Concurrent Resolution on the Budget, Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Alabama for his eloquence in laying out what is at stake in this budget debate we are having and for also pointing out, once again, that the budget before us in the Senate doesn't balance.

In a way, the speakers who have been here before on the Democratic side have been talking about another budget. They are talking about a budget that is under consideration in the other House, in the House of Representatives. They are not talking about their budget.

I suspect one of the reasons they don't want to talk about their budget is it is a budget that, for all intents and purposes, will hurt economic growth, cost jobs, and lower take-home pay for middle-class Americans because it doubles down on the failed policies of the past 4 years, which have consisted of more spending, more borrowing and more taxes, and that is what this budget is about.

I wish to quote something from the Washington Post editorial page in regard to the Democratic budget that is before us.

Except for the part about no imminent crisis, the Senate Democratic budget recognizes none of this.

They are talking about the challenges we face with regard to the fiscal crisis we are in.

Partisan in tone and complacent in substance, it scores points against the Republicans and reassures the party's liberal base--but deepens these senators' commitment to an unsustainable policy agenda.

In short, this document gives voters no reason to believe that Democrats have a viable plan for--or even a responsible public assessment of--the country's long-term fiscal predicament.

This is their assessment of the budget debate that is going on in the Senate. The Washington Post editorial page isn't exactly a bastion of conservative thought, but note what they say about this: It is not a viable plan. It is not even a responsible public assessment of the country's long-term fiscal predicament.

This is precisely what is wrong with this budget and why the Democrats who come down to the floor of the Senate aren't talking about it. They are coming down to talk about the budget that is under consideration today in the House of Representatives--which, incidentally, does actually balance in 10 years.

The first motion that is under consideration in the Senate is to recommit this back to produce a balanced budget.

It strikes me, at least, that I think most Americans would accept the logic, if you will--the notion, that we ought to be able to submit a balanced budget--at least a budget that balances in a 10-year period.

Most Americans have to make decisions every single year. They have to figure out how they are going to go about balancing their own family budget, how to make what is coming in the door meet the expenses that they have to deal with in their daily lives. Yet the Democratic budget that is before us not only doesn't balance in 10 years, it doesn't balance ever--it doesn't balance ever.

That is why this motion that is before us to recommit this budget to the Senate Budget Committee and to produce a budget that actually does balance is something I hope my colleagues on both sides will support.

It is time we got serious about doing the important work of the Senate, taking care of the people's business, which is to get spending on a more responsible and sustainable fiscal path so future generations of Americans aren't saddled with this massive burden of debt, so we can protect and save programs--important programs such as Social Security and Medicare--which are on a pathway to bankruptcy.

Social Security is already operating at a cash deficit; in other words, there isn't enough money coming in, in the form of payroll taxes, to pay the benefits that are due to Social Security beneficiaries.

Medicare is going to be bankrupt 10 years from now and even in the hospital part of that trust fund, by the year 2016, according to the CBO.

It is clear. These things are looking us right in the face. This is not something out there on the horizon, these are issues today that need to be dealt with. Yet the Democratic budget before us does absolutely nothing to address the long-term fiscal challenges facing this country. What are we going to do to save Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid?

In fact, according to the CBO, by the year 2023, 10 years from now, mandatory spending will represent 91 percent of all Federal spending. Think about that. It is about 62 percent today. We are on a trajectory and a pathway over the next decade to where 90 cents--over 90 cents out of every dollar is paying for those basic core programs with nothing left over. How are we going to fund the military or defense or the other priorities this government deals with every single day when over 90 cents out of every dollar is going to be spent on these programs? Yet this budget does nothing to address those important fiscal problems.

What it does do is it grows government--a 62-percent increase in government spending over the next decade. It adds $7.3 trillion to the Federal debt, and that is on top of the $6 trillion that has been added in the last 4 years. It raises taxes. The Democrats will say it is only by $975 billion, about $1 trillion. But if you look inside the numbers, they replace the sequester--another $ 1/2 trillion--with a fund, some sort of fund. What is going to fund that? Spending cuts? I do not think so. We are talking about up to a $1.5 trillion tax increase in this budget on top of the $1.7 trillion tax increase we have already seen under this President and the Democrats here in the Congress.

What does that mean? They say it is just a tax on the rich. We just need the rich to pay a little more. They need to pay their fair share.

They got a big, fat tax increase with the fiscal cliff. They got a big, fat tax increase with the $1 trillion in ObamaCare. The rich are getting hit with higher taxes, but what is happening is a lot of these tax increases are starting to hit the middle class, and they are starting to figure this out. If you are a middle-class American and they are saying: Let's soak the rich a little more, that is OK, the rich can pay more--Mr. President, I have to tell you, it is coming at you. If you are a middle-class American, you cannot tax the rich enough to do all the things these guys want to do to increase Federal spending and grow the size of the Federal Government.

Our focus should not be on growing the government; it ought to be on growing the economy. This budget does absolutely nothing to get the economy growing again. It simply does what we have done in the past 4 years; that is, increase spending, increase borrowing, and increase taxes.

