A concurrent resolution calling on the President and the allies of the United States to raise the case of Robert Levinson with officials of the Government of Iran at every level and opportunity, and urging officials of the Government of Iran to fulfill their promises of assistance to the family of Robert Levinson and to share information on the investigation into the disappearance of Robert Levinson with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside, and I call up an amendment.

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

Mr. President, we are in the midst of debating a ``stimulus bill'' that has been brought forth in the hopes of alleviating some of the economic pain we have in this country.

Principally, I object to many of the provisions in the bill because they are not stimulatory whatsoever. We all know that. We are going to add $1.2 trillion to the debt and we are not fixing the real problem this country is encountering, and that is the absolute collapse of the housing industry. We can spend all the money we want to spend on ``stimulus'' packages--which this one isn't--and it is not going to do a thing, unless we fix housing and the liquidity crisis.

I bring up this amendment because it shows how misaligned this bill is. This amendment seeks to eliminate a $246 million earmark. It is nothing but that. It is a tax earmark for the movie industry. Let's put the history out there. The movie industry today can take advantage and write off all of its

production costs and take an additional $15 million out of the taxpayers' pocket for every movie they produce in this country, of which 75 percent of the expenses are actually incurred in this country. What we have added is an earmark to markedly increase all movies produced in 2009, which is an additional $246 million.

I am not against tax breaks that are general across the board and will be truly a stimulus, but this is a tax break earmark that has a tremendous odor to it. The odor is this: We already created tax breaks, starting in 2004, for the movie industry that are greater than we have for any other industry, and now we are going to add to it--at a time when Hollywood is at one of its zeniths of success. As a matter of fact, yesterday in USA Today is the headline: ``Billion Dollar January is the Box Office's Best in History.''

They had the best January in their history--more profits, more revenue, a 20-percent increase in ticket sales. Yet we are going to take a stimulus bill and add another quarter of a billion dollars to one of the few industries in our country that is faring well.

To quote Rob Reiner, whom most people know--and I think this is probably disappointing to him--this is what he said when asked about Hollywood's relationship with Washington, DC:

We are a special interest group that doesn't ask for

anything, like earmarks, legislation, or tax breaks. We are

the one industry that doesn't ask for a quid pro quo.

What have we done in this bill? We have sent a quarter of a billion dollars of our grandkids' money to some of the most profitable businesses in this country, which at this point in time have not been impacted and don't project to be impacted at all by the recession we are currently experiencing.

This isn't stimulus; this is a gift. It is not going to stimulate the economy at all. What it is going to do is line the pockets of very wealthy individuals who are already not experiencing the downside of the economy. What we should have instead is tax breaks that go across the board to every small business and to every large business. If it is written that way, I would not object if Hollywood got some of the money. But we have singled out one industry to give them special treatment, when they already get special treatment under the Tax Code. This is not an appropriations earmark, this is a Finance Committee earmark. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee is on the floor as we speak. It is not aimed at him.

How long are we going to continue to play this game? How long are we going to continue to confuse the American people about what we are doing? I want the American people to respect what we are doing in this body. When we do things such as this and sneak in a quarter of a billion dollars for our friends, when they don't need it, because we can, we demean this institution. But more importantly, we contribute to the undermining of confidence in this country, showing that we are not about the best interests of all Americans, but instead the best interests of the special interests that have effective lobbying that can get a quarter of a billion dollars for this industry into a bill.

I will come back later and talk on this again. I want the people in America to ask a simple question: Is this something we ought to be doing right now to help and heal America? Is it going to help people who are out of work? Is it going to help in terms of restarting the engine of consumer spending? Is it going to do the things we need to do to make a difference in our economic situation in the world today? The answer, on this special interest earmark, is absolutely not. What we are going to do is benefit those who are doing the best in the economy today, not those who are doing the worst.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I wanted to respond to some comments by the chairman of the Finance Committee. The explanation of why we have a $250 million earmark for the movie industry was that when we attempted to give them this earmark before, somebody took it out, and now we are going to put it back. The consequence, however, belies the fact that we are only doing this for 1 year. If it is something they deserve and it should be equal, why wouldn't it be there every year?

The second point is that the movie industry gets to take advantage of every depreciation out there that every other business has. There was some debate in the House last year on whether they were truly manufacturers. But they also now have $15 million for every movie in direct writeoffs above their depreciation if they produce 75 percent of those costs in this country. If they do it in a low employment area, they get another $20 million. To say we are righting something that was wrong before doesn't fit with common sense. If we are righting it, let's put it in forever--if that is what we are trying to do. But in this bill we do it for 2009 only.

The second point I will make is that this bill is without any sacrifice. When President Obama was elected, one of the things he campaigned on was an item-by-item look at the Federal budget, to get rid of programs that don't work, get rid of lower priority programs that might work but are not efficient and are not a priority.

Nowhere in this bill is there an elimination of one Government program--not one. There is no line by line. There is no attempt to do what we are asking Americans to do every day. Here is

what we are asking them to do: We are in tough financial straits. Go through your budget, figure out what you cannot afford, and eliminate it.

We have not done that at all with this bill. There is no attempt to make the Federal Government more efficient. This bill is filled with bloating bureaucracies, further lessening liberty and freedom by way of having bureaucracies decide what we will have to follow.

I am not against the movie industry. I love the movies they produce-- the vast majority; some I abhor. But I enjoy their entertainment and the fact that they are profitable and viable. They have been very successful this last year. They had the best January in their history. For us to put a quarter of a billion dollars into an earmarked tax benefit for the movie industry at a time when Americans are struggling belies the honor and integrity of this institution.

With that, I retain the remainder of my time and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask the Senator, if I am a manufacturer and I don't have $15 million that I can come up with in bonus depreciation, do I still get to write off $15 million?

Mr. President, let me reclaim my time. The fact is, this is a tremendous advantage to them compared to other businesses. They already have a program from which they get $15 million. Then they can add another $20 million. The average cost for a film is less than 100 million bucks. We are writing off $35 million out of the Tax Code immediately before this provision even begins, and we are going to add another quarter of a billion dollars this year for just 2009, which would say we are going to treat them differently than we treat everybody else in this country.

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

Mr. President, one of the things the American people have not heard about is everything that is in this bill. I want to spend some time tonight outlining the situation we are in as a nation, the fact that we have never had a bill this large at any time, in any way, shape, or form.

I want to first start out by noting my experience as a physician. The greatest mistake physicians make is when they don't listen to the patient. One of the things we know is, if we don't listen to patients when they are sick, we end up making a lot of mistakes. The other thing we know as physicians is that if we treat just the symptoms of a disease, what we oftentimes do is worsen the disease. I want to use an example of pneumonia. I will relate to this example throughout the time I talk.

If you come to me as a physician and you have a cough, a pain in your chest, a fever, and you are ill, I can make your symptoms go away, but I won't cure the underlying pneumonia you have as a patient. I can give you a cough medicine to suppress your cough. I can give you an antipyretic to control your temperature. I can give you, with that cough medicine, something to control the pain in your chest. I can do all those things. But if I fail to diagnose your real problem, which is pneumonia, all I am doing is covering up the symptoms of the real disease.

I would contend with my colleagues and the American public that the bill we have before us is a bill that covers up the symptoms of the real disease. The real disease we have is the fact that housing and mortgages are in trouble. Everything we do that does not address that disease first, that does not attempt to solve that problem, everything we do that does not address the real disease we have is going to be wasted effort. It is not going to accomplish its purpose. As a matter of fact, there is not an economist out there right now who says if we pass this bill without fixing the mortgage problem, without fixing the housing problem--none of them agree that what we are going to do is going to have a significant impact. There is not one. You can't get one to come and testify unless you fix the real problem.

We as American citizens are on the hook for 31 million mortgages.

We have 31 million we now own--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--so whatever happens to those mortgages, the American people are going to pay for them. If they are upside down and they get worse or if they go worse underwater, if they get foreclosed upon, the American taxpayers are going to have to pay for them. Now, who is that American taxpayer? It is not us. We are going to be dead and gone when it comes time to pay off the massive amounts of borrowing we are putting forward in this bill. That American taxpayer is our kids and our grandkids. So we dare not make the mistake of treating just symptoms.

My contention is we are way too early with a stimulus bill. We can spend this $1.12 trillion by the time you add in the interest plus the six point some billion dollars we just added on top of it without paying for it. We can pass this bill. But we run the risk of doing exactly what the Japanese did in the 1990s. They passed eight separate stimulus bills, none of which addressed the real underlying disease of the Japanese economy. That is why it is called the ``lost decade'' in Japan. They now have a debt to GDP ratio of 150 percent of their GDP.

So what are we to do? Are we to continue down this path with a bill that is going to spend over $1 trillion or should we be about fixing the real disease, which is the housing and the mortgage problems this country faces?

Now, it is not easy to fix that. I know that. And I am not putting forward a definitive plan tonight to do that, although I think my side of the aisle is going to be offering one in the next few days that will address the real disease: housing and mortgages in this country.

We got here--and it is important to remember how we got here, how we got the ``pneumonia''--we got the ``pneumonia'' because we said we were going to socialize the risk on mortgages so people in this country could buy a home who really could not afford a home, and we were going to put that risk on the rest of the American taxpayers.

Well, that bill has come home. That bill now--besides the cost of actually being responsible for the 31-some million failed mortgages, of which probably 30 or 40 percent we are going to end up owning as American taxpayers; besides that cost, the cost in terms of lost jobs, the cost in terms of true, real pain to American citizens who are having trouble feeding their families, paying their bills, the real cost of that is enormous on our society.

What I want the American people to know is we caused that. We did that. We created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then we did not do the regulatory work we should have done. We encouraged them to be irresponsible. We encouraged them to have bonuses, by making more and more and more of the loans and guaranteeing them and packaging them and selling them throughout the world. We did that. The

Congress did that. No President did that--not President Clinton, not President Bush, and not President Obama. We did it. So we ought to be about fixing the real problem.

Until we fix this problem, we are going to stay in a recession. We can pass a bill that spends $1.12 trillion, and we are still going to be in a recession because what the economists tell us this year is that home prices are going to decline another 11 to 12 percent, which is going to put millions more Americans and their mortgages in trouble. So we can pass a bill that spends $1.12 trillion or we can say maybe we ought to address the real problem.

It is not going to be long until the Obama administration comes to this body and asks for $500 billion more to solve the problem with bank loans and mortgages. We ought to be doing that first. That is the real disease. There is not anybody in this body who will deny that the real disease is the housing and the mortgage failure in this country.

We are going to spend a week on this legislation. It is going to go to conference. It is going to come back. Most of the stuff we are able to take back is going to be added in conference because the power to do that is there, and it is incumbent on the other side of the aisle that they are going to take care of those who are on their team.

I want to make another point. In this bill we are talking about, we are making a fatal mistake. Let me tell you what that fatal mistake is. We are transferring the irresponsibility we have had over the last 6 years in this Congress--or last 8 years in this Congress--to the States because what we are telling them is: You do not have to be fiscally responsible. You do not have to live within your means because Uncle Sam is going to bail you out. That is what this bill says. We are going to bail them out.

So for the States, such as my State, that were smart enough and wise enough to create a rainy day fund and live within their means, we are going to ask all the taxpayers of all the States that have done that to pay for the exorbitant spending and growth in Government in all the rest of the States.

What is that going to do in the future? What is the signal that sends to the rest of the States? Here is what the signal says. Do not worry about it because if you get in trouble again, the Federal Government is going to bail you out.

Remember when New York City was going bankrupt? What did we do? Did we just pay for everything? Did we just send Federal money? No. We created an environment where they made the changes. We helped them. And I am not opposed to helping the States make the changes to put them back on a fiscal course to live within their means.

The other thing that is bad about this bill is every American family out there today--I do not care what their income is--they are reassessing every day what they need to do in terms of how to get by in the economic situation in which we find ourselves. They are making tough choices. There is not one tough choice in this bill. Let me explain what I mean by that.

President Obama campaigned on the fact that we ought to live within our means; that every program ought to be reviewed; that those that are not effective, those that have waste, those that have high fraud rates, those that are low priority ought to be eliminated. There is not one penny of effort placed in this bill that will get rid of less important Federal programs today.

We know there is at least $300 billion a year that is inefficiently, erroneously, and fraudulently spent by the Federal Government. We ask our children and our grandchildren to choke down $1.1 trillion more of debt when we have not done anything--not one thing--to lessen the waste, fraud, and abuse, the inefficiency, and to make choices on what is more important. What we are saying is everything we are doing now is important, everything we are doing is efficient, everything is working fine, and, by the way, we are going to add another $1.1 trillion.

I have this chart to show how we got in trouble--because we were spending money we did not have on things we do not need. That is how we got in trouble. This chart shows the deficits of the Federal Government from 2004, plus what CBO expects, without interest costs, by the way, as to what is going to happen to us.

We know, last year, under real accounting, accounting for the Social Security money we stole--and that is the only way you can say it; we stole about $160 billion out of the Social Security system--the real deficit, last year, set a record we have never seen. It was $609 billion. That is as of September 30. The estimate of CBO for this year is we are going to have--before we even talk about stimulus, before we do anything on stimulus, and before we account for the interest costs on stimulus--we are going to have a $1.2 trillion deficit.

Now, divide that out by 300 million Americans, and what you see is we are going to have a deficit of about $16,000 per family. For every family in this country, we are going to borrow $16,000 against their kids' future before we do this, before we even approach doing this. It does not get a lot better. Note these numbers: $1.4 trillion, if we add what the CBO expects to come out of this stimulus package, and only one-fourth of it is going to get spent this year.

Now, what do we know about stimulus packages in the past? Here is what we know. Only two times in our history--only two times in our history--have we ever had a stimulus package that was effective. Two times. John Fitzgerald Kennedy created a stimulus package that was effective, and Ronald Reagan, in the early 1980s, created a stimulus package that was effective. All of the others have been ineffective to fix what was ailing us.

If we do not fix the mortgage problem in this country, and housing, this money will be to no avail other than to shackle our children and our grandchildren for years to come. What does that mean when I say ``shackle''? It means stealing their future. Right now the average American has a 30-percent higher standard of living than the average European and the average Japanese. What we are about to do--and we have been doing--is to guarantee that 30-percent advantage in standard of living is going to go away.

