Protecting Against Indebting our Descendants through Fully Offset Relief (PAID FOR) Temporary Extension Act of 2010

A fairly short period of time.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 4331 to the Baucus substitute.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, at this time, I ask that the amendment be divided in the form I now send to the desk.

Mr. President, this is an amendment that will actually pay for everything we are doing. It does several things that the American people are demanding that we do.

It discloses the true cost of borrowing and spending that we actually do in this body.

It reduces the budgets of the Members of Congress. We had a 4.8- percent increase in our budgets. This is going to decrease that by less than a third, making us suffer with the rest of the country in terms of trying to get control of our massive debt and deficit spending.

It enacts what President Obama has been asking his own agencies to do: it takes 5 percent from all the agencies, except Defense and Veterans Affairs, and says: Cut that amount. The size of the agencies has doubled since 1999. We are asking the agencies to find 5 percent of efficiency within their agency to help us not continue to add trillions of dollars of debt to our children.

It eliminates nonessential government travel. It will save us $10 billion over 10 years. It doesn't eliminate essential; it just says that when you can do a teleconference, you do that. You don't necessarily fly and take a hotel room when you can accomplish it another way.

It reduces unnecessary printing and publishing costs of government documents. That saves us $4 billion over 10 years. Nobody reads these. They are all available online. If we get rid of the ones that don't have to be printed, we save hundreds of thousands of trees every year-- which absorb CO2, by the way--but it also saves us $4.4 billion by not printing stuff we all have on our computers already.

In working with the OMB, they are behind what we are trying to do in terms of unused and unneeded government property and government buildings. So what it does is it gives us $15 billion in direct savings in revenue by getting rid of things that we are spending $8 billion a year on maintaining that we are not using. So we save $15 billion over 10 years, plus we get the savings of not having to maintain what we own but are not using.

We will sell unused and unneeded equipment. We have $\1/4\ billion worth just sitting there in warehouses. We are never going to use it, but it is sitting there. We can get good prices from the private sector that can go out and utilize this and put it to work.

It caps the total number of Federal employees. Why is that important? I am a supporter of our Federal employees. We had a speech on the floor today accusing those of us who want to limit the growth of the Federal Government in terms of employees and the size, saying we were against our Federal employees. We are not. What we are saying is that in a time when we are running a $1.6 trillion deficit--that is what it will be this year; we said 1.4, but we have already borrowed $200 billion more than that on this floor since February 12--we ought to be getting more productivity out of what we have, not because it is not the right thing to do--it is the right thing--but because we cannot afford to be lax in anything we are doing today. Every time we don't save a dollar, we are now charging that dollar to our children and grandchildren.

It puts a cap on the total number of Federal employees. There is plenty of flexibility within the Federal Government. The Federal Government has added 160,000 employees in the last 16 months. There are 441,000 for the census, but that doesn't count them. This is 160,000 full-time Federal employees in the last 16 months. How many more employees do we need? Can we afford more Federal employees at this time or should we get more with what we have?

We also put a temporary 1-year freeze on total salary. That doesn't mean people who work for the Federal Government cannot get a raise. They can. But they need to be more productive and recognized for it. But there should be no more automatic pay increases this next year because we are running a $1.6 trillion deficit and also because the average Federal employee makes $78,000 a year and has benefits worth $40,000. The average private sector employee makes $42,000 a year and has benefits worth $20,000. Freezing that for 1 year will have a minimal long-term effect, especially when we saw today that we are actually in a deflationary period where the Consumer Price Index went down one-tenth of 1 percent. We had a nine-tenths of 1 percent decrease this year. So the cost of living is not going up; it is going down. All we are saying is, let's do this for 1 year and demonstrate that we understand the tough choices the public is making and that we are willing to make tough choices.

I agree, it is a tough choice. It is hard. But it does not mean that stellar employees cannot get raises. They can. That saves $2.6 billion this year, for 1 year.

It collects unpaid taxes from employees of the Federal Government. We have employees of the Federal Government who owe $3 billion. It directs a garnishee of those payments from the Federal employees. These are not disputed. These are not still under negotiation. These are things that have already been agreed to that are owed by Federal employees to the Federal Government. That gets us $3 billion that we do not have.

We also have a section that excessive duplication and overhead within the Federal Government should be eliminated. Two easy examples: Across 60

different agencies, we have 70 different programs to feed people who are hungry. Why do we have 70? Why don't we have 7 or one? Not one of those 70 programs has a metric on it to see if it is effective in what it does.

We have 105 programs across seven different agencies that incentivize at the cost of billions of dollars a year people to go into math, science, engineering, and technology. Why do we have 105 programs? Why not one run by one set of overhead and one agency and measure the results? There are 640 other examples of duplication just like that in the Federal Government.

What this amendment says is we ought to be about eliminating that duplication. We ought to be able to increase productivity and also increase the results of the very programs for the people we are trying to help.

The other thing we do is we eliminate bonuses for contractors to the Federal Government who are not meeting performance requirements. That is $800 million a year that your government is paying out to people who do work for the Federal Government who do not meet the minimum requirements for their contract, and yet we are paying them $800 million in bonuses as if they were meeting the requirements of their contract. That saves $8 billion over 10 years. None of us would do that with anybody who worked for us. Why do we allow the Federal Government to do that?

This government gives the United Nations 25 percent of its entire budget. But we also give voluntary payments to the United Nations. I just talked with Peter Orszag from OMB, and I am getting that report as we speak. It was due January 1. It is now mid to late June.

What we do is eliminate no more than $1 billion more than what our obligations are in terms of peacekeeping or our dues to the United Nations. There are good reasons to do that. There was, with the last foreign appropriations, a requirement that the United Nations show us where our money is going. That got thrown out in conference. But we do not even know where the $6 billion a year that we give to the United Nations is spent because they will not show us where it is spent. We would never tolerate that from any agency we fund. And yet we don't. We are saying do not give more than a billion more than that to the United Nations. We limit that. That is a $10 billion a year savings.

Here is what we do know about the United Nations. In the peacekeeping money that we give, 45 percent of it is lost to fraud. Think about that. Forty-five percent of the $3 billion that we give to peacekeeping operations is lost to fraud, documented. We found that one out by accident. They did not want us to find that out.

We ought to be good stewards with the money of the American people when it comes to contributing their money to the United Nations.

Returning excessive funds from an unnecessary, unneeded, unrequested, duplicative reserve fund that will never be spent: That is $362 million. It is a one-time savings. It will never be spent. It is sitting there. We ought to take it back.

Rescinding unspent Federal funds: There is $1.7 trillion sitting in accounts right now. Of that, $690 billion has not been obligated for the future expenditure. We are saying move $50 billion of that back into this year and use it to pay for things that are important, such as unemployment insurance, rather than borrow from our children.

Why is that important? If you have three bank accounts and each one had $100 in it and you had to write a $200 check, you would go to the accounts you had and write the check from the two accounts so you could pay the check. This money is rolling out there to the tune of $600 billion every year that is not obligated.

Common sense would say we would be more efficient with our money rather than paying interest on that money. We would use it in a more timely fashion. Everybody does that except the Federal Government. We ought to be doing it as well.

Reducing wasteful costs at the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy is supposed to be setting the example for this country on energy efficiency. They are the worst agency as far as energy costs and efficiency in energy. All we are doing is you follow the rules you have set for everybody else. It saves $13.8 million per year. That is just one agency following the rules they have told every other agency to follow.

Finally, we strike the new taxes that are in this bill because we do not need to pay for them because we can cut spending somewhere else. The last thing we need to be doing, as we have the threat of a double- dip recession, is taking more private capital out of the economy and putting it into government because the multiplier effect of government spending is very low. Private spending multiplier effect is about 1.5. That means for every dollar you spend, you end up generating about $1.5 in economic activity. For every government dollar that is spent, you generate $1.1 in economic activity. The last thing we ought to be doing is raising taxes. I don't care where it is in this economy. It is so precarious that we need private capital being invested to create jobs and opportunities for jobs in this country.

I have listed the vast majority of provisions that are in the bill. I will be back to discuss each one individually.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I offered a rather lengthy amendment to this bill, not because I was trying to be cute, but I think the American people have got to hear from us on whether we are going to make some of the commonsense changes they would expect us to make.

There are a lot of easy votes in this amendment. I mean, to not pay contractors when they do not deserve to be paid, whether to continue to do it, we did it to the tune of $6 billion at the Pentagon in the last 6 years. That is not hard.

To quit printing and wasting money on printing things we should not be printing, that is not hard. But the debate is.

It is just as important as taking care of those people who are unemployed. If we don't cycle through to a good recovery, we are going to have less opportunity to borrow money to help those people who are unemployed. We now stand at a crossroads we have never been at before. Our gross debt is in excess of $17 trillion. Our net debt is at $13.2 trillion. The difference between that is the money the Congress has stolen from Social Security and myriad other trust funds that are much smaller. But we have borrowed it and put a piece of paper in that says: We will pay you back.

The fact is, we have to pay interest. It is compounded. We will eventually have to pay it back. Only in Washington would we talk about net debt when, in fact, we are paying interest on the gross debt.

We had testimony before the debt commission 2 weeks ago by Dr. Reinhart, one of the leading economists in the country, who said we are in excess of 90 percent of our GDP, our debt. What did they tell us? We are struggling with a recession. We are trying to come out of a recession. They told us with that much debt, it is suppressing the growth of our economy by 1 percent a year. One percent a year is $170 billion in productivity and economic activity that didn't happen. If we calculate that in terms of jobs, that is about 3 million jobs that are not going to be created next year because Congresses before us and this one as well have refused to live within their means.

We have, in terms of Washington, a relatively small bill now, $100 billion plus. It was pulled from the floor to make it smaller--not to pay for a significant amount more, just to make it smaller--when, in fact, what the American people want us to do is find something within the Federal Government that doesn't make sense, don't borrow it from our children, do the hard work of finding what is not working here.

We are going to have a cloture vote on this legislation. My hope is, unless we change this bill, that this bill does not proceed until we accede to the demands of the American public. It is simple: Congress, start living like we are living. Start making the hard choices. When you have a limited budget, do what is most important first. Do what is least important last. Get rid of waste, get rid of things that should have been gotten rid of a long time ago and do what is best for the future.

We are not doing that with this bill, and we can't get anybody to debate on the other side. They will not defend it. You cannot defend borrowing $50 billion more against our children and grandchildren when we have $300 billion of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication in the government right now that we have rejected every time when those amendments come to the floor. You can't do it.

So we play the political game in Washington. We had it in February, when our colleagues passed pay-go. It is really to pay-go or not to pay-go. What pay-go means is, you American taxpayers, you pay, and we will go spend your money.

The statute said we would no longer spend new money on anything unless we paid for it. Since February 12 when this bill was signed into law, on February 24 we borrowed $46 billion. We waived pay-go. We said the rule doesn't apply now. This is more important. It was the highway trust fund. Rather than cut some of the waste, fraud, and abuse, rather than cut out some of the things that are duplications, we borrowed that from our grandchildren. We did it twice in March, $99 billion out of the Senate and $10 billion. One was for an extension; one was for the overall tax extenders. We didn't quit there. April came, $18 billion more. May came, May 20, we did $20 billion more. Pay-go didn't apply. We waived it. We said it doesn't count. The rule doesn't count.

What good is it to have a rule or a statute that says we are not going to steal from our children anymore, and every time something comes up we steal from our children? It is a farce. It is meaningless. That is why we didn't vote for it, because it was just a charade to tell the American people somebody was doing something they actually weren't.

The proof is in the pudding. Then we borrowed $59 billion on May 27. Now we have a bill out here on June 17 that is going to borrow another $50 billion. How valuable are the lives of our children that we would steal opportunity? That sounds like a fallacious claim. It is not.

I want you to meet Madeline. Madeline is a little girl. I saw this on the Internet. I actually got to meet her. Her sign actually said $37,000 6 months ago. In the last 6 months, she has gone from owing $37,000, every individual, man, woman and child in this country, to owing $42,000. What is her life worth? What is the opportunity for her worth? Are children just a toy, or do we owe it to them, based on what has been given to us, to create opportunity and a chance for a better life for the Madelines of this country?

The problem is, as we are set up right now, 9 years from now, that number is going to be $187,000 per man, woman, and child. In 25 years, if we don't change what we are doing--and we will change because the world financial community will quit loaning us money--it will be over $1 million.

Put your calculator on for a minute and calculate 6 percent of 1 million. That is the interest cost for what we will have spent in money that we didn't have per person in this country. That is $60,000 25 years from now that every one of us who is still alive will be paying each year just in additional interest before we do anything with the Federal Government.

