Concurrent Resolution On The Budget, Fiscal Year 2016
Floor Speech
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Mr. KAINE. Thank you, Madam President. I thank my colleague from Vermont who has done an able job as the ranking member on the Budget Committee.
I rise today to talk about the budget resolution that we are considering on the floor of the Senate this week.
I came to the Senate in 2013 with a background as a mayor and a Governor. I believe in getting budgets done and getting them done on time. Doing budgets under regular order is an important priority, and I have enjoyed and look forward to more work with colleagues on budgeting matters.
Quickly, we have been in a budget crisis of our own making in Congress. It is not someone else's fault. It is not the President's fault. The budget crisis we have been in has been of Congress's making. In August of 2011, when one House pushed the country to the verge of defaulting on our debt for the first time in our history, in order not to default we came up with the idea of the sequester. This was before I was in the Senate, but the basic idea was this: Let's impose punishing across-the-board cuts on all of these Federal spending levels to begin in March of 2013 to force us to try to come up with a better deal. I call that ``let's try to do something good, and if we don't, then let's do something really stupid.'' I don't know that this is a principle you should ever apply.
When I came to the Senate on the verge of sequester going into effect, my first floor speech as a Senator and one of my first votes was this: OK, we didn't find the budget deal that some wanted, but let's not do something stupid. Let's not embrace the sequester and hurt priorities that matter to people every day. Sadly, we couldn't get the 60 votes to cut off the sequester in the Senate. So since March of 2013, we have been in sequester mode. I said in committee and I will say again: The sequester violates every good principle of budgeting I have learned as either a public sector budgeter as a mayor and a Governor or as a private sector budgeter managing a multinational law firm with lawyers on three continents. Nobody would do budgeting this way. The United States, because of Congress, is doing budgeting this way, and I think we need to come up with a better solution.
During the last Congress we did find a better solution. It wasn't a perfect solution, but the Murray-Ryan budget act did a 2-year budgetary framework that eliminated half of these punishing sequester cuts and gave a significant lift to the economy.
The economy has generally been pretty strong, cutting deficits but also avoiding some of the mindless austerity that full sequester means.
A good budget for the country--and I am sad to say that the budget we will be debating on the floor this week is not a good budget for the country--but a good budget for the country would do a couple of things. It would put the promotion of growth and jobs first. The best antideficit strategy--if that is what you are interested in--is promoting a strong economy, and job growth would be the first priority. Second, we would replace a mindless across-the-board sequester with a more targeted approach. If we did that, we could credibly reduce deficits rather than reducing deficits in a way that hurts the economy and punishes programs that matter to people.
The economy and jobs side, we will grow the economy and grow jobs if we do things such as moving away from unnecessary austerity and promoting infrastructure. My colleague from Vermont has a strong proposal about infrastructure that we debated in committee and we will be debating this week. If you did infrastructure and other investments in human capital, you could credibly reduce sequester and increase jobs. We could also increase jobs if we had a tax code that didn't punish work, that didn't punish labor, wages, and salary the way this one does.
The second way would be to restore key spending priorities and replace sequester with a targeted approach. We should be focusing on a budget that maintains a strong national defense; that keeps our promises to veterans; that invests in education, especially important programs such as Head Start, pre-K, and college affordability. We can protect Federal employees, we can protect programs for people of low and moderate incomes, such as SNAP or Pell grants, and we could ensure the environment is protected if we followed targeted strategies. That would be better.
Finally, growing the economy and pursuing targeted budget strategies would enable us to credibly reduce the deficit. It is important to note that the deficit has been coming down since the Murray-Ryan budget deal was done, and that is important. But that is not the budget that will be on the floor this week.
