Floor Statements

Mr. President, I would like to be notified when I have used 5 minutes.

Mr. President, I understand we will have a set vote on the DISCLOSE Act. It got 51 votes previously. We need 60 votes to move forward to pass this bill. It is not likely to happen. Our Democratic colleagues were down here last night into the midnight hour talking about the DISCLOSE Act, which is something that is political and campaign-related that we have a significant difference of opinion about, and it is not going to pass.

I would like to ask my friends and colleagues what is it we ought to be disclosing? Is it the amount of money some individual American made honestly and spent or maybe there are some other issues we ought to disclose. I would say this Senate ought to disclose to the American people what its budget plan is for the future of this country. We haven't had a budget in 3 years. Senator Reid said it would be foolish to bring up a budget--foolish because we don't have time. We had time to spend all night last night debating this bill--or half the night-- and we are having a second vote on the same bill again today. Why don't we spend some of that time on something important such as dealing with our $16 billion debt. Why don't our Democratic leaders disclose to us what their plan is to deal with this surging debt, a debt that is increasing at $1.3 trillion a year. It is unsustainable, as every estimate we have ever been told and every witness has testified to before the Budget Committee and other committees--unsustainable. Yet they refuse to even lay out a plan for how we are going to confront that.

The House has. They laid out a historic plan. Congressman Ryan and his team and the House has passed a long-term budget plan that will alter the debt course of America and put us on a responsible path--not so in the Senate, even though they talked about it in secret amongst themselves that they had a plan. Let's disclose it. Why don't we have a disclosure of it.

October 1 is coming up pretty fast, particularly since we are going to be in recess virtually the entire month of August and it looks like the entire month of October. By October 1, the Congress has a duty and a responsibility to pass legislation that funds the government because the new government fiscal year begins October 1. Senator Reid just announced he is not going to produce a single appropriations bill. When I first came here, we tried to pass all 13 every year, before October 1, when the year starts. We are not even going to attempt it.

I think the American people ought to ask: What do you plan to spend your money on next year? The country is suffering substantially. Why don't you disclose, Senator Reid, what the appropriations bills are going to be, how much money you are going to spend on each one of the items, and subitems and subitems and subitems, so we can examine it, bring it up on the floor, and offer amendments, as the Senate is supposed to operate. Why don't you disclose that? Isn't that important for America?

I have to say, since I have been here, this will be the least performing, most disappointing year of the Senate in our history. No budget, no attempt to bring up a budget, no appropriations. Those are the bread-and-butter requirements of any Senator.

Food stamps, the SNAP program. In 2000, we were spending about $17 billion on the food stamp program. Last year, we spent $79 billion. It has gone up repeatedly. It is out of control. It needs to be managed. It needs to be focusing more on helping people in need, not just subsidizing people in need--helping them move forward to independence and responsibility. Why don't my colleagues disclose a plan for that? Isn't that important to America? I think it is.

There are a lot of other things that ought to be on the table.

I thank the Chair.

There are a lot of other things on the table we need to be dealing with and talking about and being honest about. It is time to disclose what our financial plans for the future are. It is time to disclose what we are going to do about this debt, what we are going to do about wasteful spending. It is not being done. It is a disappointing year.

I thank the Chair and yield is floor.

Madam President, if the Senator would make that 10 minutes, I think that will be fine.

Madam President, this afternoon the House of Representatives voted 244 to 185 to repeal the President's health care law, the Affordable Care Act. It was a bipartisan vote. A number of Democrats voted in support of the law, although not as many as voted originally to pass it, because a lot of the Democrats, even those who voted against it, got shellacked in the last election, and it was a pretty rough, intense debate.

The American people never felt comfortable with this legislation. I believe it will be repealed. I do not believe it will be implemented. The reason is, whether one likes it or not, we simply do not have the money.

I wish to talk about that today. I am the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, and I wish to share some thoughts with my colleagues as we wrestle with what to do on health care and how to undo the legislation that passed by the narrowest single margin in this Senate on Christmas Eve and was based on false accounting.

President Obama promised, before a joint session of Congress in 2009, to spend $900 billion over 10 years on the law. He said:

Now, add it all up, and the plan I'm proposing will cost

around $900 billion over 10 years.

$900 billion is a lot of money. It is almost twice the defense budget.

The President went on to say in support of this health care legislation that it would reduce the debt of the United States. We are going to add all of these new people to the insurance rolls, and it is going to pay for itself and reduce the debt. No one really believed that, but that is what the arguments were and the representations that were made.

But once we add up all the different spending provisions in the health care law, including closing the doughnut hole, implementation costs, including all of those IRS agents and other spending in the legislation, the total gross spending for the law over the 2010-2019 period--the 10-year budget window used at the time it was enacted--was actually $1.4 trillion. I will just show this to my colleagues with this chart because it is very important. The President promised the American people in his speech before a joint session of Congress that it would cost $900 billion. People knew it would cost more. But even then, in the initial 10 year budget window, as he proposed, when we count up all the spending in the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the legislation, including the enforcement mechanism through the IRS agents, closing the doughnut hole and other spending in the law outside of the major coverage provisions, the law spends $1.4 trillion over that same 10 year period. That is almost 50 percent more right there. I think that fact is indisputable. I will ask my colleagues to come tell me if I am wrong.

I would just note parenthetically, one of the most important components of health care reform should have been resolving the doc fix. Under current

law, we are projected, without legislation that takes effect, to reduce Medicare payments to doctors by roughly 30 percent by the end of this year.

At the time the health care law passed, the cost of a permanent doc fix added up to about $200 billion to $250 billion over a 10 year period. Democrats originally included the doc fix in earlier drafts of the bill. But in the end when they looked at the numbers, if they included the doc fix--which is critical and needs to be fixed permanently; not continuing to hang out there every year and to be fixed by borrowed money--then the bill couldn't have continued in surplus. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it wouldn't continue to be paid for as the President was saying. So they just didn't do it. They just decided they wouldn't fix one of the most important issues in health care, and it remains that way today.

So, as I work through this, we are using nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office numbers.

Most of the major spending provisions in the law, as our colleagues should know, do not take effect until 2014. So the true 10-year score should be 2014 through 2023. That is the 10-year window of full implementation. How much will the bill cost then? Each year it goes up because until 2014 we don't really see a 10-year full cost of the legislation.

So what Democrats did was--and the President deliberately did, with help from his OMB Director, Mr. Peter Orszag--they manipulated CBO's scoring conventions. In the initial 10 year budget window they only included 6 years of spending on the major coverage provisions so that CBO would appear to score it over 10 years and say it would only cost $900 billion. That delay tactic was a pure budget gimmick. So we can look at this chart and see that from 2014 through 2023, each year these red lines represent a situation in which we are closer and closer to 10 years of full implementation and how much the cost will be.

So we go from 2014, and the next 10 years, as the bill is fully implemented, and it will cost $2.6 trillion, almost three times the amount the President promised it would cost.

So people ask: How do we get in a situation where we are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend? This kind of deception. A CEO in a court of law would go to jail if he proposed using that kind of accounting in his business practice and asked people to invest in his stock.

Analysis by my staff on the Budget Committee, based on the estimates and growth rates the Congressional Budget Office utilizes, finds that the total spending under the law, including the other spending not directly related to the coverage provisions, will amount to at least $2.6 trillion, and could be much more.

Now, how did they get this done? It is a sad state of affairs, frankly. The Obama administration, Mr. Orszag, the Office of Management and Budget Director who works directly for the President, also asserted that ``health care reform is entitlement reform.'' In other words, this is going to fix an entitlement danger--the problems we have with Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid; entitlement programs, each one of which are growing at fast rates that are unsustainable, that will head to bankruptcy in the years to come.

However, a simple comparison of the Federal Government's unfunded obligations for health care programs, before and after the health care law was enacted, clearly proves that the President's health care reform is not entitlement reform. It will not improve our long term spending trajectory. It will not make these programs more viable in the future. It did not put Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid on a sustainable path. Those programs remain disastrously unsustainable.

The President does not even talk about that any more. Here we are running into a reelection campaign and the country is facing a colossal financial danger from unsustainable debt, and the President would not even talk about it. He says things are getting along fine. I think it is a failure of leadership for him not to talk honestly with the American people about our fiscal challenges.

So before the President's health care law was enacted, unfunded obligations for the Federal health care programs totaled $65 trillion over a 75-year period. That is how much we are going to run short in money to pay for the obligations we have incurred under Medicare and Medicaid--and some other programs, but those are the big ones. After the recent passage of this health care bill, however, the figure, according to my staff's estimates, has gone up to $82 trillion. So the difference in the two numbers is what has been added to the unfunded liabilities of the United States. By the way, $17 trillion is 2\1/2\ times the unfunded liabilities of Social Security, which is $7 trillion.

If my colleagues think I am in error about any of these numbers, I hope they will correct me. Perhaps I am, but we work hard to be accurate about them, and I don't believe I am off in any substantial degree.

The bottom line is this: We cannot afford this law and the additional burden it places on our country's finances.

We must repeal this health care law in its entirety and replace it with reforms that will improve our finances and reduce health care costs for Americans, not drive up their costs. This bill, whether you like it or not, will not be implemented. We simply do not have the money. At this time of high unemployment, and almost no growth, it will be hard to do the things that are necessary, that we have to do: fix Social Security, fix Medicare, provide for the common defense. Those things have to be done. We have no money to pay for a $2.6 trillion program over a 10-year period. We have to save these programs we are committed to first.

The President's health care law will not be fully implemented until 2014. It is not too late to stop it now. And we are going to have to, simply because the finances of this country will not allow for it to go forward.

I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Paul for raising these issues. We are mismanaging the American people's money. It is good to see Senator Lee, who just spoke, and Senator Paul, both new Members of the Senate, who have been out talking to the American people and made commitments that they are going to work to try to improve the process here. I celebrate their activity, their vigor, and their determination, and a lot of others feel the same way in our body.

Shortly we will be moving a cobbled-together bill. An attempt will be made to accomplish this. I expect budget points of order and another point of order to be raised.

I want to share some thoughts about how it is we do business and some of the efforts that are not legitimate as we go about our business and are dangerous to the financial health of America.

Let's take what we call the LUST fund. I know it is an odd name. The true name of it is the leaking underground storage tank fund. People who have them have to pay fees, and it goes into a fund. The idea of the fund is to be available when cleanups need to be done. When the company or other companies have gone bankrupt and there is no money, this fund will pay to clean up the waste. Maybe it makes sense. It has been operating for quite a number of years. It has run up a surplus. That surplus is in the LUST trust fund--leaking underground storage tank fund--and where does it go? What do you do with that money?

The Treasury of the United States is spending more money every year than it takes in. This year we will spend approximately $3.7 trillion. We take in about $2.4 trillion, and we have a $1,300 billion deficit. That is how much we are spending. We spend around $3.7 trillion and are taking in about $2.4 trillion, and we have about a $1.3 trillion deficit this year--the fourth consecutive year that we have had almost a $1,000 billion deficit. We will have a big one again next year because we are systematically overspending.

But let's look at this fund--it has some real money in it, a number of billions of dollars--and what happens to it. Well, when the government spends more money than it takes in, it takes the money from the LUST fund. Well, how does it get it? It borrows it. So there is actually a debt instrument from the United States Treasury to the trustees or the holders or managers of the LUST trust fund, and they have loaned the money. They do not need it today, so they loan it to the government so they can spend it. And it has been borrowed and has been spent.

The assets in the LUST fund are nothing more than debt instruments

from the U.S. Treasury. But on the books, it appears this LUST fund has assets. I guess in a sense it does. It has U.S. Treasury notes. So the people looking around to spend money and to try to meet the demands of our constituents--to build highways in this case--decided they could take that money.

And you know something, it does not score as an expenditure in that fashion. It is an odd way this is done. It is seen as found money that they can go over and spend. But where does the money come from? The money is not in the fund, remember? The fund holds Treasury bills. But the highway trust fund doesn't want Treasury bills, it wants money that can be spent. So what happens is the U.S. Treasury, which has been borrowing money from another government agency and giving a debt instrument in return, has to come up with the money now. It is going to be spent. It is going to be taken out of the trust fund. So where do they get the money? They convert an internal debt to an external debt.

The only thing they will do is borrow more money. So it will be this many billions of dollars more than $1.2 trillion or $1.3 trillion that we have. The debt is converted to a public debt, and somebody in China or in Japan or in New York will loan money to the government and they will use that money to pay the highway trust fund with it.

You see how circular that is? It allows the money to be double counted. And that is actually what happened with President Obama's health care bill. That $400 billion was funded this way. Social Security still has a surplus. Although it has been drawn down, it still has a surplus in its account--or Medicare does. So the Medicare trustees raise Medicare taxes, they cut Medicare benefits, and they save $400 billion, And that would be money of the Medicare and the trustees. It is their money. But what happened with it? Under the conventions of accounting, the money was available to be spent by the U.S. Treasury, and the U.S. Treasury then would spend it on the new health care bill.

The Congressional Budget Office Director, Mr. Elmendorf, wrote me a letter the night before the bill passed--Christmas Eve--and he said this is double counting the money. You can't simultaneously count it as making Medicare better and providing new money to fund the health care bill. Four hundred billion dollars on the night before the vote he announces this is double counting. If a private business were to do it, they would be in big trouble, I suggest. They might be sued for fraud. They would be sued for fraud.

So the money was done in that fashion, and the way it happened was Mr. Elmendorf said it is double counting the money. You cannot simultaneously benefit Medicare and fund a new health care program, although the conventions of accounting might suggest otherwise. So the real smart financiers, what did they do? They figured out how to use the conventions of accounting in a way that obscured the fact they didn't have the $400 billion and that it was, in truth, borrowed money.

Mr. President, I see my colleagues on the floor, and I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I want to share a few thoughts about the Supreme Court's ruling today and the status of the health care bill.

I believe the health care bill cannot be justified as written and will have to be changed. It will have to be repealed, and we have to start over. It is just that simple.

As ranking member of the Budget Committee, I began to look at the numbers we have had. Our team is going to redouble their effort in the weeks to come so we can know precisely how much this legislation will cost. As that becomes more and more understood by the American people, it will be clear that we do not have the money to pass the bill.

I know a lot of people are confident that it will undermine the right of an individual American to see the doctor of their choice, despite the President's protestations. Even I believe today that people will not be able to continue to keep their insurance--at least not all people will be able to--and there will be other different problems. There is a real concern that under the legislation the quality of health care will go down. I believe that is accurate for a lot of reasons, and people like Dr. Barrasso and Dr. Coburn have explained that in great detail.

As a member of the Budget Committee, I want to share some thoughts about the financing of the legislation to raise the issue of why we cannot go forward with it.

The President promised the American people before a joint session of Congress, right down the hall in the House Chamber: ``Now, add it all up, and the plan that I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.'' Now, $900 billion is a lot of money, there is no doubt about that. He said that is how much it would cost over a 10-year period. As we have all learned, that was a gimmicked-up number. It was fundamentally gimmicked up as a result of the fact that the cost of the bill where it begins to pay out money and will have real cost and the implementation of the bill was delayed 4 years. So you take a 10-year window, and the bill is going to be out there for 6 of those 10 years, and you announce it is only going cost $900 billion.

That is not the right question, is it. The right question for the American people to actually understand the impact of the legislation would be to ask how much it would cost over the first 10 years of full implementation. That is what you should be asking. We all know that the numbers have come in on that. Under the CBO estimate strictly adhering only to the insurance portion of the bill, I believe they came in as saying not $900 billion but $1,400 billion would be the cost over the first 10 years, but the true cost of the health care bill is yet higher still. A complete and honest assessment of the cost of the President's health care bill would include a full 10 years of spending starting in 2014. Adding up CBO's estimates for the different provisions in the bill, the President's health care bill will amount to at least $2,600 billion--$2.6 trillion, not $900 billion. It is almost three times the estimated costs over the true 10-year period. Now, that is how we go broke in this country. That is how this country is going broke. We go through a whole debate, and the President insisted that is how much the bill was going to cost.

When the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, they had 60 Democratic Senators, and they insisted it was going to pay for itself. They said there was more revenue than needed to pay for the cost of the bill, so don't worry about it, be happy. On Christmas Eve, without amendments and after much secret debate and a bill plopped on the floor, the bill was voted up or down, 60 votes to 40. Every single Democrat voted for it, and every single Republican voted against it.

I just have to say that the first 10 years of the bill is going to cost three times what was estimated.

In addition to delaying the major spending provisions during the original window of the legislation, here are some of the other accounting gimmicks, tricks, and maneuvers that the drafters used to manipulate the score the Congressional Budget Office gave to the bill, to manipulate how much they would say the bill cost and to hide its impact.

Well, one of the most significant things is a double-counted $400 billion. Can you imagine that? The U.S. Government, according to the score manipulation and the way it was done by the CBO, utilizing complex rules of the CBO to its advantage, the way it was analyzed, they double-counted $400 billion. So they cut Medicare expenses, they raised Medicare taxes, but they took the money and used it to fund the new bill and said they made Medicare more solvent. In some ways, we could argue they did make Medicare insolvent because the money that was spent on the health care bill was borrowed from Medicare. They are debt instruments for Medicare.

