Floor Statements

Mr. President, I wish to thank my colleague from Colorado. I will not tell him what I was doing in 1986, the last time we adjusted the tax rate, but I just want to remind our colleagues today that we are in a moment of crisis in the United States.

Today we have a national debt crisis. I have been to this floor many times, and many of my colleagues have as well, to talk about this debt crisis. It affects our ability to do the things that we know are right to do--to deal with the victims of hurricanes, with national security, and with our healthcare situation.

Folks, we are losing the right to do the right thing.

To solve this national debt crisis, we have to do many things. But one of the ways we can deal with this debt crisis--and one of the first things we have to do--is to grow our economy. The way to grow the economy is to roll back regulations, unleash our energy potential, and, yes, finally, once and for all, fix this archaic tax system, which keeps us from being competitive with the rest of the world.

In 1986, we had the third lowest corporate tax rate in history, in the world, and over the next 15 years we benefited from that. But at the same time, the more our economy grew, the lower the tax rates were taken in the rest of the world. Today, American businesses are taxed at one of the highest rates in the developed world: 35 percent. Meanwhile, for example, Japan's statutory corporate rate is just 23 percent; Germany is at 16 percent; Mexico is at 30 percent; the U.K. reduced theirs in 2009 from 30 percent to 19 percent, and they are about to go to 17 percent as we speak. As a matter of fact, the average rate in Europe is just 18 percent, while in Asia the average corporate tax rate is 20 percent.

Why is the corporate tax rate so important to an American worker? The corporate tax rate we have in America is the greatest burden the American worker has today. Why? Because it makes that American corporation less competitive with the rest of the world. It also makes that American corporation vulnerable to foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies and then the moving of those headquarters and factories and jobs offshore.

The No. 1 thing we can do for the American worker is to become competitive from a tax standpoint with the rest of the world. I have lived this. I have lived in Asia; I have lived in Europe. I have worked here most of my career, and I know when this gets out of balance, and it is out of balance today. We are penalizing the American worker because of it.

It is no secret, a lower corporate tax rate would make us more competitive globally. Our tax plan fixes this. We are one of the last countries that still has a tax on unrepatriated earnings. In other words, if we have a U.S. company that makes money overseas, it pays taxes over there; when they bring it over here, they have to pay tax here. We are the last country in the world that really has double taxation. We need to end that repatriation tax so

that we can free up almost $3 trillion of U.S. profits overseas and bring them back and invest in training, in plants, in facilities, and in research and development. Our plan makes that happen.

We have an individual tax code that is 2.4 million words in length. Let me say that again: 2.4 million words in length. Wasn't that the tax simplification law of 1986? I think it was. It is 2.4 million words in length. That is ridiculous, and it is entirely too complex. We all know that. Our plan will fix this.

It is also estimated that, if we can get it enacted, this tax plan will create over 1 million new jobs because of the changes that we are enveloping into this Tax Code right now.

In addition, it is estimated that the GDP growth will be more like 3.7 percent, instead of the 1.9 percent we have become used to over the last 8 years. Frankly, I believe there is no reason it can't be significantly more.

We are getting closer to getting this done, but I realize there is a lot more to do. It is more important now than ever that we don't get bogged down in this Washington dysfunction and gridlock.

Last week, I mentioned that many Democrats supported the changes we are talking about in the Tax Code, right up until President Trump took office. In fact, over the last several years--in fact, over the last several decades--many Democrats on the other side of the aisle and people in their place before agreed.

This is not a partisan issue. This is about national security, if you want to get right down to it. It is about making America competitive again. Who would be against that? There are decades of quotes from Democrats and Republicans about this issue. This should be a bipartisan issue.

In 1963, a very famous American made this quote:

A tax cut means higher family income and higher business

profits and a balanced federal budget.

Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left

over after taxes. . . . Every businessman can keep a higher

percentage of his [or her] profits in his [or her] cash

register or to put it to work expanding or improving his

business, and as the national income grows, the Federal

Government will ultimately end up with more revenues.

That noted American was President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. If he were here today, I think he would admonish all of us to put our partisan bickering aside and get something like this done for the American people.

Another quote:

I think [the corporate rate] should be lowered. We should

try to get it as close to the international average as we

can, so we'll [once and for all] be competitive.

That was Bill Clinton last year, 2016.

Another quote:

Get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field. And use

the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first

time in 25 years.

That was President Barack Obama in 2011, believe it or not. This is not a partisan issue.

There are more minority party leaders in the House and the Senate who have also come out and spoken on this point:

Today, 28 OECD countries and every other G-7 country has

adopted some form of territorial tax system--and all these

countries have lower corporate tax rates than the United

States. This means that no matter what jurisdiction a U.S.

multinational company is competing in, they are competing at

a disadvantage.

That was the current Senate minority leader in 2015. This is not a partisan issue.

Another quote: ``It is long past time for tax reform that would lower the corporate tax rate.''

That was House Minority Leader Pelosi last year. This is not a partisan issue.

This tax bill is being done under regular order, including a committee markup this week, with plenty of amendments, and it will go to the floor as soon as we can get it there for debate and more amendments.

I urge all my colleagues: Let's put partisan politics aside once and for all and collaborate through the amendment process to do something historic, something that American workers deserve, and that is to become competitive with the rest of the world again. Renew your support for the same tax changes your party has supported for years.

I want to close with another quote from an individual I have long admired, President John F. Kennedy, in 1962.

I repeat: our practical choice is not between a tax-cut

deficit and a budget surplus. It is between two kinds of

deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted

result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy, or a

temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut

designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and

achieve, I believe--and I believe this can be done--a budget

surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and

weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future.

Again, these are words from President John F. Kennedy, while he was President, in 1962. This is not a partisan issue.

Our tax plan is an investment in our future, just as John F. Kennedy said. It is an investment that will help all Americans.

I know there is a lot of disinformation going on: This is only a tax break for the wealthy, and so forth. When the facts come out--and they have already come out; four Pinocchios have been given to those comments. Our tax plan will prove that when we get into the details.

Equally important, getting this tax plan done to help all Americans is a critical part of developing a long-term plan to solve the national debt crisis.

I am proud to serve here with my colleague from North Carolina, Senator Tillis. I think, in North Carolina, they actually did this, and they had the results we are talking about here.

Mr. President, I say to the Presiding Officer, like you, I am a relative newcomer to this body. It is an enormous privilege and responsibility to be a Member. Like you, I come from the real world, spending a career where your word is your bond, and telling untruth is not rewarded. Unfortunately, in this body, sometimes that is not the case, and both sides are guilty. What Americans are demanding right now is a change in the status quo, not only in this body but in Washington and in its entirety.

Tonight I want to talk about some of the things that have happened in this body. I know both sides are guilty, but these are a couple of examples that I think rise above the norm and are so egregious that I could not let them stand.

Right now, Members of the minority party and their friends in the media are doing everything they can to stop us from changing the Tax Code this year. Their complaint about healthcare was that we weren't doing it in regular order. Now we are doing tax reform in regular order. The bill that we are working on in the Senate will go to committee as soon as next week. It will be marked up with amendments from both sides. At the right time, it will then go to this floor, and we will have amendments--again, from both sides--and we will vote that bill, up or down, into law or not. But Members on the other side are actively spreading numbers in studies that are based on false assumptions and have been proven to be untrue. I want to highlight a couple tonight, but there are many others.

