Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2013 - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I first want to start with just a word about the tragedy in Oklahoma. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families impacted by yesterday's devastating storms, as well as the first responders and volunteers who rushed to the scene. I hope all Americans will continue to keep them in their thoughts and prayers and be looking for ways in which they can pitch in and help in this very tragic situation.

LONG-TERM BUDGET CHALLENGES

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about the long-term budget challenges facing the country and the impact those challenges are going to have on jobs, economic growth, and future generations if we do not control spending.

Last week the Congressional Budget Office released its updated budget projections, and in conjunction with that they released an analysis of the President's 2014 budget.

Once again, the CBO report underscores the long-term budget challenges facing this country. If you listen to many of the politicians here in Washington, DC, and commentators on the Democratic side reacting to the Congressional Budget Office report, you would have heard claims that the deficit and debt crisis facing this country is solved and that no further deficit reduction is needed. In fact, President Obama took to the airwaves recently in his radio address and boasted about the deficits ``shrinking at the fastest rate in decades.''

These claims about last week's Congressional Budget Office report strike me as odd, particularly because the details of the report tell a different story. According to the CBO, the deficit for 2013 is projected to be $642 billion or 4 percent of the Nation's gross domestic product.

While the deficit may be down from its record trillion dollar-plus levels, the national debt, which is already at $16.7 trillion, continues to grow at an alarming rate--$642 billion this year alone. While it is encouraging that the deficit this year will be smaller than it was originally projected, part of those savings are due to unexpected repayments from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the revenue increases from January's fiscal cliff agreement.

The fact of the matter is a deficit 4 percent the size of the economy is nearly double the historic average. Over the next 10 years covered in the CBO's baseline projections, the national debt will grow by nearly $9 trillion to over $25 trillion.

To put that number in perspective, the country is projected to rack up over $2 billion in debt every single day over the next decade, at which point our national debt will exceed $25 trillion. This assumes the sequester remains in place. Publicly held debt will remain above 70 percent of GDP, which is much higher than the historic average of 39 percent. CBO projects that publicly held debt will continue on an upward path beyond the next decade.

This growth is driven by spending, not revenue. The CBO report confirms that revenues are projected to grow by 45.9 percent in the 8 years after the year 2015, while overall spending will grow at 55 percent during that time period, despite the fact that inflation will be 19.5 percent and economic growth 24.9 percent during that time period. Those are CBO estimates about economic growth, inflation, spending, and debt over the course of the next decade.

In other words, revenues are going up but spending is projected to grow at nearly three times the rate of inflation, meaning we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem. In fact, revenues will reach 19.1 percent of GDP by the year 2023, which is well above the historic average of 17.9 percent since the end of World War II. Spending, on the other hand, will continue to grow even with the sequester, driven largely by increases in mandatory spending. Mandatory spending on programs such as Medicare is projected to grow by 79 percent from today's level over the next 10 years. Federal health care programs, including ObamaCare, are driving the surge in mandatory spending. Federal health care spending is projected to double over the next decade as the health insurance exchange subsidies kick in beginning next year. Medicare and other programs continue to grow without needed reforms to save and strengthen them.

Spending on mandatory programs and interest on the debt will consume nearly three-quarters of all Federal spending over the next 10 years, leaving little room to pay for all discretionary programs including, I might add, national defense.

To slow the rapid rise in debt this country is experiencing, we have to control the largest driver of that debt, which is spending and, in particular, mandatory entitlement spending. The alternative is a crippling national debt that is bad for the economy, bad for jobs, bad for our national security, and bad for our children and grandchildren.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, ``Such high and rising debt later in the coming decade would have serious negative consequences.'' The report goes on to say: ``Moreover, because Federal borrowing reduces national saving, over time the capital stock would be smaller and total wages would be lower ..... ''

The CBO also warns that such high levels of debt increase the risk of a fiscal crisis. The threat the rising national debt poses to our economy is real. It will impact the American people, and it will impact our economy in very real ways. It will slow economic growth, meaning fewer jobs. It will drive up interest rates, making it more expensive to borrow money to pay for a college education or to buy a home.

It is inevitable that the national debt is going to have to be addressed at some point. The question is whether we address it directly or continue kicking the can down the road, which will only make our problems much more difficult to solve.

The Congressional Budget Office also projected in their update last week that interest spending--the amount we spend to finance our debt--is going to increase dramatically over the next several years. In fact, interest costs on prior deficit spending are going to grow from $223 billion today to $823 billion in 2023, an increase of 369 percent. Net interest costs will surpass the base defense budget in 2019, 6 years from now. Think about that. We are going to spend more in interest on the debt 6 years from now than we spend on national security, on our national defense. That is how fast the interest is going to eat up every other area of the budget.

I would hope we will be able to take this CBO report and not greet it with great fanfare and be slapping high fives because for 1 year the deficit was reduced by a couple of hundred billion over what it was supposed to be, but, rather, recognize that with $642 billion this year and a Federal debt that is going to be at $25 trillion at the end of this decade and interest payments that will exceed the amount we spend on national security, we have a serious debt crisis in this country that needs to be addressed.

It is my wish that Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle and our Democratic colleagues will work with us and that the President will step forward and acknowledge we have a debt crisis. It is not a debt crisis somewhere out there in the future, it is a debt crisis today that needs to be dealt with. The CBO update, rather than alleviating that concern, puts the fine point that we need to act, and we need to act now.

I yield the floor.

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