This government is so far out of control. It is not President Obama's fault, it is the Congress's fault. Presidents can't do things without us. We allow it or don't allow it. We have been rebellious against the principles and values that made this country great. There has never been a country that has achieved--economically, culturally, and scientifically--anything close to what we have created. Congresses are destroying it. This bill is another drop that will eventually turn the statute over that says the future is not here.

This isn't a partisan debate, this is a generational debate. We are thieving. Generational theft is what we are about because we lack the courage to confront the real problems we have and embrace, though it may cost us politically, doing the right things to ensure an American dream for the Madelines of this world. We are failing to do that. What an abandonment of our oath, what a rejection of what was given to us. Yet we have the gall to come out here week after week and spend money we don't have on some things that are necessary, some that are not, but that allow us to continue to spend billions of dollars on things that we should not be spending it on because, basically, we lack courage. It is cowardice.

I am committed not just to Madeline. This doesn't have anything to do with the Republican or Democratic Party. It has to do with the survival of our country as we know it.

Yet we continuously hear: No, we can't. We can't do this. We can't do this. We can't get rid of the easy things to get rid of because somebody well heeled or somebody well connected somewhere doesn't want us to. So who runs the country? Do the people of this country control us or is it the well heeled or the well connected or those who will be advantaged by us continuing to waste money?

Is it a fact that we spent $6 billion over the last 5 years paying performance bonuses to companies that contract with the Federal Government on performance they didn't earn, and we will not pass a law in a bill that says they can't do that anymore? Who is getting that money? Whose palms are we greasing? The fact is, we will not vote that out of here and say it isn't going to happen anymore. You are either going to perform under your contract or you are going to lose the contract, and we are not going to give you bonuses for not performing. Yet three times the Senate has voted that down.

Who benefits? It certainly isn't the average American. It is some corporate client somewhere who has too good of a sweetheart deal contracting with the Federal Government and has allies

within the Congress who say: We will protect you on the basis of having helped them in a campaign before. Do we want a future or do we want well-heeled buddies for the short term when it all collapses around us?

What we are is addicted to bad behavior. We are addicted to spending money that we don't have on things we don't need. We are addicted to not confronting the very real problems in the government. Again, it is not President Obama or President Bush's fault. Congress has that responsibility. We reject our responsibility. We have abandoned our responsibility and, with that, our integrity by not doing what we should do.

As a physician, I know what addictive behaviors are all about. What do we need to do? One of the things President Obama wants us to do that we refuse to do is to end no-bid contracts. Let's end the sweetheart deals. Let's get rid of the no-bid contracts that the well connected, well heeled get to have at a higher price than what we would pay if we competitively bid it. Why don't we do that? That has been voted down by this body as well twice; we can't do that; we have to protect our friends; we are more interested in protecting our friends than we are in saving the country. Eliminate bonuses to contractors, I talked about that. Determine the total number, cost, and purpose of every Federal program. The Government Accountability Office can't give us that number. It is too big. The Congressional Research Service can't tell us all the government programs, what their cost and what their purpose is.

We did get through, late last year, an amendment that is going to force the Government Accountability Office to tell us. Do you know how long it will take them to tell us? Three years. That is how big the problem is. With all their resources, it is still going to take them 3 years to tell us all the government programs.

What do we know that I found out and my staff has found out in researching this over the last 5\1/2\ years? We have identified at least 640 different areas where there are more than five programs that have the same goal run by different agencies in the Federal Government.

We know, for example, right now some American people are struggling and a lot of people are actually having trouble getting enough food. So we have to guess how many programs to help feed those people who are needing food? Across six different Departments, we have 70 government programs. Not one of them has a metric on it to say: Are you effective? How do you measure your effectiveness? But we have 70 sets of overhead in the Federal Government to do exactly the same thing.

You may say, How in the world did that happen? I will tell you how it happens. Some constituent comes up here and says: Here is a problem. Oh, yes, it is a problem. We do not research it to see what the Federal Government is already doing, so we author a bill. Because nobody wants to keep food away from the hungry, we pass a bill, not knowing that we already have 69 other programs. That happens time after time after time, still today, because we do not know what we have.

In math, engineering, science, and technology, which is where we would like for lots of our young people to go, we have documented 105 different programs that are funded by the Federal Government to incentivize our young people to go into those areas in eight different government agencies, eight different government Departments. Not the Department of Education--some of them are in there--but in every area. Why? Yet we do not want to do the hard work of eliminating those.

Let's identify the 105, and let's cut it to one. Let's put metrics on it. Let's have just one set of overhead. Let's accomplish that.

We have added 160,000 Federal employees in the last 16 months. Every business I know out there is doing more with less. That is not a denigration to our Federal employees. It is embracing reality that we cannot continue to add Federal employees. We cannot afford the government we have. Forty-three cents out of every dollar the Federal Government spends today is borrowed from China or Russia or countries with sovereign bank accounts, many of which would like to see us end. Can we continue to do that? Can we continue to have 40 percent of everything we are spending borrowed?

What we do know is, necessity becomes the mother of invention, and if we put the clamps and the brakes on both the growth and the size and the total amount the government spends, we will get more for the same amount--but not until we try, not until we mandate it has to happen.

Limit the overhead costs of the Federal programs. The overhead and the layers of duplication are unbelievable. A tremendous amount of savings can be done. I just visited with a three-star general who is working inside the Pentagon. One of the areas where I want to see us eliminate $50 billion a year in spending is inside the Pentagon because they have that much waste. They are going through a process now to look at where they have redundancy. Do you know what. They are finding it everywhere. But the Pentagon is so big, unless you look for it you are never going to see it.

So we now have the military starting to do what they finally need to do. They have never done it before--starting to look at redundancy, starting to look at good management, best practices, to create efficiencies so more dollars can defend us and less dollars will be spent on overhead. We need to do that government-wide, but especially in the Pentagon because it is our greatest discretionary cost with the exception of interest.

Disclose the cost, purpose, and text of legislation that is considered by Congress. There should not be a bill that comes before Congress that we do not adequately and accurately know what it is designed to do. Have a measurement on it so we know it did what we designed it to do, know what it is going to cost, and then force ourselves to evaluate it.

This is the 111th Congress. In the 109th Congress, I held 47 oversight hearings. That was more oversight hearings than the entire rest of the Senate combined. You see, we do not want to do the oversight because it is hard work and you do not get great press clippings. It does not help your campaign, your political career. But we were not sent up here for a political career. We were sent here to do the best, right thing for the country as a whole.

Most of the problems we are seeing are parochial in nature, where we have concentrated on what is best for our State at the expense of what is best for our country. I would posit that my State, Oklahoma, and the Presiding Officer's State cannot be healthy if the country is not healthy. They cannot be. Yet when our focus becomes more parochial than national, we actually undermine our future as a country.

No. 8, require the Congress to justify the creation of new government programs that duplicate existing ones. I am notorious for not letting bills get to the floor because they duplicate something that has already been done. We have created a new program, but we did not eliminate the old one, so now we have both of them running. I usually get beat. I usually get rolled with 60 votes and we create the new program. But we never eliminated the one that was not working, and we never changed the one that was not working. So we just create another program.

Mandate that Congress has to do oversight--has to do it. It must do oversight. We can do that by changing our rules. But we do not have any interest in changing our rules. It is easier to coast and not do the hard job of oversight.

I will just finish up.

One of the things I have thought about--I am not sure it will be helpful, but right now in the trouble we are in, everybody who walks through this Capitol ought to be informed of how much debt we owe and what it is per person. We ought to have that. It is in my office. If you walk by--the Rules Committee will not let me put it in the hall; they say it does not look professional--I have a computer screen where, if you walk by my office, you can see the national debt clock ticking. Your eyes will roll as fast as it is coming up. Remember, we are borrowing about $4 million a second. That is how fast it is going up.

So, anyhow, there are a lot of things we can do to stop the addiction.

I see the Senator from Georgia.

I ask the Senator, did you want to have some time? I will be happy to yield to you if you would yield back to me.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from Georgia. It does not matter if you are a Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative or Independent, what your faith is, what your sexual orientation is: Out of many one. But if we are not careful, that one is going to fall based on what we do, and the debt affects a liberal as much as it affects a conservative. It steals opportunity from liberal children as much as it does conservative children. We have to come to a point where we say: Enough is enough.

I was just thinking, as the Senator talked, the $50 billion we are going to borrow from our kids with this bill, it would run the government of the entire State of Oklahoma for 8 years--every branch, every employee, pay all the costs, build all the highways, do everything we do for 8 years, just on what we are going to borrow.

When you start putting it down into, how much is $50 billion?--we throw away billions like they were pennies here.

And how many years for a trillion seconds?

That is 31,709 years. So we are going to have a $1.6 trillion deficit this year. Well, that is 50,000 years of seconds. Just this year, it is 50,000 years of seconds.

Let me go into the amendment a little bit and talk about it. The first section of this amendment would require public disclosure of the amount of any new borrowing or spending approved by the Senate. In other words, it is about transparency. It is about letting the American people hold us accountable. It means that on the Senate Web site, after we make new spending decisions and borrowing decisions, we have to publicize it so the American people can see it, rather than hide behind it. It is simple. There is no score for it on savings. I guarantee it will save money, because if we know the American people are going to know what the financial consequences are of what we do with every vote, it is going to change some votes around here.

The other question we ought to be asking is why shouldn't they know what we are doing and the ramifications of it. It is pretty simple. It is pretty straightforward. I have told the Rules Committee that I would pay out of my personal office budget the cost of that program. In other words, I would turn back over $500,000 every year. I will pay for it out of my budget and make sure that is available, so there is no cost to it whatsoever. I will pay for it out of my budget, out of my office, so it doesn't cost us anything. But it gives the transparency the President and I worked on in this body, and he wants to see from this body, and it makes it available to the American people. So we are going to get a vote on that.

It is important to know that with this bill, if it passes, we will have borrowed 59 plus 20, that is 79; 89, 97, 143, 513, 252, plus 50-- $302 billion since February 14, outside of the budget. That is outside of the budget. Now, $300 billion will run Oklahoma for 40 years. We could run the whole State of Oklahoma for 40 years on what we have spent in 6 months. So why shouldn't we let the American people see what we are doing, since it is going to cost nothing, and it is transparency, so they can hold us accountable? Why should we not do that?

The second thing that is important is in the last year, we have markedly increased--not counting the stimulus bill--the discretionary spending of the Federal Government. We didn't leave ourselves out on that. Inflation was nothing, but we increased our own budget by 4.8 percent. So the other component of one of these amendments is that 4.8 percent, I say we give $100 million of it back, which would be a third of that. That means we still get three times what the rest of the country got in terms of an increase, but it shows at least we are willing to let--and if anybody ran their office with any appropriateness, they would have a surplus as well every year. So it is not a hard cut, but it is important, since we gave ourselves a budget increase, that we demonstrate to the American people we are serious about doing it. Vote against it and say you don't think so or vote for it and let's put it in this bill. Let's start showing the American

people we get it. We will do the right, best thing for the country in the long term.

I have occasional conversations with the President, and one of the things he has told his administration to do, and we heard it flatly rejected--not just rejected but flatly rejected on the basis of a lack of knowledge by the chairman of the Finance Committee. He has told every agency to find 5 percent in cuts. Those are the instructions he has sent out to the head of every agency. Why has he done that? Because he knows we have to. This portion of the amendment says that is exactly what we are going to do. We are going to cut 5 percent of the discretionary spending of every branch of government save Defense and Veterans. Some would say, Well, that is \1/20\th of the budget. Yes, it is. But when you look at it in light of the size of the agencies today, in the last 10 years they are twice as big as they were 10 years ago. They have grown by an average of 10 percent per year and we can't find 5 percent or one-fifth of the growth they have had over the last 10 years that can be done more efficiently or as a lower priority or not as important? We can't find that? Yet, as the Senator from Georgia said, almost every family in this country is having to do that. We refuse to mandate that the Federal Government get on a diet, do things more efficiently, more effectively; take another look to see if it can be done a different way. It is called productivity increases. We can get that.

We won't ever get it if we don't ask for it. It is not a hard concept. We can do that. We allow the agencies to make those recommendations, and that is one of the things President Obama has already asked all of his agencies to do, to go find that 5 percent. That sends a wonderful signal to the American people that we get it.