If you don't think the taxes are hitting the middle class already, just look at your health insurance premiums because the tax increases in ObamaCare were taxes on, yes, medical device companies, taxes on your health insurance plan, taxes on pharmaceuticals, all of which are being passed on in the form of higher costs to average working Americans.

We have a crisis in this country that affects the middle-income families, people who are out there every single day just trying to do their best to make their budget balance and do the important things to plan for the future of their children and grandchildren, and here we are in Washington, DC, debating yet more policies that are going to hurt the economy, going to crush job creation in this country and lower take-home pay for those very middle-class American families.

This is the wrong approach. I hope as we debate this we will have an opportunity to vote on amendments. Perhaps there is a way we can make this better. I doubt that to be the case. This budget is so far off in terms of where we need to be going as a country. If we are serious about getting the economy growing and expanding again, creating jobs for middle-class Americans, and doing something about the massive amount of debt we are passing on to future generations, this budget is the exact wrong prescription for that. We can do much better by the American people, and we need to. I hope that during the course of this debate that will become clear and that we will move in a different direction for the future of this country.

I see the leader is here on the floor. I will conclude my remarks at least for the time being and allow him to make his.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. We have among the Senators who serve in the Senate people who have balanced budgets and done it the old-fashioned way, the hard way, one of whom is the former Governor of the State of Nebraska, now Senator, Mike Johanns. Senator Johanns, like me, comes from the midwestern part of the country where common sense prevails and where people are not unaccustomed to having to tighten their belts a little bit during difficult times. As a consequence of that, many of those States in that part of the country are well managed, and they elect leaders who bring those types of principles to their leadership and to the way they govern among their States.

So the Senator from Nebraska, Mr. Johanns, has a long record--not only as a Governor, I might add, but as a mayor. He has been an executive. He knows what it is like to make those hard decisions, and he is someone who, like me, is very concerned that we get on a more sustainable fiscal path for this country, get our fiscal house here in Washington, DC, in order, and make sure we are not bankrupting this country and saddling the next generation with massive amounts of debt.

I yield to my colleague from Nebraska, Senator Johanns.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, the Senator from Nebraska could not have put it better. He has great experience with budgets and the people of Nebraska, who are similar to the people I represent in South Dakota.

Someone else who is also from a very similar State, the State of North Dakota--he is yet another Governor who, when he came here, came here in many respects because of his record of accomplishment as a Governor. The people of North Dakota elected him by an overwhelming margin largely because he knows how important it is that a State and country live within their means and that they not spend money they do not have. The Governor, and now Senator, of North Dakota has a long and incredibly strong record when it comes to fiscal matters. Again, like me, he represents a constituency which understands very clearly what is at stake when it comes to balancing our budget and making sure we are not handing that debt down to those children and grandchildren.

It is great to have here the Senator, my colleague and neighbor from North Dakota.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota. I think he put it absolutely right in terms of what the priorities should be and what the stakes are in the budget debate. I thank him for his leadership on this issue.

I want to close with one final point he made. He spoke a lot about the impact on the economy and what happens when we get economic growth. His State is a good example of this, because the State of North Dakota has a growing economy. And when we have a growing economy, we have people who are making money, people who are working, people who are investing, and that means people are paying more taxes, and that is how we get more revenue. What we need is a growing economy.

In the last 4 years, the average growth rate is less than 1 percent, eight-tenths of 1 percent. The 60-year average of economic growth, post-World War II, is 3.3 percent. So we are growing at less than 1 percent. In the last 4 years we have added $6 trillion to the debt, and we still have 12 million people unemployed and an unemployment rate that continues to hover around 8 percent.

Having said that, wouldn't we think we would want to try something different and go in a different direction? Yet this budget doubles down. It flat doubles down on these failed policies of the past 4 years that are antigrowth, antijobs, and continue to tax and spend and borrow as if there is no tomorrow. We need a different path. We need a different approach.

So I hope, as we have this debate over the course of the next couple of days, it will become clear not only to the Senators here in this Chamber but to the American people who really is interested in getting revenue the right way, which is through growing our economy, creating jobs, getting Americans back to work, and doing something about the debt and the spending crisis we have in this country.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I rise today along with my colleague from Missouri, Senator Blunt, to offer a couple of amendments that have been filed and that I hope we get an opportunity to vote on before this process concludes. If you look at the base Democratic budget that has been put before us, it has large tax increases in it; in fact, up to $1.5 trillion in new taxes.

What we would attempt to do is to ensure that those taxes, higher taxes, do not come by eliminating or capping the Federal tax deduction for charitable giving. We have tens of millions of Americans mired in poverty, and government budgets are more constrained than ever before and what fills that gap is the charitable giving. It is the generosity of people around this country who keep organizations going that are providing these essential and basic functions for many Americans.

In fact, in 2011, Americans gave nearly $300 billion to support charitable causes. This generosity not only helps to feed the hungry and clothe the needy, it has a real budgetary impact because this is an instance where the private sector is fulfilling a need that would otherwise have to be met by government spending.

