Default Prevention Act of 2013 - Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, tomorrow morning--unless it has otherwise changed--we will be voting on the request from the majority leader and the President to raise the debt ceiling by more than $1 trillion. It will not actually be a dollar figure. It will be suspended for roughly 1 year--the debt ceiling, that is. So everybody understands what the majority leader and the President are asking us to do: America has maxed out its credit card. It is about $16.7 trillion.
I know we talk about millions and billions and trillions as if we could actually conceptualize what that means, but here is an interesting comparison: Under President Obama--he has been in office for about 5 years now--our national debt has gone up $6.1 trillion. The debt accrued by all 43 previous Presidents was $10.6 trillion.
Our national debt is $16.7 trillion, and President Obama has asked to raise that credit limit another $1 trillion. Here is the catch: If he had a plan to actually deal with how we are going to pay down this $16.7 trillion, then maybe there would be a discussion. What he wants is what he called a clean debt ceiling, which is a blank check. President Obama wants a blank check to continue to borrow more and more money--not so we, the present generation, can live up to our responsibilities and make sure we are fiscally
responsible but, rather, to foist that debt off onto the next generation and beyond with absolutely no plan in place to repay it.
We have heard discussions about grand bargains. We were with the President this morning. He was kind enough to invite Republicans in the Senate over to the White House. He sort of chuckled about the grand bargain that he and Speaker Boehner and others have been pursuing over the last few years. He likened it to a unicorn. In other words, he likened it to a mythical creature no one has actually ever seen. That is what the grand bargain is, at least under this administration.
We reminded the President this morning that none of us wanted a government shutdown. This is not what we actually want, and we are all eager to end it. We also told the President that now is the time--and divided government is perhaps the best time--to end our fiscal crisis and to be responsible for the $16.7 trillion and come up with a payment plan.
If you went to the credit card company and said: I want to raise my credit card limit another $10,000, they would say what is your plan to actually pay down the debt you already accumulated? If you come back to us with a plan, then maybe we can talk about raising the limit on your credit card.
As I said, for the 220 years between the start of George Washington's Presidency and the end of George W. Bush's Presidency, the Federal Government accumulated $10.1 trillion in debt. During the Obama Presidency alone, it has been $6.1 trillion. If the President gets his way tomorrow in the vote, we are going to have to get a blank check to raise it another $1 trillion-plus. It won't be $6.1 trillion; it will be $7.1 or $7.2 trillion with no plan to pay down the debt and deal with the impact of this growing indebtedness on our economy and on our next generation.
It is important to remember what the President has said about the debt. In 2008, when he was a Member of the Senate, he said adding $4 trillion to the national debt was, in his words, ``irresponsible'' and ``unpatriotic.'' That was President Obama back in 2008, and here he is again asking for a higher debt limit with no plan to repay the $16.7 trillion or any portion of it.
President Obama is also the same person who said in 2009: ``I refuse to leave our children with a debt they cannot repay.'' He is the same person who said in 2010 that America's massive debt ``keeps [him] awake at night.'' I can't imagine he is getting much sleep these days if that is true.
This is the same person who in 2011 echoed the comments of the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ADM Mike Mullen when he was asked what his biggest concern was as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Mullen said the greatest long-term threat to America's national security is America's debt. President Obama said he agreed with that.
Finally, President Obama is the same person who in 2012 said he was running for reelection ``to pay down the debt in a way that's balanced and responsible.''
The most amazing thing I thought about the meeting we had with the President this morning is that he was actually taking credit for a reduction in the deficit. Of course, the deficit is different from the debt. The deficit is how we measure the amount of money coming into the Treasury and how much goes out in a given year. We are now spending roughly 16 cents on the dollar of borrowed money; in other words, more money than what is coming in.
The President was actually taking credit for the annual deficit's decrease. The deficit can be zero this year, and we would still have $16.7 trillion in debt. Those are related but different issues because the debt accumulates over many years when you spend more money than you have actually coming in.
In fact, if we look back, the two reasons the deficit has gone down this year is because, No. 1, one of the largest tax increases in American history that the President demanded in January of this last year--that was the fiscal cliff negotiation--and, secondly, it was the Budget Control Act and the sequester, which has actually capped discretionary spending for the last 2 years. That is what has caused a reduction in the deficit, not anything else.
So now the President said it is no big deal, this debt--$16.7 trillion is no big deal. And $17 plus trillion is no big deal, either, to hear the President say it today.
Now the President has changed his tune. Earlier he told ``ABC News'': We don't have an immediate crisis in terms of debt. In fact, for the next 10 years, it is going to be in a sustainable place.
Well, besides being completely irresponsible and not making decisions today but, rather, kicking the can down the road to the next generation and beyond, this high debt is having a present-day impact on slow economic growth. All we have to do is read the Congressional Budget Office reports, which say when the Federal Government borrows this much money from foreign governments such as China and elsewhere, that is money--the Federal Government is actually competing in the marketplace against the private sector for credit and it actually drives down private sector investment. With the debt this high, people know something is going to happen. Either the Federal Government is going to have to cut spending to deal with this debt or the President is going to want to raise taxes again, and that is exactly what he has requested year after year.
Speaking of the next 10 years, the President's latest budget proposal, which he unveiled in April, would increase our debt by $7.4 trillion as well as raise taxes by another $1.1 trillion, even though the President has raised taxes by $1.7 trillion already.
There is a reason why our economy is growing so slowly, why the private sector is sitting on the sidelines rather than investing and creating new jobs. There is a reason why the percentage of people active in the workforce is at a 30-year low. That is called the labor participation rate. All we have to do is Google the Bureau of Labor Statistics and it will tell us what the labor participation rate is. It is at a 30-year low.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 2 minutes.
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Mr. CORNYN. So not only is the unemployment rate unacceptably high, those are people still looking for work. We know more and more people are simply giving up because they have quit looking, and they are reflected in that smaller percentage of people actually in the workforce.
As we all know, the President has had multiple opportunities to make that grand bargain for long-term debt reduction. He has endorsed a grand bargain but walked away from his own bipartisan fiscal commission, the so-called Simpson-Bowles Commission, in December of 2010. He might have also endorsed a grand bargain put forward by the Bipartisan Policy Center's Domenici-Rivlin Commission, but he walked away from that one too.
President Reagan negotiated with Tip O'Neill. President Bush 41 negotiated with George Mitchell. President Clinton negotiated with Newt Gingrich. President Bush 43 negotiated with Ted Kennedy. That is what Presidential leadership requires, and which is so obviously missing in this context.
I hope the President will follow up on this meeting we had this morning and begin the kind of negotiations that would provide a payment plan to pay off the debt America already owes--by the way, it is not just America, it is every man, woman, and child in this country--before he comes back here and asks us to raise the credit card limit by another $1 trillion.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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