Floor Statements

Madam President, it is a good thing that Democrats for the first time in 4 years passed a budget--at least brought one to the floor and passed it on a strictly partisan basis. Before that, they not only didn't pass one, they didn't bring one to the floor for 4 years and refused to do so, even though a specific provision of the United States Code actually required them to do so. It was a stunning development.

Senator Conrad, then the Democratic chair of the Budget Committee, wanted to bring up budgets, fought to bring up budgets, and one time said he was going to bring up a budget. But Senator Durbin and others in the leadership apparently had a vote, and they voted against him. Senator Murray, to her credit, has gotten a budget through. The Presiding Officer is a member of that committee, and they got a budget through this year, which was a good thing. I am not sure, but I suspect Senator Murray was one of those who blocked Senator Conrad from even bringing up a budget for 4 years. So I think it is a bit aggressive to say Republicans are blocking a budget when the history is they haven't even voted on one.

Secondly, there are Members on this side of the aisle who simply say the legislation necessary to raise the debt ceiling again should be passed--like legislation should be passed--on the floor of the Senate, and it would require a 60-vote point of order where you have to have 60 votes to pass.

In conference, a raising of the debt ceiling would be put on the budget which only requires 51 votes for passage. We have simply said we would allow the budget to go to conference and agree to conference, but we want a commitment that our Democratic colleagues will not try to sneak through raising the debt ceiling on the budget--which doesn't require but 51 votes. Our colleagues have flatly refused. If they would make that agreement, we would go to conference.

I think our Democratic majority should agree to that. They have indicated they don't intend to put it on the budget. One time Senator Durbin said he didn't think it was appropriate to put it on the budget. If so, let's make clear we are not going to gimmick it up and add that to it.

The reason we have had such contention at this point in history is that we are facing fundamental challenges relevant to the whole future of America financially. It is a time of great importance. The American people understand this. The American people want us to take action to place this country on a sound financial path.

So we are heading to the debt ceiling. By law we limit the amount of money Congress can borrow and how much money we can spend above our current level. We are now spending about $3,500 billion a year and we are taking in about $2,800 billion a year. Think about it. That is what we are doing every year, and it is unsustainable.

In August of 2011 we faced a debt ceiling, and the American people told Congress: We want to clip back on your credit card. You are not going to continue to borrow this much money every year. Before you raise the debt ceiling, we want you to show that you are going to be more frugal and are going to manage our money better.

Republicans dug their heels in and said, Mr. President, we are not going to raise the debt ceiling until you agree to some financial constraints and that you are not going to keep spending recklessly every year.

After a tense time, a committee was formed and an agreement was reached, and this is what we agreed to: First, we would raise the debt ceiling $2.1 trillion. Then, over the next 10 years we would reduce the projected growth of spending by $2.1 trillion--one for one, as Speaker Boehner said.

So it gave Congress 10 years to find cuts. But in a little over 2 years, we have already borrowed another $2 trillion. We have hit the debt ceiling cap again, and we have not yet come close to saving the $2 trillion we promised to save.

And by the way, these are not really cuts. When you look at the U.S. budget, the budget was projected to increase spending from $37 trillion over

10 years to $47 trillion over 10 years. With the Budget Control Act, spending would increase from $37 trillion to $45 trillion over 10 years. That is not really a cut in spending, is it?

Yes, the way it has been carried out hits some departments more than others--particularly the Defense Department--and we need to adjust that. But fundamentally, the reduction in the growth of spending that was part of the BCA last year was not extreme, not irresponsible, and should and must be preserved.

But colleagues, the President of the United States, after signing that agreement in August--the sequester is part of the BCA. It was all part of the same deal that created the $2.1 trillion in savings. In January, after that August, he proposed a budget that would increase spending another $1 trillion and would raise taxes $1 trillion. That is basically what our colleagues passed in their budget this year: to spend $1 trillion more than the Budget Control Act said we should spend and raise taxes another $1 trillion over 10 years.

This is a total abdication of the promise we made to the American people. We said, OK, American people, we are going to vote to raise the debt ceiling. A lot of people didn't like any raising of the debt ceiling. Phone calls to my office were against any raising. People said, It is time for you guys to live within your means like I have to do in my house.

So we raised it. But we promised we wouldn't spend so much. We promised we would reduce spending by $2.1 trillion, but over 10 years. Do you know what a lot of cynics around here said? They said, Congress won't adhere to that. That is just a bunch of baloney. They promise that all the time, and then they breach their promises all the time. That is why the country is going broke.

That is exactly what the President did in January of 2012, 6 months after the agreement--he proposed to spend another $1 trillion above the amount of money we agreed to spend 6 months before. Why?

I didn't really want to sign that agreement. I didn't really want to cut that much money. So I am not bound by it. I didn't make a promise to the American people. I forgot all about that. That was 6 months ago. Oh, a 10-year promise, that we are going to contain the growth of spending for 10 years? Forget that. I don't want to do that. I want to spend more. I have investments I want to make. I have taxes I want to increase.

This is fundamentally what is occurring here. So we have got to stand firm and adhere at least to the containment of growth in spending in the Budget Control Act. We have to. Failure to do that is a capitulation in our promises to the American people, a total abandonment of any pretension that we will be fiscally responsible in this body. It is just unthinkable that we would abandon the limits we had in the Budget Control Act.

The sad truth is the Budget Control Act reductions in the growth of spending do not come close to putting us on a firm financial footing. We are still on an unsustainable debt course, as our Congressional Budget Office has told us.

Yes, we have seen a reduction in the deficits this year of $600 billion. People say that is great.

George Bush has been called profligate, and sometimes he was. The highest deficit he ever had was $470 billion. The year before his last year in office was $167 billion.

President Obama in his 6 years will have averaged almost $1 trillion a year in deficits. We have never, ever come close to that kind of deficit before in the history of the Republic.

So what does a budget say that says we want to tax people $1 trillion more and spend more money under these circumstances? I will tell you what it says.

From the President and the majority here in the Senate, it says: It is not our problem. We can't find any more ways to reduce the growth of spending. We can't save another dime. You people just don't understand. There is no way we can save any more money. We have a problem, though. And do you know who is responsible for it? You, the American people. It is your fault. You won't give us enough money. If you would just send more money, another $1 trillion, another $2 trillion, another $600 billion which was passed in January, just another few hundred billion more or a trillion here and a trillion there in taxes, why, we could solve all of the problems. Send us more money. And by the way, we will use that money to create government programs and government bureaucracies that impose great costs on the American economy and have in fact resulted in the declining wages of American workers to a degree that is not acceptable.

We need a growth-oriented, lean government--a lean government that serves the people for the least possible cost and reduces these deficits. Deficits themselves are pulling down the economic growth in our country. The size of our debt is so large, we have never had anything like it, it is already beginning to diminish the prospects for growth in our economy and reduces job creation and reduces wages.

I know we are in a tough time now. We certainly need to work our way out of this. But the President negotiated over the debt ceiling in August of 2011, and we made at least a step forward. In fact, it was the most significant fiscal step this country has taken, maybe in decades, and for the last 2 years we have actually spent less money than the year before. Think about it. To hear people talk, they would think the country is going to collapse.

But we have had a modest reduction in spending, and that has been good. It has been good. But it is not nearly enough to put us on a sustained path.

We need to save Social Security, we need to strengthen and save Medicare, we cannot afford the Affordable Care Act. We have witnessed a total misrepresentation on the Affordable Care Act with regard to its cost. The Government Accounting Office, an independent auditor, has told us it is going to add at least $6 trillion to the debt of the United States over the long term under its likely set of assumptions. It does not pay for itself--nowhere close. It is as unstable financially as Social Security is over the long term.

Let's keep working. Maybe we can develop some ways to confront our financial problems. It is absolutely critical that we do that. We have a moral responsibility to do that and we have to start working together to achieve it. I think the President needs to back off his statements that he will not negotiate on the continuing resolution or the debt ceiling.

I yield the floor.

I have a moment.

I thank the Senator. Of course that is correct. I understand the Speaker has indicated there is no guarantee that the increase in the debt ceiling would not be a part of a conference report that came out of conference committee. We have independent Senators in this body who simply said we do not think we should be subjected to having the debt ceiling increase without a full debate and the normal processes of 60 votes in the Senate. That is where the disagreement lies. People can have disagreements about the validity of their concern, but

it is a legitimate concern. If there is no intention to move a debt ceiling increase at 51 votes, why wouldn't my colleagues agree not to do it? That is the disagreement I think that now exists.

Madam President, I say to my colleague, through the Chair, it is very simple. Senators have rights. They have a right to assert those privileges on the floor of the Senate. We have Senators who say you should not do this, you should not raise the debt ceiling on the budget and we do not want to go to conference unless you do agree not to sneak that through without a full debate and 60-vote threshold on the floor of the Senate. Attaching it to a bill that is a budget deal that is huge and would have a lot of interest in it would make it even more difficult to separate that question out. Rightly or wrongly, that is their view.

I say I don't see any problem and I am amazed at the intransigence of the majority of not just accepting that. I don't think it is likely, as the Senator indicated, that the House would add that to it, frankly. I am not too worried about it. But some are and that is causing the disagreement right now. I think it would be great to go to conference. I would like to see a conference occur, frankly. I think it is an unusual and positive development that after 4 years of not even bringing a budget to the floor, that we now have the majority here passing a budget so we can try to do something with it in conference-- although I have to tell you, all of our colleagues, there is a big difference in the budgets. The budget passed out of the Senate with our majority that every Republican opposed completely busted the Budget Control Act. It is nowhere close to what was agreed to in that Act 2 years ago.

I think we have a huge gap to cover in conference. It is not impossible and it would probably be a healthy thing to start that process. I wish my colleagues would relent and commit not to try to sneak the debt ceiling increase in on the budget.

I thank the Chair. I appreciate my colleague, a member of the Budget Committee, who contributes ably and works hard to try to do the right thing around here.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think we should all note that this unanimous consent agreement essentially asks the Senate to direct the House on what to pass and to pass the CR the Senate desires. There won't be any need to, in effect, deal in that fashion. That won't work.

I would also note in response that there is a unanimous consent request agreement I could agree to and I think Members of this side would agree to, and that is that the Senate proceed to Calendar No. 33, H. Con. Res. 25; that the amendment at the desk, which is the text of S. Con. Res. 8, the budget resolution passed by the Senate, be inserted in lieu thereof; that H. Con. Res. 25, as amended, be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table; that the Senate proceed to a vote on a motion to insist on its amendment, requests a conference with the House on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses, and authorize the Chair to appoint conferees on the part of the Senate, with all of the above occurring with no intervening action or debate. I further ask consent that it not be in order for the Senate to consider a conference report that includes reconciliation instructions to raise the debt limit.

That is the reason there has been an objection over here--because, under the way we believe we should proceed, raising the debt limit is a legislative act that should be subject to 60 votes. The concern from Members of our conference who have objected is that if we put the debt limit on the budget, then we would only have to have 51 votes. They have insisted they would approve going to the House and having conference on the budget, but they want an agreement that they are not going to attempt to slip that through. And if it is not a problem, why won't they agree?

So for these reasons, we are not able to agree, and I would object.

And I believe I understood she has renewed it, and so I would renew my objection.

Mr. President, just briefly, I appreciate Senator Murray having passed a budget this year in the Senate for the first time in 4 years. It is a budget that is far from the kind of budget we should have, but it was one they stood up and voted for. That is something of value to begin our process around here.

I would note that the reason it is such an unacceptable proposal from my Democratic colleagues--very similar to what President Obama asked for--is that it raises taxes $1 trillion over 10 years and raises spending $1 trillion over 10 years. That is above the lawful Budget Control Act levels we agreed to on a bipartisan basis in August of 2011.

If we remember, the President insisted we have a debt ceiling increase then. He said that we couldn't negotiate on it, that the country would sink into oblivion if we even got close to the debt limit, and we all had to back down and just agree to raise the debt limit without any limits.

Polling data showed the American people did not believe we should raise the debt limit of America without at least cutting spending and reducing our deficits; the credit card Congress was on was going to be pulled back. So Republicans stood firm. An agreement was reached, and the President approved it. It had no tax increases and raised the debt ceiling $2.1 trillion over 10 years. How much is that? We were projected to increase spending over 10 years by $10 trillion. This would reduce the increase in spending from $10 trillion to $8 trillion--not enough to throw the government into default, disaster, and confusion if properly executed. And it certainly wasn't the best way it was done. So that was the agreement. Before the ink is dry, with a year or so under it, now our colleagues have already abandoned ship, thrown in the towel, and want to raise spending by $1 trillion over what they agreed and raise taxes by another $1 trillion. That is why we have a big disagreement.

What do our colleagues want? They want to tax more, spend more, with more debt. It is not the way to run America, and the American people know it. So somehow, in this debt crisis, we all have to work together. And I respect my colleagues, but I cannot agree to doing something in this process that violates the solemn agreement. We told the American people: OK, we have raised the debt ceiling $2 trillion, but we reduced spending by $2 trillion. The debt ceiling has already eased up by $2.1 trillion, but we still made a promise we have to honor--that we will save $2.1 trillion of growth over the next 10 years. That is our responsibility and duty.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the next two Republican Senators to be recognized would be Senator Collins from Maine followed by Senator Murkowski from Alaska and that we would continue to alternate between both sides.

I ask unanimous consent that Senator Collins be recognized at this time.

I ask unanimous consent that the two Republican speakers on this side be Senator Collins from Maine and Senator Murkowski and that we continue to alternate between both sides. Since I just butted in as part of our budget debate, I did not intend or desire to take Senator Collins' time. She has been patiently waiting next in line.

Thank you, Madam President. I appreciate Senator Schumer's remarks about the Iran sanctions. They are very important. It is an action by the United States that I think has helped in a number of ways with the radicalism in Iran, and we need to keep it up.

Yesterday, I heard Mr. Clapper--or maybe it was the day before-- testify before the Judiciary Committee, and he said he had a number of people not working. Senator Grassley said: If they are not critical people, then why do you need so many? If you have a critical job, you need enough people to do the critical duties. How many do you need? You must not need all these people. You said they are not important to us. I don't think Mr. Clapper had a very good answer to that.