Last Thursday we voted a budget out of committee. It was a long day of debating and voting. I was able to support a number of amendments, and I had some of my own and others that were passed, and I appreciate them. But I ultimately voted against the budget, and unless there will be dramatic changes on the floor of the Senate, I will, in all likelihood, be voting against the budget for the following reasons:
First, the budget before us proposes cuts to nondefense discretionary programs--education, infrastructure, research--the nondefense, noninterest, nonentitlement programs that are about 14 to 15 percent of the Federal budget. It proposes not just cutting those to full sequester levels but cutting them by an additional $236 billion over 10 years. Even the sequester levels are untenable, slashing these programs even further to make college more expensive, to spend less on infrastructure, and to spend less on research. It is foolish for the Nation.
The budget proposes $4 trillion in unspecified cuts to programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, but it only includes a budget reconciliation instruction totaling $2 billion, which leaves a very unusual gap in the terms of how we are going to find magically the $4 trillion in cuts. The budget depends on gimmicks and sort of magic tricks to achieve balance, when we are not really achieving balance.
It uses outdated baseline proposals by the CBO. We just had CBO numbers come in this March from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, showing that the country, because of an improving economy, is poised to collect more revenue and poised to spend less on some key programs. Instead of using that baseline data--the March data--the budget we worked on in committee used worse January data to make the situation seem more dire than it is. I don't know why we would do this. We should use the most updated numbers.
Finally, I voted against the budget because it contained a critical dishonesty. It proposed to do two things simultaneously that violate the basic laws of physics. The two measures are this: First we are going to entirely repeal the Affordable Care Act. However, all the taxes we are collecting from companies and people to pay for the Affordable Care Act--we are going to keep all of those in the budget. So we will repeal all of the benefits, all of the coverage, all of the protection that tens of millions of Americans get under the Affordable Care Act, but we will keep taxing people and companies and keep all that tax revenue in the budget. Clearly, both of those things are not going to happen. So the budget has this air of unreality about it.
But to me, the unreality of the numbers is even dwarfed in importance by just the flat statement that we are going to repeal the Affordable Care Act. There are many things I can say about the Affordable Care Act. Why don't I just pick one? That is that 16.4 million Americans are receiving insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. What does this budget say will happen to those 16.4 million Americans? The budget doesn't say. It has no plan for providing that they will be able to have health insurance.
Taking away health insurance from 16.4 million Americans, many of whom have it for the first time in their lives, is no small issue. That number is a big number. Sometimes big numbers just sound like big numbers. Let me put it in context. How many Americans are 16.4 million people? Well, 16.4 million people with health insurance is the entire combined population of Wyoming, the District of Columbia, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, and West Virginia. That is 14 States and the District of Columbia. The entire combined population from birth to death in those 15 jurisdictions is what 16.4 million American people are. What this budget proposes is to reach in and strip away health insurance from every last one of those 16.4 million people without a proposal, without a plan, without even any indication of how we would tackle this problem.
I refuse to be a part of that. I refuse to contemplate voting for that. I have had too much experience with people who don't have health insurance to push willingly people back into the shadows when they have had health insurance for the first time in their life.
I know the Presiding Officer understands this. We all do. Health insurance is about two things. It is about health, but it is also about assurance. So if you are sick, if you are in an accident, if your wife is in an accident, if your kids are sick, you have to have this so that you can receive health care, so that you can receive treatment. But when you are not sick and when you haven't been in an accident, you still go to bed worrying about what will happen to your children if they get into an accident, what will happen to your wife if she gets ill. Even when you are healthy, the absence of health insurance imposes an anxiety--especially on parents--that is very, very severe.
So I will not be part of a budget that tells 16.4 million people--the combined population of 14 States and the District of Columbia--that while you may have had this health insurance for the first time in your life, we are now going to take it away from you without a plan to help you have the assurance and the peace of mind and the protection of your health that you have under existing law.
We should not step backward. We should always step forward. Can we find improvements? Of course we can. But we shouldn't step backward. That is why I voted against the budget in committee, and that is why I am likely, absent major change, to vote against it on the floor.
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