On Monday, the Tax Policy Center released a study saying that the House plan, which was released last week, to change the Tax Code would raise taxes on 25 percent of American families. The minority leader said this on that day:

This analysis makes clear that over one quarter of

taxpayers will see a tax increase under the Republican plan,

all in the name of giveaways for the wealthiest Americans and

biggest corporations. Republicans want to take away middle

class deductions for people with student loan interest and

medical expenses so that the rich can exploit bigger

loopholes and corporations can pay lower taxes.

That study by the Tax Policy Center didn't even survive a full day. It was retracted later that afternoon. It is not even publicly available online today to review any longer. Do you know what is, though? The statements that came out of that report that day--false statements, just like the one I just gave, and many others highlighting that this study was reality. Maybe even worse is that these are false stories that are still running through the

media, as if they were true, as if they were facts.

The website Vox posted a story about this study titled, ``The numbers are in, and House Republican tax bill raises taxes on nearly a third of Americans.'' Surely, they posted an update saying that the study has been retracted. They say that they will update the story once new numbers are released. In the meantime, this headline and this story are still in existence as if they were still true. Why wouldn't they take down the story? Why wouldn't they change the headline until new numbers are available?

I wish this were a single, discredited study we are talking about and that this were the only time something like this has happened since we started to have this debate about changing the Tax Code and making America competitive again. Unfortunately, it is not.

Multiple Members of the minority party said that the tax framework supported by President Trump would raise taxes on families earning less than $86,000 per year. One of my colleagues said: ``On average, middle class families earning less than $86,000 will see a tax increase under the Republican `tax reform' plan.''

Another colleague said: ``The average tax increase on families nationwide earning up to $86,100 would be $794.00 per year.''

Here is another one: ``The average tax increase on families nationwide earning up to $86,100 would be $794.''

You begin to think that there is a common thread among many Members in this body about this same story. This talking point is so wrong that even the Washington Post later that day came out and said so. It gave this claim four Pinocchios, which we all know is their highest number against a falsity. That is the worst rating you can get on their fact checking.

The Washington Post's full ruling said:

Democrats have spread far and wide the false claim that

families making less than $86,100 on average will face a

hefty tax hike. Actually, it's the opposite. Most families in

that income range would get a tax cut. Any Democrat who

spread this claim should delete their tweets and make clear

they were in error.

That is from the Washington Post. At least one statement making this claim is still up, and I haven't seen a single statement admitting error. These are but a couple of examples. There are many more.

As one last example, House Minority Leader Pelosi has called changing the Tax Code ``a Ponzi scheme.'' Virtually every Democrat has called it a ``betrayal of the middle class.'' Clearly, the facts do not back up these claims.

The minority party is doing all it can to stop us from getting this done this year because it makes good politics somehow. That is the only explanation I can think of.

Answer this for me; it doesn't make any sense: Why would someone oppose giving the middle class a tax break? Why would someone oppose making America competitive again? Why would someone oppose bringing billions of dollars of U.S. profits back to the United States so that they can be reinvested in the economy and create jobs? I don't understand it.

It is time for people in Washington, and even in this body, to stop doing what is best for their own political self-interest on both sides, frankly, and start doing what is right for the national interest. That right now--in the next few days--is clearly one thing, and that is fixing this archaic Tax Code.

Every person in this body is responsible to some degree for the archaic nature of this Tax Code. Both parties are responsible. If they were acting in our national interest, we would be hearing about the study showing that, on average, Americans are projected to get a pay increase of somewhere between $4,000 and $9,000 under this plan. We would be hearing about how families making less than $86,000 a year are actually getting a tax cut. Again, that is a point even the Washington Post has acknowledged.

We would be hearing about how lowering the corporate tax rate, ending the tax on repatriated earnings will make us more competitive with the rest of the world. We would be hearing about the economic growth that could result from these potential changes.

We have a historic opportunity before us to deliver results and make a difference in the lives of all Americans. There are Members of the minority party, however, who have supported these changes in the Tax Code right up until the point when President Trump took office. But that is no excuse for this nonsense that is going on right now.

I think it is our role, on both sides, to call out these untruths. It is also our responsibility to stop this nonsense. What the American people want are facts. They don't want fake news. They want to know that we are here doing their work for them, to make sure that we make America competitive again.

I say to the Presiding Officer, like you, I live in the real world. I have dealt with the nonsense that came out of these bodies that affected our Tax Code in a way that kept us from being competitive. It is time we change that. We have to get it done this year so that we can ignite economic growth next year and give relief to the middle class, who have suffered so much over the last 8 years.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, since 2001, the Federal Government has exploded in constant dollars from $2.4 trillion in 2000 to last year almost $3.9 trillion in costs. Those are constant dollars. In September of this year, just a few weeks ago, our national debt surpassed $20 trillion for the first time, and no one in Washington blinked an eye. If that is not enough of a wakeup call, this debt is projected to increase over the next 10 years, according to the budget we are operating under now, by another $11 trillion. If that is not enough, over the next 30 years alone, it is projected that over $100 trillion of future unfunded liabilities--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pension benefits for Federal employees, and the interest-only debt--are coming at us like a freight train. These are unfunded liabilities.

Today, with $20 trillion in debt, we are only paying about $270 billion every year in interest only. I say that because just in the last year, we have seen four increases in the Federal funds rate, which fundamentally increases our interest by 100 basis points. That 100 basis points over the next few years will grow our interest on the debt by more than $200 billion on top of the $270 billion. By the way, today that is almost 25 percent of our discretionary budget, already, just at the $270 billion. If it doubles, it will be almost half of our discretionary budget. If interest rates just go back to their 30-year norm--between 4 percent and 5 percent--we could be paying as much as $1 trillion on our Federal debt. That is almost equal to today's discretionary budget.

It is going to take a long-term fix. We can't tax our way out of this problem. We can't cut our way out of this problem, and we can't just simply grow our way out. It is going to take a multifaceted approach. There are five interwoven imperatives that are at work in solving this problem. It is one thing to call the crisis, but it is another to call out the ways to fix it, and they are all within our grasp today.

No. 1, we need to fix Washington's broken budget process.

No. 2, we need to root out all the wasteful spending in the Federal Government today.

No. 3, we have to grow the economy by repealing and pulling back on a lot of regulations that are unnecessary, by revamping our tax structure and by unleashing our energy potential.

No. 4, we have to save Social Security and Medicare, of which both trust funds go to zero in 14 short years.

Lastly, we finally have to get after the real drivers of spiraling healthcare costs.

As we are working to change our archaic tax system to become competitive with the rest of the world and to get our economy rolling again, I want to talk about two things today. One is

this wasteful spending, and two is economic growth. These are two of the five imperatives that I just outlined.

According to the General Accountability Office, today and also every single year, this Federal Government wastes hundreds of billions of dollars. It is estimated today--and this bipartisan organization has identified this--that we are overspending about $700 billion a year.

Let's put that in perspective. As I just said, we spent $3.9 trillion running the entire Federal Government. That is about $1 trillion for discretionary spending and about $3 trillion for mandatory spending--so almost $4 trillion. Of that, over $700 billion has been identified as wasteful spending. I will describe those in a second, but to put it in perspective, that is almost 20 percent of everything we spend as a Federal Government. It is a larger number than what we spend on the national security of our country. Let me say that again. The number identified by the General Accountability Office of wasteful spending is larger than what we spend on our military.

