Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Ms. HIRONO. I wish to thank Senator Warner for leading this colloquy, and I am glad to join him and my friend Senator Kaine in talking about the effects of sequester and how we need to come up with an alternative to the sequester.

Senator Warner used the word ``stupid'' to describe sequester, and I think that is apt, because what family, in trying to get a handle on their budget, would just make an across-the-board cut to everything in their family's budget. The Senator raised the analogy that no business would do an across-the-board cut, but let's talk about families in our country. No family would cut across the board their food budget, their rent budget. That would not happen. So why are we doing this?

As one of the people who testified before the Armed Services Committee said, sequester was the result of political dysfunction. That is very true because it was never supposed to happen. As Senator Kaine said, I am very surprised to listen to our friends on the other side of the aisle talk about sequester--something that was never supposed to happen, and both Republicans and Democrats had agreed this was not going to happen--now take the position that we are where we are and we need to live by the boundaries of sequester.

What sequester does is it interjects huge uncertainty into our economy, huge uncertainty, at a time when we are still digging out from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Senator Warner and Senator Kaine have both acknowledged that Virginia is ground zero on the bad effects of sequester. If Virginia is ground zero, I would say Hawaii is ground 0.1. We have a huge military presence in Hawaii. They are a big part of our economy. In fact, there are some 101,000 people in Hawaii who are directly employed with the military. That is 16 percent of our workforce. Some 20,000 of them have gotten notices of furloughs, looking toward a reduction in their pay of 20 percent. Talk about the ripple effect of that kind of reduction in their ability to buy products, we can see what the negative ripple effect would be.

In Hawaii, as I said, the military is such a big part of our economy. States such as Hawaii, such as Virginia are among the first States to experience the negative effects of sequester--immediate. Thousands of letters have been going out to say: Expect to be furloughed, with 11,000 people possibly losing their jobs directly. These are immediate impacts.

The top reason we need to replace the sequester with something balanced, reasonable, fair, and not stupid is that sequester cuts jobs. There will be huge job losses, and economists of all stripes have said don't keep going down this path with these kinds of cuts that will severely hamper economic growth and cost jobs in this country. These are senseless cuts.

The State of Hawaii is already reeling from the potential impacts of sequester which will begin in a couple weeks. We have already gotten many of these notices. But the sequester also represents huge cuts to education, housing assistance, and other programs that are on the chopping block. We must listen to our constituents. So many of them, I know, have contacted all of us. There was one letter I received from an elderly woman and her husband. She lives on Social Security and on HUD housing grants--HUD vouchers--and she said: Our Social Security checks are so small.

Yes, while sequester doesn't touch Social Security, it certainly has a potential impact of cutting their housing vouchers.

She said: I don't know where we would go if we lost our HUD housing voucher. We would be homeless. I am so distressed, she wrote to me.

Another letter I received was from an Army reservist who was all set to go for his training. Now multiply this situation thousands and thousands of times across our country. He said due to sequester he will no longer be traveling to the TDY location for his training. Yet he planned his calendar based on his going. The letter he got

was that his orders had been canceled for training due to sequester and his billet is going unfulfilled to cut costs.

Failing to provide training to this young man and the thousands and thousands of other men and women who are in our Reserves degrades our Nation's readiness.

I received letters from people who work at the Pearl Harbor shipyard, which is the largest industrial employer in the State of Hawaii, with some 5,000 direct employees, both civilian and military, who got their furlough notices. These are highly skilled people with good-paying jobs. When they think about a 20-percent reduction in their salaries, believe me, they are thinking about how to revise their family budgets, and that revision is not going to involve across-the-board ``stupid'' cuts.

These are just some of the examples of how sequester will hurt a State such as Hawaii. What should we do to replace sequester? My colleagues have talked about it. The American people understand this meat-ax approach to balancing our budget is the wrong way to go because it destroys jobs and it affects many people who are working right now. So the budget put forth by Chairman Murray will reverse this path down no man's land, basically. What the Murray budget says is let's provide a balanced approach. Let's ask a little more from the most fortunate and wealthy, including the corporations, while including more smart, targeted cuts to other areas of our budget.

Let's remember once again that we have already implemented and put in place $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction. So by following the balanced approach that is represented in the Murray budget, we will have reduced the deficit by some $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

As I said, we need to do this in a responsible, balanced way, and it bears repeating--because we are still hearing from our friends on the other side that sequester is what we have; let's just live with it--that there is an alternative, friends. The alternative is a fair, balanced, smart way to deal with our budget deficit, to create jobs, and to help our families, because our budgets do reflect our values, and our values are about supporting our families, creating jobs, moving our country forward, and enabling us to continue to dig out from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

I thank Senator Warner very much for this opportunity to come forward, and I will have a few more things to say perhaps later on about the budget and how Senator Murray's budget reflects the kind of values we should be putting forth in our country.

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Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, before I begin my remarks, I wish to thank Senator Mikulski for the tremendous work she did on the continuing resolution. I know she worked so hard, and yet she is on the floor today to talk about how important passing the Murray budget is. And of course Senator Murray is on the floor also, and I want to thank her for her great work.