So my analysis of the legislation is that Medicare got a benefit, but there was no money for the health care bill. Yet they counted it as being $400 billion free to be spent without adding to the debt of the United States, but it does add to the debt. Medicare is going broke. Medicare is going to call the debt from the United States. It increases the debt of the United States $400 billion. It was counted both places--as income from Medicare and income available to be spent on the health care provision. That is a stunning development.

I got a letter from the head of the CBO the night before we voted, December 23, and he said, in effect--not in effect, I think this is a direct quote: It is double-counting the money, although the conventions of accounting might indicate otherwise.

He told us in a letter before we voted that it was double-counting the money, but under the unified budget process rule that was utilized here, it didn't score.

In addition, they counted $70 billion of extra income that would come from the CLASS Act, which was designed for young people. The net result of that was that in the first decade or so of the CLASS Act's implementation, healthy young people wouldn't make many claims and there would be a surplus of $70 billion. But over 20, 30, 40 years, the CLASS Act goes into serious decline. Its actuarially unsound. It was referred to as a Ponzi scheme by the Democratic budget chairman, Senator Conrad. Finally, the Secretary of HHS could not certify it as a sound program, so $70 billion has been wiped off that as income available to be spent.

They included--unrelated to this bill--student loan savings of $19 billion.

They relied on off-budget Social Security revenue for $29 billion, not scored toward the cost of the bill.

They ignored the cost of implementing the law. Imagine that. I mean, you have a bill. How much is it going to cost? It is going to cost $900 billion. Well, do you not score the cost of it? What about all these IRS agents? There will be 1,000-plus to 2,000 IRS agents who have to be hired and paid for, which is $115 billion not counted in the cost of the bill. Is this why we are going broke in this country? We score a bill, say it only costs $900 billion, and we have $115 billion of administrative costs not even counted.

Then there was no permanent solution to the doctor reimbursement figure. To pay the doctors at the rate they needed to be paid--and I agree they need to be paid at this rate--would cost $208 billion over the current level of expected spending. If we don't have this doc fix, as we call it, doctors would receive a 20-plus percent cut in pay for doing Medicare work immediately. They are already paid less for Medicare work than they are paid for private insurance. Doctors would quit doing Medicare work if they took a 20- or 25-percent reduction in fee payments. That is $200 billion. That was one of the main reasons we were supposed to have comprehensive health care reform, to deal permanently with this doctor fix that was being fixed every year, but not permanently. The bill didn't do it. The bill never fixed it, therefore leaving a $208 billion hole in the plan that we have to find money for, and it is an essential part of all of that.

So I would just say to my colleagues that this cost is unsustainable. It will put us on a debt course we cannot continue to be on. We are going to continue to look at the numbers, and I am going to ask people, if they desire, to come to the Senate floor and show me if I am wrong. Let me see where I am wrong. But I don't think they can show that we are wrong because I and my staff are working as hard as we can to make sure what we say about the cost of this bill is accurate and fair.

What does this do to the long-term debt of our country? That is a matter of great importance. One of the things our government does now is analyze the unfunded obligations of the U.S. Government. When we pass a law that says when everybody reaches a certain age, they get to draw a Social Security check of so much money, and it increases on a percentage basis each year, that is an obligation of the United States. That is an entitlement program, we call it. People are entitled to that whether the government has any money to pay it.

So the health care bill is an entitlement. It has a guaranteed right for an individual American to receive certain subsidized health care benefits under this plan, and it is a permanent program, but it doesn't have a permanent source of income dedicated to paying for it in any significant fashion. So it creates what the Congressional Budget Office refers to as an unfunded liability, unfunded obligations. To show Americans and Congress the true state of our long-term financial health, they do it over 75 years. It is not a perfect estimate, but it is a pretty good estimate of whether the programs are actuarially sound and what they will do to the debt of America over 75 years.

Under the numbers we have seen from the CBO and the work of our committee, it is pretty clear the health care bill that was passed by this Congress will add $17 trillion to the unfunded liabilities of the United States of America--$17 trillion--not a little amount of money, a huge amount of money. To give perspective on how large it is, the Social Security unfunded liability over 75 years is only--only--$7 trillion. This is 2\1/2\ times as large an unfunded liability addition to our government as Social Security, and we are wondering how we are going to save Social Security. It is more than half of the unfunded liabilities of Medicare or half of the unfunded liabilities of Medicare over 75 years.

At a time when we have a serious demonstrated requirement that we reduce the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, this bill would add $17 trillion to it. This is why every expert has told us this Nation is on an unsustainable course.

The total unfunded liabilities before the passage of the health care bill were $65 trillion over 75 years. That trend, experts tell us, is unsustainable and threatens the future of our children and grandchildren. After the bill passes, it is $82 trillion. We don't have the money to do health care reform in this way, with 2,700 pages and $17 trillion in additional cost to the Treasury. We don't need to affirm and repass legislation that was said to cost $900 billion in the first 10 years. In truth, in the first 10 years of its obligation-- beginning the year after next--for the first 10 years it will cost almost three times that much--$2,600 billion. So it is a matter of great concern to me.

As to the Court decision today, I am going to look at the Court decision and evaluate it. But I think it is additional proof that this health care legislation, from the beginning and in its entirety--a 2,700-page Rube Goldberg contraption--will never work. It is further proof of that.

Even the fundamental justification for the legislation that it was not a tax but a mandate has been rejected by the Court. The law was only upheld by saying it is not a mandate. In effect, it is a tax that the sponsors of the bill directly said it was not. Indeed, the President said it was not a tax himself, directly. So certainly this opinion that allowed the legislation to stand, by the narrow margin of 5 to 4, in no way is an affirmation of the wisdom of the bill but is in fact demonstration that the people who cobbled it together and who rammed it through without full floor debate and amendments, that that scheme was flawed from the beginning and it will not work.

Indeed, there are 1,700 references in that legislation to regulations to be issued by the Secretary of HHS. In other words, once the bill is passed, we will turn over huge sections of it to unknown bureaucrats who will issue regulations to administer this monstrosity. It is just not a practical and decent way to do business.

So I believed the bill clearly violated the interstate commerce power granted to the Federal Government. The Federal Government can only act and pass legislation if it has been specifically authorized by the Constitution. One of the authorized powers was to regulate interstate commerce. But if a person is sitting on the creek bank in Alabama, not buying insurance, not participating, can he be made to buy a product in interstate commerce when he is explicitly not participating in that? I didn't believe it could be done, and the Court agreed. The Court rejected the Obama administration's argument that it did.

They said the Federal Government has no power to compel a person to participate in a commercial market when a person doesn't participate. If a person participates, maybe they can regulate it. But if a person doesn't participate, they can't tell a person to participate because this is a government of limited power.

It was a historic and important ruling that the Supreme Court made clear: that there are limits to the power of the U.S. Government. I felt good about that. But now that Chief Justice Roberts and other members of the Court concluded that it may look like a mandate, but we call it a tax--and I haven't done the technical analysis they went through to reach their opinion, but that doesn't seem correct to me. It seems as though it is still a mandate, a mandate to buy something a person doesn't want to buy. That doesn't sound like a tax to me. Maybe it is. Maybe they can defend it that way, but I don't see how that is a tax. It sounds like a mandate and a penalty.

So scholars will be reading that opinion for some time, and we will know whether Chief Justice Roberts announces that this apparent mandate, apparent requirement that the President said was not a tax, now it is a tax and the law is constitutional because of it. We will wrestle with that. But it does deal with the fundamental question: Can we afford this legislation. I say we cannot. I believe the facts are crystal clear that we cannot. We absolutely have to reform it, start over, create a health care system that works at a reasonable cost for the American people and does not burden our children with exorbitant debt that could throw us into a debt crisis at most any time, and in the long term destabilize the health of the Nation we love so much.

Flood Insurance

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 2174.

Mr. President, food stamp spending has quadrupled--gone up four times--since 2001, increasing twice the rate that the other major poverty program, Medicaid, has increased. It is now the second largest Federal welfare program. An individual on food stamps, with all other government programs they may be eligible for, can receive as much as $25,000 a year.

Under this bill food stamps will average $80 billion a year for 10 years; whereas, the agriculture farm programs will average $20 billion a year. It is by far the dominant factor in this entire piece of legislation.

Amendment No. 2174 deals with the problem through a system known as categorical eligibility. Forty-three States now provide benefits to individuals whose income exceeds the statutory limit--incomes and assets. Only 11 States did that in 2007.

I ask that we be able to fix this problem, and I urge my colleagues to vote for it.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I appreciate my good friend's amendment. I do not think it deals with the problem completely and appropriately. I have offered amendment No. 2172, which would end the bonus payments for increasing registration on the Food Stamp Program. States currently receive bonuses for increasing enrollment in the Food Stamp Program. This amendment would end that policy and would save a modest $480 million--if you call that modest--out of $800 billion being spent on this program over 10 years, according to the CBO.

One of the problems we have with the Food Stamp Program, if you just think about it, is that all the money comes from the Federal Government but all the administration comes from the States. They have no incentive to manage the program in a way to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. It really helps their economy if more money comes in from out of State. For the Federal Government to have a program that rewards States on top of their natural incentives would be wrong.

I urge support of my amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays and call up amendment No. 2172.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague Senator Inhofe, who has been such a leader on these issues and has contributed so much to the national discussion as we wrestle with the challenges of trying to have affordable energy for Americans to maintain our business competitiveness and improve the quality of our air and environment. And we can do those things. We have been doing those things, and we are going to continue to do those things. But this Senate Joint Resolution 37 dealing with Utility MACT provides us an opportunity to make a strong statement and reject the program the EPA has adopted that will damage this economy, will drive up the cost of energy for every American throughout this country, drive up the cost of energy for American businesses that are struggling now to hire workers and be competitive.

If we have an advantage on the world market today, every expert tells us it is because of a decline in natural gas prices, and we have competitive electricity prices from coal. So we have competitive electricity prices from our largest source--coal--and we have surprising, wonderful new finds in natural gas that are allowing our energy to be cheaper too. This helps us create jobs and growth.

Yet we have within the administration a number of people--and, I hate to say, all the way to the top--who seem to believe that cheap energy is not a goal, that cheap energy is not something that should be brought forth, I guess because that would make their alternative sources--solar and wind and other things--even less competitive than they are today. We will develop those programs. We can seek to advance those programs. But in truth, we should not be mandating these much higher costs on the American people, hammering our economy, which, in effect, is a tax increase on the American economy.

So this is a $90 billion rule--the most expensive environmental rule in our Nation's history. And $90 billion is the amount the EPA acknowledges this rule will cost. The Congressional Review Act that Senator Inhofe has triggered says we can have this vote, this review of any regulation over $100 million, and $90 billion is 900 times larger than $100 million. It is the largest rule in American history. It changes the course of our economy. It is the kind of thing that Members who are elected to answer to the American people should be voting on, not having it done within basically a bureaucratic process, without having elected individuals engaged in it.

But the Congressional Review Act has a fundamental weakness. That weakness is that if the Congress votes to overturn an act, the President can veto it. We have this odd situation where the President appoints the bureaucrats. He appoints the head of the EPA. And all the people working throughout the executive branch and for the President, directly or indirectly--directly, really--produce the regulations the President desires they produce. They do not produce regulations he does not desire they produce. So the result is that Congress has an awfully difficult time overturning it because the President can veto what we pass. We need something like the REINS Act that would actually replace this unconstitutional, nontraditional procedure of impacting our economy with monumental regulations and putting that back to the Congress so that Congress is required to vote on the regulation.

My time, I know, is running out, but I want to reiterate that the impact of the regulations, if not changed, will

drive up the cost of energy for every single American and for all businesses in America. It will achieve only a modest improvement in mercury reductions over what President Bush proposed, and it is so extreme that it hammers coal processing and energy production in America, basically making coal no longer a realistic way to produce electricity in America. That is a huge event that impacts the economy. Fundamentally, this regulation would say that, yes, we have reduced mercury emissions by 50 percent.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

Yes, we would reduce the emissions of mercury since 1990 by 50 percent. Yes, President Bush proposed a very effective, sophisticated plan to further reduce those emissions by 75 percent--75 percent more. But there were problems with it. The courts found a problem with it. But instead of pursuing the matter in the fashion President Bush did, the new regulations call for this dramatic 90- percent reduction of mercury emissions, far more than we are able to do technologically and financially, I believe. That is why I salute Senator Inhofe for this resolution and I will support him.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank my colleague for his remarks. I caught part of the President's statement this afternoon and have gotten a transcript of some of the things he said.

As ranking member on the Budget Committee, as someone who has wrestled very intensely with these numbers for 2 years, I was shocked, I say to Senator Barrasso, by some of the things he said.

I would ask the Senator, based on the world we are in, how he reacts to the summary the Presidential adviser gave to the New York Times before the President's speech today, saying his plan ``focuses on education, energy, innovation, and infrastructure.''

First, does that suggest to the Senator spending?

There would have been private growth and private investment--not an increase in our deficit.

But it goes on. In their summary of what the President was going to say, it said he favored a ``tax code that creates American jobs and pays down our debt.''

First of all, is the Senator aware that under the President's plan that he submitted to us--his budget--the lowest single year's deficit in the 10-year window is $488 billion--that we never come close to paying down the debt in the plan he submitted to us? And how can the President--this is an unfair question, but I will ask the Senator from Wyoming--how can the President say he has a plan that pays down our debt when the lowest single deficit he proposes is nearly $500 billion?

It absolutely is.

Let me say this, in his speech--this is a quote from the transcript I have of it--he declared:

Both parties have laid out their policies on the table for

all to see.

Isn't it a fact that the House Republicans passed a long-term budget that would change the debt course of America and three Members of the Republican Senate laid out budgets that would have balanced the budget in the United States of America, and that the Democratic leadership never laid out a plan, refused to lay out a plan, and violated a law-- the Congressional Budget Act--by refusing to lay out a plan? Isn't that true? Or am I missing something?

I thank my colleague for those insights because this is a bit disappointing. It is more than disappointing. The President said, again, that he has a plan, and he has a vision ``of how to create strong, sustained growth,'' and ``how to pay down our long-term debt.'' He does not have such a plan. His plan comes nowhere close to balancing the budget. In 10 years, the lowest single deficit he would have is $488 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office--not me, the independent Congressional Budget Office.

His statement is not accurate. How can we have a bipartisan discussion on how to solve the sustained debt threat we have in this Nation if the President goes around saying his plan will help pay down our debt? It does not pay down the debt. It does not come close to paying down the debt.

He said that last year, and I grilled his Budget Director at a Budget Committee hearing. He could not defend that statement because it is indefensible. Nobody can defend that statement. And I say to any Member of this Congress, this Senate--a Democratic Member--I urge you to come down and tell me if the plan laid out by the President of the United States--the only plan we have seen, his budget--pays down the debt. It does not.

He goes on to say in this speech:

I've signed a law--

Forgive me if this is distressing to me, but we have been involved in the discussion a good long time. We have the U.S. Congress, including the Senate, and we have the President of the United States, and we all have a role in formulating an economic policy for America that will put our country on a growth path to eliminate the unsustainable debt course we are on.

The statement cited so often from President Obama's own debt commission--Simpson-Bowles--is: This Nation has never faced a more predictable financial crisis. Why? Because of the increasing debt, they said. The numbers are relentless. It is unsustainable. That is what it means. At some point, it means there will be a credit reaction, a financial collapse, or a reaction that will put us back into recession and distress. They pleaded with us to get off the path we are on.

So the President says:

I've signed a law that cuts spending and reduces our

deficit by $2 trillion.

What does he mean by that? Well, I think most Americans can remember that last August we reached the debt ceiling. We borrowed so much money that we hit the limit of money the U.S. Government can borrow. The President asked Congress to raise that debt limit so he could keep spending and keep borrowing, and basically the Republican House and Members in the Senate--to the extent we had influence--said: Mr. President, we will raise the debt limit, but we want you to reduce spending some. So they agreed, after much debate, in the wee hours of the morning--at the latest possible time--to cut $2.1 trillion in spending. The President went kicking and screaming to that point. The Democrats pretended it was a disaster and Americans were going to sink into the ocean. That is what that was all about.

Here we came with this plan, and the President now claims it is his deal, that he cut $2 trillion. I remember how it went down, and that is not a fair thing to say. He signed that law because if he did not sign it, spending would have to be cut 40 percent immediately, because that is how much, out of every dollar we spend, we borrow. We are borrowing 40 cents of every $1 we spend.

So if we had not raised the debt ceiling, the U.S. Government would have had to immediately cut all expenditures by 40 percent. That is why we are on an unsustainable course. It is not a little bitty matter.

The President suggests, if you listen to his speech: Don't worry about it. I have a plan. We are moving along fine. You do not have to sacrifice. We are going to have more education, energy, innovation, infrastructure. More spending--that is what that means. Investments, they say--that means spending. But we do not have the money. This country is out of money. This is a serious time. We have to make some tough decisions, and we need a Chief Executive telling the American people the truth about where we are, rather than promising some balanced budget and paying down debt when that is nowhere in his plan.

He says:

My own deficit plan would strengthen Medicare and Medicaid

for the long haul by slowing the growth of health care costs.