There are three facets to this as they outlined. No. 1 is redundant agencies. These are agencies targeted to do exactly the same thing that one administration or another has come in and added and that basically do the same things. That costs about $135 billion every year.

Just since 2003, we spent $1.2 trillion in improper payments. That is about $144 billion every year. These are overpayments--improper payments. This is not fraud. This is not anything like that. It is basically an administrative error, where the Federal Government has made a mistake and made improper payments--Social Security Disability, SNAP overpayments, unemployment insurance, and others. This is outrageous.

The third item is that it is estimated that we have a net tax gap of $406 billion. This is a 17-percent error rate in the IRS Tax Code. That means that people are underpaying or not paying what is calculated, according to the General Accountability Office. The Federal Government last year took in almost $3.5 trillion of taxes. Yet we had this $400 billion. That is a 17-percent error rate. I don't know what else to say. Those three things add up to about $700 billion of wasted spending. We have to get to the bottom of this. Let me also put it in perspective another way. That $700 billion every year is $7 trillion over the next 10 years.

This tax package we are talking about has an initial cost of about $1.5 trillion, as identified by both sides, before you get to the economic growth that more than pays for it. A 0.4 percent of growth pays for this tax package that we are working on. But this $7 trillion of wasted spending is overspending by the Federal Government, unnecessarily. Nobody in this body--no Democrat, Republican, or Independent--has voted on this spending. This is spending in error. These are just common mistakes made by an oversized bureaucracy. It is not a partisan talking point. Both sides bear responsibility in this debacle.

Again, these are numbers from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. I am apoplectic that I even have to be here bringing this to the attention of my colleagues. Washington knows about these problems and has known for years--decades. Yet nothing is done. A former Member, Senator Tom Coburn, actually worked hard on this. There are others who are beginning to pick up this mantle here, as I am.

But as we talk about the tax package changes--the tax changes that will get this economy growing again--I wanted us to reflect on the opportunity we have right here that can more than pay for what we need to do to give the middle class a tax break and get our economy growing again. There are things identified in this report by the Government Accountability Office. There are recommendations that can get at most of this $700 billion of wasted spending.

Let me give you a couple of examples. If the Department of Defense just manages commissaries more effectively, there is a $2 billion opportunity there over the next 5 years. If the Department of Defense weapon acquisition programs were more effective, it is estimated that tens of billions of dollars over the next 10 years could be saved in terms of purchasing the same level of equipment and machinery. If the Department of Defense simply completed an audit, we believe it would identify further opportunities for wise spending of our taxpayers' money.

But since coming to the United States Senate, I was shocked to understand that the largest line item on our budget has never been audited. It is high time that we complete that audit. By the way, there is a law that was passed in this body in 1991 requiring the Department of Defense to submit an audit. Here we are in 2017, and we still don't have that audit.

In my opinion, as hard as it is for the American people to earn their salaries and to pay their taxes, it is unconscionable that I am standing before the U.S. Senate tonight reminding us all that there is $700 billion a year that we spend in error--just bureaucratic error. Because of that and because of this financial intransigence, we have built up a debt that has created a crisis in our country. Because of these years of fiscal intransigence, we are losing the ability to fund our government the way it should be funded.

We are losing the right to do the right thing when it comes to funding things like emergencies and disaster relief efforts. Just a couple of weeks ago, we passed a $15 billion relief package for two hurricanes. Last week, we passed a $36 billion supplemental, as if nothing had happened. Every time we do that, it is borrowed money. We can wait no longer to solve this debt crisis. It is going to take tough decisions to solve the debt crisis, and we are going to have to be making these very quickly, but eliminating redundant spending, improper payments, and eliminating this tax gap are at the top of the list.

Along with reducing our spending by almost 20 percent each year, we need to grow the economy to solve this debt crisis. The single most important thing that we can do to grow the economy this next year is to change this Tax Code.

Let me remind this body that so far this year, under this President's guidance, we eliminated over 860 rules. These were rules made by the Federal Government that were choking the very life out of our free enterprise system. The result of that this year alone is that in the third quarter we have now achieved a 3-percent growth again. This is not the Holy Grail.

Who knows what this economy should be growing at right now if we just get Washington out of the way? Part of the way to do that is to correct this archaic tax policy. Changing the Tax Code will mean more jobs and higher wages for the American worker. For example, if we eliminate the repatriation tax on our corporations--again, we are the last country in the world to have a double tax on U.S. profits made overseas--it is estimated by independent, nonpartisan groups, that this would mean $4,000 to $9,000 of annual income for the average worker in the United States.

I don't know what else to tell you, except that we are not competitive today. We have to become more competitive. What we are talking about here should not be partisan issues. America needs to be competitive. We all know that.

The idea that bigger government will create more jobs has been proven not to work. Look at the last 8 years. We have had the lowest economic growth in the history of the United States.

As we debate how to fix this archaic tax system and become competitive with the rest of the world, I am reminding us tonight that we also need to get serious about cutting this wasteful spending. This spending is not benefiting anybody. It is not providing for national security. It is not taking care of people who need help. These are just simply overpayments, mispayments, and they are creating problems that should not have been created. Changing the Tax Code, as I said, is a historic opportunity to generate growth and make us more competitive. Eliminating this spending, which amounts to 20 percent of what we spend as a Federal Government, is absolutely mandatory. People back home should be demanding that.

There is a lot of heavy lifting to dig out of this debt crisis, but these two things I am reminding us of tonight should be at the top of the list. We simply cannot fail the American people to get this done. I am committed to that.

I urge my colleagues to take seriously this opportunity we have of changing our Tax Code. It is historic. At the same time, we have to get serious about eliminating our redundant, outrageous, and unnecessary spending.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I think I am the only one standing between this body and a vote on something that 2 years ago I didn't know existed, and that is a ``vote-arama'' in local Senate terms. Being an outsider to the political process, I find a lot of this very strange.

I came to Washington, and now I have a new vocabulary. It includes things like ``scoring,'' which doesn't have anything to do with sports, ``vote-arama,'' which doesn't have anything to do with the carnival down the road, or ``deficit-neutral reserve fund.'' I am still trying to figure out what that is; I see the Presiding Officer is smiling up there. Then there are ``points of order.'' There is a vocabulary centered around what we are going to be doing this afternoon, but I want to speak to the budget process itself.

First of all, I want to be very clear with my colleagues on both sides. I support this budget that we are going to vote on today for one very strong reason. It is a vehicle to get to tax reform in the United States. I will not speak on taxes today in the few minutes that I have, but I do want to speak about the process.

What we are doing in America right now in the Senate and the Congress--and what we have been doing over the

last 43 years--is losing the right to do the right thing. Let me say that again. We are losing the right to do the right thing.

Just a few weeks ago, we voted without batting an eye for $15 billion of allocated funds for the victims of two hurricanes in Florida, Texas, and other southern States, with every dime of that money in borrowed money. We have to go to China and other places and borrow that money so we can spend and do the right thing. That is not an embellishment or an exaggeration.

What about research for the rising, spiraling cost of our healthcare, driven by Alzheimer's, cancer, and diabetes? We spend about the same amount of money on that as we spend on all foreign aid. Yet, if we were to do more, we could cure those heinous diseases and lower our medical costs. We can invest in our infrastructure. We can absolutely take care of victims of wildfires, and now we have Puerto Rico.

Tonight we are going to be asked to vote up or down on a supplemental bill for some $30 billion-plus for the needs of these catastrophes. We have lost the right to do the right thing, which is, of course, to meet those needs.

