Mr. President, I come to the floor this evening to announce the introduction of a bill, S. 3095. It is called the Honest Expenditure Limitation Act of 2010. It spells HELP. It is the HELP Act of…
Mr. President, I come to the floor this evening to announce the introduction of a bill, S. 3095. It is called the Honest Expenditure Limitation Act of 2010. It spells HELP. It is the HELP Act of 2010.
On February 1 of 2010, President Obama released his fiscal year 2011 budget with a funding request of $3.8 trillion. In it he announced a 3- year freeze on discretionary spending for all nonsecurity-related agencies at the fiscal year 2010 levels, which amounts to a total spending level of $460 billion each year for those agencies. Nonsecurity spending is defined as all agencies except the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of State, and one of the national security-related agencies in the Department of Energy. The administration's Office of Management and Budget estimates this initiative will save $250 billion over the coming decade. Keep in mind, that is $250 billion from where it started, which I will address in a minute.
On the surface, this proposal gives the President the appearance of being fiscally prudent--something the American people have been demanding of their government, especially in recent months. But when you look closely at the numbers he has presented, it is clear as day why he is able to offer this spending freeze without batting an eye. For one, discretionary spending has increased by 20 percent in 2 years. Secondly, the massive $787 billion stimulus package provided a substantial spending cushion for nearly every agency, making a spending freeze such as the President's inconsequential.
Let's stop and look at that. We are talking about $787 billion in a stimulus bill, but we are also talking about having increased from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2010 by 20 percent. So what he is doing here is raising it 20 percent and then freezing it. What he ought to do, if he had to raise it 20 percent, is start bringing it down.
Additionally, this spending freeze proposal does too little to improve the long-term fiscal aspects of our Nation. We all know we stand at the edge of disaster. Doug Elmendorf, who is the Director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, recently testified about our Nation's fiscal outlook before Congress and he didn't deliver very good news. I will tell my colleagues what he said. He said that last year our budget deficit was a staggering $1.4 trillion. Remember, just a minute ago I said if you add up all of the--well, let's say that is actually more than all of the last 6 years of the Bush administration deficits. That amounts to less than the $1.4 trillion. So he said last year our budget deficit was a staggering $1.4 trillion, which represented
about 10 percent of the total economy. He expects 2010's deficit only slightly lower at $1.3 trillion or 9.2 percent of GDP.
Looking further out, the average deficit between now and 2020 is forecast to be $600 billion per year. This is all coming from Elmendorf. This is the CBO we are talking about. Additionally, CBO estimates the amount of debt held by the public will skyrocket to $15 trillion by 2020. If it sounds like a staggering number, that is because it is. When you consider the amount of interest we will be paying to China and Japan and others, it is embarrassing: $700 billion each and every year until 2020 and beyond if we do nothing about our rising deficit levels. In other words, if we keep on what we are doing right now with this administration, with the help of the Democratic legislators in both Houses, it is going to be $700 trillion.
Let's do the math and put that in perspective. If $700 billion of interest were paid evenly by every household in the United States today, it would amount to more than $6,000 per household. That is kind of interesting. I always try to do my math. When I was fighting the effort by this administration to have a cap-and-trade bill which would have been somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion, whether you are talking about the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill of 2003 or the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2005 or the bills of 2008, or later on the Boxer-Sanders bill, or even going back to Kyoto, it is going to cost somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion. I understand when we talk about billions and trillions of dollars what we are really talking about. So I do my math all the time and say, How much is this going to cost my average taxpaying families in my State of Oklahoma? It amounted to $3,100 a year. This would have been, if they had been successful in passing a cap-and-trade bill--it is all dead now. They are not going to do it. I don't care what Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John Kerry say, it is history now. People are not going to pay that kind of thing to get nothing for it.
Back when we were talking about the $700 billion interest that would be paid every year, that is what is going to happen by 2020 with this administration if we let it continue. That would cost each tax-paying family in the United States of America $6,000 per household each and every year after 2020.
