Floor Statements

Mr. President, today I recognize Laura Hodson, an intern in my Aberdeen, SD, office, for all of the hard work she has done for me, my staff, and the State of South Dakota.

Laura is a graduate of Bennett County High School in Martin, SD. Currently, she is attending Northern State University, where she is majoring in political science. She is a hard worker who has been dedicated to getting the most out of her internship experience.

I extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to Laura for all of the fine work she has done and wish her continued success in the years to come.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, at long last today we have received the President's budget. It is several weeks actually months--overdue. It was supposed to have been out on February 4. It is generally used to steer or guide the budget debate we have in Washington, DC. In this case, it is going to be a reaction to. It is going to be an after-the- fact discussion of the budget, as the House and the Senate have both passed theirs; the Senate for the first time in 4 years and the House has passed their budget every year on time. One would wish the President's budget would serve as a bridge between the House and the Senate. In this point of the process it is so much after the fact and late in the game the President's budget has come to us.

Regrettably, much of the President's budget is going to rely on the same formula the Senate Democratic budget did, which is to double down, to increase spending, significantly and substantially raise taxes, and add massive amounts to the debt. It never balances.

The budget which was passed by the House of Representatives did balance. It balanced in 10 years.

The budget which was passed by the Senate did not balance in 10 years. It never balanced. There was a real contrast in terms of trying to get to a balanced budget over a period of time, knowing full well it will not happen overnight. We got into a very big hole over a number of years, and it will take us a while to get out.

Nevertheless, the House budget did balance in a 10-year window and 10-year timeframe. The Senate Democratic budget never balances, nor does the budget we received this morning from the President.

For a lot of reasons this budget debate is important, not the least of which is it is a vision, a blueprint for the future of the country. This is true for each of the respective parties in the Congress, as well as the President, about where they wish to lead the country.

I mentioned yesterday on the Senate floor I thought the basic criteria which should be used to evaluate a budget, the question which should be asked is, What will this budget do to grow the economy, create jobs, and increase the take-home pay of middle-class Americans? What can we do, in other words, in terms of a budget process here and a budget itself which actually takes us in a direction which would enable more Americans to work and enable the economy to grow and expand again. This would make these fiscal issues look much smaller by comparison.

Last week we received employment data statistics which were due. The unemployment rate as a percentage actually dropped to 6.7 percent but only because another half million people quit looking for work. If we look at the real unemployment rate--which is to include the people who actually have stopped looking for work, people who

are working part-time because they can't find full-time employment--the actual unemployment rate is 13.8 percent. This is 21.7 million Americans. This is how many people who are either out of work, quit looking for work, or are looking for work part-time because they simply can't find full-time employment. This is a great number of people.

This is a big part of our economy. A lot of folks are out of the workforce today who couldn't find jobs. Many have actually just given up looking for jobs.

What this has done, because there are so many Americans who have given up looking for jobs out of frustration, is it has lowered the labor participation rate to a rate we haven't seen, literally, since 1979. The last time the labor participation rate was at the low level we saw in the month of March, 63.3 percent, was 1979.

In fact, if we had a labor participation rate which was equal to what it was when the President took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate today would not be 7.6 percent, it would be 11 percent. This is how many people have quit looking for work as a result of this slow and sluggish economy.

The President's budget, one would hope, would try to answer in an affirmative way the question: Does this grow the economy? Does this create jobs? Does this increase the take-home pay of working Americans?

Unfortunately, rather than growing the economy, the President's budget, instead, grows the government. Unfortunately, this is what we have seen in the budget which was passed by the Senate a couple of weeks ago.

I say this simply because I think there are two very different ideas about how to solve the fiscal crisis we face. One includes expanding and growing government, raising taxes, and adding even more to the debt. One really focuses on the issue which plagues our fiscal house in Washington, DC: not that we tax too little but we spend too much. It goes after the spending problem we have in Washington, DC, the addiction to spending. We have seen this as the percentage of our economy grow consistently over the last several years since this President has been in office.

The House budget recognized this and does balance in 10 years. It does it without increasing taxes. The House of Representatives actually produced a budget which balances in 10 years and doesn't raise taxes. In fact, it calls for tax reform. Many of us believe this would do wonders in terms of unleashing economic growth in this country, lowering rates, reducing rates, and broadening the base. It also takes on what really drives Federal spending, what really contributes to the debt crisis we have in this country, its runaway spending.

This is true for particular areas of the budget, the areas we call mandatory spending, the part of the budget which is on autopilot. It includes entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Currently, this includes about three-fifths of all Federal spending. At the end of the 10-year window it will represent about 91 percent of all Federal spending. That is how fast those programs are growing--two to three times the rate of inflation.

The President's budget doesn't do anything significant or meaningful to address that crisis. It is flatout serious.

Having said that, there were some what I would call incremental steps taken. I call them baby steps. The President agreed in his budget to address the issue of chained CPI, which recalculates the formula under which certain government programs are calculated. It achieves a certain level of savings over time.

They assume some savings in Medicare, most of which, again, are by reducing payments to providers. We have already cut payments to providers to the point many physicians and other health care providers these days are saying they are not going to serve Medicare or Medicaid patients because we keep cutting those reimbursements.

This is not the way to save and protect these programs for future generations. We must restructure or reform these programs in a way which aligns those programs with the future demographics of this country. Unfortunately, the President's budget fails on that account.

In terms of the direction these various budgets are headed, the Senate's Democratic budget, because it didn't balance in 10 years, nor does the President's, both use similar assumptions about spending. If we look at the new debt which is piled up by the President's budget, he adds $8.2 trillion to the debt over the next decade.