I stand in solidarity with all the men and women, my colleagues, who are going to be talking about how important it is to pass the Murray budget, which is a balanced budget that reflects our priorities and our values. The last few years have been hard for families across the country. Our economy is still struggling its way out of a great recession, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And we have made progress. For example, the economy has grown and millions of people are back to work. But this progress is not fast enough for too many families in Hawaii and across our Nation.

Regrettably, that doesn't seem to concern some of our colleagues in the House of Representatives. The budget proposed by the House majority, the Ryan budget, would set our economic recovery back and it would do so on the backs of those who can least afford it. Some of the hardest hit will be women and children, the very people who face some of the biggest challenges in today's economy. So I want to focus on how the Ryan budget negatively impacts women in our country.

Women in Hawaii make 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man for the same job. Monthly food costs in Hawaii are 61 percent higher than in the rest of the country. Forty percent of Hawaii households pay more than 40 percent of their monthly income on housing. Hawaii residents pay some of the highest gasoline prices in the country, which we all know can be a serious hardship on family budgets. Our high cost of living is one of the reasons we have a high percentage of women working in two-parent households in Hawaii.

Across my State and across our country, women are waking up every day, working hard, and making ends meet in any way they can. These challenges I mentioned are being overcome every single day by determined women. They work hard to improve their lives and to give their children an even greater shot at success than they had. For many, the support they receive for health care, education, childcare, paying for food and housing, makes all the difference. Unfortunately, the Ryan budget lays out a vision of America where these people, our families, are left behind.

We are told that budgets reflect our values. I agree. What are the values exemplified and reflected by a budget, the Ryan budget, that makes deep cuts in supports such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program--SNAP--and the Women, Infants and Children--WIC--Program? Combined, SNAP and WIC help put food on the table for over 50 million--I repeat, 50 million--Americans, primarily women and children. The SNAP cuts in the Ryan budget would put over 180,000 families in Hawaii at risk of losing the ability to put food on their table.

What could be more fundamental than putting food on the table? I don't know anyone who could look these families in the eye and say: Sorry that you can't afford to feed your children anymore. We have to balance the budget. We need to close the deficit. Sorry. That, to me, is unconscionable and runs counter to our core values.

The Ryan budget would also deeply cut childcare assistance and Head Start, as mentioned by my other colleagues, leaving more than 2 million children and their families without realistic early childhood or daycare.

In addition, the Pell Grant cuts in the Ryan proposal would make college less affordable for 6 million women students. Add to that the millions of male students and you are affecting the future education of our country.

These cuts don't just hurt families now, they force parents to choose between jobs and caring for children. They prevent kids from accessing early learning opportunities that we know are vital to enabling these children to succeed in school and in life.

The Ryan budget also slashes support for things such as public transit, housing assistance, and community development. Each of these investments helps make our communities better places to raise a family, which attracts businesses and creates jobs.

Finally, and most egregiously and seriously, in my view, the Ryan budget cuts health care for women of all ages by repealing ObamaCare. By repealing ObamaCare, the Ryan budget takes us back to when being a woman was a preexisting condition, thereby disqualifying her for health insurance or costing her many times more for coverage. If we repeal ObamaCare, analysts project that insurance companies could charge women over $1 billion more in premiums than men are charged for the very same coverage. So by repealing ObamaCare, the Ryan budget discriminates against women. And since when is discriminating against women a core value?

While ObamaCare requires that insurers cover maternity care, only 12 percent of plans on the individual market do so currently. Repealing ObamaCare would also undermine access to reproductive health and family planning services.

Now let's talk about how the Ryan budget would affect seniors. Seniors in our country know the Ryan budget will end Medicare as we know it. They know these changes will force millions of women--and, of course, men--to make do with a voucher for their medical care--a voucher of decreasing value. And since so many women receive lower Social Security benefits than men, while paying higher out-of-pocket health care costs, losing Medicare coverage could be the difference for them between food, housing, or lifesaving medication. Now is not the time to be making huge cuts to investments in programs that provide the very economic security we should be working to improve.

Fortunately, the priorities laid out in Chairman Murray's budget would help to strengthen the economic security so many families are seeking. The Senate budget resolution prioritizes creating new jobs, expanding opportunity, and laying out a strong foundation for economic growth. It builds on the progress we have made over the past few years instead of tearing that progress down.

I applaud Chairman Murray for prioritizing the elimination of the sequester, which the Congressional Budget Office says could eliminate 750,000 jobs. I also applaud her foresight in including investments in early childhood education, clean energy, national security, our veterans and our seniors, and her bill preserves access to health care, opportunities for higher education, and programs such as SNAP and WIC. These supports are vital to keeping our economy moving in the right direction.

The Murray plan will help improve American competitiveness, foster innovation, and open more opportunities for small businesses to succeed, and it lays out a blueprint for responsibly paying for these investments and reducing our deficit in a balanced way. Each and every one of these priorities helps to improve the economic security of men and women and children--families--in our country.

I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting the Murray plan, a plan that provides a foundation for growth, instead of a plan that takes a meat-ax approach to the economic security of millions of families in our country.

I yield the floor.

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