The Budget
Floor Speech
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor as someone who sat through the President's State of the Union and I have just come from a Senate Energy Committee hearing. I sat through the State of the Union near the Secretary of Energy and was happy when I heard some of the comments of the President when he talked about an ``all of the above'' strategy, needing all of the sources of energy. But this Monday the President's budget came out which is very different than that. It is a budget I would like to discuss this morning and talk about because, as I read through it, it looks to me as though the President has abandoned his role as leader of the Nation by not being honest with the American people about the significance of the debt that we as Americans face. To me, this budget ambushes the American people. The President, under the pretense of economizing, promises to cut $4 trillion of deficit over 10 years, but the budget itself actually piles $11 trillion of new debt in that same timeframe.
Under the pretense of helping everyone to prosper, to me the President's budget buries every single American under a mountain of debt and that is a debt that is going to rob more and more from their paychecks with each passing year. The savings the President promises are not going to come. The spending he demands is for things we cannot afford. It seems to me this President's budget is another painful step on the road to bankrupting America.
We are in the fourth year of the Presidency, and for each of those 4 years the deficit has exceeded $1 trillion; $1 trillion in each of the 4 years of this Presidency.
How does that match with what the President has been saying? In February of 2009, the President had been President about a month, he made a pledge. The pledge was he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term in office. Here we are, the final year of the President's first term in office, and this deficit is still above $1 trillion. Once again, what the President has said to the American people is very different than what he has delivered to the American people. I am still waiting for a chance in this body, in the Senate, to vote on the President's budget.
The majority leader, who sits in the front row, has said he doesn't intend to even bring it to the floor of the Senate for a discussion or a debate or a vote. The law is pretty clear: The President has to introduce a budget by a certain date--the President missed that deadline--and the Senate and the House have to go ahead and pass a budget, which this body has not done now for over 1,000 days. Multiple years and no budget has passed this body.
There actually was a vote last year on the President's budget. It was one where the budget itself was called irresponsible, and there were a number of press renderings on it. The majority leader refused to bring it to the Senate floor, so the minority leader brought the President's budget to the Senate floor. Not one Republican voted for it, but not one Democrat voted for the President's budget either. The total count on the President's budget last year in the Senate: 0 votes for the President's budget, 97 votes against the President's budget. Yet the President introduces another budget this year ignoring the two major tidal waves we face, the tidal waves of Social Security and Medicare.
It is interesting. You read in the New York Times:
Obama Faces Task of Selling Dueling Budget Ideas.
President Obama more than ever confronts the challenge of persuading voters that he has a long-term plan to reduce the deficit, even as he highlights stimulus spending.
Challenging to persuade voters that he has a long-term plan to reduce the deficit. What did he promise? What did he deliver? What we see is a health care law where he promised one thing and delivered something very different. We see it now in the budget, and the numbers are so large. The numbers are so astronomically large that it is hard for one to comprehend how much a deficit of $1 trillion truly is. You can visit with high school students or service clubs or go to townhall meetings or senior centers, the number is so large it is hard to wrap one's mind around it.
The President tries to make people believe that everything would be OK if he could just raise some taxes--just a little bit, he says--on some other people--not you but other people--and everything would be fine. When you actually look through this, to get to $1.3 trillion, which is what the President has proposed in this year's budget as a deficit, you could take all the millionaires and billionaires--things he likes to rail about--and you could take every penny they earn over that $1 million, all of them combined, and then on top of that sell off all the gold in Fort Knox, add it all together, and that would not be enough to cover just the deficit, that $1 trillion the President plans to spend over and above what comes in. It is completely irresponsible, but that is what we have seen from this administration.
So we have a President who makes presentations, gives speeches, and yet what the American people see is something very different. So this morning in the Energy Committee, we had an opportunity to visit with the Secretary of Energy specifically on budgetary issues relating to the budget and the future.
Of course, the President said he supported an all-of-the-above energy plan for the country. Well, I support an all-of-the-above energy plan for the country, but when you go through the details, that is not exactly what the American people see. What the American people see is the cost of gasoline at the pump continuing to go up. They see an administration that is blocking an opportunity to move oil from northern parts of our country, as well as from Canada, to the United States for use here.
Take a look at the front-page headline of USA Today from a couple of days ago:
``Chaotic spring'' predicted for gas. Average prices likely to hit $4.05 a gallon.