The Senate Democratic budget added $7.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Both have net spending increases. The spending amount over the 10-year period in both the President's budget proposal and the Senate Democratic proposal is on the order of $46.5 trillion. This is the amount of money, the amount of taxpayer money, the Federal Government would spend over the next decade under the budgets proposed by the Senate and House Democrats.

The House budget, passed largely by the House Republicans, spends about $5 trillion less than that over the same time period. How does it do that? It does so by reducing the rate of growth of Federal spending. If we limit the rate of growth in Federal spending to 3.4 percent, as opposed to a 4.6-percent number in the Senate Democratic budget or the 5.2 percent-increase in mandatory spending called for in the President's budget, we may achieve significant savings over a period of time.

This is not cutting government but simply slowing the rate of growth by growing government at a slower rate and moving it back into a more reasonable level. This would actually achieve $5 trillion in savings over the next decade in terms of what the Federal Government was spending. This is the way the House approached their budget.

What the Senate Democrats and the President have both done is called for massive new tax increases. The only deficit reduction which will occur under the President's budget will be cut because of tax increases. He wipes out the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts which were in place as a result of sequester.

He replaces those and achieves somewhere on the order of $600 billion in deficit reduction. This deficit reduction would be entirely accomplished by tax increases, raising taxes yet again after we put in place tax increases on the fiscal cliff on January 1. The President received a huge tax increase, something he had been wanting for for some time, $620 billion in new taxes. Add this to the more than $1 trillion in new taxes which are in the ObamaCare bill passed a couple of years ago and this President, on his watch, has signed into law more than $1.7 trillion in new taxes.

This is not a revenue problem, this is a spending problem. What we need to be focused on is what do we need to do to rein in out-of- control Federal spending. How are we going to reform and restructure these programs in a way which protects and saves them, not only for people who depend upon them today but for those who will need them in the future. This is really the question before the House.

Today we receive the President's budget. It will be the latest point at which the President has submitted a budget. Literally, it has been 100 years, let's put it that way. Around the early 1900s was the last time the President submitted a budget to this Congress at this late date. Again, having already acted in the House and Senate, I am not sure what meaning it has other than to perhaps give the President the luxury to be able to say he actually at least presented a budget. But on most of the criteria we ought to be looking at, in terms of evaluating this budget, that I mentioned earlier, it is not a serious attempt. It doesn't do anything to rein in these out-of-control programs that are growing at two to three times the rate of inflation, it has a massive tax increase, a $1 trillion tax increase on top of the $1.7 trillion in new taxes the President has already signed into law, and it adds $8.2 trillion to the debt over the next decade. So for that reason I think it fails the fundamental test of fiscal responsibility, but more important perhaps even than that, it fails to answer the question I posed earlier, which was: Does the President's budget grow the economy, does it create jobs, and does it increase take-home pay for middle-income Americans? The answer to that is simply no.

When you are raising taxes consistently--raising taxes on the people who create the jobs in our economy--it makes the economy grow at a slower rate, we have more sluggish growth, which is what we have seen now for the past several years. When we are growing at 1\1/2\ to 2 percent as opposed to 3 to 4 percent, it makes a huge difference in terms of the number of people in this country who are employed, the number of jobs that are created, and, obviously, it makes a huge difference in terms of the fiscal imbalance, because when the economy is growing at a faster rate, it means more people are working and investing and, therefore, making money and paying taxes. So tax revenues go up when the economy is growing and expanding.

That ought to be the goal. That ought to be our goal--not only to get those 21.7 million Americans who are out of work back to work but also to get the fiscal imbalance we face in a more manageable place. If we are going to get our fiscal house in order, we have to do those two things: We have to restrain Federal spending and we have to put policies in place that grow the economy.

There is a relationship between the two. It has been well documented, well studied, well researched that when we have spending that is out of control, when we have a debt as a percentage of our GDP that exceeds a certain level, it harms economic growth. It reduces the amount the economy grows on an annual basis and, in so doing, also reduces the number of jobs created. So this is the question that should be asked. Again, when we compare or stack up the President's budget against that question--does it grow the economy, does it create jobs, does it increase the take-home pay for middle-class Americans--the answer is simply no.

I would compare again the budget that was passed by both the House and Senate. In the case of the Senate, a study was done that suggested it would cost 800,000 jobs a year, again because of the tax increases that are included and the higher level of Federal spending. Simply raising taxes to fuel yet more Federal spending does nothing to grow the private economy. What we want to see is a smaller Federal economy and a bigger private economy where the real good-paying jobs are created. Clearly, this budget relies heavily--doubles down on Federal spending, adds more to the debt, doesn't achieve balance, increases taxes by $1 trillion, and takes us in absolutely the wrong direction.

I hope before this is all said and done, the House of Representatives and the Senate--both of which have passed budgets and now that we have the President's budget--can somehow sit down together and figure out how we get a proposal that would actually deal with out-of-control spending and would focus on growing the economy, creating jobs, and increasing the take-home pay for middle-class Americans. That ought to be the criteria we use.

I would hope before this is all said and done, people in this city would realize we don't have a taxing problem. The problem isn't that we tax too little, it is that we spend too much, and that is what needs to be addressed. I hope we can reconcile these budgets, but it will require the President to be engaged on a level he hasn't demonstrated so far. I hope he gets to what this real issue is and wants to get serious about reining in out-of-control government spending and we can make some headway yet. I have not lost hope. There were some incremental gains, some baby steps the President took in this, but it is far short of what needs to be done to get our economy back on track and get government spending back under control.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor to discuss the President's budget, which we understand will be released tomorrow. The budget comes out at a time when there is a lot of economic news floating around. The jobs report came out last week and indicated that job growth had been much slower than expected. There were about 190,000 jobs that were expected to be created, but there were only 88,000 jobs created, according to that report.