He has steadfastly refused to reform Medicare and Medicaid. Under this $2.1 trillion, the President insisted that Medicaid not receive a dime of cuts. And it did not receive a dime of cuts. The Defense Department gets a big time hammering under the cuts and the sequester. Medicaid--not a dime cut out of it. No reforms in Medicaid that would provide any benefit--anything other than to drive up the cost and increase the cost of Medicaid.

So how can he say that? And he has attacked Congressman Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee in the House, for actually laying out a vision to try to put Medicare on sound

footing, where it can actually be sustainable over time.

Congressman Ryan has the support of Senator Wyden, a Democratic Member of the Senate. He has the support of Alice Rivlin who was President Clinton's budget director at OMB. Alice Rivlin basically agreed with the policy that Congressman Ryan laid out to save Medicare. What happened? The President called in Congressman Ryan and attacked him on the spot. They are still accusing him of having a radical scheme to destroy Medicare. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is a plan to strengthen Medicare, to save Medicare, and put it on a sound basis so that people working today can be confident that when they retire and become eligible for it, it will be there.

But we cannot create something from nothing. We have to have a plan that provides the funding for it. This is not smoke and mirrors. Nothing comes from nothing, I have to tell you.

One more thing. The President said, ``I signed a law that cuts spending and reduces our deficit by $2 trillion.''

Well, he was forced into signing that bill. Did he really want to sign it? No, he did not. We all know that. Anyone could tell that from reading the newspapers and how the negotiations went. Our big spenders resisted that dramatically.

How much is $2 trillion over 10 years? We planned to spend $37 trillion over 10 years, increasing the debt by about $10 to $11 trillion. This would have cut it from $37 trillion being spent to $35 trillion being spent. It meant we would have increased the deficit by only $10 to $11 trillion, I guess. Not nearly enough, but at least some step toward reining in soaring spending.

So the President bragged on that just a few minutes ago. He is bragging about it. What is the real truth? The budget he submitted eviscerates that agreement. The budget he submitted in February of this year--5 months after the agreement last August--would wipe out the entire sequester, would eliminate $1 trillion in cuts, and add more spending.

In fact, he would add, under that plan, $1.5 trillion more in spending than the Budget Control Act agreement he is taking credit for signing would have allowed to be spent. This is not a matter of dispute. This is a fact. The budget he has submitted wiped out more than half of the cuts that were in that agreement, and he had big tax increases, about $1.8 trillion in tax increases. So $1.6 trillion more in spending than we agreed to just last summer, and $1.8 trillion in more taxes.

Tax, spend. Tax, spend. That is this President's philosophy. If he wants to stand for that, campaign on that, run on that, well and good. Be honest with the American people. But do not come in and take credit for things he resisted. Do not come in and take credit for budget cuts that he proposed to eliminate. How can we have a bipartisan discussion to try to reach an agreement on what to do about the unsustainable course we are on if the President is going out and saying things that are not connected to reality? I think it is irresponsible. I really do.

I do not see how a President of the United States could possibly not spend a great deal of time with the American people explaining to them why we are all going to have to tighten our belts, that we do not have the money we wish we had, that we are going to have to do this. Is there some sort of political fear that big spenders will ultimately get caught if they tell the truth about how much debt their big spending has caused the country, so they just have to pretend it is not so?

Well, they said President Bush had big debt. He did spend too much money. I criticized him some on that, and none of us are perfect in this Congress. We all voted for things probably we should not have.

The largest annual deficit that President Bush ever had was $470 billion. That is big. It is a lot of money.

President Obama's deficits have been $1.2, $1.3 trillion all 4 years he has been in office, more than twice President Bush's deficits. He has been in office now 4 years. In the plan he has laid out, even assuming our economy continues to grow--as we assume in these budget analyses--he does not come close to balancing the budget.

Every year we are adding hundreds of billions of dollars more in debt. The lowest single year in his 10-year plan would add $488 billion more to the debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the interest on the debt soars. The largest single increase in spending is interest.

Interest last year was $225 billion on the debt, and in the 10th year of the President's budget the Congressional Budget Office projects that the interest in that 1 year--10 years from now--will be $743 billion, exceeding virtually every item in the government including the Defense Department.

This is not healthy. In May, at a fundraiser--he is going to a lot of those, but sometimes, somebody has to stay home in Washington and bring this wasteful spending under control. He was at a fundraiser in Denver and he said, ``I'm running to pay down our debt.'' He said: I am running to pay down our debt. Do not worry. Let me. I am going to pay down our debt.

Well, that is just not what the numbers show. No plan has been laid out other than his budget: to tax, spend, and keep the debt on the same level we were on if he had no changes at all in the budget situation.

I am not happy about this. It is very distressing to me that this Nation is facing a financial crisis. We are all going to have to recognize we do not have the money that we would like to have to spend as we would like to spend. I told some people this morning at a breakfast/luncheon, a group from the Air Force Association, that the defense people needed to know we do not have the money. We do not have the money. For years we are going to have to be tightening our belts.

But we can work our way through it. We can do the right things. Who knows, by producing efficiencies and encouraging productivity, we could get our country on a healthier course than we can imagine at this point. I actually think we could. But we have to be honest about the situation. We have to have somebody who stays in the office for a while and actually drives the restraints in spending and insists that every Cabinet Member, sub-Cabinet Member, GSA person going to a resort in Las Vegas who is spending the taxpayers' money, that they do it with restraint and that wasteful actions are eliminated.

That is the kind of leadership we need, and the American people need to be told, and we all need to understand, we just do not have the money we wished we did. So we will have to alter our spending levels for a few years, get this country on a sound path, and create confidence. That will come when the world knows that we have gotten off the unsustainable debt path and gotten on a path that is sustainable, are set on a sound path, a path that leads to prosperity, not a path that leads to debt crisis and decline, but growth, prosperity and freedom. That is what it is all about.

Forgive me if it is irritating to me. But I did conclude, after today's speech, that the President has made a decision that he is going to run to November. He is going to run on the fact that he is reducing the debt. That is what he has apparently said. ``I'm running to pay down the debt'' is what he said in Denver. He repeated that again today. So that has to be confronted.

If I am wrong, I ask any Member of the Senate to come forward and show me what in the President's plan leads to any conclusion that he has laid out a plan that would pay down the debt of the United States. I do not see it. I do not think it is close.

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

Mr. President, as we deal with the farm bill we have to acknowledge that 80 percent of that bill now is the SNAP program, or the Food Stamp Program. I will repeat that--80 percent of this bill. So we need to not call it the farm bill anymore. It needs to be considered primarily the Food Stamp bill as that's what it is.

When we look at the bill, our sponsors are rightly pleased that they have tightened the belt of the farmers, they reduced some of the subsidies and programs, they created a little better policy, I believe, and they deserve some credit for that. But of the $800 billion that will be spent in the next 10 years, under current law--$800 billion compared to $200 billion in the rest of the farm program--for the $800 billion they are only claiming a $4 billion savings.

It is quite true that we in America do not want to have people hungry. We do not want to have people malnourished. What we want is to run a Food Stamp Program that has integrity, that creates an incentive for responsible personal behavior and that helps America to be a healthy nation.

I do not think we are there yet. In fact, we have Members on the Democratic side who are opposing even this $4 billion reduction in projected spending. This is less than half of 1 percent. And some of them don't even want to have that. Cut the farmers, all right, whack them 10 percent; but don't make real cuts to anything else or deal with any other programs. So our challenge simply is to make sure that people who are truly in need get the benefits. My Republican colleagues and I see this as a program that is temporary, helping people through tough times and creating an incentive for them to move on, be successful, find work and take care of themselves and their dependents.

I believe this chart will give some indication of the situation that we are in today. It is an accurate illustration of spending in this bill, the 2013 bill, which begins October 1 of this year. The Food Stamp Program will make up $82 billion out of the spending in this legislation that we are dealing with. In the bill, $6 billion will go to conservation programs--which is not really a

farmer's program, and they may get some benefits from it--another $6 billion for commodities, which is the orange in the chart, and $8 billion for crop insurance, which is the new fundamental basis of farm policy. I am not complaining that farmers are being squeezed. Hopefully, this has been done in a smart way that will also make those programs better. However, what I am suggesting is that there is virtually no change in the 80 percent of spending in this bill. We don't have the money to waste especially if it can be done better and smarter.

The main farm provisions in the bill experience a $14.7 billion reduction. That is a reduction of nearly 10 percent of spending relative to the baseline. To add some context, if the food stamp portion were to be reduced by 10 percent, it would save the U.S. Treasury $75 billion. Food stamp spending has quadrupled since 2001. It doubled between 2001 and 2006. Some people say the reason food stamp use is up is due to unemployment and recession. Well, that is not the entire story. For example, from 2001 to 2006, under President Bush's time when the economy had a small recession but was moving along very strongly in 2006, it still doubled from 2001 to 2006. At that time unemployment remained at about 5 percent. It is now 8 percent. When food stamps were first expanded nationally, 1 in 50 Americans were on the program. Today that number has increased to 1 in 7.

Are we confident that each of those seven Americans need this kind of subsidy? Are we sure that is needed? I believe we need to examine the program. If they need this benefit, let's get it for them. If not, let's not.

There are nearly 80 welfare programs provided by the U.S. Government, and 17 are for food and nutrition support. I repeat, 17 programs are for food and nutrition support. The costs now exceed $700 billion annually for all of these Federal programs, food and others too, plus $200 billion in State contributions. So that is almost $1 trillion a year, which is so much money it is difficult to express.

For example, an individual on food stamps may have a household that is eligible to receive and may receive $25,000 a year in total welfare support. We have a host of programs for which people can qualify, so we need to keep that in mind as we go forward. There is a patchwork quilt of Federal and State programs that help people in need. This is in addition to charitable and religious support that people can access.

The farm bill proposes to permanently elevate food stamps far above prerecession levels. In 2008 we spent less than $40 billion on food stamps. I repeat, in 2008--just a few years ago--less than $40 billion a year. Food stamp spending over the next 10 years is estimated to average almost $80 billion. This is double the prerecession amount.

This chart shows how we have grown from a little under $20 billion in 2001 to over $70 billion in 2022. We can see a little decline there between 2013 and 2022. That chart is based on projections from the Congressional Budget Office and assume that the unemployment will begin to drop in the future--we hope this is correct. Even though unemployment is expected to fall below 8 percent, they are not showing that we are going to have a major dropoff in food stamp spending in the future. Hopefully, unemployment will be falling. Hopefully, we will get this economy on the right track.

I would suggest the point that is revealed in this chart is that unemployment is not what is driving the food stamp increases. The increases far exceed the unemployment rate increases, and the decline from a projected reduction in unemployment is not very much either.

Were food stamp spending returned to prerecession levels those, say, in 2007, and then they were indexed for inflation, it would produce for the U.S. Treasury a $340 billion savings. So I don't think in 2007 the numbers that were spent are totally disproportionate to what we would need today, and I believe if properly managed we could do better.

The amendments I have filed--and there are four--address some of the perverse incentives for States to increase food stamp registration rather than an incentive to increase the integrity of the program.

For example, one of the things we need to do is to deal with the Federal provision that provides bonuses to States that increase the number of people who are registered. States currently receive bonuses for increasing enrollment and running the Food Stamp Program. They don't get bonuses for efficiently managing the program to reduce fraud, they don't get bonuses for finding people who are on the program illegitimately and selling their benefits in the marketplace or otherwise abusing the program, they get bonuses for seeing how many people they can sign up. That is not a sound policy.

The next amendment I have is Restoring the Asset Test for Food Stamps. You would think it is pretty well accepted that if a person has a certain amount of assets, they shouldn't have the government pay for their food. But through a system known as categorical eligibility, 43 States have now provided benefits to individuals whose assets exceed the statutory limit for them. Only 11 States did that in 2007.

Why? There are a couple of reasons. I guess one of them is they help get the incentive bonus for signing up more people. If they get around the asset test and sign up more people, maybe they get a bonus.

What incentive does the State have to reduce the amount of dollars from Washington? They don't match a dime of it. What incentive do they have to reduce the amount of money--free money in their minds--from Washington going to the State? Not much really.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, if passed, this amendment would save $11 billion, and all it would do is to say that SNAP beneficiaries would have to comply with the requirements of the program before they get the food stamps. It is called categorical eligibility. If people qualify for any other welfare program, the States have been given the power to say they qualify for food stamps even though they don't meet the formal qualifications for the food stamp program. Let me say that again--if they qualify for these others, under categorical eligibility they are categorically entitled to food stamps. That is not a good policy. It does not appropriately target the correct population, and we should fix that.

Another issue is what has been referred to as the LIHEAP loophole. This reform--and the amendment I have offered, and I hope we get a vote on it--requires households that receive larger food stamp payments on the basis of home energy expense actually provide proof of that expense. This is a real problem. States have been part of this, frankly. They have learned how to manipulate the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program money, and it creates an opportunity to have more people qualify for higher food stamp benefits than they are entitled to. It is not good policy and this abuse should be dealt with. The CBO says if that abuse were eliminated, it would save $9.5 billion over 10 years in addition to the other savings in this bill.

Then another amendment, called the SAVE amendment, would simply require that the Federal Government use a program called SAVE--similar to the E-Verify program--to ensure that those adults receiving benefits are, in fact, lawfully in the country. If they are not lawfully here, they should not be getting welfare support from the U.S. government. How basic is that? They just should not.

One of the most important things we can do to restore integrity in our immigration system is to quit providing economic benefits for people who violate the law. This is the first thing we need to do. It is an important thing to do. So I think that would be an amendment we should include.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Federal spending is set to increase 50 percent over the next 10 years. I repeat: Federal spending is projected to increase 50 percent over the next 10 years, and this creates a problem for us. Our per-person debt is worse than that of Portugal, Greece, Spain, or Italy.

This is a chart that shows that. We didn't make up these numbers, and it is perfectly established that they are accurate.

This raises a good question. What is the per capita debt of the United States per person? In other words, what

does the U.S. government owe? It is $49,800 per person--man, woman, and child in America. In Spain it is $20,000, in Portugal it is $22,000, in France it is $35,000, in Greece it is $40,000, in Italy it is $40,000, and in Ireland it is $46,000.

This level of debt is not healthy for us. So the idea that we have an unlimited ability to throw money at every problem we have and that we don't have to make sure every single dollar we appropriate helps the people truly in need, and is wisely spent, is over. We have to end that concept. This government, this Congress, this administration has been far too blase about managing the people's money.

It is like we just want to leave the money out there and maybe it will create a stimulus and somehow it will help the economy and we will give more than we need to give and not worry about it. We don't want to investigate anybody who rightfully qualifies for these benefits. We don't want to cut off anybody who truly deserves these benefits. That would be unkind. However, it is not unkind to insist that people meet the qualifications of the program. The people who don't meet the qualifications don't get the money. That is only common sense, and that is justice as Americans know it.

It is amazing that 40 cents of every dollar we spend in our country today is borrowed. The United States is headed for what has been called the most predictable economic crisis in its history. The debt course we are on is unsustainable. We are headed to a debt crisis if we don't change where we are going, as every witness before the Budget Committee, of which I am ranking member, has told us. Yet many Senators in this body are not only unwilling to achieve more than $4 billion in savings from the $800 billion program, but some even consider $4 billion too much to reduce from the program.

The junior Senator from New York proposes to increase food stamp spending even more than the current growth we have seen, explaining that ``food stamps are an extraordinary investment because for every dollar that you put into the SNAP program [the food stamp program] you get out $1.71.'' I won't repeat that because this is what the director of the program said, or the Secretary of Agriculture, I believe. He said that for every dollar spent on food stamps, you get out $1.71. Under this reasoning, we ought to just increase the food stamp program 10 times. Why not? Under this reasoning we are going to get even more money back. Somehow, it is going to create a stimulus and it is going to bring more money in for the Treasury and make the economy grow. Why don't we just pay for clothes, shoes, and housing? Why not? It is precisely this kind of thinking that has bled our Treasury of money that we need to pay for the demands this country has.

I also think it is a moral issue. What is our policy objective? Is it our national goal to place as many people on welfare, food stamp support, as we can possibly put on that program? Is that our goal? Is that a moral vision for the United States of America, just to see how many people we can place in a situation where they are dependent on the Federal Government for their food? I just ask that. I think we should wrestle with that question.

Under the current proposal, no fewer than one in nine Americans will be on food stamps at any point during the next 10 years. Which is the better goal--to permanently have one in nine Americans on food stamps or to have as many Americans as possible achieving financial independence?

Left unattended, the safety net really can become a restraint, a trap. Welfare reform is guided by the moral principle that welfare support can become damaging not only to the Treasury of the United States but to the recipient. Over time, the trillions of dollars we spend on welfare programs--with the greatest of intentions, with the greatest desire to do good--can replace the normal support role of private family, church, and community. It can become a barrier to self- sufficiency and an incentive not to be engaged in the tough, real world of work and competition. So I think it is not compassionate to increase without limit the size and reach of the Federal Government. The central premise of the American society is that the empowerment of the individual is always preferable to the empowerment of the state.