Other people say: Well, you have to fix the finance, you have to fix the credit markets, you have to fix the liquidity markets. You cannot fix the credit markets, you cannot fix the liquidity problems we have by spending money. We have already spent $400 billion of the TARP money, and other than pulling us back from the precipice of an absolute collapse of our financial markets, we still have the credit markets tied up and frozen in this country.

I want to give you an example. I have a farmer friend who has been banking with a bank for 15 years. He has never missed a payment. He has been 100 percent on his payments every time. He has assets far in excess of what his loans are--far in excess--15, 20 times what his loans are. He was told this last week by his bank: We don't want your business anymore.

Now, this is a guy who is a premium credit risk. Why do they not want his business? Because they want the money in the bank rather than to have even a good loan outstanding.

Our credit problems are not getting better. They are getting worse. We have not solved the problem by putting money on the equity side of the balance sheets of the banks. The reason we have not solved the problem is because we have not approached and fixed the real disease, which is the mortgage markets and the mortgages that are underwater and the housing crisis in this country.

I want to spend a moment on another issue. A lot of the rhetoric we have heard in the last 3 or 4 months in this country goes after markets and capitalism. Market forces and capitalism in this country created the greatest country that has ever been or ever will be. When we hear market forces and capitalism criticized as the cause of all of our problems, we need to do a gut check.

Market forces and capitalism didn't cause this problem. Congress caused this problem, by our short-term thinking, by thinking, How do I look good politically, how do I do something that isn't based on markets? That is what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were all about. We were actually giving loans to people who couldn't afford them. It wasn't market capitalism that got us in trouble, it was short-term, politically expedient thinking that got us in trouble. So the next time you hear

somebody attacking the very thing that generated liberty, that very thing that generated freedom, the very thing that generated the greatest standard of living in the world, you ought to ask the question: Is that true? Did market capitalism get us in this trouble?

What got us in this trouble was creating a socialized risk that abandoned the market principles and created a system of loans to people who could not afford the loans.

One of the questions I think we ought to ask--at least the American taxpayer ought to be asking every Member of Congress--is what guarantee do you have that passing this $1.12 trillion spending bill is going to solve the problem? You know what. There is not a guarantee out there. No Member of Congress can tell them that. We are going to treat the symptoms with this bill. We are going to solve some of the short-term problems. We are going to create dependency from the States. We are going to outline and do things we have no business doing. We are going to expand Federal bureaucracies. We are going to raise the baseline to $300 billion that will never go away. That is what we are going to do with this bill. We are going to emphasize and fund the most inefficient bureaucracies in the world, not on the basis of what is the best thing to do but because we will look good and we will help out somebody who needs our help right now.

I am not opposed to us helping people who are unemployed. I am not opposed to giving extra food stamps to people who find themselves, through no fault of their own, in a predicament they can't change, but that is not what this bill does. What this bill does is take a list of policy options that have been on the table for years and funds them in enormous, extravagant amounts, that will have no impact--zero impact-- in terms of getting us out of a recession, and will have a 100-percent impact in guaranteeing we are going to lower the standard of living in this country and we are going to steal opportunity from our children.

Let's look at where we are right now as a nation. At the end of this year, we will have an $11.6 trillion debt, probably an $11.8 trillion debt, very close to our total GDP. We have $95 billion in unfunded liabilities we are going to place on the backs of our children and our grandchildren through Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare Part D--things we are going to give people that they have not paid for or we have stolen the money that was there to pay for them, and we are going to transfer that to our children.

Last year, we paid, as Americans, $230 billion in interest. Do you know what it is going to be 2 years from now? It is going to be $450 billion. How many people think the interest rates we are seeing today are going to be stable and the same 5 years from now? All of the economists tell us they are not. As the world looks toward us and we continue to borrow--we have increased our debt by $5 trillion by the time you take what the Federal Reserve has done and what the Treasury has done--how many people think we are going to be able to borrow money for 10 years for 2.6 percent? No economist thinks that. They know it is going to rise 2 or 3 percent. So we are going to go from about 16 percent of our budget for interest payments to about 40 percent of our budget for interest payments. What are we going to do then? The very real important things we need to do--not the superfluous stuff; the important things the Constitution says we should be doing--what are we going to do then? Are we going to borrow more?

What happens when we borrow more? What happens when we borrow more is interest rates go up, inflation goes up, and we have one of two choices: We can file bankruptcy as a nation or we can have hyperinflation and a marked devaluation of the value of the dollar. What does that mean? That means you won't be able to keep up with your payments, you won't be able to buy a home, the cost of any good that is imported in here will rise astronomically. This is Armageddon for us. While we are in this shape, how dare we think we can spend money we don't have now on things we don't need now and get out of a problem that was caused by the very same philosophy: It cannot happen and it will not happen.

Let me outline what we have done so far in terms of this ``economic downturn.'' Last April, we borrowed $160 billion from our grandkids and we gave everybody a tax credit under $75,000 a year or $150,000 for families. We didn't pay for a penny of it. We didn't get rid of one wasteful program. We didn't make one hard choice. What do the economists tell us we did with that? What was the net effect? The net effect was that 12 percent of it had an effect. Twelve percent. Now, crank that up to $1.1 trillion at 12 percent, which is what the estimate is of this bill in terms of what kind of effect it is going to have. We are going to have about $120 billion that is going to have a positive effect, and then we are going to have another $850 billion or $860 billion that is going to have no effect whatsoever except to steal the future from our kids and our grandkids.

We are going in exactly the wrong direction. We ought to be standing on the principles that made this country great. There ought to be a review of every program in the Federal Government that is not effective, that is not efficient, that is wasteful or fraudulent, and we ought to get rid of it right now. We ought to say, Gone, to be able to pay for a real stimulus plan that might, in fact, have some impact.

I would be remiss if I didn't remind everybody that next week we are going to hear from the Obama administration wanting another $500 billion. Outside of this, they are going to want another $500 billion to handle the banking system. Still not fixing the real disease--the pneumonia--we are going to treat the fever or treat the cough, but we are not going to treat the real disease. Until we treat the real disease, this is pure waste. It is worse than pure waste. It is morally reprehensible, because it steals the future of the next two generations.

I am going to wind up here and finish, but I wanted to spend some time to make sure the American people know what is in this bill. I think once they know what is in this bill, they are going to reject it out of hand. Let me read for my colleagues some of the things that are in this bill. The biggest earmark in history is in this bill. There is $2 billion in this bill to build a coal plant with zero emissions. That would be great, maybe, if we had the technology, but the greatest brains in the world sitting at MIT say we don't have the technology yet to do that. Why would we build a $2 billion powerplant we don't have the technology for that we know will come back and ask for another $2 billion and another $2 billion and another $2 billion when we could build a demonstration project that might cost $150 million or $200 million? There is nothing wrong with having coal-fired plants that don't produce pollution; I am not against that. Even the Washington Post said the technology isn't there. It is a boondoggle. Why would we do that?

We eliminated tonight a $246 million payback for the large movie studios in Hollywood.

We are going to spend $88 million to study whether we ought to buy a new ice breaker for the Coast Guard. You know what. The Coast Guard needs a new ice breaker. Why do we need to spend $88 million? They have two ice breakers now that they could retrofit and fix and come up with equivalent to what they needed to and not spend the $1 billion they are going to come back and ask for, for another ice breaker, so why would we spend $88 million doing that?

We are going to spend $448 million to build the Department of Homeland Security a new building. We have $1.3 trillion worth of empty buildings right now, and because it has been blocked in Congress we can't sell them, we can't raze them, we can't do anything, but we are going to spend money on a new building here in Washington. We are going to spend another $248 million for new furniture for that building; a quarter of a billion dollars for new furniture. What about the furniture the Department of Homeland Security has now? These are tough times. Should we be buying new furniture? How about using what we have? That is what a family would do. They would use what they have. They wouldn't go out and spend $248 million on furniture.

How about buying $600 million worth of hybrid vehicles? Do you know what I would say? Right now times are tough; I would rather Americans have new cars than Federal employees have new cars. What is wrong with the cars we have? Dumping $600 million worth

of used vehicles on the used vehicle market right now is one of the worst things we could do. Instead, we are going to spend $600 million buying new cars for Federal employees.

There is $400 million in here to prevent STDs. I have a lot of experience on that. I have delivered 4,000 babies. We don't need to spend $400 million on STDs. What we need to do is properly educate about the infection rates and the effectiveness of methods of prevention. That doesn't take a penny more. You can write that on one piece of paper and teach every kid in this country, but we don't need to spend $400 million on it. It is not a priority.

How about $1.4 billion for rural waste disposal programs? That might even be somewhat stimulative. New sewers. That might create jobs.

How about $150 million for a Smithsonian museum? Tell me how that helps get us out of a recession. Tell me how that is a priority. Would the average American think that is a priority that we ought to be mortgaging our kids' future to spend another $150 million at the Smithsonian?

How about $1 billion for the 2010 census? So everybody knows, the census is so poorly managed that the census this year is going to cost twice--in 2010 is going to cost twice what it cost 10 years ago, and we wasted $800 million on a contract because it was no-bid that didn't perform. Nobody got fired, no competitive bidding, and we blew $800 million.

We have $75 million for smoking cessation activities, which probably is a great idea, but we just passed a bill--the SCHIP bill--that we need to get 21 million more Americans smoking to be able to pay for that bill. That doesn't make sense.

How about $200 million for public computer centers at community colleges? Since when is a community college in my State a recipient of Federal largesse? Is that our responsibility? I mean, did we talk with Dell and Hewlett-Packard and say, How do we make you all do better? Is there not a market force that could make that better? Will we actually buy on a true competitive bid? No, because there is nothing that requires competitive bidding in anything in this bill. There is nothing that requires it. It is one of the things President Obama said he was going to mandate at the Federal Government, but there is no competitive bidding in this bill at all.

We have $10 million to inspect canals in urban areas. Well, that will put 10 or 15 people to work. Is that a priority for us right now?

There is $6 billion to turn Federal buildings into green buildings. That is a priority, versus somebody getting a job outside of Washington, a job that actually produces something, that actually increases wealth?

How about $500 million for State and local fire stations? Where do you find in the Constitution us paying for local fire stations within our realm of prerogatives? None of it is competitively bid--not a grant program.

Next is $1.2 billion for youth activities. Who does that employ? What does that mean?

How about $88 million for renovating the public health service building? You know, if we could sell half of the $1.3 trillion worth of properties we have, we could take care of every Federal building requirement and backlog we have.

Then there's $412 million for CDC buildings and property. We spent billions on a new center and headquarters for CDC. Is that a priority? Building another Government building instead of--if we are going to spend $412 million on building buildings, let's build one that will produce something, one that will give us something.

How about $850 million for that most ``efficient'' Amtrak that hasn't made any money since 1976 and continues to have $2 billion or $3 billion a year in subsidies?

Here is one of my favorites: $75 million to construct a new ``security training'' facility for State Department security officers, and we have four other facilities already available to train them. But it is not theirs. They want theirs. By the way, it is going to be in West Virginia. I wonder how that got there. So we are going to build a new training facility that duplicates four others that we already have that could easily do what we need to do. But because we have a stimulus package, we are going to add in oink pork.

How about $200 million in funding for a lease--not buying, but a lease of alternative energy vehicles on military installations? We are going to bail out the States on Medicaid. Total all of the health programs in this, and we are going to transfer $150 billion out of the private sector and we are going to move it to the Federal Government. You talk about backdooring national health care. Henry Waxman has to be smiling big today. He wants a single-payer Government-run health care system. We are going to move another $150 billion to the Federal Government from the private sector.

We are going to eliminate fees on loans from the Small Business Administration. You know what that does? That pushes productive capital to unproductive projects. It is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Then there is $160 million to the Job Corps Program--but not for jobs and not to put more people in the Job Corps but to construct or repair buildings.

We are going to spend $524 million for information technology upgrades that the Appropriations Committee claims will create 388 jobs. If you do the math on that, that is $1.5 million a job. Don't you love the efficiency of Washington thinking?

We are going to create $79 billion in additional money for the States, a ``slush fund,'' to bail out States and provide millions of dollars for education costs. How many of you think that will ever go away? Once the State education programs get $79 billion over 2 years, do you think that will ever go away? The cry and hue of taking our money away--even though it was a stimulus and supposed to be limited, it will never go away. So we will continue putting that forward until our kids have grandkids of their own.

There is about $47 billion for a variety of energy programs that are primarily focused on renewable energy. I am fine with spending that. But we ought to get something for it. There ought to be metrics. There are no metrics. It is pie in the sky, saying we will throw some money at it. Let me conclude by saying we are at a seminal moment in our country. We will either start living within the confines of realism and responsibility or we will blow it and we will create the downfall of the greatest Nation that ever lived. This bill is the start of that downfall. To abandon a market-oriented society and transfer it to a Soviet-style, government-centered, bureaucratic-run and mandated program, that is the thing that will put the stake in the heart of freedom in this country.

I hope the American people know what is in this bill. I am doing everything I can to make sure they know. But more important, I hope somebody is listening who will treat the ``pneumonia'' we are faced with today, which is the housing and mortgage markets. It doesn't matter how much money we spend in this bill. It is doomed to failure unless we fix that problem first. Failing that, we will go down in history as the Congress that undermined the future and vitality of this country. Let it not be so.

Mr. President, I appreciate the indulgence of you and the staff. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, a couple of comments on the McCain proposal that several people are putting together. I have looked at it. I still need to study it a little more. But on the surface, it is a responsible, balanced proposal. That group needs to be congratulated for putting such a proposal together.

I rise because the most deliberative body in the world is facing a moment of great challenge but also great possibility. We should all feel the grave responsibility weighing on each of us as we debate this bill. If we pass legislation that truly stimulates the economy, it could carry this Nation to new levels of growth and prosperity. Unfortunately, if we pass a bloated spending bill with little chance of jump-starting the economy, we could delay this country's financial recovery for many years to come.

While there isn't a crystal ball to show us what path will bring us to the ultimate goal, we are not without some guidance. Winston Churchill once said: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We have several examples from which to learn. We will heed those lessons if we absolutely want to raise this Nation from the economic quicksand that is swallowing it up more and more each day.

The Great Depression is a chapter of history that fewer and fewer Americans can recall firsthand. Maybe that is why the circumstances are so widely misunderstood today. It has been said that today's economic crisis is the result of a perfect storm. Well, the Great Depression was many perfect storms.