When someone raised the question of defense cuts under the Budget Control Act, and he expressed concern about that, which I would share. I think Mr. Clapper is right to be concerned about it. So I asked Director Clapper: Do you know the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Have you ever heard of the Commander in Chief of the United States?

The House--the Republican House, I must say--has a half dozen times or more, over several years, passed legislation that eases those cuts and finds other reductions in spending from other departments and agencies that have received no cuts and as a result reduces the burden on the Defense Department. Indeed, the Defense Department represents one-sixth of the U.S. budget and they are being asked to take one-half the cuts and don't think that counts in bringing down the war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan; that is entirely different. I am talking about the base defense budget that has taken half the cuts under the Budget Control Act. It is too much for the Defense Department. It ought to be spread around. The House has voted more than one-half dozen times to do that. It died in the Senate because I guess they want to utilize the military to threaten Republicans: If you don't do what we want, we are not going to fund your military.

My goodness, the President is the Commander in Chief of the U.S. military. Doesn't he have a responsibility to make sure we are adequately funded? I have to say, I am just getting a little frustrated with that argument.

First of all, I don't think he is required to lay off that many people. He indicated he was reviewing it. He was going to bring back more people, as he could have been doing all along, but I think it did allow another example of disastrous complaints beyond reality. One more thing. Senator Schumer, and many of our Democratic colleagues, have been conducting a sustained and direct attack on the millions of people who supported and identified with the tea party movement. Make no mistake about it, they don't respect the people in the tea party movement. They demean them in every way virtually every day in this body.

The tea partiers believe in America and thought this U.S. Congress has turned into lunatics and are putting this country into bankruptcy by its spending too much and passing ObamaCare. Democrats passed ObamaCare in spite of the overwhelming objections by the American people. They did it without listening. The tea party spontaneously rose up, and it clobbered a bunch of Democratic House Members and Senators. It switched the whole majority in the House by a big number. So they don't like it.

Everybody who opposes them and says: You are not listening to us, they are now demeaning and attacking. I think the American people and the people who identify with and support the tea party, either directly or indirectly, need to know that. I know the people in the tea party. They care about America. They love America. They can't understand what is going on here and they think they are moving us into bankruptcy and we forgot the entire concept of constitutional limited government.

We have heard a lot of talk about the challenges facing the government during the funding lapse we are in. All of us want to see the government return to normal operations, and I certainly do, but what we seem to be losing sight of is the permanent consequences--the debt consequences--of the Affordable Care Act. It needs to be a part of this discussion. The Democrats have refused to listen. They basically blocked any effort in the Senate to reform in any significant way the Affordable Care Act. It has been going on ever since it passed. Their goal is to put up a wall around it so if anything comes up, they will not listen to it. They will not consider it. They will not discuss it. It is a fact. It is a done deal. We can't even discuss it.

The House has a right to fund what they want to fund under the Constitution and not fund what they choose not to fund. They are trying to initiate and force a discussion on one of the most important issues facing America. One of the things that is so dangerous about this law has not been properly discussed, and I wish to talk about it.

A lot of us are going to donate our pay during this furlough to charity. I certainly will. I wish our friends would begin to be more concerned for the private sector workers. There are millions of American workers who will be permanently affected by the Affordable Care Act. They will be hammered by it. Eventually full funding will resume to our government. We know that. This furlough will end.

If this ObamaCare remains in full effect, the consequences for American workers are going to be lasting and damaging, as will the consequences to the United States Treasury and our financial condition.

In particular, as ranking member of the Budget Committee, I would like to focus on the huge and fundamental accounting manipulation that lies at the center of this health care law. I am going to make some statements, and if anybody has detailed objections or rejections to it, I want to see them, and I will respond to them. But I am correct in what I am saying, and I look forward to any discussion that anybody would like to have. So far people don't want to talk; they want to ignore the problem.

We have to deal with these accounting manipulations because it is a colossal blow to our Treasury. The Affordable Care Act was packaged and sold based on a promise that I am going to disprove. The American people knew it wasn't true anyway. Before a joint session of the Congress, the President of the United States said and promised this: ``I will not sign a [health care] plan that adds one dime to our deficits, now or any time in the future, period.''

That is a bold statement. It is as good as ``read my lips.''

As I addressed earlier this week, hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings to the hospital insurance, HI, trust fund were double- counted under the legislation that was passed--at least $400 billion over the 2010 to the 2019 10-year period. I asked for an analysis before the bill passed on December 23. We ended up voting on December 24, Christmas Eve. They rammed it through before Scott Brown, who would have denied them the 60th vote, was elected in Massachusetts--liberal Massachusetts--on the commitment he would be the vote to kill ObamaCare, but they were able to get it through before he was able to take office.

The night before we voted, I asked CBO about it. I insisted they give an answer, and they did. They said:

The key point is that savings to the HI trust fund--

That is Medicare--

under PPACA--

That is ObamaCare--

would be received by the government only once, so they cannot

be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the

same time, pay for current spending on the other parts of the

legislation--

ObamaCare--

or on other programs. . . . To describe the full amount of HI

trust fund savings----

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have an additional 2 minutes.

The CBO went on to conclude to say:

To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as

both improving the government's ability to pay future

Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of

Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of

those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the

government's fiscal position.

What a statement that was. In fact, CBO estimated that if Medicare savings were truly set aside to pay future Medicare benefits, the new health care law would not decrease but increase the deficit over the first 10 years and subsequent decade. They said it would increase the deficit.

But there is a lesser known, equally shocking, account gimmick that I wanted to mention today; that is, how it was done with Social Security. They have obtained another $100 billion over the next 10 years by double-counting Social Security money.

My time is up, and I could explain it in more detail, but we have to understand this. According to the Congressional Government Accountability Office--and I asked them not too long ago when they issued a report--that over the next long-term implementation of ObamaCare, it would add $6.2 trillion to the debt of the United States. That is almost as much as the liabilities that Social Security has and fully accounted for--my budget staff tells me that the ObamaCare legislation will be harder to fund and add more to the deficit----

Than Social Security will under the current problems. We need to stop digging the hole and we need to start fixing Medicare and Social Security and not adding other programs we can't pay for.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for 2 minutes and to be followed by Senator Enzi for the normal time he was allocated.

Madam President, we share being attorney generals of our States, and I just wish to take a moment to express my sincere and deep thanks--and from all of us--to the men and women who protect us every day, the Capitol Police. We had a very serious incident yesterday. Our people rallied and responded in an appropriate way. I believe they conducted themselves in a professional way.

For example, I saw one young man. He said he had heard and responded immediately, was running toward the scene. We think: Well, that is OK. That is what they do. That is what they are supposed to do.

We need to understand, when one of our young men and women are responding to a scene of a firing, of weapons discharged, they do not know what is there. In this environment, it could be a very serious thing. Their very life is at stake every time. Everyplace they stand on our streets, everyplace they stand in our building, the Capitol, and our office buildings, they are standing there subject to a threat by somebody who could appear out of nowhere with deadly force, and they do it with professionalism and courage every day.

We have been very fortunate in seeing this Capitol be well protected, and I wish to express my appreciation for them and all who place their lives at risk every day to protect the operational functions of this government.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Madam President, we have a number of serious difficulties in our country. The most serious is a lack of jobs and a lack of economic growth. The Affordable Care Act is devastating to that situation, making it much worse.

Our colleagues need to understand, as we talk about the difficulties that would happen if there would be a shutdown--and there will be difficulties, for sure. But the idea that this is not an important matter that needs to be addressed when we confront the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, is wrong. We have to address this question.

One thing I would say to all of us, the numbers are in and it is quite clear: 77 percent of the jobs that have been created since January of this year are part time. Every economist has said that is in large part driven by the Affordable Care Act. They have no doubt that this is a major factor and is an exceedingly unusual and dangerous trend that businesses are hiring people part time, not full time--77 percent of those hired this year are for part time work.

When we look at the job numbers that will come in tomorrow and at how many people found jobs, maybe it will be 180,000, maybe it will be 210,000. They will brag about that I'm sure. But has anybody thought about the fact that to an unprecedented degree those jobs will be part time, without health care, without retirement benefits, and less job security? Somebody needs to be thinking about this. The health care law is absolutely a driving factor. Businesses told me that as I traveled my State in August. They say they are trying to keep small businesses below 50 employees too. They are not hiring people only to stay below 50 employees so they don't have to comply with some of these rules.

What have we heard all year? We are not going to talk about fixing the Affordable Care Act. We are not going to bring it up. We are not going to get a single amendment in the Senate.

The House has repeatedly legislated on the Affordable Care Act. The Senate refuses to take up their bills, refuses to allow votes, refuses to have a full debate. We are at the end of the year, and nothing has been done about it. We could expect some tension to build up here.

What I hear the House saying is: Delay this bill for 1 year. It is not working. Delay the individual mandate and give ordinary Americans some relief from this law. The President has already delayed parts of ObamaCare--probably without lawful authority--and delayed it for a year for Big business. But the President and Senator Reid have, in effect, said: We will shut down the government before we delay the law for ordinary Americans.

The House has passed a bill to fund the government, but the bill that was just voted down would simply have delayed the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act for 1 year. Maybe this time we could actually fix some of the problems or change some of the provisions in ObamaCare that are so damaging to America.

One thing I wish everyone to know--and I am the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee and we deal with the numbers--I wrote to the Government Accountability Office. They are an independent group, and I asked them what the long-term costs of the Affordable Care Act would be. The President said, unequivocally, this bill will not add one dime to the debt of the United States. Do you remember him saying that? He said it many times. His aides and Senators said the same thing many times. The President went on to say, however, you may have forgotten: Not now, not ever, period.

Well, is that true? Will the Obama administration health care law not add one dime to the United States debt now or ever?

What did the Government Accountability Office say? This is a chart that reflects what they told the Budget Committee in response to my question.

They said over the 75-year period, it adds $6.2 trillion to the debt of the United States. That number is huge, as $1 trillion is a lot of money.

How huge is it? How do we compare it? All of us know that Social Security is in great difficulty and under serious threat. We have to reform it and put it on a sound basis. It is not going to be easy to do that. Why? Well, it has unfunded liabilities. We don't have enough money coming in to pay for the commitments we made to pay out in the future.

Remember, Social Security has a dedicated source of revenue as well. It is on your paycheck every month. It is the FICA we pay. It goes to Social Security and there is a Medicare withholding too. Those funds are dedicated for Social Security or Medicare. But people are living longer, and the benefits are such that we are going to have a shortfall in the future.

How much is that Social Security shortfall we have been wrestling over how to fix? It is $7.7 trillion. In the ObamaCare bill that passed on Christmas Eve, that they rammed through the Senate on Christmas Eve on a party-line vote before Scott Brown could take office and provide the vote for Massachusetts that would have killed the bill. They rammed it through the Senate without any amendments, and it added at least another $6.2 trillion to the long-term debt of the United States of America. It is worse than that, and I can explain why it is even worse. That number does not consider interest on the $6.2 trillion over 75 years. I suspect the interest is going to be many trillions of dollars more and it adds to the debt.

As we borrow the money, we pay interest on the money we borrow. It is not free. We borrow the money on the market or from trust funds. This is a big deal. The American people need to know that the promise this law will not add to the debt is absolutely false.

This is based on, the GAO said, accepted accounting principles and a realistic scenario of what is likely to happen over time should the plan be implemented. One of the things they say is the cuts they made to Medicare providers, hospitals and doctors, that provide health care to seniors are so large they will not be sustainable. If they continue to cut in that fashion over a period of years, hospitals would close and doctors would quit practicing. You cannot do it. We are already dealing with a doc fix now on a bill that cut doctors more than they could reasonably be cut. Every year we have to find up to $20 billion to get the money to fund the doctors because we can't cut below a certain amount. So I would say this GAO number is low.

As we wrestle with the great responsibilities we have been given as Senators, yes, we need to think about what would happen in the next few days if the government does not function. I hope we avoid that. We absolutely should avoid that because it is not good.

We need to be asking ourselves what are we doing to our children, grandchildren, and the financial stability of the United States of America with a new entitlment program that is going to commence now, by January 1, that will add more than $6.2 trillion to the debt of the United States. This is a huge amount. I ask our colleagues to consider it.

One more matter that shows how we get in trouble financially is when the numbers get so large nobody can quite follow. The larger the numbers get, the harder it is to follow.

Under the legislation of the Affordable Care Act, the plan was to cut up to $500 billion over the next 10 years from Medicare by cutting providers while promising patients would receive just as good health care as they always did. We are not cutting your benefits, we are only going to cut providers. We have done this before. At some point you can't sustain that.

On December 23, the night before this bill passed, I spoke with the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, our own accountant, and told him in a conference call words to this effect: It is absolutely unbelievable to me, Mr. CBO Director, Mr. Elmendorf, that we are about to vote tomorrow morning, we are told, on the largest health care bill since Medicare and we don't know how to count the money. I think they are double-counting the money. This is unbelievable, how many hundred billion dollars we are talking about, it seems to me. I could hear somebody on his end of the conference call say: It is double-counting. I heard someone say it in the background.

I ask unanimous consent of the Chair for 1 additional minute.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. Elmendorf, by the next morning, gave us a letter. It laid out and contained this language. He said:

The key point is that savings to the HI trust fund--

That is the Medicare trust fund.

--of $500 billion over 10 years, the savings from the HI

trust fund by cutting providers and increase Medicare taxes

under PPACA--

That is the Affordable Care Act.

--would be received by the government only once, so they

cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and,

at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of

the legislation or on other programs.

You can't simultaneously say you are using this money to support Medicare by making Medicare more sustainable and then spend the money on a new program because then it is not going to be available to strengthen Medicare. That double-counting is not even taken into account in the $6.2 trillion figure derived from the GAO study.

I would conclude by saying the unfunded liabilities in this law are huge. They are a direct threat to the future of the United States financially. At this point in history, we need to be saving Medicare, we need to be saving Social Security, and we need to be saving Medicaid. We don't need to be starting another program without sufficient funds to pay for it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to use 15 minutes of the appointed time and be notified after 10 minutes.

I thank the Chair.