The amendments we have spent a lot of time working on--each one of them is crafted to improve the program. None of them represent major cuts in the amount of spending that is involved in the food stamp program. For each one of them the biggest savings would be about $10 billion, but in each case it is $10 billion that would be saved, that would make the program more efficient, that would improve the integrity of the program, and not reduce any of the benefits that will go to those who would qualify for food stamps under existing law. It would not reduce that.

I am concerned that the majority leader has filled the tree on this bill. Senator Reid has basically taken control of the amendment process. So we have a bill moving through the Senate that will spend about $1 trillion over the next 10 years, and 80 percent of the spending in this bill will deal with food nutrition programs, with SNAP programs--80 percent of it--and we have only had one amendment that deals with that program--only one.

We have been here for days without voting on anything.

Senator Roberts is trying to get amendments from the Republican side to be voted on.

The majority leader says: Well, I don't think I will approve that one. No, we don't want to vote on that. We have already voted on something like that. We are not going to vote on that. You have already had a food stamp amendment. We are not going to have any more food stamp amendments.

That is the kind of talk that is going on here.

This is the U.S. Senate, the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world--something we are exceedingly proud of--where we can have debate, vast, continuous, intense debate. It is part of the glory of this body. So now we have one person--the majority leader-- using a parliamentary technique called filling the tree and basically saying I don't get a vote on any of those amendments I just mentioned.

I believe they are responsible amendments. I believe all four should be adopted. I believe it would make the food stamp program better. It would help ensure we have enough money to make sure the people who are in need get help. If we don't get off the debt course we are on, we are going to be in a crisis and all the programs are going to be cut--maybe more than we really need to cut them--because we have to get on the right course.

So I am objecting to this. I am not happy about it. I don't think it is healthy. I do believe the majority leader has utilized this technique of filling the tree more than any majority leader in history--far more than any majority leader in history--and it is not a healthy trend for the Senate.

We have always had a lot of amendments on the farm bill, and we need to have these amendments. So I hope and believe that--I hope we will get votes on these amendments. I hope that we will be able to debate these amendments and that we will be able to help improve the food stamp program.

I want to mention one more thing. Senator Rand Paul offered an amendment earlier that did not pass that would have block-granted the money to the States. I am not sure--different people can disagree on exactly how he would go about that and whether he did it the right way and whether the spending level he chose was appropriate, but let me say this: A system in which the Federal Government gives an unlimited amount of money to the States creates a perverse incentive for the States to make sure they achieve every possible dollar from Washington. This system creates no incentive for the States to enhance the integrity of the program and to stop those who are abusing it, because when we spend State money to investigate and prosecute and stop abuse, we have reduced the treasury of the State. When we reduce the amount of food stamps pouring into the State, we reduce the amount of Federal money coming into a State--an additional adverse consequence economically for that State.

So we need to create a situation in which the State is given a certain amount of money--a fair formula--and then they have the responsibility of making sure it goes to the right people. If poor people aren't getting enough

money, they will then have an incentive to identify those who are improperly getting the money, cut them off, and direct the money to people in need. We don't have that incentive today. That is one reason the food stamp program is not operating effectively.

So I think Senator Paul was correct fundamentally in his approach that block-granting the food stamp program to the States would create the right incentive to make the program more effective, to create more integrity, and to make sure people most in need receive the benefits.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I know the Senator is the assistant leader. The majority has a lot of things to do. If he would like to finish now, I would be pleased to yield.

The American people are all worried about the direction of our country and for a good reason; they have witnessed a growing disregard for the Constitution and the limits that it places on the federal government. Our Government is a government of limited powers. In essence, I hear my friend and colleague and able advocate Senator Durbin say the question is about medical care. The question is about, he thinks, that it is unfair that some people do not buy insurance and therefore we ought to make them buy insurance. He thinks that is unfair.

We had a nearly year-long debate in this Congress, and Senator Durbin prevailed by a single vote, before Senator Brown could be confirmed to kill the health care bill. They were able to pass it through with an interim Senator by a single vote and it passed. But that is not what I and Senator Cornyn and others are here to talk about today. The point today is, Should the Supreme Court of the United States decide this question as a matter of law and principle or should they divine what they think the people want--although the polls show the American people consistently oppose this legislation and never supported it, ever, but it was rammed through anyway. So they want to say: This is important. We think it is unfair--even though the polling data shows people don't want this law--and the Supreme Court should uphold the law and shouldn't worry about a little thing like the Constitution and limited powers.

So that is what I want to talk about today. I want to affirm the duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, and that duty is to fairly and objectively interpret the Constitution and to render justice, not based on polling data and not based on congressional desire.

Polling data shows that the American people overwhelmingly think the law is an impermissible, unconstitutional regulation, so it is difficult for me to say this is such a matter that the Supreme Court has to acknowledge a minority view and approve it even if the Constitution doesn't agree. I don't think that is an argument that can be sustained, in my view.

Since the oral arguments in the case, in my view--and a lot of my colleagues share this view--the President himself, Democrats in the House and the Senate, their friends in the media and liberal government, pro-health care advocates have stepped up undignified and unjustified attacks on the Court, which seems to me to be a pretty transparent effort to try to influence the decision of an independent branch of government. It also seems to me an attempt--since I have been a student of this for some time now--to lay the groundwork and to declare that the Supreme Court is somehow illegitimate if they don't render a verdict in line with one that my colleagues think should be rendered.

I will say parenthetically that 2 years ago when this passed 60 to 40, it took 60 votes to pass it. It wouldn't pass today. It wouldn't even come close to having 60 votes today because the American people spoke and sent home a lot of people who voted for this bill when they didn't want them voting for it. That was a big deal in the election, frankly, if you want to talk about that.

So this philosophy that we hear advocated is a dangerous philosophy of law and jurisprudence. It is results-oriented. It is political, not law, and it surely is contrary to the great heritage of law that this country has been so blessed with. It may be that my colleagues are concerned because when pressed by the Supreme Court Justices during oral argument, the Solicitor General of the United States seemed to be utterly incapable of identifying any limiting principle on government power. The Solicitor General proffered various reasons why health care is unique, but not one of them was effectively grounded on any constitutional text, principle, or theory--at least in my view.

People can disagree. The Justices will have the final word on it. The nonlegal argument that the Court should not overturn a popular law suggested by many is, of course, irrelevant, not only because this health care law is, in fact, unpopular, but because popularity does not translate into constitutionality. Of course, under the popularity theory, it would be wrong for the Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, which the administration has decided is unconstitutional and refuses to defend in court, even though the law was so popular that it passed 342 to 67 in the House and 85 to 14 in the Senate. So making the popularity argument revealed the lack of legal argument. It condemns such advocates as advocates against law, not for law.

Supporters of the health care law have disdainfully and consistently dismissed the notion, and it was done during the debate, that the legislation raised serious constitutional questions. I remember the debate in the Senate. This disdain was no more starkly demonstrated than when a reporter asked then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi what the constitutional basis was for the statute, and she condescendingly replied: Are you serious?

Is our time up?

Mr. President, how long might the majority leader expect to be, and if it is possible to have consent to speak an additional 5 minutes after the majority leader.

I know the majority leader is extremely busy, and I appreciate his courtesy and respect with the difficult duty he has here.

She said: Are you serious? Well, when the Solicitor General of the United States was being grilled by the Justices, I have to say it looked serious then. It is axiomatic that the Commerce clause--which is the provision in the Constitution that the law's supporters argue gives the government the power to take over health care--was never understood to grant unlimited power to the Federal Government. The Federal Government, without doubt, is a government of limited powers.

It certainly never meant that Congress could regulate noncommerce under the power to regulate commerce. We can't regulate noncommerce when the only power the Federal Government is given is the power to regulate commerce. Give me a break.

As distinguished Judge Roger Vinson stated in his opinion in this case when he struck this bill down:

It would be a radical departure from existing law to hold

that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce

clause. If it has the power to compel an otherwise passive

individual into a commercial transaction with a third party

merely by asserting--as it was done in the Act--that

compelling the actual transaction is itself ``commercial and

economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate

commerce,'' it is not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress

could do almost anything it wanted . . . If Congress can

penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in

commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would

have been in vain, for it would be ``difficult to perceive

any limitation on federal power'' (Lopez), and we would have

a Constitution in name only. Surely this is not what the

Founding Fathers could have intended.

It is a serious question. The Supreme Court needs to decide it, and they don't need to have Congress trying to pressure them one way or the other.

The President of the United States, President Obama, might think that it is, in his words ``unprecedented'' or ``extraordinary'' for the Court to strike down a clearly unconstitutional statute, but it is not. The Supreme Court has a duty under the Constitution and under the powers of the judiciary to speak clearly if Congress passes a law that violates the Constitution, that assumes powers Congress does not have, and that attempts to act in ways on behalf of the Federal Government that the Constitution never gave the government the power to do. They have a duty to strike it down.

The Court's reputation would be damaged if it bows to political bullying, but it won't be damaged if it follows the Constitution. I think it is wrong to disparage and threaten the Court during the pendency of a case in order to influence the outcome. I don't have any problem with criticizing a decision if I disagree with it, but to try to politically pressure the Court I think is wrong for us to do.

These are important questions of law. I have an opinion, but the Court has a duty. That duty is to decide the case before them impartially, as a neutral umpire, and without regard to the crowd noise. I believe they will do their duty, and we all await the outcome.

I thank the Chair, and I thank the majority leader.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I want to discuss today several amendments I have to the farm bill that is now before the Senate. What might surprise many people to learn is that the overwhelming majority of funds in the farm bill are not spent on anything to do with farmers or even agriculture production. For instance, crop insurance amounts to--which is a big part of the new bill and is progress, I think--the crop insurance provisions amount to just 8 percent of what we will be spending. Horticulture is less than 1 percent. But a full 80 percent of the farm bill spending goes to the Federal food stamp program. Yet only 17 percent of the small savings that are found in this proposal comes from food stamps. Out of the $23 billion in cuts, none of which

occurs next year, out of almost $1 trillion in spending over 10 years. So about $23 billion in cuts. Most of that is taken from the farm provisions, but only 20 percent of it goes to that. At the same time, food stamp spending is virtually untouched. I believe they propose $4 billion in savings after 80 percent of the cost of this bill is in the food stamp program. The other $17 billion comes out of the 20 percent-- not the food stamps.

Overall, the legislation will spend $82 billion on food stamps next year--$82 billion, and an estimated $770 billion over the next 10 years. To put these figures in perspective--and they are so large it is difficult to comprehend--we will spend, next year, $40 billion on the Federal highway program, but $80 billion on the food stamp program.

Food stamp spending has more than quadrupled--four times. It has increased fourfold since the year 2001. It has increased 100 percent since President Obama took office, doubled in that amount of time. There are a number of reasons for this arresting trend. While the poor economy has undeniably increased the number of people who qualify for food stamps, this alone does not explain the extraordinary growth in the program.

For instance, between 2001 and 2006, food stamp spending doubled, but the unemployment rate remained around 5 percent. So from 2001 to 2006, we had a doubling of food stamps while unemployment is the same. When the food stamp program was first expanded nationwide, about 1 in 50 Americans received food stamp benefits. Today, nearly one in seven receive food stamp benefits.

We need to think about that. This is a very significant event. We need to ask ourselves, is this good policy? Is it good for America? Not only is it a question of, do we have the money, the second thing is, is it going to the right people? Is the money being expended wisely? Is it helping people become independent? Is it encouraging people to look for ways to be productive and be responsible themselves for their families? Or does it create dependency, part of a series of government programs that, in effect, are not beneficial to the people who actually benefit from them in the short term?

Three factors help explain this increase. First is that eligibility standards have been significantly loosened over time with a dramatic drop in eligibility standards in the last few years. Second, it has been the explicit policy goal of the Federal bureaucracy to increase the number of people on food stamps. Bonus pay is even offered to States that sign up more people. States administer this program.

And, third, the way the system is arranged with States administering the program but the Federal Government providing all of the money, all of it, they do not have--States do not match food stamps. States have an incentive, do you not see, to see their food stamp budget grow, not shrink, because it is more Federal money coming into the State which they pay no part of.

That means overlooking, I am afraid, I hate to say, dramatic amounts of fraud and abuse, because the enforcement and supervision is given over to the States. So I filed a modest package of food stamp reforms to the farm bill which will achieve several important goals: save taxpayer dollars, which is a good thing; reduce the deficit; achieve greater accountability in how the program is administered; confront widespread waste; direct food stamps to those who truly need them; and help more Americans achieve financial independence.

I guess I am the only person in the Senate who has ever dealt with fraud in the food stamp program. Shortly after law school, when I was a young Federal prosecutor, I prosecuted fraud in the food stamp program. Later I came back as a U.S. attorney, and we saw drug dealers selling food stamps, we saw various other manipulations of it. As attorney general of Alabama for a period, I was involved in enforcing integrity in the program. So I know the benefits food stamps play to people in desperate need. I know it is helpful. But I know, Americans know, they see it every day, that there are abuses in this program. It is the fastest growing entitlement program bar none. We need to look at it. I understand there are some who oppose even saving $4 billion over 10 years out of the food stamp program.

We are spending 80 a year. Four years ago, we were spending 40. We cannot do better than that?

Food stamps is the second largest Federal welfare program following Medicaid. If food stamp spending were returned next year to the 2007 funding level, and you agreed to increase it for 10 years at the rate of inflation, that would produce an astonishing $340 billion in savings for the U.S. Treasury. And we have to have some savings because we don't have the money to continue spending at the rate we are.

Food stamps are 1 of 17 Federal nutritional support programs and 1 of nearly 80 Federal welfare programs. So there is no confusion, these figures count only low-income support programs. They don't include Medicare, Social Security, or unemployment benefits.

Collectively, our Federal welfare programs constitute about $700 billion in Federal spending and $200 billion in State contributions to the same programs. That is about $900 billion on the Federal-State combined--most of it Federal--and $900 billion is about one-fourth of the entire Federal budget.

An individual on food stamps may receive as much as $25,000 in various forms of financial assistance for their household from the Federal Government--as much as $25,000--in addition to whatever salary they may earn in part- or full-time work, or any support they may receive from their families or communities. In other words, this is not normally the only source of income for the person.

Changes in eligibility have also eliminated the asset test for food stamp benefits, which brings me to the first of four amendments I have filed.

No. 1, let's restore the asset test for food stamps. This change has been quite significant. Through a system known as categorical eligibility, States can provide benefits to those whose assets exceed the statutory asset limit, as long as they receive some other Federal benefit. Why is that? I don't know; it makes no sense to me. If you qualify for another program, you automatically get food stamps. Categorically, you are eligible for them. One State went so far as to determine that individuals were food-stamp eligible solely because they received a brochure for another benefit program in the mail. Well, that meant there is more money from the Federal Government coming into their State, more benefits. I guess they see it as an economic benefit. It didn't cost them any money; the money came from Washington.

According to the CBO, the simple process of going back and restricting the categorical eligibility problem that is now springing up would produce $12 billion in savings for taxpayers over the next 10 years and should not eliminate a single person who qualifies for food stamps under the statutory restrictions for the program. All it would mean is that if you qualify for food stamps and fill out the proper form, you get it, like everybody else has to do.

Second, there is the heating subsidy loophole. Fifteen States are using a loophole in order to get more food stamp dollars from the Federal Government. They do this by mailing a very small check--get this--often less than a dollar a month--under the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, LIHEAP. Anyone who receives that check, which may be as little as a few dollars a year, becomes eligible to claim a lower income on the basis of home energy expenses--even if they don't pay those expenses.

This reform will require households that receive food stamps to provide proof of payment for their heating or cooling in order to qualify for the income deduction. If the government is paying for your heating, you should not say I need food stamps because I have a big heating bill. But this is a clever maneuver designed by States-- frankly, deliberately--to extract more money from Washington--free money for their States, and it is not good policy for America. It is not right that some States get more under the food stamps program by using this technique than others who don't use this abusive practice. Closing this loophole will produce $14 billion in savings over the next 10 years. That is a lot of money.

No. 3, let's end the bonus payments going to States for increasing the number of people who sign up. We ought to

be giving bonuses to people who identify people who are abusing the problem and bringing those down, if anything.

States currently receive bonus payments for enrolling individuals in the food stamp program. Those bonus payments highlight the perverse incentive States have to expand food stamp registration rather than to reduce fraud and help more people achieve financial independence. We need to be focusing on helping people to get work and to be more productive and to bring in more money for their families than food stamps would bring in. That is what the focus of American vitality and growth should be.

No. 4, let's implement the SAVE Program for food stamp usage. This amendment would simply require the government to use a very simple SAVE Program, similar to the E-Verify Program, to ensure that adults receiving benefits are in fact lawfully in the country. This is a commonsense thing to do at a time when we have to borrow 40 cents out of every dollar we spend in this government. We spend $3,700 billion and we take in $2,400 billion. We borrow the rest every year. We cannot afford to be providing incentives, benefits, bonuses, and payments to reward people who have entered the country illegally. We just don't have the money.

