End Wasteful Tax Loopholes Act

I thank the Chair and express my appreciation to Senator Murray for her leadership, her courtesy, and her skill in managing the bill through the committee and on the floor. She is an experienced legislator who has strong convictions, but she is easy to work with, courteous, and effective in what she does every day. I thank Senator Murray, and I enjoy working with her.

Well, our Chair says this is a pro-growth, pro-middle-class budget. I say it is a pro-tax, pro-spend, and pro-debt budget. It is a budget of deep disappointment. It is a budget that comes nowhere near doing the things necessary to put America on a sound path. It is a budget that does, indeed, reflect the stark differences between our parties. It is rather remarkable to me, the extent to which our majority party in the Senate has no interest in producing a budget that actually balances and actually puts America on the right path.

They say they care about growth, and I know they do. I know they would like to see the economy grow more and more jobs being created because we have had the slowest recovery during this recession since anytime after World War II, at least. It has been very, very slow. But we have done something to a degree we have never done before; that is, borrow and spend to stimulate the economy.

Someone has compared borrowing and spending to stimulate the economy to the idea of someone taking a bucket and scooping up water in one end of the swimming pool and pouring it into the other. We have no net gain. The truth is that we lose some of the water out of the bucket as we walk along the shore. In this case, what we lose is interest on the debt indefinitely because there is no plan to pay down the debt.

So this budget that is before us today does not balance, it does not put us on a sound path, it does not create confidence among the American citizens that the future is going to be sound, that we have gotten this country reoriented in a way that is going to produce long- term growth. Indeed, it is going to do exactly the opposite. It is going to do exactly the opposite. It says, once again, that this Senate is not willing to do the things necessary to put America on a sound course. And it is not that hard. We can do this. It is within our grasp. But our leadership in this Senate, contrary to the House, is not willing to take those good, solid but achievable steps necessary to put this country on a sound path. I just feel that very deeply.

Hopefully, in the context of our debate and a budget being moved through here on a party-line vote, I suppose, as it was in committee, maybe some connection will be made amongst ourselves and our Members and our brains about the real issues facing the country and what we need to do to get on the right path. And maybe even in conference, if not here on the floor, we can have some miraculous agreement that would create the kind of long-term confidence businesspeople and the American people are looking for from the U.S. Congress and the government.

Senator Reid indicated he would like to finish. I would like to finish too. We were under the impression that we could have started this voting process on the budget as early as Monday, if not Tuesday. That could have happened. Apparently, the leadership decided to block amendments. That created, on this side, a number of Senators who felt very strongly that they, in fact, had relevant amendments and they wanted them voted on, and they would not agree to time limits until the majority agreed to give them a vote. Whether I was for or against the amendments is not relevant. I thought they should have been given a vote. They are Senators. A big bill moving forward, several appropriations bills cobbled together to fund the government, and we only have four or five amendments. Serious amendments, such as the Moran amendment with 28 cosponsors, Republicans and Democrats, was blocked. He couldn't get an amendment on a relevant issue involving the health and safety of America.

So that has put us behind in the schedule, not anything we have done. There was not a problem on this side. If they had been given amendments, they would have been done in very short order and could have been completed Monday or early Tuesday.

So here we are. We have under the law 50 hours of debate on the budget, 25 to a side, and an unlimited number of amendments can be offered. So that is going to take time, as it always does, and I am sorry it is getting pushed into the weekend.

I would also just say briefly that as time has gone by, I have been more and more convinced of what I believed from the beginning, which is that this Congress is not capable of producing a massive overhaul of the Federal health care program. I remember the night Senator Reid refers to when the final passage, I guess, occurred or the day that it occurred. But what I remember most is being here Christmas Eve--my birthday--when the bill cleared the Senate on a straight party-line vote, 60 to 40. Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts was elected on a promise to block and kill the legislation. The American people were consistently opposing the legislation. They were able to ram it through before he could take office and cast the deciding vote. They got the absolute minimum number of votes--60--to pass this monstrosity.

I am told now the regulations in the bill are 6 feet high when stacked. We still haven't seen them. That legislation has 1,700 references to this section to be effectuated by regulations to be issued by the department. Regulations continue to pour out in record numbers to try to clarify the hundreds and thousands of ambiguities in the bill.

We were told that people's health insurance premiums would go down, that this was going to bend the cost curve to bring health care costs down. We warned that would not happen. Who was correct 3 years ago? Health care costs are surging. They are not through surging yet. We are going to have more increases as the health care bill takes effect in January of next year. The average person's premium has already gone up $2,000-plus a year. Small businesses all over America are telling us they are not hiring because of the health care bill. This has clearly been a deficit and a detriment to job creation.

We had no ability to write this health care law. We didn't know enough about it. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: Well, we have to write it to see what is in it. What she meant was that we are just going to pass some vision of health care reform and the bureaucrats will take care of it. Well, they are not taking care of it well. We are not capable of managing it.

We are endangering the greatest health care system the world has ever known. We are going to see fewer and fewer top-quality young people go into medicine. I am hearing that over and over again. Doctors are telling me they don't know what to tell their children about going into medicine.

This is just one example of what happens in this country when people in Washington take on the arrogant view that they know how to fix the health care system--one of the most massive, complex, marvelous systems the world has ever known.

You can go to Alabama and see some of the best doctors in the entire world in our State. People go there from all over the world. Dr. Andrews treated RG3 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, his private practice in Birmingham. People can go to top-quality surgeons in Mobile, Montgomery--throughout the State--Auburn-Opelika, Tuscaloosa, Huntsville. This is true for every State in America.

For people to say our health care is not the best in the world--why do people come here from all over the world? That is one of the most horrible things I have ever heard, really, around here, suggesting we don't. So we have people who die sooner than in some other countries. We have a lot of causes. We have more obesity. We have more smoking. We have fewer people taking care of themselves sometimes. We have a lot of individual problems. We have a higher murder rate. We have high accident rates in automobiles. So we have things that pull down our lifespan, but that doesn't mean our health care isn't good. It doesn't mean our health care is not the best in the world. All of us have seen that.

Mr. President, I wish to ask Chairman Murray where we are now on going through the business of the day. I appreciate the chairman's leadership and suggestions as to going forward.

I would like to start with a motion, yes, and I am prepared to do that, and I thank the chairman.

I offer a motion to recommit this budget that is on the floor today to the committee with instructions that it be altered to produce a balanced budget.

That is what I think this Nation needs. I think that is what the American people want, and that is what we are determined to fight for because it is the right thing for the country, not because it is some green eyeshade goal. I have heard that argument, and that is not what is on our minds when we say: Let's balance the budget. It is not what the American people have on their minds when they say: Why don't you guys balance our budget?

What is it that is necessary here? We believe that if we alter our debt course in a responsible way and we begin to reduce the deficits regularly and steadily in an effective way, we can reach a balanced budget and we can keep on that balanced budget without cutting expenditures. The facts are quite clear that we can increase spending every year, just not as much as we are increasing spending today and just not as much as our Democratic budget increases spending. That is what we believe we should do. I will explain as we go forward how that can create jobs, create growth, will make this country healthier, will create confidence in the world financial community, will see more money come to the United States, and will allow businesses that are sitting on cash to begin to invest and hire people. That is the direction in which we should be going. That is what would be good for America.

But first and foremost, as I explained last night, the Democratic budget on the floor today comes nowhere close to that. It is nowhere close to setting forth a plan that would actually balance the budget. Indeed, the budget never balances under their plan, and it won't balance in the future. Things are only going to get worse. They are going to get worse because it deals in no way with the fundamental, driving forces of the debt this country faces. It does not deal with that. If we don't deal with those issues, then we are not going to get the debt under control. But we can do it. We can do it in a number of ways.

Now, the President has sent a very clear message. Recently on ABC, with George Stephanopoulos, the President said: And so, you know, my goal is not to chase a balanced budget just for the sake of balance.

Who said we are trying to chase a balanced budget just for the sake of balance? That is not what we are doing. We are trying to put America on a sound debt path. We are trying to put America on a sound financial path that will create confidence and avoid the danger of a fiscal crisis.

We started counting last night. My colleagues, yesterday and last night--I think we stopped counting--used the phrase ``balance'' 24 times: This is a balanced approach. It is a balanced plan. We are seeking primary balance. We are going to have a responsible, balanced plan.

Pretty soon, they will say they have a balanced budget. Well, they don't have a balanced budget. We need to understand that fully.

Secondly, the budget that has been produced does not even put us any closer to a balanced budget than we are today. When we add up the taxes that are being increased, when we add the new spending that is in this bill, it doesn't change the debt course at all.

Earlier this year, Mr. Elmendorf, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, testified before our Budget Committee. Mr. Elmendorf is an excellent scholar and a man who has managed the money of the budget well. Mr. Elmendorf is--Mr. President, I am having a little trouble concentrating with the roar going on in my background. I would appreciate it if we could keep it down a little bit.

So Mr. Elmendorf told us at the Budget Committee that we are on an unsustainable path. OK. This is after the Budget Control Act, after we reduced the growth of spending $2.1 trillion, and that includes the sequester. After we did all that, this year he told us we are on an unsustainable debt course. He said this is a danger to America and we have to get off it and we need to make further changes to get on the right course.

So we have looked at this budget, and we thought the committee, which called him, would listen to him, and we wanted to see if the budget that is on the floor now actually helps us get toward a sound financial future. I have to say it does not. It does not change the course we are on. It raises taxes dramatically, but it raises spending and eats up all the new taxes, not altering the amount of debt that will be raised over 10 years.

Isn't that a failed budget plan? Isn't that a failure of leadership? I hate to say that. But the challenge of our time is to deal with our financial crisis. The challenge of our time is to alter the debt course we are on and put us on a sound path, and it has not been met by this budget.

The House budget--we all may have different ideas about some of the things in it--provides for increased spending every single year, but it balances the budget, totally balances the budget, in 10 years. It would balance in 10 years and does it by increasing spending every year, on an average of 3.4 percent a year. So we can increase spending at 3.4 percent a year--increase spending--and balance the budget.

But the problem is the budget the majority sends forth would increase spending at 5.4 percent a year. That does not sound like a lot, but the difference is trillions of dollars. The difference is a plan that puts us on a sound financial path to the future and a plan that leads us on the unsustainable debt course we are now on.

My Democratic colleagues need to look at this. We saw, I guess, in Politico--I had the quote here yesterday that said fundamentally the majority's plan was written by the left of the Democratic conference-- the left--and it said explicitly to the left of President Obama. That makes sense if we look at what is in the budget. Look how much they spend, how much they tax, and how they do not reduce the debt we are adding every single year. So that is what we have.

As Chairman Murray said, budgets present a contrast. Budgets lay out your vision for the future. A budget defines who you are because it says how much you want to tax in the next 10 years, it says how much you want to spend in the next 10 years, and it requires you to state how much debt you are going to accumulate for America over the next 10 years.

This plan will add another $7.3 trillion to the debt of America. We are already at almost $17 trillion. That will take us to about $24 trillion in 10 years. Interest on that debt is huge. By their own numbers, interest on their debt would amount to approximately $800 billion in 1 year. Interest on the debt, under their budget, would rise to the point of $800 billion in 1 year. We spend about $100 billion on education. We spend about $40 billion-plus--a little over--on highways, roads, and bridges. That is just an example. We are now surging from $200 billion, $250 billion in interest to $800 billion in interest. As a result of the accounting CBO has provided us, if we follow this path, it is going to crowd out spending for research, it is going to crowd out spending for children, education, health care, and any other program this government wishes to undertake, including defense.

Mr. President, what kind of time limit is there, might I inquire? Is there 30 minutes on this side on this motion?

The first question would be how much time is left on my half of that hour.

Mr. President, I call up the motion.

This motion would simply say this to our colleagues--it will be a defining vote for our Members; and Members need to understand the meaning of this vote--the question will be: Do you favor a balanced budget? Is it important to you? Have you said: I am going to vote for a balanced budget amendment. Have you said in your townhall meetings and in your campaigns and in your debates: I believe in a balanced budget amendment or I believe in a balanced budget, period.

What we are saying is that this country can balance its budget. We can balance the budget in America today if we set forth a plan that allows the spending levels to increase by 3.4 percent a year for the next 10 years. Isn't that great news? We can spend 3.4 percent more each year. According to the data the Congressional Budget Office gives us and we rely on, we can do that and still increase spending over the next decade.

Inflation is going to increase about 2 percent or a little over, according to CBO. Inflation will increase about 25 percent over the next 10 years and about 40 percent if we increase spending each year at 3.4 percent. That puts us on a path to balance. It begins to reduce the debt overhang for our country. It brings down the amount of debt we have in our country and puts us on a sound path. It does all the things we need. It sends a message to the world that we have our financial house in order. I believe good Members of this body--Democrats and Republicans alike--have told their constituents and are sincerely of the belief that we can and should balance our budget. When I say ``balance,'' I mean honest balance, not some balanced approach, not some primary balance, none of that; that when the revenue comes in and the money goes out, it is the same. We are not sending more money out than we are bringing in, in revenue, having to borrow the difference and pay interest on it. Because that is what we have been doing to a degree we have never, ever done before in this country. We have never, ever done before what we are doing now. We have never, ever had 4 consecutive years of trillion-dollar deficits--nothing close to it.

People say President Bush was irresponsible. He should have been more wary of the grand promises that the economy would never have a recession and that things are going to go great. He should have. The next to the last

year he was in office, the budget deficit was $167 billion. It had dropped from a higher figure in his time in office. His last year, it was $450 billion or $460 billion.

President Obama has been in office 4 full years, starting his fifth, and his deficits have been averaging $1,200 billion a year. We have never, ever, ever seen anything like this before. The debt of the United States of America has surged, and our Democratic colleagues do not have a plan that will put us on a sustainable path in the future.