Look, what we are here today about is the Democratic majority in the Senate has built a fortress around ObamaCare--the Affordable Care Act. They have refused steadfastly any serious reevaluation of the law. They have blocked every attempt to do that. The House, Senator Cruz, Republicans, and others are trying to force this Congress to confront the obvious flaws in that law, and they have refused to do so.

That is why it has all come down to a debate at the end of the year over what we are going to do. Do we just give up? Do we allow the majority in the Senate to not even allow votes in the weeks to come? They are not. They will not do it unless they are forced to do so. They made a strategic decision to reject and fight off any attempt to bring up a vote on the floor of the Senate.

People in America, I am sure, cannot believe if a Member of the Senate desires to try and fix and improve the Affordable Care Act that they cannot go to the floor and get a vote on it. That is exactly what has been happening ever since it passed. Polling data show the American people want substantial changes to it. Members, even Democrats, have said they want some change. But nothing gets voted on that will actually make a real change in the law.

It is the plan of President Obama and Senator Reid to accept no change. Indeed, Senator Reid has made clear his plan is to move to a single-payer system. He said openly and publicly just a few weeks ago he wants a single payer system for all health care in America--the United States Government. And that can only be described as socialized medicine.

That is what the goal is, and we have got to confront this. So I wanted to say that first of all. But as ranking member of the Budget Committee, I want to share a few thoughts about where we are financially and what is going to happen with this legislation. First and foremost we have to know that the Affordable Care Act is deeply unsound financially. The President's promise--repeatedly made--was that it would not add one dime to the debt. He said it would not add one dime to the deficit ``now or ever, period.''

Is that true? No, sir, it is not true. This is a hugely unsound new entitlement program that will endanger the financial future of America at a time when we need to quit digging ourselves deeper in debt and begin to work ourselves out of debt.

The Acting President pro tempore is on the Budget Committee. We both know these numbers.

We are dealing with Social Security, desperately trying to figure out a way to make Social Security sound so our seniors can go to bed at night and not have any worries about the future of Social Security. Medicare is even more stressed. Now we are adding this law--ObamaCare.

What does it do? The Government Accountability Office, headed by an independent person, actually appointed by President Obama, has issued a report stating that under the likely financial scenario over the next 75 years--that is how they figure Social Security and Medicare's liabilities--this bill will add $6.2 trillion to the Federal deficit. Social Security's unfunded liabilities are only $7.7. We are talking about adding almost as much debt to the future of the United States and to our children and grandchildren as Social Security has in liabilities. We need to be fixing Social Security, not creating a new entitlement. We need to be fixing Medicare, not adding another one. We need to be fixing some of our pension plans that are unsound, not adding more debt. We were promised it wouldn't happen.

We are going to have a budget point of order later, and we will hear arguments that ObamaCare is good for the budget. But this is how a country goes broke. This is how a country goes broke. We are going to have a score from the Congressional Budget Office that says over 10 years this law will bring in more money than goes out.

In one sense that is correct. But where did they get the money? The money--$500 billion or so--is coming out of Medicare. But it is Medicare's money. They are cutting doctors and hospitals--providers-- $500 billion, and they are saying, therefore, the U.S. Treasury--the conventions of unified budget accounting, as CBO says--will show it as increased money. Therefore, it can be spent by an entirely new program. But it is not money for a new program or the U.S. Treasury. It is not Congress' money. This is Medicare's money, and it will be loaned by the Medicare trustees to the U.S. Treasury so it can be spent on this program.

The ObamaCare money that comes out of the Medicare savings is borrowed money. It is not free money. It is not new money. It is borrowed--borrowed from the trustees of Medicare--and it is headed in a downward spiral, and they will call those loans in very soon. There is just no money there, and that is how it all comes out.

The Government Accountability Office says under a realistic set of assumptions this law will add $6 trillion--$6.2 trillion--to this country's deficit. Mr. Holtz-Eakin said in the first 10 years there will be $500 billion added to the debt of America.

Supporters of the new law will contend otherwise, but it is indisputable that this is so. We are adding to the debt and it is going to threaten the future of America.

I would also point out, as we work our way through the entire effort to focus on our debt and what we will do for America, we need to understand how this accounting works. The Congressional Budget Office, on December 23, the night before the bill passed in 2009, in response to my request, sent a letter saying you cannot simultaneously use the money for Medicare and to fund a new program, though the conventions of accounting might indicate that. You cannot use it for both purposes. They used the phrase it was ``double counting.''

That is our own Congressional Budget Office. The night before this bill was rammed through the Senate, they told us that. Yet we still have the President--we still have Members of this body insisting this law is fully paid for and will not add to the deficit ever, period. Nothing could be more false. Nothing could be more false.

I know there are good people who feel like we have to keep this process moving, we have to send something to the House, and they will want to move this bill to the House. I understand that. But I just want everybody to know that we all need to fully understand that this health care law is unsound financially. This health care law will never work.

Second, I am disappointed that our colleagues in the House have sent a bill

over that spends at a rate that would add $20 billion more to our debt than the Budget Control Act would allow.

Colleagues, we have got to be so careful about this. I know they have an excuse for it. I know they say that by the end of the year the sequester will cut those spending levels down and it will not add to the debt at the end of the year. Don't worry about it, they say. But right now we couldn't agree, so we just spent more money on the discretionary side than we should have otherwise. We are going to spend $988 billion instead of $968 billion, $20 billion more at that rate.

But they say after 3 months or 2 months, when this CR ends, it will all be fixed. I am worried about that. It is going to be harder, I think. I think the pressure is going to be more intense 2 months from now to keep spending at that level.

I don't think they should have sent a bill to this floor, even though they can correctly argue that if sequester laws stay in effect, it will be reduced. I recognize that they can continue to argue that.

I thank the Chair.

But fundamentally it is going to be harder for us to confront this problem as we go forward in the future because we will have more cuts over 9 or 10 months than would otherwise have been the case if we don't make any of them in the first 2 months in this Congress.

I would say to our colleagues who are thinking, ``We may need to waive the budget points of order. Let's just go forward, and somehow we will work all this out in the future. We are going to be watching''--I can't support it. But those who feel they have to do so to keep the ball moving when the House sends another bill back over here, it ought to be on the budget level, not above it. I hope they will do that. That will relieve one more problem.

But the truly big issue is how to understand the cost of this health care law. My colleagues, using a score from the Congressional Budget Office, are going to contend that if you eliminate ObamaCare, it will cost the Treasury money. That is what they are going to tell you, and that is the score CBO would issue. But the CBO Director told us it is double-counting the money. You can't score this money twice.

But according to the conventions of accounting and the 10-year window over which this occurs, by reducing the cost of Medicare, you can therefore spend more money to fund a new program. You can do that, and it will appear not to add to the debt. But you can't count the amount of money coming in because it is Medicare's money. It is simply borrowing money from Medicare. It is going to add to the debt.

Our own independent Government Accountability Office has said, according to the likely analysis of events over the next 75 years, as they do for Social Security and Medicare, this plan is going to add $6.2 trillion to the Federal deficit. In other words, what they are saying is that you would have to deposit $6 trillion into an account today to have enough money to honor the commitments that are being made with the Affordable Care Act. So that much money, in addition to the other revenues and taxes that are in the legislation and the payments that are made by Americans, is not going to be enough, and we need that much more money. But we are committing this benefit to American citizens. It becomes an entitlement. We are committing these benefits to them, and we don't have the money to honor the commitment. That cannot continue. We cannot as a nation continue down this path.

Wall Street and others are telling us we have to get our house in order. We cannot continue to add to our debt in this fashion.

I understand the difficulties Members will be facing when they cast a vote as they come up here today. I am not going to criticize any Member on their vote--although I am not going to vote to waive the budget. I think we ought to stay within our budget, and I think we cannot get by with this idea that the Affordable Care Act is going to improve the financial condition of America when it absolutely is not.

I would be delighted. The Senator is such a fine leader of the Appropriations Committee and one of the most knowledgeable people here, a person I respect greatly.

I certainly do. And I think I may have had a little role in the fact that a budget was passed since I had been complaining that the Democratic majority went 4 years without passing a budget and several years without even bringing it to the floor. While the House was passing a budget every year, the Senate failed and refused a fundamental legal requirement to even produce one.

But this year our new chairman, Senator Murray, did bring a budget forward and did move it through the body. There was a concern--I didn't raise it, but a number of colleagues on this side of the aisle said: We are glad to have the budget move forward, but we want you to commit not to raise the debt ceiling on a budget reconciliation because you could raise the debt ceiling with 51 votes instead of 60 votes.

I know the Senator may not like that, but that is exactly what was said. And Senator Durbin on this floor said he did not think it could be done under the rules of the Senate and that we could raise the debt ceiling on the budget. But then why wouldn't the Senator agree to that?

So the request from the people who objected to sending a budget forward to conference was based solely--and they expressed it repeatedly--on the concerns that budget reconciliation would be used to raise the debt and therefore not be subject to a 60-vote majority.

Mr. President, I yield the floor. If I have not used all my time, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, as I explained the unfunded liabilities of the Affordable Care Act, I now want to make something clear. It is a lot more than that. It is unlike Social Security and Medicare, where there is a dedicated tax that supports those programs that are on our payroll withholding every week, that FICA withholding, dedicated to Social Security and Medicare. There is no dedicated tax support for ObamaCare.

If you assume all the new taxes they raise are actually used to fund ObamaCare, then there would be a $6.2 trillion shortfall, a liability. But if you do it like it should be accounted and assume that none of this money raised in taxes is actually dedicated to the Affordable Care Act, then it runs about $17 trillion according to estimates by my Budget Committee staff.

Congress is well-known for this. Unless your tax money is absolutely legally dedicated to something, it gets spent on other things. So we have no confidence we will come in with just $6.2 trillion. It is likely to be far higher than that, the way we know this body operates.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I want to share some remarks about the comments. I want to say Senator Boxer is a great advocate and does a good job as chair of our Committee on the Environment and Public Works. Pretty much we have had unanimous votes on bills that came out, Republicans and Democrats voting unanimously on the bills that came out. Sometimes we have differences and we fight over them, but a lot of times things are getting done around here.

But I will just say it is not actually fully correct to say the Republicans opposed the President's health care bill, the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. The American people opposed it by huge numbers. They, through an election, a remarkable election, and in some very close wins, found themselves with 60 votes in the Senate of the United States. They had a majority in the House, and they decided to move this bill. They shut out Republicans, moved a partisan bill, and they got it through--even when Scott Brown, if you remember, was running for the Senate in Massachusetts to fill the late Senator Kennedy's seat. He promised he would be the vote that would deny the 60 votes and stop this bill, and he won in Massachusetts. But he couldn't get here quickly enough. They were able to get the bill passed before he got here to kill it.

This has never been a popular bill and the polling number shows it is even less popular today than it was when they rammed it through. So this is not a little bitty matter. It threatens our Republic, I think, in a lot of different ways. I have talked about that earlier. But I would say--to understand the dynamics on the floor of the Senate--you have to understand that the majority leader, having gotten his bill passed on Christmas Eve 2009, after all kinds of maneuvers to get that accomplished, has protected it from any further debate and discussion. He has blocked any ability to bring up the legislation and to be able to amend it and fix some of the obvious flaws in it. One of the top drafters, the Senate Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee, has called it a train wreck, and it at least at needs reform. It really cannot succeed in its present form. Senator Reid has blocked any effort to bring up a bill and fix it. The American people might find that hard to believe, but I will repeat it: Since that time there have been numerous efforts on behalf of Members from this side to call up amendments and call up legislation to alter, amend, and replace the ObamaCare legislation.

He has utilized parliamentarian maneuvers, filling the tree, to block that. It cannot continue. This is about to become a law. It is going to hammer the American economy. It is already hammering the economy. The American people don't want it, and we are not going to go silent. So this is the beginning of the fight.

Senator Cruz--maybe people can disagree with his tactics--but he drove and raised the issue. We need to keep talking about it; we just do. It is time for this Congress to listen to the voice of the American people.

Senator Boxer is a good person, and she said President Bush had $1 trillion deficits and President Obama has reduced them in half. The highest deficit President Bush ever had in the 8 years he served as President was $487 billion, which is a lot of money--too much. The year before, it was $168 billion.

When President Obama took office, what was the first thing that was passed within weeks? A $1 trillion stimulus bill to supposedly stimulate the economy, but the money went out to government agencies and departments, and it had no stimulus impact at all. It was $1 trillion--every penny of which was borrowed. That year the deficit went up well over $1 trillion. The next year it was well over $1 trillion, the next year well over $1 trillion, and the next year well over $1 trillion.

In the first 4 years of President Obama's leadership, we had the highest deficits ever recorded in America. It is a stunning event, and he fought every day--and there were fights on the floor--to spend more and borrow more.

Some of his advisers would say: The reason this economy isn't growing so well is because we didn't borrow and spend enough. We didn't have enough. We should have created more debt and should have spent more. It has resulted to this date in the lowest rebound economically from a recession since World War II, and we are not doing well in that regard.

It is absolutely not so that President Obama bears no responsibility for the unprecedented debt that he has run up during this time. He is still advocating for $1 trillion more in spending above the Budget Control Act levels that he agreed to in the summer of 2011. He wants to spend $1 trillion more than what he signed as an agreement to raise the debt ceiling.

I know he didn't want to, but Congress said: We are going to cut back on your credit card. Now we are going to raise the debt ceiling $2 trillion, as you said you need, but we demand that you reduce the growth of spending over 10 years by $2 trillion.

We were projected to have spending growth to $10 trillion over the current rate of spending, which is about $3.6 trillion a year. We were going to increase it by a total of $10 trillion. Under BCA, if we adhere to it, we would increase it by $8 trillion, not $10 trillion. That is not going to bankrupt America. There is no reason we can't run this government by growing the spending by $8 trillion instead of $10 trillion. So it is unbelievable that we make that point.

I know the budget balanced in the last years of the 1990s, and President Clinton proudly claims credit for that, and he was a part of it. But I haven't forgotten that the Republican House was in a constant battle over Democratic President Clinton's spending levels, and there was actually a fairly long shutdown of the government to contain the growth of spending, and it resulted in a balanced budget. That is how it happened. There was credit enough to go to both sides of that.