Although the unemployment dropped a little to 7.6 percent--if we factor in the number of people who had quit looking for jobs, which was half a million people--we had a labor participation rate which is literally the lowest since 1979. We have to go back to Jimmy Carter's Presidency to find a time when the labor participation rate hit that low number where 63.3 percent of the people who are eligible to work are actually out looking for work. There a lot of people who have completely quit looking.

We also looked at the U-6 number, which measures employment in a different way. It adds in the number of people who are no longer looking for work or who are working part time but would like to work full time. The unemployment rate for that is about 13.8 percent. This is a very sluggish, weak economy, where there are a large number of people across this country who continue to be unemployed, who continue to try and make their way without the advantage of having a job out there to pay their bills.

It strikes me that as the President releases his budget, the fundamental question which should be asked in the context of the economic data I have just mentioned is what will his budget do to create jobs, grow the economy, and increase the take-home pay for middle-class Americans. To me, that seems to be the question we ought to use as we evaluate not only the President's budget but other budget proposals that have been made here in the last few weeks.

When I say other budget proposals, of course, the House and Senate have both adopted budgets. The House passed their budget. They have passed their budget every year on time. The Senate, for the first time in 4 years, actually adopted a budget a couple weeks ago, and tomorrow we will finally have the President's budget, which, interestingly enough, was due on February 4. We were supposed to get the President's budget February 4. Typically, his budget would kick off the debate on the budget. It would be the starting point on which the two Houses of Congress--the House and Senate--base their budgets and gives them a little information as they move forward, but this is completely in reverse.

In fact, I think this is the latest the President has released his budget since about 1920. We have to go back almost 100 years to find a time when the President has released his budget at a later date than he did this year. So his budget comes after the fact. That being said, I hope when it does become public and we begin to dig into it a little bit and look at what is in it, we will have a more definitive answer to the questions: What are we going to do to create jobs? What are we going to do to grow the economy? What are we going to do to increase the take-home pay of working Americans? To me, that is fundamentally what we ought to be focused on in light of the very abysmal jobs report from last week.

What we are hearing about it--and again we will not know the final details until we see this tomorrow--is it is going to consist of a huge new tax increase. It will be another $1 trillion tax increase on top of the $1.7 trillion in tax increases that the President has already signed into law. If we go back to ObamaCare--the health care bill that passed a few years ago--it included $1 trillion in new taxes. We had the fiscal cliff deal, reached on January 1 of this year, which had $620 billion in new taxes. If we take ObamaCare, the fiscal cliff deal, and then add in some other taxes that have been imposed since the President took office, we are now over $1.7 trillion in new taxes and new revenue.

So when the word came out that the President's budget was going to include another $1 trillion in new taxes on top of the $1.7 trillion already mentioned, we need to ask the questions: At what point does this do serious harm to the economy? At what point do we get to that juncture where we have so much burden, so many new taxes and new regulations imposed upon our economy, that it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to create jobs and get the economy growing at a faster rate. In fact, what we are hearing, at least at this point, is that we have $1 trillion in new taxes, which means overall we would have a $600 billion number in terms of deficit reduction.

We have been told the President's budget replaces the sequester, which had $1.2 trillion in spending cuts. If there is just $600 billion in deficit reduction, what that essentially means is that all the deficit reduction is in the form of higher taxes. We have $1 trillion in new taxes, $600 billion in deficit reduction, and we are completely replacing the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts that is currently in effect, unless, of course, as is proposed in the President's budget, at least we are told is proposed in the President's budget is going to be replaced.

My point simply is this: In this country, we have a sluggish economy, chronic high unemployment, massive amounts of debt, all of which can be, if not entirely, at least partially cured and fixed by a more robust, more expansive and growing economy, growing at a more historic rate. The economic growth we have seen since this President took office, the average is .8 percent--eight-tenths of 1 percent is the average economic growth in 4 years since the President has been in office.

The historic average over the past 60 years is about 3.3 percent, and that includes 11 recessions. We have been through 11 recessions in the last 60 years, and still we have an average growth rate of 3.3 percent. It is not terribly robust, but on average at least it is good enough to keep the economy chugging along, to keep throwing enough jobs out there to keep a majority--or at least keep the unemployment rate at a reasonable level and keep Americans employed. Yet in the last 4 years the average is .8 percent.

Last year, we looked at 1.5 percent to 2 percent, in that neighborhood, but the fact is, until we start growing at a faster rate, we will be plagued by chronic high unemployment and we will continue to have these massive deficits year over year. As we all know, when we have a growing and expanding economy, people are working, investing, making money, and paying taxes. When the economy is growing, we get more tax revenue, and that makes the fiscal imbalances look smaller by comparison as well.

The real objective we ought to have in front of us if we want to deal with the fiscal imbalance and if we want to deal with the sluggish economy out there is policies that will promote economic growth, policies that make it less expensive and less difficult for people in this country to create jobs. We should not add more taxes, not add more costs in the form of new regulations, not impose more burdens on the economy but unleash the economy and allow it to grow and allow people in the economy to create jobs.

There are a number of reasons why that cannot happen. As I said, we have $1.7 trillion in new taxes that have been put on the economy since the President took office. His budget, as we are told, is going to include another $1 trillion in new taxes. We have new health care mandates that businesses--small businesses, large businesses, businesses of all sizes--are reacting to. It is something I hear more about now when I travel my State than almost anything else.