Herbert Hoover, a Republican, did not sit on the side lines, as many people believe, when Black Thursday and Black Tuesday struck in 1929. He was actually a big government interventionist. Working with Congress, he raised taxes. He enacted protectionist laws by raising U.S. tariffs. Senator McCain referred to these as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. He pushed all levels of government to invest in infrastructure and expand public works projects.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1932, he created great momentum by earning the confidence of the American people. But his New Deal sent this Nation into an even deeper economic depression. In the late 1930s, there was a ``Depression within the Depression.'' The stock market did not return to 1929 levels for 25 years.

While World War II pulled us out of the Great Depression, there were still tremendous sacrifices being made by all Americans. Some have argued that the spending of the New Deal was not aggressive enough. I couldn't disagree more. On some levels, we are still paying for the projects that began with the New Deal.

The single biggest failure of the response to the Great Depression is that the private sector was not encouraged to grow this country out of its financial crisis. In fact, by injecting so much money into the Government programs, FDR created a competitor to the private sector. This was a match between David, the private sector, and Goliath, the Government monster. This time, unfortunately, Goliath won. We know that the policies of the New Deal

actually prolonged the Nation's financial hardships. After all, the depression lasted 10 years. Do we want to be in this kind of an economic recession for 10 years?

More recently, we have learned from Japan's failed efforts to spend its way out of a recession. Japan passed stimulus bills for 10 straight years during the 1990s. They wasted money on unnecessary projects while letting insolvent banks be supported with Government money. Does that sound familiar? What did that get them? Unmanageable, debilitating debt, and a decade of rising unemployment.

We cannot afford to ignore the lessons of history. The responsibility facing us during this crisis cannot be overstated. We are bound by the Constitution that empowers us to collect taxes, borrow money, regulate commerce, and provide for the general welfare. We, however, are also bound by the responsibility to future generations of Americans. To burden our children and grandchildren with the kind of debt we are talking about today should give each of us reason to pause and consider the ramifications.

There is no doubt that the crisis facing the financial markets, the housing sector, and families will require extraordinary measures. There is perhaps no better illustration of the grave challenges facing the Nation than that of the State of Nevada. At one time, people thought we were recession proof. When Americans buckle down on spending, a vacation to Las Vegas is no longer in the cards. Jobs are lost, homes are foreclosed, and it becomes harder to ignore the half-finished construction projects across southern Nevada.

Here in the Senate, we are among the few Americans with at least some level of job security--that is, of course, until the next election. Most Americans are living day to day, waiting to hear what new massive layoff will be announced and if it will hit them or someone in their family. It is a terrible feeling to have that much uncertainty in your life.

The calls and e-mails I have received from constituents are heartbreaking. These are good citizens who have worked hard, saved well, and contributed to their communities. They now find themselves in a place of desperation.

Mrs. Louise Cutler has lived in Clark County, NV, for more than 17 years. Her husband and two grown children who have degrees are unemployed. Louise lost her job with a mortgage company more than a year ago. She is back at work now making about $20,000 less than before. She has student loans to pay, has lost $120,000 dollars in the value of her home, and she wants to know how we are going to help her.

My constituents--all of our constituents--are looking to us for leadership and solutions.

I believe we need to stimulate our economy immediately. Government has a role to play here. The question is, How do we leverage our resources-paid for on the backs of struggling taxpayers--as efficiently as possible in order to stabilize our economy and grow it in the future?

I believe we need to start with the root of the problem. My training in veterinary medicine taught me that you don't use a Band-Aid to treat a massive puncture wound. Ignoring that problem to treat superficial injuries does not help the patient survive. The economy is very much our collective patient. It would ensure greater catastrophe to put a Band-Aid on an initial wound that started this downward spiral--and that is the housing crisis. Unfortunately, the housing market is barely addressed in this so-called stimulus bill. Most Americans would say it is the first thing we need to heal. If we make mortgages more manageable, people can stay in their homes and our economy can begin to rebuild.

One proposal I have--a guaranteed 4-percent, 30-year fixed rate mortgage for Americans would go a long way to ease pressure on family budgets. On average, more than 40 million creditworthy homeowners would save more than $400 per month. That makes a huge difference to most families, and it would target the problem of oversupply in the housing market, something we cannot ignore. This is like a permanent tax cut which economists believe is the best stimulus for our economy, not just a 1-year tax rebate.

Another proposal that goes a long way to fixing the housing situation is one from Senator Isakson. It expands the current homeowner tax credit to $15,000 and covers all property and all home buyers, not just first-time home buyers. This would give a big boost to housing markets across the country.

So what else works? Limited spending that makes our economy more efficient as well as tax relief that provides businesses and companies the additional capital to retain and hire more employees. This will help to increase their output and compete into the future. That spending and tax relief needs to happen soon--not next year or two years down the road. American families cannot wait that long.

I think we all must be prepared to make a sizable investment in order to ensure a swift and successful recovery. Unfortunately, the bill before us does not do that. Instead, it spends money on programs that cannot and will not aid that recovery. While Pell grants, Head Start, and the National Endowment for the Arts may be worthwhile projects in their own right, putting billions of dollars into them will not stimulate the economy. I have fought for Head Start for years, but I do not think it should be considered immediate stimulus.

The bill before us simply does not qualify as an economic stimulus bill, and there is nothing immediate about it either. It is a laundry list of spending priorities with a token of tax relief. We need a true economic stimulus bill that efficiently spends money on projects that will make our highways and infrastructure better equipped as a conduit for business. We need meaningful tax relief that will spawn a new generation of growth and success in the private sector.

Instead, half of the so-called tax portion of this bill is just creative spending dressed up as tax relief. It gives tax relief to people who do not even pay income taxes. How are we relieving their tax burden if they do not have one?

In actuality, only $21 billion of this trillion-plus dollar spending bill goes to small businesses, the engine of our economy. That equals less than three percent of this monstrous bill. This is supposed to be an economic stimulus bill to create jobs and drive growth, but less than three percent is dedicated to tax relief for small businesses which is where 80 percent of the jobs in the United States are created. How do we expect to stimulate the economy that way? That goes to show you how little input Republicans actually had in this process. I hope that will change.

President Obama came to the Hill last week with a message of bipartisan cooperation. I have reached out to my Democratic colleagues on several tax relief measures that they agree would give a much needed boost to our economy. I hope these proposals have the opportunity to be voted on by all of my Senate colleagues so together we can witness an economic revival.

The first is a plan that I am very familiar with. I worked with Senator Barbara Boxer to get it enacted into law several years ago. We called it the Invest in the USA Act, and it lived up to its name. It brought $360 billion back into the United States in 2005 and helped to retain or create more than 2 million jobs. It also produced more than $34 billion in various tax revenues. History has proven that reducing the tax rate U.S. businesses pay to return money they made overseas provides a tremendous return. One great example comes from California- based Oracle. They used repatriated earnings to defeat a German company in acquiring a U.S.-based retail software firm. This purchase allowed Oracle to keep those jobs and intellectual property in the United States. Oracle has since grown its facilities in Georgia and Minnesota by several hundred jobs.

Right now I am working with Senator Barbara Boxer to add an updated version of this legislation to the stimulus package. Right now, the foreign subsidiaries of many U.S. companies are faring well overseas. Competitive tax structures make it beneficial for those companies to keep their money overseas. If they wanted to return the money to the United States, the companies would have to pay up to a 35-percent tax rate. That is not much of an incentive to bring income earned overseas back to the United States.

The proposal Senator Boxer and I have put forward gives businesses the

temporary relief they need. Instead of paying a 35-percent tax, they will only pay a 5.25 percent tax if they bring the money back in the next 12 months. These funds must be used for capital investment, job creation and training, research and development, or U.S. debt reduction. Some economists predict that this time around, the legislation would inject as much as $565 billion back into the United States economy.

This legislation is critical in order to get this country going again. It puts capital back into U.S. banks which can then loan that money to people and get the economy going again. Another proposal that I introduced--and I thank the chairman of the Finance Committee for working with us on a compromise--deals with the cancellation of indebtedness. My proposal would allow businesses to buy back their debt in 2009 or 2010 without high tax consequences. It would help firms deleverage and also give financial firms that hold debt more liquidity. Here is how my bill works. Under current law, if a company purchases its own debt at a discount, it is required to pay income tax on the amount of the discount. If a business owes $1 million but negotiates a discounted amount to its lender--say $750,000 so that it does not default--it would have to pay taxes on the $250,000 difference.

Well, a lot of companies are strapped for cash and have a large amount of debt. They cannot afford to pay taxes on the difference. Instead of paying that tax, we are going to delay that for 5 years. They would then have an additional 5 years to be able to pay the taxes. This is going to help small and large businesses across the United States. I believe this proposal is going to help improve the debt situation of many companies in the United States. I thank the chairman of the Finance Committee and Senator Conrad for working on this proposal.

So let me conclude. If we pass this $1.3 trillion spending bill, which is what it started at, we are going to have trillion-dollar debts over the next several years. This does not include another $500 billion in TARP funds that Secretary Geithner may be asking for.

We still have an omnibus spending bill to come before us. We still have military supplemental bills. Unfortunately, they are not just military bills. Everything else gets Christmas-treed on top of it. We are talking trillions and trillions of dollars.

I am looking at our Senate pages; the next generation to lead our country. Don't we care about them? Don't we have a moral responsibility not to pass huge tax burdens on to them? Current calculations are, with the debt we are running up, plus Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, they are going to have to pay close to a 90-percent tax rate if things are not changed. I do not think that is fair to them. Here we just pass debts on. I believe as a generation we are morally corrupt because we take whatever we want.

President Roosevelt talked about ``the forgotten man.'' What he was talking about was this person who was forgotten during the depression. Unfortunately, we may be now dealing with a forgotten generation; a generation who does not have a voice in the Senate. We need to stand up and say, ``We cannot pass this kind of debt burden on to them.'' ``We cannot pass the kind of high taxes on to those who are going to be required to pay this debt.''

So, Mr. President, we need to act responsibly. We cannot put, as this bill does, $200 billion into new entitlement programs. We cannot raise the baseline as this bill will end up doing. We know programs do not stop around here, so we need to act in a much more responsibly manner than this bill does.

Yes, we want to act quickly, but there is a false deadline that has been put on this bill. There is still time. As we saw with TARP funds, when we do things too quickly around here, we make major mistakes. The false deadlines we put on this bill, I believe, are going to lead us down the wrong road. So let's slow down. We do not get any trial runs on this one. This bill is too big. Let's make sure we do this right. Let's join, not as Republicans and Democrats, but as Americans to get this right.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER: The Senator from Montana.

Mr. President, first of all, I wish to congratulate and thank my colleague from California, Senator Boxer. A few years ago, we worked on an amendment together. Not a lot of people knew about it. The first time it was voted on in the Finance Committee, most of the Republicans in the Finance Committee voted against it. I remember talking to Senator Nickles at the time. He was leading the charge with the Republicans against the amendment, frankly, because a lot of people did not understand it.

It does not sound right that someone who invested overseas can bring the money back for less than what they pay in the United States. But the problem is that companies, if they have to pay a 35-percent tax on the money to bring it back, as Senator Boxer and I recognized it is common sense, they are not going to bring the money back.

The chart Senator Boxer had clearly showed that. Very small amounts each year of the profits that companies made overseas actually came back into the United States, until we passed what we called, at the time, the Invest in the USA Act.

The outside economists got it. They understood it. They projected-- Allen Sinai, who was the economist at the time, did the studies. He predicted between $300 and $400 billion would come back to the United States and it would actually produce tax revenues, it would produce jobs.

Guess what happened, $360 billion came back to the United States. The Congressional Budget Office, Joint Tax, they said only about $135 billion would come back, and it would lose revenue to the Federal Government.

Well, a minimum of $16 to $20 billion was paid in taxes on the money that was repatriated, so it only increases revenues to the Federal Government. It did not hurt the deficit; it actually helped the deficit. The economists have studied the indirect and the direct revenue effects of the jobs that were saved and the jobs that were created. The estimates are closer to $34 billion of additional revenue, tax revenue to the Federal Government from the last repatriation.

So the Invest in the USA Act, which Senator Boxer and I worked on in a bipartisan fashion, passed 75 to 25 in the Senate. It turned out to be a great success. So we are trying to put a new version of this on this bill. To our amazement, the outside economists again are predicting that $565 billion this time is going to come back to the United States.

There is about $800 billion sitting overseas. The companies are not bringing it back. It creates jobs overseas. That helps the banks that are overseas with their capital. They are not bringing it back because they have to pay up to a 35-percent corporate tax rate.

We want to bring foreign earnings back one time. If they bring the money back in the next 12 months, we charge them a 5.25-percent tax. Well, is not 5.25 percent on $565 billion better than 35 percent of zero?

This is common sense. That is going to help the deficit. We have to get real about this and put some commonsense thinking into this.

I commend to my colleagues two studies: One is by Allen Sinai and the other by Robert Shapiro and Aparna Mathur. By the way, Robert Shapiro, former Clinton adviser, liberal economist; Allen Sinai, by any stretch of the imagination, at best a moderate economist. These are not rightwing radical economists. These are not neoclassical economists who are talking about this.

I ask unanimous consent to have their conclusions printed in the Record.

What their studies are showing today, as they showed before we acted in 2004, is that money is going to come back. The Treasury actually

will be helped. Jobs will be created in the United States. And a side benefit is $565 billion comes into the banks in the United States to help capitalize the banks. What are we all talking about here? That our banks don't have enough capital. This, without a cost to the taxpayer, brings capital back.

But in the wisdom of Joint Tax, they actually say that this bill is going to cost money, that it is going to decrease revenues to the Federal Government, where all the evidence by outside economists as well as all the evidence by history shows otherwise. Look at this. Every year money being repatriated to the United States, pretty consistent down here, below $50 billion was brought back in each year. Guess what. We passed the Invest in USA Act in 2004. Repatriation shot up to $360 billion. Look what happened the next year. It went right back down, and it has been down since.

I will.

I was aware of the new numbers coming out of Joint Tax. But the outside economists say this will probably mean $45 billion in direct revenues, not including revenues produced when you actually have people in jobs and people paying taxes who are earning the money in those jobs. We have some great examples of what businesses did with that.

But let me quote Dr. Tyson, who was the chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. She recently wrote a report that said $565 billion would be repatriated. The money would be brought back to the United States. She believes it could raise $28 billion in investment in renewable energy projects alone, health care initiatives, and broadband deployment.