We need health care reform. It needs to be smartly and effectively done. We can improve health care in our country, but it does not have to tank the American economy, and that is what has been happening in recent days. I was going to talk about that, without much reference to ObamaCare and the health care bill--which is a negative factor of economic growth of very large proportions--but I just followed my friend and able colleague, Senator Boxer, and I wanted to share those points.

Last Thursday I delivered the first in a series of speeches looking at the state of our economy. I directed my staff on the Budget Committee--I am the ranking Republican there--to specifically analyze conditions facing working Americans so I could share those findings directly with the Members of the Senate. Both parties need to focus their efforts on defending working Americans from policies--Washington policies too often--that damage their financial well-being. It is happening. Last week I discussed the falling incomes and social challenges eroding the security of the middle class.

Today I will focus on the jobless recovery and the general problem of unemployment.

Few things matter more to a working family than the pace of the economy, especially after a hard recession. If on the one hand, it is a rapid, strong recovery, jobs will return quickly, people will return to the workforce, and a great deal of social suffering will be averted.

If, on the other hand, it is a slow recovery, then businesses don't create many new jobs, wages stagnate or fall, as they have been doing, and families continue to borrow from their savings to pay their bills. Life is spent wondering and worrying about the future.

We live today in the slowest economic recovery--they called it an economic recovery--since the end of World War II. No recovery from a recession since the end of World War II has been as slow as this one. Not counting the Great Recession, we have had 11 recessions since 1945. All had faster, stronger recoveries than this one--with all of them we bounced back quicker.

How slow is this economic recovery? Well, it has been nearly 6 years since the recession began in December of 2007. We still have not returned to the number of jobs we had 6 years ago. We haven't come back to the number of people working that we had 6 years ago. We are 1,988,000 jobs--almost 2 million--short of the 146,273,000 jobs we had when the recession began. This is not good.

Let's compare that with the other two bad postwar recessions: the contractions of 1973 through 1975 and 1981 and 1982--serious recessions. The recession of 1973 lasted 16 months. The recession of the 1981 collapse lasted 16 months, and the recession of 2007 lasted until June of 2009, or 18 months.

Working people were hit hard by these two earlier recessions. The unemployment rate rose to 9 percent in 1975 and 10.8 percent in 1982. The highest monthly unemployment rate for the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 was 10 percent. Our unemployment rate didn't hit as high as 1982. There is not much difference in the severity and length of these recessions. They were pretty similar.

Even so, total jobs had recovered by 25 months after the start of the 1973 recession and by 28 months after the recovery from the 1981 recession. It has been 70 months, however, since the start of the 2007 recession, and employment has not yet recovered.

Lost hours of work is another and even better way to gauge the failure of the current recovery. It is not simply the number of jobs in the economy but the number of hours worked that strongly influences the pace of economic activity.

In the fourth quarter of 2007, just as the recession was starting, Americans worked about 236 billion hours--that is a lot of hours. We still have not returned to that level.

In the third quarter of 2013, this last quarter, the Labor Department estimated Americans still only worked 232 billion hours. That is a shortfall of 3.5 billion hours. This decline is greater per worker since the population of available workers has increased by 9 million. So we have got 9 million more workers and a decline in the number of hours worked, and it is still well below what the number was in 2007. This is not the kind of recovery we need to be looking for.

Still another way to show the slowness of this recovery is to measure how much higher GDP--the economy today--is compared to the start of the recession. It turns out that economic output is 4.4 percent higher. Compare this with the 1973 and 1981 recessions. By this time after the 1973 recession, GDP was 17.9 percent higher, and GDP after the 1981 recession by this time was 20 percent higher. That is, the economy was 20 percent bigger by this time after the 1981 recovery.

Our current economy is only 4.4 percent larger. The 1981 economic gains were five times as great as this.

These are the top line numbers. What do they mean to real people? Below this surface we find extensive economic suffering throughout our Nation. There are 25 percent more discouraged workers today--988,000 versus 793,000--than there were in June of 2009 when the recession ended. We had 366,000 discouraged workers when the recession started in 2007, which means we have had an increase of 172 percent in this sad number in 6 years.

One of the most stunning developments of this recovery has been the decline in the labor force participation rate. This is a fundamental indicator of the breadth and depth of a recovery and of economic growth. Today 58.7 percent of the noninstitutionalized population 16 years of age and older is working--58.7 percent today. In 2007 that number stood at 62.7 percent. The current rate of labor force participation is the lowest this Nation has seen since 1978. The percentage of the population working today in the age group of workers is the lowest it has been since 1978, and it is not getting better.

This decline is due to two factors: increased unemployment, and labor force dropouts--discouraged people who are no longer even looking for work.

How many people are we talking about? If the same percentage of the population was working today as was working in 2007, we would have 154,089,000 workers. Since we currently only have 144,285,000 million people working, it appears that 9,804,000 people are out of the labor force--9 million normally expected to be working are out of the labor force.

When they are out of the labor force, it does not show up in the unemployment rate. It is only people who are actually applying for jobs who show up in the unemployment rate. So the unemployment rate we see today hides the real depth of the unemployment problem we have in America.

Of the 5.7 million who totally dropped out, more retirements and more disability than in 2007 explain about two-thirds of those dropouts. People went on disability, went on retirement. Many of them went on retirement at 62 when it would have been better if they could have had a decent job opportunity to work to 65, 66, 70, but they have dropped out because they are older workers, perhaps, and were unable to find decent work. But it cannot be good for America for millions of people to take their Social Security at 62 rather than later, too often because no work is available.

More than 4 million unemployed Americans have been out of work for more than 27 weeks--4 million--more than half the year they have been unemployed. All told, 11.5 million Americans want to work but cannot find jobs.

The unemployment rate for those between the ages of 16 and 19 who are not in school or in the military or in prison stands at 24 percent. So teenagers have a very large number, and the number is much higher for minority teenagers and young men particularly. This is the highest teenage unemployment has ever been this far into a recovery. It is very dangerous for our society to have so many young people--especially young men whose unemployment rates are even higher than females--out of work. This is not good for America.

We need to have a growing economy that creates jobs, and we don't need to be bringing in--under the immigration bill that passed the Senate, we don't need to be bringing in twice the number of low-skilled workers as we have been doing, as we have a generous immigration policy. This bill would double the number of guest workers coming into America to take jobs that children need to be doing. They need to be working. We don't need teenagers and young people--19, 20, 22, 23--with nothing to do month after month, year after year.

At 13 percent, unemployment among African Americans is about twice the national average of 7.4 percent. Unemployment among Hispanics stands at 9.4 percent. Unemployment among those with less than a high school education is 11 percent. But we want to bring in millions of people without high school educations to compete for the few jobs that are out there.

Again, these statistics, as bad as they are, mask the real-life implications of the slow economy. These are young careers that have failed to launch when they should, marriages perhaps put off until the economy improves, families not started until couples can afford children--a generation of children that arrive out of wedlock. We have retirements taken too early, loss of homes, perhaps; older children at home who should be out on their own, and we would normally expect them to be working; and lots of part-time, extra jobs at lower pay just to make ends meet.

Indeed, one of the most devastating statistics is the growth in part- time work instead of full-time work. It is a

stunning number. We have 5,188,000 fewer full-time jobs today than in December of 2007--5 million fewer. That equals a decrease in full-time employment of 4.3 percent, even though our population is growing.

At the same time, part-time employment has grown by 3 million over this same time period. That is an increase in part-time jobs of 13 percent. So make no mistake, the total number of jobs since 2007 is down, and for the people who are finding work, the work they find too often can only be part time.

Now 77 percent of the people who got a job since January of this year got a part-time job, not a full time job. When we see, colleagues, the reports of 190,000 jobs, 200,000 jobs, remember, 77 percent of those are part-time jobs. Those numbers hide the reality of the danger in our workforce.

Nearly 90 percent of the increase in part-time work represents people who, according to the Labor Department, ``could only find part-time work.'' In other words, they would like full-time but could only find part-time work. At the end of 2007, this number stood at 1.2 million. However, the most recent data shows that this population has grown by 127 percent to 2,714,000--a 127-percent increase in this number.

Job growth in the economy since 2007 has been principally in part- time work. We are becoming a part-time economy.

The President's health care law, without any doubt--I don't believe any economist, even if they try to sugar-coat it the best they could, would deny that the President's health care law is playing a major factor from the shift from full-time work to part-time work. As we all know, part-time workers don't enjoy the same health, retirement, vacation, and other benefits as full-time workers do. It is exceedingly hard indeed to succeed in this economy and in a career with only a part-time job.

We must recognize one of the biggest contributors to the decline in full-time jobs is the health care bill we have been debating. As others have observed, it is destroying the 40-hour workweek. That is what a union leader said: It is destroying the 40-hour workweek. It is even an assault on workers.

Let me tell my colleagues about one constituent who wrote my office. Linda Askew, from Sheffield, AL, wrote in July, asking Congress to do something to help. Ms. Askew has a small neighborhood business. She employs less than 10 people. According to Ms. Askew:

We have been here for almost 50 years. We have tried to

help our employees have health care for over 10 years now . .

. The new premiums are $590 per month for single coverage and

$1,520 for family coverage. . . . These costs are almost

becoming unbearable for our company. More troubling than

that, in the letter--

she got a letter from her insurance company--

was that part of the reason for this increase was blamed on a

new health care reform fees and taxes that health insurers

must pay on behalf of all their groups . . .

So to reduce the cost of health care in America, the health care bill raised taxes on the insurance companies that provide it. It gets passed along.

She continues:

Small businesses cannot keep up with these increases.

In the coming days, as I document the conditions facing American workers, I will also address the many causes of this economic deterioration--and there are many. There are many causes for the deterioration in the economy. Republicans and Democrats need to heed these problems I have stated, including a decline in wages, beginning in 1999 through a different administration.

The question is, What are we going to do about it, Republicans and Democrats? We need to consider these issues and deal with them.

What we are seeing is immensely troubling. As Washington grows larger, Washington grows wealthier and more powerful, American workers are being impoverished, sidelined, and marginalized. We see the numbers showing that the only area of America that has been showing raised growth is Washington. Washington! The government class is being enriched at the expense of the middle class. From deficit spending to Federal regulation to the immigration bill, Washington is pursuing policies that benefit lobbyists, the well-connected, government employees, regulators, and bureaucrats, but that are reducing the wages and job opportunities for everyday American workers. The numbers are clear.

Both parties need to shut out the special interests, work to develop policies that will restore our history of dynamic economic growth--and we can do so--growth that benefits all the people of our Nation.

What is the response we get from the governing class? What do they tell us the problem is? On the deficit, what do they say the problem is? We haven't spent enough money. It is your problem, American people. Just send us more money and we won't have deficits anymore. Trust us. Send us more money. The President proposed a $1 trillion tax increase in his budget. It was rejected, but that is what he proposed and that is what he advocates for. So they want to spend more.

They believe they can invest. We give the government more money, and it is going to invest in the economy and everybody is going to be better off. But we have seen that movie. It has been going on for 5 years, to a degree unprecedented in the history of America. They say, Don't worry, borrow and spend. Don't worry about the debt. We can just borrow more and spend more and that will stimulate the economy.

They say we need to regulate more. We need to block more American energy and import more, I suppose, from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and that is going to improve our economy. Really? We are going to drive up the cost of energy and coal and that is going to improve jobs in America? That is going to help a working person who now has to pay $200, $250 a month for his gas bill to commute? That is supposed to be good for us?

All we have heard is more taxes, more regulation, more government, more debt. That is the policy we are seeing here. I haven't seen anything that has the power to produce the growth and prosperity that we need.

So I say we have to get over this. We have tried this. It is not working. These policies have made it worse. We have to get back to classical American policies that validate individual responsibility, that allow people to progress and make more, that don't drive us to import more oil, that don't put regulation by massive numbers all over the economy, driving down productivity and driving up costs. That is the kind of thing we need to be doing. If we will do that, and if we will allow the vitality of the American spirit to flourish and flower and get this burden off the backs of our people, I think we will be surprised how much better things can be.

It is a serious crisis. This trend has been going on far too long. We can't ignore it. We can't say it is just the recession. We have been going along like this since 2007. We have not seen the growth we need. The tax and spend and borrow policies haven't worked. It is time for us to confront that. I hope my colleagues will.

I will continue to examine the data we are seeing out there and share it with my colleagues and maybe we can surprise ourselves how much good we can do in the long run.

Thank you, Madam President. I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank Senator Durbin and appreciate his leadership and courtesy.

I want to speak for a few moments about the impact of the President's health care law, the Affordable Care Act. Although the law hasn't been fully implemented yet, this massive overhaul--Federal takeover, really--of the health care system is already proving to be anything but affordable.

My team on the Budget Committee, where I am the ranking member, did some research on this issue, and we want to know what the real costs would be and how it will play out in the end. So what I will share with everyone now are some very important facts that all of us need to know.

The President has repeatedly said we have a health-spending problem, but what he hasn't said is that this law will make that problem worse.

Last week actuaries from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services--those are our top Federal health care people, CMS--issued a report, and its findings were unequivocal. This law will lead to higher health care costs. By 2022 the law is projected to increase cumulative health spending by $621 billion. That is the report from CMS. They basically work for the President of the United States.

Next year growth in the private health insurance premiums--the increases in our own private insurance premiums--is expected to accelerate to 6 percent from 3.2 percent this year, 2013. So the increase in premiums, CMS projects, will go up from 3.2 percent to 6 percent.

The Congressional Budget Office, CBO--they work for us here in the Congress--also released its annual long-term budget outlook last week. It concluded, 1, that Federal health care spending will ``grow considerably in 2014 because of changes made by the Affordable Care Act . . .'' They says the health care law is by far the single biggest factor driving the growth in Federal health care spending over the next decade--accounting for 53 percent of projected growth.

So our own government agencies are finding--which most Americans knew, despite promises to the contrary that were repeatedly made when it passed on Christmas Eve after it was rammed through this Senate-- that this bill can't be done without increased costs, and government agencies are making that statement today. It is not my opinion, it is what our own agencies say.