When we talk to people who create the jobs, there is uncertainty about how this is going to be implemented. There are lots of delays in terms of its implementation. We are looking at significant increases in premiums across many different age groups.

We heard the Senator from Wyoming, who was down here earlier, talking about the impacts of health care and what it will mean to the economy, what it will mean to people who buy their health insurance in the individual marketplace, people who acquire it through their employer. Obviously, there are people who might be forced into exchanges. There is just a tremendous cloud of uncertainty which hangs over our economy right now. Much of it is due to government policy generated in Washington, DC. Many of those policies come back to the budget. What is the vision we have for the future of this country?

The budget is a vision statement, as has been stated by Vice President Biden in the past. It sort of lays out a policy framework for the two parties and their respective ideas about how to grow the American economy, how to get people back to work, how to improve the standard of living and the quality of life and the take-home pay for middle-class Americans. Again, that is what I would argue the budget discussion we have should be focused on.

It strikes me as somewhat unusual and ironic that the President, after getting $1.7 trillion in new taxes since he took office, would submit a budget that is several months late, filled with new tax increases, and would put even more burdens on an already fragile economy. Yet that is what we are hearing is going to be in his budget.

There are some other things which I would hope he will include in that budget. We are told he is going to propose a modest and what I think is a bipartisan entitlement reform known as chained CPI that would change the calculation in some ways and would be more reflective of cost and the economy when it comes to calculating benefits for certain programs. But it is a small change in terms of what the dimensions of the problem are.

In fact, if we are going to do anything serious and meaningful to deal with the runaway spending and debt, we have to--in a structural way--reform these programs on the mandatory side of the budget that are growing at two to three times the rate of inflation and are unsustainable.

If we look at what drives Federal spending today, it is mandatory spending, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--programs that are sort of on autopilot, if you will, in the Federal budget that today represent somewhere on the order of about three-fifths of all Federal spending. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, 10 years from now it will represent 91 percent of Federal spending if we continue on the path we are on today. That is completely unsustainable. That means we have 9 percent of all Federal revenue available to fund national security, fund nondefense discretionary spending, and to pay interest on the debt. That is a future we cannot comprehend.

I think what it points out is we need to deal with these programs in a way that reforms them, that saves them, that protects them not only for generations of Americans today who depend upon them but also for future generations of Americans. On the current trajectory, on the current path, we simply cannot do that, and we have to make changes and reform these programs.

So it would seem the President, in his budget, would contemplate what he might do, proposals he might make to address that. Again, we will not know for sure until we see it tomorrow, but my understanding is there will be very little in terms of consequential, meaningful change, meaningful reforms and restructuring of programs that will actually get us on a more sustainable fiscal path.

I have to say the connection when we talk about policies--and I could go into a lot of different policy areas that I think drive up the cost of doing business in this country, one of which I already mentioned; that is, the new health care entitlement program that imposes lots of new requirements and mandates on employers as well as on individuals and is filled with $1 trillion in new taxes. But there are other areas of our economy as well.

If we look at the power of energy in this country and what it could do to unleash jobs to help get our economy growing at a faster rate, we see we have enormous opportunity out there in that sector of our economy.

We obviously have enormous opportunity if we are willing to take on our Tax Code. Our Tax Code is enormously complicated, complex beyond the comprehension of most Americans, which is why in many cases they have to turn it over to a professional tax preparer. But I believe it is fair to say if we could reform our Tax Code in a way

that broadens that base and does away with a lot of the loopholes and the special interest provisions--the exclusions, deductions, et cetera, in the Tax Code today--broadens that tax base, lowers the rates--we could unleash a period of economic growth unlike anything we have seen in a long period of time.

If we go back to the last time this was done in 1986, we know we saw a long period of economic growth because people--there was a lot of pent-up uncertainty and there is today, I might add, as well--and there is a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines that could be deployed and a lot of jobs, frankly, and opportunities we are losing to global competitors because our tax rates are, frankly, just not competitive in the global marketplace.

So I would argue that reforming our Tax Code would be enormously helpful if we are serious about growing the economy and creating jobs. That too is an area where I hope the President will engage. So far we have not heard from him on that except to say in terms of the corporate tax rate he would be willing to work with us on tax reform that would be deficit neutral. But if we look at what is coming out of his administration, these proposals, and the budget we will see tomorrow, most of it involves raising taxes--closing loopholes, perhaps, but doing it to generate new revenue to fund new Federal spending, not to reduce rates and to generate economic growth. Economic growth ought to be the goal in tax reform. It ought to be progrowth tax reform, and it would take us a long way toward that goal of getting this economy back on track and unleashing the economic growth we all want to see.

But I have to say it is also important, if we are going to get the economy growing again, that we get Federal spending under control. There is a lot of research out there, a lot of study that has been done that has looked at the relationship between high levels of debt as a percentage of our economy, GDP, and high levels of spending as a percentage of our GDP and how that impacts or translates into economic growth and jobs. The studies suggest that when our debt to GDP reaches a certain level--and ours exceeds that by 90 percent according to one of the studies--that it costs 1 point to 1.5 points of economic growth every single year. In this country that is about 1 million jobs. So as long as we continue to have a debt to GDP that exceeds 90 percent--ours is now about 104, 105 percent of GDP--we are in dangerous territory when it comes to the fragile nature of our economy and what it means to our ability to grow in the long term as we project out into the future.

If we look at many of the European nations that are strangled with high debtloads right now, a tremendous amount of leverage, we can see what is happening in their economies. How have they tried to cure that in most cases? They try to raise taxes, which makes the problem even worse because that slows economic growth.