It does something else that is important, and so will the defeat of this bill, and if we pass it with it being paid for. Right now in this country the value of our dollar is pretty good. The reason it is good is because people are worried about Japan and the value of the yen, and they are significantly worried about the Euro because of what is happening to Greece and now what is getting ready to happen to Spain. So money is rushing in. Smart money around the world in these other economies is rushing to hide in dollars. In about 2 years from now, that money is going to be sucked back out of here, because those economies will have made the hard choices of austerity with which to restabilize the Euro or their currencies. They will have done it.

What we need to send to the international finance market is a signal that says we too are way overextended and we are going to start making the appropriate choices to secure our financial future.

It was 2 months ago that Moody's put a notice out that said if things don't happen and start to change with U.S. Government bonds, they are going to be downgraded from AAA to AA. That is a big downgrade. We have never had an AA rating. So all of a sudden, the world rating system is going to say that maybe an investment in our product, our dollars, is not what it should be.

We need to make sure that doesn't happen. We need to make sure we have sent a signal to the world. When we start doing things where we are paying for new things by cutting lower priority items, we send that signal. We build that confidence back. When we start paying for new bills and the extensions of benefits, we extend that back up.

We are going to hear--actually, we won't hear, because we won't hear anybody come out and debate against these things. What they will choose to do is to ignore them and then vote against them. So the American people won't hear a legitimate debate on why we shouldn't cut 5 percent across the board, letting them decide what areas are most important and recommending them to us; we won't have a debate. We won't debate, and then we will kill it, thinking it will go away. Well, the American people have gotten that already. That is not acceptable to the American people. If you think we shouldn't cut spending in the Federal Government, come out here and defend it. Come out here and give us a philosophical, logical reason why we ought to continue to steal from our children and grandchildren. We won't see that. We won't see a strong debate against each of the points I am going to make associated with this amendment. The real question ought to be: Why? Because it is indefensible to vote against it. That is why. You cannot see the waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication in this government and not say we can do better.

Section 4 of the amendment eliminates nonessential government travel. Do my colleagues realize that almost every government office now has audio-visual equipment for the ability to carry on a teleconference anywhere in this country and overseas? Yet, last year, we spent--no, 2 years ago we spent--the data is behind--we spent $13.8 billion on airline tickets and hotels for Federal Government employees of which over half was nonessential. In 2006, $3.3 billion was spent on airfare. In 2007, $3.5 billion was spent on airfare. In 2008, $4 billion was spent on airfare. We can't get the numbers for 2009 yet. Hotel rooms, $2.3 billion, up to $2.5 billion. Car rentals, from $423 million to $437 million. Most of this can be done by teleconferencing. Why wouldn't we say at a time when we are borrowing $1.6 trillion from our kids that maybe we ought to teleconference rather than get on an airplane? I can tell you it is a whole lot easier than traveling 1,600 miles twice a week. So what does this do? It saves us money.

One of my favorite ways of saving money is to cap the printing costs in the Federal Government. We have examples of it right here. Every day, we put a Calendar of Business out, we put an Executive Calendar out, and we publish the Congressional Record, and we print hundreds of thousands of copies. You know what. It is all on line. We can save $4 billion over the next 10 years by printing limited amounts of things we need and not printing some things everybody else has access to on a computer. Why would we not do that? Why would we not cap our printing costs? Think of the thousands of acres of trees we can save every year. What we know is every year, Federal employees, through our direction, spend $1.3 billion on printing. The analysis by GAO says $440 million of that is unnecessary. So over 10 years, that is $4.4 billion. That is $4.4 billion that we won't take from Madeline. Madeline and her other 3- and 4-year-olds won't have to pay it back. Remember, they won't be paying $4.4 billion back; they will be paying the compounded interest that will double that debt in 10, 12 years. In 20 years, it will triple it. In 30, it will quadruple it. So they won't be paying $4.4 billion back, they will be paying $20 billion back. Why would we not do that? Why would we not make this decision to do that? It has been rejected by this body in the past.

Before the Bush administration left, I was working with them on unused Federal real property. We have billions, if not hundreds of billions, in underutilized Federal property owned by the taxpayers.

We spend $8 billion a year maintaining buildings we are not using. Think about that. We are spending $8 billion a year maintaining buildings we are not using. But we can't sell them because there is a little bill called the McKinney-Vento Act that says every used building in the Federal Government has to be offered as a homeless shelter first--even if it is an airplane hangar on a closed military base.

We created a bureaucracy nightmare that doesn't allow us to do that. Consequently, we could take a tenth of the $8 billion we are spending and appropriate that directly to the homeless and save $7.2 billion a year. But this body has rejected that as well. They voted it down. They didn't give a reason, they just voted it down. We have 46,745 underutilized properties, 18,849 properties we are not using at all, and a total of 65,000 properties we are not utilizing with an estimated value of $83 billion. That's $83 billion of property you are paying the maintenance on that we are not using, that we could sell and pay for almost all of this bill. But we won't do it.

Of course, we don't buy many properties anymore. The reason for that is because of the way our budget scoring is, even though it would be smarter to buy it because the total cost of the building is charged to the agency in the year in which the building is completed. None of the agencies are buying buildings anymore, they are renting

them. We should not be renting the first building. We should be getting rid of the $85 billion worth of buildings we don't need and buying a building, because you can own a building a lot cheaper than renting one--maybe not last year, but commercial rates are coming back up. Yet we don't do it.

Since 2005, out of this $85 billion, because of the bureaucratic nightmare of steps you have to go through, we have only sold $2.5 billion worth of an $85 billion portfolio. None of you would do that with your own property. If you had property out there that you owned, and you were spending 10 percent of the value of that property every year maintaining it, and you weren't utilizing it, and you had an opportunity to sell it, you would sell it. Not the Federal Government. We ought to be asking why. Who took a stupid pill to say not to do that?

Some of the properties are not of any value, so we ought to demolish them, because it costs less to do that than to maintain them. I will give you a rundown on some of them. On the buildings we now have, which we are utilizing, we have a maintenance backlog of $35.5 billion. We are spending money on buildings we don't want, maintaining them, but we can't take care of the buildings we have because we don't have enough money because we are spending it on buildings we don't use.

Section 7 provides that the Department of Defense would auction new, unused, or excellent condition excess inventory to the highest bidder, rather than transferring it at no cost to State agencies and others. You buy tons of stuff every year through the Defense Department that they don't need. As a matter of fact, they don't even know what they have. It is sitting in warehouses around the country. And what do we do when we figure out we don't need it? We give it away. When we are $13.2 trillion in debt, it is time to stop giving it away. It is time to get some value for the American taxpayers who paid retail price for that and turn around and sell it. It has been voted on before and rejected.

I mentioned in my opening words about capping the total number of Federal employees this year. That is called a hiring freeze. But it is not a hiring freeze because if you have retirements, you can replace them. We added 160,000 Federal employees in the last 16 months. We have only have an increase in net new jobs of about 450,000. Almost 50 percent of the net new jobs have been Federal jobs--at a time when our deficit is going to be one of the highest on record.

I say time out. I say do it with whom you have. If you have retirements, or people who leave, replace them, but don't increase the numbers anymore. Those numbers don't include the census of 441,000 temporary workers we have hired and will go away. How else are we going to get our budget under control if we don't do it in terms of personnel?

The other thing is, if you look at the process over the last few years on Federal employees--and I will say it again--I will discuss the fact that those of us who think we are in a crisis moment in our country and feel we ought to be making tough choices would say we ought to freeze total salary costs. That is not a salary freeze per individual. That is just saying that in this department, this agency, here is how much you are going to spend on salaries, and we are not going to go up this year. We are not going to raise the total amount we spend on salaries this year. That still allows every manager great flexibility. You can promote and give raises to people who are performing. But you can't increase the total amount of money.

Why is that important? There is an article in today's paper that OPM is starting to look at it. We looked at it, and here is what we know: In 1999, the average Federal salary was $49,536. It is now $78,806. Inflation during that period of time averaged 2.4 percent. Salary increases during that period of time averaged 4 percent--1\1/2\ times the rate of private pay increases in this country.

What happened to benefits? Average personnel benefit per Federal employee is nearing $40,000 per year. Depending on how much you make, that may seem like a lot, or not, but when you look at the average private sector pay, it is $42,000. It is $36,000 less than the average Federal employee is paid. I don't want Federal employees to get a cut. I just don't think we ought to increase them at a time when most people aren't getting pay increases. I don't think we ought to increase Federal pay.

The benefit differential is even more stark. The average for benefits for the average person in this country, who doesn't work for the Federal Government, is $20,000 per year. So we have almost twice as rich a benefit, or 1\1/2\ to 2 times as rich a benefit for Federal employees as everybody else in the country who is employed. I am not saying cut them. I am saying for 1 year let's not let it increase. Let's do right by the American people, who are struggling, and let's do right by the grandchildren and young children in our country by putting some common sense into what is allowable, given that we are in a time of crisis. We voted on that before. It failed.

Federal employees also have, unpaid to the Federal Government, $3 billion in back taxes, and that is not under dispute. Federal employees, who average $78,000 a year, owe the Federal Government $3 billion. I say they ought to be paying that. I say it ought to be coming out of their wages. It is time to not allow that as a condition of your employment anymore. It seems unconscionable to me that you cannot pay your taxes, when you make $78,000 a year, and we are not going to force you to pay them. So it is a $3 billion savings, but it is an important signal to send to people: We are all paying taxes, and you ought to, too, since you make 1\1/2\ times what the average person in this country makes.

We talked earlier about section 11. It eliminates the awarding of bonuses to government contractors when they have unsatisfactory performance. That is a no-brainer. Nobody in the private sector is going to give a bonus to somebody who isn't performing. But the Federal Government does it all the time. We need to statutorily say you cannot do that anymore.

We now know that we spent $6.2 billion at the United Nations last year. We have no transparency from them on how our money was spent. We know we account for 25 percent of their regular budget and 26 percent of the peacekeeping budget. We did get a little piece that leaked data on an audit. We know that nearly 40 percent of the money spent on peacekeeping is defrauded. Our voluntary additional contributions to the U.N. were $1.3 billion last year.

All this amendment says is, don't give more than a billion to an incompetent organization where we cannot find out where they are spending our taxpayer money. It is a ridiculous commitment. Why would we even let them have a billion? At least save $3 billion a year over the next 10 years, but by not allowing that to go forward.

I want to talk about one other thing I think is important that most of this body has voted against several times. We have $1.7 trillion sitting in the bank--money that the Congress has appropriated to be spent in outyears. Almost $700 billion of that has not been obligated for anything. Yet we have T-bonds and T-bills we are paying interest on while that sits over there.

Prudent management would say that rather than borrow more money, you would use money from the bank account you already have. So this portion of the amendment takes $50 billion out of that $700 billion. We ought to eliminate it all, if it is unobligated. I recognize they have to have some movement back and forth, but they will never notice that $50 billion that isn't in the unobligated balances, and when that expenditure comes, we can appropriate money for it. We are letting money sit idle while we borrow additional money to do additional things. This simply says that we move $50 billion out of that.

Section 18 is about getting energy efficiency at the Department of Energy.

Section 19--I talked to one of the Senators from California on this amendment. I am not opposed to fixing the problems with Medicare, the statistical inaccuracies in their payments, but I am opposed to not fixing it for the five other States that have it as well.

It is unfair to take the State of California when the States of Georgia, Minnesota, Ohio, and Virginia all have exactly the same problem. Yet in this bill, as we heard Senator Grassley say

earlier, we only fixed one of the States. That is called an earmark. There is nothing wrong with fixing it for California, but there is plenty wrong with fixing it for California but not fixing it for these other four States. If it is something that needs to be fixed, why would we advantage California over these other States? It is called favoritism. It is called exceptionalism. It says that the citizens of California are worth more in this country than the citizens in Ohio and Georgia and Virginia and Michigan. They are not. If it is a problem that needs to be addressed, let's address the whole problem.

Why did they not address the whole problem? Because it would have cost more money. We are going to borrow $400 million per year to fix it in California, and that is OK but it is not OK to fix it in the other States. That is inherently unfair, it borders on the unethical, and it is exactly the type of thing the American people reject. If there is a problem, fix it for everybody. Do not single out one group of people at the expense of the rest of Americans.

Finally, this amendment eliminates all tax increases in this bill. The last thing we need to be doing right now is decreasing capital formation in this country, decreasing the ability to invest in new ideas, decreasing the capability of small businesses, which this bill goes after in terms of their subchapter S status, and making it more expensive to start a new business or keep one running when 70 percent of the jobs that are created in this country--and we are hurting for jobs--are created by small businesses.