Here is the biggest one. You just heard my great colleague, Senator McCain from Arizona. He is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, of which I am a member. He talked about how decimated our military is from a funding standpoint. He talked about readiness. He talked about capitalization. But today, we are borrowing every dime we spend on our military, on our veterans, and on every domestic discretionary program in the United States. That is a fact. Where do we get the money when we run out of our own money? We spend every dime of our own. By the way, we collected over $3.5 trillion of Federal tax revenue last year. It is the largest amount America has ever collected in income taxes and total taxes for the Federal Government--the most we have ever collected--but all of that money goes to mandatory expenses.

As a matter of fact, since 2000, under one Republican President and one Democratic President, our government has grown from $2.4 trillion to $4 trillion. That is not the worst of it. The worst is yet to come. We have added in two Presidencies $14 trillion to our Federal debt. Of our $20 trillion, $14 trillion of it was added under these two Presidents.

In the next 10 years, the current budget under which we are working will add another $11 trillion to our debt.

Here is the problem. The blue line here is what you heard Senator McCain talk about earlier. That is our discretionary spending. It is flat. As a matter of fact, between 2009 and today, we have lowered discretionary spending by over one-third, by $400 billion. But what has happened is that our mandatory expenses have exploded.

On this chart, this line here, are our mandatory expenses; that is, Social Security, Medicare, pension and benefits for Federal employees, and the interest on our debt. This is a formula for financial disaster.

At this point, we already have $20 trillion of debt. Over the next 30 years, some estimates say that we will have over $130 trillion of future commitments, liabilities coming at us like a freight train.

We are hamstrung because we have a budget process that doesn't work. One thing that contributes to this is a process that over the last 43 years, since the 1974 Budget Act was put in place, which created this budget process, the budget has worked only four times in 43 years. It has funded the Federal Government only four times. That is not a partisan comment; that is an indictment on this body and on the body across the hall.

In any other environment--sports, medicine, business, military-- imagine if you had a process that worked only four times. Imagine if you had a tank in World War II, and you are over there, and every 43 times you fired it, it worked only four times. Imagine what result would be.

What we have here is a system that doesn't work. I am going to try to explain that very quickly.

First, we have committees in the U.S. Senate that involve themselves in appropriations and the funding of the Federal Government. Some are called authorizing committees. These are committees like the Foreign Relations Committee; we have Appropriations. We have all of these authorizing committees over here on the left. On the right here are Appropriations Committees. Today, these committees have to pass 12 bills in order to fund the Federal Government.

Over the last 43 years, out of the 12 bills we have to appropriate to fund the government, we have averaged only 2\1/2\ bills. In any other world, that can't work. It doesn't work here. So we end up with 179 continuing resolutions to get us past the end of our fiscal year to continue spending at last year's rate, and then we go to an ``omnibus''--another new term that I had never heard of--at the end of the calendar year. Basically, most times, six or eight people will get in a room and decide how to spend $1 trillion. This current budget deals with, primarily, issues that are not on the mandatory side.

There is a way forward. There are Members on the other side--and I am going to call out one--my good friend from the State of Rhode Island. Senator Whitehouse and I and others have been working on this for quite some time. He has a great idea: Let's pick a point in the future, make the debt a percentage of our GDP, and work backward from there with guardrails on what we can do every year.

There is a budget process we have been working on that creates a politically neutral platform that allows both sides, in a bipartisan way, to argue and fight over what we think the budget should include, because we believe the budget should be a law.

Today, the budget is only a resolution, which means it is nothing but a political statement by the majority party.

We then go to an authorizing process where the minority party, because they weren't asked to play in the budget process--we have an authorizing process in which, today, we have over $300 billion of Federal expenditures a year that are not authorized, over $300 billion.

Then we are supposed to go to an appropriations process. As I have just said, we have appropriated, on average, over those 43 years, only 2\1/2\ bills a year instead of 12.

We can fix this. It is not a partisan issue. We will absolutely fix this budget process in a bipartisan way. I am going to vote for this. I hope my colleagues will vote for this budget bill so we can go on and debate taxes.

The debt crisis is the No. 1 crisis we face in our country. It keeps us from doing the right thing--funding our national defense and taking care of our needs.

I will support this budget today, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I have great news. This is the last amendment and the only bipartisan amendment tonight, and after this we will vote on the entire bill.

The purpose of this amendment is to declare this process--the vote- arama--utter nonsense. It is part of a budget process that both parties have perpetrated and persisted with for 43 years. It has only worked four times; to fund the Federal Government, according to the Budget Act of 1974, four times in our history. We are supposed to appropriate 12 bills a year to fund the Government. We have averaged 2\1/2\.

I urge all of my colleagues to make clear to the American people that we recognize this budgeting process is broken and we are committed to fix it.

Thank you.

Mr. President, I would like to echo what my esteemed colleague from Missouri has outlined in the last few minutes. His leadership on this issue is pronounced, and his experience on this floor is not to be underestimated. I appreciate his leadership on this, and I appreciate the opportunity to weigh in on this.

Before my remarks today on this historic opportunity before us right now to finally, after 30 years, become competitive again with the rest of the world, I would like to preface my remarks with a personal comment. My mom and dad were schoolteachers. We were middle class. I grew up working on our family farm. My mom and dad were really the first two in their extended families who had ever been to college. All of my relatives were farmers in the South.

I think the Tax Code that we have had for the last 100 years, since it was instituted in our country, has created an imbalance. We can see right now that we are losing competitiveness with the rest of the world. We have a growing disparity among income levels in this country, borne out somewhat by the derivative results of an archaic, out-of- control, out-of-date, and inappropriate tax policy.

Today, we have two crises in America. I have spoken on this floor a lot about this. We have a global security crisis that cannot be argued against. It is deadly. It is serious. We also have a debt crisis, and they are interwoven because of our inability to discipline ourselves on this floor over the last 30 years, particularly the last 16 years. We now have $20 trillion of debt, and that is the result of an explosion in the size of our Federal Government.

In 2000, the size of our government--these are constant 2016 dollars. The size of our government in 2000 was $2.4 trillion. ``Trillion'' is a big number, and it gets a lot of zeros out there. I have a hard time even digesting what that is. But 2.4--I can relate to the size that it is today, and it was $4 trillion last year. So our Federal Government has grown over 60 percent in 16 short years. There was one Republican President and one Democratic President. My experience here in the last 2 years has been that there are no innocent parties in terms of this out-of-control spending on the part of the Federal Government.

One of the solutions to this debt crisis is a growing economy. President Trump, from day one, has said that growing the economy is job one, but it was part of a bigger strategy in his first year.

There were four components to the strategy in the first year. One was that we had to get Neil Gorsuch confirmed to the Supreme Court, and that was done. Second, we had to roll back on some of the more onerous regulations that were stifling the very life out of the free enterprise system. To date, over 800 regulations have been removed from our government. Third was healthcare. We are still trying to fix a collapsing ObamaCare system that is hurting people back home. Lastly, we had to reform our tax package so that we could become competitive with the rest of the world and get our economy going again.

Job one this year was to get the economy going again. To some degree, it is beginning to move. Consumer confidence is at a 16-year high. CEO confidence is at a 20-year high. Why? Because they finally see rhetoric in Washington talking about the things they have been asking for for over 10 years, and that is relief from some of the pressure the Federal Government has put on the free enterprise system that keeps us from being competitive with the rest of the world.