Put another way: The entire financial industry bailout--remember the famous bank bailout? I know Republicans were partially responsible for that too. That happened. That vote took place in this Senate on October 1 of 2008. It was back during the Bush administration. It was back when Hank Paulson came in and told everybody that he was going to save our Nation and so Republicans bought into it and many of my good conservative Republican friends voted for a $700 billion bailout. I did not and a few others didn't, but a vast majority did. That is kind of interesting because that $700 billion is the same figure we are using right now that it will cost people by the year 2020--just the interest alone. But the $700 billion that we could spend on interest in 2020 happens each and every year. We don't get anything for it. It is the cost of living having this much debt in the first place.
At this rate, it will become more and more difficult for the government to fund priorities we truly think are important, such as national security and infrastructure spending. For some reason, nobody around here wants to spend money on infrastructure. I know I get criticized. I am considered to be a conservative. I have been rated the No. 1 most conservative Member of the Senate some time ago by the American Conservative Union and just last week by the National Journal. So you are looking at a conservative, but I am a big spender on some things. One is protecting America. That is what we are supposed to be doing around here. The other is infrastructure. We have a crumbling infrastructure system. Look what happened with some of the bridges crumbling down. I guess that was in Minnesota. People died up there. Our infrastructure is crumbling. It is aging. We need to do something about it, but I can't find anyone who wants to spend money on infrastructure. Instead we are spending money on social engineering.
To combat this, several proposals have been recently introduced that I support. In the House, Congressman Pence and Congressmen Hensarling introduced a constitutional amendment that would cap the Federal spending at 20 percent of the economy--20 percent of GDP. It is one way of doing this. I think it is a good idea. I am all for it. Additionally, Senator DeMint introduced an amendment requiring a balanced budget. I am all for that. Some of my colleagues are supporting a year-long earmark moratorium. That is kind of phony. It was reported on Monday that Speaker Pelosi has suggested a year-long earmark moratorium as well. My colleagues need to consider a couple of issues in talking about earmarks.
One, an earmark moratorium does nothing to combat the increasing government spending. In other words, if you have a moratorium on earmarks, it doesn't save a cent. Funding that would have been spent in earmarks will simply be spent by the Obama administration, by their bureaucrats. I suppose it should come as no surprise that Speaker Pelosi supports the Democratic administration fully funding its own priorities.
Secondly, last year's earmarks accounted for only 1.5 percent of discretionary spending--1.5 percent. Where is the focus on the other 98.5 percent? Where is the focus on what I call bureaucratic earmarks? Here is what happens. If you stop earmarks--if you read the Constitution, article I, section 9 of the Constitution, it says what we are supposed to be doing here in the House and in the Senate. We are supposed to be making priorities. We are supposed to be doing the spending, and our Founding Fathers recognize that we do a better job knowing what our needs are in the local communities than the central government does.
If we let the President and the President's budget dictate everything and then we try to make changes within that, people will say, Oh, that is an earmark. Well, wait a minute. If you don't do that, then you are having the unelected bureaucrats in government in the Obama administration do the earmarking. So the President earmarks too. If you don't believe it, look at the Appropriations Conference Report, where the focus is on the vast majority of discretionary spending which is doled out every year by unelected bureaucrats.
I wish more people would understand this, because I find that a lot of the people who hammer and demagog the earmark mantra are the ones who are the biggest spenders and it is a nice way of deviating from your behavior. I think something needs to be done immediately and seriously.
So today I am introducing the HELP Act, as I mentioned. It is called the Honest Expenditure Limitation Program Act of 2010. The bill does three things. One, it places caps on nonsecurity discretionary spending which I define exactly as President Obama's budget does. I do this because I wish to show the similarities between what he said he wants to do and what I want to do. The second thing is it enforces the caps by sequestering any spending above the cap through across-the-board cuts, a process that currently applies to mandatory spending, but not to discretionary. Three, it disallows Congress from evading the sequestration cuts through a 67-vote point of order against any attempt to exempt new spending from this legislation. That is going to make it pretty tough to get through.
Rather than simply freezing the spending as the President wants to do at the 2010 levels--let's keep in mind, first, he increased discretionary spending for a year by 20 percent, and then he wants to freeze it there.