So what we need to be looking at in terms of a budget is one that takes on what is driving Federal spending over the long term--the mandatory part of the budget--reforms and restructures programs in a way that saves and protects them; that doesn't in any way impact people who are drawing benefits today but makes those programs more sustainable for future generations of Americans. We need a budget that brings the debt-to-GDP and the spending-to-GDP levels down to a more historic norm that are consistent with what we have seen over our Nation's history as opposed to what we are looking at today, which are extraordinarily high levels of debt and extraordinarily high levels of spending as a percentage of GDP.

We ought to think about what we can be doing in terms of reforming the Tax Code and streamlining regulations to lessen the burden and the tremendous weight we put on our small businesses and our job creators.

Those are the types of things we ought to be looking at in terms of policy. That is what the budget ought to be focused on, getting spending under control, getting it back down to a more reasonable level and a more historic norm. But until we do that, my fear is we are going to continue to see chronic unemployment, a lot of people leaving the workforce, and labor participation rates that are at historic lows. We are going to continue to see a sluggish economy that continues to stumble along at 1.5, 2 percent annual growth. We are going to continue to see take-home pay levels go down for ordinary, working-class, middle-class Americans who are out there trying to pay their bills, trying to take care of their everyday expenses and perhaps put a little bit aside for their retirement or for their children's education. Those are hard decisions that Americans are making at their kitchen tables every single day. These are kitchen table issues; they are pocketbook issues. They are the kinds of decisions that American families have to contend with. They don't have the luxury the Federal Government has of being able to go out and borrow.

Of course, today, of every dollar we spend in Washington, DC, 40 cents is borrowed. So we continue to borrow like there is no tomorrow. We continue to pile up massive amounts of debt, put it on the backs of our children and grandchildren, hand them the bill or the credit card overcharges we are making today. That is wrong. It is inconsistent with everything that has made this Nation great. Part of our Nation's heritage is we have been a country that has understood the idea that one generation sacrifices so the next generation can have a higher standard of living and a better quality of life. That is something that is very true in my part of the country in the Midwest, in South Dakota.

My grandfather and great uncle are among those who came in 1906, didn't speak English, learned the language, worked hard building a railroad, and later were able to save enough money to buy a small merchandising store and continued in their pursuit of the American dream.

That is what I think has characterized generations of Americans like them since, up until today. Today we are at a point in American history where if we don't get our fiscal house in order, if we don't deal with these imbalances that have gone on now for decades, we are going to relegate, if you will, future generations of Americans--our kids and grandkids--to a lower standard of living and a lower quality of life than what we have enjoyed.

That is why the President's budget, as much as it is late, is so important, because it really does set that tone. It really does tell us what that vision for the future of this country is. If we don't have a leader in the White House who can lay out in a systematic way what he wants to do to address the economic data--the statistics I mentioned earlier, the high unemployment, the underemployment--we consistently see these economic numbers come out from one month to the next. When there is a little improvement, we get all excited about that, and the next month it takes another tumble.

We find more and more people who are just leaving the workforce, and the labor participation rate is at a historically low level since 1979, and we haven't seen it down 63.3 percent, which is what it was for the month of March. If we are going to do something about that, we are going to have to have people who are going to demonstrate the political courage that is necessary to confront these big challenges and big decisions, and that means people in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. But awfully important to all of this is the President of the United States.

There is only one person in this country, among 307 billion Americans, who can sign a bill into law. There is only one person in this country who has the bully pulpit and the capability to rally people in the Congress and people around the country as well as around great causes. I can't think of a greater cause today than doing something to deal with runaway spending and a debt that is hurting our economy, that is enslaving future generations of Americans to a lower standard of living and a lower quality of life.

Those are issues that need to be addressed. The President's budget tomorrow could go a long way toward addressing that. I am afraid it is going to be a missed opportunity if what we hear about it is actually true. We hear it doesn't address the long-term drivers of spending and debt, it raises taxes $1 trillion, and it does $600 billion of deficit reduction but all in the form of higher taxes. That is not going to solve

our problem. We cannot raise taxes enough to deal with what plagues our country in terms of our fiscal imbalances. What plagues us is the fact that we spend too much, not that we tax too little; that we have a slow rate of growth in our economy, so slow we are not generating the number of jobs and the amount of investment that will get the economy growing and taking off again, but also improve the fiscal picture for our country's future.

So I hope I am wrong about this. We will see tomorrow if everybody will be pleasantly surprised and the President will take on the big issues and do away with more taxes and more spending and more regulations and more costs for businesses that are trying to create jobs. But I think that would be the triumph of hope over experience. So far what we have seen out of this administration is that very formula: more spending, more taxes, more cost to small businesses to create jobs, and higher cost from regulations. They have been consistent on that. That is not the way to get the economy growing and expanding again.

We believe we ought to be not growing the government but growing the economy. Frankly, if all of us in the Senate looked at every bill that comes before us in terms of what will it do to create jobs, what will it do to grow the economy, what will it do to increase the take-home pay for middle-class Americans, we would probably get a lot higher quality legislation, legislation that produces solutions for the American people, which is something we are not doing today.

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

If I might, I thank the distinguished ranking member of the Budget Committee for yielding, and I will pose a question to the Senator, if I might.

I heard Senator Sessions say earlier and put up a chart which suggested that the term ``balanced'' had been used 191 times by the other side in the course of this debate. Is that correct?

That may be an incomplete count, but nevertheless the Senator and his staff counted 191 times where the word ``balanced'' has been used. As the Senator from Alabama very fittingly pointed out, there is nothing balanced about this budget. In fact, this budget doesn't balance in 10 years; it doesn't ever balance.