We have bipartisan economists saying this is going to work. The only people who don't seem to think this is going to work are the people somehow inside the walls here in Washington, DC who don't seem to get that if you have to pay a 35-percent tax, it is better to keep the money overseas.

One of the great American companies is Microsoft. Do you know that Microsoft has no exports from the United States. They have a lot of them from Ireland. Guess why. Ireland has a 12.5-percent corporate tax rate. If they pay that and they want to bring the profit back to the United States, they have to pay a lot of money, up to a 35-percent tax rate. So guess what they do. They keep the money in Ireland. They produce products in Ireland, and they export those products from Ireland instead of bringing the money back to the United States and creating jobs where they can have exports from the United States. From a commonsense perspective, it makes no sense to me to oppose this piece of legislation that will help capitalize our banks. It will help improve the capital structure of our businesses, because the money, as Senator Boxer so eloquently discussed, can only be used to hire and train workers. It can only be used for research and development, for capital improvements, for acquisition of businesses that may be distressed. That is certainly what Oracle did. Oracle bought two companies. They outbid a German company that was going to take 2,000 jobs outside the United States. Oracle buys them, keeps them in the United States, and then over the next few years increases employment at both places. Dell built a plant where they hired 1,800 workers. Those are good things to do with the money and more companies will do exactly this.

We look forward to the debate. I think it makes common sense. I thank my colleague from California, Senator Boxer, who has done great work this time as she did last time. I appreciate working with her.

Mr. President, first of all, there is not fungibility this time. Senator Boxer and I worked very closely to make sure there were very tight uses of the money, and there is going to be IRS audits afterward to make sure they use the money exactly how the bill specifies.

The other thing is the distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee was trying to point out the companies repatriated money and then laid off workers, and he was trying to point out that was somehow a causative effect. It had nothing to do with it. Ford repatriated $1 billion almost and laid off 30,000 to 40,000 employees. OK. Ford had a lot of other problems. These companies had a lot of other problems.

Hewlett-Packard had huge problems going on, and the repatriation made it a lot better, so they ended up in a short period of time laying off some people, but in the long run they ended up increasing American employment over the next several years because they were in a better financial position. That is the way our companies are today. You could take a lot of other companies during that same period of time that did not repatriate a dollar and laid off people. So what did repatriation have to do with anything?

Now, the chairman of the Finance Committee brought up that it is a question of fairness, that U.S. companies doing business overseas would only have to pay at a 5.25-percent tax rate on the money they made overseas, while companies in the United States pay a 35-percent corporate tax rate. Well, I will join you right now in lowering the corporate tax rate in the United States. I will join you hand in hand to lower it. By the way, if you lower it, you do not have to do the repatriation amendment. As a matter of fact, they tell us that at somewhere between a 20-percent and 25-percent corporate tax rate, you do not have to do repatriation because then money can flow where money would be used most efficiently, and a lot of this money would come back on its own to the United States. The problem is, the way the tax structure is set up today, it encourages companies in the United States that have invested overseas to keep the money there because it is too prohibitive to bring the money back to the United States.

So I ask the rhetorical question, once again: Is 5.25 percent of $560 billion better than 35 percent of zero or 35 percent of a small number? That is really what we are dealing with here. So whether it is CRS, whether it is Joint Tax, they just do not seem to get it. The outside economists get it. They understand it. That is why their studies show 2 million jobs will be created this time, maybe more than that. Actually, Shapiro actually says it will be about 2.6 million jobs created or saved with this amendment. So I think the facts are clearly on our side on this issue. Whether it is a fairness issue or whatever, the bottom line is we want to help the United States of America.

The last point I will make is, if you did nothing with this money-- absolutely zero--if we required nothing except for the money to come back to the United States and come in to our banks, wouldn't that be a good thing right now? Common sense: Our banks need capital. We need liquidity in the United States. Let's try to follow this simple formula: In order to have employees, you must first have employers. OK. Are you with me so far? In order to have employers, you have to have capital.

Mr. President, $560 billion in capital leads to a lot of employees. That is capitalism, folks. You need capital to have employees. It is a simple formula. Let's get this right.

I yield the floor.

Will my friend yield for a question?

The opponents of this measure are saying the Joint Tax seems to be the experts we should trust. Is my friend from California aware, I wonder, that in 2004 when we were doing this debate, the Joint Tax Committee estimated this measure would decrease revenue by $3 billion? But is my friend from California aware this actually produced to the Federal Government a net of $16 billion in tax revenue? We were not hurting the Government revenue but helping it? I further ask, through the Chair, is my friend from California aware that the Joint Tax Committee, last year, scored this same measure at $18 billion? This year, they scored it $29 billion. Was last year's estimate right, or was this year's right? They were so wrong in 2004 when, by the way, the outside economists were right. The inside economists were wrong. Was my friend from California aware of those facts?

Mr. President, I ask my friend from California this question. It was brought up earlier that the money is going to come back anyway. The Senator from California has a chart in front of her. I ask her if she could explain the chart and that the money wasn't coming back until we lowered the tax rate. And then it went right back up after we lowered the tax rate.

A big deal has been made of which economists we can trust. I ask my friend from California, when Joint Tax scored this last time, not only were they wrong on revenue estimates, but they estimated that about $100 billion or so would come back to the United States. The outside economists estimated between $300 billion and $400 billion would come back to the United States. According to CRS this time, according to the study the chairman of the Finance Committee quoted, $360 billion came back and $312 billion was used according to the measures we put in the bill. Was she aware that the Joint Tax Committee was that far off on their estimates, not only on revenues produced but on how much money could come back?

Mr. President, I wish to make a couple points. Once again, I wish to get back to some common sense. Is it better for the money to be overseas, or is it better for the money to be in the United States? If it is overseas, it creates jobs. If it is in the United States, it can create jobs in the United States. That is the bottom line.

On the chart my friend from California showed earlier, the money was not coming back to the United States in any significant amounts until we passed the 2004 ``Invest in the USA Act.'' And then the next year, $360 billion came back to the United States. After that, it went back down as far as the money coming back into the United States.

By common sense, we have to know that the money is not going to come back to the United States. By doing this, we are not encouraging companies to go overseas. Quite frankly--and I said to my friend, the chairman of the Finance Committee--if he wants to lower the corporate tax rate, I would join him right now. As a matter of fact, I may be offering an amendment to do that because I believe that our corporate tax rate, being the second highest in the industrialized world, is too high, and it encourages other companies to go overseas. But we cannot do that. We do not have enough bipartisan support to do that.

Here we have a bipartisan measure. Very few things happen on this bill in a bipartisan way. This is truly bipartisan. The four sponsors of this amendment--two Democrats, two Republicans--are working together. The last time this bill passed the Senate was a 75-to-25 bipartisan vote. That should show us right now a lot of people looked at this and said it was a good idea, and a lot of people are looking at this again. It is a good idea because it makes common sense to bring money back into the United States to create jobs in the United States.

I will just say, if Joint Tax was wrong a few years ago, they are probably wrong again. As a matter of fact, I cannot even believe the last year they scored a repatriation bill with a larger scope at around $15.9 billion. This year they are scoring a more narrowly tailored version at almost $29 billion. In one year, they are that far off, and they were totally wrong back in 2004.

The outside economists are saying this is going to save or create over 2 million jobs. Isn't that what we are about, trying to create and save jobs in this bill? This particular amendment, even if it did cost the money Joint Tax is saying, creates more jobs for the dollar than anything else in this entire stimulus package.

We ought to adopt this amendment. It is common sense, and we ought to put common sense to work when we are trying to save the U.S economy.

I reserve the remainder of our time.

Mr. President, how much time is on the opposition side?

Mr. President, first of all, to set the record straight, Senators Bingaman and Kerry both voted no the last time.

Several other things. The Senator from North Dakota said he would like all Americans to pay a 5-percent income tax, such as in this bill. Well, that means that he would raise taxes on 40 million Americans who pay no income tax today. Let's get the facts clear. Last time, $360 billion came back into the country and created about 2 million jobs. This time, more money is going to come back. Almost double, about $565 billion the estimates are, is going to come back this time. We have to ask ourselves this commonsense question.

The opponents would argue the money came back last time and no jobs were created. From a commonsense perspective, if the companies did not do anything that they said they were going to do last time, if money is in the United States--you need capital to create jobs. Right now we have a banking system that does not have capital. Capital markets are shut down. Guess what? Jobs are not being created because there is no capital to invest to create jobs.

If $360 billion came back last time and $565 billion is going to come back this time, doesn't anybody with any kind of common sense know jobs are going to be created with that? We have to get real. Put your thinking caps on. I don't care what Joint Tax says. I don't care what the CRS says. Put your commonsense thinking cap on, and we are going to have a good piece of legislation if we adopt this amendment.

I encourage all of us to vote in a bipartisan fashion for this bipartisan amendment. I yield the floor and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, what is the regular order?

Amendment No. 178

Is it subject to a point of order? I believe it is, and I make a budget point of order.

I raise a point of order on this amendment.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am not going to speak about the amendment I plan to offer in the next hour or so. But I really have to respond to my friend, Senator Ensign. Ironically, he and I are offering an amendment together.

I have heard now several of my Republican friends come to the floor with the same comments over and over and over again: Don't rush this bill. Well, if you came from my State--and I was a little shocked to hear Senator Ensign because his State is going through a terrible time--where we have a 9.2-percent unemployment rate and jobs being lost every minute, maybe you should look inside yourself and roll up your sleeves and get to work with us.

I find it extraordinary that after 8 long years of Republican rule around here, where we saw the debt go from $5 trillion to $10 trillion, and not a word from the other side about fiscal responsibility, with tax cut after tax cut to the wealthiest few, an unlimited checkbook for Iraq--no problem then. We did not hear speeches about the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren. Oh, no. All of a sudden, when the middle class is hurting, when the working poor are hurting, when people are losing their homes--not the richest of the rich; they are fine; they do not have mortgages--average families, suddenly my friends on the other side come out with their charts: Oh, my goodness, a trillion dollars of spending.

Well, we had a Presidential election about this issue, and I think it is safe to say the reason the results were as they were is because of this economy. I do not think there is any pundit or even anyone in the Senate who would argue otherwise. Remember the turning point, when the Republicans said: The fundamentals of our economy are strong? Well, maybe they still feel that way. Why don't they come out and say that? They do not want to say that because it is so obviously ridiculous when we are losing 500,000 jobs a month. We have lost more jobs in the last 2 months than there are people who live in the State of Delaware. This is where we are. So instead of working together, our friends on the other side come out, one after the other, with the same talking points: The Democrats are irresponsible. Well, I ask: Who is irresponsible? People who want to work to ease the pain of what is happening in our country or people who brought us to this point, giving tax cuts to the millionaires and the billionaires, and a war we never should have fought, and now they find their fiscal soul.

I am so disappointed. We have a President who has reached out to the other side, and all we get are speeches from talking points about why we shouldn't act now. I will tell my colleagues, if this gets away from us, if we can't get the votes we need--we just need a couple of our friends on the other side of the aisle--then this is going to be the party of Herbert Hoover over there all over again, and people will come out in the streets, as they did during the Great Depression and said things about Herbert Hoover that I can't repeat on this floor. People are hurting. They are two paychecks away from losing their homes. In some communities in my State, one in four homes is underwater and is being foreclosed.

Now, is this bill perfect? Absolutely not. There are things in this bill I

would vote to take out; there are a handful of things, a small percentage I would vote to take out. So if you want to work with us on that, fine. But to come down to this floor and suggest that we are rushing through an emergency bill and that is wrong--it seems to me to be coming from a list of talking points that don't mesh with reality. So I hope we can change the tone of this debate.

The American people spoke out in November, and my friends on the other side are becoming the party of no: No, we can't do anything. No. And what do they come up with? Tax cuts for the wealthy again. That is what got us in this fiscal mess in the first place. We want to give tax cuts, as we do in this bill, to the middle class, to the working poor.

At this point, I would just say to my friends, look into your heart, look into your soul, and look at reality.

I wish to say to my friend Senator Mikulski that I am proud to support her amendment.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I have an amendment at the desk, amendment No. 112, and I ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be considered as read.

Mr. President, I am pleased to offer this amendment on behalf of myself and Senator Ensign. We

have a number of cosponsors, so this is truly a bipartisan amendment, and I think it is worthy of everyone's consideration.

It is pretty simple what this amendment would accomplish. It provides an incentive for companies to bring back foreign earnings into the United States, and those foreign earnings must be invested in our U.S. economic recovery.

Right now there is about $800 billion sitting offshore because companies do not want to bring it in because it would be taxed at a 35- percent rate. This means, first and foremost, if you think about it, that our banks do not have any of these funds at a time when they are desperate for capital. This means that at a time that we want to inject dollars into this economy, those dollars are sitting offshore.

Now, we tried this once before. You are going to hear Senator Levin and others attack us for that last attempt. So to preempt that attack-- I will have more to say about it later--I wish to show you what actually occurred last time that we did this.

We saw in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, before we passed our repatriation, all of these dollars, almost more than $350 billion, sitting offshore, not doing the American economy any good. When we passed this, those funds came back.

Now, what you are going to hear from some of my colleagues is that some of the companies did not live up to the spirit of the amendment. The spirit of the amendment was to bring the money home and invest it here at home in job-producing activity.

It is true. That is why, in this amendment we are offering, we have tightened the strings of what the companies can do, and we have required an audit of each and every company that takes this particular tax break. We have said that you only can use these funds to create or retain jobs, to make capital improvements in your business, to buy other businesses that will otherwise fail, to invest in clean technology.

We do not allow these companies to use any of these funds for golden parachutes or high CEO pay. We do not allow these funds to be used for dividends. We do not allow these funds to be used to buy stocks. Now, I can tell you a lot of the companies would like to see fewer strings. But Senator Ensign and I have agreed, in order to pass this, we are going to put some tough strings on it. That is what we have done.

Now, I do not have to go through the litany of job losses we have seen in our great Nation. Last month, there were 500,000 jobs lost. Laura Tyson, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton, says:

In the current crisis, even credit-worthy and profitable

companies face liquidity and credit constraints.

And she said, in essence, that the repatriation policies provide a short-run stimulus.