If we come back out of the economy and we restrain the spending growth just a little bit, we can balance the budget. That is what we ought to do. Again, the goal of balancing the budget is not some frivolous goal for political reasons. The goal of a balanced budget is that we would put us on a sound financial course. It will mean we have confronted the challenges of our time. It means we know we cannot continue to spend systemically more than we bring in, that a debt crisis could occur and we could have a decline in wealth in America.

So when we say we want to recommit to the committee, colleagues, you need to know what this means. It simply means this: We are directing the committee, the majority of whom are Democrats--and they can write the budget as they choose, using whatever tax changes they want to make and whatever spending changes they want to make--but the budget that hits this floor would be a budget that balances, that creates growth, confidence, and prosperity for America. That is what we are asking you to cast a vote for, and I believe you should break ranks on this. I believe you should vote your conscience. I believe every Senator should vote the beliefs of their constituents. Poll after poll after poll shows that the American people prefer a balanced budget. They know we cannot continue to do what we are doing.

I think it has potential. We are willing to work with the majority. We may disagree with the results, but, my goodness, wouldn't it be great if the Senate produced a budget that balances--and it has one vision of how to balance the budget, the House produced a budget that balances and they have their vision about how to balance the budget-- and we go to conference and we could actually reach some sort of a compromise that would fix the financial future of America? The whole world would be amazed. They would say: My goodness, the United States-- look at this--they have gotten themselves together. We thought they were going goofy. We thought they had completely sold out to spending and borrowing and look at this.

There would be more investment. American businesses would feel better. American workers would feel better. We would begin to have more growth that way.

That is the way we believe jobs and growth are best created, not by the sugar high that comes from borrowing and spending money.

Back when we did the stimulus bill--I would like to share this with my colleagues because a very important concept was explained us to by Mr. Elmendorf, the CBO Director. Back when we did the stimulus bill, the $800 billion-and-something that President Obama passed that was going to reduce the unemployment rate dramatically, put the country on a sound path, and stimulate the economy, we asked how were we going to do it? We were going to borrow money--every penny of the $830 billion-- now $1 trillion with interest--was borrowed and we spent it.

This is what the Director of the Congressional Budget Office said about that. He said: Yes, it will create growth in the short term. It will enhance the growth in the short term. One financial expert called it a sugar high. We will get that. But once that is over and we have the burden of the debt, it begins to cost us every year and it will cost us as long as that money has been spent, as long as we pay interest on that money, and we are going to pay interest--young people, American people--indefinitely because we have no plan to pay down this debt that we have accumulated. We will be paying interest on that indefinitely.

This is what CBO said back in 2009 when the stimulus bill was passed. They said: Yes, you get a short-term benefit. But CBO said that over 10 years, you will have less net growth than if you did not have the stimulus package at all. Think about that.

So we took the sugar high. We voted to borrow the money. I did not. I opposed it. But it passed to borrow more money, to spend now to try to create a sugar high, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, pour one bucket of water from the pool into another, and this is going to somehow permanently fix our economy.

There were some things that I think would have been legitimate for us to do at that time. I supported a more restrained package that had more infrastructure and actual benefits in it. But, fundamentally, we are almost now at the point where the benefits of that spending have been gone and the detriment is already here. Multiply that. Multiply that by the fact that we now have a total of $17 trillion borrowed from around the world, and we are paying interest on that every day. But we are paying extraordinarily low interest rates, unlike any we have seen in the history of the world, and those low interest rates are not expected to remain.

This is why they project that with this budget we will have a $24 trillion debt by 2022, resulting in $800 billion a year in interest. This would be more than the Defense Department, more than we pay on Social Security today, and more than we pay on Medicare today. This is a huge item.

I would say we want growth. We want prosperity. We want to unleash the natural, inherent, entrepreneurial power of the American spirit, economy, and culture. It is a wonderful thing we have. Our free market infrastructure is magnificent, but it is being handicapped by poor economic financial policies of this country. We need to exit this path and return to a path for a balanced budget amendment.

I thank you for the opportunity to make this motion and hope it will be considered. It would provide the committee with full freedom to produce a balanced budget through any way you choose, through any mix of tax-and-spend policies which would be chosen by the committee. It would then come back to the floor. If we were to vote for it, then it would go to conference and put us in an extraordinarily better position to achieve a bipartisan agreement this year, which could help pull us out of the economic doldrums. This would put us on a path to economic prosperity to eliminate the debt drag which international studies, the IMF, European Central Bank, Bank of International Settlements, and Professor Rogoff and Professor Reinhart have all shown pulls down growth. They are saying our debt is so high it is lowering economic growth right now.

We would change all of this through a balanced budget coming out of committee. It would put us on the right path without having to reduce spending, actually. We could still increase spending every single year.

I submit my motion, and I yield to the Chair.

Mr. President, was the time used there time against the motion?

Mr. President, we understand what is happening here. The budget produced by the majority does not balance, doesn't come close to balancing, does not change in any measurable way the debt course we are on that the Congressional Budget Office Director said is unsustainable.

This budget taxes more, it spends more, and does not change the debt course we are on; therefore, it is a budget about to bankrupt America because, as Mr. Elmendorf said, our current deficit plan endangers our future.

They have used--we have counted--now over 30 times the word ``balanced.'' We have heard a balanced approach, a balanced plan; a balanced approach, a balanced plan. But it does not balance.

Senator Coons, a great Senator, was a county commissioner. He balanced his budget and gained acclaim for it, and it wasn't a balanced approach--it was a balanced budget.

The Presiding Officer has been a Governor and balanced his budget. All former Governors in this body balanced budgets--real balance.

A balanced approach means nothing, nada, zero. A balanced approach means nothing. It is an excuse to tax and spend and not change the debt course of America. At some point, every Senator is going to have a moral responsibility to decide whether they want to stay on that course.

The Ryan budget is not before us. This motion that I have does not require the committee to have a Ryan budget. This motion would simply say: Committee, go back and look at this budget. Committee, do a budget that balances, and if you want to tax oil companies, if you want to tax rich people more, lay it out. If you want to cut spending in some other area than Ryan wants to cut spending, do so. But remember, Ryan does not cut spending.

We see the chart up here. How much does Ryan cut spending? Ryan's budget doesn't cut spending. Our proposal is not to cut spending. It increases spending every single year. One of the ways this country is going broke is, when they reduce the growth of spending, they say it is a cut. That kind of logic is why we are going broke.

If we change the growth rate from 5.4 percent that we are on now to 3.4 percent, this budget would balance. We can grow spending every year and balance the budget--no net cuts. Some programs ought to be eliminated but no net cuts.

We are glad to have Senator Thune, who has served so ably on the Budget Committee for many years, is thoroughly knowledgeable about these issues and is part of the leadership in

our conference and I yield to him on the resolution.

How much time remains on the resolution?

Mr. President, I yield to Senator Thune.

Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from South Dakota such time as he and Senator Johanns would utilize.

Mr. President, if you would, that would be from the resolution.

Madam President, I have enjoyed listening to our colleagues discuss the issues, particularly

the sequester. I know Senator Kaine and I talked about this previously. I would just like to make a few points that are so important for every Member of this body to understand.

Senator Kaine just said additional deficit reduction is needed. He is exactly correct. But this budget has no additional deficit reduction.

They claim they have a balanced approach. They have used that word now 40-some-odd times, ``balance.'' This budget never balances. It does not balance in 10 years, 15 years, and has no vision that would even lead to balance. It remains unsustainable in terms of adding to the debt every single year, resulting in a 1-year interest payment in 2023 of $800 billion--well more than the defense budget; surging interest from around $250 billion now to $800 billion a year--forever, I suppose. And it would go up with the debt rising and with interest rates that could rise even more.

So we don't have additional deficit reduction in the budget that we are being asked to vote on. Senator Kaine said can we make cuts? Yes. Well, I would say we can make more cuts, but we don't. Yes, there is some reduction in some programs, but, on net, no deficit reduction in the budget. So it doesn't change the debt course. You can't deny that.

What we are saying is, go back to the committee. Write the budget like you want. If you think there ought to be more taxes than I think, that is OK. Bring it up. Let's vote on it. But let's have this budget do what you say, be balanced. They have used this word ``balance''-- balance, balance, balance--40 more times. We have been keeping up with it. It is so ridiculous. It is utterly unbalanced. It never balances.

By their own admission, the deficits in 1 year are never lower than $400 billion. So it never balances.

A balanced approach. A balanced plan. Why? Are they guilty of confusing the issue? Do they think the American people will hear their message and think, oh, they have a balanced budget? I suspect that is what they think. Twice I have observed my Democratic colleagues at the committee slip and say they have a balanced budget. They have this in their heads so much, but a balanced plan is what they are really saying.

So what is a balanced plan? The way it has been promoted: $1 trillion in tax increases, $1 trillion in spending cuts, a net $2 trillion in deficit reduction. Not so. It is not so. The tax increases are offset by spending increases.

That is just the way it is. You can spin it any way you want to, but I want to make that point.

One thing I will share about the sequester--and I am so pleased that Senator Rubio is here, and I look forward to yielding to him. I truly think this is an unwise mechanism to reduce spending. It should not happen. It should be fixed.

I totally agree with my colleagues that this is unfairly and disproportionately falling on the military. I know Senator Rubio has military bases in Florida. I have them in Alabama and they have them in Virginia, we almost all do. These are patriotic Americans, and these furloughs are in effect 1 day a week, a 20-percent pay cut out of the blue. It is not necessary, and there are other things that have happened.

So how did it happen? Well, it was proposed by the White House, who said: OK, if this special committee doesn't reach agreement on the details of spending cuts, then we will have a sequester across the board. So it originated from the White House. The political theater we have down here is not correct, and we need to be honest about this.

The Republicans agreed to it. It was part of the Budget Control Act. That is the legislation. And who signed the legislation in blue ink right on the back? The President of the United States, Barack Obama.

So he signed it, it is his document, and we agreed to raise the debt ceiling $2.1 trillion, and we agreed to reduce spending over 10 years by $2.1 trillion.

Before the ink was dry, the President was proposing to eliminate the cuts he agreed to. He has been fighting to eliminate those cuts from the beginning, and they are not really cuts. If they were properly applied, it would reduce the growth of spending and not cut spending at all.

So the committee that was supposed to find other cuts failed. The sequester went into effect. And it is an antimilitary provision. It was designed by Jack Lew, a very liberal member of the President's Cabinet, who was the Director of the Office of Management and Budget at the time.

The President, in my opinion, seemed to be quite happy to see these cuts fall on the Defense Department. He seemed to be happy to have this happen.

Why do I say that? Because he has done nothing to fix it except demand something that he has no right to demand, and that is to violate this agreement to reduce spending and instead raise taxes and spend more. That is not going to happen. Congress is not going to vote to violate the agreement they made with the American people less than 2 years ago. If we give in on that, we might as well quit.

Our colleagues say they want to have a balanced approach to this budget, and they are going to raise taxes. Most people who hear that think the taxes would be used to reduce the deficit, but they are not. The taxes are going to be used to fund more spending over the agreement we have had in place now for about 20 months under the Budget Control Act. They want to increase spending above these levels, and they want to use all the new tax increases they are now proposing to fund it.

It does not change the debt course of America, which Mr. Elmendorf, the CBO Director, told us in committee is an unsustainable path that we are on even after the Budget Control Act was passed in August 2011. So we need to work on it.

I am prepared to offer solutions. The House of Representatives has twice passed legislation that would alter the Budget Control Act so that the cuts don't fall so hard on defense. In fact, they eliminated the additional defense cuts, the second phase of defense cuts, and found cuts elsewhere in the budget and smoothed it out fairly. That is what should happen, and that is where we need to be.

So I would encourage all our citizens, all our Members of Congress, all our military leaders by saying if you want to fix the sequester then address your request to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Address your request to the Commander in Chief of the U.S. military, who has an absolute duty--a responsibility--to ensure that these reductions are done in a fair way.

We have voted and fought for flexibility on this side of the aisle, and we believe in finding, and will vote for, other reductions in spending to prevent this happening the way it is set to occur under current law.

It seems to me they wanted it to happen this way, so they could come to the floor and make a point somehow that we are dramatically and disastrously hammering the budget, when it is not necessary for it to be done this way. That is the way I see it, and I believe we can reach agreement on this. I think somehow we will because it is not right the way the military--representing one-sixth of all Federal spending--is taking half of the cuts. That is the way it falls right now. It is not right and it is too damaging.

It is great to see Senator Rubio. I believe he is next up. I yield to him and thank him for his contribution to our discussion.

Madam President, I ask that time be counted against the resolution.

Madam President, I will be yielding to Senator Thune, one of the experienced former members of the Budget Committee. He will be sharing his thoughts. I would say to my colleagues, we have been hearing that the Democratic plan is a balanced approach. It is balanced, but it is not a balanced budget. What we need is a balanced budget. That means the amount of money that comes in is the same as the amount of money that goes out.

We can do that and increase spending every single year by 3.4 percent. This is very doable. It does not require the slashing of spending on every important account that we care about in Washington. That is what we are here for, and the administration, the Cabinet Secretaries and so forth, they will make sure the limited amount of money any government has is wisely spent. Therefore, we are not talking about devastating cuts. We are talking about better management and working with how to grow spending over the next 10 years--growing spending over the next 10 years by 3.4 percent, not at 5.4 percent. That balances the budget even under the assumption of 2.5 percent inflation. It can be done. That is what the experts tell us, and that is the best estimate we have today.

The motion to recommit the budget is now on the floor--recommit to the committee, with instructions that they decide what to do to alter it so that when it comes back it is balanced, a real balanced budget-- not a balanced plan, not a balanced approach, not some balanced theory--but a real balanced budget. Presumably our colleagues think balance is important because they have mentioned the word about 40 times. We have been counting them since we have been on the floor. I think when we get to that vote we will be asking our colleagues: Do you really want to achieve a balanced budget?