This amendment has 20 segments, and we are going to have 20 votes. We are going to see where this body lines up on these issues. Vote against common sense at your peril. Vote against the future of our country. Vote against Madeline and everybody else like her. Vote to increase the debt even higher. Vote to increase the size of the Federal Government. Vote to undo pay-go again. Continue doing what we are doing, and what we will see is the American people are going to reject that. They are rejecting it now. It is high time we started listening to the American people.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I want to address my colleagues on a couple of different issues. One would be to speak in support of part of the Coburn amendment, and the second one would be to speak on the issue of taxes.

I want to speak in favor of Senator Coburn's amendment that would repeal a special deal for California. As I have said before, Medicare's payment system for physicians is flawed in many ways. One of those flaws has resulted in unfairly low payments to physicians in my own State of Iowa and many other rural States over the course of many years.

Medicare payments vary from one area to another based upon geographic adjustments made by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These adjustments are supposed to reflect the differences in the cost of providing care in different areas and equalizing physician payment. But the geographic adjustors have been a dismal failure. They do not accurately represent the costs in rural States. Instead, they have created unfairly low Medicare rates and have, in fact, even discouraged physicians from practicing in rural areas such as Arkansas, New Mexico, Missouri, Iowa, North Dakota, and maybe, you could say, a lot of rural States.

Last fall, I offered an amendment to reform the unfair formula that has caused these unduly low rural payments during the Finance Committee markup of the health care reform bill. My amendment requires CMS to use accurate data rather than inaccurate proxies to calculate the geographic adjustors for physician practice costs. My amendment was accepted unanimously by the entire Senate Finance Committee, and it was included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was signed into law by the President in March. It is a national solution to this problem that has plagued so many rural States.

Unfortunately, the rural equity that my amendment would finally achieve has been endangered by the Democratic majority's sweetheart deals. One of these sweetheart deals was added to the Senate health care reform bill that is now law. This special deal was added behind the closed doors of the Senate majority leader, and it addressed the unfairly low payments in rural States. It was included in the Senate health reform bill for two of my Democratic colleagues from so-called frontier States. It is what I call the frontier freeloader provision. And it can be called that because it just helped five States at the expense of 45 others.

The frontier freeloader deal gives higher Medicaid payments to just five States--North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah-- and it is at the expense of every other State. Even though Iowa, New Mexico, Arkansas, Missouri, and other rural States do not benefit from this deal, they have to pay for it. Here we are. Taxpayers in your State and mine--all the other 45 States--have to kick in to pay the $2 billion for higher Medicare payments for these 5 so-called frontier States. This is another example of how the secret deals made by the Democratic majority leader to get votes during health care reform led to bad policies such as the ``Cornhusker kickback,'' the ``Louisiana purchase,'' and the Florida ``Gator aid.'' I introduced legislation in April to repeal this sweetheart deal for frontier states. My bill, the Medicare Rural Health Care Equity Act, would eliminate this special deal for these five States. We should improve physician payments for all rural States, not just a select few.

The Coburn amendment would address a similar concern--yet another special deal for just one State has been included in the Democrat's tax extender bill. Section 522 of the Democratic substitute would provide $400 million over 10 years to create yet a new system for calculating payments for physicians in rural areas, but you know what, only in one State--California. This is just one more example of the sweetheart deals that have permeated the Democratic leadership's efforts during these times. Will these special deals ever stop? I strongly oppose these sweetheart deals, and I will continue to speak out against them, and I will continue to work to pass legislation to repeal these special deals, such as the Medicare Rural Health Care Equity Act, that I introduced this year.

That is why I strongly support the amendment by my colleague from Oklahoma to strike this $400 million sweetheart deal for California from the bill, and I urge my colleagues, especially those from other rural States, to do the same. You see, what happens here when you start doing something for 1 State here and 5 States over here--there are about 30 States, maybe 35 States that have similar problems. We ought to attack these similar problems with the same principle, as I see it.

As I said, I wish to continue to address my colleagues on the subject of time-sensitive tax legislative business. I have already spoken on other items. I have a chart here that says what the four items are that are time sensitive that we ought to be working on and how far we have gotten on some of them. Obviously, as you can see from the Xs there, we have not gotten very far on most of them.

Last week, I discussed the unfinished tax legislative business. This chart gives you an update of the legislation before the Senate. It deals with only one small, however important, part of unfinished tax legislative business.

These tax extenders are on their second Senate stop. This is the bill now before the Senate. As this chart shows, the tax extenders which are overdue by almost half a year are not alone. There are three other major areas of unfinished business.

One area is the one I discussed a couple of days ago--the alternative minimum tax, the AMT patch. That issue, if you do not deal with it, is going to raise the taxes of 24 million Americans, middle-class Americans who, frankly, were never intended to pay the alternative minimum tax. If we do not fix it, 24 million people are going to see their taxes go up.

Yesterday, I addressed the issue of the death tax. That is an area which is very important. I took a lot of time of my colleagues last night to explain the issue and particularly the impact on small, family-owned businesses that may be sold off because we do not have a good estate tax policy.

The third area and the one I am going to address now is the 2001 and 2003 tax rate cuts and family tax relief package. That is the one that, if Congress does nothing between now and December 31, starting January 1, 2011, the American people are going to have the biggest tax increase in the history of the country and without even a vote of Congress. Existing law, with the tax reductions of 2001 and 2003, sunsets. ``Sunset'' simply means that if Congress does nothing, the biggest tax increase in the history of the country happens without us even casting a vote here in the Senate.

As important as the AMT patch and the death tax are, these two I just mentioned are dwarfed by the impact of this third package of expiring tax provisions. I am referring to the marginal rate cuts and the family tax relief of the bipartisan tax relief that was enacted in 2001 and 2003. Efforts to make these tax relief packages permanent were rebuffed. The resistance was the result of a hard and determined minority back then, marshaled by the Senate Democratic leadership. It was reflected in the budget resolutions offered in filibusters.

Even more inexplicable than the Democratic leadership's failure to extend popular and bipartisan tax relief enacted in 2001 and 2003 were some of the reasons given. It was basically said that since Republicans wrote the law, it is our--meaning Republicans--problem. The left wing of the blogosphere echoed the Democratic leadership's position.

Some of those reflections in the blogosphere even alleged that the sunset was a Republican conspiracy. I

came across a 2007 posting on Daily KOS blog. The posting referred to the provisions of the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005, which was enacted in May 2006. That legislation contained two basic pieces. One was an extension of lower rates for capital gains and dividends. Another was the extension of the alternative minimum tax patch. The poster's analysis concluded that the bill was a ``poison pill'' designed--can you believe it--to sabotage the economy, which supposedly would increase the prospects of Republican candidates in 2012. I know that sounds a little far-fetched, but that is what the KOS posting on their blog said. The argument seems to be that having popular and bipartisan tax relief from 2001 and 2003 all sunset at the end of 2010 would cause such an economic mess that the Democrats, assumed by the posters to be in power at the time, will take the blame and suffer at the polls.

In the posting titled ``The Monster Republican Tax Hike,'' the poster stated that:

Republican Congresses chose not to make their tax cuts . .

. permanent.

The argument seems to be that Republicans put sunset clauses in the bill solely to improve long-term budget projections and that responsibility for the expiration of tax relief rests completely with Republicans. The implication is that by lowering taxes, Republicans are responsible for a tax increase that would occur when the Democratic majorities control both Houses of Congress. That is a little far- fetched because it is just some sort of conspiracy that you can control the electorate and these things are going to exactly work out this way. That is obviously stupid, but that doesn't keep bloggers from talking-- whatever they want to believe.

The commentaries I just referred to are available to anyone in the April 12, 2007, edition of the Congressional Record.

I have heard some Members on the other side as well as key staff have made similar assertions. As one who was involved in the writing of these tax relief plans of 2001 and 2003, I want to tell my fellow Senators without reservation that these assertions are absolutely untrue, besides being ridiculous. To begin with, it is completely ridiculous to suggest that President Bush and Republicans in general did not intend or desire the permanence of tax relief. President Bush and Republicans in general have favored tax relief permanence. You need to look no further than the budgets to which I referred. The administration and Republican Congress budgeted for extension of the bipartisan tax relief provisions. That action affected the bottom lines of those budgets.

We heard over and over the criticism of those budgets. We heard it from the Democratic leadership, liberal think tanks, and some sympathetic east coast media. As a matter of fact, after 3\1/2\ years of congressional control, we still hear the Democratic leadership's criticism every day. Just recently, the Speaker of the House was asked when the Democratic leadership would cease laying the blame for all fiscal problems on Republican budgets of the years 2001 to 2006. MSNBC's Chuck Todd recently interviewed the highest ranking Democrat in the House. Mr. Todd asked if there was a statute of limitations on placing responsibility on the Presidency of Mr. Bush.

At what point do you think the public says something [like

this]? ``You know what, yes, we were unhappy with the Bush

administration . . . [but] stop blaming the Bush

administration.

Mr. Todd went on to say:

When does that run out?

But then the Speaker specifically replied:

Well, it runs out when the problems go away.

The blame game is no substitute for doing the job you have been hired to do. People elect folks to public office to do--what? To govern; govern at the will of the people. Governing is not just about enjoying the benefits of public office. This is a public trust we hold. We work for the American people; they don't work for us. Part of governing is also about making choices. Some of those choices are tough, as we know, and those of us in public life need to be accountable for those choices.

The Democratic leadership cannot have it both ways. They cannot continue the bipartisan tax relief and not be responsible for the deficit impact those policies carry. No family can make decisions about its budget and evade the consequences by blaming their next-door neighbors. No business can make decisions about its budget and evade the consequences by blaming a competing business. The fiscal consequences are an important part of that decision.

The statutory pay-go or pay-as-you-go regime was enacted as part of the last debt limit increase. It covers only part of the revenue loss of making permanent the bipartisan tax relief plans of 2001 and 2003. For instance, the alternative minimum tax patch is extended for only 2 years. Death tax policy is extended at 2009 levels only through 2011. How do you plan estates when you only have a tax law in place for 2 years?

Even with those limitations, the Joint Committee on Taxation states: Complying with the pay-go rule means a revenue loss of over $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of the Joint Committee on Taxation's estimate of the tax relief covered by statutory pay-go. And this is a summation of that.

The expiring tax relief I am talking about today includes the marginal rate cuts and family tax relief. Under the statutory pay as you go, the amount permitted in this area is about $1.4 trillion as you can see at the top of the chart on the right. It covers about 80 percent of extending all of the marginal rate cuts and family tax relief from the 2001 and 2003 bipartisan plan.

That number makes sense because the bipartisan tax relief plans cut taxes for virtually every American family who pays income tax. How significant and how widespread is this tax relief? This chart here, drawn by the Congressional Budget Office--and I want to remind people throughout the Nation that CBO is a professional group of people who see numbers as what they are, void of politics, and make predictions. So I hope this may shed some light on the question of how significant and widespread is the tax relief.

The line measures the effective tax rate paid by the top 5 percent of the taxpayers. That is at the top, the top line. This group roughly represents those taxpaying families with incomes over $250,000. Under the Democratic leadership's budget, this line will go back up to where it was in the year 2000. That is also where the President's budget, meaning President Obama's budget, and the statutory pay-as-you-go regime would take the rates.

The Republicans believe this significant tax increase will be a mistake. We hope we will be able to debate this policy in the House and Senate, in committee and on the floor. That was, after all, the process that was followed when the bipartisan tax relief plans were passed in years 2001, 2003, and 2005.

We will point out that about half of the heavy tax increases will fall on small business owners. The top marginal rate on small business owners will rise by 17 percent. Democrats and Republicans agree, small businesses are a key job creator of the future and for a long period of time in our country. President Obama correctly points out that small business creates 70 percent of new jobs. I do not argue with his percentage.

The rest will also hit investment hard. The top capital gains rate will rise by 33 percent. The top dividend rate could rise by almost 275 percent. All of this is set to occur not at some far distant future point, it occurs a little over a half a year from right now.

We all hope the economy is on a path to recovery. But does this heavy tax increase on small business owners and investments ever make sense? Because even the most liberal Members on the other side might wonder whether it makes sense right now to increase taxes at this time. Is the recession ending? There is good news some days, bad news some days. But the uncertainty is a factor that people do not want to move forward with investment and creating jobs.

Do we think then that the private sector will grow if we hit small businesses and investors this hard 6 months from now? They are not going to wait 6 months from now to make some decisions. They are making those decisions right now. If we can give them some certainty, I think it would be a big boost for our economy.

You can see that the broad bipartisan tax relief brought the effective rate down with respect to the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers. This is the red line. Some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle may be thinking to themselves, sure, this is true for income taxes. But what about other Federal taxes such as Social Security, which make up a large percentage of the taxes paid by middle and low- income individuals?