People, if you vote against this, know you are voting against a stimulus because those funds will be available to support the domestic operations of U.S. companies. If you do not want to listen to Laura Tyson, listen to Robert Shapiro, chairman of Sonecon, former Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs under Bill Clinton. See what he says:

$421 billion in foreign-sourced income currently held

abroad could be repatriated. We project that nearly $97

billion of the $421 billion would go to retaining or creating

employment.

And he goes on to say:

Additional funds used for employment could save or create

an estimated 2.6 million jobs, including 2.1 million jobs in

manufacturing.

That is a Democratic economist. Now, last time, everyone said: Oh, nothing is going to come back in. No taxes will be paid to the Government. That was wrong. As a result of this repatriation in 2004, $18 billion in revenue was received by the U.S. Treasury, six times what some experts predicted.

Now, 62 percent of the funds were spent on worker hiring and training, R&D, and capital investments. You are going to hear horror stories, and I say to my cosponsor from Nevada, you are going to hear a litany of horror stories.

Well, I am going to tell some of the good stories. Oracle, a California high-tech company, used the funds repatriated in 2004 to outbid foreign competitors to acquire two U.S. companies--one in California, the other in Minnesota, and to keep the companies and their intellectual property in the United States. Oracle has increased jobs at both firms.

Intel, another California company, used repatriated funds to help build new fabrication plants. Now, some of the things you are going to hear I do not like to hear. I do not like that some companies did not act in the spirit of the amendment. But the amendment was not tightly drawn.

Let me say, loudly and clearly, if any company or any individual in the United States of America does not live up to the law, they should be gone after by the IRS and have to pay their back taxes. That is what is going to happen to companies that disobey this law. That is clear in our amendment.

I tell you what we do, we guarantee that there will be an audit of these companies. Now, I would say to any of my colleagues who oppose it, show another case where we pass a tax break and we require every company that takes advantage of it to get audited. As a matter of fact, I think it is a fantastic precedent to set around here, so maybe Chairman Levin does not have to hold hearings if the IRS did its job and go after the bad apples.

We address the issue of fungibility. We require that foreign funds must be spent in addition to the current spending level, not to displace money. We require that. We assure transparency and accountability.

I am proud that Senators Ensign, Bayh, Specter and Inhofe and I have come together across party lines. I am proud. This is a good amendment. I would ask my friends, where we have an opportunity such as this in the current environment, to inject $300, $400, $500, $600, up to $800 billion into this economy.

Now, people are going to say it costs money. Joint Tax says it is a few billion dollars over the first couple of years. Let me say, only in the Government would there be a cost of something that actually increases revenue. Those revenues were not coming in. We have proven it. These revenues sat out there all these years until we passed the bill. Then they came home and they paid their taxes.

I believe it brought in 16 billion--between 16 and 18 billion came into the Federal Government. So this amendment means job creation, it means funding for the banks that need capital injection. I am tired of voting for public money to fund banks. I did it. It was tough. Taxpayer money. I wish to see some of this money that is sitting out there get injected into the banks.

You are going to hear horror stories, you are going to hear populist arguments. I would put my populism to the test. I do not stand here every day and endorse tax breaks. I am very cautious. But common sense says, you have hundreds of billions of dollars sitting offshore, we are not being paid taxes on the money.

They will pay taxes on the money when it comes in. We have heavy strings attached. We require an audit. We have transparency attached. We have support from the National Taxpayers Union, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, we have support from industry. They very much would like to bring this back but do not want to bring it back in a circumstance where they are so heavily taxed.

So we have a choice: We can walk away from this amendment and we can let $800 billion sit offshore or we can learn from our experience the last time, where we did take in $18 billion into the Treasury.

But no question, we could have had some tighter strings. Senator Ensign, I have to thank him, because I am sure he had some other ideas for some of the uses, and I prevailed upon him. I said: Let's allow for a few uses.

I see that the Senator from New Hampshire is here. I wanted to close right now in this argument by telling you the uses that would be allowed because I think those are very important.

Here is the chart, folks. I ask Senator Shaheen to take a look at this: These are the sole permitted uses of repatriated funds. I hope my colleagues who stand and bash this tell me why these are not good.

Why is it not good to hire workers and train them? Why is it not good to do more research and development? Why is it not good to do capital improvements which will put people to

work? Why is it not good to acquire distressed businesses to avoid layoffs, shutdowns or bankruptcy? Why is not good to allow these funds to be used for clean energy initiatives?

Now, I ask that rhetorically. Maybe the answer comes back, we do not trust these companies. Well, let me tell you, we have added an audit. Every company that does this has to be audited by the IRS. It is automatic. So I am very pleased to present this admendment tonight. I am looking forward to hearing from Senator Ensign. I know we have a debate for which we will stick around, but at this point I will yield the floor.

Will my colleague yield?

I have been advised by my staff that Joint Tax today told us that in the first 2 years we will get revenues of $5 billion. Then they go off and speculate as to what is going to happen in 2017. So we can tell our friends here, in the first 2 years, Joint Tax tells us we are going to gain $5 billion. Obviously, they are off on that. We got $16 billion the last time. But even they are saying in the early years we gain revenue. I wanted to make sure my friend knew that.

Before the distinguished chairman of the committee might leave the floor, he said some things that are not true, so I wish to point out to him that I am holding in my hand a report done by Robert J. Shapiro and Aparna Mathur. Robert Shapiro was a former Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs under Bill Clinton. He says that almost 2 million jobs were created the last time we brought the money home.

Let's take a look at that chart again, because I think it is worth looking at. He shows where they were created. Job creation or retention: 1.6 million manufacturing. They either retained it or created it. He goes through how many of them were food industry, paper, chemical.

I can tell you about Oracle, which was stated by my distinguished cosponsor, that Oracle went in and bought companies that were going downhill and were going to be bought up by a foreign company and saved those jobs. I can tell you, because we have the list of things that were done. We will take a look at Cisco.

And then my friend, the chairman of the committee, talks about these companies as if they are some terrible people. Cisco Systems, we should be proud of Cisco Systems. Intel, we should be proud of these companies. Cisco brought back $1.2 billion in 2004. They were right here. And it was used to create 1,200 R&D engineering jobs in the United States. Cisco says they have added 8,500 jobs in the United States, excluding employees added through acquisitions.

So my friends who are opposing this are going to stand up and throw out the horror stories and numbers. We have the studies. It doesn't take a degree--although I have one--in economics to understand that if money is sitting offshore and it isn't coming in in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and then in 2005, it jumps up and comes in, gives $18 billion to the Treasury, and according to Robert Shapiro and Laura Tyson, we see millions of jobs saved, then you can stand up and demagog this thing to death. I could do it. They are going to demagog this to death. But I have the facts.

I also want to say that there were abuses the last time. The spirit of the law was not followed. The law was weak. That is why this is a very strong amendment. We tie down what they can spend. They have to have maintenance of effort. And any company that does this must be audited. It is in there. You show me another amendment that gives a tax break that does that kind of due diligence.

My friend can stand up there and say it didn't work the last time and it won't work this time. We have evidence to the contrary. We know what happened. Even Joint Tax says in the first 2 years we are going to make $5 billion. The whole notion that these companies are going to bring the money in out of the goodness of their hearts, I wish they would. Believe me, I wish they would. So you will hear more of this attack, and I hope you will put it into perspective, because the facts are otherwise.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I love this debate and I love my colleague from North Dakota. I am going to start off by saying I have a 9.2- percent unemployment rate in my State. People are struggling and suffering. That is why I support this amendment, which I was proud to work on with Senator Ensign, Senator Bayh, and Senator Specter.

First, my friend has it wrong. He has it absolutely wrong. We are bringing money home to America. We are not sending money out. It is already gone. Look what happened the last time we did this. The money came home. Now, you can argue theoretically in any way you want, but we have the proof. Here it is. We passed a law in 2004 and this money came home. I say to my friend from Michigan, eloquent on the point of defending the Joint Tax Committee--and I ask my friend from Nevada to back me up on this point. I say to my friend from Michigan, if I can get his attention, that we can worship at the altar of the Joint Tax Committee. I don't. I don't because they were wrong. They were wrong. It is not a theoretical argument. They were wrong.

Yes.

I was aware. The Senator is absolutely right. They said it would cost $3 billion from the Treasury and, in essence, $16 billion was added to the Treasury, and even now they are saying over the first 2 years there will be $5 billion added to the Treasury. My friends don't talk about that; they talk about the long range.

I also say to my friends who oppose us so vociferously, on the other side of this, you will find very respected economists who believe that the Boxer-Ensign-Bayh-Specter amendment

makes sense. They are Alan Sinai--I don't know how my friend says he backtracked. He said this in December. Maybe he backtracked in the last 2 weeks. In December, he said that repatriation has spurred $280 billion in capital investments over a 5-year period, increased R&D development by $7 billion a year for 5 years, increased Federal revenue by $82 billion, and will create or save up to 425,000 jobs by 2012.

Joint Tax ought to backtrack. They were flat wrong. They said maybe $200 billion will come back, and $360 billion came back. They said we would lose money. We wound up with $16 billion added to the Treasury. So it is very easy to demagog. It is very easy. But my friend has it wrong.

Then my friend says that effectively the corporate rate is only 17 percent. Well, if that is true, then this is less of a tax break than he is making it out to be. You cannot have it both ways and say, look at this giant tax break and then say the effective rate is 17 percent. I suggest to my friend, as he went through the phone book in his State, thank goodness, because of the work of this Congress, people in the $40,000 to $50,000 range don't pay any taxes.

I will tell you something. I am rarely standing up here and saying a tax cut to the business community is stimulative. But this one is, because it was stimulative. We have it right here from Robert Shapiro, who worked for Bill Clinton. He said that jobs saved or created were 1.6 million from the last tax break. So my friends come here and quote Joint Tax as if we have to say they are right, when they were wrong-- just wrong--wrong on estimating what would come back, wrong on estimating what would come into the Treasury. If you read these economists, whom I have heard colleagues on this side quote constantly--Laura Tyson, Alan Sinai, and Robert Shapiro--they are saying how to stimulate the economy, and this is one way to do it. To stand up here and be against it is fine. I don't mind that one bit. But to stand up here and be against it because you were for the fact that there are corporations that have earnings offshore, I abhor that, too. I want to bring them home. No matter what my colleagues say, guess what. This is a free marketplace, and they don't have to and they won't unless they have an incentive. That is a fact. We may wish it to be another way.

Look at this chart. Year after year after year, very little came back. When we took action, all of this came back. The reports are in from these economists--and most happen to be Democrats--that it worked.

My friend is so right to ask that. Sometimes debates are difficult to follow. They are confusing and complicated. This is not complicated. We know the way the corporations were acting before, and we know what happened when we took this chance. We got arguments from people here that money won't come back and it will not be spent here. By the way, this is a tight bill. My friend from Michigan argues that we don't force the companies to spend the money. We don't force them to spend the money. I don't even think that is constitutional. But I have to tell you this: Even if the money sat in American banks, I say to my friend from Nevada, who is my pal on this one, wouldn't that be in and of itself a reason to do this? We are breaking the backs of taxpayers to take $770 billion, I think it is, through TARP to capitalize our banks. As my friend says, if they don't spend the money right away, they let it sit in these banks that need this capital and, hopefully, they will start lending, which we hope will happen so we can get back to an orderly market. It will make the banks healthier.

My view is that this year there is more of a reason to do it than ever before--the terrible recession. We have a tight bill that will only allow this tax break to be utilized if the money is used to create jobs, where they bring the money home. That is it. Otherwise, they cannot get the break. We have a forced audit in here, and I defy my friends to find another piece of legislation that has such an audit--a forced audit.

I am happy to, yes.

Mr. President, that is right. My understanding is they were way off by more than $100 billion. So for us to say: Oh, my God, don't vote for the Boxer-Ensign amendment because Joint Tax says A, B, and C, I say to my friend, Joint Tax has been so out to lunch on this. They didn't even come close to what happened.

We can have lots of arguments, but I can tell you this: Nobody gains in America when that money sits offshore. They did not gain in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. We had Oracle buying companies that were failing. We had Cisco Systems expanding. Yes, we know there were job layoffs. Of course, we know that. If Pfizer has a problem-- let's just say they have a drug on the market that is causing a problem, they are going to lay off people. They are going to have problems.

We do not allow funds to be used for dividends. We do not allow funds to be used for any kind of golden parachutes or CEO pay. We do not allow buybacks of stock. We tighten it up very much.

I hope we can get to the 60 votes. I am very confident we will get a majority. I hope we get to the 60 votes. It sends a good message. The message is we do not like money sitting offshore. We want to bring it home and help the banks. We want to bring it home and help the workers. We want to bring it home and invest it in America. That is why it is called repatriation. You can get up and you can make every argument in the book, but when you do, I think you have to explain to people why economists such as Laura Tyson, Allen Sinai, Robert Shapiro are very clear, why they say that Joint Tax was off, why they say that even the last bill that was not as strong as this actually created and saved jobs, and why they predict that if we do this, it will stimulate the economy.

I know my friends would like to have a time agreement. I have no problem with that whatsoever. If there is to be a time agreement, Senator Ensign and I are very happy to agree to it as long as we have full measure to respond to speakers.

Reserving the right to object, I don't understand what we are doing.

I would agree to that, happily, if we can have 1 minute prior to the vote to restate.

I yield to Senator Ensign for as much time as he may consume.

Mr. President, can you tell me how much time remains on each side?

Mr. President, if you could tell me when I use 5 minutes, please.

Mr. President, people stand and argue against this amendment, and they say things that are not factual. They have every right to say it. I protect and defend their right to say it, but they are not factual.

Now, Senator Kerry said there is no proof that any jobs were created. Well, Allen Sinai, Robert Schapiro, and Laura Tyson have all said jobs were created and jobs will be created. Senator Kerry said, in his forceful argument against this amendment, that companies simply didn't do anything, and now if they do R&D it will simply replace what R&D they were going to do. We don't allow this to happen. It has to be new spending, maintenance of effort must continue.

I want to call to my colleagues' attention to the report that was issued by Robert Schapiro, Under Secretary of Commerce under Bill Clinton, in which he points out that 1.6 million jobs were in fact created or retained, just in manufacturing; 102,000 jobs in wholesale and retail; in transportation he goes on and shows all the different jobs that were created for a total of 2.1 million jobs. Now, does that mean every company added jobs? No, some didn't, but it has nothing to do with this.