Ultimately, beyond first steps, the best way to achieve integrity in the food stamp program is to block-grant it to the States. Send so much for the program, a fair percentage to each State, and let them distribute it. This will provide States with a strong incentive to make sure each dollar is being properly spent. They don't have that today. It does no damage to a State if somebody is getting the money improperly, or getting more than they are entitled to. If a State is administering the program and some people are getting too much and others are not getting enough, then the State has an incentive to make sure the abuses stop and the aid goes to the people who need it. That is the kind of program we need in America--one that works and has incentives built in to make the program have integrity.

The House budget adopts this reform. They like to complain about the House and say the House doesn't know what they are doing. This is a commonsense reform. I am proud of what the House did. They did exactly the right thing. Senate Democrats, of course, have not even written a budget in 3 years. It has become clear that if we had gone through a financial analysis, a budget debate in this Congress, we could save a lot of money by ending the abuses in the Food Stamp Program, and it would help us do other things the government needs to do. It would also become clear that we will run out of money to pay for this program if we don't make changes soon. We are in a financial situation that is so grave that every expert has told us we are on an unsustainable path and we have to get off of it. If we don't, we can have another financial catastrophe, like in 2007, and like they are having in Europe today. That is very possible. So we have to reduce our deficit and our abusive spending.

Reforming the way we deliver welfare is the compassionate course. It is not mean-spirited to say that people who are not entitled to the benefits don't need the benefits and should not get them. There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with having incentives in your program, not to see how many people you can get on food stamps but to see how many we can get to work and be productive and take care of themselves.

The result of welfare reform in 1996, if you remember that--and many of you do--was less poverty, more growth, less teen pregnancy, more work, and more people successfully caring for themselves. We have slipped back, in my opinion. We moved back from some of the progress we made from the 1996 provision.

Unfortunately, since 1996, Members in both parties have failed to protect these gains. The welfare budget has swelled dramatically. Oversight has diminished. Standards have slipped. We now find ourselves in need of welfare reform for the 21st century. We do. That is the nature of any government, where once programs are established, they go beyond rationality and need to be reformed periodically.

It is time to re-engage the national discussion over how the receipt of welfare benefits can become damaging, not merely to the Treasury but also to the recipient.

Left unattended, the safety net can become a restraint, permanently removing people from the workforce. And Federal programs, unmonitored, can begin to replace family, church, and community as a source of aid and support.

We need to reestablish the moral principle that Federal welfare should be seen as temporary assistance, not permanent support. The goal should be to help people become independent and self-sufficient.

Such reforms, made sincerely and with concern for those in need, will improve America's social, fiscal, and economic health. Empowering the individual is more than sound policy; it remains the animating moral idea behind the American experience, our national exceptionalism. We believe in individual responsibility. We believe in helping people in need, but we don't believe in creating circumstances where decent, hard-working people, who work extra and save their money, who give up vacations and going out to eat so they can take care of their family, are also required to support people who are irresponsible. That is not a healthy situation for us to be in.

We need to strike the right balance. We can help those people in need and create a government and a social assistance program in America that benefits the people we seek to benefit and benefits the State treasuries at the same time.

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

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

Mr. President, every summer the Congressional Budget Office produces a long-term budget outlook. This is the report they produced yesterday, which is what they do every year. It is a grim document indeed, not a document that should give us comfort but should be a call to action as to what we would need to do about the financial future of our country. It is part of their effort to produce for Congress objective, impartial analyses. We all will complain about this or that from CBO, but they are pretty objective, and they work hard to produce the kind of information we can benefit from as Americans, certainly that we in Congress need as we deal with our challenges at this period in history. They lay out, over 25 years, what we could expect to see if current policy is extended.

These are some of the things they find in this report that are certainly disturbing to us. Actually, they are more than disturbing, they are unacceptable. They are absolute proof that we are on an unsustainable debt course, and that means we have to get off it or bad things will happen. The numbers I will give from this report, as Federal Reserve Chairman Mr. Bernanke indicated last year, would not happen--events wouldn't occur because we will have a crisis before that if we continue on this path.

This is what they found: 25 years under the current policy, annual deficits would reach $5 trillion a year or 17 percent of GDP and would rise steadily thereafter. In other words, we would have in 1 year a $5 trillion deficit. This year we expect to spend $3.7 trillion total, including defense and Social Security and Medicare.

They go on to make this finding: Federal debt would reach approximately 200 percent of GDP; that is, the debt would be twice as large as the entire American economy. Japan has that high a debt. It is the highest in the world. It is financed because of Japan's unusual saving policies--financed mainly internally, but we are not financing our debt that way now. In fact, 60 to 70 percent of our debt now is being financed by the Federal Reserve, by buying Treasuries by the Federal Reserve. That is very dangerous because it is, in effect, printing money. So this is an unsustainable path.

They go on to say annual Federal spending would rise to $10 trillion a year or 36 percent of GDP. So 36 percent of the entire economy would be consumed by Federal Government spending. We are now 18 to 20 percent, in that range. This is a historic alteration of the fundamental concept of our government being a government of limited powers. That is a stunning number.

They go on to say this: Yearly interest, what we would pay yearly, would reach $2.7 trillion. That is certainly a large number. As I said, this year we spent $3.7 trillion.

The Federal debt, according to the report, will be double the size of the entire U.S. economy in 2037, 25 years from now. CBO agrees that higher levels of Federal Government debt will burden American families and destroy economic growth. We have had studies on that. Reinhart and Rogoff reports--I think most economists agree with this principle--that when taxes reach high levels, it pulls down the entire economy's ability to grow.

They go on to say each family's share of the Federal debt will climb to $382,000, per family, by 2037 or an additional $287,000 over what today's family's share of the total American debt is. That is, of course, more than twice as much.

CBO warns that ``large budget deficits and growing debt would . . . lower the growth of incomes in the United States.''

According to CBO data, over the next 20 years, high debt levels will result in $21 trillion less in economic output. This is a significant reduction in economic growth, and it is out of growth that we hope to be able to close the deficit gap. Without growth, we can't do it. But if we run our debt too high, it pulls down growth and makes it even more difficult for us to maintain the growth levels we need to get our economy and Federal budget under control.

They go on to say that government debt will also slow economic growth nearly 1 percent a year, on average, supporting a landmark study done by Reinhart and Rogoff that quantified the effect of debt on advanced economies.

I asked Secretary of Treasury Geithner about the Rogoff-Reinhart study. He said it was an excellent study. Then he added: In some ways, it understates our problems.

We were talking about this 1 percent factor. When our debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP, we lose 1 percent of growth. He acknowledged the validity of that, and then went on to say that it understates the problem, because when we reach that high debt level, we are vulnerable to an economic shock--another recession, a 2007 debt crisis, a Greek- like problem.

Government debt, the report indicates, will also slow economic growth, and that 1 percent of slowing growth, according to numbers released by the Obama administration--and I think they are pretty accurate--1 million jobs is 1 percent of GDP. So if we go from 2 percent to 1 percent GDP growth, 3 percent to 2 percent GDP growth, we lose 1 million jobs.

We don't need to be losing jobs. We need to be creating jobs, and debt is a threat to economic growth. The idea some people have that we could continue to borrow, borrow, borrow and spend, spend, spend and this will create a healthy growing economy that could be sustained is absolutely truly false, I believe.

CBO gave this ominous warning:

Growing debt also would increase the probability of a

sudden financial crisis, during which investors would lose

confidence in the government's ability to manage its budget

and the government would thereby lose its ability to borrow

at affordable rates.

It seems to me pretty clear, if we look at the numbers, that spending is the primary cause of our long-term fiscal imbalance--that and a lack of growth.

Under both the baseline and current policy scenarios set out by CBO, spending will remain well above historical averages. So it is not as if they are assuming we will cut spending and that we will reduce what the government spends each year. They are assuming the spending levels will be well above historical averages. If we return those spending levels to historical averages, I believe we then have a far better chance to get our economy under control, rather than just asking the American people to send more money to Washington.

Under current policy, annual Federal spending will exceed $10 trillion--or 36 percent of GDP--by 2037. Twenty-five years used to seem like a long time to me, but as I have gotten older, 25 is a lot shorter period of time.

By 2025, the report indicates, mandatory health spending, Social Security spending, and interest costs--Medicare and Medicaid, mandatory health spending--Social Security, and interest costs will consume 100 percent of the revenues this government is expected to receive; the Defense Department, zero; the Education Department, zero; Federal highway bill funds, zero. All of it would just be in those programs. That reveals to us that necessity of looking at those programs, to think that we can deal with our surging deficits without confronting the fact that the largest, most sustained growth areas are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt.

What about raising taxes? Why don't we raise taxes? There are problems with raising taxes. It has consequences. It weakens the private sector. It takes more money from the private sector where the money is earned, where growth is generated, and distributes it to the governmental sector--which, I have to tell you, is not as efficient and productive and hasn't proven it is and has not gone through what private business has gone through, which is to make themselves more efficient, more productive, and utilize technology and advanced techniques to produce more widgets for less cost. The Federal Government has not done that.

This is what CBO said:

To the extent that additional tax revenues were generated

by boosting marginal tax rates, those higher rates would

discourage people from working and saving, further reducing

output and income.

There is no doubt about that. This is not some rightwing scenario. If we keep raising taxes on the productive sector, we are going to have less of it. It will discourage people from working and saving, further reducing output and income. That is an economic fact. It is not a scare tactic. So it is not just something we can do. Why don't we just raise taxes? That is the reason. It weakens economic growth. It weakens the private sector. It empowers the government, violates our heritage of limited government, and is not healthy for American families and job creation.

The Congressional Budget Office agrees we cannot wait; that we cannot continue to delay action on the deficits. This is what they say in this report:

Waiting to address the long-term budgetary imbalance and

allowing debt to mount in the meantime would be detrimental

to future generations.

We don't need to do things that are detrimental to future generations. We are already leaving them with more debt than we ever should, and we need to get off this path.

I have told this story, but back in Marion, AL, I was at a house of a World War II veteran just less than 2 years ago. Mr. Wheeler has since passed away, but he was the last person to speak as I was listening to people's views. He said he lived through the Depression and served in World War II, he lived through the inflationary period in the 1970s and 1980s, and the problem we face is not the high cost of living; the problem we face is the cost of living too high. Frankly, that is what has happened. Individually, we have lived too high. We have to deleverage. Individual families are doing it. The government has lived too high. It has assumed too much debt, and there is no way out of it-- no easy way. There is no free lunch. Nothing comes from nothing. Somebody pays.

To get this debt under control, we have to manage better than we ever have, in my opinion. I truly believe that, and we can do it. We can manage better. It is going to take leadership of the Chief Executive Officer of the United States, and Congress needs to be involved in the process too.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, before the Senate Budget Committee earlier this year, testified this way:

Having a large and increasing level of government debt

relative to national income runs the risk of serious economic

consequences. Over the longer term, the current trajectory of

federal debt threatens to crowd out private capital formation

and thus reduce productivity growth. . . .

It is growth we need. It is growth we need that will make America more competitive, that will produce more widgets for less cost, that will allow us to export and be competitive, to defeat importers by producing products better and at less cost than the importers can. That is within our grasp. But we are getting away from that and debt is a threat to us.

Chairman Bernanke goes on to say:

To the extent that increasing debt is financed by borrowing

from abroad, a growing share of our future income would be

devoted to interest payments on foreign-held federal debt.

High levels of debt also impair the ability of policy makers

to respond effectively to future economic shocks and adverse

events.

Adverse events occur periodically, and high levels of debt impairing our ability to react to those make us more vulnerable to serious economic dislocations that would occur in the future.

But Mr. Bernanke also knows that on our current course, we will never make it to the years where our debt is three, four, five times the size of our economy.

He also stated about the CBO outlook:

The CBO projections, by design, ignore the adverse effects

that such high debt and deficits would likely have on the

economy. But if government debt and deficits were actually to

grow at the pace envisioned in this scenario, the economic

and financial effects would be severe.

In other words, what he is saying is we are not going to get there. It is not going to happen because we will have a financial crisis before then, and we can see that.

We had the President's fiscal commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and they told us, ``We are facing the most predictable financial crisis in our Nation's history.'' Both of them signed a statement to the Budget Committee just last year to that effect, and they said we could have an economic crisis in as little as 2 years.

We have not had a budget in the Senate. The Republican House has produced a budget, but the Senate Democrats have determinatively refused to bring up a budget in committee or bring one on the floor. We are now 3 years without a budget, while we have had trips to Las Vegas and conferences and tax credit loopholes for children of illegal aliens. Children who don't even live in the United States are getting a $1,000 tax credit from Uncle Sam and we can't get that fixed. That seems to be too hard to do, costing $4 billion a year.

So these are the kinds of things Americans need to be aware of and need to be focused on. If we do so, there are a number of options that would allow us to get the country on a sound path. We can do some things without debt, such as tax simplification that creates more growth, such as eliminating every regulation that does not serve the national interest and benefit the economy but adds cost to our productive capability in America and delays production of energy or delays construction of factories and businesses--eliminate those regulations that don't make sense. We can work hard to produce more American energy, keeping our wealth at home. We can reduce the amount of debt we are running up so we are sending fewer dollars, fewer billions of dollars, abroad every year after year after year just to pay the interest on the debt.

There are a lot of things we can do that will create jobs and growth and productivity gains in America that will not add to our debt, and we have to find those things. We have to tighten our belt across the board, in Congress and the White House and down to every agency and department and government entity that exists in this country and around the world. If everybody does that, we will surprise ourselves with how much progress we can make. I think it is not too late for us to reverse the course.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Chair, and I appreciate the insight the majority leader provided. We will look at that and see where we stand on it, but I would urge that we do not need to wait a great deal of time for this to be fixed.

The inspector general for Tax Administration of the U.S. Treasury Department started raising this formally in 2009. The issue actually came up in 2007 when individuals in the Treasury Department thought there was something wrong occurring. So the inspector general did a report, and he has called on us to fix it.

In fact, he said in his report:

We continue to believe the legislation is needed to ensure

compliance with both laws.

I would say that is what we need to do. The House has acted and we should act. Four billion dollars a year is a great deal of money. It is about $10 million a day that is going out of the country to individuals who should not be receiving it.

According to the inspector general's report, the amount of the child tax credit--and as Senator Vitter said, this is not a tax deduction. This is a $1,000-per-child tax credit that we have for people in the United States who work, who have worked lawfully, and who have children and they get a check. If they owe no income tax at all, and a substantial percentage of the people who work in America end up not paying income tax, but they still get a check from Uncle Sam for $1,000 per child.

It was a policy I supported because over the years families had not gained the kind of deductible advantage that had been done 30 years ago when people had children, and it leveled the playing field and helped working families raise children in a decent environment. It is a policy I like, but it is not for somebody here illegally and has children in some foreign country. That is not what it is about. It is for $4 billion. It has surged.

In 2005 the inspector general noted that the IRS paid out to these ITIN filers $924 million in 2005. In 2006, it was $1.3 billion. In 2007 it was $1.7 billion. In 2008 it was $2.1 billion. In 2009 it was $2.9 billion. From 2009 to 2010 it went from $2.9 billion to $4.2 billion. It has been surging every year.

As a matter of protecting the Treasury of the United States from abuse, the IG says we need legislation. The Senator from Louisiana has drafted legislation that will do the job precisely as it should. Would the Senator agree that Congress should not wait around another year? It is something that the House already passed, and if we passed it, it would become law in perhaps a matter of days.

Mr. President, I would point out to my colleagues how much $4 billion is. It is a matter that we deal with on a regular basis around here. It is a number that has come up several times recently.

For example, we had a shortfall in our plans to fund the Federal highway program--a deeply disappointing event that we couldn't get that bill passed. It started out as a $4 billion shortfall. They worked that number down, but it is still not fully paid for. We would like just a few billion dollars to pay for the bill, and it hasn't been passed.

The student loan fixed rate where the interest rates would be dropped--if I am not mistaken, that was $4 billion. We need it to reduce interest rates on student loans. That is $4 billion, according to the IG, going out of our country wrongfully every year that we could save.

The President spent a lot of time traveling around the country saying we should raise taxes on the rich and we should pass the Buffett tax. He had a proposal for the Buffett tax. How much would the Buffett tax raise? It would raise $4 billion. That is how much closing this loophole would raise. Frankly, I am a little disappointed that the Treasury Department officials and the administration itself haven't immediately seized upon this loophole that is costing the taxpayers large amounts of money and responded themselves by sending legislation over and asking us to pass it. Why aren't they asking us to pass it to begin with? Well, the inspector general, who is an independent--who gets a little independence within the Department of Treasury but, in fact, is an employee of the Secretary of the Treasury--he says we need this legislation. Quoting his report:

Clarification to the law is needed to address whether or

not refundable tax credits such as ACTC may be paid to those

who are not authorized to work in the United States.

Well, of course they ought not to be getting a check from the U.S. taxpayers if they are not authorized to be working here.

So as the ranking member on the Budget Committee, knowing how tight our budget is, I salute Senator Vitter for doing it this year as well as last year when he saw this problem and attempted to get it passed. I am pleased the House has passed it. I think if we keep working at it, I say to Senator Vitter, maybe we can get it done in the Senate, remembering that $10 million a day is going out of the country for every day we fail to act.