Senator Sanders said: We think you do not tax the rich enough. You need to tax the rich more and more--as if taxing and punishing them will fix the problem of growth in this economy that is truly too slow. We are having the slowest recovery in our Nation's history, at least since World War II. So we do not have a good recovery coming on. We need to be talking about that.

But I guess my final statement is we do not need a balanced approach, we need a balanced budget. There is a gulf of difference between the two.

The plan before us today raises taxes $1 trillion. They claim it cuts spending nearly $1 trillion and that it is a balanced approach: tax increases, spending cuts, and deficit reduction. That is the message that has been coming from the other side. Except it is not accurate. This budget increases taxes by $1.5 trillion. It also increases spending. That is what it does.

We are concerned about that. The net result is there is no change, it seems to me--no change, a good analysis shows, in the debt course we are on.

I see my colleague, Senator Thune. It is now time to yield to him. I yield to Senator Thune.

I thank the Chair. It will be yielding off the resolution.

Madam President, I see we have Senator Vitter of Louisiana ready to speak. I ask unanimous consent that their time be taken off the budget resolution.

Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Senator Portman is such a valuable member of the Budget Committee. He served as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He knows how this situation works.

But that dotted line on the chart, it is just spending, isn't it? It is spending as a percentage of the American economy. So in some sense that surging upward line of spending is even worse than at first glance it might appear.

Madam President, I think we will proceed now to the other side. Then there will be back and forth on the Internet Fairness Act; is that correct?

All right.

For the information of my colleagues--and I guess this will not be in concrete--I will recognize Senator Enzi for 10 minutes, Senator Alexander for 10 minutes, and Senators Blunt and Ayotte for 5 minutes each.

Senator Enzi, I know, has worked hard on this legislation, and I yield to him.

Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes to Senator Cochran.

Mr. President, what is our agreement at this point?

You are into it?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 2 minutes.

Mr. President, I appreciated Senator Tester's remarks and his belief that Montanans believe they should live within their means, and he supports a plan to reduce the deficit. But I just want to share with my colleagues that the budget that is before us today is not balanced. It does not reduce the deficit. It taxes a lot more, but its spending increases at the same level, and there is no net change in the unsustainable debt course we are on.

He said it reduces the deficit by $2 trillion. I want you to know that is what the Budget Committee claims for that budget, but it is not accurate. It does not reduce the deficit $2 trillion. It does not. It keeps us on the same path.

It is not a balanced deficit reduction plan, because it doesn't reduce the deficit. It increases taxes and increases spending, if you call that balance. It is not the right kind of plan. I wish we could get together on fundamentals of numbers in that budget.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question? I will not insist on an answer but I wish to raise something.

You have the time. That will be fine. Thank you.

Mr. President, my colleague, Senator Murray, has questioned the $1.5 trillion in tax increases that we have contended in this legislation. I think it is there because there are two separate reserve funds that would allow taxes to be increased by $500 billion without legislation and would go through without a supermajority, to be passed on a simple vote.

But our colleagues say that is not there, so I would offer into the Record, Mr. President, a number of documents that support our view that it is $1.5 trillion. Others can agree, disagree about it, as it is presently written. I would offer that for the Record and our explanation and why we think that is accurate. I ask unanimous consent to have that material printed in the Record.

I would like to say this to my chairman: I am willing to concede the point if the chair would agree to amend the two reserve funds so that they cannot be used to advance tax increases, and I would cease making that argument and accept the fact that you have already almost $1 trillion in new taxes.

So I would ask through the chair, is the Senator willing to amend those two reserve fund languages so they cannot be used to add another $500 billion in new taxes?

Mr. President, I thank the chair, and I assume, then, that she refuses to clarify the ambiguity, the certain option to increase taxes by another $500 billion. That could be eliminated simply by making the suggestion I just announced. She is rejecting that. So I think it is legitimate to assume that the intent of this reserve fund is to raise taxes another $500 billion.

Secondly, with regard to the situation we have been discussing concerning the sequester, I know the Senator said just a few moments ago that the sequester is not deficit reduction. We can disagree about that, but that was her opinion, apparently. I think it is inaccurate.

But my question to the Senator is, does your budget as now presented on the floor eliminate the spending limits that are in current law under the Budget Control Act and specifically the sequester portion?

Well, I wouldn't misconstrue it. So it does eliminate the sequester.

So then the next question would be, did you score the allowed increase in spending of $1.2 trillion in your budget as increased spending?

Well, your staff indicated that you could not double- count that money, and if you eliminated the $1.2 trillion in sequester limit and allowed $1.2 trillion more to be spent, you would not save $1.85 trillion but approximately $700 billion on that decision alone. Do you agree with your staff in their analysis?

One more question, then. Do you still stand by the promotional material that went with the budget--and in the budget document itself--that you have reduced the deficit over current law by $1.85 trillion or isn't it a fact that eliminating the sequester reduces that to approximately $700 billion in savings?

Mr. President, I would just say that the Associated Press disagrees. It is plainly inaccurate. Plainly, I asked that question, over current law, did they count the sequester increase in spending? And the staff admitted in our Budget Committee mark up that it did not--that increased spending--and therefore we reduce the deficit savings from $1.85 trillion to about $700 billion. There is another $700 billion in gimmicks, so there is no reduction in the deficit in this budget.

The AP reported:

. . . because Democrats want to restore $1.2 trillion in

automatic spending cuts . . .--cuts imposed by [the] failure

to strike a . . . budget pact--Murray's blueprint increases

spending slightly when compared with current policies.

The Hill says:

The Murray budget does not contain net spending cuts with

the sequester turned off.

So I will say this is a serious issue. We need to understand that the sequester is law. It is not just a policy, it is in law. It is taking effect right now. The deficit reduction proposed by this bill is not $1.8 trillion but, in fact, zero.

I thank the Chair and would now recognize Senator Barrasso for 10 minutes, I believe, and Senator Alexander for 10 minutes. I thank them for their patience.

I wish to thank Senator Murray for her leadership on this budget. This is not an easy thing. We all know this. She actually has been working on this many years. I am very proud of this budget and the work which has been done here, the balanced approach which has been taken.

I wish to thank Senator Mikulski, the Senator from Maryland, our fearless leader of the women Senators, who has been there since the beginning and understands these fights in a different way than many of us who are new can't imagine. We will need to continue moving forward for the women of this country and can never step backward, which is where I wish to begin discussing this budget.

The budget Senator Murray has proposed is a budget which moves us forward. For a long time, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have been talking about how we need to get $4 trillion in budget reduction and deficit reduction over the next 10 years.

We have done $2.4 trillion. It is a start. It is not all we need to do, but it is a start. Of that amount, the $2.4 trillion, 70 percent was in cuts. When we look at the proposals which have been made by Simpson-Bowles, Rivlin-Domenici, the Gang of 6, all the groups which have worked on a very strong bipartisan basis, they have all proposed something like 2 to 1 on spending cuts to revenue.

The proposal which has been made on the House side which passed in the House today isn't even close to that. In fact, when we look at Congressman Ryan's budget, there isn't revenue in this budget. He does include some of the past revenues. Even when you do that, that is a 10- to-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue for this country going forward. It is not the right mix. Yes, we need to balance our budget, but we also need a balance which is budgeted.

The last thing we need to do is balance our budget on the backs of women and children. This is why it is important for people. I will return later to speak about some of the economic issues in my State and why it is so important to move forward and have a budget with a balanced mix of spending cuts and revenue. I truly believe we need a deal here. We need to bring this debt down. It is very important to me because I think it will trigger investment. We need to do it in the right way.

Today, I am focused on one issue; that is, the effect this budget would have on women and children, the budget proposed in the House versus the budget Senator Murray has put together.

It is no coincidence the Senator who is leading us through this budget process is the same Senator who joined me last spring when the Violence Against Women Act was on the floor. We needed to rally all 17 women Senators behind us. At the time people thought it was stuck, it was a gridlock and wasn't going anywhere. Then all the women Senators, Democrats and Republicans, came together.

Patty Murray was the leader in this effort. This is why this Senate budget not only maintains but increases critical funding for the Violence Against Women and Family Violence Program. This will give law enforcement better tools for responding to cases of domestic violence and sexual assault, programs which make sure mothers and children have a safe place to go and programs which help victims get back on their feet again. Even more important, this includes programs which save lives.

As a former prosecutor, I know firsthand how important the Violence Against Women Act has been. We were very pleased it was reauthorized on such a strong bipartisan basis. It is incredibly important, not just for those individual victims but for entire families and entire communities. Statistics show kids raised in violent homes are 76 times more likely to be perpetrators of these crimes when they grow up.

This is why I truly appreciate Senator Murray's work to ensure we have a policy in place, which is something we worked on in the Judiciary Committee. I see Senator Hirono from Hawaii. We worked hard on this, as it is important, but also the funding is in place. We consolidated programs, reduced funding with the Violence Against Women Act and did different things in the last Violence Against Women Act to make it more efficient. This is fully funded in this bill, and it is very important for people to know who care about this.

As to health care, something which is very important to our kids, the House budget, as has been noted by Senator Stabenow and others, would slash billions of dollars in basic health care services for children, including prenatal care for expectant moms and vaccinations for kids. Under the House proposal, more than 33,000 women would lose access to maternal and child health care services in Minnesota alone. Meanwhile, another 8,551 children would lose access to lifesaving immunizations. This is only in my State.

Sadly, after the devastating flu season we just experienced, with many children dying across this country, how could anyone think it is a good idea to cut funding for vaccination programs? How could that be one of the proposals in this budget. There are so many loopholes we could close, so many tax subsidies we could eliminate. Why would we cut kids' vaccinations? Sadly, this is what happened in the House today.

While we are on the subject of health care, I also wish to point out the House budget would cut funding for the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, meaning hundreds of thousands of women would lose access to mammograms, pap smear tests, cervical cancer screening, which is the tip of the iceberg. By repealing the Affordable Care Act, the House budget would threaten preventive care for women across this country. The Ryan budget would eliminate the important reforms to improve patient care, already noted by Senator Mikulski and Senator Stabenow. It would eliminate the important reforms to improve patient care and the delivery system which is included in the health care bill.

What is interesting to me is Congressman Ryan does acknowledge the Affordable Care Act has some very good savings in it because he includes those over $700 billion in savings in his budget.

This is great, but then he cuts out all those budgets I spoke about which were so important to the American people: to not be banned from health insurance because you have a preexisting condition and to be able to keep kids on their parents' insurance until they are 26 years old. I am looking forward to that with my own daughter.

The third thing I mentioned is closing the doughnut hole for our seniors. Those things are all being cut under this budget.

We have had this debate too many times already. I wish to be clear; the Senate budget not only protects core funding for preventive services but upholds the Affordable Care Act and its most important provisions for women and children.

Let's turn to another front to see how women and children of this country, particularly children, fare and this is education. On the education front, the Senate budget--while still making $975 billion in cuts, $975 billion in spending cuts--still maintains core funding for early education through the Head Start Program. The House budget, when combined with sequestration, would push almost 200,000 low-income children out of the program in 2014.

We all know education is one of our best investments. When we look at the global economy and education growing across this country, we are getting real competition from other countries. The last thing we need to do is cut back on education.

This is why the Senate proposal includes continued support for elementary and secondary schools through programs such as IDEA, the ladder which provides early intervention in special education services to kids with disabilities. Our budget also makes key investments in improving literacy and increasing the emphasis on STEM, science, technology, engineering, math.

This is the future. We want to train our own kids in America, as Senator Sanders is well aware, to ensure they have the skills to be able to compete on the international stage.

What does the House budget do? It slashes close to $1.2 trillion of investments in education, skills training, science and technology, R&D, transportation and infrastructure over the next 10 years.

Do you know what I think. I think that is being penny wise and pound foolish and not what we should do in the budget for the United States of America. I truly believe we have an amazing opportunity right now. We have seen better unemployment numbers than we have seen in 4 years. The housing market is starting to turn around. People are starting to go back to work. It is not nearly where it should be. The last thing we need to do is go backward. The last people who want to see us go backward are the women of America.

I was listening as Senator Stabenow spoke about the health care bill, the Affordable Care Act, and during the Finance Committee there was a debate about whether maternity care should be included in the mandatory benefits. One of our colleagues at the time said: I don't understand why maternity benefits should be included. I never needed them.

Without missing a moment, Senator Stabenow looked across the table and said: I bet your mother did.

There are a lot of mothers around America right now who are looking at these budgets because these budgets represent values, the future of our kids and the women and men of this country.

Let's bring our spending down. Let's get over the $4 trillion figure we are supposed to get out of the debt reduction but do so in a way which doesn't hurt middle-class families and doesn't hurt the families most vulnerable. I know we can do it. We are a great country.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Murray for her great leadership. I also wish to thank Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin on the Marketplace Fairness Act. This is a bill and an amendment that needs to pass. It is incredibly important to small businesses, big businesses, and to people across this country who work for retailers.

When I travel around my State, I hear from small, locally owned retailers about the competitive disadvantage they face against online retailers, small businesses such as Creative Kidstuff that sells educational and developmental books for kids and Thrifty White Pharmacy, a full-service, employee-owned drugstore.

Right now, States are currently unable to require out-of-State or online-only retailers to collect sales tax and it puts local mom-and- pop stores at a disadvantage. Not only that, but this tax loophole is draining billions of dollars in lost revenues from State and local governments--$23 billion last year alone across the country.

In effect, this tax loophole subsidizes some taxpayers at the expense of others and some businesses over others. That is why we call this the Marketplace Fairness Act.

