Concurrent Resolution On The Budget, Fiscal Year 2016 -- Continued

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that on Monday, March 23, at 5:30 p.m., the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nomination, Calendar No. 19; that the Senate then vote without intervening action or debate on the nomination, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, that no further motions be in order, that any statements related to the nomination be printed in the Record, the President be immediately notified of the Senate's actions, and the Senate then resume legislative session.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?

Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, writing and passing a budget is one of the most fundamental responsibilities of any legislative body. Unfortunately, it is something we have not done in the U.S. Congress since 2009. It is outrageous. It should be considered a scandal.

Today I will take a few minutes to discuss the budget we have before us today and how we intend to discharge our responsibilities to the American people in the 114th Congress. Of course, one of the most important parts of a budget is that you have to determine what your priorities are--things you have to have, things you want but maybe need to defer, and things you want but maybe cannot afford.

When it comes to the budget Chairman ENZI and the Senate Budget Committee have produced, our priority is clear. Our priority is to protect the hard-working taxpayers of this country. Where do we start and how does the Senate Republican budget get America on the right track, boosting economic growth and job creation?

To start with, this budget actually balances and puts us on the path so we can begin to pay down our national debt, and it is important to say that it does so without raising taxes. Those seem like pretty straightforward goals for any budget, but unfortunately that has not been the case in recent years.

Throughout his 6 years in office and in the budgets he has sent to Congress, President Obama seems to be committed to the notion that the only way Washington can revive strong economic growth is by steadily growing the government. Unfortunately, at the same time you end up adding to deficits and debt in the process.

Yes, it is true that we have had an experiment in the size and role of government over the last 6 years, and I must say we are no longer talking about esoteric theories that were debated in the Federalist Papers or during the founding of our country. We now actually have hard evidence. We have things we can point to that show this has been a failed experiment.

Under this administration, our national debt--and the bills, not that I will have to pay, but these young people and my children will have to pay--has gone from $10.6 trillion to more than $18 trillion. I know those numbers are almost meaningless to most of us because we simply cannot conceive of numbers that big.

The latest budget from the President adds another trillion in tax increases and never balances--ever, while, in fact, the budget which was voted out of the Budget Committee and is now before us on the floor of the Senate actually brings us a surplus, and the President's budget would leave our country with a massive deficit of over $800 billion in its final year.

The last budget proposed by our friends across the aisle, Senate Democrats in 2013, would have hit the economy with another $1 trillion in taxes and added more than $7 trillion to our national debt.

I believe, based on the failed experiment of the last few years, we should conclude that just taxing and spending is not going to allow us to achieve the kind of prosperity and economic growth we all so badly want. America's debt is a real danger, and one that apparently the President chooses to ignore, and our friends across the aisle, in their budget proposals, seem to ignore it as well.

The reason our debt is so dangerous is because it makes us vulnerable to fiscal shocks and shocks to our national security and makes it much harder for us to respond to them, and our debt obviously costs money to service. We need to pay interest to the people who buy our bonds, our national debt, and when interest rates go back up from where they are now, which is a historically low rate, more and more of the hard-earned tax dollars the American people will be paying to the Federal Government will be used not to pay down the debt but will be used to pay interest on the debt to the people who own it, countries such as China and other sovereign entities that purchase that debt. We will be paying interest on that debt in a way that makes us dangerously vulnerable not only to fiscal shock, but also crowds out our ability to deal with other priorities, such as law enforcement, education, national security, and the like.

Last year the Congressional Budget Office pointed out that in the past few years debt held by the public will be significantly greater relative to the gross domestic product than at any time just after World War II. Our debt will be higher relative to our economy than at any time since World War II.

What does that mean to my fellow Texans? The CBO goes on to say that with a debt so large, Federal spending on interest payments will increase substantially as interest rates rise to more typical levels. That is what I was just referring to. The other thing that happens is that as the Federal Government's debt goes up, we basically reduce national savings and capital stock at the same time and wages will be smaller. In other words, our national massive debt is hurting economic growth today. It is hurting our economy, and it virtually assures that it will get worse in the days ahead.