I have lived around the world, and I have run businesses. I started my career working for an hourly wage in construction. I understand that America--and I can say this with some authority--has some of the best workers anywhere in the world and in the history of the world. On the back of that, we have innovation, capital formation, and the rule of law. That is what has created this economic miracle over the last 7 years, but we have taken it for granted. What we have done is allow other countries because of our immigration policy, because of our tax policy, and because of our regulatory policy, particularly of late--we have lost our competitive edge.

We believe that to get this economy going, President Trump is right. I am absolutely committed to the strategy President Trump has laid out. It really is only three things, and we have already started on two with his leadership.

No. 1 is regulatory reform, which I talked about.

No. 2 is that we have to get this energy policy going. What the President has already done with the Keystone Pipeline and the Clean Power Plan has set the stage to allow us to become the energy czar, if you will, of the next century right here in North America.

Lastly--and maybe most importantly--is to get this Tax Code so we can be competitive with the rest of the world. Let's talk about what competitive means. In 1986, the last time we actually made any real, substantive change to the Tax Code, the United States, after those changes, had the third lowest corporate tax rate in the world. What that did is allow us to compete with the rest of the world and set the stage for the next 10 to 15 years of economic boom that is now part of history.

What has happened now, though, is that the rest of the world has caught up. They have lowered their corporate tax rates. They have simplified their regulatory environment and taken the burden off some of their people. Today we have absolutely the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and we are the last country of the major OECD countries--the 39 countries--to actually still have a repatriation tax. This is unbelievable. We have been so arrogant as a country that we have let the rest of the world outrun us to the next stop, and they are now outcompeting us.

How does this affect the average man and woman on the street? Well, this I believe--the repatriation tax and indeed the lack of competitiveness in our Tax Code--is an absolute tax on American workers. Why? Because right now, twice as many companies in the United States are being purchased by companies outside our country, as compared to companies that our U.S. companies are buying outside the United States. That is nothing but a reflection on the

imbalance of our high tax environment here at home, and the people who suffer from that are the people who buy products in the United States and the people who work for companies that sell products in the United States. By companies, I am talking about friends of mine who have small businesses in South Georgia and have four employees. I am also talking about friends who run large corporations, multinational corporations. All of the above contribute to our economy.

We have unwanted acquisitions. Just look at recent history. Burger King was bought by a Canadian firm, Timmy's. Look at the beer industry in St. Louis. Today, most of those companies are owned by Brazilians and Belgians. These are not mean CEOs who decided to move their corporate headquarters, no. This is a reflection of a competitive disadvantage in which someone outside the country has used our Tax Code and our tax dollars to actually buy U.S. companies to the detriment of U.S. workers. How can anyone be against lowering our corporate tax rate and doing away with this repatriation tax?

The Business Roundtable in 2004 documents--and this is interesting-- that if our corporate rate today were just 20 percent, over 4,700 companies that have been purchased over the last couple of years would still be in the United States. I think that is tantamount to a marching order for us here in the Senate to make this change.

The way forward is very simple. This is what is talked about in this tax package that we are beginning to talk about publicly, and this is only after 9 months of regular order in committee with multiple hearings. We heard in the healthcare debate: Oh, this is not regular order. We didn't have the chance to talk about it and put amendments in and all this.

Well, this time, in tax, it will be by regular order. There will be amendments. There will be debates. There have already been multiple hearings. We are looking for input from all corners.

This strategy has three parts: One, we have to lower this tax on our American workers--lower the corporate tax rate to be competitive with the rest of the world. Two, eliminate this repatriation tax as every other country in the world has done. And, last, we have to simplify our individual Tax Code.

My mom and dad were schoolteachers. They were proud of their ability to pay their taxes, but they were burdened by that. Right now, we don't need to do that. We have to find a way to make this Tax Code more equitable for everyone.

Nearly 90 percent of Americans want the code changed. Over two-thirds think taxes are too high. Almost two-thirds say that lowering the corporate tax rate--again, they get the fact that this tax rate is lower in the rest of the world and that it is a penalty on the workers here in the United States.

Nearly every CEO surveyed by the BRT, Business Roundtable, said that delays on tax would damage our economy. Here is why. We just heard the Senator from Missouri talk about timing. We have to have a sense of urgency on this for one reason; that is, if you want to affect the economy next year, you have to get this done this year. Budgets are being finalized for next year right now. Capital investments have already been made in terms of determining how much and where and how soon they will be making it. More importantly, during the back half of next year, we will have the holiday season, which offers up a significant portion of our retail sales for the year, and those decisions are being made right now--before the purchases that are made next spring.

We have major CEOs weighing in on this. Randall Stephenson, CEO at AT&T, said that if we get the corporate tax rate lowered, ``We will step it up''--meaning their capital investments. ``Every additional billion dollars . . . is 7,000 hard-hat jobs putting fiber in the ground, cell sites up, and antennas on cell sites.''

David Abney, CEO of UPS, said: ``We'd like to bring some of those foreign earnings back, invest them into our network here.''

Finally, Mark Weinberger is the CEO of one of the major accounting firms we have here in the United States. They are multinational, so they have experience around the world in this with Ernst & Young. Actually, through these tax changes, they will stand to lose revenue because we are simplifying how people calculate what they owe in taxes. His quote is this: ``I think it's truly a bipartisan issue''--I agree--``something everybody can rally around . . . it's urgent for our country.''

To get this done, we have to move past partisan politics and Washington games. We saw how we disappointed the American people--both sides. The Democrats in 2009 crammed ObamaCare down the throats of America through a supermajority. We now know it has failed. Republicans were not able to fix it this year, so far. So we all need to look at this tax issue as a bipartisan issue to fix this once and for all for the people back home.

We can't get bogged down in this scoring--this financial modeling that is only done this way in Washington. People back home don't run their small businesses this way. They don't run big businesses this way. They sure don't run their personal finances this way. We can't get bogged down in bad numbers and bad timing coming from the Congressional Budget Office--not this time. It is too important. The only score that matters to me is GDP growth and the jobs that it creates--the change of lives that it can affect for the people back home.

I hear people talking all the time: I work part time; can you help me get more hours? Wages at the low-income level have not grown at all in the last 30 years. That is terrible in the United States. We can fix that. It is a function of the thing I am talking about right now-- American companies that lost their competitiveness because of the rules here in Washington. This is a 1-percent increase in our GDP. Say we grow from 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent. That alone is $3 trillion of revenue over the next 10 years. That is doable. Everybody in this room knows that.

But we have to change this Tax Code to put people back to work, to get our economy going again, and to become competitive with the rest of the world. The end result will be to address, finally, this debt crisis.

The reason we want this Tax Code changed is to put people back to work and to change lives here in America. But the long-term benefit of this is that it gives us more flexibility and more capital with which to solve this long-term debt crisis. Growing the economy alone will not fix this debt crisis, but we will not fix the debt crisis unless and until we fix this Tax Code.

We need to have a sense of urgency like never before in order to get this done this year. I echo the comments of my colleagues, and I thank you for this opportunity.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that morning business, for debate only, be extended until 12 noon.

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

Mr. President, we have had a lot of action today in the Senate, which is unusual here, and I wish to address it.