I have been committed to a competitive agenda for this country since I got to the Senate, and part of that agenda includes not only encouraging competition and innovation, but it is also about having an even playing field for our businesses. Minnesota alone lost about $394 million in 2011 from out-of-State sales that are legally due but not collected. This lost revenue translates into over 7 percent of Minnesota's general sales tax liability in 2011. That is what we are talking about. This is real money.

One of the longstanding principles of tax fairness is that similarly situated taxpayers should be taxed similarly. A bookstore on Grand Avenue in St. Paul has to charge a sales tax, while an online retailer selling that same book hundreds of miles away does not. A consumer buying a T-shirt in downtown Duluth is taxed differently than his friend who is buying that same T-shirt on the Internet. Someone buying a TV at Best Buy--hometown company--in Richfield, MN, is taxed differently than if he buys the same TV online.

Our current situation encourages tax avoidance, undermines our tax system, and ultimately creates a competitive disadvantage for brick- and-mortar retailers at a time when we want them to succeed.

I am so excited that there is a bipartisan group of Senators supporting this bill. Our momentum is growing. We can see it today on the floor.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a list of some of the supporters from my State that includes major stores such as Target and Best Buy to the Uffda Shop in Red Wing, MN. I have shopped there and I suggest my colleagues do the same. It also includes Mary's Morsels & Catering and Sleepy Eye Floral & Design, to give my colleagues just a sense of the hundreds of companies that support this in Minnesota.

Mr. President, I will conclude my remarks by saying this is an opportunity to help our State and local governments, but it is a big opportunity to help the employees and workers of this country who work every day, showing those TVs, making sense of things, explaining how things work, going to work every day, putting those flowers in the vases. They deserve an equal playing field. This amendment does it.

I am now going to begin my 30 minutes of Joint Economic Committee time. I am the vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee, which is a joint committee with the House and I am the Senate chair.

I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes, that Senator Tester be permitted to speak for up to 8 minutes, that Senator Sanders be permitted to speak for up to 5 minutes, that I then again be permitted to speak for up to 5 minutes, and that Senator Franken be permitted to speak for up to 2 minutes.

Mr. President, I wish to first thank Senator Murray again for her leadership on the Budget Committee. Day in and day out, month in and month out, she has been working on this budget and she has achieved, along with the committee, a smart, balanced proposal for meeting our country's fiscal challenges.

This is not the first time I have come to the Senate floor to talk about the critical need for a balanced approach and to bring down our debt in a balanced way, but this is the first time in a long time I have actually felt optimistic that we are going to get a budget through the Senate and optimistic that there are a lot of stirrings of bipartisanship and compromise. While our budget, as has been pointed out and I will point out, is very different than the House budget, I think there are still grains of compromise there. We have seen this willingness in the Senate, with our Republican colleagues, to talk about bringing the debt down, whether it is the Gang of 6 or the Gang of 8 or whether it is the work of Simpson-Bowles or the work done with the Rivlin-Domenici group. These are all reasonable proposals. We don't agree with everything in them, but they are all reasonable proposals and they contain some balance.

The other reason I am optimistic is that we have a great opportunity here. I was reminded of this last week when former Republican Senator Judd Gregg testified before our Joint Economic Committee. He actually paraphrased the Foreign Minister of Australia saying, ``The United States is one debt deal away from leading the entire world out of economic doldrums.''

I couldn't agree more. Look at the economic news we have had in just the last month. We know there is so much work to do, that there are too many people unemployed, and there is too much investment that is not being made. But we also know that we saw the best month for unemployment numbers than we have seen in 4 years. We are seeing a turnaround in the construction market. We are seeing a turnaround in the housing market. I can tell my colleagues that in my State, we have unemployment that is at about 5.6 percent. So we are seeing progress, but we have more to do. The last thing we need to do now is to go backward. We need to go forward, and that is what Senator Murray's budget does in a very balanced way.

As I have said many times before, we are talking about balance. I believe the Senate budget achieves the right equilibrium. It includes an equal mix of responsible spending cuts and new revenue from closing loopholes and ending wasteful spending in the Tax Code. Our proposal builds on the $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction we have already received--I don't think every citizen knows that--$2.4 trillion. Let's remember 70 percent of that was spending cuts and the other 30 percent was revenue. That is a balance. It is not exactly the balance we wanted on our side of the aisle, but if we were to adopt the House budget right now, we would be at, if we include the past revenues, 10-to-1 spending cuts to revenue. That is not the balance we are seeing in the other proposals that have been made by these bipartisan groups.

How does our budget do this? The additional debt reduction to the $2.4 trillion we have done to get to over $4 trillion in debt reduction--first of all, $975 billion in targeted cuts and $975 billion in revenue. Again, this will help us to surpass the bipartisan goal of $4 trillion and put our debt-to-GDP ratio at about 70 percent.

Some of the most important points in the Senate budget include the fact that it replaces sequestration--which is just a hammer--with smart, targeted cuts while also making critical investments in areas such as education, workforce training, and infrastructure.

When I get out in our State with our unemployment rate at 5.6 percent, I hear time and time again that there are jobs unfilled, that we need to train workers, that we need our high school kids to be going into trades again, to be going into technology, math, and science. This budget accounts for that. It produces savings in Medicare and Medicaid by eliminating waste and fraud, promoting efficiency, and emphasizing cost alignment. We know a little bit about this in Minnesota, with the Mayo Clinic and the way we deliver health care in a high-quality, low- cost way.

One study out of Dartmouth showed that if they simply used in the rest of the hospitals across the country the cost-effective ways of the Mayo Clinic, we could save $50 billion--$50 billion in 5 years with chronically ill patients. That gives a sense of what we are talking about when we talk about high-quality, low-cost care.

Our budget also recognizes there is a massive amount of spending that takes place through the Tax Code to the tune of over $1 trillion per year in tax expenditures.

I come from a State with a thriving renewable energy sector, and 2 years ago we agreed to let the ethanol tax credit expire at the end of 2011, which saved billions of dollars. In fact, that was $60 billion in 10 years--$60 billion. I do not understand why the oil industry cannot follow ethanol's lead. I am proud of the work they are doing. I have been out to Lewiston. I have seen the drilling in North Dakota. It has helped to increase our own domestic oil production and decrease our dependency on foreign oil. But I do not believe the oil companies still need $40 billion in 10 years. That is a lot of money we could bring in to reduce the debt.

We can make other commonsense changes. One I would propose is with the home mortgage deduction, very near and dear to everyone's heart. Cap it at $500,000 in value of a home. If you buy a million-dollar home, great. Then you get it for up to $500,000 in value of the home. That brings in tens of billions of dollars in debt reduction.

All told, the proposal that is coming out of Senator Murray's budget reduces the deficit by approximately $2 trillion. If enacted, our debt will continue on a downward path, where our debt-to-GDP ratio will be, as I mentioned, about 70 percent. The Congressional Budget Office has stated that a debt-to-GDP ratio in that range would also result in a 1- percent increase in the size of the economy in that year.

We cannot discount the impact that a growing economy can have on deficit

reduction. CBO expects GDP growth to be above 3 percent in 3 of the next 4 years. As the economy grows, we will see more revenue, and we will see lower deficits.

Former CBO Director Alice Rivlin, who just testified last week at a Joint Economic Committee hearing on the very topic of debts and deficits, said this:

The really important thing is to keep the debt from growing

faster than the economy.

I could not agree more. Deficit reduction must be paired with economic growth. This is where we need to be, and I am optimistic that ultimately--while we have many differences that we are going to hear a lot about today--ultimately, we are going to come together on something that works for America.

Unlike the proposal in the House, I will tell you the Senate budget preserves and protects Medicare, ensuring that it is there for our seniors today and strong for our children and grandchildren tomorrow.

I firmly believe we can make some reforms to our Social Security safety net, and that those reforms--that money--can go right back into Social Security to keep it solvent. On the Medicare front, there are many things we can do without reducing the benefits for our current seniors, for the people who deserve that help.

Look at what we could do. The VA negotiates prescription drug prices and gets much less expensive drug prices for high-quality drugs. Right now, we do not do that with Medicare. By negotiating prescription drug prices under Medicare Part D, you could produce $240 billion in savings over 10 years right there. Why not leverage the power of America's seniors? They have a lot of power.

We all agree we need to reduce our debt. But our ultimate goal is not simply a balanced budget; it is a budget that is balanced.

Let's look at what goes on with the Ryan budget. Well, the Ryan budget gives millionaires a huge tax cut, drastically lowering their income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent.

Last year, the Joint Economic Committee, on which I serve, estimated that a similar plan introduced would have given millionaires an additional $285,000 in tax breaks, while hitting the average middle- class family with a $1,300 tax hike.

He also claims his tax cuts for the wealthy, which would cost about $4.5 trillion--and I say that because I believe they would be paid for by the middle class--will not add to the deficit. But Ryan refuses to name one specific loophole or expenditure that his budget would eliminate to pay for the tax cuts.

Some experts project that such extreme cuts, as we would see in his budget, would cost jobs. I believe that is true. That is why, as we are seeing this improvement in stabilization of our economy, we need to do things in a balanced way over the long term. We need to send the clear message that we are reducing this debt and get to our goal of $4 trillion in debt reduction in 10 years. But we simply cannot do it by doing it on the backs of the middle class who are still struggling in this country.

I urge my colleagues to support this budget proposal. It is time to get it done. I truly see this as a time of opportunities not only in the next 2 days to get the budget done, but also in the next few months as we negotiate with our colleagues across the aisle to get a budget for America.

Thank you very much, Mr. President.

I now yield 8 minutes to Senator Tester of Montana.

Mr. President, the Joint Economic Committee has 30 minutes on our side, and I do not know on the Republican side. I think we are about halfway or more into it.

Yes.

If the Senator would like to speak for a minute or so, if he has something he would like to say.

Mr. President, I think we have made our case here with the $975 billion in spending cuts that are contained in the budget, and the fact that to date we have made $2.4 trillion in debt reduction, and of that 70 percent or $1.5 trillion has been spending cuts. What we are simply trying to do with this budget is keep this balanced approach to not set an economy--which was literally on its heels a few years ago-- back in the same place. We want to do deficit reduction. We want to give our businesses the kind of consistency and incentive to invest, but not do it in a way which Chairman Bernanke has said would cause a sharp contraction by doing too much too soon at once on the backs of the middle class and seniors. I am very hopeful in the coming months I will be able to find some kind of compromise and agreement with our colleagues.

The American people are tired of the gridlock. They want to see people are willing to work together. I truly believe courage is not just standing alone but standing next to someone you don't always agree with for the betterment of this country. Senator Sessions and I have worked very well together on Judiciary matters, and I wish to continue to do this on the budget.

Turning to another matter, I spoke about marketplace fairness, and I support that amendment to this bill. I also want to talk about the medical device tax repeal. As I mentioned before, one of my major focuses in the Senate has been on an innovation agenda, the idea we should manufacture items in this country, invent things, and export to the world. This is how we are going to get out of the current situation we are in. I believe we can do it.

We need to do it by promoting innovation all across this country. My State has a long history of innovation, bringing the world everything from the pacemaker to the Post-it note. We are home to one of the world's leading medical device companies, Medtronic, started by Earl Bakken in his garage. It is not just the large medical device companies and their employees who keep this industry running, the small- and medium-sized companies and their entrepreneurs are incredibly vital as well.

In Minnesota we have over 400 medical device companies employing more than 35,000 people across the State. This thriving technology, the medical technology sector, has been one of the keys to our success and one of the bright spots in America's economy. When you look at the potential for exports, as you see a growing middle class in China and in India, people are finally going to the hospital. They are beginning to receive good health care. We have a great potential here for more jobs in America as long as we do this correctly.

The United States is currently the largest net exporter of medical devices in the world, yielding a trade surplus of roughly $5.4 billion a year. Medical device companies are also responsible for creating millions of high-paying, highly skilled American jobs, exactly the kinds of jobs we want in this country. These are the kinds of jobs where every parent sends their kid to high school and says, is he or she going to learn something which will create a job? I am looking at our pages right now, and I can tell you medical device jobs are one of those kinds of jobs.

In order to ensure our country remains a world leader in medical device innovation, we need to address the 2.3-percent excise tax on medical devices. As you know, this came out through the Affordable Care Act. At the time I opposed that tax. We negotiated and were able to get it halved from $40 billion to $20 billion in 10 years. It still isn't right because it creates too much of a burden.

Medical device manufacturers are not the ones which are going to get multiple new customers, millions of new customers out of the increase in coverage in the health care bill. Pharmaceuticals might. They negotiated something. Think about it. A lot of medical devices are used by people who are older. They tend to have health care coverage with Medicare and other things. This is the issue here is this is not at the right rate, this is not the right tax, and it should be repealed. The tax is a burden on medical device businesses but, most importantly, it is a disincentive for jobs. It stifles innovation, and it makes it more difficult for the next generation of lifesaving devices to make it to the market. I have been fighting to reduce it, repeal it, and to delay it since the first day it was introduced. At the end of last year, I rallied a record number of Democratic Senators behind the effort. While we couldn't get an agreement included in the fiscal cliff negotiations, we had great traction. I think there were 18 or 19 Democratic Senators in strong support.

I see Senator Coats from Indiana, as part of the strong support we had on the Republican side for repealing this tax.

This is why Senator Hatch and I have filed an amendment to the budget resolution to repeal this tax and help give these businesses and their employees the certainty and stability they need to keep researching, developing, and inventing the next medical breakthrough. Our amendment now has the support of 28 of my colleagues from both sides of the aisle. I am hoping we can continue to work in a bipartisan way.

I yield 2 minutes to my colleague Senator Franken of Minnesota to speak about this important issue.

I thank Senator Franken for his strong words in support of this amendment. I thank him for being a cosponsor of this amendment.