Democrats have repeatedly complained that the law would bend the cost curve. The President said it would slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government. That is what he promised. He said it would ``slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.'' Democrats--pushing the law, against the wishes of the American people, in 2009--claimed the law would not add to our deficit and would improve our Federal balance sheet, our budget situation. The President promised he would not sign a plan that ``adds one dime to our deficits now or any time in the future.'' That is an unequivocal promise. It sort of reminds me of the promise ``read my lips, no new taxes.'' Surely a colossal misrepresentation of the debt impact of a gargantuan government takeover of health care is a serious matter.

The nonpartisan actuaries at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMS, project that this law will increase health care spending as a share of our total economy. In other words, the law bends the cost curve in the wrong direction. It bends it alright, but in the wrong direction.

We need to understand how the Democrats were able to assert that their plan was financially sound, which they insisted on repeatedly, as we went through weeks of debate on this matter. This is how. This is very important, I say to my colleagues. Senators do not understand this fully and Congressmen do not understand this, and I don't think the American people fully understand it. The Democrats' claims about the fiscal impact of the health care law were based on monumental accounting maneuvers and multiple other gimmicks.

Before the law passed, the Congressional Budget Office warned that the law would ``maintain and put into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time.''

That is careful language from our accountants at the Congressional Budget Office. I am sure they were pressured not to say that. At that time, both Houses of Congress were controlled by our Democratic colleagues, with 60 votes in the Senate. They warned us that the law would ``maintain and put into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time.'' Isn't that true.

CBO and the CMS Actuary also highlighted that hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings were double counted.

We need to understand this. This is a key point we need to understand. I made an inquiry to them. I made an inquiry to them late in December 2009. I got the letter from them the night before the Christmas Eve vote in the Senate to pass ObamaCare--on December 23--and I wanted and insisted that we get a clear answer on the question involving approximately $500 billion in Medicare savings, which I contended was double counted.

They were claiming they were going to use this money to strengthen Medicare and they were also claiming the money was available to fund ObamaCare. Can we do both with the same money? If we are confused about that issue, if we can't understand that issue, now we can begin to understand why this country is in such disastrous financial shape.

This is what the CBO responded by saying on the night of December 23:

The key point is that savings to the HI trust fund--

that is Medicare--

under PPACA--

that is the Affordable Care Act--

would be received by the government only once, so that they

cannot be set aside for future Medicare spending and, at the

same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the

legislation or on other programs.''

How simple is that?

They go on:

To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as

both improving the government's ability to pay future

Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of

Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of

those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the

government's fiscal position.

Right before the vote, they said, in effect, you are double-counting this money and you can't use the money simultaneously to benefit Medicare, which is where the money is, as well as use the money to fund ObamaCare, or a new health care plan, or any other policy. This is so basic.

The next spring, in March of 2010, CBO estimated that without this double counting, the health care law increases the deficit over the first 10 years and the subsequent decade. Under the conventions of accounting, it would appear we could have this health care plan, at least for 10 years, and it would appear that it reduces the Federal deficit, but that is because of the conventions of a unified budget accounting. The money that comes into Medicare--the money that is saved by cutting Medicare providers--is Medicare money. It is not the Treasury's money to spend on a new health care program. It is Medicare's money.

So because it looks as though in the short run we have an advantage, they were able to count it and say, Well, money coming in is equal to the money going out, but they forget that all of the people paying into Medicare off their FICA and off their checks each week are going to draw that out in the long run from this trust fund. Everybody who is paying in is going to draw out all of that money, and more, because it is unsound actuarially.

If my colleagues want to see other gimmicks, look at the CLASS Act Program which they counted on to produce $70 billion in premium revenue over its first ten 10 years as enrollees began paying premiums into the system. The program was so actuarially unsound that the Secretary of HHS had to notify Congress, as she was required to do, that there was ``no viable path forward'' to implement the CLASS program. With that decision, and a lot of pressure from some of us in Congress, nearly 60 percent of the Democrats claimed deficit reduction in the first 10 years disappeared. We had to eliminate that. So that amounted to 60 percent of the so-called surplus that would be produced by the legislation. Those savings from the CLASS program were not real and should never have been counted in the first place.

The Wall Street Journal called the CLASS Program ``a special act of fiscal corruption.'' One of our Democratic Members--actually, the chairman of the Budget Committee at the time, Kent Conrad--said it was a Ponzi scheme. In the first 10 years, the numbers looked good, but over a period of time the money drawn out was going to be far greater than ever was put in. They claimed to produce $70 billion in assets for America when over the lifetime of the program it was a devastating, unsound program that if a private insurance company had tried to offer it and promote it in that fashion, I am sure someone would have gone to jail. Absolutely unsound financially.

Eventually, Congress had no choice but to repeal the CLASS Act, this bankrupt entitlement program, as part of the fiscal cliff bill at the end of last year. But the case of the CLASS program is but a sign of what is to come under the rest of the health care law.

While the American people always knew this health care bill would never pay for itself, they did not fully understand how the President and his supporters could insist otherwise. I wish I had been able to better explain at the time. I tried, but at the time I was not successful in penetrating the media and the administration's view that the bill would create a surplus for America. Maybe we could have stopped the legislation from being rammed through Congress if we had been more effective on that point. But the facts are crystal clear now.

A report issued by the Government Accountability Office--that is our independent GAO--in February of this year, at my request, revealed that under a realistic set of assumptions, the health care law is projected to increase the Federal deficit by 0.7 of the entire GDP over the next 75 years, an amount that is equivalent to $6.2 trillion in today's dollars. So it would add $6.2 trillion in unfunded liabilities to the United States of America over the lifetime of the program, over the next 75 years. This estimate excludes debt service or interest on the debt caused by the shortfall.

This is an enormous sum, $6.2 trillion. Let's put it into context. We all know Social Security is financially unsound. We are in a desperate effort now to figure out ways to find the money to make Social Security sound so retirees can know they are going to get their benefits in the future. We all know it must be fixed. At the time this health care law was enacted, the 75-year unfunded liability for Social Security was $7.7 trillion. In passing this bill, we add almost as much unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years to the U.S. Government as Social Security. Instead of putting Social Security on a sound path, this bill added another $6.2 trillion in unfunded liabilities to our debt that is almost as large as Social Security's liabilities.

It is a monumental problem we have created for ourselves. We have dug the hole deeper financially, which is the worst thing we could be doing. The first thing we should do is stop digging.

This finding seems to strike a nerve with some supporters of the law, so much so that they tried to attack me and argue with the GAO, but attacking the messenger doesn't change the facts. The GAO report is crucial. It clearly answers the question. It sank any validity to the President's claim that his plan would not ``add one dime to our deficits now or at any time in the future, period.''

Health care economist Christopher Conover at Duke University explained that the Government Accountability Office's report did not ``cook the books'' or use ``wacky assumptions.'' According to Professor Conover, GAO's assumptions in this more plausible scenario are a ``carbon copy of those used by the Congressional Budget Office, the Medicare trustees, the Treasury Department, and the Medicare Actuary in their own independently derived long-term budget projections.''

Independently derived long-term budget projections are the techniques that were used in the GAO report, and they found $6 trillion added to our debt.

So despite what we were told by the proponents of this law, the truth is that the President's health care law will further increase the cost of health care, it will add to our already unsustainable deficits and debt, and, if fully implemented, would forever alter the relationships not only between patients and their doctors but between the American people and their government. Period.

It has been 3\1/2\ years since its passage, and every day we learn more about how the law is harming Americans. Here are some of the important facts: Jobs. Part-time is the new normal. Seventy-seven percent of the jobs that have been created over the last year have been part-time.

The Investor's Business Daily has kept a running list of employers who

are cutting hours and staff levels because of ObamaCare. Currently, the IBD tally of businesses, including large firms, affected by ObamaCare is 313. This list includes the University of Alabama, which announced it was capping the number of hours students could work for the university because of ObamaCare.

Remember, I just indicated 77 percent of the jobs created this year, since January--and it hasn't been that large a number--are part-time jobs, and every economist tells us without any doubt that the President's health care law is driving those decisions by businesses. It is unprecedented. We have never seen this kind of trend.

The president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Joseph Hansen, an original supporter of the law, recently said that ObamaCare would have a ``tremendous impact as workers have their hours reduced and their incomes reduced.''

ObamaCare penalizes hard work.

According to a new paper by Casey Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago--a premier economics department--the marginal tax hikes included in ObamaCare add up to a 17-percent reduction in the reward for working for median income families. This penalty American workers will take will essentially, he says, erase all gains in labor productivity made over the last decade.

This health care law has also led to the loss of health insurance coverage.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the largest security guard provider in the United States--Securitas--will stop offering health insurance because of ObamaCare.

We hear that over and over again. This report is in addition to other major companies that employ millions of Americans. These companies include Darden Restaurants--owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster--Home Depot, and Trader Joe's.

Small businesses and their workers will be penalized.

Democratic colleagues have claimed that most firms are not subject to ObamaCare tax penalties because they have less than 50 workers and are therefore not subject to the employer mandate penalty. But it is not an accurate statement. ObamaCare includes a nondeductible fee on insurance providers that the CBO has warned will get passed back to small business owners who pay for the health insurance of their employees. It is another tax on companies that provide health care to their employees.

I recently received a letter from a small business owner in Wetumpka, AL, Leesa Williams of Lee's Auto Repair, to let me know she is already being subjected to this tax even though her business has only 11 employees. She wrote to warn me that if the fee continues, she will be forced to reevaluate the offer of insurance to the small number of people at her repair company.

Costs are increasing, premiums are rising, and millions of Americans will lose the coverage they have today. Workers are having their hours--and their paychecks--reduced. Its countless regulations are stifling job creation and adding uncertainty to the already fragile economy.

The State director of NFIB/Alabama--a small business group in Alabama--says that Washington is doing a ``lousy job'' of keeping small businesses informed about the law and it will do real damage to them.

So where will it end? When will we save ordinary Americans and the American economy from this oncoming train wreck?

The administration has taken five steps already to delay the implementation of important parts of this law pertaining particularly to powerful interest groups that are pushing for delays and changes and relief. Many of them are getting it--but not John Q. Citizen. Big businesses unilaterally have been given a break from the law for at least 1 year. The Administration is considering a carve-out for Big Labor.

We need to be considering the overall impact of the law on our economy, on jobs, on the length of hours that Americans are working. We need to consider that.

The President's health care law will worsen, not improve, our fiscal outlook. That is clear. It is hurting our economy right now. It is clear. It is harming millions of Americans right now, and it is growing the size and scope of government in a huge leap forward.

Congress must permanently repeal this unworkable law and start over with health care reform that will actually reduce costs and not hurt everyday Americans in a way that is in the classical American tradition of responsibility and limited government.

I wish through this budget and continuing resolution process we could have forced a real debate on this health care law. It is absolutely clear that the leadership in this Senate is stonewalling and refusing to even acknowledge these problems, will not allow amendments or legislation to be brought up and voted on that would fix this law and make it better and help the American economy.

So this has been an effort by Senator Cruz and others, and I think everybody on our side is committed to engage in this and to force changes because it will not be, it looks like, accepted voluntarily. There is no consensus that we should even talk about it. Indeed, it is the position of the majority that we will not allow a full and open debate about the way to fix the problems with this law.

So the American people, I hope, will continue to relay their views to the Members of this body, and as time goes by we are going to confront this legislation. We are going to be able to force the ability of the American people to have their voices heard in this body.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question?

By chance, or maybe because of the significance of it, my first question is very similar to what Senator Roberts had asked, because I have given a lot of thought to this. I haven't signed letters. I haven't said how I was going to vote on this issue. But it was called to my attention that Senator Reid, the majority leader, flatly stated a month ago he believed in a single-payer system.

They asked him: Is it the Senator's goal to move toward a single- payer system? And his answer is: yes, yes, absolutely yes.

I just left the Budget Committee hearing. We have a great team there, on the Republican and Democrat side, and my friend Sheldon Whitehouse and I had a little exchange about the new health care law, and I thought he was suggesting it wasn't much of a change. So I asked him this, I said: The majority leader said he favors a single-payer system. He said: I do too.

It wasn't long ago in the Budget Committee that Senator Bernie Sanders also said he favored a single-payer system. And Senator Roberts mentioned others. And of course the President did. I checked the President's quote from 2003. He has denied it since, when he was trying to get the votes to pass the new law, but in 2003 he said he was a proponent of a ``single-payer universal health system.''

I think this is a huge national issue. This new health care law is clearly driven by an agenda: to have a single payer. So I ask Senator Cruz: If there is a single payer, who will the payer be?

In other words, the Federal Government?

Let me ask this. In other words, the government is going to be the one that pays for everything. In health care in America there will be only one payer, the government, and it would then, since it is a predominant power, be able to dictate health policy, such as in the socialized medical systems that have failed around the world; would it not?

Madam President, if the Senator will yield again for a question.

And is it not true--since Senator Reid has made his position crystal clear ideologically, and based on the actions the Senator from Texas and I have observed--that he has steadfastly resisted any change whatsoever in the legislation as passed, certainly any change that would constrict its power and reach?

Madam President, without yielding the floor, will the Senator yield for a further question?

I notice a real low number of jobs being created this year. And the reports were that 77 percent of those jobs created this year were part-time, not full-time jobs.

Allan Meltzer, one of the great economists in the last 50 years, a knowledgeable observer of our economy, just testified in a Budget Committee maybe 3 hours ago that ObamaCare was a factor in that occurring.

Would the Senator agree that we have had this extraordinary increase in part-time jobs rather than full-time jobs, and that is hammering working Americans who need full-time work?

Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question without yielding the floor?

I know the Senator is aware that the number of people employed in the workforce today has fallen to the lowest level since 1975 and wages have declined. We learned today in our Budget Committee hearing we have had a surge from around 300,000 people working part- time to 1 million.

These are bad trends, but one place has avoided that; that is, the Washington, DC, area. It has had more job growth, higher income job growth than any place in America.

If this bill becomes entrenched into law, will it not create a huge additional increase of government workers and bureaucrats in and around this city, all riding on the backs of American workers?

Madam President, if the Senator would yield for another question.

I know the Senator is aware that Senator Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, a long-time Senator who I believe has announced he is not going to run again but shepherded this legislation through the Senate and worked in many ways to try to make it better--lost some battles in that time--has referred to this as a ``train wreck'' because there are so many things going wrong right now. Did the Senator hear that from him?