Instead of doing that for 3 years and then allowing spending to explode again, which is what his proposal does, my bill would actually cut discretionary spending for nonsecurity agencies, the same exemptions he has, back to fiscal year 2008 levels. It is cutting it back by 20 percent of what he tries to do, about $400 billion a year. Spending would be frozen for 5 years--not 3 years but 5 years, through 2020. Rather than simply freezing spending levels for only 3 years and at an artificially high level, as the President's proposal does, my initiative would hold the Federal Government more accountable for the next
10 years by creating real, meaningful spending cuts and then placing the cap at reduced levels.
The difference in savings between my plan and President Obama's plan is clearly displayed on this chart.
If we look at the chart, the blue bars represent how nonsecurity- related discretionary spending levels will rise over the next 10 years if allowed to increase. This is according to OMB's numbers.
The red line illustrates the impact of Obama's plan and what will happen if spending is allowed to increase following the 3-year freezing on the estimates of OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. They are nonpartisan, by the way, and very accurate. Clearly, the $250 billion in savings is not substantial when spread over a 10-year period. It really does not tighten the belt at all.
My proposal is represented in the green bars. These are the spending levels. Watch as they go down over the period of time from 2010 to 2020. We phase down spending levels from the high point in 2010 to a more reasonable level between 2011 and 2015 and then stay flat thereafter.
My plan, when compared to the blue bars of doing nothing, will save more than $880 billion over the next 10 years. Let me say that again. By reducing nonsecurity discretionary spending levels, using the same definition of ``nonsecurity'' as the President is using, to 2008 levels and then holding them there through 2020, our Nation can save nearly $1 trillion. When I compare my plan directly with President Obama's, my plan saves $634 billion more than his.
I have made my estimates using the methodologies of the Office of Management and Budget, and they are probably conservative. First off, if you look at the history of discretionary spending, annual increases are far greater than what they assume they are here. Second, we do not estimate how much we would be saving in interest by not having to borrow the spending we are cutting. Overall, this proposal will likely save much more than the nearly $1 trillion we estimate.
If we do nothing to curtail skyrocketing government spending or merely freeze it at an artificially high, elevated level for a few years, as the Obama administration is trying to do, we will find ourselves in a tragic situation. The clock is ticking. Congress is going to have to act.
Some of my colleagues will probably attack this proposal because the hardest thing to do around here is cut spending. Without cutting spending, we only leave one alternative, and that is massively raising taxes. That is not what the American people want, and it would harm our economic recovery.
Around these halls, we seem to forget. Most of the Members of the Senate have forgotten the recess last August when they had all the tea parties out there and people were yelling and screaming and people wanted to get involved. People were getting involved in politics who never had been involved before. They were concerned primarily about two issues. At that time, it was government-run health care and cap-and- trade, which would have been the largest tax increase in the history of this country.
Right now, the Obama administration is saying: I don't care what anybody says, we are going to stay with it; we are going to be tough; we are going to have this government-run health care system and bring back cap-and-trade. They have just completely forgotten what happened.
I have to agree with Senator McConnell. I hope people remember that all the way through the election because that is going to repeat what I remember in 1994.
Others may charge this proposal will harm the government's ability to help citizens in their time of need. But what is important to realize about this spending reduction is that it will have no impact on mandatory spending programs such as unemployment benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those programs are in need of reform, but this bill does not do that. This bill only affects the agencies identified by President Obama as nonsecurity.
My bill, the HELP Act of 2010, would take President Obama's proposed spending freeze and truly make an impact. Rather than merely freezing spending at the inflated 20-percent increase of the 2010 levels, this would bring it back down to 2008. I think this can be done.
I really do believe the American people are going to start getting involved. They have not forgotten. I was giving a speech in Florida. This particular group was actually Club for Growth. Their group is concerned about spending. I told them some of the things we could be doing, some of the things to watch out for. Watch out for those who say you can have a moratorium on earmarks and somehow affect--if you affected all of that, it would be something like 1.5 percent. My bill affects the other 98.5 percent.
We are going to have to do it right now. If we wait, each month that goes by--as I said, the budget he increased and his deficit was as much as the last 6 entire years of the Bush administration.
This is the HELP Act. It is one that will work, and it is one that has come along at the right time. Now is the time to act.
