Default Prevention Act of 2013-- Motion to Proceed--

Floor Speech

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Mr. CRAPO. Madam President, I rise today to discuss the multiple issues that have now presented themselves to us in the Senate and to the U.S. Congress and, frankly, the American people.

I have been in several hearings this morning. The first was with Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, where the Finance Committee discussed with him the pending expiration of our debt ceiling and what his understanding is of how that will impact the country. He raised a lot of serious concerns--very legitimate serious concerns--that others are raising.

We then followed that up with a hearing in the Banking Committee where we had representatives from a number of the various industries in the United States also discussing what is going to happen in the United States if the country does not increase the debt ceiling. And there are serious consequences that will happen if we do not do this.

But what I tried to do in both of those hearings--and I will refer to my conversation with Secretary Lew--was to focus us back on the broader, bigger threat. Secretary Lew basically said that we have a manufactured crisis in the United States because of our unwillingness at this point to face the debt ceiling and simply extend the debt ceiling without any kinds of conditions or negotiations.

I reminded him that the crisis we face--the big crisis we face--is the debt crisis, and it is very real. I guess in a sense it has been manufactured over the last 20 or 30 years by Congresses and Presidents who have refused to control spending and have put us into tremendous debt.

Our debt ceiling we are negotiating about right now--or I think wishing we could negotiate about right now--is $16.7 trillion. It has grown by trillions of dollars over the last 5 or 6 years.

What the President has asked us to do is to once again increase the debt ceiling by another $1 trillion or more with no reforms, no fiscal changes in our policies to deal with the mounting spending crisis we face. The President's position is: You give me this $1 trillion or more of new debt authority, and I will then talk to you about reforming our fiscal policy. The problem is we have been trying to negotiate over fiscal policy now and trying to get reforms put into place for years and we have not been able to get there.

When I asked Secretary Lew about this, he basically said: We have made progress on our overall debt crisis in the past few years, and I think we can continue to work on those kinds of steps if you will simply pass this clean debt ceiling extension and do so in a way that involves no negotiations from the President in any way.

I reminded him that a major part of the progress we have made in the last couple of years was made when we met the debt ceiling 2 years ago in 2011. It was the Budget Control Act that put into statute over $2 trillion of reductions in our spending path. That was attached to the debt ceiling as we moved forward. It was literally the debt ceiling negotiation that generated the only significant spending controls this Congress, this country, has seen for years and years. Yet the President refuses to take another step now that we have met the debt ceiling again and negotiate for further reforms.

By the way, there is another reason we have made some progress in the past few years. That is that we have implemented massive new taxes on the American people. The ObamaCare legislation itself contains nearly $1 trillion of new taxes, and although they were delayed for a few years, they are now beginning to fully hit the American people. Last January, the President was able to win his argument and succeed in getting the top income tax brackets raised, an impact on our Tax Code that I think was harmful rather than helpful and clearly was damaging to the creation of jobs and to businesses across the United States. But, nevertheless, another $500 billion to $600 billion of tax revenue was put into the mix there.

So what have we done? We have made a plan to control discretionary spending over the next 10 years and reduce it by about $2 trillion. If we stick to that, we will get $2 trillion worth of spending reductions. We have raised taxes by at least $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years, all of which, I believe, has been harmful to our economy, but has generated revenue to try to help reduce the debt cycle. But we have not addressed the two critical parts of reform that we must address in this country if we are ever going to get control of our spending excesses and stop the out-of-control spiral toward insolvency that we see; that is, reforming our entitlement system and reforming our broken Tax Code.

What have we seen there? Virtually minimal, if any at all, reforms of entitlements. They seem to be off the table. Yet they are the part of our spending problem that is the biggest and the most out of control. On tax reform, we have seen no reform of the Tax Code. We have a Tax Code that is the most unfair, the most complicated, the most expensive to comply with, and the most anticompetitive code we probably could have created if we did it on purpose. Yet we have no reforms of the code. Instead what we have done is add to the code another $1.6 trillion of new taxes on the American people.

What we are asking is whether we can move forward in trying to deal with our fiscal problems in this country by negotiating over entitlement reform and tax reform. I frankly believe we ought to be at the negotiating table talking about that. But what we have been told is: No, as soon as you raise the debt ceiling by--the amount we are hearing is somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 trillion--as soon as you raise the debt ceiling, then we can talk further about other negotiations, then we can get engaged in trying to deal with our debt crisis.

I pointed out, as I said to Secretary Lew, that the last major progress we made on spending reform happened in negotiations relating to our debt ceiling. Why cannot we negotiate now and make significant fiscal reform in addition to dealing with our debt ceiling? It is that debt crisis that is the biggest problem.

I was on the Bowles-Simpson Commission, the President's own commission, that he put together some years back, 2 or 3 years now. We spent a full year studying the impacts on our economy of America's fiscal excess and what we needed to do. The Bowles-Simpson Commission came up with a plan. It was a proposal. We concluded that--this was 2 or 3 years back--we needed to reduce our spending path, our debt path in the United States by at least $4 trillion. We concluded we had to deal with that by reforming our entitlement system and we had to deal with it by controlling discretionary spending. We agreed to having some of that tax revenue the President was demanding. We also agreed that in the overall mix we would have about a 3-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue.

The President did not accept that recommendation. Many of us tried for months and months and months afterward to get that recommendation to the floor for a vote. But it has not made it to the floor for a vote.

My point is, negotiations have been under way for years and years. Significant plans have been developed that would help us move forward. We know what to do. We need to have the will to do it. So far, the only reforms we have been able to get in the last few years as a result of the debt crisis that we face have come when we have met these pressure points dealing with our debt ceiling.

We are not asking to shut down the government for the purpose of simply making a point. We are trying to get to negotiations. We want to see the government reopened. We are not seeking to have the debt ceiling expire. We want to have negotiations to be able to put together the kinds of fiscal reforms that should always accompany extensions of the debt ceiling.

I believe the reason Congress put a statutory debt ceiling in place in the first place was because it wanted to give America a gut check every so often about the spending problems we have. We have put almost half of the entire spending system of the government on auto pilot. We do not even have the opportunity to vote on it here in Congress.

Ultimately, we have to deal with the debt ceiling. Ultimately, we have to deal with the funding to keep our government operational. Let's not just move forward and accomplish those objectives, leaving in place the unrestrained fiscal crisis we are dealing with in this country. Let's use this opportunity to put together the kinds of fiscal reforms that should accompany decisions to allow our country to increase its debt.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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