It seems to me we are at a point where we have to push hard. That is the conclusion I have come to, and I will ask the Senator's opinion. It seems to me we are at a position where we need to push hard to force discussion of this legislation because the majority leader wants to make it even bigger government, to take it even further. He is blocking and going to resist any attempt to have real debate, real amendments being offered. He will not allow votes, and he is going to fill the tree and otherwise dominate the Senate so we can't even have the classic debate and amendments and votes to improve this train wreck of a law.

Is that the way the Senator sees the situation we are in today?

Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question?

I would also observe, and the Senator probably is aware, it does appear there is a budget point of order against this whole continuing resolution. I want to mention a couple of things.

I want to thank the Senator for having the courage to stand here and raise the concerns I am hearing all over my State. I had three separate meetings in August, as I traveled the State, with small business groups. It is difficult to overstate the concerns they have with this law. They tell me without a doubt it is impacting their willingness to hire and the uncertainty in the workplace is damaging business in America, and they are passionate about it.

They are struggling to get by. They are laying off people and they are not happy about it. They say this law alone is the primary thing that is hammering them in this country. I have given a lot of thought to it. I am beginning to see that we have to use the opportunities we have to confront this issue and talk about it and try to force some changes and improvements.

I appreciate the effort, and I am going to support the Senator. I am going to oppose any advancing of the final bill that does not provide some change in ObamaCare.

I did not sign the letter, and have some great friends who see it differently than I do who likewise are totally opposed to the health care law. I want to be sure people who are listening need to know good people, I think, can disagree on this. But the Senator stood up and raised the question and forced us to confront it and talk about it and I think it is good. I intend to support him. I am not going to vote to move a bill where we are sure we are going to be blocked from having any

meaningful discussion on one of the most historic, damaging laws in maybe the last hundred years that would basically move us to single- payer, government-run socialized medicine. I think that is where we are heading.

I thank the Senator for his leadership. Hopefully we can begin to force this Senate to act. The House has already acted. They have repeatedly acted to fix this legislation, because it is so damaging. But the Senate, the Democratic Senate, refuses to act. It refuses to listen. That is the problem I have. One way I have to express that is to support the position the Senator has taken.

I thank him very much and wish him good luck.

Would the Senator yield?

I thank the Senator.

An econometric firm and others have studied what is likely to happen in our economy. As I understand it, they predict that far more people will be dumped from coverage into the exchanges than they have today. So people who are under health care coverage today--it is being paid for by their employer. The employer discovers it would be less expensive to quit providing health care coverage and let those individuals go into the exchange, and they may or may not provide any subsidy to them.

So I do think the extent to which we as Senators go into the exchange and are guaranteed the full subsidy we have been getting--that is different from what is going to happen to millions of Americans. I guess the Senator maybe has heard that argument and how it is possible that if businesses decide to drop health care, individuals can then be forced to go into the exchange without any subsidy at all. I would ask Senator Cruz if he understands that is possibly what could happen to large numbers of Americans.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

The Senator made an important point about too often what goes on around here is that we have to obscure the reality of what is happening. I think that is important. I wish to ask about it. The Senator asked Senator Durbin--I didn't see exactly how he answered. I think the Senator asked him whether or not he believed in a single payer. I don't think he answered. We know for a fact, though, that Senator Reid in August said, when squarely asked: Do you believe in a single payer, he said: Yes, yes, absolutely yes.

What we have learned since then is that others are making the same statement. This spring, Senator Sanders of Vermont, a nice and able Senator in the Budget Committee, said this bill is not going to work; really, in my view, it is not going to work; It needs to be a single payer.

Senator Sanders is one of our more liberal Members--and I think it was how he identified himself, as a socialist, but he is an honest, able advocate. He said the truth: this bill, as written, will not work. It has to be a single payer.

Only this afternoon in the Budget Committee, one of our esteemed Members of the Democratic Party, when asked--when I made a comment about Senator Reid, that the majority leader of the Senate said he wanted a single payer--he said, this ought to be a single payer system.

I don't know how many others have. The President said, in 2003, when he was running, he flat out said he wanted to have a single payer. Then he backed off and began to obscure that position, it seems to me. It seems to me that they realize that the American people were nowhere ready to have their government take over health care. So what did they do? It seemed to me that they obscured what the reality of this legislation was. They began to move away from it, and they began to say that it was something that it wasn't.

In the last few days it is almost like they have come out here in the open and begun to say that is what should happen. I understand the Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, has said that she favors a single-payer system.

I think I will say to Senator Cruz that I feel you are doing important work because the American people may not yet fully know how huge an issue it is before this Congress. This is huge.

Let me ask again, when we say there is a single payer--hair begins to stand up on my neck--I think I know who the payer is. Who would be the single payer for all health care in America if that kind of agenda took place?

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for one question?

When the Senator thinks about those people who have tweeted and e-mailed and called and have written, most know something about the American system. If you were in Illinois or Alabama or Texas or Utah and you talked about this and said: This law has got real problems and it can't work the way it is, wouldn't the Senator think they would think the Senate would be able to take up this legislation and actually discuss it in a grownup way; that amendments could be offered that could fix it and be voted on up or down?

Doesn't the Senator think the fact we are in this situation--the Senator called it a steamroller--where the majority leader is blocking all amendments, all ability to attempt to fix this legislation and make something that would actually work, even though the House has passed repeatedly changing this law and ending this law, that the average American would be shocked to think we are incapable in this Senate of bringing up legislation and having it voted on in order to fix this bill?

Mr. President, will the Senator yield one more time for a question?

I am interested in those tweets. I just wanted to thank the Senator for what he has done, because I think he is alerting all of us to the critical importance of the health care issue.

This is a plan, it seems to me, and the Senator has expressed it, I believe, to take over health care by the U.S. Government. We can all disagree. I was here when everybody on the Republican side fought this legislation until Christmas Eve, when it was finally rammed through shortly before Scott Brown from Massachusetts could take office and kill it. That is how close it was. I know people disagree about how to deal with it, and I understand and respect people with differing visions, but I wanted to say the Senator's leadership has served a valuable purpose tonight, and I am pleased to be able to support his effort. I wish him every success in those efforts, and I hope, as the Senator continues tonight, he will drive home the critical importance of this issue as we go forward. It is a matter this entire Nation cannot look away from. It is a matter we need to consider fixing because the legislation, as presently written, will not work.

We have two choices, it seems to me. We move forward to a single payer, as Senator Sanders said we must do because this legislation won't work as written or will we move back to the classical American view of insurance and private health care and our own personal physicians.

I thank the Senator from Texas and would be pleased to hear some of those great tweets I know he has.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

I thought that a very gracious question of the author of unanimous consent, that we would vitiate the vote and 30 hours of debate. The Senator asked very little in exchange for it, other than to continue to talk.

To follow up on that then, it seems to me that what the Senator was saying would be an offer that most everyone here would be pleased to receive and accept, unless they have some surreptitious motive.

In addition, I think the Senator's continued request to be allowed to continue to speak is reasonable. I think the Senator has earned the right to ask that. The Senator has now spoken. The American people are watching the fourth longest time any filibuster or floor time has been held by a Senator. I think that is a perfectly reasonable request. It will allow the Senator to continue to express the concerns that he has expressed. I am somewhat taken aback that it wasn't agreed to.

Again, to make clear, it would seem to me little if any reason that they would object to that, the majority would object to that.

Madam President, we have had, I think, a national discussion and the American people have begun to focus on what is imminent and that is that the implementation of the ObamaCare legislation is going to be a disaster. It is not prepared. As Senator Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, said: It would be a train wreck. That is where we are headed. The Democratic majority has absolutely refused to allow any serious negotiation, amendments, legislative reform to fix the problems with the legislation. That is the fundamental problem we have here.

Senator McConnell recalled how this bill was first passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve nearly three years ago--and it was against the will of the majority of the American people. I remember Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts ran against the health care to fill the vacant seat, Senator Kennedy's seat. He campaigned and said: Elect me in liberal Massachusetts and I am going to kill the health care bill. Republicans hadn't been elected to the Senate in Massachusetts in decades--and he won. He was prepared to kill the legislation, providing that single vote that would deny them the 60 votes they had to have for passage. They were able to rush it through before he could take office and move it in that fashion. It had problems that could not have been fixed otherwise and they were able to do that.

I want to recall to the American people the power, the force that was used to pass this bill despite the consistent pleas of the American people not to do it. I have not forgotten that. I don't think the American people have.

What has happened now? The Senate refuses to discuss it. They do not want to discuss it because they do not want to enter into a legislative process that you would think would be perfectly sensible. The bill was passed, what, in 2009? It is now about to hammer us and the negative impacts are quite clear. It is about to hammer us and they refuse to bring it to the floor. So the House funded the U.S. Government. They sent a bill to the Senate that funds the U.S. Government except it does not fund the ObamaCare part, requiring us to confront this issue once again.

What does the majority say? What does the President say? They are saying we will shut down the government. We will never pass anything that allows us--that makes changes in this bill. We will not send back a compromise. We will not agree to have hearings and discuss how to fix it and make it better. No. Absolutely. We are going to use the brute power of the majority party in the Senate to deny that process. I do not think that is right.

Let me say it is not a little bitty matter. My friend here has the toughest job in Washington, being majority leader of the Senate. I respect Senator Reid. But recently in Nevada he was asked: Do you believe in a single payer for health care America? And the quote I saw was: Yes, yes, absolutely yes.

Yesterday in the Budget Committee the ranking Republican on that committee--one of our esteemed Democratic colleagues when this matter came up, said: ``I support single payer system.''

In the Budget Committee--earlier in the year Senator Sanders said this bill is not going to work. The only thing that is going to work is a single payer. Senator Sanders, as we know, is known, at least in the past, as a Socialist and has run as a Socialist. The leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, has said she believed in a single payer. But President Obama, in 2003, clearly said he favored a single-payer health care policy for America. What does that mean? Who is that payer? I asked Senator Cruz that. He said: Of course the payer is the U.S. Government. What they are proposing, what they desire, what they intend to impose on the American people--because they had a brief shining moment, they had 60 Senators in this body and they rammed through a fundamental change in the health care policy of this country--and the American people do not want it. Senator Cruz did not waste time. Senator Cruz raised this issue in a way I hope resonates throughout this country, just how serious it is, the health care question facing our country. It is fundamentally the biggest change in government and the size of government we have had in decades, I guess at least

since Medicare; maybe bigger than Medicare. And they say it is paid for. Don't worry, it is all paid for.

The American people know this cannot be so. How can you do all that and not cost money? We have a score from the Congressional Budget Office over the life of this bill. They have gimmicked it up to make it look as though there is an advantage in the short term, but it is not. Over the long term, the Government Accountability Office told us that it is going to add at least $6 trillion to the debt of the United States over the next 75 years. That is close to how much our unstable Social Security will add to the deficit of America. So we have Social Security, we have Medicare that is even a larger unfunded mandate than Social Security over the next 75 years, and we are adding another $6 trillion to it? And the American people do not want it.

This was a recent paper from the University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan who found that by 2015, a little over a year from now, the work disincentives in ObamaCare will have essentially erased all gains in labor productivity over the last decade.

We know this legislation is hammering the American economy. Do you not listen to colleagues? I traveled my State in August. I had several meetings with small businesses. It just pours out. Business are trying to keep their number of employees below 50 so they will not be impacted. They are putting people on part time.

Let me say we have never seen this in America. It has never happened to us before in our history, in my knowledge, nothing close to it. We have had marginal job gains since January, hampered fundamentally by a lot of things, but ObamaCare being one of them--clearly one of them. But more dramatically, 77 percent of the jobs that were created in this country since January were part time, caused many ways by the ObamaCare matter. Clearly, we have been told repeatedly that businesses are hiring people part time to avoid the mandates of this terrible, disastrous legislation. So they have decided: In for a penny, in for a pound, as James Carville said, I guess. We are going to stick and we are not going to allow it to come up for improvement, we are not going to allow it to come up for debate.

I know Republicans have all indicated they support a way to deal with preexisting illnesses in America. We can work on that. We can do a deal, legislation so that young people can stay on parents' policies longer. Those things are all possible. What about people not getting jobs? What about people getting part-time jobs with no health insurance? This is not a waste of time. Write it down: This is just the beginning. As John Paul Jones said: We have just begun to fight.

We are not going to allow this country to socialize medicine. That is what the goal is, and we are not going to allow it. We are going to fight it, fight it, fight it, and we are going to demand that this legislation come back so it can be improved and made to work. It is not working now. It is a train wreck, and it is hampering this economy.

Allan Meltzer, the famed economist, testified yesterday at the Budget Committee. Mr. Meltzer said he first testified before Congress in 1949. He was so good and so clear. I think he is 91 years old. There is no doubt that he is one of the most distinguished economists over the last 50 years. He has written a number of books. He said 77 percent of workers being hired part time is directly attributable to ObamaCare. He said it is bringing down employment rates. It is creating uncertainty in the economy, of which there is no doubt. I don't think anybody can deny that.

People are losing jobs, and they are working at part-time jobs, and it is hammering the economy, creating uncertainty, lack of growth, and it is going to continue to do so, and rates have gone up.

We can improve the current system of health care. There is no doubt about that. But I am telling you, we do not need to have a system of health care in America that is run by the U.S. Government. We do not need to do that.

We can all disagree about the right procedures to move forward in this body. Senator Cruz stood courageously in order to highlight this issue, and it has served a valuable national purpose. I thank him for it.

It is time for all of us to confront the reality that this is not working. It is hurting America. It has to be fixed, and we are going to insist on it as time goes by.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, we have a very serious problem with the new health care law. Costs are surging. We now have a projection from the Government Accountability Office. Under a realistic set of assumptions, the health care law will add over $6 trillion to the unfunded liabilities of the United States of America. Private health insurance premiums are going up. Unions are in full rebellion. Congress is in rebellion with regard to our staff. Doctors are rebelling. Many of them are giving up practices. They didn't get the one thing they really needed, which is a fix to their Medicare reimbursement. The President has had to delay the employer mandate. This law is nowhere close to workable. It is not good. There are many more bad things I could say about the status we are in today.