So the fact is, when my colleagues stand up and say, why are we doing this when it was such an utter failure, well, take your argument to Laura Tyson, take your argument to Allen Sinai, take your argument to Robert Schapiro and show them where they are wrong.

Then we are told Joint Tax has to be paid attention to. They were dead wrong the last time. I mean, they said maybe we would have $100 billion come in, maybe up to $200 billion. Well, $360 billion came in. They were way off on the revenues. The revenues they said would come in--it was $16 billion that came into Treasury. They said it would cost $3 billion. So they were wrong. So how can we stand here and try to defeat this measure?

Now, my friend from Massachusetts says this isn't the time or the place or the bill and so forth. This is a moment we can respond to this recession. We are going to do it in many other ways, and I will be supporting things and opposing things, but let me just read to you from Robert Schapiro's report--remember, a Bill Clinton Commerce Under Secretary.

As President Obama and Congress expand the catalogue of

measures to help stabilize the financial system and address

the economic decline, a major untapped resource sits on the

balance sheets of the foreign subsidiaries of U.S.

multinational corporations. These subsidiaries hold up to $1

trillion in past earnings because current U.S. law defers

U.S. corporate tax on those profits until they repatriate. If

those earnings were transferred to the parent companies in

the United States, they could find substantial new capital

investment and employment and provide additional liquidity to

the strapped U.S. financial system as companies reduce their

domestic debt. In principal, the earnings currently held

abroad would provide significant economic stimulus and

financial market liquidity if a change in government policy

could induce U.S. multinationals to promptly repatriate them

and use them for designated purposes.

So my friends stand here and make an argument about how horrible it is that these companies have money abroad, and I agree. I am upset about it. I was upset in 1997 about it. I was upset in 1998 about it. I was upset in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003. Finally, in 2004, Senator Ensign and I got together and we said: Let's see if we can get that money home. So for my colleagues who are lamenting the fact that this money is abroad, we say: Join with us; bring it home.

If you are saying the effective rate is 17 percent, if we can bring it in at 5.25 percent, that is less of a loss to the Treasury.

I will take 1 more minute. Then I will retain.

So I love a debate, but I would like to debate on the facts. The facts are that this is what happened until we had the tax holiday. Now there is a new hue and cry: You did it in 2004; never do it again. Well, I think it is a good thing that Oracle bought up two or three companies that were going to go belly up and that were going to be bought out by a foreign competitor. I think that was good. I think it was good that Cisco Systems added so many jobs--more than 1,000 new jobs.

So when my friends stand and they lament the loss of jobs, I lament every job loss in this country. And I say to Cisco Systems: Good for you. You brought the money in and you did the right thing. Did every company do that? No. That is why we have tightened up this bill.

I thank the Chair, and I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

We will call it 4, and I will take 2 and yield 2 to my friend, and we will close.

First of all, this isn't a shop-worn argument. This is an argument that is going to create jobs, if we win it. Who says it? Laura Tyson:

Repatriation policy provides a short-run stimulus and would

make funds available to support the domestic operations of

U.S. companies quickly.

Robert Schapiro, Under Secretary of Commerce under Bill Clinton:

The earnings currently held abroad would provide

significant economic stimulus and financial market liquidity

if a change in government policy could induce U.S.

multinationals to promptly repatriate them and use them for

certain purposes.

You know, here it is. If you want to get the break, these are the things you have to do. You have to hire workers. You have to use it for research and development, for capital improvements. You have to acquire distressed companies and clean energy investments.

Look, my friends. The world is the way the world is. I think Senator Ensign and I, Senator Bayh, and Senator Specter are realists. Yes, in many ways I would like to think I am an idealist. I don't like the fact that these companies are keeping their money abroad. But guess what. They are not going to bring the money back because Byron Dorgan or Barbara Boxer comes on the floor of the Senate and says: Please be good. Please be good. We need the capital in our banks. We need the capital to create jobs.

We need to make it profitable for them, and that is what we are doing. We did it before.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a chart that was done by Mr. Schapiro proving that 2.1 million jobs the last time were either created or saved.

Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my time to my colleague, Senator Ensign.

Mr. President, I move to waive the relevant section and ask for the yeas and nays.

Is there a previous unanimous consent agreement?

I was just asking if there was a previous unanimous consent agreement, I ask the Presiding Officer.

What is the nature of that request?

Reserving the right to object, would the majority leader and the Senator from Maryland object to a sequence of speaking so some of us can plan the use of our time at least for the next two or three speakers?

I would, Mr. President. I ask unanimous consent that after the Senator from Maryland, the Senator from Georgia and whatever speaker on the other side wishes to speak, then I be----

Mr. President, I would like to begin by thanking the managers for their patience and their leadership in this marathon that we are engaged.

I rise in support of the Coburn amendment, which strikes the $246 million Hollywood tax earmark. It is quite an interesting earmark in that the stimulus legislation provides a tax earmark for Hollywood in the amount of $246 million--a quarter of a billion dollars--over the next 11 years, and would allow large Hollywood studios the opportunity to choose between the existing tax break for movie studios or to write off 50 percent of the entire production cost for movies and TV shows made in 2009. In the years that follow the remainder of the production cost would be written off according to existing depreciation law. The 50-percent accelerated depreciation in the first year is a ``bonus depreciation.'' Obviously, this amendment would strike that special earmark.

I would point out to my colleagues that Hollywood is doing okay. They raked in over a billion dollars in January--the biggest January ever for the movie industry. That is testimony to the attractiveness of the product. Box office receipts were up nearly 20 percent in January 2009, with ticket sales up 16 percent over January 2008, when January is typically considered a weak month for the industry.

Movie director Rob Reiner was recently asked about Hollywood's relationship with Washington, DC, and claimed:

We are a special interest group that doesn't ask for

anything like earmark legislation or tax breaks. We are the

one industry that doesn't ask for a quid pro quo.

Well, rather than targeting tax breaks at big-time political donors, the stimulus should have targeted its tax break toward mainstream America.

I regret that I can't support the so-called stimulus bill that has been presented. We have an opportunity to craft a bill that would provide real relief for the American people at a time of great economic uncertainty. Unfortunately, that opportunity has so far

been rejected. Once again, parochial partisan and special interests have taken precedence over the interests of the American people.

This bill has become nothing more than a massive spending bill, expected to cost taxpayers more than $1.2 trillion, according to the latest estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, and $1.2 trillion dwarfs any Government program in history, after adjusting for inflation. It is bigger than the New Deal and the Iraq war combined. The interest alone will be costlier than the Louisiana Purchase in current dollars or the amount the United States spent to land on the Moon.

During a press conference in November 2008 to introduce the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget, then President-elect Obama said:

The new way of doing business is, let's figure out what

projects, what investments are going to give the American

economy the most bang for their buck, how we protect taxpayer

dollars so that this money is not wasted, restore a sense of

confidence among taxpayers that, when we spend our money, it

is on that which is actually going to improve their quality

of life, create jobs that are so desperately needed, help to

spur on economic growth and business creation in the private

sector. That is all part of the new way of doing business.

1I was very pleased to hear the President speak those words. However, I do not believe the bill before us today is reflective of that sentiment. Let's acknowledge and continue to acknowledge that American families are hurting and they need our help. We have entered the second year of a recession. Record numbers of homeowners face foreclosure, our financial markets have nearly collapsed, the U.S. automobile manufacturers are in serious trouble, and the national unemployment rate stands at 7.2 percent--the highest in 16 years--with over 1.9 million people having lost their jobs in the last 4 months of 2008. Additionally, the number of Americans filing first-time unemployment claims this month matches the highest level in 26 years. Housing starts decreased 15.5 percent in December compared to the prior month. For 2008, housing starts were at a new low, shattering the previous record of 1.014 million set in 1991.

The list goes on and on, and I don't have to tell any American of the economic challenges we face and the real suffering that is going on throughout America. In the last year alone, due to the mortgage crisis, the Government has seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and we already passed a massive $700 billion rescue of the financial markets. We have debated giving the big three auto manufacturers tens of billions in taxpayer money as a ``short-term infusion of cash,'' knowing they would be back for more.

Last week, the House approved its $819 billion stimulus package on a party-line vote. The total cost of that legislation is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire Federal Government. We need to stimulate the economy, but we need to do it in a smart, fiscally responsible manner that will not bankrupt future generations of Americans. It is more important now than ever before that Congress restore fiscal discipline to Washington and get our financial house in order.

In a November 25, 2008, opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, John Taylor, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of economics at Stanford University, wrote:

The major part of the first stimulus package last year was

the $115 billion temporary rebate payment program targeted to

individuals and families that phased out as incomes rose.

Most of the rebate checks were mailed or directly deposited

during May, June, and July of 2008. The argument in favor of

these temporary rebate payments was that they would increase

consumption, stimulate aggregate demand, and thereby get the

economy growing again. What were the results? This chart

reveals the answer. The upper line shows disposable personal

income through September. Disposable personal income is what

households have left after paying taxes and receiving

transfers from the government. The big blip is due to the

rebate payments in May through July. The lower line shows

personal consumption expenditures by households. Observe that

consumption shows no noticeable increase at the time of the

rebate. Hence, by this simple measure, the rebate did little

or nothing to stimulate consumption, overall aggregate demand

or the economy. These results may seem surprising, but they

are not. They correspond closely to what basic economic

theory tells us. Temporary increases in income will not lead

to significant increases in consumption. However, if

increases are longer term, as in the case of a permanent tax

cut, then consumption is increased and by a significant

amount.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the full text of Mr. Taylor's op-ed.

Now, one of the unfortunate things, and this is beginning to be appreciated by the American people, is that Members of Congress couldn't resist the temptation to load this bill with hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary spending, that will not do anything to stimulate the economy. We all know some of these, but they bear repeating, that have been included under the guise of stimulus: $400 million for STD prevention; $600 million for new cars for the Federal Government; $34 million to remodel the Commerce Department headquarters here in our Nation's Capital; $25 million to rehabilitate ATV trails; $150 million for honeybee insurance; $75 million for smoking cessation; and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.

There is no doubt all of those are worthy causes which probably deserve our attention, our care and, sometimes, our dollars. But to portray them and others as a stimulus to create jobs and to have our economy recover, I think flies in the face of reality.

In the Senate bill, we have $100 billion to assist States with agricultural losses; $300 million for diesel emission reduction grants; $150 million for facility improvements at the Smithsonian Museum; $198 million for school food service equipment; and $2.9 billion for the weatherization assistance program.

There is also $6 billion of wiring for broadband and wireless in rural areas. I have always been an advocate of that. But the fact is, anyone who is knowledgeable of the difficulties and challenges will tell you that it takes years to achieve that goal even if the funds are available.

In order to comply with the Congressional Budget Resolution, the committee report contains a statement of how the emergency provisions contained in the bill meet the criteria for emergency spending. The report states, and I quote:

The bill contains emergency funding for fiscal year 2009

for responses to the deteriorating economy, natural disasters

and for other needs. The funding recommended herein is

related to unanticipated needs and is for situations that are

sudden, urgent, and unforeseen, specifically the devastating

effects of the economic crisis, natural disasters and rising

unemployment.

Perhaps the authors of the bill can explain to me how $150 million for honeybee insurance falls within the distinction as outlined in the legislation. Someone needs to explain to me how giving tens of millions of dollars to the National Endowment of the Arts or the Smithsonian Museum will reverse ``the devastating effects of the economic crisis.''

The problem is we are accumulating debt that we are laying upon future generations of Americans. We are going to have to pay this debt sometime. My great worry is that if we do not account for this debt in some way, if we continue trillions of dollars of unnecessary and wasteful spending, then obviously we will find ourselves back in the situation we were in the 1970s, when we had hyperinflation and had to debase the currency.

I want to say a word for a minute about ``Buy American.'' The next time I come to debate on the ``Buy American'' provisions, I intend to bring a picture of Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley, the two individuals who were responsible, in the view of historians, for taking a country that was in a serious recession into the depths of one of the great depressions in the history of the United States.

Because as we enact protectionist measures, I was interested to hear my friend from North Dakota, Senator Dorgan, say it was not in violation of any treaty. It is in violation of several treaties. It is in violation of what has been an important aspect of America's policy which has been free and open trade.

I guess the fundamental difference I have between the authors of the ``Buy American'' provisions and myself is that I believe the most productive, the most innovative, and the strongest and best workers in the world reside in the United States of America, that the innovations and technology that have led the world have come from the United States of America, and that our products can compete anywhere in the world under free and open trade conditions.

Now, there have been violations on the part of other countries. That is why we are members of the WTO. That is why there are provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement that should be vigorously pursued when there are violations and protectionist activities on the part of any nation of which we are participants in trade agreements.

If there are specific violations, then those violations should be addressed. But I wanted to emphasize, if we pass these ``Buy American'' provisions, you will find other nations retaliating and you will find us on a sure but unfortunate path to the exacerbation of our economic difficulties. That is a matter of history. Consult any historian. I hope we will not keep these ``Buy American'' provisions in whatever legislation we arrive at.

This bill contains protectionist ``Buy America'' provisions that will prove harmful to both the American worker and the world economy. The Senate version of the stimulus bill goes beyond the stark protectionism of its House counterpart in a way that risks serious damage to our economy. The Senate bill requires that major projects funded in the bill favor American-made steel, iron, and manufacturing over goods produced abroad. These anti-trade measures may sound welcome to Americans who are hurting in this economy and faced with the specter of layoffs. The United States, after all, produces the world's finest products. Yet shortsighted protectionist measures risk greatly exacerbating our current economic woes. Already, one economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics has calculated that the ``Buy American'' provisions in this bill will cost more jobs than it will generate. Some of our largest trading partners, including Canada and the European Union, have warned that such a move could invite protectionist retaliation, further harming our ability to generate jobs and economic growth.

We have seen this tendency before. In the 1930s, as depression swept the globe, countries around the world enacted protectionist legislation in a counterproductive effort to preserve jobs at home, at the expense of those abroad. It was a fool's errand, and the result was the largest and most prolonged economic downturn of the 20th century. We know better now, and we must have the foresight and the courage to do what is right.

I am very concerned about the potential impact these ``Buy America'' policies will have on bilateral trade relations with our allies. From a philosophical point of view, I oppose this type of protectionist trade policy, not only because I believe free trade to be an important means of improving relations among all nations, but it is essential to U.S. economic growth. Moreover, from a practical standpoint, the added ``Buy America'' restrictions in this stimulus bill could seriously impair our ability to compete freely in the international markets and could also result in loss of existing business from long-standing trading partners.