Well, this chart is not just a depiction of Federal income taxes, it includes all Federal taxes. This includes Social Security, other payroll taxes, excise taxes, frequently referred to by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle as regressive taxes, everything, including all Federal taxes over the last 30 years.

The top 5 percent has paid a lot higher effective tax rate than the bottom 95 percent. It has been that way no matter which party has controlled the White House or controlled Congress or controlled both. It shows something you would never know if you listened to the rhetoric from the other side or even the punditry of the media and the left.

Here is what it shows: A progressive income tax system is very deeply embedded into our culture. The bipartisan tax relief plans of 2001 and 2003 made the system yet more progressive. Those plans brought the rates down for the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers. The 2001 and 2003 tax relief plans dropped the effective tax rate for taxpaying families under $250,000 to their lowest levels in a whole generation.

This is the current law level of taxation. In a little over half a year, these rates will pop back up for all of these taxpayers. I have a couple of charts that illustrate how significant the tax hit will be. Middle-income families will run right through these tax walls. I have used these charts several times in the last few months.

For a family of four with an income of $50,000, that is a tax wall of a $2,300 tax increase. For a single mom with two kids earning $30,000, that tax wall will be $1,100. The President, as powerful as he is, cannot unilaterally hike or cut taxes. He needs a bill from Congress to do that. On our side, we want all of the tax relief made permanent. We want the opportunity to debate and to amend a bill that deals with this basic level of taxation.

As has been made clear for the last 3\1/2\ years, Republicans do not control this Congress. We cannot decide the fate of the marginal rate cuts and family tax relief. This is unfinished business. It is unfinished tax legislative business that affects every American taxpayer. It will have fiscal consequences. They are pretty significant fiscal consequences, as you can see by the figures on this chart. That is going to raise taxes an awful lot. If the Democratic leadership wants to keep these levels of taxation low, then they have to deal with the fiscal consequences. Alternately, the Democratic leadership can raise taxes and claim the revenue.

Not changing the law by failing to act is the same as raising rates on virtually every American taxpayer. But they will have to explain to the taxpayers why they raised taxes by almost 10 percent, on average. In the 2006 election, almost 4 years ago, the American people provided the Democratic leadership with control of the Congress. In the 2008 election, over 18 months ago, the American people provided the Democratic leadership with yet the largest majority in more than a generation. They also provided the Democratic leadership with a President of their party.

The Democratic leadership spent the periods of 2001 to 2006 thwarting our efforts to make bipartisan tax relief of 2001 and 2003 permanent. It would seem okay to keep Republican bills from 2001 through 2006 from being made permanent, but the 2001 tax bill was very bipartisan.

Upon assuming control, they have spent 3\1/2\ years with no legislation to make permanent or even extend marginal tax rates and family tax relief packages. My friends in the Democratic leadership need to step to the plate. We have had budgets and statutory pay-as- you-go. We have debated this and voted on the breadth and composition of marginal rate cuts and family tax relief in those contexts, yet no legislative action; no House committee and floor action; no Senate committee and floor action. And that would be the bottom line there. The Xs show nothing happening on something to give permanence to tax law, to give predictability to the future of those people who have to put up money to create jobs that expand our economy.

Without it, the biggest tax increase in the history of the country could be a fact. So I say once again, step to the plate. Blaming former President George W. Bush and Republican Congresses of many sessions ago is no substitute for running this time-sensitive tax legislative business through the process. Put forward proposals. Let us debate those proposals. Let's allow for amendments. Allow votes on amendments. Do the people's business. It is time to check every one of these boxes.

Mr. President, at around lunchtime, the Senate voted on Senator Thune's alternative to the Democratic leadership's extender bill. Senator Thune's amendment took the exact opposite approach to the Democratic leadership's substitute. It cuts taxes by $26 billion by extending current law. It cut spending by over $100 billion, and reduced the deficit by $68 billion. Those are Congressional Budget Office, CBO, and Joint Committee on Taxation estimates.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, CBO, the current version of the Democratic leadership's extenders substitute would increase direct spending by about $105 billion through 2020 and raise revenues by about $50 billion over that period, resulting in a net deficit increase of about $55 billion for the 2010-2020 period.

The contrast couldn't be clearer. The Republican Conference, along with one member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, voted to change the bottom-line fiscal effects of the Democratic leadership's extender substitute. The Thune amendment would reduce the deficit by $13 billion more than the amount the Democratic leadership's extender substitute would add to the deficit. Senator Thune's amendment reached this better fiscal result by restraining Federal spending.

All but one of the Democratic Caucus who were present, 57 Senators, voted against Senator Thune's amendment.

The junior Senator from Florida, one of the 41 Senators who voted for Senator Thune's amendment, came to the Senate floor to highlight the differences between the Democratic Caucus and the Republican Conference in the approach to this extender bill.

The junior Senator from Michigan also made some comments on the current fiscal problems. She made her arguments in response to comments from the junior Senator from Florida. Last year, at about this time, there was a lot of revision or perhaps editing of recent budget history. I expect more of it from some on the other side.

The President signaled as much in an interview with George Stephanopoulos a few months ago. I agree with the President that there's a lot of revisionism in the debate.

The revisionist history basically boils down to two conclusions:

1. That all of the ``good'' fiscal history of the 1990s was derived from a partisan tax increase bill of 1993; and

2. That all of the ``bad'' fiscal history of this decade to date is attributable to the bipartisan tax relief plans.

Not surprisingly, nearly all of the revisionists who spoke generally oppose tax relief and support tax increases. The same crew generally support spending increases and oppose spending cuts.

In the debate so far, many on this side have pointed out some key, undeniable facts. The stimulus bill passed by the Senate, with interest included, increases the deficit by over $1 trillion. The stimulus bill was a heavy stew of spending increases and refundable tax credits, seasoned with small pieces of tax relief. The bill passed by the Senate had new temporary spending, that,

if made permanent, will burden future budget deficits by over $3 trillion. That is not Chuck Grassley speaking. It is the official Congressional scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office, CBO.

All of this occurred in an environment where the automatic economic stabilizers thankfully kicked in to help the most unfortunate in America with unemployment insurance, food stamps and other benefits.

That antirecessionary spending, together with lower tax receipts, and the TARP activities has set a fiscal table of a deficit of $1.4 trillion for the fiscal year that ended several months ago. That is the highest deficit, as a percentage of the economy, in post-World War II history.

Not a pretty fiscal picture. And it is going to get a lot uglier with the budget put forward by the President this year. It's the same result under the budget crafted last year by the Democratic leadership. So, for the folks who see this bill as an opportunity to ``recover'' America with government taking a larger share of the economy over the long-term, I say congratulations. You have recovered America with a vast expansion of government and the American people have a lot of red ink to look forward to.

Members who voted for the budget and the fiscal policy envisioned in it put us on the path to a bigger role for the government. But supporters of that fiscal policy need to own up to the fiscal course they are charting.

That's where the revisionist history comes from. From the perspective of those on our side, it's seems to be a strategy to divert, through a twisted blame game, from the facts before us. How is the history revisionist? Let's take each conclusion one-by-one.

The first conclusion is that all of the ``good'' fiscal history was derived from the 1993 tax increase. To test that assertion, all you have to do is take a look at data from the Clinton administration.

The much-ballyhooed partisan tax increase of 1993 accounts for 13 percent of the deficit reduction in the 1990s. Thirteen percent. That 13 percent figure was calculated by the Clinton administration's Office of Management and Budget, OMB.

The biggest source of deficit reduction, 35 percent, came from a reduction in defense spending. Of course, that fiscal benefit originated from President Reagan's stare-down of the communist regime in Russia. The same folks on that side who opposed President Reagan's defense build-up take credit for the fiscal benefit of the ``peace dividend.''

The next biggest source of deficit reduction, 32 percent, came from other revenue. Basically, this was the fiscal benefit from pro-growth policies, like the bipartisan capital gains tax cut in 1997, and the free-trade agreements President Clinton, with Republican votes, established.

The savings from the policies I have pointed out translated to interest savings. Interest savings accounts for 15 percent of the deficit reduction.

Now, for all the chest-thumping about the 1990s, the chest thumpers, who push for big social spending, didn't bring much to the deficit reduction table in the 1990s. Their contribution was 5 percent.

What's more the fiscal revisionist historians in this body tend to forget who the players were. They are correct that there was a Democratic President in the White House. But they conveniently forget that Republicans controlled the Congress for the period where the deficit came down and turned to surplus. They tend to forget they fought the principle of a balanced budget that was the centerpiece of Republican fiscal policy.

Do my friends on the Democratic side remember the government shutdown of late 1995? Remember what that was about? It was about a plan to balance the budget. Republicans paid a political price for forcing the issue, but, in 1997, President Clinton agreed. Recall as well all through the 1990s what the year-end battles were about.

On one side, congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration pushed for more spending. On the other side, congressional Republicans were pushing for tax relief. In the end, both sides compromised. That is the real fiscal history of the 1990s.

Let's turn to the other conclusion of the revisionist fiscal historians. That conclusion is that, in this decade, all fiscal problems are attributable to the widespread tax relief enacted in 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2006.

In 2001, President Bush came into office. He inherited an economy that was careening downhill. Investment started to go flat in 2000. The tech-fueled stock market bubble was bursting. Then came the economic shocks of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Add in the corporate scandals to that economic environment.

And it is true, as fiscal year 2001 came to a close, the projected surplus turned to a deficit.

In just the right time, the 2001 tax relief plan started to kick in. As the tax relief hit full force in 2003, the deficits grew smaller. This pattern continued up through 2007.

If my comments were meant to be partisan shots, I could say this favorable fiscal path from 2003 to 2007 was the only period, aside from 6 months in 2001, where Republicans controlled the White House and the Congress. But, unlike the fiscal history revisionists, I am not trying to make any partisan points, I am just trying to get to the fiscal facts.

There is also data that compares the tax receipts for 4 years after the much-ballyhooed 1993 tax increase and the 4-year period after the 2003 tax cuts.

In 1993, the Clinton tax increase brought in more revenue as compared to the 2003 tax cut. That trend reversed as both policies moved along. Over the first few years, the extra revenue went up over time relative to the flat line of the 1993 tax increase.

So, let's get the fiscal history right.

The progrowth tax and trade policies of the 1990's along with the ``peace dividend'' had a lot more to do with the deficit reduction in the 1990s than the 1993 tax increase. In this decade, deficits went down after the tax relief plans were put in full effect.

No economist I am aware of would link the bursting of the housing bubble with the bipartisan tax relief plans of 2001 and 2003. Likewise, I know of no economic research that concludes that the bipartisan tax relief of 2001 and 2003 caused the financial meltdown of September and October 2008.

As I said, from the period of 2003 through 2007, after the bipartisan tax relief program was in full effect, the general pattern was this: revenues went up and deficits went down.

That is the past. We need to make sure we understand it. But what is most important is the future. People in our States send us here to deal with future policy.

They don't send us here to flog one another, like partisan cartoon cut-out characters, over past policies. They don't send us here to endlessly point fingers of blame. The substitute before us takes us in the direction of more deficits and debt. The Thune amendment, which was rejected by most of the Democratic Caucus, would have put us on a path in the opposite fiscal direction. My friends on the other side fool no one if they pretend that the fiscal choices made by the Democratic Leadership and the President over the last year have nothing to do with this rapidly rising debt.

President Obama rightly focused us on the future with his eloquence during the campaign. I would like to paraphrase a quote from the President's nomination acceptance speech:

We need a President who can face the threats of the future,

not grasping at the ideas of the past.

President Obama was right.

We need a President, and I would add Congressmen and Senators, who can face the threats of the future. Grasping at ideas of the past or playing the partisan blame game will not deal with the threats to our fiscal future.

It is not too late to correct the excesses of the stimulus bill or the bloated appropriations bills that will come. The Senate missed an opportunity, with a partisan rejection of Senator Thune's alternative.

Senator McCaskill's and Sessions' amendment, which calls for a time out on the exponentially rising levels of appropriations spending, is a good start. The President called on the Democratic leadership to do something similar. That is what the American people want and need. There is a way to reach a real bipartisan compromise, not just picking off a few Senators that frequently vote with the Democrats.

Mr. President, I have a unanimous consent request but I will wait until a Member from the other side is here to make it. As a predicate to that, I will make a statement on my reason for doing so.