I would like to address this to the people in Texas, Louisiana, and to all of those who just experienced the devastating results and the impact of Hurricane Harvey. Obviously, our hearts go out to those people, and, of course, we are going to do the right thing and help the people of Texas, which is just what we voted on today. But there is a bigger issue I want to speak to today. I relate to this personally because, just last year--almost exactly to the day--our family was evacuated from our home in South Georgia. As I speak today, we were just notified today that my wife and mother-in-law, who are there today, will be evacuating this weekend from the south coast of Georgia, trying to get out of the way of the next hurricane--Hurricane Irma-- which looks to be a very dangerous storm as well, coming into Florida over the next day or so.

But this crisis that we just saw in Texas and that we might see in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina with the next hurricane--Hurricane Irma--reminds us of a bigger issue. It reminds us that because of our inability to get our financial house in order and as a result of the debt crisis we have today, we are losing the right to do the right thing. Whether it is medical research, whether it is infrastructure, or whether it is education, whether it is funding our military, which we will deal with next week, we are losing the right to do the right thing. By that I mean our own financial intransigence over the last 16 years, primarily, but, I would say, ever since 1965, when we had the Great Society and the great War on Poverty, which has failed miserably. That was another great, sweeping, progressive, liberal program that failed to make any dent in our poverty rate in the United States. The poverty rate today is fundamentally the same as it was in the days when that bill was signed into law.

Because of our intransigence, our ability to appropriate money to deal with disasters like Hurricane Harvey and potentially Hurricane Irma and others is in danger. Moving forward, we just simply will not be able to continue to deal with these emergencies and crises if we don't have a functioning Federal Government that actually pays its bills and has its financial house in order.

The national debt is actually what pulled me into the political process. It is the reason I am in the Senate today.

The people of Georgia understand that this is an underlying crisis that we have been digging here for the last two decades and it simply has to be dealt with.

Today we have $20 trillion in debt. I call that a crisis because we do not have a plan to reduce that back to some reasonable percentage of our GDP. This is greater in size than the size of our entire economy. What is worse than that and what is more concerning is that over the next 30 years, we have over $130 trillion, by most estimates, of future unfunded liabilities coming at us like a freight train. That is Social Security, Medicare, pension benefits for Federal employees, and the interest on the debt, primarily.

Here we are dealing with this debt ceiling just today, and I would argue that the debt ceiling has been the most ineffective thing that I have seen in the Senate. Over 100 times it has been extended or increased, and it has not slowed down deficit spending in the Congress. It has not kept us from having a $20 trillion debt today.

Washington knew this was coming, by the way. We have raised or suspended this debt over 100 times to no avail. It hasn't slowed down the debt spending that we have been doing, particularly over the last two decades.

Two months ago in June, a group of Senators and I listed the debt ceiling as one of the key reasons why we thought we ought to stay here during the month of August, instead of going home and having our work period there, because we felt that this needed to be debated and that we needed to get to a long-term solution.

Exactly 3 months ago today, I stood right here in the Senate and laid out what I thought the real consequences of the debt would be. At that time I said:

Congress is the only enterprise I can find anywhere in the

world that funds its operations the way we fund this

government. The problem is we have a system that is

absolutely, totally broken. It is a fraud that is being

perpetrated on the American people.

I stand by that today. The American people know that this is a fraud perpetrated on them, and that is why I think we have seen change in leadership in the White House. Just three months later, we see our debt limit today being dealt with in a way that puts in jeopardy our ability to deal with these national disasters, such as hurricanes and fires. We heard just a few minutes ago about the devastating fires in the Northwest.

Let's be clear. The United States cannot and will not default on our debts. It will not default on our obligations, but this debt ceiling issue should have already been resolved months before now. We actually hit this debt ceiling--just so everybody remembers--in March of this year. The Secretary of the Treasury has been using unusual measures-- extraordinary measures, they call them--to keep the government funded during this period of uncertainty. In fact, we hit this debt ceiling at a time when we should have been dealing with the budget. But still today--as I stand here today--we do not have a budget for fiscal year 2018, and we have 15 days until the end of this fiscal year, or the end of September of this year--September 30.

Raising the debt ceiling now just until December 15 isn't what puts our country at risk. The debt ceiling is not the issue here. It is not the problem. It is the unbridled spending that both parties have succumbed to over the last two decades under two Presidents--one Republican and one Democrat. Our government has grown from $2.4 trillion to $3.9 trillion. That is constant dollars. Neither party can point fingers at the other in terms of the explosion and the size of the Federal Government.

What is worse, as I just said, is that over the next 30 years, our mandatory expenses--it is not our discretionary spending. Discretionary spending in the last 9 years has come down, largely because of the Budget Control Act and because of sequestration. Our discretionary spending has come down from about $1.5 trillion to just over $1 trillion last year. That $400 billion reduction, though, came on the back, primarily and largely, of our military.

The debt ceiling has to be dealt with, but it is not the driver of our problems. The budget process is the underlying release valve that causes this problem, and it allows both parties, particularly in the last 20 years, to spend money we don't have.

The budget process, as I have said before on this floor, has only worked four times in 43 years. We have to appropriate 12 bills a year to fund the Federal Government. The average over that 43-year period is only 2\1/2\. That is the fraud that is being perpetrated on the American people. No other body--no other entity that I can find anywhere in the world--can get away with that. Yet here we are, kicking the can down the road again for another 3 months.

Fixing the budget process alone will not solve the debt crisis, but we will not solve the debt crisis unless and until we fix this broken budget process. We cannot ignore this any longer. We must stop piling up this debt on the backs of our kids and our grandkids.

The fix is readily available. This debt crisis is not something we can't solve. People say: Well, you can't touch Social Security and you can't touch Medicare. Wait a minute. If we don't touch them, they are going to be broke in 14 short years. In 14 years, the trust funds of both Social Security and Medicare go to zero--zero. People will not be up here changing Members of this body at the rate they are now. It will be much accelerated.

The fix can be done. There are five areas that need attention, and any of these areas can have bipartisan solutions. I will not go into detail today. I will just highlight the five areas, but we have to deal with each one of these on their own merits. The budget process is broken and can be fixed. I believe we have right now, behind the scenes, Democrats and Republicans working together to find a bipartisan, politically neutral platform to present our arguments on both sides of the budget process and to create a budget that actually funds the Federal Government appropriately, without all of this drama and without a release valve of extra spending.

The second thing is redundant spending. We know that the GAO, or the General Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office both agree that we have several hundred billion dollars in redundant agencies and redundant programs.

The third is to grow the economy. This is job one by this President. This President has said that job one of this administration this year is to do the things necessary with the regulatory environment and the tax environment to grow the economy.

The fourth area is to save Social Security--not to cut it but to save Social Security and save Medicare. That can be done, and I believe there are bipartisan alternatives that we should be debating right now. In 2\1/2\ years, that has not come before this body, and I don't see it happening in the balance of this year.

The fifth area is that, while we debated healthcare most of this year, we debated the insurance side of healthcare for the individual market and Medicaid but what we never talked about--and we haven't under President Obama, President Bush, and, now, even under President Trump--in this Congress is that we have not dealt with the spiraling drivers of healthcare costs themselves--healthcare delivery, pharmaceuticals, and the fact that the neediest among us are getting the most expensive care in emergency rooms today unnecessarily.

Don't be misled. We are well into this debt crisis. This is not something that can be solved with a 10-year planning horizon. This is a situation where we need to tell the bond market and the world that we are committed to a 20-year or 30-year period in order to fix this debt crisis.