The good news is it doesn't have to be that way, and this budget puts us on a path to balance and one that begins to pay down the debt, not adding to the debt with more taxing and spending along the way. And the good news is we don't have to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel.

There are better options, many of which are reflected in the budget we have proposed and will be voting on this week. There are policies and programs in the budget that we have borrowed which have proven to be successful around the country in States such as Texas and others.

My State, in particular, has experienced an economic surge that has seen a boom in job creation and exports and it has been named the best State in the Nation in business 10 years running. Some people have actually called this the Texas miracle, but I take issue with that characterization. There is nothing miraculous about what has happened in Texas when we talk about the economy because you cannot explain a miracle, but it is no secret why Texas has been one of the leading job creation engines over the last several years.

If we ask business leaders, they will tell us what makes Texas such an attractive place to do business.

In Texas, we know we should not punish job creators with taxes that discourage investment and overregulation, which make it hard to make the bottom line balance. We are not ashamed of our abundance of natural resources, nor are we apologetic about encouraging its development. The results have been extraordinary.

For example, Texas added nearly 460,000 jobs in 2014 alone--460,000 jobs in 2014--more than any other State. Despite being home to about 8.5 percent of the total U.S. population, Texas accounted for nearly one-third of all new job gains during the last 10 years for the Nation. Simply put, what we have shown is what can be accomplished with sound public policy that allows for job creation and economic prosperity, and that is the good news. It is not a fluke. It is not a miracle. It is about good policies actually working to benefit the people of my State and that could also be put to work for the American people.

We can take strategies that have worked in the States and lessons we have learned in these laboratories of democracy and apply them here in Washington on a greater scale for the benefit of the entire Nation. Simply put, it boils down to lower taxes, sensible regulations, and a lower level of per capita government spending.

What happens under those conditions is that the private sector is willing to invest, and when they invest, they create jobs and grow the economy, and we all benefit, including the government, by increased tax revenue. The government doesn't benefit, nor do the people benefit, when government policies discourage investment and job creation and economic growth, which is what has been happening over the last few years.

In the budget before us, which balances without tax hikes, we can protect taxpayers and foster an economic environment that allows jobs and opportunity to blossom.

Gallup released a survey earlier this month that talked about the biggest concerns facing the American people. The top concern was government. They are concerned about their government. The second was the economy, and the third was jobs. All three of those concerns actually tie neatly together because many Americans now feel they don't have the same opportunities they once had. Maybe they have been laid off or had a tough time finding a new job that is as rewarding for them personally and financially. Maybe they are actually working as hard as they ever did, but they are actually making less money than they did 10 years ago.

If people are deeply concerned, as I am, about the availability of good jobs and the state of our economy, it only makes sense that people would not be satisfied with the government as well. These concerns transcend geographic, partisan, and demographic boundaries, and they are shared by Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike.

Sadly, one of the statistics that hasn't gotten better over the last few years, even though the unemployment rate has crept down, is the percentage of the American people--the workforce--who have actually left the job market and given up looking for a job, and that remains at a near historical high--about a 30-year high--the so-called labor participation rate. So when the unemployment rate goes down and we say, Oh, that is a good thing, a lot of the reason it is going down is because fewer and fewer people are actually looking for work and they have dropped out altogether. That is a bad thing.

Most people don't see themselves as future business owners; they simply hope to find a good job doing something that provides them the ability to put food on the table and to take care of their families, and that gives them a sense of satisfaction for a job well done. Yet, as we know, small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy, and it is the small businesses that actually help create the jobs that most hard-working taxpayers are occupied in. So if we are making it harder for small businesses to create jobs, we are also making it harder on workers to find jobs.

As I travel my State and talk to small business men and women, they tell me one of the biggest challenges they have had is something the President trumpets here in Washington as a grand success; that is, ObamaCare because ObamaCare has been a job killer. This budget assumes full repeal of ObamaCare, and it gives us the opportunity to make good on our promises and finally remove one of the biggest roadblocks to job growth. Is that because we don't care about health care? Well, no; exactly the opposite. What we intend to do as a replacement is to replace ObamaCare with affordable health care that provides people access to the kind of quality care they want for themselves and their families.