The only person who apparently is stuck with this, who doesn't have power to influence the process, is John Q. Citizen. Businesses are getting their employer mandate delayed because it just won't work.

In fact, this law is clearly, indisputably savaging job creation and economic growth. Seventy-seven percent of the people who got jobs this year got part-time jobs, and every expert says ObamaCare is a big part of the reason--a big part of that. Businesses are staying below 50 employees so they feel as though they are not so bound. Wages are down again this year. Unemployment is high. The percentage of the American people who are actually working is down--the workplace rate--and it is at the lowest point since 1975. This health care law is a big part of it. It just is, and everybody knows it. Talk to any businessperson, and they will say that the uncertainty, the costs, the problems that are entailed with it are impacting what they do. That is just a fact.

So this year the Senate has done nothing--absolutely nothing. Every attempt to confront the serious problems with this law has been blocked by the Senate Democratic majority led by Senator Reid. That is just a fact. The House has passed repeated bills to confront this problem, and they have now sent over a bill from the House that funds the Government of the United States but defunds this unworkable health care law. Republicans in the House and Senate have put forward serious proposals to improve health care in America.

We ought to understand the posture we are in here. The Senate Democrats have refused to consider any reform. The House has passed a number of bills to deal with this in a responsible way, and they have now passed a bill--a continuing resolution--to fund the Government of the United States, but defund the President's health care law.

What does he say? He says: Well, I will talk with Putin, negotiate with him. I will negotiate with Assad. I will negotiate with Iran. But I will not even talk to anyone in the U.S. Congress about this health care law that is clearly unworkable and, as one of our Democratic Members said, a train wreck. No chance. Not one jot, not one tittle of my health care law will be changed.

What is he saying there? I will shut down the government before I allow a change in my ``perfect'' health care law.

So I want to raise the question, Who is causing the problem in this country? Who is the one who is refusing to fix an obviously failed health care law that needs major reform? It is the President of the United States and a majority in the Senate. I express my deepest concern about it, as a member of the Budget Committee, and we will talk more about it in the days to come, but this law is financially unsustainable. It is not what it was sold to be.

The American people have never believed you can have a huge expansion of health care and not have an impact on the U.S. budget. They are absolutely right, as the GAO has already told us.

I know others are prepared to talk. I just want to say that we need to understand what has happened. It is time for

us to make some fundamental changes to this law, and all we are hearing from the White House is this: No, sir. Not one change will they accept. We will not even have serious negotiations about it. That is unacceptable. It needs to change. I hope in the next few days the American people will become engaged, and perhaps our colleagues will see it differently.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Would the Senator yield for a question?

Do I understand the Senator does not oppose the bill as passed in the House that would have authorized this program to go forward, but the concern is new revenue has been generated that is being spent for other programs?

I would just say this. We need to get in our heads in this body that just because you raise revenue and pay for a new spending program, that doesn't have implications for the Federal Treasury and the budget. In fact, we have rules that guard against it.

I thank Senator Cruz for raising and highlighting that. We need to consider it. Because the idea that you can just do that is dangerous and it creates more taxing and more spending, more revenue and more spending.

The Senator from Texas raised the point, just because you raised revenue doesn't mean the people who raise the revenue get to spend it on what they want. He is perfectly correct to say I think it should be used for deficit reduction. I thank the Senator for raising the issue.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me say to the Senators who have worked on ending the Federal Government's involvement in this program that this is a great accomplishment, and I thank them for that. I do think there is technically not a budget point of order for the process they have used in funding this bill, although I think Senator Cruz is raising a valid concern. I guess if we could do $50 million on deficit reduction, we could do more. But I did want to say that I am proud of the thrust of the legislation. I think it is good legislation. I thank them for it. And it does not, I am informed, violate the Budget Act.

Mr. President, I have directed my staff on the Budget Committee to conduct a detailed analysis of the economic conditions facing working Americans--their wages, their employment conditions, and their household finances. I will give a series of talks over the coming weeks looking at that financial situation and the state of our Nation as a whole economically. I will also attempt to look at the causes leading to our current financial difficulties and suggest some steps to restore America's financial future.

This topic is very important. The sad fact is that the state of middle and lower-income Americans is worsening on virtually every front. The slow growth of the economy (and this has been the slowest recovery from a recession since World War II or the Great Depression) is restraining the normal upward movement of income that previous generations have experienced. It has accelerated in the last several years, but it has been going on--we have to be honest with ourselves-- for a much longer period of time. If you don't have a job now, you are twice as likely to only find a part-time job as full-time work, if you can find one at all.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, middle-class incomes have declined for 18 years. That has happened with different parties, different Presidents, and different majorities in the House and Senate. That decline means that savings for college and retirement are growing at alltime lows. Young people are not marrying as early as they want, sometimes due to bad economic prospects. That means families are launching later in life, which gives couples less years to pay down a mortgage or raise children.

Perhaps the greatest single source of our economic anxiety, however, is the fear of losing a job or that our children won't be able to get a job or our grandchildren won't be able to get a good job.

It is not just the unemployment rates that remain too high--at 7.3 percent as of August 2013--it is the number of people we all know who are working well below their potential because nothing is available that uses their job skills. It is the number of people we know who have given up looking for work or who are working part time because nothing full time is available to them.

Fewer people are working today than in 2007. Almost 4 million fewer people are working today than in 2007, but during that time our population has increased and the number of workers of working age has increased. Just before the recession hit in December 2007, about 62.7 percent of the working-age population was working--62.7. If that same percentage was working today, we would have 154 million jobs. But we don't have 154 million, we have 144 million. And only 58.6 percent of the population is working, which is a marked decline. In short, we are missing 9.9 million jobs when we compare this economy to the one in 2007.

Here is another way to look at the job problem. In 2007 we had 363,000 discouraged workers--people who had given up looking for work because they couldn't find a job but still had not disappeared from the rolls of employment security offices. Today we have 866,000. That is an increase of 140 percent in discouraged workers.

Here is another barometer of the middle-class difficulties. We have 1,988,000 fewer full-time jobs today than in December 2007; however, we have 3,627,000 more part-time jobs. How we calculate this is important. People with part-time jobs, according to the jobs people at the Department of Labor, are not counted as unemployed, they are counted as employed, although they may want a full-time job, and most do. So our economy is producing part-time jobs rather than full-time jobs. That has been going on for a long time, and it is not acceptable. These jobs often have no health care program or retirement plan.

A very high percentage of all jobs created this year are not full- time jobs, and workforce participation--the percentage of people who are actually working today--is the lowest since 1975. That is not acceptable. And these trends have been going on for some time.

Let's take a look at median family income. The Census Bureau published new estimates of household income on Tuesday, August 17. They report that the median income of American households is lower than last year, lower than the year before, and, in fact, is lower than at any time since 1995, adjusted for inflation.

This is a very serious trend. While we have done a lot of things to make this economy better, few benefits are going to main-line, hard- working American people. They are struggling out there. You have to go back to 1995 to find median household income that is lower than today's household income.

Even if we take broad measures of income, we get similar results. If we divide all of the income by the population to come up with a per- capita income concept, per-person income is lower today than at any time since 1997. This is an unacceptable trend. It is clear it is not a short-term phenomenon. It is now a negative trend for almost 18 years, and it cannot continue.

While the stock market has rebounded and corporate profits have remained strong, that should not and cannot be used to obscure these trends, trends that have accelerated after we emerged from the recession of 2008 and 2009.

Many are concerned that the Federal Reserve is furthering the Nation's economic problems with a growing wealth gap. Their quantitative easing has boosted the wealth of the investor class but has not benefited the working class. This is not the way our policies should work. People who know what to do with low-interest money seem to be coming out ahead. But the people who don't have money, don't have jobs, who are working part time instead of full time, are slipping.

Our civil society, the great foundation of the our economy, today has certain weaknesses that we have to talk about. I will address more in a separate speech, but let me give a few thoughts.

Few social institutions are more important in helping us through difficult economic times than marriage. However, marriage is disappearing in the

bottom 50 percent of the income distribution. Many people stay too long in low-income unemployment situations, and it is not healthy. And too often, the fathers are not in those households. If you are in the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution and give birth, there is a greater than 50-percent chance that the father will not be living with you when the child comes home from the hospital. Perhaps, as many suggest, our welfare policies are exacerbating these trends. We need to look at that.

Also worrying is the decline of charitable giving since 2007. Like the overall economy, this vital part of our social and economic system has not recovered effectively. Total charitable giving fell in 2008 to $303 billion from $326 billion. As of the end of 2012, total giving was only $316 billion--still 3 percent below what it was 6 years ago.

I would conclude and note that the road we are on is leading to the continued erosion of the middle-class civil society, the quality of life for hard-working Americans is not improving financially, and the continued expansion of the welfare state and the permanent entrenchment of a political class that profits from the growth of government. It is time we recognize both the disastrous conditions facing working Americans and the moral obligation we have to replace dependency on government with the freedom and dignity that comes from work and independence. That has got to be our goal.

There are things that can be done to improve these conditions. It is time for us to defend working Americans and their undeniably legitimate concerns about current trends. I will talk about that as we go forward. It is something we need to seriously consider.

Relevant here is this question, can we bring into our country more people than we have jobs for? Won't that pull down wages and make it harder for people to get work? And this question, shouldn't we defend more effectively our workers against unfair trade and competition from around the world? Both of those policies are ones I hope we could have bipartisan support on, although I am worried. The Senate's immigration bill would increase permanent immigration by 50 percent, would increase guest workers--people who come and take jobs--by double, all in addition to the 11 million who would be given legal status here.

I do think our colleagues are correct to say we should do more about trade and have fair competition on the world stage for our workers. I think we have got to convert more of this welfare spending, the 80- some-odd programs that are fundamentally geared to lower income Americans, that spend $750 billion a year--which is larger than Social Security, larger than defense, and larger than Medicare--we need to convert some of that to better use.

For example, for every $100 spent on these programs, only $1 goes to job training. Shouldn't we focus more on getting our unemployed, our people who need more training, trained, ready to move into the workforce, to take jobs? Can we afford to bring in millions of people to take jobs and to leave our people on welfare and the unemployment rolls?

Those are some of the fundamental questions we as Americans need to be asking. But first and foremost, colleagues, we are not able to deny the unassailable fact that we have had a slide in the financial well- being of millions of Americans, and that this has been going on for well over a decade.

I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, we continue to see that special interest groups remain undaunted in their efforts to ram through an immigration bill that will do real damage to the wages and job prospects of working Americans. That is just a plain fact. Consider the economic situation we find ourselves in now. Inflation-adjusted wages--that is the way to compare wages correctly over time--are lower today than they were in 1999. This is a steady decline. Actually, new numbers indicate they are lower than they have been since 1995. Working Americans are not having their wages go up. Their wages are going down. Median household income is lower today--median income, which is the best way to account for how families are doing--than it has been every single year since 1989. The size of the workforce today has shrunk to a 35-year low. We have the lowest workplace participation since 1975, and a record number of Americans are on welfare, including almost one in six on food stamps.

But we still have this determination, it seems, by our masters of the universe--people who know so much better--that what we really need in America is more workers. I would contend it is quite plain--with high unemployment and low job prospects, declining workplace participation, and declining wages--that what we have a shortage of is not workers, but we have a shortage of jobs, and we need to put our people in those jobs. That is a very simple concept, and I think it is undisputable.

That is why I care about this issue, and I think we have to talk about it. What we are talking about, remember now, is not the end of immigration. We are not talking about anything like that. We are talking about maintaining the greatest immigration flow of any nation in the world--maybe in the history of the world--with 1.1 million a year, plus a very generous guest worker program, where people come in just to work. And we can support that, but this bill that passed the Senate would have doubled the number of guest workers and increased by at least 50 percent--over 1.5 million a year--those coming permanently, in addition to legalizing 11 million who entered unlawfully. I truly believe that cannot be sustained and that this is good for the vast majority of the American people.

What we are seeing routinely is the one interest that is being omitted in all of the debate is the interest of the average working American--the average citizen of this country who goes to work every day. Everybody else has their interest represented. Everybody else is raising money, putting ads on the television, spinning this and spinning that, but the average guy is getting hammered by this. It just is so.

Let me cite some of the things that are going on, and I will run through this because I think it is important for us to know. Here in Politico, September 17, it starts off saying:

Nancy Pelosi is huddling with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg,

top labor leaders and former AOL leader Steve Case in

separate meetings this week as supporters of immigration

reform try to revive the issue.

After they got so badly hammered by the American people when it passed through the Senate, it is now dead on arrival in the House and they are trying to revive it.

The article goes on to state:

House Republicans bristled when a group of Senators met

with outside groups supporting immigration reform and

formulated a campaign-style strategy to target more than 100

House Republicans over the August recess.

To try to pound them into submission, I guess.

Despite the blowback, Schumer, the so-called leader of the

Gang of Eight--

The leader of the Gang of 8, to be frank

continued to work the phones over the August recess with a

clear message: Please get active on immigration and back

reform in the Republican-led House.

The article says he reached out to all his allies to tell them to go forward. He said:

We had a very good August. But I don't think it's dead by

any stretch of the imagination.

Well, I think he does not want it dead and I think he is working hard to keep it alive, but somebody needs to make it clear to the American people that it is not dead and it could be revived. There are special interests out there, traditional Republican allies as well as strong Democratic and liberal activists who are pushing for this legislation.

Our friends say they want comprehensive immigration reform, but what does this phrase really mean? What does it really mean? Isn't that what we should ask? They want a large increase in future low-skilled immigration combined with immediate amnesty for those here illegally and a promise of enforcement in the future. And that promise was proven to be worthless.

The first legislation, which stayed on the floor for weeks and went through the committee, would only have reduced the illegal flow by about 25 percent. They promised it was the toughest bill in history, but the Congressional Budget Office--our independent analysis--proved it would have only minor impact on the illegality while doubling the number of guest workers, increasing substantially the number in terms of annual flow of immigrants who want to be here permanently, plus amnesty for the 11 million. Instead of what we would normally expect to legalize over 10 years--10 million--we would legalize 30 million under this bill. That is what they proposed here in the Senate. Well, I don't think this is good for America, and I don't think the American people want that to happen.