Ideas are coming from both sides of the aisle. One idea comes from the Democratic side that says: Let's pick a time in the future, put a stake in the ground about what target percentage of GDP our debt should be, and then develop a roadmap between today and that point in time in the future to commit ourselves to get there. I applaud that idea. I think that is a genuinely brilliant idea. It is something that other countries have done before and it is something that works.

I hope my colleagues will please remember that, today, every dollar we spend in our country's defense, which is about $600 billion directionally correct in our military and between $150 billion and $200 billion for our veterans,

and all domestic discretionary spending, or about $1.1 trillion--every dime of that--is borrowed money. Let me say that again. Every dollar we are spending on our defense, every dollar we spend on our veterans, and every dollar we spend on our discretionary domestic programs, like what we are doing here today, is borrowed money.

This simply cannot continue. I can't think of any taller order. Between now and the end of the year, as we debate the tax changes that we want to make to our Tax Code so that we can become competitive with the rest of the world, let's remember why we are debating that tax issue.

We are debating the tax issue to become competitive with the rest of the world, to grow the economy. That is one of five areas which need to be dealt with. Our regulatory work is the other area in that attempt to grow the economy. But we will not dig out of this debt crisis unless and until we fix our budget process, stop this redundant spending, save Social Security and Medicare, and fix the spiraling nature of our healthcare costs.

I can think of nothing--nothing--in our future the rest of this year that is more important than addressing this budget process as we look at tax and dealing with this long-term debt crisis that we have.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 765 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Perdue substitute amendment be considered and agreed to, the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, this legislation is important because it will offer the Purple Heart the same types of legal protections currently in place for the Medal of Honor and help put an end to profiteering off of the sacrifice of our great American heroes.

I would like to thank those Senators who have cosponsored this bill, as well, and the chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee for persisting to get this bill on the floor.

There is no higher honor that we have in the Senate than to honor our veterans and the people who put their lives on the line every day for their country.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that if the Senate receives H.J. Res. 76 from the House, and if the text of H.J. Res. 76 is identical to the text at the desk, that the joint resolution be considered passed, the preamble be considered agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, it is nice to see you here at 11 p.m. on Monday night. One of the privileges we have of being in the majority is that we get to preside over the U.S. Senate, so we can listen to all of our colleagues talk to this august body.

I have been in that chair for the last couple of hours. I can't go to bed tonight without putting the record straight in this body. I don't think there is a Member of the U.S. Senate who doesn't want America to have the best healthcare in the world. The problem is, we have a campaign of disinformation that is underway right now, and it is outrageous. I cannot let it stand.

My mission tonight, very briefly, will be to put some facts on the table, on the record, because we have a lot of innuendo right now, a lot disinformation: Oh, my God, people are going to die.

Let me remind everybody, we are sitting here with a healthcare system that is collapsing. There is no other way to describe it.

Why are we here tonight at 11 p.m.? Before I get to healthcare, I want to remind the American public of why the U.S. Senate is open tonight. We also did this earlier in the spring because something historic is underway right now in the United States of America and that is this: For the first time in our history, the minority party has not waived a Senate rule that would bypass the time requirements when confirming a nominee by the President of the United States. Because of that, we today have confirmed only around 29 percent of this President's nominees. The prior President, at this very point in time, had over 70 percent--over 70 percent--almost 300 people. I think the number today is under 50 for this President. It wasn't until a month or so ago that he could even have a full staff meeting.

By the way, who is running America today? Holdovers from the last administration because we haven't been able to confirm the new nominees. Over 200 people right now stand in line, waiting to be confirmed by this body. It is outrageous.

The American people ought to be upset. They ought to be more than upset. Let's define who is doing that. It is not the majority. The minority party is dragging their feet because it slows down everything else.

Guess what doesn't get done this year if we continue with this schedule. Unless we are here every night, as we are tonight, we will not have time to get to taxes this year. We will not have time to get to what the American people are assuming we are going to get to. Consumer confidence is at a 13-year high

because they are anticipating that we are going to clean up some of this mess.

Let me quickly move on to healthcare and put a few facts on the record tonight before we close. There are five healthcare systems in America. We forget this. We talk only about ObamaCare right now, but there are five healthcare systems in America.

First, we have group policies. This is where almost the majority--the vast majority are in this. Anyone who works in a company or in a large organization has a group policy.

Then there is the individual market. The individual market is what ObamaCare addresses. It is only 13 percent of the entire healthcare system.

Then there is the VA.

Then there are Medicare and Medicaid.

There are five different systems of healthcare in the United States. What we are dealing with is the individual market and Medicaid--mostly the individual market.

Let me try to describe the situation as we see it today. In 2008, before the ACA, there were 48 million people in America who did not have insurance. That is a catastrophe by anyone's measure. In the richest country in the history of the world, we had 48 million people who did not have insurance. You could be precluded from having insurance because of a preexisting condition. You could lose your insurance. You couldn't transfer across State lines. If you changed companies, even in group policies, you could be denied coverage under the next employer's policy.

There were real problems. Both sides had responsibility for that, but today after the ACA, 28 million people, as we stand here tonight, still do not have insurance in America--28 million. Of the 20 million who got it, 16 got it only because of the expansion of Medicaid, not because of ObamaCare's work in the individual market; 16 million got it because of the expansion of Medicaid.

All that was, was bribery from the Federal Government to certain States that decided to take the money and run. They didn't do their citizens a full justice. What we see of the remaining 4 million of the 20 million who got insurance during ObamaCare--remember, 16 million got it because of the expansion of Medicaid; of the remaining 4 million, 2 million are like my wife and me.

Do you remember the day when President Obama said that if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance and if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor? Like most Democrats in the Senate and the House who voted on ObamaCare without reading it, he obviously didn't know what was in the bill because neither of those things were true.

I was canceled. In an individual policy before I ran for the U.S. Senate, my individual policy as a retiree was canceled, and the only policy we could get under the exchange in ObamaCare included things like vision, hearing, drug rehabilitation. I have never had a problem with that. My wife hasn't either.

By the way, maternity--I met my wife in first grade. We are not having babies at this age. What is that? My rate is almost double because we had to take things in policies that we did not need.

Of the remaining 2 million, 1 million are the most destitute, low- income people who really do need our help, but we have disrupted the entire healthcare system because the Democrats thought that the bigger government approach would work.

How has that worked out in places like the VA? I hear talk now about single payer; I will get to that in a second. If you like the VA, you are going to love a single-payer system because that is exactly what it is.

Let me go on. I have heard a lot of talk in this Chamber tonight about, oh my God, the Republicans are going to hurt people in America-- hurt people in America.

Let me talk about who is hurting people in America today. This is a travesty in itself. We cannot get the information from the IRS. We have just now gotten the information from the IRS. In 2014, the IRS, under the rules of ObamaCare, fined 8 million people $1.8 billion.

Mr. President, I don't know about you, but I am outraged. I know you are too.

The irony of that is that 85 percent of the people who were fined in 2014--$1.8 billion--85 percent made less than $50,000, and less than half of them made $25,000.

What our Democratic friends did was cram down the throats of Americans this thing called ObamaCare, and then they put fines on people who couldn't afford insurance, and they are the poorest people in our country.

Who is standing for those guys today--the Democrats? Don't you bet. They want a Big Government solution that gives them more power, and they could not care less about the very poor people they claim to champion. I have had enough of it. This is outrageous.

Twenty-two million people are going to lose insurance. That is what they tell us. Let's clean this up right now. The CBO's own estimate says that once you remove the mandate--forget about what else is available. If you just remove the mandate, because the policies are so expensive, 15 million are going to give it up. That is happening today.