The irony of ObamaCare is that it spends and taxes so much, and yet still 30 million people are uninsured. Many people find the health insurance they purchased--even on the exchanges--has high premiums, which basically render them uninsured to the extent that they can't even afford it, and it has raised their premium costs by adding mandates for coverage they don't want and they don't need.

We can do much better.

Now, I have heard the President and some of his allies say, Well, we have to have ObamaCare because we need to cover young adults up to the age of 26 who can be covered under their parents' policy or we need ObamaCare because we need to cover people with preexisting conditions. The fact is we can do both of those things. We will do both of those things, and we don't need everything else that comes with it.

We also need to capitalize on an energy boom that is taking place across the United States. This budget boosts development of American-made energy. Unfortunately, the President decided to put his party and his politics ahead of American job seekers recently when he vetoed a bipartisan bill to construct the Keystone XL Pipeline that the State Department said would create 42,000 jobs--construction jobs to start with--and a number of other jobs thereafter. It would also provide an alternative means to transport oil from a friendly ally, Canada, and we wouldn't have to ship so much of it in railcars over the surface, which is admittedly a much more dangerous and volatile situation.

The President, when he vetoed the Keystone XL Pipeline, took basically the opposite approach to what we have taken in my State and other States around the country, where we have seen our natural resources and the development of those natural resources as a way to grow jobs and grow the economy.

In Texas, we have produced 94 percent more oil between September 2008 and September 2012. That has been primarily due to the innovation of the oil and gas industry and the so-called shale oil and gas revolution, which transformed States such as North Dakota and Texas, and in places such as Pennsylvania where the Marcellus shale exists. The Eagle Ford, the Barnett, and the Haynesville shale plays in Texas have been economic boons in my State and created thousands of jobs and added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the tax rolls.

As my friends along the border of Texas and Mexico remind me, those natural resources do not stop at the international border. Indeed, I was recently in Mexico City with our colleague, Senator Kaine from Virginia, where we met with a number of oil and gas company representatives at the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City, talking about the change in the Mexican law which now will encourage private investment in developing their natural resources in Mexico. Of course, the better the Mexican economy does, the better our economy does, and the fewer people who feel as though they have to immigrate to the United States in order to provide for their family.

This budget is a responsible budget. It balances in 10 years, it doesn't raise taxes, and it begins a downpayment on our national debt. It sends a very important message that the 114th Congress and the new majority are very serious about discharging the most basic responsibilities of governance--something that hasn't been done since 2009, since the last time we had a budget, but we also learn from the States when it comes to protecting taxpayers and removing barriers to growth and how that helps not only the small businesses but the people who work at the jobs created by those small businesses.

In conclusion, there is one other thing this budget does. We know that since the Budget Control Act of 2011 and the sequestration that occurred--the automatic caps on spending that occurred as a result of the failure of the supercommittee to come up with a grand bargain--our Nation has spent less and less on our national security. That has given rise not only to deep concerns by many of us, including the Presiding Officer, about America's role in the world and the message we are sending to our adversaries, but it also raises the question of what is the primary purpose--what should be the No. 1 priority of the Federal Government? I believe, and I think many of us believe, that national security is the most important priority of the Federal Government. We have kind of lost sight of that in recent years with the budget caps and sequestration. We have tried to be responsible about spending. Unfortunately, with an unhelpful partner in the White House, sequestration seemed to be the only way we could keep a cap on runaway discretionary spending, higher deficits, and greater debt. But I think now is the time for this Congress to step up and say that national security is our No. 1 priority. This budget does just that, and it provides additional resources necessary for the Department of Defense to make sure we not only maintain our status as the preeminent military power in the world but also keep our commitment to our military families and those who have chosen to make the armed services a career.

We also send a very important message to our adversaries that America will not shrink or retreat from its leadership role on the world stage. Unfortunately, I think as a result of not only our budgetary decisions but also a number of missteps and missed signals by the administration, some of our adversaries have gotten the idea we are in retreat and that we are somehow pulling back and going to be rendered a spectator rather than a leader on the world stage. Perhaps the single most important thing this budget does is it says, America is back as the leader of the free world and we will not shrink and we will not turn our back on our responsibility not only to ourselves and our people but to our friends and allies across the world.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source