore it. He was quoted in the press saying it would be foolish for the majority to propose a budget.
Why? Because he doesn't want to subject members of his own caucus to hard votes, to tough decisions. These are exactly the kinds of tough decisions the American people sent us to make, and these are exactly the kinds of tough decisions every household and every small business in America is expected to make in order to cope with this economic crisis we find ourselves in. But this is exactly what Majority Leader Reid has chosen to protect his members from making. Why? Because it will help solve the problem? No. Because he doesn't want them to be held accountable in the next election.
We know it has been more than 1,000 days since the Senate passed a budget, and it is just unthinkable, to me, that we would fail to meet one of our most basic responsibilities. Can you imagine a family or a small business operating without a budget? We know why it is so important and why the absence of a budget has encouraged and facilitated runaway spending: Because when we budget, we figure out how much money we have and we figure out what we must have and what our priorities are. Then we figure out what we would like to have but maybe can't afford to have now so we need to put off. And then we figure out what we want but we can't afford that so we are going to have to do without.
Congress has simply, under Senator Reid and the Democratic majority of the Senate, refused to meet its responsibilities for fiscal discipline. It is clear they are running out of excuses.
Senator McConnell pointed out that Jack Lew, the President's new Chief of Staff, said: The reason why Democrats can't pass a budget, even though they hold the majority, even though they control the agenda, is because of those mean old Republicans, because it takes 60 votes to pass a budget.
Mr. Lew has been around a long time and he knows that is not true. I had hoped he would have corrected the record because he knows--and we all know--it takes a simple majority of the Senate to pass a budget. But before we can pass a budget, Majority Leader Reid has to call it up and bring it on the floor of the Senate and schedule a vote, which he has simply refused to do.
So instead of acting responsibly and proposing a budget and voting on a budget and allowing it to be debated, the President has chosen to take the low road and, last year, simply to attack chairman of the House Budget Committee Paul Ryan and House Republicans for the budget they passed. It is not perfect, but it was trying to do their job and to make a responsible proposal. But rather than meet that responsible proposal with a counterproposal and try to work out the differences during the legislative process, the President, unfortunately, took the low road and attacked and attacked and attacked, rather than trying to offer a viable solution.
It should come as no surprise that under the President's watch, the national debt has grown to more than $15 trillion and is now larger than the U.S. economy. That is right, our debt is 100 percent of our gross domestic product. Government spending is now 25 percent of our economy; unfortunately, revenue is about 15 percent. So we have a 10-percent gap, which represents the annual deficit, and the cumulative deficits make up that $15 trillion debt.
We know our Nation has lost its AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's because they are becoming concerned about our willingness--indeed, about our ability--to meet our most basic responsibilities. All three major rating agencies have assigned a negative outlook to our Nation's long-term rating. What that means is potentially the specter of higher interest rates that we have to pay when China and other countries buy our sovereign debt. A 1-percent increase, if they became worried about our ability to repay our debts and they simply charged us more, would wipe out any savings we might otherwise be able to make through cuts.
The warning sound has been heard, and the fiscal tsunami that many budget experts have said in the past would not hit this Nation is fast approaching. It is a challenge that faces the country today, not just tomorrow, and we need solutions. The way the American people feel about this overhang of debt and the lack of clarity with regard to taxes and regulation in our future is shown in the stagnant job growth we have seen.
No sensible job creator is going to start a new business or to expand an existing business with such huge debt and such great uncertainty about their taxes, the regulatory overreach, and the economic environment. They are simply not going to do it. All we have to do is look across the Atlantic Ocean and watch our European friends and what they are going through today and see what will happen when governments overspend and debt is allowed to run unchecked.
What is so disappointing is that President Obama has had multiple opportunities to embrace a bipartisan fiscal overhaul plan. The one I keep mentioning is the Simpson-Bowles plan, and the reason I do is because it is his debt commission that he appointed. It was bipartisan. We had three Republican Senators who were on that commission who voted for it; $4 trillion worth of cuts, tax reform that would lower the marginal tax rates, eliminate $1 trillion-plus in expenditures, and would create economic growth and certainty for our economy and help put America back to work in the meantime. Unfortunately, the President, instead of embracing that bipartisan proposal, with the budget submission he makes today indicates he has chosen once again to remain on the sidelines and to campaign rather than try to come up with real solutions. The President's plan fails to right the ship and will continue to lead us down the path of more debt, higher taxes, and runaway spending--a path that has brought the economies of many European countries to the brink.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
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