May I ask how much remains on the Joint Economic time?

I want to thank the Senators who joined me today as we work to advance a smart, balanced approach for meeting our country's fiscal challenges. The time is ripe for common ground on a budget plan to move the economy forward. While I don't know if we will have that bipartisan plan in the next few days, I think we will get a budget through this Chamber which will pave the way for the kinds of bipartisan negotiations we need to have. We need to keep this country moving, and moving in the direction we need.

When I go out there and talk to small companies throughout my State, they want us to get something done. They want to have consistency so we are not playing green light, red light with the Tax Code; that they know exactly where they stand. I think they all acknowledge everyone is going to have to sacrifice a little here. I think they acknowledge we are going to have to do something which makes a difference and not just speak about it anymore. We have not only the opportunity but the responsibility to find common ground on a deficit reduction plan which will help build a stronger, more resilient framework for economic renewal so families and businesses have the certainty they need.

I think we know neither party is going to get everything it wishes, but this doesn't mean we can put our heads in the sand and pretend this isn't happening. I truly appreciate my Republican colleagues. When we meet behind closed doors and speak about this, they have a willingness to compromise. I think this is what will happen in the future. However, our job in the next 2 days is to get a fair budget through a balanced budget.

This is what Senator Murray's budget is. I have been part of this, and I look forward to working with her and our colleagues in the future to show the American people we can stand tall and do what is right.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I want to thank my ranking member, Senator Sessions. We had a good debate, and I think everyone had a chance to see the differences about the values and priorities that drive us, how we see our country, and our future. I am looking forward to having that conversation again today.

The budget we are debating on the floor this week puts our middle- class families first. It reflects our progrowth, pro-middle-class agenda that the American people went to the polls in support of at the election just a few months ago. It takes the kind of truly balanced approach that families across our country strongly support, and I believe it is a strong and responsible vision for building a foundation for growth and restoring the promise of American opportunity.

I spoke at length last night about our budget. It is built on three principles. No. 1, we have to protect our fragile economic recovery, create jobs, and invest in our long-term growth. This is something every family in America is asking us to focus on.

No. 2, we need to tackle our deficit and debt fairly and responsibly. As Democrats we understand it is a responsibility we bear today, and we do it in this budget. No. 3, we need to keep the promises we made as a Nation to our seniors, our families, and our communities. There are many people who have struggled so much over the last few years and they are counting on us to be there for them again now.

We are going to hear a lot more about all of these principles today, and we are going to discuss the stark contrast between the budget that is expected to move in the House of Representatives today and the plan and path we have put forward here in the Senate as Democrats.

At this time, I yield to Senator Sessions for his opening remarks, and we will continue this debate throughout the day.

Absolutely. I am happy to get things going here today. Does the manager on the other side have an amendment he wishes to start with this morning?

Mr. President, I rise to use time in opposition to the resolution.

Our colleagues have sent a motion to the desk which sends our budget back to committee to balance.

I think we all know what this means. They wish to send our budget back to take months and weeks to put together a budget, which does one of two things in order to balance: It either raises incredible revenue or has devastating cuts. We have seen the package they are talking about. It is the Ryan budget being debated in the House right now. They say they would eliminate the deficit in 2023.

The Republicans have not put this budget out here right now, because they don't want to specify what the cuts are and be responsible for them. They just want some mystical moment to happen back in committee where these tough decisions are made.

We know what they are looking at. They are looking at the Ryan budget. They say it eliminates the deficit, but it does so in a devastating way to middle-class families across this country, families who are already struggling so much.

We hear a lot about balance these days. I want to clarify some real differences, important differences between how the Senate and the House budget use the word ``balance.''

The proposal which passed through the Budget Committee in the House would be devastating for our economic recovery. It would really threaten hundreds of thousands of jobs this year alone. It makes extreme cuts to our infrastructure, which is crumbling; to education, which is so important to our future; to the innovation this country has been built on, which would lay down a strong foundation for broad economic growth--which our Senate budget is working so hard to make happen.

Their budget in the House which the Republicans now want us to go back to committee and put in place would dismantle Medicare and cut off programs to support our middle-class and most vulnerable families. This sounds pretty unbalanced to me.

Frankly, their budget gets worse. As we learned last week, House Republicans have put forth a budget which calls for huge tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and makes it unclear how it will be paid for.

Those pay-fors will come on the backs of families who are working hard, average families who would see their taxes increase in order to give that tax cut to the wealthiest Americans. This is what they call balance.

I don't think that is balance. House Republicans like to say they are offering a balanced budget, which I would note also includes savings from the Affordable Care Act they vowed to repeal and tax increases on the wealthiest, which they strongly oppose. They haven't explained how they will reach that goal of reducing those rates down to 25 percent and who will pay for this. It is pretty clear, when you look at the numbers, how that will happen.

The House Republicans never explain how they get to what they call ``balance,'' because the only way they can do it is by raising taxes on the middle class or making deep cuts to vulnerable families and seniors, who depend on these benefits.

Our budget takes a very different approach to balance. We ensure our families today have the ability to get what they need to put their families back on a stable path to recovery. We make sure we invest in the important things this country needs to ensure our middle class has what they need in education and infrastructure. These are the things which allow families to know their kids can go to college, pay their mortgage, receive job training, and get back to work. That is balance.

When we have a responsible approach to spending cuts and to revenue, balance is an important word. Balance is about making sure we do what the Simpson-Bowles report has recommended, what every bipartisan group has said, and contains a responsible mix of revenues and spending cuts. This ensures no one bears the burden of the challenges of this country alone.

I would not call the House Republican bill balanced. Their balance says the wealthiest Americans, the biggest corporations don't contribute to this problem at all. Everything is done on the backs of our middle-class families.

Balance is an important word. It is an important word to every family, every community, every American. The approach we take is balanced, making sure everyone has an opportunity in this country for the future we need. This ensures everybody participates in solving the problems in front of us.

I take a backseat to no one when it comes to making sure we have a balanced approach. Our budget does that. We are going to be hearing more on it right now. We have a number of colleagues on the floor.

Let me make this very clear. The motion to recommit the Senators on the other side have offered simply says we will return to committee until we get the Ryan bill in front of us. This is something we soundly reject.

I have a number of colleagues here who will participate. I yield to the Senator from Delaware and thank him for his great contributions to our committee this year.

Mr. President, I yield time from the resolution.

Mr. President, I yield 60 minutes to the Senator from Virginia. Both Senators from Virginia are here. They are both great members of our committee who have contributed a great deal of time and effort in helping us get on to a path of sustainable economic recovery and deficit reduction. I appreciate the work of both of them.

I yield to the Senator from Virginia to offer a resolution.

Madam President, I thank the Senators from Virginia and Hawaii for excellent statements and laying out the framework of why it is so important that we have a progrowth bill that is balanced, that deals with both spending cuts and revenue, and I really appreciate their time both in committee and on the Senate floor.

I ask unanimous consent that at 3:45 p.m. today there be up to 60 minutes of debate, equally divided between Senators Klobuchar and Coats, or their designees, for a report on the economic goals and policy under section 305(b) of the Congressional Budget Act.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent this discussion be taken from the resolution time.

Let me thank all the women Senators who are down here speaking so eloquently about the importance of passing a budget resolution which reflects the values and needs of women in this country and the men who are important to them.

I wish to especially thank our dean of women, Senator Mikulski, who has made this a lifetime passion to ensure the women who come after her have the strength and ability to participate in the economy in any way they wish. I thank her and the other Senators for their leadership.

Senator Klobuchar will continue this discussion.

Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from Hawaii for joining a number of very strong Democratic women to talk about the importance of our budget for women in this country, and I appreciate her strong voice here in the Senate.

I yield 30 minutes off the resolution to the Senator from Vermont, who is a great member of our Budget Committee and contributes so much thought to all of it. We appreciate all his work.

Madam President, it is my understanding there are a number of Senators who have come to talk on one of the provisions they would like to offer. I think we will start with their side, with Senator Enzi to be yielded to from their side.

If the Senator wants to yield time to him, I will then yield to a Democrat.

Madam President, I note the time will come off the resolution on this.

Madam President, I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Illinois off the resolution.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the hour for Senators Klobuchar and Coats now begin at 4:10 p.m.

Madam President, I yield 5 minutes to the chair of the Finance Committee, Senator Baucus.

Madam President, I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Maryland.

I believe they are yielding time off the Republican side.

MS. AYOTTE. Madam President, I rise in opposition to the amendment I heard that is going to be filed, the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act. I think we have need to rename this legislative proposal for what it is, the Internet Tax Collection Act. I come from a State, New Hampshire, that does not have a sales tax nor do we have an income tax. One of our famous Governors said low taxes are the result of low spending, and that is how we do it.

There has been a lot of talk on the floor today about somehow this Marketplace Fairness Act is about States rights. This act, which really should be named the Internet Tax Collection Act, infringes on the rights of retailers in New Hampshire and businesses that have thrived and grown over something great called the Internet. It forces them to become tax collectors for the rest of the Nation. In fact, they would be forced to become tax collectors for nearly 10,000 tax jurisdictions across this country should this proposal go forward.

I have heard a lot of talk about leveling the so-called playing field. There is nothing level about this playing field. These are cash- strapped States looking for more money and asking Washington to impose burdens on other States that have chosen to have a low tax burden, like States such as mine which doesn't have a sales tax. In fact, this is another attempt to turn our businesses into tax collectors. I think it is wrong.

It is the opposite of States rights. There has been some discussion of conservative support for this. There is absolutely nothing conservative about this proposal because, again, what this is about is officials in cash-strapped States across the country looking for new ways to plug their budget holes. They are attempting to make New Hampshire businesses, and other businesses across this country, use the Internet to collect their taxes. This is not just about the State of Tennessee handling its own taxes, it is making New Hampshire, which has no sales tax, collect for the rest of the Nation, and it is wrong.

The exemption for small businesses is a red herring. This so-called exemption doesn't even match up with what the SBA defines as a small business retailer. We know what will happen with the small business exemption. When the States don't get the revenue they want, they will be right back here again looking for us to repeal the small business exemption, saying: It is not fair that this category of businesses has been exempt. They will be looking for more and more, and here we are in Washington letting them trample on the States that made the decision not to have a sales tax. This bill should not go forward.

I want to share some stories from New Hampshire. My constituents have written to me about this. A company in Franconia, which is in the northern part of New Hampshire, calls this a job killer. From Pittsfield, an online coin and stamp dealer says: If policymakers

decide to impose new sales tax collection burdens on small businesses and force them to collect and remit 9,600 tax jurisdictions nationwide, the legal compliance and administrative cost alone would undoubtedly make it harder and, in many cases, impossible to enjoy the opportunities and benefits of the Internet marketplace.

This is from a business in Amherst:

Our company is a poster child for small family-run Internet

businesses. We have over 80,000 customers nationwide. The

burden of collecting and distributing sales tax for this

would be prohibitively expensive.

Finally, another constituent from Boscawen believes this would open the door for States to begin taxing across their borders for many other different taxes. Another company from Rindge says:

This bill is absolutely terrifying. I think I may not be

able to survive. I may not be significant to many in

Washington, but my little machine shop is the center of my

family's livelihood.

When I hear my colleagues come to the floor and call this a States rights issue, what about States such as New Hampshire? Why are we going to make this vibrant part of our marketplace, the Internet, a tax collection haven for other States? So businesses in New Hampshire and other States are going to collect taxes for Indiana, and this is all because cash-strapped States are coming here and asking Congress to do this.

By the way, for those who believe this is some kind of conservative bill, this is not my idea of conservative. The Americans for Tax Reform are against this, the Heritage Foundation is against this, the Campaign for Liberty is against this, the National Taxpayer Union is against this, Cato is against this, and the Heartland is against this.

This is not about small government. This is about forcing businesses in States like mine, with no sales tax, to become the tax collectors for the Nation. It is wrong.

This is not about small businesses. I urge my colleagues to vote against the online tax collection act because that is what this really is.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from Minnesota.

Mr. President, I am pleased to yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Rhode Island, who is a member of the Budget Committee and has worked hard to get us to where we are. I appreciate his input to get us to this point.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes off the resolution time to my colleague, Senator Wyden of Oregon, who is an outstanding member of the Budget Committee. He has been waiting to come and speak. I want to thank him as well for his valuable input throughout the process.

I yield 3 minutes off the resolution to the Senator from Minnesota, and then she will take her 30 minutes as the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee following that.

Mr. President, I yield myself 10 minutes off the resolution.

Mr. President, we are having this debate in hopes of ultimately reaching a fair and bipartisan budget deal. We all know that is not going to be easy, so the least we can do is get our facts straight. It is kind of disappointing to see that rather than engaging in a productive conversation, some of our Republican colleagues prefer to launch some pretty inaccurate attacks. I would like to take just a moment to correct some of those inaccuracies so we can focus on the urgent task at hand.

Some Republicans continue to claim the Senate budget includes a $1.5 trillion tax hike. I talked about this last night, but I wish to make it clear again. This is not true. Here are the facts:

Of the $975 billion in new revenue from those who can afford it the most, $480 billion is matched with responsible spending cuts to fully replace sequestration, $100 billion goes toward targeted, high-priority infrastructure repairs and job training to help boost our economy and put Americans back to work. The rest goes to reduce the deficit. But, unfortunately, rather than seriously considering the credible path we have presented in our budget plan, some Republicans have decided to play some games with these numbers and are not telling the truth.

Instead of subtracting the sequestration replacement portion and the investment package from that $975 billion in total revenue, they are trying to say we should add it all together. They are taking one side of the ledger, combining that with the other side of the ledger, and coming to a conclusion that makes absolutely no sense. It doesn't make sense. You don't have to take my word for it. Fact checkers and reporters have called this claim false. They have called it a step too far. The Washington Post fact checker even gave it two Pinnochios.