As the majority continues to struggle in an attempt to pass another massive deficit spending bill through Congress, biodiesel plants in Iowa and throughout the country continue to lay off workers because the Democratically controlled Congress has not extended the biodiesel tax credit. This is a simple and noncontroversial tax extension that will likely reinstate 20,000 jobs nationwide and about 2,000 jobs in my State of Iowa all by itself. These jobs have fallen victim to a tactic used by the Democratic leadership to hold this popular and noncontroversial tax provision hostage to out-of-control deficit spending in Washington.

This past February, I worked out a bipartisan deal with Chairman Baucus to extend the expired tax provision, including the biodiesel tax credit. However, the Senate Democratic leadership decided to put partisanship ahead of job security for thousands of workers in the biodiesel industry. I am here again to try to put thousands of workers back to work, American workers, in the process of producing a clean and renewable fuel. We already stripped out and passed the so-called doctor fix from the larger extenders bill last week. We should do the same with the biodiesel tax credit right now.

Also there is a difference between the biodiesel tax credit and the other tax provisions in the tax extenders bill. The failure to extend the biodiesel tax credit before it expires has ground the industry to a halt, because biodiesel is now more expensive than gasoline and gas stations know they can't sell it. So, of course, naturally, they don't buy it. Therefore, biodiesel producers have stopped producing it because they have nobody to sell it to. While the other tax provisions are important, they are not as time sensitive as biodiesel, because they are not transactional tax incentives like the biodiesel tax credit but instead are based on the taxable year.

I am going to reserve my unanimous consent request until the Senator from Michigan returns. I will go to other remarks I want to make at this point.

I see the Senator has returned so I will make my unanimous consent request at this point.

Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 4853

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 4853, that all after the enacting clause be stricken and the text of S. 3440, to extend the biodiesel fuel tax credit, be inserted; that the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be laid on the table.

Mr. President, I have a further unanimous consent request. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 4853; that all after the enacting clause be stricken and that an amendment at the desk, which is the text of S. 3421, be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. President, may I ask how much time remains?

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, this morning we saw yet another replay of a dialog between some of my friends on the other side and some on my side of the aisle. It kind of goes like this. Republicans make a proposal to make a pending Democratic leadership proposal such as the extenders bill deficit neutral. The Democratic leadership marshals the votes and defeats the deficit-neutral proposal on a largely party-line basis. After the vote, debate ensues. My friends on the other side define the proposal that they defeat in an incorrect way. They define it as a proposal to carry out the policy of a fiscally responsible manner as opposition to the underlying policy in the proposal. Republicans counter that the Republican deficit-neutral proposal carries most, if not all, of the policy contained in the Democratic leadership's proposal.

When the smoke clears, the true differences between the two sides' approaches become very clear. My friends on the other side want to add to the deficit to carry out the underlying initiative--be it an extension of unemployment benefits or a lot of other things in the bill. On this side, we want deficit neutrality at a minimum by rolling back future bloated spending. The Democratic leadership wants to keep in place the future bloated spending. Tax increases are OK, if they are offset. Bring on hundreds of billions of dollars of tax increase, whether they hit individuals, small businesses, or what have you. As an example, the latest tax is due to hit next week. Next Tuesday, July 1, users of tanning bed services will face a new 10-percent tanning bed excise tax. God help us if someone proposes to make the government even a little bit leaner. That proposal will be met with a brick wall of resistance, even if it is a proposal to roll back future unobligated, unallocated stimulus spending, which stimulus spending has not accomplished what it was intended to accomplish, keeping unemployment under 8 percent.

The upshot is this: For my friends in the Democratic leadership, keeping the spending spigot all the way open trumps deficit reduction. Keep the spending going, in other words. Worry about our deficit sometime down the road. Let our grandchildren worry about it.

On the Republican side, we want to trim the spending and save some taxpayers money by managing priorities. That is a worthwhile debate. It is an intellectually honest debate. It is the kind of debate that can inform fiscal policy judgments. But my friends in the Democratic leadership are not content to have the debate on that basis. Instead, we have seen a pattern where they want to change the subject. Instead of focusing on the present and the future, my friends on the other side want to revisit the past. In veering away from current choices and future fiscal consequences, my friends on the other side take the discussion in a whole different direction. My friends on the other side claim they cannot deal with these problems in a fiscally responsible manner because of Republicans. Republicans only left them with fiscal problems.

People watching C-SPAN witnessed this back and forth last Thursday, and around lunchtime the Senate voted on Senator Thune's alternative to the Democratic leadership's extender bill. The Thune amendment took the exact opposite approach to the Democratic leadership's substitute. It cut taxes by $26 billion by extending current law. It cut spending by over $100 billion and reduced the deficit by $68 billion. Those are not this Senator's numbers. They come from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the last version of the Democratic leadership's extender substitute would have increased direct spending by about $105 billion through the year 2020, and raised revenues by about $50

billion over that period, resulting in a net deficit increase of about $55 billion. As an aside, last Friday Chairman Baucus and I prevailed on the leadership to clear the deficit-neutral bill that extended the so-called Medicare doctor fix. That action will cut those numbers a little bit.

On the larger bill, however, the contrast could not be clearer. The Republican Conference, along with one member of the Democratic caucus, voted to change the bottom line fiscal effects of the Democratic leadership's extender substitute. If Senator Thune had prevailed, his amendment would have reduced the deficit by $13 billion more than the amount the Democratic leadership's extender substitute would have added to the deficit. The Thune amendment reached this better fiscal result by simple common sense of restraining Federal spending. All but one Member of the Democratic caucus then in attendance, 57 Senators, voted against the Thune amendment. One of the Senators who voted for the Thune amendment came to the Senate floor to highlight the differences between the Democratic caucus and the Republican Conference in the approach to this extenders bill.

A Member of the Democratic leadership also made some comments on the current fiscal problems. Instead of focusing on the question of whether to offset the policy or not, that Member decided to change the subject. As we saw this morning, that Member of the Democratic leadership wanted to go back several years and talk about fiscal history.

This morning, like last week, there was a lot of revision or perhaps editing of the recent budget history. I expect more of it from some on the other side.

The President signaled as much in an interview with George Stephanopoulos a few months ago. I agree with the President that there is a lot of revisionism in the debate.

The revisionist history basically boils down to two conclusions: One, that all of the ``good'' fiscal history of the 1990s was derived from a partisan tax increase bill of 1993; and, two, that all of the ``bad'' fiscal history of this decade to date is attributable to the bipartisan tax relief plans.

Not surprisingly, nearly all of the revisionists who spoke generally oppose tax relief and--do you know what--support tax increases. The same crew generally supports spending increases and opposes spending cuts.

In the debate so far, many on this side have pointed out some key undeniable facts. The stimulus bill passed by the Senate, with interest included, increases the deficit by over $1 trillion. The stimulus bill was a heavy stew of spending increases and refundable tax credits, seasoned with small pieces of tax relief.

The bill passed by the Senate had new temporary spending that, if made permanent, will burden future budget deficits by over $2.5 trillion. That is not Senate Republicans adding that up. It is the official congressional scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office, nonpartisan as they are. In fact, the deficit effects of the stimulus bill passed a year ago March--passed within a short time after the Democrats assumed full control of the Federal Government--roughly exceeded the deficit impact of the 8 years of bipartisan tax relief.

All of this occurred in an environment where the automatic economic stabilizers, thankfully, kicked in to help the most unfortunate in America with unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other benefits.

That antirecessionary spending, together with lower tax receipts, and the TARP activities, has set a fiscal table of a deficit of $1.4 trillion for the fiscal year that ended several months ago. That is the highest deficit, as a percentage of the economy, in post-World War II history.

It is not a pretty fiscal picture, and it is going to get a lot uglier with the budget put forward by the President this year. It is the same result under the budget crafted last year by the Democratic leadership.

So for the folks who see this bill as an opportunity to ``recover'' America with government taking a larger share of the economy over the long term, I say congratulations. America has been recovered with a vast expansion of government and the American People have a lot of red ink to look forward to.

Members who voted for the budget and the fiscal policy envisioned in it put us on the path to a bigger role for the government. But supporters of that fiscal policy need to own up to the fiscal course they are charting.

That is where the revisionist history comes from. From the perspective of those on our side, it seems to be a strategy to divert, through a twisted blame game, from the facts before us. How is the history revised? Let's take each conclusion one by one.

The first conclusion is that all of the ``good'' fiscal history was derived from the 1993 tax increase. To test that assertion, all you have to do is take a look at data from the Clinton administration.

The much-ballyhooed 1993 partisan tax increase accounts for 13 percent of the deficit reduction in the 1990s--13 percent. That 13 percent figure was calculated by the Clinton administration's Office of Management and Budget.

The biggest source of deficit reduction, 35 percent, came from a reduction in defense spending. Of course, that fiscal benefit originated from President Reagan's stare-down of the Communist regime in Russia. The same folks on that side who opposed President Reagan's defense buildup take credit for the fiscal benefit of the ``peace dividend.''

The next biggest source of deficit reduction, 32 percent, came from other revenue.

Basically, this was the fiscal benefit from pro-growth policies, like the bipartisan capital gains tax cut in 1997, and the freetrade agreements President Clinton, with Republican votes, established.

The savings from the policies I have pointed out translated to interest savings. Interest savings account for 15 percent of the deficit reduction.

Now, for all the chest-thumping about the 1990s, the chest-thumpers, who push for big social spending, didn't bring much to the deficit reduction table in the 1990s. Their contribution was 5 percent.

What is more, the fiscal revisionist historians in this body tend to forget who the players were. They are correct that there was a Democratic President in the White House. But they conveniently forget that Republicans controlled the Congress for the period where the deficit came down and turned to surplus.

They tend to forget they fought the principle of a balanced budget that was the centerpiece of Republican fiscal policy.

Remember the government shutdown of late 1995, my friends on the Democratic side? Remember what that was about? It was about a plan to balance the budget. We are constantly reminded of the political price paid by the other side for the record tax increase they put in the law in 1993. Republicans paid a political price for forcing the balanced budget issue in 1996. But, in 1997, President Clinton agreed. Recall as well all through the 1990s what the year-end battles were about.

On one side, congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration pushed for more spending. On the other side, congressional Republicans were pushing for tax relief.

In the end, both sides compromised. That is the real fiscal history of the 1990s.

Let's turn to the other conclusion of the revisionist fiscal historians. That conclusion is that, in this decade, all fiscal problems are attributable to the widespread tax relief enacted in 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2006.

In 2001, President Bush came into office. He inherited an economy that was careening downhill. Investment started to go flat in 2000. The tech-fueled stock market bubble was bursting. After that came the economic shocks of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Add in the corporate scandals to that economic environment.

And it is true, as fiscal year 2001 came to close, the projected surplus turned to a deficit. But it is wrong to attribute the entire deficit occurring during this period to the bipartisan tax relief. According to CBO, the bipartisan tax relief is responsible for only 25 percent of the deficit change, while 44 percent is attributable to higher spending, and 31 percent is attributable to economic and technical changes.

At just the right time, the 2001 tax relief plan started to kick in. As the

tax relief hit its full force in 2003, the deficits grew smaller. This pattern continued up through 2007.

If my comments were meant to be partisan shots, I could say this favorable fiscal path from 2003 to 2007 was the only period, aside from 6 months in 2001, where Republicans controlled the White House and the Congress. But, unlike the fiscal history revisionists, I am not trying to make any partisan points, I am just trying to get to the fiscal facts.

There is also data that compares the tax receipts for 4 years after the much-ballyhooed 1993 tax increase and the 4-year period after the 2003 tax cuts. I have a chart that tracks those trends.

In 1993, the Clinton tax increase brought in more revenue as compared to the 2003 tax cut. That trend reversed as both policies moved along.

Over the first few years, the extra revenue went up over time relative to the flat line of the 1993 tax increase.

So, let's get the fiscal history right.

The progrowth tax and trade policies of the 1990s, along with the ``peace dividend,'' had a lot more to do with the deficit reduction in the 1990s than the 1993 tax increase. In this decade, deficits went down after the tax relief plans were put in full effect.

No economist I am aware of would link the bursting of the housing bubble with the bipartisan tax relief plans of 2001 and 2003.

Likewise, I know of no economic research that concludes that the bipartisan tax relief of 2001 and 2003 caused the financial meltdown of September and October 2008. I have a chart that shows what the President inherited from a Democratic Congress and a Republican President.

As I said, from the period of 2003 through 2007, after the bipartisan tax relief program was in full effect, the general pattern was this: revenues went up and deficits went down.

That is the past. We need to make sure we understand it. But what is most important is the future. People in our States send us here to deal with future policy. They don't send us here to flog one another, like partisan cartoon cut-out characters, over past policies. They don't send us here to endlessly point fingers of blame.