Mr. President, to conclude, I think the American people are unhappy with their leaders. They feel as though the money they have sent here is not being well spent, is not being watched closely enough. We have a big judicial conference for the second year--since 2010, the second time--to go spend $1 million on a resort conference in Maui. We have the Solyndra loans going out to cronies that are not being paid back in any way. We have the General Services Administration having a big party out in Las Vegas with hot tubs and magicians and so forth. We have no budget for three consecutive years in the U.S. Senate. And what are we hearing from many of our leaders here in Washington? Well, we have a problem, American people. We have too big a debt. Send us more money. Send more money. We don't have enough. We are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. Send more money.

I think the American people are tired of hearing that. I think they have a right to be tired of hearing that. Until this country is willing to face up to saving $10 million a day on this kind of manipulation that has been going on since 2007, at least, and has been raised by the inspector general since 2009, until those kinds of things are stopped, I don't think they should send any more money to Washington. We need to honor the money they are sending.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am on the floor this afternoon to discuss a discovery--really, a stunning discovery for me--and that is important for all of us.

As many people know, Congress and the President struck a deal last summer to raise the debt ceiling. That deal set in place discretionary spending caps--not nearly enough to balance our budget over 10 years but a step in the right direction. That legislation said we will raise the debt ceiling $2.1 trillion but we will cut spending $2.1 trillion over 10 years--a promise to cut spending over 10 years.

That legislation also required the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee--of which I am the ranking member--by April 15 of this year to file aggregate spending levels--spending limits--based on the Congressional Budget Office's March 2012 financial baseline and to allocate the funds that could be spent under that Budget Control Act legislation to each of the Senate Appropriations Committees. In other words, these levels as submitted tell the appropriators how much they can spend, and the budget chairman has that responsibility and duty to do that. He takes the level agreement that was agreed to and sends that over.

These are real dollars that each appropriating committee is therefore allowed to spend. Yet we have learned something that is disappointing-- really astounding to me. The numbers filed by Chairman Conrad, my good friend who is a fair and able chairman, are not, in fact, the spending levels from the CBO baseline as the statute sets forward. Instead, the discretionary outlay total submitted by the chairman to the committees for fiscal year 2013 is derived from the President's budget, not from the CBO baseline.

The discretionary spending allocation for the Senate is therefore inflated by about $14 billion more than what was agreed to just last August when we told the American people we would raise the debt ceiling, continue to borrow money, but we were going to reduce spending.

So let me repeat that. These allocation levels have been inflated by $14 billion to match the President's budget--not the CBO base line that the BCA Committee was working from. It raises outlay levels over that August agreement. That, I submit, was a solemn agreement between the Members of Congress, both the Senate and the House, the American people, and the President himself who signed that agreement.

So I have sent a letter to Chairman Conrad urging my chairman to correct and refile numbers that are proper--numbers that comply with the law.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter that I have written Senator Conrad today.

U.S. Senate,

Committee on the Budget,

Washington, DC, May 22, 2012.

Hon. Kent Conrad,

Chairman, U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget, Dirksen Senate

Office Building, Washington, DC.

Dear Chairman Conrad: Section 106 of the Budget Control Act

(BCA) requires the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the

Budget to file allocations and aggregate spending levels that

are consistent with the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO's)

March 2012 baseline. On March 20, 2012, you filed such levels

in the Senate to be printed in the Congressional Record (at

pages S1832 S1833).

I was therefore surprised to find that the filed outlay

aggregate for fiscal year 2013 is not consistent with CBO's

baseline but, instead, appears to reflect the higher outlay

level for discretionary spending in the President's budget

request (as estimated by CBO). The President's blueprint was

voted down unanimously by the Senate.

Specifically, the filed outlay aggregate for fiscal year

2013 is approximately $14 billion higher than CBO's baseline

figure. The aggregate on-budget outlay level filed with the

Senate is $2,944,872 million, but the CBO baseline for on-

budget outlays is only $2,931,228 million. The filed figure,

therefore, does not satisfy section 106 of the BCA.

Furthermore, section 106(b)(2)(B) of the BCA requires that

the mandatory spending allocations to Senate authorizing

committees be consistent with the CBO baseline. The CBO March

2012 baseline amount for the Committee on Finance for fiscal

year 2013 is $1,328,395 million. But the allocation filed on

March 20 ($1,328,474 million) is $79 million higher than the

CBO baseline figure.

Before the Senate takes up appropriation bills for fiscal

year 2013, I request that you review your allocations and re-

file the enforceable levels and related committee allocations

at amounts that are consistent with CBO's March 2012

baseline, as required by the BCA.

Very truly yours,

Jeff Sessions,

Ranking Member.

It is unthinkable that we would not only spend more than Congress agreed to but would institute instead the numbers derived from President Obama's budget--which, in this Chamber, when I brought it up a few days ago, was rejected unanimously. This is another example, I am afraid I have to say, of the sleight-of-hand tactics that have been utilized in this Congress for too long that say we have an agreement and we are going to do better and we are going

to spend less. But as soon as the ink is dry--before the ink is dry, really, on the agreements, people start manipulating ways around it trying to spend more than the allowed. It seems to me, since I have been in the Senate for 15, 16 years, we have Members of Congress who take it as a personal challenge to see how they can defeat, get around, and spend more money than they are allocated.

The American people are being misled in this attempt. We are not following the Budget Control Act, and it is not a partisan matter. It is about honest accounting. It is about safeguarding the American treasury. It is about restoring faith in the Senate Chamber. The American people are right to be angry with us and to not trust us because we haven't honored their trust. We haven't managed their money well. Political elites remain totally disconnected from the financial reality that our country faces.

Game the system, spend more. The alarming discovery that the discretionary allocations filed for the Senate are a total of $14 billion higher than we agreed to and the latest in a long line of episodes, this is the latest in a long line of episodes that underscores the financial chaos that is the American Government.

These episodes include the GSA scandal in Las Vegas, with hot tubs and skits and magicians; the Solyndra loan, $500 million to cronies for an ideological vision that did not work; the IRS checks I talked about earlier this morning, with Senator Vitter, given to illegal aliens who claim dependents living abroad. These are people here illegally claiming dependents abroad while the U.S. Government is sending them checks based on children who are not in the country. The inspector general from the IRS says this is costing the taxpayers $4 billion a year.

It also includes the revelation that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will spend $1 million or more of taxpayer money for a decadent getaway to a beachfront resort and spa in the Hawaiian tropics. And, of course, it includes a 3-year refusal of the Senate majority to produce a budget plan--3 years without a budget.

We are badly in need of strong Executive leadership to put our finances in order. We need a President, Cabinet heads, sub-Cabinet heads who understand from the top to the bottom that they are there every day to look for ways to save money. This immigration tax scam costs the American taxpayers $10 million a day. Divide that out, $4 billion over 365 days. The House has passed legislation that would close that gaping loophole. Meanwhile, the Senate is not acting.

This chaos cannot continue. Accountability and discipline must be achieved, and the first step to right the ship ought to be actually correcting these allocations. I call on my Senate leadership friends to do that. We need an honest accounting. We need to spend what we agreed to, what was passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President. These dollars do not belong to us, they belong to the American people. They must be protected. Each one of them is precious. Each one of them was extracted from some hard-working American and sent to Washington on the hope and the prayer that it would be wisely spent. And we do not have enough of them. We do not have enough money.

To stealthily increase discretionary outlays by $14 billion in one fell swoop is unacceptable. It must be corrected. I call on my colleagues to do so, else we will continue to lose the confidence of the American people.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, the fundamental question we as a Nation have to ask is: What are we going to do now? What are we going to do for the future? What is our plan for the future? The problem we have in this Senate is that the Democratic majority steadfastly and adamantly refuses to lay out their vision for the future while investing a considerable amount of time and effort in attacking anybody who does. They even voted down their own President's budget, as bad as it is--the most irresponsible budget ever submitted here, in my opinion.

This is an odd situation we are in, and I will say that our country has never been in more danger financially. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson--Senator Conrad served on their committee--came before the Budget Committee, of which I am the ranking member, and told us in a signed statement--that this Nation has never faced a more predictable financial crisis. In other words, the course we are on today is unsustainable. They told us that. They told us it could happen within as little as 2 years, and that was over a year ago that they gave that testimony.

We are in the danger zone financially. I know a lot of people would like to say it is not so, but it is so. Look at this chart. This chart shows the total debt of the eurozone, including the U.K., and the United States. Our debt exceeds that of the eurozone. We have a larger debt than they do. My good friend Senator Conrad, who is such a fine person, noted that President Bush presided over a period in which our debt increased, and it did increase. The largest debt President Bush ever had was $480 billion in 1 year, which was too large. President Obama has never had a budget that was less than a $1,200 billion deficit, and next year it will be over $1,000 billion again, according to expert testimony. We are on an unsustainable path. So I would note that our $15.5 trillion debt for the United States is greater than the eurozone and the eurozone has a larger population than we do.

Let's look at this chart, which drives that number home again, in case anybody is worried about it. I am. It shows the average debt per person in the countries we have been reading about that are in financial trouble, and it hits them sometimes surprisingly, and we never know quite how it is going to hit. But look at this: The debt in Spain, which we know is in a rocky financial position, is $18,000 per person; Portugal, $19,000; France, $33,000; Greece, $38,000--Greece's debt per person is $38,000, whereas the United States is $44,000. Yes, we have a little larger economy, but this is the danger zone.

A few people were saying we could have a financial problem in 2007 as a result of the bubble in housing. They

warned us that might happen. A lot of people said: Oh, no, not this time; it is different; we have it under control. Yet we had a financial crisis that we haven't recovered from yet. So I would say we do need to take action.

We do not have a budget. If we have a budget, why did President Obama comply with the United States Code and submit a budget this year? If we have a budget, why did the House pass a budget? If we have a budget, why did four different Democratic Congressmen and groups of Congressmen submit budgets in the House? If we have a budget, why did Senator Conrad seek to have a budget markup in the committee? He basically said: Well, we may not bring it up on the floor, but the law says we should have a budget and I am going to bring one up in committee. The day before the committee met, the Democrats met in conference and told him not to do it.

So we were expecting to have an actual markup of a budget presented by the Democratic leadership and we didn't get it. Why? Senator Reid said it would be foolish to have a budget--foolish. What did he mean by that? Why would the Democratic leader, attacking Republicans this morning, say it is foolish for us to produce a budget? Well, he said that because he meant it would be foolish politically. It would be not smart politically because the Democratic leadership in the Senate would have to lay out a vision for the future and the vision they wanted to sell and could agree on was one the American people wouldn't like. It wouldn't be smart. They would reject it. We would add the numbers up and see how much they actually want to increase taxes, how much they are going to increase the debt, how much spending is going to increase. That is not leadership. It is an utter failure of leadership.

In contrast, the Republican House produced a budget that changes the debt course of America. It puts us on a sound financial path. One can agree with it or disagree with it. We will have other budgets offered today from the Republican side that will have substantial support, that will change the debt course we are on, balance the budget in a certain number of years, and put us on a sound financial path. I expect every one of those budgets to be opposed by every Member on the other side of the aisle. Again, it appears they will unanimously vote down President Obama's budget and not offer one of their own, directly contrary to the law.

I know the majority leader this morning said: Well, filibuster is our problem. But we can't filibuster a budget. The Congressional Budget Act is designed to ensure that a budget will be passed. The Congressional Budget Act does not allow a filibuster. Only 51 votes are needed to pass a budget, so why is it being mentioned? Because they prefer to hide under the table and not stand up and be counted and not address the greatest trouble this Nation has, which is our debt.

I see some of my colleagues here today, and I ask unanimous consent to participate in a colloquy with my colleagues for up to 20 minutes.

Madam President, I see Senator Blunt here, who was part of the leadership in the House before he came to the Senate. I know he has a deep understanding of these issues and the place we are in as a Nation today. I also see Senator Thune from South Dakota, who is an active member of the Budget Committee and part of the leadership here in the Senate.

I am pleased to yield to Senator Blunt and ask him how he feels this morning as we move forward today to bring up a series of budgets with no plan from the majority party in the Senate.

Briefly, before I go to Senator Thune and get him engaged in this discussion, based on the Senator's experience in the budgetary process, I'm sure he is aware that about 60 percent of Federal spending is mandatory entitlement spending. Does the Senator think we can develop a long-term plan for the future that fails to address that large portion that is growing faster than the other part of the budget?

I thank the Senator.

I thank Senator Thune for his leadership and active participation in this debate. I ask the Senator, what is on his mind this morning, as we are heading for votes on four different budgets?

I could not agree with the Senator more. I would note,

the reason we are here today is because a budget was not produced. The Parliamentarian of the Senate ruled that a budget has not been produced and, therefore, under the rules of the Budget Act, budgets that have been filed can be brought to the floor. That is how we were able to force the votes today.

Senator Thune, briefly--and I will also ask Senator Blunt, who is in our leadership--isn't it a fact that what happened with the Budget Control Act is that we had spent so much money, we had reached the spending limit of America--the debt ceiling--and we had to have a last- minute effort to reach an agreement; the Republicans insisted that we had to reduce spending, and we got a reduction in spending from $47 trillion over the next 10 years to $45 trillion? You would have thought that was going to bankrupt America--that we would spend $45 trillion instead of $47 trillion.

That is not a budget. It was a limit on spending, and it was done because Republicans said: We are not going to raise the debt limit until you at least cut some spending. That is all that could be accomplished. We avoided a crisis, but it was a pretty tense time.

Senator Blunt.

Senator Blunt has been in the leadership in the House. He is in the leadership of the Senate. Be frank with us. What is it that would cause the majority party not to want to lead, not to want to lay out a plan for the future, and attack anybody who does lay out a plan? I know it is hard. We all know this is a tough thing. But doesn't the Senator think a party that aspires to lead the Senate should, instead of hiding under the table, stand up and say what they believe we should do over the next decade financially?

Well, we need revenue--they use that word but will not explicitly say whom they want to tax except a very few rich. The Buffett tax would produce about $4 billion a year when we have a $1,200 billion deficit.

I would note that Senator Manchin, a former Governor of West Virginia, said in today's Politico that he would have been impeached if he failed to produce a budget as West Virginia's Governor. He said: Sure I have a problem with failing to offer a budget. As a former Governor, my responsibility was to put a balanced budget forward.

Well, I see my colleague is here. I think our time is up. There might be a couple of minutes for Senator Thune.

Madam President, is the time up on this side?

I yield the floor.

Madam President, we need to lay out a plan for the future of this country. That is what this is all about. My colleague just said vote no on all of them and keep going, don't go back. What I hear being said--and there is no ambiguity about it--is let's keep on the path we are on. This is good enough. Here is the letter: Let's be happy. We are in Washington, and we are having fun, I caught a fish and we had a party, send more money.

Isn't that what it is all about, isn't this what we are hearing from the other side? Send more money. We will take care of things for you. We don't have to cut anything. We are not on an unsustainable path. Actually, we cut spending over the next 10 years from $47 billion to $45 billion. Aren't we great. That is a huge increase over the current level of spending; it increases spending every year under the Budget Control Act--not nearly enough to change the debt course of the country. But that is OK.

By the way, do you know what President Obama's budget does? It wipes out the sequester. Before the ink is even dry on the Budget Control Act, the agreement at the eleventh hour to reduce spending over the next decade by $2 trillion, President Obama submits a budget in February proposing to wipe out the sequester--all $1.1 trillion of it. What kind of commitment do we have to control spending? Send more money; that is the solution. Tax, spend, tax, spend. I wish it weren't so. I wish I could say differently.

Well, let me ask this question: Do my colleagues not feel a responsibility to tell the American people what their financial plan for the future of America is? Do they have no responsibility? Do they feel no sense of obligation, no duty? All they want to do is attack anybody else's plan who is trying to save this Republic from financial disaster--attack them because they might want to reduce spending somewhere, and somebody might not like it because they didn't get quite as much from the government as they got before. Are there no programs that we are prepared to reduce or eliminate that are wasteful and not worthwhile? Is there nothing in this government? Maybe we stop GSA from having hot tubs in Las Vegas; maybe we ought to at least do that. How about the TSA, which has warehouses with millions of dollars of equipment in them that is not even being used? What about the $500 million Solyndra loan and other bogus loans to political cronies? And evidence is coming out that there is more of that. Can't we cut that? Or will they say that is anti-energy?

What they need to do is get off the backs of the energy producers and allow more energy to be produced. It doesn't take taxpayer money to produce more energy and have decent regulations. Do you know what they do? They send checks to Uncle Sam. They pay royalties on offshore and Federal lands. They pay taxes on the money they make. The people who work at the oil companies pay taxes.

That is the way you get money, not by just taxing somebody.

I think the American people fundamentally understand that a tax on the rich is a tax on the private sector, and when you overtax the private sector, you get less of it. It is the private sector that creates the wealth that pays the taxes that allows us to distribute money here and go back to our districts and act as though we are some hero for returning people their money that we took from them, and we want to be some specially credited person because we brought back some bacon to our district. The American people understand this. They are not happy about this.

The Budget Control Act is not close to what we need to do to put our country on a sound path. It is not close. I have to say that the President's budget undoes half of that. When I said the Budget Control Act took spending down from $47 trillion to $45 trillion, President Obama's budget that was submitted a few weeks ago would add $1.6 trillion back, so that would make it go from $45 trillion to $46 trillion in spending over 10 years.