By the way, do you know that CBO is using a March 2016 baseline to compare these numbers to? It is outrageous. In business, you would never accept this. Yet today they are determined to be the ``holy grail'' up here. I haven't seen a number come out of the CBO that I would depend on yet. In fact, in 2010, they overestimated the number of people who would sign up for ObamaCare by 12 million people. They missed the estimate by more than 50 percent. This isn't a rounding error. They don't know what they are doing.

Right now, today, we have the same problem. Fifteen million people say they will give up their insurance voluntarily because it is too expensive. That has nothing to do with the new plan. That is because ObamaCare is too expensive.

They also say that 4 million people will give up Medicaid. Medicaid is free. Why would somebody give up Medicaid?

They say ObamaCare is so good and so affordable that they are going to add 5 million people to it. There is no evidence today that would back that claim up. That is not a quantified model outcome. It is the estimate of a person who sits over there and makes this up. The other side is acting like, oh my goodness, this is the ``holy grail.''

Let's talk about this. The premiums under ObamaCare prior to this year, over the last 2 years, are up over 105 percent in America. They say that the reason premiums are going up is because of uncertainty coming out of the White House. This year's rates were determined last year, before we even knew this President was going to be a nominee. That is more disinformation.

What I am fed up with is that it sounds like a good story until you see the facts. The premiums in my State alone going into next year are going up 42 percent.

Here is the untold truth: In my State, 96 of 159 counties have only one carrier. That is a monopoly. They can do pretty much whatever they want. That is under ObamaCare, not anything else we are talking about. That is the reality today.

By the way, here is the real comeuppance. Today in my State--and you have the same problem in your State--300,000 people who make less than the poverty rate in my State cannot get insurance today under ObamaCare. Forget about what we are talking about to fix this mess. Today under ObamaCare, they can't get insurance--300,000 people in my State. That is true in every State in our country. That is the untold ugliness of ObamaCare.

ObamaCare is hurting people right now. I am tired of hearing the other side talk about how they care for people--they care for people-- and then they fine the poorest people in America $1.8 billion. Then they deny 300,000 people in my State access to healthcare. Enough already.

What are we doing about it? Six months ago, this President said that there were four objectives that any healthcare system in America and the individual market had to meet. The first was access. We have already talked about how ObamaCare is failing people who need access to it. The lowest income people in America are being denied insurance under ObamaCare. We fixed that. People who want insurance are going to get insurance.

By the way, premiums were the second thing we had to do to try to get costs down because it is becoming too

prohibitive. I have sons in the middle of their careers. They can't really afford the insurance they are being offered today. I feel it firsthand in my own life.

Premiums right now, though--if we put into place the suggestions we have on the table right now, the HHS Department has estimated just last week with a very credible model that rates could come down as much as 78 percent in the next 4 years. Has anybody heard the other side remind us of that data point? No. Why do those rates come down? Because the free-market system gets to act again, instead of being shackled in choices being removed. All of a sudden, now we move into it.

By the way, they talk about these made-up fantasy policies. Wait a minute. I had one of those made-up fantasy policies that you can't get today under ObamaCare. It is called catastrophic coverage. For some people with a high deductible, catastrophic coverage--that works. They are denied that today because Big Government knows more about what you need in your personal life.

The third thing we had to do--and this was very important. The second part of this problem is that Medicaid was not on a sustainable path. I am sorry. They have overpromised, and they cannot deliver. There is no way over the next 30 years that we can sustain Medicaid. Just as Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt, we cannot afford to do what they are promising people we are going to do. They know that. They already know that.

Just like the Great Society, these Big Government programs that they promise all the time are going to work have never worked. The Great Society, the War on Poverty was going to remove poverty from America. I remember that.

I sit at a desk where that bill was signed by the then-Democratic leader of the Senate, Richard Russell, before it went to the White House. I am reminded every day of how Big Government has failed the American people. That war on poverty has spent trillions of dollars trying to reduce poverty in America. Yet, today, the poverty rate is fundamentally the same as it was in 1965 when that was signed into law.

Big Government does not work in situations like this. I lived under a single payer. My son lived under a single payer. This is the alternative they are after. I have heard it mentioned three times on the floor of the Senate tonight. We cannot go there. It bifurcates delivery. It would add $3.2 trillion. That is more than we spend on all of our mandatory expenses today--$3.2 trillion every single year. That is impossible. If you think that would work, imagine this. Go home and look at your tax bill. Whatever you paid the Federal Government last year, double it. That is what that would mean. It is not workable.

The fourth thing we had to do was make sure preexisting conditions were protected. I worried about that through my entire career. If I changed jobs, if I had been sick or my family had been sick, I might have been denied insurance. We can't allow that. This bill doesn't allow that. We protected preexisting conditions. We put Medicaid on a sustainable path for the long term. We also bring premiums down. That was a major priority here. And we give everybody in America access to healthcare--period, end of the conversation.

That is not good enough. The other side is not going to be happy until this Federal Government steps in and takes over 18 percent of our economy called healthcare. They tried to do it in 1992 to 1994, under HillaryCare. They tried to do it here. I remember the Speaker of the House saying: If you want to know what is in this bill, you have to vote for the bill. We are not doing that today. This cloud of innuendo that the other side has perpetrated on the American people is just not true.

In 2010, not one Republican voted for ObamaCare. Not one amendment got to the floor of this Senate. Yet they want to talk about this great open policy. They had 7 years to fix this mess. People in my State have been hurt by it. It is unforgivable, and we can do something about it this week.

Senator John McCain is very sick. He is a fighter. He will take care of this. I hope he will be back this week to help us. If he can, I think he will. We are going to vote on it this week. We have to do this for the American people.

I want to remind everybody what is at stake here. If we don't pass this tomorrow, then we end up moving toward a single-payer system. Let me remind everybody of the other Big Government failures we talk about: the VA and the Postal Service. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are bankrupt. We talk about the ObamaCare failures. Then there is the Great Society of rural poverty. I want to remind everybody.

Let me close with this. I heard tonight that this is a reckless action, the new policy. I heard New Testament examples about how to take care of your brethren. It is shocking to me that somebody on the other side would say that when they know these statistics of what they have done--8 million of the poorest people in America have been fined $1.8 billion. Half of them make under $25,000 a year. That is taking care of your brethren all right. I am embarrassed. We can fix that.

I believe we heard the rain of devastation: No one is helped by this bill; it is a reckless act. Here is the one I love: We want to work with you. We want to work with you to help fix this thing. Just a year ago, I didn't hear any speeches in here--I don't think you did from that Chair--where anybody on that side acknowledged that there was anything wrong with ObamaCare. You hear today: We want to work with you to help fix ObamaCare. It is 7 years too late, in my opinion. It would have been nice to have been included in the conversation in 2009 and 2010 when it was crammed down the throats of Republicans.

I believe this is a historic moment in America, not just for healthcare. Healthcare is very important, but it is bigger than that. This is about the direction of our country. Are we going to try to trust Big Government again and again until we can't afford it? We are already well down that rabbit hole. We cannot afford this chance again. We have already proven it doesn't work.

I hope that this week colleagues on our side will get together and we will vote this thing in. I welcome any Democratic support as well. I know we are not going to get it. This is a time to stand. I hope we will have that vote. I fully encourage my colleagues here to support that. Let's get on with business.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand adjourned under the previous order.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.