Let me be clear. I am not against U.S. procurement of American products. The United States, without a doubt produces the very best products in the world, this certainly is the case with American-made defense products. In fact, a Department of State study reported that U.S. defense companies sold more weapons and defense products and claimed a larger share of the world market than was previously realized. This study shows U.S. exports of defense products increased to nearly $49 billion in 2006, comprising nearly 70 percent of global exports. This number continues to rise steadily. Furthermore, I believe that competition and open markets among our allies on a reciprocal basis would provide the best equipment at the best prices for the taxpayers and U.S. and allied militaries alike.

Congress can continue to protect U.S. industries from foreign competition for selfish, special interest reasons, or we can loosen these restrictions to provide necessary funds to ensure our economy can return to the strength it once had. ``Buy America'' policy in defense spending is particularly harmful and costly. Every dollar we spend on archaic procurement policies, like ``Buy America,'' is a dollar we cannot spend on training our troops, keeping personnel quality of life at an appropriate level, maintaining force structure, replacing old and worn-out weapon systems, and advancing our military technologies. It is my sincere hope that legislative provisions like ``Buy America'' in the stimulus bill are dropped and that Congress will end once and for all the anticompetitive, antifree trade practices that encumber our Government, the military, and U.S. industry.

In addition to the ``Buy America'' language contained in both the House and Senate stimulus bills, other policy provisions have been included in this legislation. Many of these items are nothing more than typical policy riders that will do nothing to stimulate the economy and create jobs. Most are partisan provisions that were added to this bill because it is considered to be ``must-pass'' legislation. They should not be included in any type of stimulus legislation and should instead go through the regular legislative process and subjected to necessary debate. Some examples of these policy riders include requiring the Transportation Security Administration to buy 100,000 employee uniforms from U.S. textile plants, legislation to give Federal workers new whistleblower protections, and legislative language favoring open access, or net-neutrality, that telecoms have long opposed.

Additionally, both bills contain wasteful Davis-Bacon provisions that mandate artificially high wage rates, based on faulty data, for its Federal construction spending. These rates are determined by the Secretary of Labor to be the prevailing wages in the geographic locality of the project for similar crafts and skills on comparable construction work. A report by the Department of Labor found that the wage surveys on which the prevailing wages are based are inaccurate. DOL's inspector general submitted a report to Congress that noted that a contractor hired by DOL found ``one or more errors in nearly 100 percent of the wage reports we reviewed.'' The error rates were high even after a more than $20 million effort to fix the surveys. In addition to outright errors, the inspector general noted that DOL used faulty methodology from unscientific surveys that led to bias, and even the data it did collect was untimely and, therefore, suspect.

The Davis-Bacon Act is an outmoded, depression-era, inflationary policy that, according to recent estimates, will inflate the construction costs of this bill by $17 billion. If we are trying to create new jobs then we should repeal Davis-Bacon, not encourage its expansion in this bill. Davis-Bacon imposes heavy regulatory burdens and unnecessary costs on Government contractors--not to mention the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the inflated costs. Furthermore, Davis-Bacon makes it more difficult for entry level job seekers, the unemployed, and the unskilled to obtain work.

A recent study noted that ``contrary to its purpose, the Davis-Bacon Act distorts construction labor markets. Davis-Bacon wages bear little relation to market wages, because the Government's prevailing wage estimates are wildly inaccurate. In some cities, Davis-Bacon rates are much higher than market wages. In Long Island, New York, for example, market rates for plumbers are $29.68 an hour. Davis-Bacon rates, however, are $44.75 an hour, 51 percent more than what the markets demand. In other cities, Davis-Bacon wages are significantly below market rates. For instance, Davis-Bacon rates for carpenters and plumbers in Sarasota, FL, are $6.55 an hour, a figure below Florida's minimum wage of $7.21. Nationwide, Davis-Bacon rates average 22 percent above market wages and inflate the cost of Federal construction by 10 percent.'' Mr. President, decent, livable wages are important for every American--but imposing harmful, outdated Davis-Bacon requirements on Federal construction projects will do nothing more than bloat the cost of this bill, suppress new construction hires, and depress the economy.

I want to say a few words about the proposal that I and a group of other Senators have presented today and will be proposing as we go through this debate. Basically in the category of taxes, it would eliminate the 3.1-percent payroll tax for all American employees, lower the tax bracket from 10 percent to 5 percent, lower the 15-percent tax bracket to 10 percent, lower corporate tax brackets from 35 to 25, lower tax brackets to 25 from 35 to small businesses, and help provide for accelerated depreciation for capital investment. The total cost of that provision would be $275 billion.

It would also extend the unemployment insurance benefits, extend food stamps, unemployment insurance benefits would be made tax free, and training and employment services for dislocated workers would be provided at the cost of $50 billion.

There would be housing provisions. Let me emphasize to my colleagues what we all know: It was the housing crisis that began this conflagration and it will be the stabilization of home values that ends it.

My friend from Nevada here and others have been working hard to try to address the housing crisis. In our respective States, obviously, the housing crisis is of the utmost severity, as it is throughout the country. But in high-growth areas of the country such as ours, it is even more severe. We have seen even more dramatic reductions in home values.

So our primary goal, my friends, is that we must stabilize home values if we are going to reverse this deep and precipitous slide we are seeing and the difficulties we are experiencing in our economy.

Among other proposals, $11 billion would require the Federal Government to allocate funding to increase the fee that servicers receive from continuing a mortgage and avoiding foreclosure from a one- time fee of $1,000 up to $60 per month for the life of the loan.

Safe harbor provisions remove the legal constraints inhibiting modifications; tax incentives for home purchases; the tax credit in the amount of $15,000 or 10 percent of the purchase price, whichever is less, with the option to utilize all in 1 year, or spread out over 2 years, and GSE and FHA conforming loan limits. This cost would be around $32 billion.

We should invest in our national infrastructure and defense. We should spend $9 billion to improve, repair, and modernize Department of Defense facilitates, restore and modernize barracks, improve facilities and infrastructure directly supporting the readiness and training of the Armed Forces, and invest in the energy efficiency of Department of Defense facilities. This activity would generate construction and craftsmen jobs in the short term by addressing deteriorating conditions of existing facilities for projects that are ready to be carried out in the next 9 months.

As to the resetting our combat forces, the Department of Defense will be requesting emergency supplemental appropriations in the spring of 2009 to support the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Inclusion of this in the stimulus accelerates those requirements and will be used to place new orders or to repair vehicles, equipment, material, ammunition required to fully equip our combat units, while generating jobs on assembly and manufacturing lines around the country.

I urge my colleagues to think about, if we are going to provide funds, that our defense needs are great, of the equipment that has been worn out in Iraq and will again be required to be used in Afghanistan. Obviously all of us who have visited our military installations know there are facilities that need to be modernized, restored, and new construction. We propose $70 billion for road and bridge infrastructure, road and bridges on Federal land, public transit and airport infrastructure and improvements, and $1 billion for a small business loan program. The total estimated cost for investing in our infrastructure: $88 billion.

Finally, we need to require these spending programs in the stimulus bill be sunset 3 years from enactment. If this spending is intended to restore our economy and jump-start it, once the economy is jump-started and restored, then we should not have to continue this spending and increase the size of our debt and lay it on future generations of Americans.

This proposal states that after two consecutive quarters of economic growth greater than 2 percent of inflation-adjusted GDP, the following control mechanisms will trigger to reduce the deficit and promote long- term economic growth: All spending provisions in the economic stimulus legislation where funds have not been spent or obligated will be cancelled and permanently rescinded. The budget baselines shall be adjusted downward to ensure that all spending in the stimulus, whether spent or cancelled, is treated as a one-time expenditure and not assumed to be repeated.

What a lot of Americans do not know is every time we add a spending provision, that becomes part of the baseline, which assumes that that money will be spent over time. We cannot continue that indefinitely. We propose a 2-percent across-the-board reduction in spending, with the goal of balancing the budget by 2015.

We should establish two separate entitlement commissions, one to make recommendations on systems and the other Medicare-Medicaid. We all know the elephant in the room is Social Security and Medicare, and the unfunded liabilities associated with it. We should also require recipients to disclose costs for awarded projects, prohibit stimulus funds from being used for lobbying activities, political contributions, holiday parties, unnecessary renovations, and questionable travel.

We should spend some more money on accountability, transparency, oversight, and results. We should create a recovery and accountability and transparency board with a Web site, create a Congressional oversight panel, establish a recovery and reinvestment oversight board composed of Federal agency heads, require review and audits by the Comptroller General on the bill's effectiveness in achieving economic and workforce recovery goals, and establish a special inspector general modeled after the oversight required for TARP. The total is $445 billion. I think this is a balanced proposal and one that I hope deserves the serious consideration of this body.

I want to say a word about TARP. The American people have been dissatisfied with the results, and Members of this body have been as well. In the first round of $350 billion, it seemed that the priorities seemed to change literally on a daily or weekly basis.

It became unclear as to exactly what that $350 billion was going to do, and, apparently, if you look at all of the statistics, it has not resulted in significant improvement.

Now, what would have happened without it will be a matter of conjecture and analysis by economists and historians. Now we are in the second round. Now we are told there may need to be more, another TARP, after we pass this stimulus legislation and an omnibus appropriations bill.

When we start totaling that, we are talking about several trillion dollars, and we can't continue that without the American people experiencing some tangible results. Most Members of this body are in agreement. We need to stimulate and jump-start the economy. Let's not do it in such a way that our children and grandchildren pay for it in the most painful and difficult manner. We owe that to them.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I will speak briefly. I believe Senator Mikulski is perhaps going to offer the next amendment. I do not want to disadvantage the time that has been allotted. I did want to, however, point out that I intend to talk about three amendments very briefly. I filed two of them; I will file the third shortly.

All of us understand what has happened in recent months. In the last 4 or 5 months we have seen money go out the backdoor of this Government unlike any time in the history of our country. In fact, you can read the U.S. Constitution. I don't think you can find a place in the Constitution that describes the mechanism by which massive amounts of money have gone out of this Government--$8.5 trillion, to the extent we now know how much has been moved from our Government to support various enterprises.

The reason we know that is Bloomberg News sued the Government and the Federal Reserve Board, which is the only way anybody got the information about how much money has been obligated by the Federal Reserve Board which opened its discount window for the first time in history to investment banks.

It has never before happened. How much money was committed? We know some snippets of all of that. We know that, for example, Citigroup got about $45 billion, and then we are told we have reached an agreement, along with the direct funding to Citigroup, that we are guaranteeing nearly $300 billion for toxic assets for Citigroup. We know that. We know how much has gone to some of the other investment banks. We know how much money went to AIG. We have a notion of how money went in certain directions. But no one knows exactly how much went out of the Federal Reserve Board, to whom, in what direction, for what purpose. How much from the FDIC, how much from TARP, when, why, how much--we don't know the answers to all of those questions.

Here is what I propose: Last week there was a lot of discussion about bonuses. I believe last year the Wall Street investment firms lost $35 billion in income and paid $18 billion in bonuses to their employees. I don't know. I have a masters in business. We went through a lot of casework in business school. I don't think I came across a case that said: Here is good business--lose $35 billion and then pay $18 billion in bonuses. I don't guess I saw that in the Harvard Business Review.

One amendment is, we ought to, as a government, have the right to understand what kind of bonuses are being paid by firms that are receiving financial assistance under the structure of the financial assistance that has been offered by our Government.

I propose an amendment. It is an amendment that would report bonuses to the American taxpayers. I want all companies receiving emergency economic assistance from any Federal financial agency to publicly release information on any bonuses paid, including the bonus recipients and the amount of the bonuses. The American people have a right to that information. After all, these are companies that have asked for and received Federal assistance. Let's have the American public be able to shine a spotlight on what has happened to that money, including, especially, the use of that money potentially for bonuses.

Second is an amendment I have filed that is what I call the Jobs Accountability Act. This is all about creating jobs. If we are, in fact, about creating jobs, then this proposal would be to say we should have quarterly reports in the Congress after this legislation is passed because tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars will have been spent in the pursuit of creating new jobs.

Why is that important? Mr. President, 20,000 people will likely learn today they lost their job, 20,000 people today and every day; 2.6 million last year, and they say 2.6 million more in the first 6 months of this year. This is a deep crater. We have to care about trying to create jobs, putting people back on payrolls to give them some hope and some confidence again.

If we are spending money to do that in what is called an economic recovery program, let's try to track that money. This amendment is very simple. It is the Jobs Accountability Act. What I propose is that when this money goes out the door to the recipients--State

governments, local governments, and others--we ask them to file quarterly reports with the Congress to say three things: One, I received the money; two, here is how I spent the money; and, three, here is how many jobs I estimate we created with this money. It is the only place we will get this kind of information.

Does anybody think we ought to just ship money out the door and not ask for some sort of reporting requirement about how many jobs we created? Otherwise, it is sort of the helicopter theory of money. Get the money in bags, take it up in a helicopter, shove it out the side, and let it scatter. That is not what this is about. We are supposed to be focusing like a laser on jobs. Let's get the reports from everybody who received this funding in order to determine the effect of what we have done. That is an amendment I have filed.

The third amendment I have not filed but will file today is the issue of runaway manufacturing plants. It is something I have worked on in the past with my colleague from Maryland, Senator Mikulski. This is an interesting proposition. We are trying to create jobs because we are losing jobs in this country.

We have a perverse provision in our Tax Code that says this: If there are two companies in Maryland right across the street from each other, making exactly the same product to be sold in this country, in our marketplace, and one of them, on a cool January day, decides: You know what, I am leaving Maryland. I am getting rid of my workers. I am moving my production to China and I will make that product by hiring 30-cent-an-hour labor and I will ship the product back to America to be sold--after that transaction is done. What is the difference between the company that stayed in Maryland and the company that left Maryland to produce in China? The difference is the American company that left and got rid of their jobs and moved to China has a tax bill that is lower than the company that stayed.

We actually provide in this tax system of ours the most pernicious incentive I can imagine, and that is an incentive to say to companies: If you have a choice, we will actually pay you an incentive in the Tax Code to move your jobs overseas. My runaway plant amendment will fix that situation.