This is the way they propose to operate this government. That is what their plan is. Why won't they lay it out? Because they know the American people will look at it and say: Good grief, that is not what we want for this country. You guys have to get your house in order. We expect you to cut some spending. We know there is waste, fraud, and abuse in the capital. You better get busy.

All we hear from my Democratic colleagues is: Send more money. What is particularly troubling is the suggestion that it is OK, we don't have to make any changes. But we do. We do have to make changes.

Let me show you this chart. The changes will be difficult, but not so bad as to have the country be damaged in any significant way. This is where our spending level is today, $3.6 trillion. This is the next decade under the Budget Control Act, where we cut spending. In that late-night confrontation before the government was to shut down because we reached the spending limit and could not borrow anymore money, an agreement was reached to take $2 trillion out of spending over 10 years. That is what this chart is--after that cut had been put in place. President Obama wants to wipe out half of it. So it would add $8 trillion in new spending. If you cut that to $6 trillion or $5 trillion, we would balance the budget. You would still show an increase; it would just maybe be a $4 trillion or a $5 trillion increase in spending instead of $8 trillion. We could make a big difference there.

The path we are on is unsustainable. The path we are on leaves us in the danger zone. The path we are on has led us to have more debt than Europe and more per capita than any country in Europe, and it is unsustainable. I am worried about this.

I am particularly worried that we don't have a sense in this body that we have to make changes. We are going to have to look at the entitlement programs. I have heard Senator Conrad say this repeatedly. He served on the debt commission, and they said we have to do that.

Does the President propose any entitlement changes in his budget? No. Are the Democratic Members of the Senate proposing entitlement changes? No. Who is? Congressman Ryan has proposed entitlement changes. He is prepared to defend them as being the kind of changes that will preserve, protect, and sustain Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

We cannot allow entitlement spending to continue to increase at rates four and five times the inflation rate. That is an unsustainable spending course. When 60 percent of our budget is increasing at three or four times the inflation rate, we are in big trouble, and we can't tax our way out of that. That is just a fact. Upper income people are going to have to contribute more to Medicare. They just are. We don't have the money. We can't just make it up and act like that is not reality. It is reality.

So I think the budgets we will see from this side will be attacked viciously as wanting to kill these programs. They are not designed to kill these programs. They are designed to put us on a financial path where we can be healthy and prosperous and sustain the benefits we have promised. But a big chunk of Medicare is paid for out of the General Treasury of the United States, and people with big incomes ought to contribute to some of that, and they can do that. We can do that as a nation.

So, Madam President, I think it is rather odd that we have come to the floor and called up--without debate, without opportunity to amend-- a series of budgets. Why? Because no budget has been produced in the Budget Committee, and under the rules of the Senate members can bring up a budget. We don't get to have amendments, but we can bring up one. Under the Budget Act, the Budget Committee should have hearings, have a markup, offer amendments, and bring the budget to the floor with a guaranteed 50 hours of debate, unlimited amendments, and then final passage within a certain time. That is the way it works. It guarantees priority to a budget because the people who wrote the Budget Act in 1974 knew how important a budget was. They gave it priority. It can't be filibustered. It can pass with 50 votes, with the Vice President--51 votes otherwise can pass the budget--because we need a budget, and we should be seeking to do that.

To me, it is pretty frustrating to see our current situation. So I guess I will conclude by asking: Does the majority party not feel an obligation to tell the American people where they would like to lead the country; and do they not, in a time of financial crisis, want to lay out a plan they can rally behind and ask the American people to rally behind to save our country?

It is an absolute fact this country has never, ever, ever, been in a financial condition as severe as this one. We have never, ever faced the long-term systemic debt threat we face today. We have never been on a path so unsustainable. Never. Nothing close to it. This is a threat to the future of America, and the party that aspires to lead the Senate should lay out its plan. The President should be engaged. He should be insisting we pass a budget that has some meaning and would change the debt course of the country. Yet what do we have? Nothing but attacks on Members of Congress who lay out plans that would actually do that.

They do not want to bring up a budget. Why? They say it is foolish. It would be foolish for us. Yes, it would be foolish to reveal ourselves. The American people might add up how many taxes we want to increase. They might add everything up and say: Your plan doesn't change the debt course. They may add things up and say: You spend too much. So we don't want to do that. That would be foolish.

I have never seen a situation where, in a time of crisis, this Nation has had a failure of leadership as great as we are seeing today. Now maybe I don't get this. Maybe something is wrong with me. But I think everyone who cares about the Republic should be prepared to stand and vote on proposals to put us on the right path.

We are not on the right path today. We have a threat out there that could put us in a financial crisis overnight. It could happen very quickly. When that occurs, it will be too late to fix it.

We saw the warnings that led to the 2007 financial crisis. That was a deeply damaging event--that crisis. We haven't gotten over it yet, and we could have another one. Wouldn't that be terrible? These numbers don't assume we have a recession. They have no real recession projected in the numbers we will see. We need to avoid a debt crisis, another financial crisis, as Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, on the debt commission, told us to avoid. We need to do that, and we are going to have some leadership on both sides of the aisle, I believe.

So, Madam President, I will reserve the remainder of my time, and I yield the floor.

Right. I believe Senator Toomey is here and would be prepared to go next after Senator Alexander.

Mr. President, I wish to make a reference to the Budget Control Act. One of my colleagues said we are running away from the Budget Control Act. I would suggest that is not accurate. In truth, the Budget Control Act was a cap on spending, and the Republicans have proposed that we spend less than that, as any economist would tell us we need to do because it wasn't sufficient.

The difficulty arises, however, when we consider what President Obama proposed with regard to the Budget Control Act. It is amazing. In August President Obama signed the Budget

Control Act as an agreement to raise the debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion in exchange for reducing spending by $2.1 trillion. He signed that, it went into effect, and it is the current law today. But when he proposed his budget in January of this year that we will vote on later today-- and I expect it will not get a single vote, and it should not-- President Obama's budget wiped out half of those savings. So $1 trillion of those savings were wiped out, and he replaced it with almost--he added more spending in addition--Mr. President, I am having a little trouble thinking here.

So I think the dramatic event that has gone unappreciated is that the President's budget eviscerates the Budget Control Act and puts us back on full speed tax and spend.

I see my colleague Senator Enzi is here, a senior member of the Budget Committee who has been involved in so many important issues. He is an accountant, a small businessman, and he understands the real world and the value of a dollar. I yield to Senator Enzi.

Mr. President, before Senator Enzi leaves the floor, he made reference to the fact that in the European parliamentary system, when a Prime Minister proposes a budget that fails, that would be cause for collapse of the government and a new election.

He also correctly recalled how the deficit commission that was appointed by President Obama came back with a number of recommendations that would have gone far farther than the President's budget in dealing with our debt course.

But I would ask the Senator about that moment he mentioned, after the debt commission reported, when the President came before the joint session of Congress to give the State of the Union. Was the Senator surprised and disappointed that the President virtually ignored the debt commission and did not take the opportunity to explain to the whole audience of the American people that we are on an unsustainable course that could lead to financial catastrophe?

Yes.

I could not agree more. I do believe the debt course we are on, which is unsustainable--every expert and the witnesses who come before the Budget Committee on which Senator Enzi and I serve have told us it is unsustainable, and if we get off of it and tighten our belts and do things such as Governor Bentley in Alabama is doing, Governor Christie has had to do, Governor Brown is now facing in California-- they let that State go so far out of control, it is going to be difficult to bring it back--but they have to make tough choices. If we do that, I believe we will get some positive impact on the economy from the confidence that restores.

I say to Senator Conrad, I see Senator Lieberman is here. I would be willing to yield if you are ready to use some time now.

Mr. President, I will yield 4 minutes to the Senator from our side.

He will have a flat 8 minutes.

Mr. President, I would share something that was in last week's Wall Street Journal, because it deals with an issue that is important and not to be dismissed, and that is should we begin to make reductions in spending today. I think Mr. Barro provides some real valuable insight to that.

With regard to Senator Lieberman, I do think that the budget process can work. It should be able to work. But it will not work if we do not try to make it work. Under certain circumstances, it is hard to get a bipartisan budget if you do not have everybody together. So maybe it is worth examining whether we can make improvements there.

But Mr. Barro deals with this question. He writes:

The weak economic recovery in the U.S. and the even weaker

performance in much of Europe have renewed calls for ending

budget austerity and returning to larger fiscal deficits.

Curiously, this plea for more fiscal expansion fails to offer

any proof that Organization for Economic Cooperation and

Development countries that chose more budget stimulus have

performed better than those that opted for more austerity.

He continues. These are the developed countries in the world, OECD countries.

He goes on:

Two interesting European cases are Germany and Sweden, each

of which moved toward rough budget balance between 2009 and

2011--

That is after the financial crisis--

while sustaining comparatively strong growth--the average

growth rate per year for real GDP for 2010 and 2011 was 3.6%

growth for Germany and 4.9% for Sweden. If austerity is so

terrible, how come these two countries have done so well?

The OECD countries most clearly in or near renewed

recession--Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and perhaps Ireland

and the Netherlands--are among those with relatively large

fiscal deficits.

The deficits for these six countries for 2010 and 2011 were 7.9 percent of GDP. Germany and Sweden did not raise taxes but cut spending. He goes on to say:

Every time heightened fiscal deficits fail to produce

desirable outcomes, the policy advice is to choose still

larger deficits--

Borrow, tax, and spend. He goes on to say:

If, as I believe to be true, fiscal deficits have only a

short-run expansionary impact on growth and then become

negative, the results from following this policy are

persistently low economic growth and an exploding ratio of

debt to GDP.

Japan, he goes on to note, ``once a comparatively low public-debt nation, apparently bought into the Keynesian message many years ago.'' That is the ``spend'' message. ``The consequences for today is a ratio of government debt to GDP around 210 percent, the largest in the world.''

I ask unanimous consent to have that article printed in the Record because I think it helps give us some guidance that at some point bringing spending under control and tightening our deficit clearly would achieve more financial benefit than continuing to borrow and spend or create new taxes that depress the economy.

Mr. President, I would share a few thoughts in general about where we are. Our colleagues on the Democratic side have said they want more taxes. They have not told us what taxes, how much, and where they would be. But they have told us that. Senator Conrad has said that.

He has also been open and bold about the need to cut spending. So he wants more tax increases than I would like and he wants substantial spending cuts, but that is his view. He stated it publicly. But I will have to say, that is not the position of the Democratic majority in the Senate because they have refused to put it on paper.

Senator Conrad was going to have a Budget Committee mark up. We were going to mark up a budget. He was going to lay out a plan. I guess it would be somewhat ``Simpson-Bowlesish.'' But it was not offered because the leadership and I suppose the members of the Democratic Conference agreed that they do not want to be on record. They would rather do like last year. And what happened last year?

They voted against the Toomey budget; they voted against the Ryan budget; they voted against the Rand Paul budget; and voted against the President's budget.

They wiped their hands. They did not vote for anything to cause any pain to anybody. And presumably they thought that was better than actually being engaged in leading and telling the American people what they planned to do to change the debt course we are on. That is the deal.

Well, I would say a couple of things. If I were talking to a group of American citizens today, I would say this: Do not send one more dime to Washington, DC until they show you a budget, how they are going to spend it. I mean, why should they? We get in trouble; we overspend; we place the Nation at risk. And all we want to say is: Send more money. You cannot cut, we are going to throw people into the streets, and push older people off the cliff in a wheelchair.

No, I do not think so. I think the American people need to hold this Congress, this government, to account. They need to say, we are not sending you any more money until you get your house in order. And we are not paying for hot tubs in Las Vegas. We are not throwing away $500 million on a Solyndra loan project that never had a chance to succeed and was benefiting cronies of the White House. We are not going to pay for the TSA to have warehouses filled with millions of dollars in equipment not being used.

You do not have your act together. We want you to get your act together. We want to see some management. We want to see some leadership. Who is the top manager in America? It is not the chairman of the Budget Committee, or the ranking member of the Budget Committee, it is the Chief Executive. The President heads the executive branch. Every Cabinet member, subcabinet member, sub-sub-sub cabinet member works for the President.

We had a situation where it has become clear that for over a year, people illegally in the country earning money are filing income tax returns and gaining as much as $4 billion a year in child tax credit money, a direct payment from the United States for children who do not even live in the country.

The Inspector General for the U.S. Treasury Department said this should have been ended, and the IRS is not ending it. Congress ought to pass a law about it. The House has done so. This Senate has not acted. Those are the kinds of things that are happening. I would think the President of the United States, as soon as he learned that, would say: Stop it today. If you care about the money of the American people, if you care about the fact that we are now spending about $3.6 trillion dollars a year, taking in $2.3 trillion a year, so a deficit of $1.3 trillion.

Oh, they say that President Bush increased the deficit. And he did. But the highest deficit he ever had was about $450-some-odd billion. The last 3 years under President Obama, the deficits have averaged over $1.3 trillion a year. Next year, beginning September 30, the next fiscal year, it is projected to be over $1 trillion again.

This is an unsustainable course. We are looking here for some reality and leadership. I think it is a stunning, amazing development when we have the President of the United States at a time of financial systemic crisis and danger who has the opportunity to lead, who does not lead, who has an opportunity to tell the American people why we need to change the course we are on, the fact that it is going to take some belt tightening and some pain and some sacrifice--not so much, but some.

We are going to have to do it. And if we do it, the country will be on a good path. We can save this country. We can avoid a debt crisis that could happen to us, because indeed our debt per person in America is higher than that of Greece, higher than that of any other country in Europe. We are in a dangerous area. We need to get off of it. I am amazed the President has not led.

I think it is a development of the most stunning nature that he would, as the law requires, submit the budget he submitted. It is irresponsible. It did not get a single vote in the Senate last year. It went down 97 to 0. It was voted down 414 to 0 in the House this year. I suspect in an hour or so it will go down again on the floor of the Senate by unanimous vote. That speaks a lot. That says a lot, indicates the sad state of affairs which we are in.

It is deeply disappointing.

I see Senator Lee from Utah here, who is a new Member of the Senate. If Senator Conrad doesn't have an objection, I will yield to him and note that Senator Lee campaigned throughout his State. He talked to thousands of people. He was elected in this last cycle. He felt the mood of the people of his State and America, their concern about the debt course we are on. He has worked extremely hard and has laid out a proposal that he would like to explain and ask us to support.

I thank the Senator for his leadership and his commitment and his hard work since he has been in the Senate.

Mr. President, the Budget Control Act is not a budget, it is just a containment of spending. A clever attempt was made to make it look like a budget, but it is not a budget. If it was a budget, why did the President submit a budget this year? Why did the House pass a budget? Why were four budgets produced in the House by Democratic House Members?

In today's Politico, an article quotes Senator Lieberman, who just spoke and who caucuses with the Democrats.

I don't think [Democrats] will offer their own budget and

I'm disappointed in that.

Senator Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, said he would have been ``impeached'' if he had failed to produce a budget as West Virginia's Governor, though he conceded there are differences with the State budget process.

Sure I have a problem with [failing to offer a budget]. As

a former governor, my responsibility was to put a budget

forward and balance it, so anyone who comes from the

executive mindset has a problem with that. I don't care if

you're Democrat or Republican.

``A problem with that'' means a problem with not having a budget.

Senator Mark Pryor, a Democrat from Arkansas:

The budget process is just not working around here. We've

had three years with President Obama where we're not able to

get a budget resolution passed.

That 3 years includes this one.

So we don't have a budget, we have a spending cap. And our Democratic colleagues--bless their hearts--have been whining that the House proposed a budget that came below the Senate's Budget Control Act caps in some areas, so they say that was breaking the budget.

I would just advise them that when they vote on the President's budget--and I assume they will all vote against it; they did last year--the President's budget wipes out half the savings in the Budget Control Act.

The President signed the Budget Control Act last August to raise the debt ceiling. We agreed to cut spending $2.1 trillion--not nearly enough, but we cut that and it was a decent step forward in the right direction, and the President proposes a budget this year that takes half of it out. Give me a break. There is no sense of wanting to have a budget, to adhere to one, and to contain spending. What do they want? More taxes.

The President said, ``The Buffett rule will help stabilize the debt.'' That is what the President said; that is, tax increases on the rich would help stabilize the debt. Well, the Buffett tax would raise about $4 billion a year. This year the deficit will be $1,200 billion, not $4 billion. That is not going to fix it. It will be $1,200 billion, and the Buffett rule would raise about $4 billion a year. What kind of responsible leadership is that, for the President of the United States to be traveling this country at a time when we have never faced a more significant financial threat to America--we never, ever have been on a debt course as dangerous as the one we are on today. It is systemic. It is deep. We have to make serious changes, and he goes around saying the Buffett rule is going to stabilize the debt? He also said his budget last year would lead us to balance when the lowest single deficit year in 10 would be a deficit of $748 billion.

So I don't know what kind of leadership we are getting. It is not good leadership. It is worse than no leadership because when a budget is prepared with great effort by Congressman Paul Ryan in the House, and his budget will actually change the debt course of America and minimize the pain we all have to suffer and create some growth and prosperity, the President invites him over to a conference, sits him down there, and then attacks it, and he has been attacking the budget ever since. Why is this? Why will not our colleagues support any budget?