People care about that. People all across the country drive around, they see the signs up, they see what the cost of a gallon of gasoline is, and they see it impacting their daily lives.
Today a number of us visited the Energy Committee and talked about today's Wall Street Journal article this morning. ``Oil Rise Imperils Budding Recovery.'' We want this country to recover. We want people to get back to work. We want to make it easier and cheaper for the private sector to hire people and get America working again. The price of energy goes up, the price of oil goes up--``Oil Rise Imperils Budding Recovery.''
What does it say? ``The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline has jumped 13.1 cents to $3.51 cents in the past month.'' So gasoline at the pump is up 13 cents in the last month. This is according to AAA.
It goes on to say:
Some parts of the country have seen even bigger increases, with prices approaching $4 a gallon in parts of California.
Higher prices at the pump--and this is where it really hits home. This is what I hear about at home in Wyoming when the price of gasoline goes up. And we drive great distances, Mr. President, in your home State and my home State. People notice it because it impacts on other things for which they can use that same money.
It says here in the Wall Street Journal:
Higher prices at the pump force consumers to cut back spending on discretionary items like restaurant meals, hair cuts and family vacations, hurting those industries.
Isn't that what it is really about as the price of gasoline at the pump goes up? It hurts the ability of families and the quality of life--they could spend that money in other ways.
It says:
A prolonged increase can drive up inflation and drive down hiring.
We are a country that wants people to get back to work. We want to give them those opportunities, and it just seems that the President's budget and the policies of this administration and a rejection of things that would actually help us with American energy are going to make it harder for families. When the price of gasoline goes up, the impact on an average family is over $1,000 a year in terms of their ability to have disposable income. If it is a family dealing with a mortgage and bills and kids, that is a huge difference in the quality of life for those American families.
States around the country get it. I look at Wyoming. We are in our legislative session there right now. We balance our budget every year. The constitution demands it. If less money comes in, we spend less money. They make the tough decisions.
The President said he is ready to make the tough decisions, but I don't see tough decisions in this budget. What I see is a political document, a campaign document, something that has more stimulus money in it, money so he can promise people things. We all know how that first so-called stimulus program went. To me, it was a failure. We had spending of about $800 billion. The President promised that if we passed the stimulus program, the unemployment rate would stay less than 8 percent. They put out charts, and by today, from those charts, the unemployment rate should be 6 percent. The unemployment rate is still 8.3 percent. It has been over 8 percent for 36 months now.
When you look at this and look at the President's budget, to me, it is debt on arrival. The budget spends $47 trillion, it borrows $11 trillion, and it increases the national debt to $26 trillion by 2022. It is debt upon debt upon debt. So from were do you borrow the money? A lot of it you borrow from overseas. A lot of it comes from China. So what role is China playing now? Well, they are continuing to lend us money.
By the way, when the President blocked the Keystone XL Pipeline, what did China say to our northern neighbors, our big trading partner, Canada? If the United States doesn't want it, if President Obama isn't interested, we will take the oil in China. The Prime Minister of Canada was in China last week doing exactly that--cutting a deal with the Chinese for energy that will be sold from Canada. I think we should want it. I think if we want to be energy secure and work on energy security, which, to me, is an issue of national security, we should want that energy. Good jobs; the amount of money in terms of jobs that are available--this isn't government money, it is private money to put people back to work. We haven't seen it, and this administration, through its budget and through its policies, continues to oppose those efforts for American jobs.
So what we see is that under the President's 10-year budget proposal, the spending goes up every year without stop. Every year from now to over the next 10 years, spending goes up and we see trillion-dollar deficits year after year after year.
What is most disturbing to some of my colleagues who have accounting degrees--especially the senior Senator from the State of Wyoming, who is an accountant, who has run businesses; he looks at this, and he can easily point out the budgetary gimmicks, the accounting tricks that have been used over and over to make this budget, as irresponsible as it happens to be, look not as bad as it really is.
This budget is bad for America, and it is a continuation of a number of policies that have come out of this administration that have made it harder and more expensive for the private sector to create jobs. What I am trying to do is look for ways to make it easier and cheaper for the private sector to create jobs. We have not seen it in the President's budget, we have not seen it in the policies of this administration, and we have not seen it in this President.
Thank you very much.
I yield the floor.
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