The substitute before us takes us in the direction of more deficits and debt. The Thune amendment, which was rejected by most of the Democratic Caucus, would have put us on a path in the opposite fiscal direction. My friends on the other side fool no one if they pretend that the fiscal choices made by the Democratic leadership and the President over the last year have nothing to do with this rapidly rising debt.

President Obama rightly focused us on the future with his eloquence during the campaign. I would like to paraphrase a quote from the President's nomination acceptance speech: We need a President who can face the threats of the future, not grasping at the ideas of the past.

President Obama was right.

We need a President, and, I would add, Congressmen and Senators who can face the threats of the future. Grasping at ideas of the past or playing the partisan blame game will not deal with the threats to our fiscal future.

It is not too late to correct the excesses of the stimulus bill or the bloated appropriations bills that will come. The Senate missed an opportunity with a partisan rejection of Senator Thune's alternative.

We took a small, bipartisan step last Friday. The Senate unanimously approved a paid-for Medicare doc fix bill, led by my friend, Chairman Baucus. That was the way we need to go.

There are more bipartisan fiscally responsible efforts underway. Senator McCaskill's and Senator Sessions' amendment, which calls for a timeout on the exponentially rising levels of appropriations spending, is a good start. The President called on the Democratic leadership to do something similar.

That is what the American people want and need. There is a way to reach a real bipartisan compromise. It is right in front of the Democratic leadership. Efforts to change the subject and blame Republican Congresses of many years ago won't answer the questions about what needs to be done now.

Efforts to blame every fiscal problem on a Republican President who retired a year and a half ago is no answer. It is a strategy that avoids responsibility for the trillions of new spending that the Democratic leadership and this President have muscled through with large majorities. It is time to match the power with responsibility. The American People expect no less.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 20 minutes.

Mr. President, we have watched with horror the unfolding disaster in the gulf. We have seen precious lives lost, hard- earned livelihoods hammered, treasured ways of life imperiled. We have seen the largest deployment of resources ever against an environmental disaster. We have seen astonishing corporate negligence.

But we have seen something else too--something that ought to be a lasting lesson from this catastrophe. We have seen the revolting specter of an agency of government subservient to--captive to--the industry it is supposed to regulate.

From the Minerals Management Service, which is supposed to regulate deep sea oil drilling, here is what we have seen.

From the 2008 inspector general's report on MMS's Royalty in Kind Program, based in Colorado: senior executives steering lucrative contracts to an outside company created by the executives; staff failing to collect millions of dollars in royalties owed to the American people and allowing oil and gas companies to revise their own multimillion-dollar bids; staff accepting gifts and money from oil and gas companies with whom the office was conducting official business; and staff participating in social events with industry representatives that included illegal drug use and sex.

From the IG report, the inspector general's report, released last month on the MMS office in Lake Charles, LA: the district manager telling investigators: ``obviously we're all oil industry,'' employees accepting numerous gifts from companies doing business with MMS, including a trip to the 2005 Peach Bowl on a private airplane, skeet shooting contests, hunting and fishing trips, and gulf tournaments; an MMS inspector conducted four inspections while negotiating a job for himself with the company that owned those platforms, and finding--guess what--no violations during those inspections.

A 2007 inspector general report into the Minerals Revenue Management Office of MMS cited ``significant issues worthy of separate investigation, including ethical lapses, program mismanagement, and process failures.''

As my hometown Providence Journal wrote in a recent editorial:

The Deepwater Horizon accident has made it painfully clear

that, in its current form, MMS is a pathetic public guardian.

Neither it nor BP was prepared for a disaster of this

magnitude, and MMS's cozy relationship with industry is a big

reason why.

I agree with the Providence Journal.

The scope, the extent, the insidious nature of corporate influence in regulatory agencies of government--this question of regulatory capture--is something we should attend to here. It is the lesson, and it raises the question beyond the Minerals Management Service: How far does this corporate influence reach into our agencies of government?

The wealth of the international corporate world is staggering. The five biggest oil companies just this quarter posted profits of $23 billion--that is a 23 with 12 zeroes behind it--in just one quarter. The Republican appointees on the Supreme Court just overturned decades of precedent and 100 years of practice to give these big corporations freedom to spend unlimited funds in our American elections. Put it to scale. Consider $23 billion of pure profits just in one quarter by big oil, and compare: The Obama and McCain campaigns together spent about $1 billion in the last election. Do the math. For 5 percent of one quarter's profits, big oil could outspend both American Presidential campaigns. That may be some politician's idea of a happy day because that is who they work to please, but it is wrong and it needs to be stopped.

But think, if that is what corporate influence could do in a national election, think of what those vast, powerful tentacles of corporate influence can do to a little government agency such as the Minerals Management Service: Revolving doors to lucrative jobs in the industry so you are set for life; sports tickets, gifts, drugs; constant, relentless lobbying pressure and threats of litigation; steadily inserting operatives in regulatory positions. Inch by inch, the tentacles of industry reach further and further into the regulator, until it silently and invisibly comes under industry control and becomes the industry's puppet, until it is serving the special interests and not the public interest.

This is no new phenomenon. Marver Bernstein wrote about regulatory capture more than 50 years ago. He explained that a regulator tends over time to ``become more concerned with the general health of the industry and tries to prevent changes which will adversely affect it,'' to become ``passive toward the public interest.'' This, he said, ``is a problem of ethics and morality as well as administrative method,'' and he called it ``a blow to democratic government and responsible political institutions.'' Ultimately, this leads to what he called ``surrender: the commission finally becomes a captive of the regulated groups.''

If you don't want to go back half a century for a discussion of regulatory capture, look to last week's Wall Street Journal editorial page where a senior fellow at the Cato Institute writes:

By all accounts, MMS operated as a rubber stamp for BP. It

is a striking example of regulatory capture: Agencies tasked

with protecting the public interest come to identify with the

regulated industry and protect its interests against that of

the public. The result: Government fails to protect the

public.

There is plenty of evidence that the oil and gas industry had captured MMS. When you have a captive agency, you get what we have seen: altering, deleting, or ignoring recommendations from government scientists.

A draft environmental analysis for drilling in the gulf from May of 2000 included the haunting prediction that ``the oil industry's experience base in deep-water well control is limited,'' and a massive oilspill, ``could easily turn out to be a potential showstopper for the'' Outer Continental Shelf ``program if the industry and MMS do not come together as a whole to prevent such an incident.''

This unwelcome observation was deleted from the final analysis published.

Oil and gas company employees filling out official inspection forms in pencil for the MMS inspectors to trace over in pen; nearly 400 categorical exclusions, shielding even deepwater drilling from thorough environmental review. Cut-and-paste Environmental Assessments were provided by the oil and gas companies. BP's Environmental Assessment listed walruses as a species of concern in the Gulf of Mexico. There are not, and never have been in the memory of man, walruses in the Gulf of Mexico. When they are writing about walruses in the Gulf of Mexico, you know, No. 1, they are cutting and pasting out of documents in Alaska; No. 2, they are paying no attention to what they write because they know it doesn't matter; and, No. 3, they know perfectly well that MMS will never catch the fact that they have cut and pasted because they are not looking at it either.

MMS adopted wholesale for its oil and gas drilling ``best practices'' proposals of the American Petroleum Institute, and then they made most of those best practices only suggestions.

There has been virtually no enforcement. According to the MMS Web site, between 2000 and 2009, civil penalties averaged less than $130 per well per year on our Outer Continental Shelf, and only three criminal referrals were made to the Department since 1990 in the last 20 years. Add it all up and

there is no real question: MMS was a captive regulator.

So the question is, After all those years of corporate control of government in the Bush years, how far-reaching is the insinuation of corporate influence? We know big PhRMA wrote the Bush pharmacy benefit legislation. We know big oil and big coal sat down in secret with Dick Cheney to write their energy policy. But down below the decks, down in the guts of the administration's agencies, how far were the tentacles of corporate influence allowed to reach? How many industry plants are stealthily embedded in the government, there to serve the industry, not the administration or the public?

Well, how is it looking? It is not looking good. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, gave up its watchdog role years ago and became the lapdog of the big Wall Street financiers, raising leverage limits, refusing to investigate Bernie Madoff, and helping to precipitate the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression.

Twenty-nine miners were killed in a West Virginia mine with a safety record that President Obama called ``troubled.'' The Mine Safety and Health Administration has been described as a ``revolving door'' with industry, staffed by people with mining companies' interests at heart, even at the expense of worker safety.

The Bush head of MHSA, for instance, oversaw the rewriting of regulations in 2004 that allowed conveyor belt tunnels to double as ventilation shafts, a practice that contributed to a fatal 2006 Massey mine disaster.

Who knows how far it leads? Think of the timber rights the taxpayer gives up every year, the grazing rights, the multibillion-dollar contracts to big government contractors, the oil and coal leases on land, the carnival of public wealth at which these big corporations feed.

The vital question is this: Are these assets of our Nation still in the hands of servants of the Nation or have the servants of the Nation quietly and insidiously become the servants of the big private corporations that want to profit from that public wealth--corporations for whom every dollar of a sweet deal, every avoided expense allowed by a cozy regulator, every corner cut in safety or environmental protection, goes straight to their bottom line and right into their pockets. The big multibillion-dollar corporations, is this who we want safeguarding our national assets? Is this who we want controlling agencies of the U.S. Government?

Winston Churchill once said in a phrase I like that history turns on sharp agate points. What is the sharp agate point on which the history of this gulf catastrophe should turn? What lesson of history, if left unlearned after this disaster, are we condemned to repeat?

I hope the lesson we learn is this one: that we can never, never again let agencies of the Government of the United States of America fall so under the influence of the corporations they are supposed to regulate.

This government of ours, founded in a revolution pledging the lives and fortune and sacred honor of those early patriots; this government of ours, which has raised for more than two centuries the promise of freedom in human hearts; this government that lifts its lamp aloft to brighten the darkness of chaos and despair in far distant corners of the globe; this government, whose finely tuned balance, crafted by the Founders, has seen us through Civil War and World War, through westward expansion and Great Depression, through the light bulb and the Model T and the Boeing 747 and the iPod; this government of ours, formed by Washington and Madison, Jefferson and Adams, and led by each of them, and later led by Abraham Lincoln and by Harry Truman and by Theodore Roosevelt and by Franklin Roosevelt and by John Fitzgerald Kennedy; this American Government of ours should never be on its knees before corporate power, no matter how strong. It should never be in the thrall of corporate wealth, no matter how vast.

This American Government of ours should never give the American citizen reason to question whose interests are being served. Never.

In this complex world of ours, government must protect us in remote and specialized precincts of the economy. In those remote precincts, few people are watching, but big money is made. We must be able to trust our government, both in plain view in front of us, and in corners far from sight, to be serving always the public interest, not doing the secret bidding of special interests, of corporate interests because that is where the big money is at stake.

Have we now learned, have we now finally learned, with the financial meltdown and the gulf disaster, the terrible price of all those quietly cut corners? Have we now learned what price must be paid when the stealthy tentacles of corporate influence are allowed to reach into and capture our agencies of government? I pray let us have learned this. Let us have learned that lesson. I sincerely pray we have learned our lesson and that this will never happen again. But let's not just pray.

In this troubled world, God works through our human hands, grows a more perfect union through our human hearts, creates a beloved community through our human thoughts and ideas. So it is not enough to pray. We must act. We must act in defense of the integrity of this great government of ours, which has brought such light to the world, such freedom and equality to our country.

We cannot allow this government that is a model around the world, that inspires people to risk their lives and fortunes to come to our shores--we cannot allow any element of this government to become the tool of corporate power, the avenue of corporate influence, the puppet of corporate tentacles.

I propose a simple device in this country of laws--not men, of rule of law--and that is to allow our top national law officer, the Attorney General of the United States, to step in and clean house whenever an agency or element of government is no longer credibly independent of the industries and businesses it is intended to regulate.

When a component of government is deemed no longer credibly independent of the corporations or industry it is supposed to regulate, I suggest that the Attorney General be allowed to come in and clean up, hire and fire and take personnel action to ensure the integrity of the personnel; to establish interim regulations and procedures to ensure the integrity of the process; to audit permits and contracts and ensure they were not affected by improper corporate influence, and if they were, to rescind them where they are not in the public interest due to that improper corporate influence; to establish an integrity plan for that component of government, all subject to appropriate judicial review where private rights are affected. Then the Attorney General can get back out, with his or her job done, sort of like an ethics trusteeship or receivership.

