Agricultural Act of 2014 -- Conference Report

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, once again, the President of the United States has failed to meet the statutory deadline to propose a budget. In fact, he has missed the deadline so many times that people hardly notice anymore. Failure seems to become the rule, not the exception. The President has now missed the budget deadline five times since he took office in 2009. By comparison, his three White House predecessors missed the deadline a total of four times in 20 years. Five times under President Obama; four times in the last 20 years under his three immediate predecessors.

All totaled, it is now the 18th time that the Obama administration has missed a legal deadline related to the Federal budget. I guess the President and his administration consider the law purely an advisory matter not binding on them. The law is for other people, not for this President and for his administration, seems to be their attitude.

The reason this is so important is because, as we all know--whether it a family budget or a budget for your business--setting a budget is where you establish your priorities: the things you have to have, the things you would like to have but maybe need to put off, and then those things you really cannot afford. That is how you budget. That is why it is so important.

But if your budget includes massive amounts of new spending, along with firm opposition to major reforms, you would have no choice but to ask for a huge tax increase. The President, I do not think, wants to put himself on record again, like he did last year, for another huge tax increase, nor does he want his party's members, who are running for election in 2014, to have to cast the hard vote on the President's own budget.

Last year, his 2014 budget proposal would have raised taxes by roughly $1 trillion--a trillion-dollar tax increase. That is on top of the $1.7 trillion that taxes have gone up during the last 5 years under this administration.

It looks as if the President's priorities are more taxes, more spending, and more debt.

But if those sorts of priorities led to robust economic growth and job creation, we would see one of the strongest economic recoveries in American history. But the truth is more taxes, more spending, and more debt are not a recipe for economic growth and job creation--just the opposite.

We are seeing the evidence of that right now. We are suffering through the weakest economic recovery since the great recession in modern history. Actually, we are seeing the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression right now. There are a lot of reasons, but the Congressional Budget Office has given us some reasons that I want to talk about just briefly.

They talk about ObamaCare and its impact on job growth and economic growth. As a matter of fact, the Affordable Care Act, the President's signature legislative accomplishment--the Congressional Budget Office said the number of full-time workers will go down by 2 million in the coming years as a result of the Affordable Care Act. So in addition to people getting cancelled policies or sticker shock and finding out that their health care costs did not go down, they went up, or finding if you like your doctors you cannot keep them, what we are finding is that these same people may find themselves out of work as a result of the policies in the Affordable Care Act.

The Congressional Budget Office looked primarily at how employers would respond to a new penalty for failing to offer insurance to employees who worked more than 30 hours. That response would include cutting people's hours, hiring fewer workers, and lowering wages for new jobs. I know my friends on the other side of the aisle agree with the President when he said we ought to raise the minimum wage.

Well, one of the problems is the President's own health care policy that they all voted for is killing full-time work and putting people in part-time work, meaning that their weekly wages have been depressed. For them the answer is not to deal with the source of that problem, which is ObamaCare, but to fix wages at 40 percent higher than they currently are per hour, which we know--economists tell us and it is intuitively true--is going to put more people out of work, put more pressure on workers.

Perhaps one of the most distressing things about the Congressional Budget Office's report today is what they said, what the prospects look like for the President's remaining term in office. The Congressional Budget Office does not see unemployment falling below 6 percent for the rest of President Obama's term--6 percent for the remainder of his term.

Yet, despite all of this, the President still will not get behind genuine progrowth reforms. He will not support genuine reforms of our existing programs such as Medicare and Social Security that would actually save them and put them on a fiscally sustainable path. He has no plan for controlling our national debt.

I went back and looked. Last time Congress came within one vote of passing a balanced budget amendment, do you know what the national debt was then? It was $4.85 trillion. Do you know what it is today? It is in excess of $17 trillion, with no end in sight. So the truth is Republicans have put forward ideas for streamlining Federal regulations, for mitigating the negative effects of the Affordable Care Act and for replacing ObamaCare with patient-centered reforms that would cut costs, broaden quality insurance coverage, and improve patient access. But so far, the majority leader and the President have shown zero interest in trying to work with Republicans to solve our Nation's most serious economic challenges, which are having a direct impact on the American people.

Instead, the President said he is going to go it alone. He has a pen; he has a phone. But as I have suggested before, one of the things he could do that would put Americans back to work almost immediately and make us more North American energy-independent would be to sign the Keystone XL Pipeline.

I know my time is expired. I ask unanimous consent that the three articles I was referring to on the CBO report be printed in the Record.

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