Notice that the one group not represented in all of this is U.S. citizens--the American people. In a recent interview, the President of the U.S. Chamber of Congress, Mr. Tom Donohue--a great American, and I know him and respect him--said this about what is going on, and people who are concerned about this issue need to pay attention because he is one of the driving forces. He is meeting with La Raza and meeting with the Democrats and Senator Schumer and meeting with others. He wants more workers, apparently.

Reading from BusinessReport.com:

An agreement between the national business lobby and the

AFL-CIO was crucial to passing immigration reform in the

Senate, says U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas

Donohue, who spoke today at a breakfast by BRAC. Unions are

looking for new members, Donahue says, while businesses

need both laborers and highly skilled workers.

This is a frank statement. I give Mr. Donahue credit. He lays it right out there. If you want to know the forces at work here, unions believe that if we legalize and bring in more people, they will have a better chance of adding union members.

Unions are looking for new members, Donahue says--

That is their interest. They have forgotten the interests of their workers, the ones who were working and whose average wages have declined and who are being laid off--

while businesses need both laborers and highly skilled

workers.

We can bring in new workers under the current guest worker immigration program, and we can deal compassionately with people who have been here a long time. We can do that but not with the legislation that came out of the Senate.

Listen to this:

Donahue says the House doesn't need to pass a

``comprehensive reform,'' suggesting problems could be fixed

with smaller bills. ``Take the whole thing, go to conference

with the Senate, and we'll build a bill.''

Those of us who care about how legislation is crafted can feel the hair rise on the back of our necks when we hear this because this is exactly what they are trying to accomplish. They want the House to pass a bill or two to look like it is tough on enforcement, then go to conference and take the Senate bill, which is a total disaster, and build a bill that he likes, bring it back to the floor of both Chambers where no amendments can be offered, and ram it through, to some degree like the massive health care bill was rammed through. That is what they want to do.

I think the House needs to be careful about this. Once you go to conference, once you start meeting with these special groups--the Democrats want votes, union members want members, businesses want cheap labor, immigrant groups want to bring more and more. Where are the American people in this? Who is paying for these ads they run on television? Not the average guy. I don't know any average guy sending them money to run these ads. It is people who have a special interest in it.

Just a few days ago, a remarkable event happened. The human resource managers for some of the Nation's largest businesses groups--that is, the people in charge of hiring--sent a letter to House leaders claiming:

Many of our companies continue to have difficulty finding

sufficient American workers to fill certain lesser-skilled

positions. Thus, in addition to addressing the need for more

highly skilled immigrants, we strongly support efforts to

bolster the availability of a workforce at all skill levels.

. . .

They originally tried to say this bill was designed to bring in more high-skilled workers and reduce the numbers of low-skilled workers because of our unemployment problems and other reasons, but they openly say they want all skills.

The question is, Are these businesses really suffering from a labor shortage? Byron York, an excellent writer--writing, I believe, in the Washington Examiner--looked at that question. This is what he found:

. . . at the same time the corporate officers seek higher

numbers of immigrants, both low-skill and high-skill, many of

their companies are laying off thousands of workers.

Isn't that something? Could that be true? Well, let's look at his article. Pretty damning, it seems to me. Remember, this letter I just read saying that they have to have more low-skilled workers from the human resource officials was analyzed by Mr. Byron York. He finds this:

The officials represent companies with a vast array of

business interests: General Electric, The Walt Disney

Company, Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt

Hotels Corporation, McDonald's Corporation, The Wendy's

Company, Coca-Cola, The Cheesecake Factory, Johnson &

Johnson, Verizon Communications, Hewlett-Packard, General

Mills, and many more. All want to see increases in

immigration levels for low-skill as well as high-skill

workers, in addition to a path to citizenship for the

millions of immigrants currently in the U.S. illegally.

Well, what did Mr. York discover?

Of course, the U.S. unemployment rate is at 7.3 percent,

with millions of American workers at all skill levels out of

work, and millions more so discouraged that they have left

the work force altogether. In addition, at the same time the

corporate officers seek higher numbers of immigrants, both

low-skill and high-skill, many of their companies are laying

off thousands of workers.

They say they need more workers. How can it be they are laying off workers?

For example, Hewlett-Packard, whose Executive Vice

President for Human Resources Tracy Keogh signed the letter,

laid off 29,000 employees in 2012.

So they want more foreign workers and they just laid off 29,000 Americans? Oh, boy. That is a stunning number.

It goes on.

In August of this year, Cisco Systems, whose Senior Vice

President and Chief Human Resources Officer Kathleen Weslock

signed the letter, announced plans to lay off 4,000--in

addition to the 8,000 cut in the last two years.

So they have laid off 12,000 people, and now they can't find people willing to work.

United Technologies, whose Senior Vice President of Human

Resources and Organization Elizabeth B. Amato signed the

letter, announced layoffs of 3,000 this year. American

Express, whose Chief Human Resources Officer L. Kevin Cox

signed the letter, cut 5,400 jobs this year.

Maybe they ought to try to give some of those jobs to people they laid off, many of whom probably worked for them for 20 years or more.

Proctor & Gamble, whose Chief Human Resources Officer Mark

F. Biegger signed the letter, announced plans to cut 5,700

jobs in 2012.

This is really offensive to me, as I think it should be to all Americans. This is the kind of leadership we have in corporate America. They come in here and say they have to have workers, totally ignoring the fact that they are laying them off by the thousands. Maybe they find some who work cheaper. Maybe that is what the interest is.

Those are just a few of the layoffs at companies whose

officials signed the letter. A few more: T-Mobile announced

2,250 layoffs in 2012. Archer-Daniels-Midland laid off 1,200.

Texas Instruments, [laid off] nearly 2,000. Cigna, 1,300.

Verizon sought to cut 1,700 jobs by buyouts and layoffs.

Marriott announced ``hundreds'' of layoffs this year.

International Paper has closed plants and laid off dozens.

I will note parenthetically that last week it was announced in Alabama that International Paper was closing a plant, and 1,100 people who had worked there 25 and 30 years will be out of work. The plant shuttered. But they signed the bill saying they need more workers.

And General Mills, in what the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

called a ``rare mass layoff,'' laid off 850 people last year.

There are more still. . . . According to a recent Reuters

report, U.S. employers announced 50,462 layoffs in August, up

34 percent from the previous month and up 57 percent from

August 2012.

``It is difficult to understand how these companies can feel justified in demanding'' that we ram through an immigration bill doubling the number of workers, increasing dramatically the number of people who would be permanent residents of the United States, claiming they need workers, while these very same companies all signed letters. We are laying off thousands of workers. We have to be realistic.

Senator Schumer is meeting with business groups to pressure Republicans to join him in conference. But what do conservative thinkers have to say about Senator Schumer's plan? I will share a few comments--and there are many more--from intellectuals and writers, some conservative, some maybe not conservative.

The National Review wrote this:

By more than doubling the number of so-called guest workers

admitted each year, the bill would help create a permanent

underclass of foreign workers. . . . The creation of a large

population of second-class workers is undesirable from the

point of view of the American national interest, which should

be our guiding force in this matter. . . . The United States

is a nation with an economy, not an economy with a nation.

Bill Kristol of Fox News, the editor of the Weekly Standard, joined with Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review, in an unusual joint editorial and went on to lay out deep concerns about the passage of this.

Passing any version of the Gang of Eight's bill would be

worse public policy than passing nothing. House Republicans

can do the country a service by putting a stake through its

heart.

Victor Davis Hanson, who has written a book on immigration, is an excellent columnist in California.

The United States may be suffering the most persistent

unemployment since the Great Depression. There may be an

unemployment rate of over 15 percent in many small towns in

the American Southwest.

American businesses may be flush with record amounts of cash, and farm prices may be at record levels. But we are still lectured that without cheap labor from south of the border, businesses simply cannot profit.

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who has dealt with these issues for years and has had hearings on and tried to analyze the meaning and impact of these immigration flows, wrote this:

Recent history shows that a grant of legal status to

illegal immigrants results in a further influx of illegal

immigrants who will crowd out low-skilled workers from the

workforce. . . . Before the federal government grants legal

status to illegal immigrants, serious deliberations must be

given to the effect such grant will have on the employment

and earnings prospects of low-skilled Americans. History

shows that granting such legal status is not without profound

and substantial costs to American workers. Does Congress

care?

Thomas Sowell, the great African-American writer, says this:

``Jobs that Americans will not do'' are in fact jobs at

which not enough Americans will work at the current wage rate

that some employers are offering. This is not an uncommon

situation. That is why labor ``shortages'' lead to higher

wage rates. . . . Virtually every kind of work Americans will

not do is, in fact, work that Americans have done for

generations.

Look, salaries do make a difference.

David Frum:

The United States is entering its sixth year of

extraordinarily high unemployment. Twelve million Americans

who want work cannot find it. Millions more have quit

searching. Slack labor markets have depressed wages

throughout the economy. . . . Yet however little workers

earn, there is always somebody who wishes they earned less.

And for those somebodies, the solution is: Import more cheap

labor. But not just any cheap labor--cheap labor that cannot

quit, that cannot accept a better offer, that cannot

complain.

There is too much truth in that. I am concerned about it and I think Americans should be concerned about it. This is a bill that is antiworker.

President Obama has said recently that Republicans want to accelerate the gap, the wealth gap between the rich and the poor. That is not so. But his own White House has been the central entity driving--behind the scenes as much as they possibly can be because they do not want their fingerprints on it or they do not want it to be identified with the White House--but they have been the central entity pushing the bill. It will have a direct impact on the wages and employment status of millions of Americans, particularly low-income Americans who are the ones who had their wages decline the most.

Professor Borjas, at Harvard, himself a refugee, is the leading expert on wages. It has been documented. We have had a significant decline in wages over the last 30 years and a significant portion of that decline is directly related to the large flow of immigrant labor into America.

Of course, it has been accelerated by the illegality that is occurring in our country. I think we could sustain something like the current legal flow, but we need to end the present illegality, and we should not pass legislation that doubles the number that will be coming in.

Polls show overwhelmingly that the American people do not support a large increase in guest workers or low-skilled immigration. For instance, by a 3-to-1 margin, Americans earning under $30,000 support a decrease in legal immigration, not an increase, not a doubling of it. I am sure most do not have any idea that Congress is about to pass a law that would double the amount.

But the one group that has not been represented in this conversation has been the hard-working people of this country. All Americans, immigrants, millions who have come to our country, and the native-born alike will be hurt by an immigration plan that is guaranteed to reduce wages and permits even more lawlessness in the future.

What makes America unique is the special reverence we place in the rule of law and the special faith we place in the everyday citizen. Let's stay fast to those principles. Let's stand firm for those principles.

Let me say one more time: The heart of the American people on the question of immigration is good and decent. They have been misportrayed as opposing all immigration and that is not so. But they are concerned about the lawlessness. They believe a great nation, their nation, should have a lawful system of immigration and people ought not, by the millions, violate those laws. Congress and the Presidents have failed to respond to their legitimate requests, year after year, decade after decade.

It is time for that to end. We need a lawful system of immigration that serves our national interests that we can be proud of, that allows a number of people to come to this country, as many as we can. But we have to know they have a chance to get a good job, their children will have a chance to get a good job, and we are not displacing American workers who need jobs and a bit higher wage instead of a falling wage.

That is what this country ought to be about. It was not part of the bill that passed this Senate that is now waiting to go to the House. The House needs to be very careful when they move forward, if they move forward, with any legislation, that they do not go to a secret conference committee and include all kinds of provisions driven by the AFL-CIO and by the chamber of commerce and by La Raza and by Democratic politicians who wanted votes. They have to be sure that is not who is writing this bill because that is who has been writing it so far. It ought not to happen.

The openness with which the advocates of this bill have discussed what they are trying to do is rather remarkable. I hope it is a signal to our House Members to be alert, to do the right thing as they go forward in trying to move a bill that ends the illegality, that identifies what the right flow of immigrants into America is and creates a system that will actually work in a practical way in the future and will deal compassionately with people who have been here a long time and who have tried to otherwise be good citizens and do the right thing.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I wish to discuss the Sessions- Pryor Amendment No. 1879 to S. 1392, the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act. I would like to recognize the excellent work of my friend, the senior Senator from Arkansas, Mr. Pryor, who is an original co-sponsor of this amendment, and I would ask him for permission to engage in a brief colloquy concerning our amendment.

I thank my colleague for his willingness to discuss this amendment. I would ask my colleague, what is the purpose of our amendment?

I thank the Senator from Arkansas. Our amendment is sound policy for at least three reasons. First, the amendment saves taxpayer dollars by reducing redundant testing of products when already covered by a comprehensive, voluntary third-party testing program. At a time of record debt and deficits, this government needs to consider every option for making government lean and fiscally responsible. We have been informed by the Congressional Budget Office that our amendment does not impact the deficit.

Second, the amendment reduces regulatory burdens on American manufacturers. We need to do all we can to help make U.S. manufacturing more competitive on the world stage. Our amendment promotes domestic manufacturing and competiveness.

Third, our amendment increases DOE's enforcement capabilities to ensure that a greater number of products are verified every year. This will help achieve the kinds of energy efficiency improvements the law was intended to achieve. So I think this amendment should garner the support of this body.

I recently received a letter from Rheem Manufacturing Company, which has a large manufacturing facility in Montgomery, AL that employs over 1,000 people and manufactures heating and cooling products in Fort Smith, AR. The Rheem letter expresses support for our amendment and explains that it ``will enhance our ability to sustain American manufacturing jobs and competitiveness while conserving taxpayer resources and allowing federal agencies to focus enforcement on entities that do not voluntarily participate in rigorous industry-led efficiency certification programs.''

I would, in turn, ask Senator Pryor: who else is supportive of this amendment?

I would ask Senator Pryor one additional question. One of the purposes of this amendment is to reduce the testing burden on manufacturers for a number of Federal government programs. For instance, manufacturers who utilize accredited, independent third parties for testing and certification should not be compelled to undertake duplicative testing to demonstrate compliance with other Federal programs so long as the test methods used for evaluating product performance are the same. Additionally, this amendment does not intend to limit competition between private sector testing and certification programs, provided that accreditation and

other legitimate government requirements for recognizing such efforts are clearly defined. Would you agree?

I thank Senator Pryor for his work on this issue.