The other thing I would suggest to my colleague from Alabama is that in the course of the debate, it has become clear to me--and I think clear to anybody who has been observing this--that the so-called balanced approach they advocate is anything but balanced.

We have a $1.5 trillion tax increase. We have a spending increase that is at 62 percent over the course of the next decade--a net spending increase notwithstanding their assertions that somehow this is a reduction in spending. The whole idea that this is ``a balanced approach'' strikes me as a big charade. I think that is what this entire budget is. That is why all the editorial pages across the country, including those from newspapers that are not considered the least bit conservative--many of us in the Chamber who are on this side of the aisle expect most of the newspapers around the country and their editorial pages to attack Republicans and Republican budgets--have absolutely eviscerated in their editorial comments the budget that has been put forth by the Senate Democrats. I think it is simply because it is anything but balanced.

When they used the word ``balanced'' 191 times on the floor of the Senate with regard to this debate, if we think about the ``balanced approach'' they talk about--even when we were dealing with the fiscal cliff, they talked about a balanced approach, but there was no balance there. It was all tax increases. There was a $620 billion tax increase. Over the course of the President's first term, we got a $1 trillion tax increase with ObamaCare. If we add those together with some other tax increases that have been added on, we are at $1.7 trillion in new taxes--or new revenues, as they say.

We want balance. Well, we have $1.7 trillion in new revenue already, and then they are talking about another $1.5 trillion in taxes. Really? Where is the balance in that? This is all about raising taxes and growing government at the expense of the economy.

I say to my colleague from Alabama, we are going to vote on an amendment pretty soon by the Senator from New Hampshire, Ms. Ayotte, that raises a point of order against any tax increase that would occur until the unemployment rates gets back down to 5.5 percent, which is what the President and White House said in 2009 would be the unemployment rate by now without the stimulus. It is hard to imagine that after spending $1 trillion that was borrowed from our children and grandchildren to ``stimulate the economy'' and still having an unemployment rate that hovers around 8 percent, they would be talking about yet more taxes when we know that raising taxes does nothing but hurt the economy and hurt job growth.

If the real goal is to get deficits and debt under control--my colleague from Alabama shares my view--the best way to do that is to expand the economy. We need to have people working again, investing, and paying taxes. We don't need less revenue, we need more revenue in order to have a growing economy. That is what we should have before us. This budget does the opposite. It adds $7.3 trillion to the Federal debt and raises $1.5 trillion in new taxes on top of the $1.7 trillion tax increases we have already seen in the last 4 years under this administration. This is a completely wrongheaded approach, which is why it is not just the Republicans in this Chamber who are saying that, it is the so-called independent folks out there in the media who say it on their editorial pages. They are calling it what it is. It is a charade.

There is nothing about this exercise we are going through here on the Senate floor this week that will solve the Nation's fiscal problems or get people back to work or get this economy growing again. I say that in terms of a budget. The budget is supposed to confront harsh realities, and it is supposed to set a vision and blueprint and pathway for the future.

If this is their pathway--ignoring the problems and sweeping them under the carpet--as far as the long-term structural challenges we face with regard to Social Security and Medicare, this does nothing to protect those programs. It does nothing. There is no reform in here. There is not anything in here that prolongs the programs that people rely on today that are headed toward bankruptcy. At the end of this decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, that is going to represent 91 percent of all Federal spending. Think about that--91 percent of all Federal spending will be composed of mandatory programs. Only 9 percent of the entire budget will be left over to pay interest on the debt, national security, and all the other discretionary things the government funds.

This budget does nothing to address the long-term structural fiscal imbalances that face this country. Yet it relies on the same old tried- and-failed policy: Well, let's just raise taxes a little more. It will be a tax increase on the rich because Lord knows we are the defenders of the middle class.

Let me tell the middle class in this country, they cannot raise taxes enough on the rich to do all the things they want to do in the form of growing government and increasing spending. This is going to hit and penetrate middle-income Americans. Middle-class families are going to get hit with higher taxes because the appetite to spend on the other side is endless. It just goes on and on and on, and we are not doing anything to address that.

We have a spending problem in this country, not a revenue problem or a tax problem. It isn't that we spend too little or that we tax too little, it is that we spend too much, and that is what we need to address in this budget. That is where this budget falls terribly short.

It is an incredible disappointment to finally--after 4 years--have a budget on the floor of the Senate that is inadequate to the future of America and relies on the same old failed policy that raises taxes and hurts economic growth and hurts job creation.

We are still hovering at 8 percent unemployment. In the last 4 years, we have added $6 trillion to the Federal debt. We have a sluggish economy that is growing at 1.5 to 2 percent, and for the 4-year average it has been less than 4 percent. The 60-year historical average is 3.3 percent economic growth. If we got back to the normal economic growth pattern average over the last 60 years, these fiscal challenges we face would be so much smaller by comparison simply because a growing economy helps address all of these problems we are talking about today. Unfortunately, the budget we have before us doesn't focus on growing the economy; rather, it focuses on growing the government, and that is where it falls so miserably short.

It is really unfortunate that is the vote we are going to have today. Many of the amendments we are going to vote on are an attempt to improve it. I

hope that the Ayotte amendment will pass and that the tax increases included in this budget--that the point of order will be approved and will deny any tax increase until we get the unemployment rate back down to 5.5 percent. That is where it should be. If we have a growing economy, it would be closer to that number.

I support the good efforts of my colleague from Alabama. He has been here on the floor for many, many hours over the last couple of days doing yeoman's work by pointing out the shortcomings in this budget that we are considering before the Senate. The Senator from Alabama has laid out a very different vision for how we can solve these problems.

