Concurrent Resolutions on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2006 - Conference Report
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2006--CONFERENCE REPORT
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota for his leadership on this budget. When there was a break here and another Senator was speaking, I asked Senator Conrad an obvious question: Have you ever seen a worse budget since you have been in Congress? His answer was no. Well, I have not either. I cannot remember a budget this bad.
When you take a look at the budget deficits of President Bush, and now his Republicans in Congress, it reminds me of a lot of baseball players who were on steroids and in denial. We are seeing these budget deficits mushroom, and the so-called fiscally conservative Republicans are ignoring it. We need to send out an all points bulletin by the Capitol Police to find out if there is one fiscal conservative left on the Republican side of the aisle because each year now under President Bush we have been digging this deficit hole deeper and deeper.
Sadly, the party that used to stand up and say, we want to balance the budget--in fact, amend the Constitution to do it--has now raced away from that value, that principle, and we find ourselves in a terrible predicament. We have a budget that does not accurately reflect the cost of the war in Iraq. It does not reflect the President's proposal to privatize Social Security. It doesn't reflect making permanent all the tax cuts. It doesn't reflect the cost overruns for the President's Medicare prescription drug program. It doesn't reflect the true cost of plugging this tax loophole problem called the alternative minimum tax.
Do you know what BusinessWeek Magazine said? BusinessWeek is not a liberal publication. They said of President Bush's budget that it has become a comedy routine.
Listen to what they said:
It resembles Swiss cheese, and the holes are more interesting than the substance.
They understand that this budget doesn't reflect the true spending of America. We understand that if this budget is enacted--and I am sure my Republican colleagues will march lockstep to the well to vote for it--we are going to find ourselves in the deepest deficits in the history of the United States of America. The President and his party are making history with the deepest deficits in our history and the fact that they are calling for tax cuts in the midst of a war. Tax cuts in the middle of a war? No President has ever done that. This President does it and does not flinch.
We met in the Appropriations Committee this afternoon with an $81 billion supplemental emergency appropriation because you cannot add it in the real budget. It is not a real budget item; it is an emergency budget item, although we are going into our third year in Iraq. The emergency keeps coming every single year. They won't add it to the real budget because it makes the deficit look a lot worse. That is the reality. Yet, at the same time, as the Senator from North Dakota explains to us, we find ourselves in this deficit hole with the budget that doesn't tell the truth about spending in America.
This President wants to stand up and give tax breaks to the wealthiest people in America. Just next year, as the Senator from North Dakota pointed out, there are $32 billion in tax cuts for Americans making over a million dollars a year. Did you listen to the President tonight on television? He spoke to the American people. This is what he said: We need to index Social Security benefits in a way that will reduce Social Security payments for some and increase them for lower income people. I am not going to object to increasing payments for lower income people. I think that is a fair, just, moral thing to do. But when you take a close look at the President's proposal, it means if you are making the average income--$60,000, let's say, and that is not a lot of money, but an average income--when you retire, the President's Social Security benefit change will take over 40 percent of your benefits away. The President said these higher income people--making $60,000 a year under the President's definition--must be prepared to sacrifice.
The spirit of sacrifice. Where is that spirit of sacrifice when it comes to millionaires next year, millionaires to whom the President's tax cuts will give $32 billion more to spend. If you are making $60,000, you need a spirit of sacrifice; if you make a million dollars, have a tax cut. How about $32 billion worth of tax cuts.
Then look at what this budget cuts: $10 billion in Medicaid cuts that reduce final funding for health care. Today, the Governor of my State and the mayor of the largest city came to talk to us about Medicaid. They talked to us about what that meant. Medicaid, where I live, is a critical program. Medicaid for most States is essential. Two out of three people in nursing homes in America today rely on Medicaid to pay their bills so they can live there
from month to month. Medicaid provides health care to children, pregnant women, seniors, and people with disabilities. The budget resolution cuts $10 billion out of Medicaid. We passed an amendment on the floor to restore that money, and I am glad a few Republican Senators stepped up and said we have to, you cannot cut this program. This is for the neediest people in America and, on a bipartisan basis, we restored the money. Sadly, it disappeared when it came to the conference. The conference budget resolution has put $10 billion in cuts right back into the budget. That is unfortunate.
Medicaid funding covers 130,000 new children in Illinois and 135,000 new parents because we worked hard to make sure that more people had health insurance. This cut will endanger that kind of coverage. As I said, Medicaid, the largest insurer in Illinois, covers more than 2 million people. More than 40 percent of the births in my State are covered by Medicaid, and it provides health insurance to almost 1 out of every 3 kids in my State. That is where the President goes to cut, so that he can fund tax cuts for people making over a million dollars.
Senator Obama and I have a town meeting every Thursday morning for visitors from Illinois. The question came up this morning about this whole tax cut proposal. I said that I am reminded that when I was with the President last week in Springfield for the opening of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Center, we were driving out of town in our motorcade and someone had made a homemade sign and put it up right near the airport. The President could not miss it; nobody could miss it. The sign said this: ``Whose taxes would Jesus cut?'' Interesting, isn't it? If we are going to have justice and compassion in America, how can we cut health insurance for children, health insurance for the elderly in nursing homes, and then turn around and give a tax cut to people making over a million dollars a year?
The President has cited in his budget his affection for community health centers. Yet grants for community health centers will be cut by this budget. We are going to see nursing homes impacted. Providers to Medicaid patients, whether they are hospitals, pharmacists, or doctors, are going to see dramatic cuts in what they receive.
When you get down to the other aspects of this budget that are troubling, I have mentioned to the Senator from North Dakota that we are eventually going to get it right between the eyes with this alternative minimum tax. This was enacted to make sure some of the wealthiest people in this country paid something in taxes, but it has gotten out of hand. It has reached the point where it is affecting more and more middle-income families. If we don't stop it, it is going to create a great economic hardship on these taxpayers. The AMT applied to 3.3 million people in 2004. That number is going to jump to 35 million by 2010.
This budget refuses to acknowledge the obvious. If we are going to have a fair Tax Code, we have to deal with it. Rather than cut taxes on those making over $200,000 and those making over a million dollars a year, this administration and the Republicans in Congress prefer to cut veterans health care, cut No Child Left Behind mandated programs, and cut the health care on which many families and people across America rely.
I believe we can do better. I believe we should be sensible, understanding that fighting a war, as we must--a war on terrorism and a war in Iraq and Afghanistan--requires reality in budgeting; that if we are going to do this, the thought of tax cuts for the wealthiest people in America is off the table.
We may not balance the budget this year because a war is expensive and because the economy is weak and because our gasoline prices do hurt economic growth. But we certainly can see ourselves moving forward if we had a sensible budget resolution. Sadly, this budget resolution does not meet that test.
It is unfortunate that what we are doing today means that more deficits will be heaped on those of previous years. It is hard to imagine that only 5 or 6 years ago, under the previous President, we were generating surpluses in our Treasury, Social Security was stronger, we had an economy moving forward, and sadly since then we have gone into the doldrums. Things are getting progressively worse and more expensive.
As the Senator from North Dakota has pointed out, the mortgage holders for America are Japan, China, and Korea, the OPEC nations, and Caribbean nations, as well as those in Taiwan, Korea, and places such as that. It means we are in debt to them more than our children are in debt to them and that their grip on the American economy will be tighter in this budget resolution.
We are still going to have an all-points bulletin to find a fiscal conservative on the Republican side of the aisle who will vote against this budget. I hope they come to their senses and understand we cannot build a strong nation by these misplaced priorities.
I yield the floor.
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