Unfortunately, as we know, the White House has proposed limiting the value of itemized deductions for those earning above $200,000 for singles, and $250,000 for married couples to 28 percent. Previous estimates were that this proposal would reduce charitable donations by up to $5.6 billion a year. As the Charitable Giving Coalition has recently stated, that amounts to more than the annual budgets of the Red Cross, Goodwill, YMCA, Habitat for Humanity, the Boys and Girls Clubs, Catholic Charities, and the American Cancer Society combined.

But even this impact understates the degree to which charitable giving could be harmed under the White House proposal because we now have a new baseline with a higher top income tax rate. A new study by the American Enterprise Institute estimates that the President's itemized limitation under the new tax rates will lower total giving by individuals by more than $9.4 billion per year.

We ought to be exploring new options to expand charitable giving rather than limiting the charitable donations in order to fund higher levels of government spending. If we are going to explore any changes in the charitable deduction or any other tax provisions that we have in the Tax Code today, it ought to be in the context of progrowth revenue-neutral tax reform, not as a way to pay for higher spending, which is what these proposals would do. I hope the vote on this amendment this time around will be just as broadly bipartisan as the one I offered back in 2009, where we got 94 votes in support.

The second amendment will put the Senate on record in support of eliminating the destructive Federal estate tax, better known as the death tax. That amendment I offer with the Senator from Missouri and several others of my colleagues.

I have long believed the Federal estate tax is an unnecessary, counterproductive, and inefficient tax. More important, the death tax strikes many of us as not simply being bad tax policy but a policy that runs counter to the very essence of the American free market system. This is not a tax on rich fatcats, as some will claim. We already have an income tax, and it is one of the most progressive income taxes in the developed world.

The death tax is different. It is a tax on success, a tax on assets that have been accumulated through a lifetime of hard work and generated from income that was already taxed when it was earned. Many of these businesses are ``land rich and cash poor,'' meaning that the value of the business is in the land and in the business assets. These businesses do not have substantial liquid assets sitting around to pay a second layer of tax that is imposed when a loved one passes way. As a result, the death tax often requires that business assets are sold simply to pay the tax.

Consider South Dakota, where we have seen farmland prices increased by over 50 percent in just the past 5 years. States such as Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and North Dakota have seen similar increases.

Finally, my amendment will give farmers, ranchers, and family business owners peace of mind, and it will do so in a deficit-neutral way. When we voted on a sense-of-the-Senate to eliminate the death tax in 2002, 11 Senate Democrats supported that, including a number of Senators who are still in the Senate today. Much has changed since 2002, but I believe the death tax was a bad tax law then, and it remains so today. I hope to get a strong bipartisan vote on this as well.

Before I shift to my colleague from Missouri, I simply want to say, as I have said before, that when we look at this budget process and the budget proposal put before us by the Senate Democrats, the question we ought to ask is, What does this do to promote economic growth? What does this do to create jobs? More than anything else, what we need in this country is increased economic growth. Increased economic growth will get the people who are unemployed back to work, which will increase the take-home pay of middle-class Americans.

We have seen a sluggish economy, chronic high unemployment, and a massive amount of debt over the past 4 years. It is time to chart a different course, and the way to do that is to put policies in place that will encourage economic growth. A $1.5 trillion tax increase is not the way to do that, and we certainly do not want to take away the incentive people in this country have to continue to give out of the generosity of their hearts to our charitable organizations all across the country.

It is also important that once and for all we get rid of the death tax, which is so punitive to people who work so hard and want to pass that on to the next generation of Americans.

I am happy to yield to my colleague from Missouri, who, like me, represents a lot of farmers, ranchers, and hard-working small businesspeople for whom the tax issues are important. He will offer comments on the impact of some of these tax policies and the impact some of the budget proposals coming from the Senate Democrats would have on the State of Missouri.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I thank my colleague from Missouri. He has a great deal of experience. As he said, we worked together on these issues for a long time. We both recognize the importance of economic growth. We see a budget put before us by the Senate Democrats that grows the government and not the economy. We believe the focus should be on growing the economy, not the government. The amendments we offered have that thought in mind.

There are other colleagues who are here to speak to the basic budget proposal the Democrats have put forward and talk about some of the amendments they intend to offer.

Thank you.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, the House Republican budget does something the Democratic budget does not do--it balances. It actually balances in 10 years, and it does it not by taxing more but by spending less, spending at a slower rate--3.4 percent over that 10-year period.

If we look at what the House Republican budget does, it is focused on growing the economy, not growing the government. What the Democratic budget, before the Senate this evening, does is it grows the government, not the economy.

In fact, if we look at the analysis that has been done, it is suspected the Democratic budget would cost us 850,000 jobs and reduce take-home pay for middle-class families by $1,500. The House Republican budget takes seriously the challenges that are facing this country, takes the steps necessary to save and protect Medicare for future generations of Americans, something this budget--the Senate Democratic budget--does not do.

I urge my colleagues to support this budget, and it is a serious one, that balances the budget in 10 years and puts our economy back in growing mode and our fiscal house back in order.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source