I fully expect my Democratic colleagues to vote against all of these budgets and not vote for one. Think about that. They will vote against four, not vote for one. Well, because you don't have the fingerprints on anything that results in cutting spending, nobody that benefits from spending is going to be mad with you. Everybody who wants more money and doesn't want to have a dime reduced in the take they get from the taxpayers' trough and the debt we borrow--they don't have any reduction in that, and then they can't be mad at me. But that is not a responsible course.

This is not a little matter. This is what Admiral Mullen, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said just 2 years ago:

The biggest threat we have to our national security is our

debt.

In an important statement by 10 former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, they wrote in March of 2011:

At some point, bond markets are likely to turn on the

United States, leading to a crisis that could dwarf 2008.

Bond markets will turn. That is what they have done on Greece.

The Simpson-Bowles Commission's Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, in testimony to our committee, said:

This nation has never faced a more predictable financial

crisis.

The same thing as the Council of Economic Advisors said: You are on a debt path that is unsustainable.

Chairman Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve--always cautious about what he says--talking about the Congressional Budget Office's projections of surging debt year after year, says:

The CBO projections, by design, ignore the adverse effects

that such high debt and deficits would likely have on our

economy. But if government debt and deficits were actually to

grow at the pace envisioned by this scenario, the economic

and financial effects would be severe.

And I recall at one point he said in his testimony: You see these debts being projected out there year after year, surging at this high level? You are never going to get there.

What he meant was that we would have a financial crisis before that happened.

I would say to my colleagues, this is a time of challenge for the Senate and the Congress of the United States. Will we rise to the challenge and actually do something? We can talk about it. We can have secret meetings and secret meetings and secret meetings. That is not fixing it. We can have these last-minute decisions, like last summer when the government was about to virtually shut down because the debt limit had been reached, and reach some secret agreement that is brought up on the floor for a vote and is not very well written. Or we can do what the law requires. In the United States Code, the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. It requires that we pass a budget. We can't guarantee exactly how it will all come out, but we ought to attempt to comply with the law, at least. We haven't attempted to do that.

I am worried about our future. I am worried about where we are heading. And I do think the American people have a right to be upset with us. They are not happy with us. They should not be happy with us. When their Congress has allowed this country to reach a state where we are taking in $2.3 trillion and spending $3.6 trillion, when 35, 40 percent of what we spend is borrowed money, the American people have a right to be unhappy about that. They absolutely do. We are not protecting their interests, their children's interests, their future, or the economy.

And it is stunning to me that the leader of the free world, the President of the United States, the Chief Executive, isn't pounding away at the Congress to bring spending under control and to reduce the debt we have. Instead, he seems to never want to talk about it. He only talks about investments--more investments.

In fact, that budget he produced this year, what did it do to the spending levels we agreed to last August? Before the budget control agreement of last August, the U.S. Government was on path to spend $47 trillion over 10 years. What it effectively did was it reduced that spending to $45 trillion--still substantially more each year than we are spending now. There is growth every year under that proposal--too much growth, too much debt. But it was a step. So this year when he proposed his budget, he proposed spending another $1.4 or $1.5 trillion, new, on top of that. After he signed the agreement that we would cap spending at $45 trillion, this would take spending up to $46.6 trillion again, almost $47 trillion, where we were before the agreement was reached. Now, that is not responsible leadership. And he had a big tax increase. Tax and spend--that is what that budget is. And the American people shouldn't be happy with us.

It was noted also that Senator Harkin said, well, this isn't the President's budget, that Senator Sessions offered some joke, or something to that matter. But it is the President's budget. It has the numbers in it that the President had. They directly reflect the President's request. If any Senator wants to come forward and show any number we put in there that is different from the President's numbers when he laid out his budget, then I would like to see it. Maybe we could correct it. But I don't think there is an error. I think we scrupulously followed the President's budget proposal request, and when people vote on it, they can know they are voting exactly on what he proposed. I don't think anybody will dispute the numbers we have in the budget.

Also, I note that some of our Democratic colleagues are not happy about having no budget produced by the Democratic side. They feel bad about it, and I understand that. But I would have thought we would have had some Members come down and complain about it, to say that they didn't think the Democratic leadership, the Democratic conference should have blocked Senator Conrad and the Budget Committee from having a budget, that they should be handling this differently. But we haven't had that, so I guess everybody is basically happy on the Democratic side not to have to cast any tough votes.

Mr. President, how much time is remaining on this side?

Mr. President, as we come to a conclusion of this debate, Senator Harkin said something that was pretty insightful. He said: Show me your budget, and I will show you what you value.

Refuse to show me your budget, I will say, and I can say you are refusing to show what is important to you.

One of the things that has been brought up is the war costs. The war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan has been expensive, no doubt about it. Last year the total for both wars over 10 years reached $1.3 trillion--10 years--both wars. That was the deficit last year alone, $1.3 trillion. This year the war costs are declining. The year we are in, we are spending $118 billion on the war. Our deficit will be $1,200 billion. So eliminating all war costs would be less than 10 percent of the amount of our deficit.

I say that so we understand what has happened. Over 50 percent of our spending is in mandatory entitlement programs--Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, retirement benefits. Those are huge and they are increasing at two, three times the rate of inflation. That is what puts us on an unsustainable course.

The President's budget goes against everything the experts said, against the debt commission he appointed, and refuses to confront these surging entitlement costs. That is a disappointment because we have nothing from the other side on how they would deal with them.

But the Members on this side have offered budgets, and Congressman Ryan offered a budget. They do begin to deal with this painful but difficult situation concerning the entitlement programs. I note the Budget Control Act they have been calling a budget had nothing to do with over 50 percent of the budget. It did not deal with those expenditures, it did not deal with the entitlements. That is another reason it is not a budget. It is a cap on discretionary spending. That is all that was. It was a step in the right direction but not a budget plan that would help us have a prosperous future.

This is an important day. I think it will cause the American people and all of us in Congress to confront the reality of a danger we face from debt. No matter how we vote this day, this next hour--even if we vote in what I think is the wrong way--hopefully this whole process would have caused all of us to confront the reality of the danger to the American Republic, the growing debt.

I would say from my experience it will be tough to deal with it, but I absolutely believe we can. It is not outside of the possibility and ability of this country to reverse our course. The kind of cuts we will need to have will not be such that will damage in any significant way the strength and health of America.

I yield the floor.

I appreciate that and will agree to those 2 additional minutes.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, we have 1 minute on each side?

Mr. President, the President's budget is now before us. Last year it failed in this body 97 to 0. It failed in the House, the budget that he offered this year, 414 to 0. I expect it will receive no votes today. That is a stunning development for the President of the United States in his fourth year in office, to produce a budget for the future of our country at a time of fiscal danger, great financial and economic danger to our country, to not receive a single vote.

Maybe somebody will vote for it. Let me tell you why we should not. It does not change the debt course. It violates the budget agreement the President signed and Congress passed last year, by increasing spending over that level by $1.5 trillion. It throws off another $1.8 trillion in tax increases, essentially using tax increases to offset new spending programs, not to pay down the debt. It is the most irresponsible budget submitted. I urge my colleagues to vote no.

Madam President, at a time when our Nation has never, ever faced a deeper, more dangerous systemic debt threat than we face today, the Republican House, under the leadership of Congressman Paul Ryan, has produced a budget that would change the debt course of America, create economic growth, put us on a path to financial stability, and do the things that a responsible budget should do. The President's budget utterly failed in that regard and has gotten no support. This budget will do the job.

People can disagree with this or that portion of it. I think this budget is a historic step in the right direction for this great Republic, and I urge my colleagues to support it.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Madam President, I am here to speak, I believe, for the great majority of Americans who believe the time is long overdue for the Federal Government to fulfill its commitment and its responsibility to end the lawlessness at our borders. Only then can we put this matter, the deep frustrations that are occurring, behind us and move our country forward in a positive and united way.

Immigration security is especially important in these economic times. Illegal labor does, in fact, depress wages and makes it more difficult for out-of-work Americans to find good-paying jobs. Immigration security is also vital to stopping cartels that are creating violence around our borders and in our cities. The Federal Government has a duty to protect those living in communities which suffer every day from preventable drug and gang violence.

There is nothing compassionate about looking the other way when we can take concrete actions to make our schools and communities safer in every part of the country. There is nothing compassionate about a policy which makes it harder to protect not only Americans but immigrants who live in our country from gang violence that occurs in cities and at our border today.

Unfortunately, instead of compelling sanctuary jurisdictions, such as the city of Chicago, to cooperate with Federal law enforcement officers, the administration has gone after those States that are trying to assist the Federal Government to end the lawlessness in our country. Under the administration's new ``prosecutorial discretion'' guidelines, if the Department of Homeland Security doesn't consider someone a priority, that individual's deportation proceedings are closed and they are allowed to remain in the country. So far, the administration has granted this form of backdoor amnesty to almost 17,000 aliens illegally in the country, some of whom have been convicted of crimes.

The administration has also been resistant to the popular E-Verify program, never once including it in any of its jobs or economic plans. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, has effectively ended worksite enforcement operations, meaning employers can continue to hire illegal workers rather than out-of-work Americans.

A determined President could take meaningful steps to stem the tide of illegality. I have been encouraged by Governor Romney's commitments on this issue. This is something I have worked at for some time, and I am absolutely convinced that with consistent, smart, effective leadership and a commitment on behalf of this country to end the lawlessness, it can be done and done quicker and with less difficulty than most people realize.

For example, Governor Romney recounted the following conversation he had with a Border Patrol agent, and it is so similar to ones I have had with Mr. Bonner, who headed the National Border Patrol Council. This is the conversation as Governor Romney recounted it:

They said, when employers are willing to hire people who

are here illegally, that's a magnet, and it draws them in.

And sanctuary cities, giving tuition breaks to the kids of

illegal aliens . . . those things also have to be stopped. If

we want to secure the border, we have to make sure we have a

fence, determining where people are, enough agents to oversee

it, and turn off that magnet. We can't talk about amnesty, we

cannot give amnesty to those who have come here illegally.

That is what Governor Romney said he was told by the agents who have to deal with this every day and who try to do their job professionally, and I think that is correct. That is what they are telling me. That is what law enforcement officers have told me for some time.

Another example of how our country is so out of control is this government's failure to follow the rule of law with regard to Child Tax Credits.

The Treasury Department's own inspector general for Tax Administration, who analyzes problems within the agency and issues reports, reported that in 2010 the Internal Revenue Service paid illegal aliens a staggering $4.2 billion in child tax credits for dependents, a great deal of whom don't even live in the country. This has been going on for years. This cannot continue. It must be stopped, and fixing it can't be delayed.

The Treasury IG report states:

Although the law prohibits aliens residing without

authorization in the United States from receiving most

Federal public benefits, an increasing number of these

individuals are filing tax returns claiming the Additional

Child Tax Credit, a refundable tax credit intended for

working families. The payment of Federal funds through this

tax benefit appears to provide an additional incentive for

aliens to enter, reside, and work in the United States

without authorization, which directly contradicts Federal law

and policy to remove such incentives.

That is from the inspector general for Tax Administration at the U.S. Treasury Department, not my language. Of course, that is exactly correct. That is exactly correct. How could it be otherwise?

In a press report from Indiana, one of the illegal aliens admitted his address was used to file tax returns by four other undocumented workers who don't even live there. Those four workers claimed 20 children live inside that one residence, and as a result the Internal Revenue Service sent the illegal immigrants tax refunds totaling $29,608. A tax credit is not a tax deduction, it is a direct payment, a direct transfer of wealth through the tax system to an individual-- $29,608.

The Treasury inspector general's report further stated:

Millions of people are seeking this tax credit who, we

believe, are not entitled to it. We have made recommendations

to the IRS as to how they could address this issue, and they

have not taken sufficient action, in our view, to solve the

problem.

Well, that is not acceptable. Now, $4 billion is a great deal of money. Four billion dollars a year is about $10 million a day. They found that $4 billion was doled out to people who received this one benefit illegally. No wonder we have people taking vacations to Las Vegas on the government's dime. No wonder we are giving $\1/2\ billion loans to failed companies like Solyndra. What are we doing here in Washington?

So I say it is time to end this. I would note that the House of Representatives has voted to end this, and so it is now time to see what this Senate will do. We need to act to end it also.

I have been in the Senate for 15-plus years, and being on the Judiciary Committee, we have seen the debate over immigration move forward, sometimes encouragingly and sometimes discouragingly. But every few years, it seems that the Washington masters of the universe who have willfully and deliberately failed to follow through on consistent promises to end immigration illegality begin to discuss some form of amnesty. They continue to incentivize the illegality but remain unwilling to take the necessary steps--not impossible steps--to secure the border on behalf of all citizens.

For example, just this week my good friend and able Senator, Mr. Durbin, said that the DREAM Act is a bill that says: If you graduate high school and you have no serious problems when it comes to criminal convictions or moral issues and you either complete service in the military or 2 years in college, we will put you on a path to becoming legal and becoming a citizen.

But we have examined that legislation in its most recent version, and it would really in effect grant amnesty to millions of people here illegally regardless of whether they go on to finish high school, finish college, or serve in the military. That is what the legislation does. And the bill is certainly not limited to children. It would apply to illegal immigrants who are in their thirties now. Because the bill has no cap, no limit, no sunset, no ending, it would allow people to remain eligible for the rest of their lives, at any age, to claim this benefit. Once they are naturalized, those granted DREAM Act amnesty would then have the right to legally petition for entry into the United States of their family members, including their adult brothers and sisters and the parents who caused their illegal presence in the United States to begin with, easily tripling the number of green card holders.

This is a big issue. We need to be careful about these things. We need to consider what we are doing here.

The bill's provisions are so broad, they are open to those who have even multiple misdemeanor criminal convictions that could include drunk driving and certain sexual offenses. But the bill goes further, offering safe harbor protection to those here illegally, those who have pending deportation proceedings against them. Those deportation proceedings have to stop even when the individual might pose a risk to Americans when that deportation may be based on the commission of serious crimes.

This is especially dangerous because the safe harbor would also apply to those from terror-prone regions in the Middle East. In fact, the DREAM Act altogether ignores the lessons of 9/11, going so far as to open eligibility to those who previously defrauded immigration authorities, as did many of those 9/11 hijackers.

So you say: Well, Jeff, what are we going to do? What can we do here? You say no, no, but we need to have a plan. We need to do something.

Please, colleagues, think this through. The way forward for our country, the right way, the way to end the bitterness and develop common solutions for all residents is, first, secure the border, as Americans have asked their government to do year after year and this Congress and this administration have failed to do so.

We must rebuild the trust, the trust of the American people, before other actions are taken. How commonsensical is that? People have a right to believe we will promise enforcement and give amnesty. That has been the pattern. We give the amnesty but don't do the enforcement. That is why people are upset with Washington. Why shouldn't they be? It has gone on for several decades. It has gone on since I have been in the Senate. We have to follow through on the commitments that have been made to the American people to do what we promised. It is time to end the lawlessness, not surrender to it.

With determined leadership from the White House and support in the Congress, we can, in just a few years, I am totally convinced, solve the problem at our border, restore the rule of law, put an end to the border violence, and create a sane, just, and lawful system of

immigration for America--a system that we can be proud of, a system that befits a nation as great as ours.

Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I wish to recognize the 15th anniversary of NumbersUSA, a national grassroots organization that advocates for immigration policies that seek to serve the national interest.

NumbersUSA was formed in 1997 by Roy Beck, a former journalist who has been recognized by the Houston Chronicle as ``one of the five leading thinkers in the national immigration debate.'' Under his leadership, NumbersUSA has grown from a mostly Internet-based organization of about 2,000 grassroots members to nearly 1.3 million activists, giving a voice to American citizens on the important issue of immigration and securing our border.

Those who were in Congress during the 2006 and 2007 debates on comprehensive immigration reform will confirm just how effective NumbersUSA is. NumbersUSA was an active leader in an outgunned coalition that stood up to virtually all the elites in Washington. The big lobbies pulled out all the stops, spent millions of dollars, and bore down hard in their push for mass amnesty. But Goliath fell to the grassroots David, whose faxes, e-mails, rallies, visits to our offices, and phone calls registered the clear message that the American people would not accept Washington rewarding lawbreaking. The overwhelming grassroots response actuated by the NumbersUSA coalition was most evident when citizens called Capitol Hill in such volume that it shut down the Senate's telephone system.

NumbersUSA approaches the important and sensitive issue of immigration by emphasizing the number of immigrants that are lawfully admitted to the United States. Their approach is captured in a statement prominently placed on their website: ``To talk about changing immigration numbers is to say nothing against the individual immigrants in this country. Rather, it is about deciding how many foreign citizens living in their own countries right

now should be allowed to immigrate in the future'' and ``about protecting and enhancing the United States' unique experiment in democracy for all Americans, including recent immigrants, regardless of their particular ethnicity.''

I commend NumbersUSA for speaking out effectively on these important issues for America. Their voice has added a valuable perspective to the discussion. I congratulate them on a successful first 15 years and wish them even greater success over its next 15 years.