Republicans have also made the argument that this budget actually only includes $300 billion in deficit reduction. That distorts the facts. It is not true, and it is inconsistent actually with what Republicans have claimed in the past.

Our budget includes 1.85 in deficit reduction, evenly divided between responsible spending cuts and new revenue. That revenue comes from closing loopholes and cutting wasteful spending from a Tax Code that has been skewed toward the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations. But some Republicans say that because part of what we are doing is replacing sequestration with smarter deficit reduction, that this somehow diminishes the savings.

I actually find this kind of interesting because I served on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction when Republicans and Democrats discussed ways to replace sequestration, which was, of course, well after sequestration had been signed into law. We didn't reach an agreement because Republicans refused to include revenue. But we did agree then that deficit reduction to replace sequestration was deficit reduction. In fact, my colleague Senator Toomey put forward a plan to replace sequestration--to replace sequestration that he said would have ``reduced our deficit by $1.2 trillion.''

I find it odd that some Republicans were willing to count replacing sequestration as deficit reduction when they were putting forth plans to do it, but they will not treat the Senate budget the same way, especially since bipartisan groups, including Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin and the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget, all used the same starting point that the Senate budget does. Like us, these groups knew sequestration was not deficit reduction. It was there to trigger deficit reduction that would come from replacing it. That was the whole point.

In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that the Senate budget uses the appropriate starting point:

``Bowles and Simpson received no criticism when they did

the same thing for their new budget plan of a few weeks

ago.''

I didn't hear any Republicans complaining then. This just goes to show that, sadly, some of our Republican colleagues appear more interested in politicized attacks than serious consideration of our plan. The American people deserve better. They deserve better. They want an honest conversation. That is what we are trying to have with the credible approach we put forward.

Finally, I wish to strongly dispute the criticism I have heard that Democrats somehow don't take reducing our deficit and debt seriously. Despite what you may have heard, Democrats care deeply, as we both know, about restoring our Nation's fiscal health. We think it would be absolutely wrong to pile up unsustainable debt and hand it to our children. That is exactly why the Senate budget presents a serious, credible, and sustainable approach to getting our debt and deficits under control.

Experts on both sides of the aisle have generally come together around a

few principles for a responsible deficit reduction plan. The Senate budget builds on the work of the last 2 years to meet each of those benchmarks.

In 2010, the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission recommended finding roughly $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. This has now become the benchmark of other serious bipartisan proposals. The Senate budget builds on the $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction that has already been done in the last 2 years since Simpson-Bowles, with an additional $1.85 trillion in new deficit reduction, for a total of $4.25 trillion in deficit reduction since the Simpson-Bowles report.

What the Senate budget does is it takes us the rest of the way to that $4 trillion goal and actually beyond it. Following the recommendations of Simpson-Bowles and the Senate Gang of 6 plan, the Senate budget importantly reduces the deficit to below 3 percent of GDP by 2015 and keeps it well below that level for the rest of our 10-year window in a responsible way. It pushes our debt as a percentage of the economy down, moving it in the right direction, as we have been told is an important goal.

So our budget reaches these benchmarks the way the American people have consistently said they want it done and the way economists and experts across our political spectrum have recommended--with an equal mix of responsible spending cuts across the Federal budget and new revenue raised by closing loopholes and cutting wasteful breaks that, by the way, primarily benefit the rich.

This budget responsibly cuts spending by $975 billion. As a member of the Budget Committee, the Presiding Officer knows we made some pretty tough choices to get there.

We think every program, including the ones that we know are important, needs to be wringing out the waste and trimming fat and reducing costs so our taxpayers get that benefit. So $500 billion of our deficit reduction comes from responsible savings on the domestic spending side, including, by the way, and I remind all, $275 billion in health care savings that we do in a way that does not harm seniors or families.

There are no sacred cows. We have put everything on the table. But we do it in a responsible way to preserve and protect and strengthen programs such as Medicare and Medicaid that the American people support as well. Our budget saves $240 billion by carefully and responsibly reducing defense spending while giving the Pentagon enough time to plan and align the reductions to time with the drawdown of our troops from overseas. The remainder of the savings, $242 billion, comes from savings on interest payments due to lower debt.

Taking the balanced approach the American people have consistently called for, our Senate budget matches those responsible spending cuts with $975 billion in new revenue, which is again raised by closing loopholes and cutting unfair spending in the Tax Code while locking in tax cuts for the middle class and low-income working families so we protect them from paying anymore.

There is bipartisan support for reducing the deficit by making the Tax Code more fair and efficient. During the fiscal cliff negotiations, Speaker Boehner proposed that we reduce the deficit by $800 billion by closing what he called special-interest loopholes and deductions. So the Senate budget takes him up on that. Every bipartisan group that has tackled this issue in a serious way recommended a lot more revenue than the $600 billion raised from the wealthiest Americans in the yearend deal.

If our budget passes, the total deficit reduction since the Simpson- Bowles report will consist of 64 percent spending cuts, 14 percent tax rate increases on the rich, and 22 percent new revenue from closing loopholes and cutting wasteful spending in the Tax Code. That is a responsible approach. It is a balanced and fair approach. It is the one endorsed by bipartisan groups and experts and it is one that is supported by the vast majority of the American people.

I want to say this again. Here are the facts. Our budget does not include a $1.5 trillion tax hike. It does raise $975 billion, again from closing loopholes and cutting wasteful spending in our Tax Code. It reduces the deficit by $1.85 trillion when analyzed the same way Republicans have analyzed their own proposals. And Democrats do care deeply about our country. We do want to reduce our debt and deficit, which is exactly why we have put forward a responsible proposal to put our debt and deficit on a downward sustainable path. As we continue this debate over the next day I urge my Republican colleagues to stick to the facts. Let's end the misinformation. Let's work together on the job the American people want us to focus on and get a comprehensive budget deal and get our country back on track.

Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes off the resolution to Senator Wyden.

If the Senator would withhold, because we have two Senators waiting to talk. I will be happy to answer that. Can we let two of them go on our time?

I yield 10 minutes to Senator Wyden and 35 minutes to Senator Levin.

Mr. President, let me just respond again. As the Washington Post said in giving this concoction two Pinocchios, the reserve funds the Senator refers to lie within there in order to provide the $975 billion in revenues. So essentially what he is doing is double-counting. So I would just say to the Senator through the Chair that there is no need to have any kind of agreement here. That is what our budget does. It is clear. It is what every expert has said.

Mr. President, as I have stated many times out here on the floor--and our budget is very clear--we replace sequestration with a balanced mix of spending cuts and revenues, exactly as we have stated. There is no reason to misconstrue this. That is exactly what our budget does.

Mr. President, this is a matter of semantics. We replace the sequestration, very clearly, because it is very damaging to our country.

Mr. President, I assume we are taking this off the Republican time.

Mr. President, let me be very clear: We have put out a budget that is credible. It is clear, and it is a good, solid approach. I know we are playing with numbers here in terms of baselines. There is no need to do that. We are doing what every single budget has done-- Simpson-Bowles and everyone else--replacing the sequestration. We are clear that we have $975 billion in spending cuts, $975 billion in revenue. We, within the context of that, replace the sequester cuts. We take the $2.4 trillion that has already been done since Simpson- Bowles--since Simpson-Bowles and we add another $1.85 trillion in deficit reduction.

Mr. President, over the baseline, which we are very clear in what we are using--we are not hiding the ball, as he is trying to do when he is mixing numbers here--we reduce the budget by an additional $1.85 trillion, absolutely.

Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes off the resolution to the Senator from New Mexico.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to take 3 minutes off of our side of the 30 minutes to allow the Senator from Alaska to proceed, and then we will continue on the debate.

Mr. President, let me, first of all, thank the chairman of the committee for her great work in putting together what is this first step toward getting this issue that has plagued this body and plagued this country behind us.

This budget, as I have said to her and others, wouldn't have been the exact one I would have drafted. However, it reflects the varying concerns of the Democratic caucus. It is a budget that is credible, that is real, that moves us forward, and that has as part of its core all of the critical ingredients.

Anyone who has looked at this problem--I know the chairman of the committee has, I know the ranking member has; many of us have wrestled with this; all of the bipartisan groups have wrestled with this issue-- have all said we have to do three or four things. No. 1, we have to have additional revenues. No. 2, we have to do entitlement reform. No. 3, we do need, yes, smart, targeted cuts on both the discretionary side and the defense side.

The Democratic budget, compared to what has now been as I understand in the last hour passed by the House, is the only document, the only budget that has all four of the component parts of any solution that will get this problem of the $16.5 trillion debt that our Nation faces, and a debt that goes up by $3 billion a day, to start putting a realistic, real plan in place to attack this problem in a real way.

I wish my colleagues from North and South Dakota were still here, because I, as was my good friend and colleague, the Senator from North Dakota, was a Governor as well and, yes, we had to balance our budgets. I and my colleague, my great friend, the junior Senator from Virginia, was a Governor as well. I have to tell my colleagues, I will match our record of fiscal responsibility in Virginia and progrowth policies in Virginia with any State in the Nation. Independent rankings have named Virginia the best managed State in the country, the best State for business, the best State for educational opportunity. Those are not my words, not the words of the Senator from Virginia, but independent validation.

How did we get there? Well, the remarkable thing was what we had in Virginia because of actions of prior administrations. When I came in and when the Senator from Virginia was my lieutenant governor, we had a structural budget deficit. How did we have that structural budget deficit? One, because we had spent too much, yes, but also what we put in place was a tax code and a revenue stream that would never meet the needs of basic operations of government.

That analogy is actually what we face now in the United States of America. Yes, we do need to find ways to limit our spending. But what I find curious from all of my colleagues who talk about this issue is their constant focus on the spend side with virtually no mention of what we in this Nation have done on the revenue side.

Anybody who can read a balance sheet--and I take great pride in the fact that I was a businessman long before I was a politician--realizes we have a revenue side and spending side. If we take a moment and look at what previous Congresses have done on the revenue side, back in early 2002, 2003, we put in place a tax cut that cut $4.5 trillion out of the revenue stream over 10 years. We had an expectation we would see budget surpluses as far as the eye could see. Well, I think there is not an economist anywhere or, for that matter, virtually any elected official, who would at least acknowledge privately that in retrospect that was a tax cut of unsustainable proportions. What is particularly remarkable when we talk about growth is that some of the period of our Nation's highest economic growth took place during the 1990s under President Clinton when we had a Tax Code that generated that additional $4.5 trillion of revenue over a 10-year period.

What is remarkable about all of the debates and all of the groups that have looked at this, all of which have included new revenue back into the revenue stream along with targeted cuts, along with entitlement reform, is that every one of those independent reviews of our problem has said the only way we get a balanced approach to get this debt and deficit under control is yes, cuts, yes, entitlement reform, but, yes, additional revenue as well.

The plan that is most often cited on this floor is the Simpson-Bowles report. Simpson-Bowles, on a 10-year basis, based upon the baselines they used in 2010, would have generated $2.2 trillion of net new revenue--$2.2 trillion of net new revenue. Again, thinking about that in the context of what we cut, that is less than half of the amount of taxes we cut back in 2003. So even the most ambitious proposal has said we do not need to go back to the Clinton tax rates when our country was prospering at unparalleled rates. We do not need to put back all of that revenue. We do not even need to put 50 percent of that revenue back in. But we do need to put somewhere between one-third and 40 percent of the revenue back into the revenue stream to make sure we correct the structural deficit on both the spending side and the revenue side.

What does this budget do? Well, we put $600 billion back in on New Year's Eve in a deal where many of us maybe had to hold our nose or our breath on, but it was back in the revenue stream. We put on top of that now another $1 trillion back in--$975 billion back into the revenue stream. That puts us at $1.575 trillion of net new revenue back in-- $1.575 trillion--literally only one-third of the revenue that was taken out with the $4.5 trillion tax cut in the so-called Bush tax cuts.

So I find it a little strange for those who are saying: Let's look at the country's balance sheet--and, yes, we have to cut spending--not to reflect back upon the incredible growth we had back in the 1990s and recognize we have both a structural problem on the spending side but also a structural problem on the revenue side.

I have to tell you, from any kind of reasonable standpoint, putting one-third of the revenues we took away back into the revenue stream seems to me to be a reasonable, balanced, thoughtful, and, candidly, on any kind of operational basis, business basis, fiscally conservative approach.

I have colleagues here, and I want to engage in a conversation about sequester, but I also have to make one other point that particularly bothers me about what the House, which just passed their budget, did and I assume that many of my Republican colleagues, I guess, are endorsing.

I 100 percent agree with my colleagues that we have to have a growth agenda in America. You cannot, no matter how much you cut, cut your way to prosperity. And you cannot--and I know our Republican colleagues agree--you cannot spend your way and tax your way to prosperity. You have to have a growth agenda.

Well, for 20 years before I got into politics, my business was investing in businesses that were growth businesses. I was a venture capitalist. I was proud to cofound Nextel, close to 70 other technology-related companies. Anybody who was an investor in businesses--whether you were me or whether you were Mitt Romney at Bain Capital--looked at a couple of key components of any business in which you would invest. There were generally three items you would look at on any business plan. One was, did that business invest in its workforce, because in a global economy there is a global competition for talent, and the most important criteria you can look at, if a business is going to be successful, is, are the workers going to be trained and are they going to be able to compete and do the job?

The second thing you would look at--of any business I would look at-- is, does that business have a plan to invest in its plant and equipment? Whether you are creating software or making widgets, are you going to stay current in a very competitive marketplace with how you make things?

The third issue is, no matter how successful your business is today, are you going to stay competitive in this global economy and how do you stay ahead of the competition, because no matter how good you are today, somebody tomorrow is going to come up with a new idea.