It is really ironic. I am sure this is-- The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The minority time has expired.

Mr. President, I yield back our time so our colleagues have an opportunity to use the term ``balanced'' a few more times before this debate concludes.

I yield the floor.

Children's Budget

Mr. President, I appreciate the effort being made by the Senator from Virginia. He is moving in the right direction. We do need to get rid of this once and for all. I would be happy to accept his amendment by voice if he would be willing to do that. But I think it is important to have a vote on eliminating the death tax.

The death tax is a punitive tax. It hits farmers and ranchers squarely in the face at a time when they are trying to pass on their farm or ranch operation to the next generation of Americans.

By the way, the amendment I will offer is a deficit-neutral reserve fund; it would be offset. The point the Senator from Virginia made about it not being offset is not accurate.

The way we would approach this, it would have to be offset, but it is time that we put a stake in the heart of the death tax and end it once and for all.

Mr. President, this amendment will create a deficit- neutral reserve fund to completely--completely--eliminate the Federal estate tax burden that is facing America's family farmers and small businesses. There are lots of reasons to support elimination of this destructive and inefficient tax, but for me the issue comes down to being able to tell the farmers and ranchers I represent that I am doing everything I can to make sure they can pass on their family farm to the next generation without a double tax imposed from Washington, DC.

Behind me is a chart. This is data selected from the latest Agriculture Department report on farmland values. Farmers in the States represented on this chart truly are land rich and cash poor. These farmers literally have to sell off land or spend large sums in financial planning solely because of the estate tax--all of that to bring in less than one-half of 1 percent of all Federal revenue.

Next year the estate tax will generate $15 billion--that is all-- relative to all the harm that it causes to farms, ranches, and small businesses in this country. It is time to end this tax. It is time to put a stake through the heart of this tax. I ask my colleagues to support the repeal with this amendment.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Alabama for his eloquence in laying out what is at stake in this budget debate we are having and for also pointing out, once again, that the budget before us in the Senate doesn't balance.

In a way, the speakers who have been here before on the Democratic side have been talking about another budget. They are talking about a budget that is under consideration in the other House, in the House of Representatives. They are not talking about their budget.

I suspect one of the reasons they don't want to talk about their budget is it is a budget that, for all intents and purposes, will hurt economic growth, cost jobs, and lower take-home pay for middle-class Americans because it doubles down on the failed policies of the past 4 years, which have consisted of more spending, more borrowing and more taxes, and that is what this budget is about.

I wish to quote something from the Washington Post editorial page in regard to the Democratic budget that is before us.

Except for the part about no imminent crisis, the Senate

Democratic budget recognizes none of this.

They are talking about the challenges we face with regard to the fiscal crisis we are in.

Partisan in tone and complacent in substance, it scores

points against the Republicans and reassures the party's

liberal base--but deepens these senators' commitment to an

unsustainable policy agenda.

In short, this document gives voters no reason to believe

that Democrats have a viable plan for--or even a responsible

public assessment of--the country's long-term fiscal

predicament.

This is their assessment of the budget debate that is going on in the Senate. The Washington Post editorial page isn't exactly a bastion of conservative thought, but note what they say about this: It is not a viable plan. It is not even a responsible public assessment of the country's long-term fiscal predicament.

This is precisely what is wrong with this budget and why the Democrats who come down to the floor of the Senate aren't talking about it. They are coming down to talk about the budget that is under consideration today in the House of Representatives--which, incidentally, does actually balance in 10 years.

The first motion that is under consideration in the Senate is to recommit this back to produce a balanced budget.

It strikes me, at least, that I think most Americans would accept the logic, if you will--the notion, that we ought to be able to submit a balanced budget--at least a budget that balances in a 10-year period.

Most Americans have to make decisions every single year. They have to figure out how they are going to go about balancing their own family budget, how to make what is coming in the door meet the expenses that they have to deal with in their daily lives. Yet the Democratic budget that is before us not only doesn't balance in 10 years, it doesn't balance ever--it doesn't balance ever.

That is why this motion that is before us to recommit this budget to the Senate Budget Committee and to produce a budget that actually does balance is something I hope my colleagues on both sides will support.

It is time we got serious about doing the important work of the Senate, taking care of the people's business, which is to get spending on a more responsible and sustainable fiscal path so future generations of Americans aren't saddled with this massive burden of debt, so we can protect and save programs--important programs such as Social Security and Medicare--which are on a pathway to bankruptcy.

Social Security is already operating at a cash deficit; in other words, there isn't enough money coming in, in the form of payroll taxes, to pay the benefits that are due to Social Security beneficiaries. Medicare is going to be bankrupt 10 years from now and even in the hospital part of that trust fund, by the year 2016, according to the CBO.

It is clear. These things are looking us right in the face. This is not something out there on the horizon, these are issues today that need to be dealt with. Yet the Democratic budget before us does absolutely nothing to address the long-term fiscal challenges facing this country. What are we going to do to save Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid?

In fact, according to the CBO, by the year 2023, 10 years from now, mandatory spending will represent 91 percent of all Federal spending. Think about that. It is about 62 percent today. We are on a trajectory and a pathway over the next decade to where 90 cents--over 90 cents out of every dollar is paying for those basic core programs with nothing left over. How are we going to fund the military or defense or the other priorities this government deals with every single day when over 90 cents out of every dollar is going to be spent on these programs? Yet this budget does nothing to address those important fiscal problems.