I have offered it, I believe, four times with my colleague from Maryland and some others. We have come up short four times. But we have a lot of new Senators who I think would very much like to vote on this amendment. We also have a new President who campaigned on it, a new President who went all across this country and said: Let's stop the incentives for shipping jobs overseas.

This is the perfect place, it seems to me, to have this vote. The reason is because we have a tax bill on the Senate floor now. This is, it seems to me, exactly the wrong incentive. If we are trying to create jobs, why should we have provisions in our Tax Code that move jobs elsewhere? Let's plug that hole, and we can do it with the amendment I will be offering.

My amendment has had over the years many cosponsors and the strong support of my colleague from the State of Maryland. I will file that amendment today. A tax bill is on the Senate floor. If not now, when should we ever plug this loophole that says as a country, we stand behind shipping jobs overseas. Let's say we stand behind keeping jobs here. No tax advantage for those who export them. Let's provide tax advantages, if we are going to, for those who create jobs and keep jobs in this country.

I will be happy to yield.

That is exactly the case. Most people would not even believe that to be the case. They would say: How on Earth would someone have constructed a system that allows that to happen? Oh, but they did, and they have fiercely protected it.

The reason the steel company that stays here pays a higher tax is the steel company that leaves and ships back to this country gets what is called a deferral of income tax; they don't have to pay the tax until some point later. Of course, we know from history and from the history what has been described as being filed to this bill, ultimately if they are repatriated, they get to pay a tax rate of 5\1/2\ percent, something no other American gets to pay. It is a pernicious tax incentive that we certainly ought to put an end to, in my judgment.

That is exactly the case. There is a ``Buy American'' amendment I helped put in this bill that has caused a fair amount of controversy, but it is not violative of any trade agreement. It represents in this bill mostly grants to the States and others for public works projects. It seems to me to the extent we possibly can, we ought to urge the purchase of steel or iron or skids steer loaders in this country to do so. I recognize it is controversial. I am not interested in being violative of any trade agreement that we have, and my understanding is this provision does not violate trade agreements because it will largely come from State grants for public works projects.

I hope to offer the amendment dealing with the tax issue, and I will file that this afternoon. I hope I can get in line so we can have a debate because it is first and foremost about jobs.

Mr. President, there has been a generous amount of discussion and debate. In fact, I was sitting listening to it and curious that my friend from California described those who would speak in opposition as being engaged in demagoguery before she heard the opposition. So there is a clairvoyance here, I guess, before we have an opportunity to speak on these issues. I will not engage in demagoguery, but I will not disappoint her in my opposition to this piece of legislation.

Let me describe what this piece of legislation is. If you like the notion that we want to encourage companies to move their jobs from our country to other countries, then this is the legislation for you. This is an acceleration of what we have done for far too long and what some of us have tried to correct for a long time. There is an unbelievably pernicious provision in our tax laws that says: If you have two businesses right across the street from each other and one of them decides they are going to fire all of their workers and move to China, and they both make the same product and sell the same product in the United States, the only thing that is different once they have moved those jobs to China is the company that left our country and fired their workers ended up with a lower tax bill. What an unbelievable thing to have in the middle of our Tax Code. I intend to try to correct that with another amendment, by the way. But this repatriation tax holiday amendment is kind of a cheerleader amendment for that proposition: Well, we like that; in fact, let's encourage more of it.

Let me straighten out a couple of things with facts. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts.

First of all, the corporate tax paid in this country is not 35 percent. That is a statutory rate. The effective tax rate paid by corporations in America is around 17 percent, not 35 percent. So when we talk about it, let's talk about what is real. All right. So big corporations on average pay 17 percent. But what we have in this piece of legislation is to say those corporations that have, in many cases, moved their plants overseas and made profits overseas with the full understanding in our tax laws that they will at some point repatriate those profits and then pay the corporate tax rate on those profits in our country, this amendment says no, that is not going to be the case. What we are going to try to do is say: If you bring them back, you get to pay a 5.25-percent tax rate--not a tax rate that ordinary folks pay, a tax rate that is almost one-half of the tax rate the lowest income folks pay. That is pretty unreasonable, in my judgment. Now, let me just say that in the ranks of bad ideas, the pantheon of bad ideas, this ranks way up there. It is tired, old, shopworn, and they try to slide it through here with a thick coat of legislative Vaseline, just sort of slip it all through here while we are debating how to promote economic recovery in this country.

Let me just turn to a few facts, if I might. This is the New York Times, Lynnley Browning talking about the one-time tax holiday--this isn't new; we have done this before--in 2004 that offered companies the chance to bring that money back at a reduced rate of 5.25 percent. Put another way, the tax break gave each company claiming it an average of $370 million in tax deductions.

So we are probably not at odds that the proposition is to give very big tax deductions to big companies. That is what this amendment is.

Now, the New York Times. The drugmakers were the biggest beneficiaries of the amnesty program--this is the 2004 program-- repatriating about $100 billion in foreign profits and paying only minimal taxes. That is the purpose of this amendment. But the companies did not create many jobs in return. Instead, since 2005, the American drug industry has laid off tens of thousands of workers in this country.

I was part of that 2004 debate. I remember the claims that were made: Do this. Give a special deal to these companies. They will create jobs. Well, the biggest beneficiaries were the big drug companies. They didn't create jobs; they cut jobs in our country. A success or failure? It seems to me that is a failure, and now we have the same proposition back saying: Let's have another round of this.

Hewlett Packard: $14.5 billion in repatriated profits, 14,500 jobs cut. Colgate-Palmolive. Motorola. I could spend a lot of time, but I got rid of most of those charts, so just to show an example.

This is an editorial by the Chattanooga Times: It shouldn't escape Americans' attention--this is 2005--that U.S. companies have disclosed plans to repatriate some $206 billion in foreign profits--that is as a result of the 2004 legislation--under a one-time tax break allowed by Congress on the grounds--you guessed it--that such a big break would ignite a strong spurt in growth. The upshot, of course, is that no such job spurt appears to be materializing. Some have even announced plans to cut domestic operations and jobs.

Colgate-Palmolive repatriated $800 million in foreign profits and cut 4,450 jobs and shut a third of its plants over the next 4 years. Even the primary advocate--and I mention this because my colleague just mentioned Mr. Allen Sinai--even the primary advocate for the special one-time break, economist Allen Sinai, is now soft-pedaling his reduction of 660,000 new jobs over 5 years. He now says the efficacy of the tax break will be hard to prove.

Well, some other thoughts about this. Michael McIntyre, Wayne State University: There is no evidence that the tax amnesty added a single job to the U.S. economy.

Michael wrote a piece about this in December of 2008.

Again, Michael McIntyre: Most of the repatriated money was used to buy back corporate shares and for other expenditures favoring management. Not exactly something that fits very well in an economic recovery plan. One study found that repatriations did not

lead to an increase in investment, employment, or R&D. Instead, a $1 increase in repatriations was associated with an increase of approximately $1 in payouts for shareholders.

So much for new jobs.

Professors Clemons and Kinney, Texas A&M research study: On average, firms appear to have responded to the opportunity to reap tax savings provided by the act but did not use the funds to increase domestic investment.

Finally, Robert Willens, tax and accounting authority, New York Times article: It was basically worked out to be one big giveaway. The law never took into account the fact that money is fungible.

That is the most important point. Money is fungible. You can say it will create jobs; it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean a whit.

So here we are in February of 2009, 5 years after the last time the proposal was made to give a very big tax break by saying to some corporations: You know what, we have tax rates that we want you to pay, but if you are big enough and if some of you move jobs overseas from our country, we will give you a 5.25-percent tax rate.

Now, this is the Bismarck, ND, phone directory. We are not a metropolis and we don't have the largest city in the country, but I could go through this phone directory and read some names. We have a lot of Olsens, by the way, and a lot of Schultzes because we are a lot of Scandinavians and Germans and so on. But I could go through all of these names and ask the question: Do you think Mr. Copeler would like to pay 5.25 percent income tax? I think so. I hope so. How about Mr. Clause? Would he be able to pay 5.25 percent? I am sure he would like it if we just cold-called him and said: What do you think about this? But no person I am aware of will be invited by this Senate to say: We would like to give you a 5.25-percent income tax rate--just the biggest companies in America, many of which move their jobs overseas, and we say: We will give you a big fat reward. We will claim that you are going to create jobs, but we know better because the studies are clear.

As for the studies that have been done about the cost of this, we don't have to debate that. This loses $29 billion in 10 years. There is no debate about that. We only have one entity that makes those estimates. This costs $29 billion in losses over 10 years.

But the major point--which I assume causes the gritting of teeth by those who believe it is demagoguery--is we have been fighting for years to say to American employers: For God's sake, stay here in this country. Don't go in search of 30-cent labor in Shenzhen; keep your jobs here. And many of them said: Tough luck. Take a hike. We are leaving. We are going to go produce Radio Flyer little red wagons in Shenzhen, China. Yes, it was produced in Chicago for decades, years, but tough luck, we are firing all of those folks and we are producing the little red wagon in China.

We are doing the same thing with Huffy Bicycles and with Etch A Sketch. I could talk about a hundred products that are all in China. We gave them all a tax break to leave. Isn't that something?

This now says to American companies that own the product that is now going to be produced in China: If you bring your money back here, we will cut your tax rate by 85 percent.

There is an old country saying, ``There is no education in the second kick of a mule.'' We don't have to relearn what we knew in 2004. Some of us made the case in 2004 that this was an unbelievably bad idea, that it rewards exactly the wrong thing. I am all for tax breaks. I would like to see on this bill a 15-percent investment tax credit that has an end date to it, which says if companies--small businesses and large businesses--make these investments now, before July 1 next year, they will get that. I would like to see a big investment tax credit and require investments in the early period. I am all for big tax breaks for consumers to buy cars and homes. I would like to see people start buying homes and cars again. I think that would help the recovery. I am not opposed to tax breaks. I want us to do things that provide incentives to keep jobs in this country, to create jobs, and we know-- we don't have to guess--this amendment does exactly the opposite. I have heard numbers and studies discussed. This is not rocket science. We have the definitive analysis of what happened in 2004. We have an estimate of what this will cost now.

We lost jobs in 2004 and forward, and this will cost us $29 billion in lost income now. It will say to any other company, if you ever think about moving jobs overseas, understand there are enough people in Congress who in 2004 and 2009 will come up with another idea in 2014 and 2019 that will cut your tax rate to 5\1/4\ percent some day and you will never have to pay your full measure of income tax on profits as an American corporation. This rewards all of the wrong things.

I don't accuse my opponents of demagoging. I think they are wrong and they are using bad facts. We disagree about that. I agree that there are very different opinions on this issue. One is wrong and one is right. Ours happens to be right. There is only one public interest here. The public interest is demonstrable here, not even a close question. I hope if we are talking tonight, on a day when 20,000 Americans lost their jobs--every day somebody comes home and says, ``Honey, I lost my job''--when we are trying to create jobs and restore jobs by creating an economic recovery package, we don't have people coming to the well of the Senate and saying count me in for providing a 85-percent tax cut to big companies that moved overseas, that we know will not create jobs and we know will further deepen the Federal budget deficit.

Mr. President, having given full measure and vent to my concern and interest, I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

The Senator asked me about backtracking. He made the same prediction in 2004 and then backtracked. I predict he will do the same thing.

Mr. President, I don't know what people are to think when they watch this or hear this debate--he said, she said, they said, we said. At the end, the question is, What is real? What are the facts? So let me see if I can uncomplicate this.

This isn't like trying to connect two plates of spaghetti. This is a place of public interest about what should we do to try to create jobs in this country. My colleagues say we are worried because there is so much foreign income overseas. That is not our worry. Our worry is that they have decided to take hundreds and hundreds of billions of overseas income that is required to pay an income tax when it comes back to this country and have said let's give those companies an 85-percent tax cut if they do what they had previously promised they were going to have to do anyway, and that is repatriate this income. That is what we are concerned about.

So let me see if I can put it in the frame of a company--Huffy bicycles. A lot of people worked at Huffy bicycles for a long time. They made $11 an hour making Huffy bicycles, sold in Wal-Mart, Sears, and Kmart, capturing 20 percent of the American bicycle market. But they all got fired. They all lost their job because that company moved to China in search of 30-cent labor in Shenzhen, China. The last day of work at the Huffy plant in Ohio, the workers, as they left their jobs and pulled out of their parking space, left a pair of empty shoes where their car used to park. Their jobs were gone, but it was the only way they could say to their employer, who moved their jobs to China: You can ship our jobs overseas, but, by God, you are not going to fill our shoes. That was the plaintiff

cry of all the folks who lost their jobs who loved to make bicycles.

Guess what. Our Tax Code gives a tax break for shipping those jobs overseas. This amendment continues that very approach and says: By the way, if you ship your jobs overseas and then repatriate the income from what you have earned overseas, we will give you an 85-percent tax break.

I am telling you, it makes no sense. There is no evidence anywhere, no matter what charts you put up, that this created jobs in 2004. It did not. It cost jobs. Allen Sinai, noted economist, yes, he made the same claims then, and then backpedaled. He makes the same claims now. But let's talk a year or so from now, and he will backpedal again.

The fact is, this is a giant tax break to some of the largest companies that cut their tax bill by 85 percent without any evidence they will create jobs. In fact, exactly the opposite evidence exists because we have experienced it, and we lost jobs as a result. This also will cost the American taxpayers $29 billion in lost tax revenue at a time when we are up to our neck in debt.

So you know, let's think of what we are debating. We are debating an economic recovery program. We are going to promote recovery by dragging out a shop-worn, tired old argument that the way to do that is to give an 85-percent tax cut to companies that have earned income overseas, many of whom have fired their American workers and shipped the jobs overseas. I don't think that makes any sense at all.

In fact, if this happens--it happened 5 years ago--if it happens now and it happens 5 years from now, every company will understand, you can move jobs overseas and you will never ever have to pay the corporate tax rate when you bring foreign earnings back. You will always have somebody standing up to say we have a sweetheart deal for you.

Oh, it doesn't apply to the Joneses or the Olsens or the Larsons or the Christiansens, it just applies to the big companies that decided to park that income overseas. I say this: How about a 5.25-percent income tax rate for every American, rather than just a few of the biggest companies? How about all of us get a chance to get some of this 5.25 percent income tax rate? I don't think that is being proposed. Let me propose that.