I would invest in businesses that met those three criteria. I would say that former Governor Romney had a very successful record at Bain in many cases. I bet he looked at those same three criteria.

Countries, in a very similar way, have their own business plans, and budgets kind of reflect those business plans. We may call it different items, but we have those same three criteria: workforce, plant and equipment, staying ahead of the competition. We just call it different items. We call it our investment in education and workforce training. In terms of plant and equipment, we call it our investment in infrastructure because how well your economy, how well your country is going to do is how well your roads, your rail, your ports, and your broadband are, how well you can move goods and equipment in an efficient and effective manner. The third item is, how do you stay ahead of your competition? Well, in the global economy, staying ahead of your competition means, what is going to be your value added? That is going to be your intellectual capital and your ideas. That means research and development.

Well, under the growth agenda criteria, under the business plan criteria, under the investment criteria, the House budget that just passed--and I hope I find my Republican colleagues will contradict me and say: No, no, we do not want to do this, but the House budget that just passed takes Federal domestic discretionary spending, which is currently only 16 cents on every tax dollar that we spend in America-- and for those viewers, in English, non-Washingtonese, domestic discretionary spending is, yes, money we spend on the environment and energy and law enforcement and early childhood, but it is also the money we spend in the Federal Government on education, infrastructure, and research and development. It takes that 16 cents--not a very high number right now even--and takes it over about a 20-year period to less than 5 cents.

I have to tell you, I would never invest in a business that spent less than 5 percent of its revenues on its workforce, its plant and equipment, and staying ahead of the competition. I would never invest as a nation in a nation that is spending less than 5 percent of its revenues on the education of its people, the infrastructure of its nation, and the research and development to stay ahead of the competition.

I tell you, I have spent a lot of time as somebody who looks at what some of our competitive countries are doing. China is spending, just on infrastructure, four times the percentage of their GDP what we are; India, significantly more as a percentage of their GDP on education; even Europe, with all its challenges, significantly more than what this House budget would spend on America's business plan, on America's growth agenda.

I have to tell you, I would never invest in it. I have to tell you, I would really question if Governor Romney, whom I have great respect for with his business acumen--I do not think Bain Capital would ever invest in a business plan for America that spent less than 5 percent of its revenue on its growth agenda and its ability to stay ahead of the rest of the world.

So I hope over this coming debate we can talk about growth agendas, we can talk about revenues, we can talk about balance, we can talk about looking at our plan from any historic perspective. But what I want to turn to now--and I apologize to my colleagues who are on the floor--is the question of sequester.

Back in August of 2011, when we got close to the budget ceiling debacle--not exactly a high point for this institution or Congress, and we could debate about who had the idea or where it came from originally, but what was curious about that was we set up a process that said: We are going to figure this out in a way where we will never get to sequester.

I use the analogy for sequester--some of us are old enough--my good friend, the Senator from Maine, may recall the movie ``Blazing Saddles.'' In that movie, ``Blazing Saddles,'' the sheriff comes out and puts a gun to his head, and all the townspeople come up and say: Oh my gosh, the sheriff may pull the trigger.

We in Congress set up that circumstance with the sequester, and unfortunately 2 weeks ago we allowed that trigger to be pulled. Because I believe, as somebody who cut spending as the Governor of Virginia-- and I know my colleague, the new Senator from Virginia, cut spending as well--we know how to make cuts. But there are smart cuts and smart ways to cut, and there are stupid ways to cut, and there could not be created a more stupid way to cut than sequester.

There are 975 separate line items in the Navy budget. Those 975 separate line items in the Navy budget are not of equal value to the taxpayer, nor are they of equal value to the defense of this Nation. But within the framework of sequester, we do not have any ability to pick and prioritize the way any reasonable business leader or any reasonable Governor would. We had to cut them all of an equal amount. The remarkable thing that is happening--and, again, my friend, the Senator from Virginia, will talk to this more--is that there is example after example, under the name of sequester, that supposedly we are cutting spending where we are actually going to cost the taxpayer more than any perceived savings. I will just cite two examples before I turn to my friend from Virginia.

For those viewers, the American government actually does get certain things right. We have even gotten a law that if we do any bulk purchases, we have to get at least a 10-percent discount. If we buy 10 tanks instead of 1 tank, we get a discount. If we buy more than one Virginia class submarine, we get them at $2 billion apiece. If we buy them individually, they cost $2.5 billion apiece.

Under the name of sequester, if this is allowed to continue, we will have times where we will have to violate those contracts and not only pay a penalty cost but then not receive the government discount because of volume purchasing. It does not mean we are not going to still have to buy the same amount; it just means it is going to cost the taxpayer more money.

In the case of research, the National Institutes of Health does some remarkable work, but anybody who follows medical research knows you cannot normally finish a research project in a single year. So it may take 4 or 5 years to do a cancer research project. If we allow sequester to continue, you may have 4 years of a cancer research project done, but because you cannot discriminate between projects, you cannot let that fifth year of the contract, so the first 4 years of that research is flushed down the toilet.

My colleagues, there has to be a better way to deal with this. Our budget, which replaces sequester with half revenues and half more targeted spending cuts, I believe moves us in that right direction. We in Virginia, in many ways, are ground zero of the effects of sequester. Many States have not begun to feel it. They will at some point.

I would like to turn to my colleague, my good friend, the new Senator from Virginia, somebody who serves now on the Armed Services Committee and has

made hard choices as Governor as well, who knows what it takes to have a balanced approach to continue to grow the economy. He has continued the kinds of accolades that Virginia has received. I would like to ask the Senator from Virginia if he would be willing to explain in a little bit more detail some of the challenges we face at ground zero in Virginia around sequester and why the approach we have taken in our Senate budget is better than the status quo approach we are now having to deal with.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

I would ask the Senator, I know he has seen and is very familiar with these installations and their families because of his tenure as Governor. You may also want to make the point: in an area such as Hampton Roads where you put these folks on furlough with literally 88,000, 98,000 immediately affected, will the Senator speak about the point of the ripple effect this has for literally thousands of others who provide the support services--restaurants, gas stations, auto repair, you name it--which rely on those folks having jobs as well?

I thank the Senator from Virginia.

I ask unanimous consent to engage in colloquy with my friend, the Senator from Virginia, the Senator from Hawaii, and the Senator from New Hampshire as well.

To briefly respond--I don't want to keep returning to the ``Blazing Saddles'' analogy, other than the fact these cuts were set up to be the stupidest way possible. No rational group of folks would allow them to come to pass.

The only other point I wish to make is with regard to the Senator's point about the ROTC individuals. I think at times this may not have been part of debate--although there may have been a number of colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have argued strongly against sequester and pointed this out as well. We are not just talking about the immediate short-term effect on that furloughed employee or the ship which may not get repaired. As these cuts were set up to be so ridiculously put forward, the effects of these cuts will actually, in many cases, cost us more money than the savings.

If that ROTC member who has taken 3 years of ROTC decides to quit and not become an officer, the money we have invested in his or her training up to that point is flushed down the toilet.

If we do not make the ship repairs that are part of our industrial base and if the workers at those ship repair businesses in Hampton Roads and in Hawaii and in New Hampshire and in California and in Alabama and in Mississippi leave those careers and those welders go elsewhere, the cost of replacing that workforce and retraining them because we have said, oops, we made a mistake and we come back and fix it 2 years from now, will end up costing the taxpayer more than the dollars we have saved.

If we continue to defer the maintenance and the training of our Armed Forces so we don't have divisions ready to go into action, the cost to get them

back up to military readiness will be exponentially higher the longer we wait than doing these cuts in a smarter, more tailored and more phased-in fashion.

I think the military and everybody I have seen realizes they are going to have to make the kind of cuts to make sure that everything-- domestic discretionary, defense, entitlement reform, and revenues--all have to be part of the mix.

Our military does a remarkable job for us, and we owe them not only the kind of platitudes we sometimes say on this floor, but we owe them an ability to manage a budget that is reasonable, that is thoughtful, that does not have this kind of arbitrary, across-the-board-regardless- of-performance cut. We owe that young man or woman who is in the ROTC the commitment that our Nation will stand by their obligations to their training and support of them so they can continue to serve and protect our Nation.

I now want to ask our friend, another new Senator, the Senator from Hawaii, for her comments. Hawaii is a State that has enormous military assets as well as other assets on the frontline of our Nation's shift in focus on Asia. She may want to add as well any particular stories about her views on sequester and how our budget takes a more reasoned and balanced approach.

The Senator from Hawaii.

I wish to thank the Senator from Hawaii for the real stories of how these sequester cuts are affecting folks in her State of Hawaii, and, obviously, my friend, the Senator from Virginia, has expressed those challenges as well.

Let me be clear. It is not that our budget proposal doesn't make significant cuts in defense. We still add roughly $250 billion of cuts in defense over a 10-year period, but we do it in a smarter, targeted, phased-in way.

The last point I wish to make, before I ask my friend, the Senator from Virginia, to close out, is I want to agree with so many of my Republican colleagues who have come and pointed out this is a responsibility we owe to our children and our grandchildren. We, candidly, owe it to ourselves. This $16.5 trillion in debt goes up $3 billion a day, and it is unsustainable. As Erskine Bowles once said: It is the most predictable crisis in our lifetimes if we don't grapple with it. And so we need a growth agenda.

Two comments I would simply make in closing: If we look back at recent American history for the period of the highest economic growth, the period that we added the most jobs, the area where America continued to lead in innovation, it was during the 1990s. We had a Tax Code at that point that generated sufficient revenue to meet our needs without dramatic expansion of government. I think, in retrospect, most of us would acknowledge we probably made a mistake when we took $4.5 trillion out of the revenue stream in some of those cuts that were made earlier.

We have a spending issue, but we also have a revenue issue. What this Democratic plan puts forward doesn't say we have to put all those revenues back. It doesn't say we have to put half those revenues back. What the Democratic plan says, to get us back on this path to balance, to get us back on this path to growth, we have to, roughly, return about one-third of that $4.5 trillion. With what we did on New Year's Eve and what this budget does, it replaces $1.575 trillion into the revenue stream. It doesn't bring us back to the 1990s rate, but I would love the chance to debate my colleagues on how that is not a reasonable assumption.

If we have a structural deficit problem on the spending side, we also have a structural deficit problem on the revenue side, and I believe this approach is reasonable and both fiscally prudent and responsible.

I would simply close as well with saying that we can't tax and cut our way out of this problem. We have to have a growth agenda. Any good company--any good country--has a business plan. Any business plan for any good company--any good country--that is going to compete in the 21st century has to do at least three things: They have to invest in their workforce, invest in their infrastructure, and they have to stay ahead of their competition, which means research and development.

I tell my colleagues, there is no way a plan that says America will invest less than 5 percent of its public revenues in its education, infrastructure, and R&D will keep America the leading economic power in the 21st century. If we want to honor our commitment to our children, we have to leave them not only a nation that is not riddled with debt and deficit but also a nation that continues to be the economic leader in the world. I believe our plan makes and protects those investments in those key components of growth.

I hope, over the coming hours, we will go through this debate--I know we will have a spirited period of a lot of amendments--that this budget will pass, and it will then find agreement with our colleagues in the House.

I want to again commend both the chair and the ranking member in that at the end of the day, we have to find common agreement to get this done. This issue that hovers over all of our other debates has in many ways become a metaphor of whether our institutions can function in the 21st century. So just as the chair and the ranking member found agreement through a markup process where both sides were heard and amendments were offered and debated in a fair and open process, I want to thank both the chair and the ranking member for their commitment. They have different ideas about how we get there, but at the end of the day we do have to get there in common agreement.

Mr. President, I want to give the Senator from Virginia the last word on this issue. So I yield the remainder of my time to the Senator from Virginia.

Mr. President, I rise today as the senior Senate Republican of the Joint Economic Committee to discuss one of the most fundamental issues this body confronts on a year-to-year basis, or at least should confront on a year-to-year basis, which is passing a budget through which we could operate the rest of the year and measure how we spend hard-earned taxpayer dollars.

Unfortunately, we haven't had one of these budgets for 4 years. I am pleased we finally have arrived at this particular point. I will speak about that in more detail.

A few years back when I was serving as Ambassador to Germany, I made calls on the various ministers. They would be equivalent to cabinet secretaries in our country. I would always try to get a little background information on them before I went to see if we had anything in common, or an ice breaker to start the conversation.

I was calling on one of the ministers and noticed, reading his background first, his birth date was the same as mine. It was a milestone birthday. We were both born in 1943. At the time, the date of my seeing him was just a couple of months after we both celebrated our 60th birthday.

To break the ice, I said to him: Mr. Minister, we have something in common.

He said: What is that?

I said: We both were born on the same day. Therefore, we both reached a very important milestone in life.

He looked at me seriously and said: And how are you doing with all of this?

I said: Well, I am doing fine. I don't feel any different, and I don't think I think any different. It is almost as if the number is meaningless.

He looked at me seriously and said: You are in serious major denial. This is a big deal. This is a major milestone.

Well, ever since he said that, I have been wondering, gosh, is that little pain in the right shoulder the beginning of more problems and so forth?

It reminded me of the situation we faced here when others have said the debt problem we have is not a major problem or that we don't have a spending problem. It reminded me of the minister who said: You have to be in major denial.

Year after year, we are spending a lot more money than we take in, and there is no end in sight to that. Mandatory spending alone on programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is projected to double in a few years' time. It is estimated each new child born today will inherit $50,000 or more of debt, which they will need to pay off as they grow, go through their education years, and become part of our economy. They are going to be saddled with this ever-growing debt.

My three latest grandchildren, Grace, Charlie, and Avery, all young, just a few years old, are inheriting a very significant amount of debt which will saddle and stifle their opportunities to participate in the American dream and enjoy many of the same opportunities many of my generation have had.