I will conclude by saying that the damage to America from the corporate takeover of the SEC was nothing short of catastrophic. Just in my State of Rhode Island, 70,000 Rhode Islanders are unemployed. Many have lost their homes, retirement, health insurance. The toll is devastating. The damage from the corporate takeover of the Minerals Management Service has also been catastrophic. Who knows what potentially catastrophic damage lurks in whatever other agencies of government that have silently succumbed to corporate takeover but just have not yet exploded in disaster.

If the financial catastrophe and the gulf catastrophe and whatever other catastrophes lurk have any meaning at all, it is that business as usual is no longer enough to stem the tide of corporate influence-- insidious, secret corporate influence--in agencies of the U.S. Government. It is an institutional problem--relentless, remorseless, constantly grasping and insinuating corporate influence. It will never go away. It will only worsen as corporations get bigger and richer and more global, and there has to be an institutional mechanism in place to resist it so that it no longer takes a catastrophe to call the failure of governance of an American regulator to proper attention.

I think this is the right way. If a colleague has a better idea, I am more than willing to listen. But one thing I know is that after an economic catastrophe and this environmental catastrophe, this much, at least, is clear: We can no longer wait for catastrophes to

root out improper corporate influence in our government, in this government of our United States. We have to, at long last, address the problem of insidious regulatory capture of agencies of our government, captive to the industries they are supposed to regulate.

I thank the Chair and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise to speak on the pending legislation, which is called the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010. Sometimes it is spoken of as the tax extenders bill. But in reality it is a deficit-extending bill. The reason I say that is because the substitute amendment still adds a reported $55 billion in red ink to the deficit.

More deficit spending is simply irresponsible. Our national debt, as we know, is over $13 trillion, and $2.3 trillion of that $13 trillion of debt has been added just since the time President Obama has been sworn into office. Congress is spending money in a way that would give drunken sailors a bad name--more than $30,000 per household, more than $12,000 per household from our children.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the public debt under the President's budget will be at 90 percent of our gross domestic product by the year 2020--90 percent of our gross domestic product. Greece had a debt-to-GDP ratio of 115 percent, and we are getting far too close for my comfort.

Our debt represents a national security vulnerability. I am glad the substitute amendment retains my amendment, which we voted on earlier, to create greater transparency on exactly who owns our debt when we run up deficits and add to the debt, and it requires us to then periodically assess the strategic and economic risks associated with that debt. For example, the Treasury Department recently reported that China holds about $900 billion of U.S. debt. So when we spend money here, somebody has to buy the debt. What happens is that China and other countries buy that debt, and that creates a potential national and economic security issue.

The best way to reduce our strategic and economic risks associated with our debt is to stop spending money we do not have. Stop. Every family, every business in America, when they run out of money, they do not just continue to try to max out their credit card. The problem is that the credit card of the Federal Government knows no limits. Only the Federal Government can continue to print money and rack up debt and hope and pray that countries such as China will buy that debt in the future. It has to stop.

America's fiscal mess is not just a math problem. Government debt crowds out private sector investment that instead could help create jobs for the 15 million Americans who are unemployed. Our unemployment rate is

close to 10 percent. For Hispanics, it is 12.4 percent. For teenagers, it is 26.4 percent--the toughest job market for young people in 41 years even though it is summertime and many of them are out of school and looking for work. Nearly 9 out of 10 net jobs created in May were temporary jobs created by the Federal Government in hiring temporary census workers. Only 41,000 net private sector jobs were created in May--an anemic figure, to be sure. According to economist Larry Lindsey, as much as 20 percent of the net private sector job creation in May was due to the oilspill in the Gulf of Mexico--temporary workers hired to skim oil off the gulf and to protect our beaches and estuaries.

We know the administration will, unfortunately, further exacerbate the unemployment situation, particularly along the gulf coast where I live in Texas, by its 6-month ban on offshore deepwater drilling. We all understand we have to stop this spewing well. That is job No. 1. No. 2 is we need to make sure we understand what happened and make absolutely sure, as much as humanly possible, that it never, ever happens again. But we also need to be mature enough and aware enough to assess what this means if we impose a lengthy ban on deepwater drilling. It means more dependence on imported oil from abroad, from dangerous parts of the world, even countries that wish us ill. It also means jobs here at home will be destroyed because these deepwater rigs will move to other parts of the world, Brazil and other places. According to the energy industry, more than 46,000 jobs could be lost as a result of the moratorium in the short term and 120,000 jobs in the long term.

Unfortunately, the policies that are promulgated by the Congress and by this Senate have an impact on jobs. They can either be a positive impact and facilitate private sector investment in job creation or they can be job killers. I, for one, worry far too often that what is emanating from Washington, DC, these days amounts to job-killing policies, and this underlying bill we are debating has a couple of good examples.

We know job creation should be our No. 1 priority when unemployment is at historic highs, when people are losing their homes due to foreclosure because they simply do not have jobs to be able to pay their mortgage. But this so-called tax extenders bill actually raises taxes on capital creation and on investment in a way that will hurt job creation. There are two taxes I am referring to specifically, and while both are somewhat technical, it is very important to understand them.

The first tax relates to so-called carried interest. Partners in private equity firms are often paid based on their performance in addition to their salary. Under current law, this so-called carried interest is taxed like a capital gain at the 15-percent rate, if we are talking about right now, 15 percent, as opposed to ordinary income, which is taxed at a much higher rate.

The substitute amendment would change the way this carried interest is taxed and take it from the capital gains, which is a much more attractive rate, which encourages capital formation, encourages investment, and raise that rate to the highest individual income tax rate for ordinary income of 39 percent. What do you think is going to happen when entrepreneurs and investors look at this change in the tax law from 15 percent to 39 percent? Do you think it will expand or will it contract the amount of money invested in job-creating ventures? Well, common sense should tell us it will contract it. It will reduce the number of jobs. It will reduce the capital available for investment. And it is exactly the opposite policy we ought to be pursuing with high unemployment and people losing their homes.

Higher taxes on this type of business activity is bad enough, but even worse is another tax that is embedded in this bill called enterprise value. These are arcane subjects and, indeed, I felt a little better yesterday after talking to some of my colleagues on the floor. I said: Do you understand what enterprise value tax is? And thank goodness I saw some blank looks on their faces, and they did not understand it. So I did not feel alone. So we have all had to get a little bit smart and a little bit better educated. But let me tell you what I have discovered in the process of my own education. Enterprise value is known as brand value or good will. It is the value of the sweat equity, the hard work owners put into businesses over time.

Under current law, when a partner sells his or her interest in a business, the enterprise value is taxed as a capital gain. This legislation would change the tax treatment on the sale of that business but only for certain types of businesses. In other words, this bill targets certain types of businesses. But as one writer commented recently--they said they worry that this is a stalking horse or an attempt to take all capital gains treatment for the sale of businesses and to raise it to ordinary income levels--in other words, to double, or more, the taxes on the sale of certain types of businesses.

Owners of investment firms and real estate partnerships would be singled out for higher taxes when these businesses are sold. They would pay much higher taxes than what are paid under current law. Again, why should people care? Why should anyone within the sound of my voice care about what this handful of private equity firms and real estate partnerships pay? Well, it is because what this, in effect, does is it takes the seed corn that is used to grow the economy and it destroys it. It dries up the money that creates the investment, that then allows the creation of businesses and expansion of businesses to create jobs. That is why all of us should care even if we individually don't have to pay it.

In fact, under this narrowly tailored and targeted and discriminatory bill, investment partnerships would be the only businesses in America where the value inherent in the enterprise would be ineligible for capital gains treatment and instead be hit with the higher tax bill when the overall enterprise part of it is sold.

This legislation would break new ground in taxing enterprise value as ordinary income and would unfairly tax value accumulated perhaps over decades by small businesses all across America.

Supporters of this bill will tell you this proposal is all about targeting the hedge fund managers on Wall Street, suggesting that this is payback or due retribution for the havoc a handful of people have wrought on the American financial system. But this proposal would not target the people who caused the financial meltdown. This targeted provision would have a devastating effect on Main Street in Illinois, in Montana, in Texas, in Pennsylvania--everywhere around this country.

Let me give you an example. Private equity-backed companies based in my State employ about half a million workers. What happens to those jobs if this legislation becomes law? Well, not surprisingly, a lot of the investors in these private equity firms where the private equity- backed companies get their money are retirement systems such as the Employees Retirement System in Texas and the Teacher Retirement System in Texas, both of which have a portion of their assets invested in private equity.

So I ask again: What happens if this legislation becomes law? What happens to small businesses that depend on private equity to grow their businesses and create jobs? Well, I received an answer to that question from Donald Brown, the chief executive officer of a medical device company that has an office in Fort Worth, TX. The name of that company is Arteriocyte Medical Systems, otherwise known as AMS. AMS is a fast- growing company--again, something we ought to want to encourage, not discourage, by the policies emanating from Washington. Fast-growing companies create jobs which allow people to provide for their families. In a high unemployment economy, it ought to be exactly the sort of growth we ought to encourage.

This company has an interesting story to tell because it is partnered with the Institute for Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Their goal is to improve surgical outcomes for U.S. troops injured by blast burns and to reduce the necessity of amputations. AMS has also grown because private capital equity was invested in this business in 2007 and helped them grow from 6 employees to 70 employees, with an average employee salary that exceeds $72,000 a year.

Here is what Mr. Brown told me in a letter he sent:

By changing the tax treatment of carried interest to

ordinary income, [this bill] would penalize entrepreneurial

risk-taking and discourage investment in companies like ours

that need capital the most.

I ask unanimous consent to have Mr. Brown's letter to me printed in the Record following my remarks.

Mr. President, it is telling and it is also disappointing that the Senate earlier today rejected the Thune alternative, which I cosponsored. The reason I say it is telling and disappointing is because the Senator from South Dakota offered us an option to extend many of these expiring tax provisions, but it would not have enacted punitive, economically destructive tax increases--things such as the enterprise value tax and the tax on carried interest.

The option offered to us by Mr. Thune, the Senator from South Dakota, would have continued important expiring tax provisions, including the State and local tax deduction, which I must add provides Texans with over $1 billion in Federal tax relief annually. That is because we do not have a State income tax, and we are proud of it. That is one reason why we continue to grow and create jobs while many other parts of the country do not fare as well. But this at least provides equity to us by allowing people in Texas who pay sales tax to write that off of their Federal income tax, as other States do when they pay a State income tax, to write it off their Federal income tax.

But instead of increasing the budget deficit by $55 billion--which this bill does, as it currently has been offered--the option offered by the Senator from South Dakota would have reduced the deficit--reduced the deficit--by $68 billion and extended the expired tax provisions.

It is baffling to me why we would reject, why the Senate would reject, an opportunity to do what on a bipartisan basis we want to do: extend these tax benefits for the benefit of the American people, but to do so in a way that is fiscally responsible. I just do not get it. Hence, further evidence of the growing disconnect between what is happening here in Washington in the Congress and what we are hearing from the American people, who are tired of reckless spending, and they are tired of endless debt, and they know a day of reckoning will come.

If the Senate adopts the legislation before us, it will send another clear message. It will send the message to investment firms and real estate partnerships: You have been punished for taking risks, you have been punished for creating jobs, and you have been punished for success.

To all other American entrepreneurs--the people we ought to be encouraging because these are the people who make the investments that allow companies to be started and companies to grow and jobs to be created, but to all other American entrepreneurs, it will send the message that it may not have been you this time, but you are next. The next time the big spenders want more money to grow the size of the Federal Government, your company, your business, could be the next on the chopping block.

To global investors--and we know in a globalized economy there are people all around the world who have a lot of different choices as to where they want to start their business--unfortunately, to these global investors, it will send the message, if we pass this bill as written: America does not want your business. America does not want your business.

I cannot think of a more damaging, more destructive message to be sent by what we do here in the Congress than sending the message to global investors: We do not want your business here in America. That is because our economic rivals, other countries such as China and India, and others, offer a much lower tax and offer a much more welcoming environment when it comes to entrepreneurs and investors from a tax perspective.

To the 15 million Americans who are unemployed--15 million Americans, including the 472,000 who filed for unemployment claims for the first time last week--this legislation will send the message that Washington's priority is not in creating jobs. Washington's priority is to grow the government.

I do not think these are the messages we should be sending. I urge my colleagues to oppose this substitute amendment. We will have a chance to show the American people on which side we stand when we have the cloture vote on this bill tomorrow morning. Make no mistake about it, a vote for this bill will be a vote for killing jobs, for chasing away investment, for saying America is not interested in your business--at a time when Americans are suffering high unemployment and people are losing their homes because they cannot pay their mortgage payments because they have lost their jobs, with no end in sight.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Exhibit 1

I suggest the absence of a quorum.