Interest rates were held down by the Fed at historically low levels. We might also be facing our day of reckoning. I had the opportunity to speak with the Fed Chairman some time back. He indicated we are running out of tools here at the Fed to address these problems. The people up the street who handle the fiscal issues, not the monetary issues, need to stand up and address the problem.

I think we all know we can only keep interest rates low for so long. It is important to understand a 1-percent point increase in interest rates would add over $1 trillion to the United States debt in a 10-year period of time. These historically low rates are not going to stay historically low forever. They are going to rise as investors lose confidence in America's ability to pay off their debts in the future if we keep plunging into the level of debt and deficit spending which has been taking place here over the last several years. Eventually, we are going to reach that tipping point, and when we reach that tipping point, investors and consumers lose confidence. When that happens, interest rates rise. When interest rates rise, it impacts our economy in a very significant, negative way. All we have to do is look across the Atlantic, in Europe, to see what is happening there to get a glimpse of the crisis that can come with not dealing with the ever- increasing debt and not taking the necessary steps over a period of some time to put our country on a fiscal path to health.

I think most of us here know that we have to make some tough choices and that it will require political will in order for us to address this. We have been avoiding this for years, and we are going to face a debt-induced catastrophe if we don't address it and address it soon.

So when you are faced with this kind of fiscal mess, what do you do? Well, what families and businesses all across America have had to do when they have faced these types of situations--sit down, create a budget, and put themselves back on a path to balance and prosperity in order to avoid the inevitable: a collapse of the family budget or the business budget. Our communities and our States have had to do this. We see this happening everywhere except in Washington. It is this body and this administration that have refused to step forward, No. 1, to pass a budget on which to guide our spending and, No. 2, to make the decisions necessary to turn this economy around and begin to put us on a better path toward a balanced budget.

Why a budget? Well, it helps us identify priorities. Sitting on the Appropriations Committee, where agency heads and Secretaries come before us and present their requests for the future fiscal year in which we are making decisions, I ask each one of them: Do you have a plan B?

They say: What do you mean by a plan B?

I say: if we continue down this path that is going to ever shrink discretionary spending--whether it is for cancer or paving roads or education or any other worthy project, there is going to be less money if we don't address this spending problem, particularly if we don't address mandatory spending.

I ask them: Have you looked at doing what every family has had to do and what every business has had to do during these 4 years of tepid growth, which just seems to linger and linger and linger? We still have 23 million people out of work. Have you looked at ways in which you can make your spending and the parts of the budget you oversee more efficient and more effective? Are there things you can cut? Are there programs you can eliminate that no longer are effective or perhaps shouldn't have been there in the first place? Are there things you would like to do but without the resources are not able to do at this time?

You know, if a family is faced with lower revenue--dad's salary has been cut or mom has lost that second income or for whatever reason--and they are having a hard time making payments--education for the children, mortgage payments, and so forth--the family has to say: You know, we are going to have to look at how we spend money, and we are going to have to cut back. Maybe we won't be able to go to Disney World this year as we had planned. Maybe we will need to buy a tent and go to the State park or do something less expensive. And if they have kids with a credit card: We are going to have to put limits on that or you are going to have to scale back.

These are decisions every family has had to make. These are decisions every business owner is faced with and has to deal with, and they are doing that. But this is a decision that hasn't been made here.

Well, it has been 4 years--1,400-some days; I think 1,422 days and counting--since this body, the Senate, has passed a budget which would allow us to determine what our priorities are or at least give us a guidepost as to how we are going to spend money. Four years since this body has presented to the American people, who elected us to come here and represent them, a budget and give them the transparency of how we are spending their money.

Finally, after 1,422 days, after 4 years, we have a budget before us. While I am pleased that is the case and I am pleased we are here debating that, it is disappointing when we learn what that budget offers.

One would think, after 4 years--and particularly after the 4 years we have been through and the 23 million people unemployed or underemployed and the rate of growth of this economy half of what it normally is-- that the budget being presented to us would take some steps toward addressing our spending issues and would not incorporate $1 trillion or more of increased taxes, which will simply go to more spending. How could we possibly support a budget--being $16.7 trillion in debt--that plunges us further into debt--a staggering increase in debt--and also doesn't reduce spending? That is at least a step but nothing nearly appropriate to what we are facing.

So this budget grows government. Let's not make any excuses. It grows government by increasing spending, and it grows government by a massive increase in taxes just after we have had one a few months ago, not counting the massive increase in taxes that is going to occur beginning in 2014 with the implementation of ObamaCare. When we add that up and look at the cost of that, we face a dire circumstance. So one would think a budget being offered to us would not increase debt by 42 percent but would address the real problem.

I know there has been a dispute about how much of the budget revenue is increased taxes. Some say $1.5 trillion. Those who have presented the budget simply say: Oh, no, it is only $1 trillion. Well, whether it is $1.5 trillion or only--only--$1 trillion, it is $1 trillion in new taxes on the American people after they just got hit with more than $\1/2\ trillion 2 months ago and are going to get hit again with another $1 trillion when ObamaCare fully kicks in. I mean, it just defies credibility, and I think the investment community and consumers and taxpayers all across America look at this and say: What in the world are you doing?

What are the consequences of this? Well, the Heritage Foundation indicates that the Senate Democrats' budget would cost over 8 million jobs nationwide and 225,000 jobs in my own

State over the next 10 years. They estimate that the budget would reduce economic output by $1.4 trillion and reduce private domestic investment by $820 billion. We certainly see the trend here, and the trend is a negative consequence not a positive consequence.

So I think these statistics emphasize the fact that the entire mindset behind this budget seems to be how we can find more revenue to fund more government spending rather than how do we grow the economy. Our goal ought to be to grow the economy, not grow an already bloated government with more taxes to pay for more government spending.

This budget never balances the budget. We will never reach the point our States have had to reach in balancing their budgets. The majority of our States have had to pull themselves out of a hole, and they have done so because many are constitutionally mandated by their own State constitutions to balance that budget. Families have had to balance their budgets, and businesses have had to balance their budgets. Only the Federal Government doesn't seem to balance its budget and this plan doesn't even attempt to get us there.

I have been coming to the Senate floor day after day after day this year basically talking about the need for Republicans and Democrats and the President to come together with a bold, credible, and enforceable long-term plan to reduce our debt and put our country back on a path toward growth and prosperity. We need to recognize that it will take more than a quick fix. It is going to take more than this soap opera drama of kicking the can down the road, extending the decisions we have to make for yet another few months behind this, behind that, or whatever. It is going to take the will to roll up our sleeves, stop wasting our time and instead get to work on a plan that will deliver real results for the American people.

To solve this dire situation and reduce dangerously high debt, I believe we need a plan that includes three major things:

We need to reform the way we spend. We need to go through each program at every agency and department and determine how we can do more with less. My colleague from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, already has taken steps to triage our Federal Government's spending by identifying programs that are ineffective, unnecessary, and overly duplicative.

We need comprehensive tax reform. The Joint Economic Committee has heard witnesses from the left, from the right, from the middle, nonpartisan, Republican, Democratic, Independents, and there is a consensus: If we don't have comprehensive tax reform together with a sensible, credible, long-term, enforceable deficit-reduction plan, we will not pull ourselves out of this mess we are in.

The growth element of what we need comes through tax reform. Senator Wyden and I, in a bipartisan way, have worked for years--he worked years before that with former Senator Judd Gregg--on putting together a plan. We are not saying it is the be-all, end-all, but it forms the basis for a simplification of the Tax Code. It is revenue neutral, it addresses our lack of competitiveness around the world in terms of our corporate entities and businesses, it fixes rates at reasonable levels, and it ought to be the basis for at least the discussion and moving forward.

If we don't combine our spending discipline with comprehensive tax reform, we are not going to have the element that will produce the growth and revenue that will bring us closer to balance.

Finally--I talk about this all the time--let's have the courage to address what we know is driving us into more and more deficit and will prevent us, if we don't adjust it, from ever having a rational plan to get us out of this situation, and that is mandatory spending.

Let me quote from the President's own bipartisan commission. They said:

By 2025, revenue will be able to finance only interest

payments, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Every

other Federal Government activity--from national defense and

homeland security to transportation and energy--will have to

be paid for with borrowed money.

That is because our revenues will only pay for these few programs, which are eating up all of our expenditures. So from cancer research to education, from paving roads to air traffic control to meat inspectors, national defense and homeland security, and everything the government does that is an essential function for the Federal Government--all will paid for with borrowed money.

Let me go back to their statement.

Debt held by the public will outstrip the entire American

economy, growing to as much as 185 percent of GDP by 2035.

Interest on the debt could rise to nearly $1 trillion by

2020.

That is just 7 years away. Returning to the quote:

These mandatory payments--which buy absolutely no goods or

services--will squeeze out funding for all other priorities.

So not only will the uncontrollable growth of mandatory spending squeeze out funding for all other programs or priorities in our country, but it will also jeopardize the safety net we have put in place for retirees who have worked hard and put money aside to become eligible when they retire for Social Security and Medicare and for those who find themselves in a situation where Medicaid is a necessary safety net.

We have always taken pride in being a country that is compassionate. We have been a place where, if you work hard, you can earn a good living, you can raise a family, and in later phases of life you will be able to rely on the safety net of health and retirement programs you have invested in. But if we don't act on mandatory spending, if we don't act on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, we will all but ensure the demise of these much needed programs for future generations. Failing to act and leaving our children and grandchildren with this enormous debt burden is immoral.

We all know--or we ought to know by now--our current path is unsustainable. Academics, economists, and business leaders from all sides of the political spectrum repeat the same thing: Unless we make the tough choices we have been avoiding for years, we are going to face a debt-induced catastrophe and it is only a matter of time and the clock is running down.

Congress and the President must summon the courage and the political will to do the right thing and take the tough medicine now that will heal this economy. What we have been doing for the last 2 years that I have been here is basically looking at a chronic illness and saying: Take two Advil; maybe you will feel better in the morning. That doesn't work. We need the bold, the credible, and the enforceable plan that will put us on the path to prosperity, and it must include spending discipline, comprehensive tax reform, and mandatory spending reform.

I am going to be offering up to five amendments to this budget. I don't want to spend a great deal of time on this now. I will, for the record, mention the five I am going to offer.

The first is a mandatory spending budget point of order. This would be a point of order against any legislation that increases the net level of mandatory spending at any time our gross Federal debt exceeds 100 percent of the economy or our GDP.

Numerous studies have said that when we reach 90 percent, we are at a tipping point, and it becomes historically proven that it has a serious negative impact on our economy. I have raised this to 100 percent to allow a little room. This point of order will be in place and, if passed, can only be overridden with 67 votes. This should force Congress to think before we act.

Secondly, I am offering an amendment that is called debt transparency legislation. One of my colleagues and a Member of the House of Representatives, Luke Messer, has passed similar legislation in the House with very significant bipartisan support.

It simply requires the Congressional Budget Office to report annually an estimate of the cost per taxpayer of the deficit for any year that the President's budget is projected to be in deficit. The American people deserve to know this number, and this amendment would achieve that.

I am also offering an amendment to repeal the 3.8-percent tax on investment income. If we want to stifle the economy more, if we want to prevent more growth and slow down this economy, throw in yet another tax on the very people who are providing the capital and the investment.

We just talked about the medical device tax, which I have supported, working along with Democratic cosponsor Senator Klobuchar from Minnesota and many others who have joined us. It is an absolutely irresponsible tax, simply a way for the administration to pay for the costly health care law that taxes the very industry that is providing us revenues, high-paying jobs, and helping our trade balance exported quality products. This is crippling, and it is forcing some of these companies to look overseas because of this egregious surtax on top of all the other taxes they pay. So I support the amendment of Senator Hatch and Senator Klobuchar to repeal that medical device tax.

I am also offering an amendment designed to fix our broken and convoluted Tax Code. I see Senator Wyden has come to the floor. Senator Wyden and Senator Gregg started a heroic project several years ago to put together a comprehensive tax reform package. The work and the hours spent in pulling this together is amazing. When Senator Gregg left the Senate, he called me and he said: This is something I think you ought to take a look at. Perhaps you can take my place and work with Senator Wyden so it can be a bipartisan effort going forward. We have discussed this with our colleagues. It should serve as the basis for tax reform.

As I said earlier in my remarks, we cannot address this problem without spending discipline and comprehensive tax reform combined. All the witnesses who have come before us in the Joint Economic Committee have asserted this and enforced this; that it is the necessary element to provide the growth to accompany the spending discipline and, added to that, the mandatory entitlement reform.

Finally, an EPA amendment--which working with my colleague Senator Manchin, a Democrat, again, a bipartisan effort--to deal particularly with an EPA rule. I will not go into the details of that.

But these will be some of the amendments I will be offering in conjunction with my colleagues to hopefully make this budget a better piece of legislation.

To conclude, it has been 4 years since the Senate has passed a budget. The plan before us, in my opinion, has not been worth the wait. It will not help generate more jobs for the more than 23 million Americans who are either unemployed or underemployed. It will not improve this slow economy. It will not save Medicare and Social Security from going broke. It will not produce a path to bipartisan comprehensive tax reform. It will not ever balance the budget. It will not help hard-working Americans get back to work and get ahead in this life. We can do better than this.

After 4 years of inaction, the American people deserve better than this plan. The American people elected a divided government. It was not a mandate for either party. It is a challenge, a challenge all of us need to accept.

So let us act now. Let us summon the courage to stand and work together on a truly balanced plan--not one that calls for ever more spending and ever higher taxes but one that puts in place real reforms.

The first step is passing a credible budget. Sadly, in my opinion, this budget doesn't match the need. Hopefully, we can make the adjustments for this to put us on that path to prosperity.

I yield the floor.