What it does do is it grows government--a 62-percent increase in government spending over the next decade. It adds $7.3 trillion to the Federal debt, and that is on top of the $6 trillion that has been added in the last 4 years. It raises taxes. The Democrats will say it is only by $975 billion, about $1 trillion. But if you look inside the numbers, they replace the sequester--another $\1/2\ trillion--with a fund, some sort of fund. What is going to fund that? Spending cuts? I do not think so. We are talking about up to a $1.5 trillion tax increase in this budget on top of the $1.7 trillion tax increase we have already seen under this President and the Democrats here in the Congress.

What does that mean? They say it is just a tax on the rich. We just need the rich to pay a little more. They need to pay their fair share.

They got a big, fat tax increase with the fiscal cliff. They got a big, fat tax increase with the $1 trillion in ObamaCare. The rich are getting hit with higher taxes, but what is happening is a lot of these tax increases are starting to hit the middle class, and they are starting to figure this out. If you are a middle-class American and they are saying: Let's soak the rich a little more, that is OK, the rich can pay more--Mr. President, I have to tell you, it is coming at you. If you are a middle-class American, you cannot tax the rich enough to do all the things these guys want to do to increase Federal spending and grow the size of the Federal Government.

Our focus should not be on growing the government; it ought to be on growing the economy. This budget does absolutely nothing to get the economy growing again. It simply does what we have done in the past 4 years; that is, increase spending, increase borrowing, and increase taxes.

If you don't think the taxes are hitting the middle class already, just look at your health insurance premiums because the tax increases in ObamaCare were taxes on, yes, medical device companies, taxes on your health insurance plan, taxes on pharmaceuticals, all of which are being passed on in the form of higher costs to average working Americans.

We have a crisis in this country that affects the middle-income families, people who are out there every single day just trying to do their best to make their budget balance and do the important things to plan for the future of their children and grandchildren, and here we are in Washington, DC, debating yet more policies that are going to hurt the economy, going to crush job creation in this country and lower take-home pay for those very middle-class American families.

This is the wrong approach. I hope as we debate this we will have an opportunity to vote on amendments. Perhaps there is a way we can make this better. I doubt that to be the case. This budget is so far off in terms of where we need to be going as a country. If we are serious about getting the economy growing and expanding again, creating jobs for middle-class Americans, and doing something about the massive amount of debt we are passing on to future generations, this budget is the exact wrong prescription for that. We can do much better by the American people, and we need to. I hope that during the course of this debate that will

become clear and that we will move in a different direction for the future of this country.

I see the leader is here on the floor. I will conclude my remarks at least for the time being and allow him to make his.

Mr. President, we have among the many people who serve in the Senate some people who have balanced budgets and done it----

We have among the Senators who serve in the Senate people who have balanced budgets and done it the old-fashioned way, the hard way, one of whom is the former Governor of the State of Nebraska, now Senator, Mike Johanns. Senator Johanns, like me, comes from the midwestern part of the country where common sense prevails and where people are not unaccustomed to having to tighten their belts a little bit during difficult times. As a consequence of that, many of those States in that part of the country are well managed, and they elect leaders who bring those types of principles to their leadership and to the way they govern among their States.

So the Senator from Nebraska, Mr. Johanns, has a long record--not only as a Governor, I might add, but as a mayor. He has been an executive. He knows what it is like to make those hard decisions, and he is someone who, like me, is very concerned that we get on a more sustainable fiscal path for this country, get our fiscal house here in Washington, DC, in order, and make sure we are not bankrupting this country and saddling the next generation with massive amounts of debt.

I yield to my colleague from Nebraska, Senator Johanns.

Mr. President, the Senator from Nebraska could not have put it better. He has great experience with budgets and the people of Nebraska, who are similar to the people I represent in South Dakota.

Someone else who is also from a very similar State, the State of North Dakota--he is yet another Governor who,

when he came here, came here in many respects because of his record of accomplishment as a Governor. The people of North Dakota elected him by an overwhelming margin largely because he knows how important it is that a State and country live within their means and that they not spend money they do not have. The Governor, and now Senator, of North Dakota has a long and incredibly strong record when it comes to fiscal matters. Again, like me, he represents a constituency which understands very clearly what is at stake when it comes to balancing our budget and making sure we are not handing that debt down to those children and grandchildren.

It is great to have here the Senator, my colleague and neighbor from North Dakota.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota. I think he put it absolutely right in terms of what the priorities should be and what the stakes are in the budget debate. I thank him for his leadership on this issue.

I want to close with one final point he made. He spoke a lot about the impact on the economy and what happens when we get economic growth. His State is a good example of this, because the State of North Dakota has a growing economy. And when we have a growing economy, we have people who are making money, people who are working, people who are investing, and that means people are paying more taxes, and that is how we get more revenue. What we need is a growing economy.

In the last 4 years, the average growth rate is less than 1 percent, eight-tenths of 1 percent. The 60-year average of economic growth, post-World War II, is 3.3 percent. So we are growing at less than 1 percent. In the last 4 years we have added $6 trillion to the debt, and we still have 12 million people unemployed and an unemployment rate that continues to hover around 8 percent.

Having said that, wouldn't we think we would want to try something different and go in a different direction? Yet this budget doubles down. It flat doubles down on these failed policies of the past 4 years that are antigrowth, antijobs, and continue to tax and spend and borrow as if there is no tomorrow. We need a different path. We need a different approach.

So I hope, as we have this debate over the course of the next couple of days, it will become clear not only to the Senators here in this Chamber but to the American people who really is interested in getting revenue the right way, which is through growing our economy, creating jobs, getting Americans back to work, and doing something about the debt and the spending crisis we have in this country.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I rise today along with my colleague from Missouri, Senator Blunt, to offer a couple of amendments that have been filed and that I hope we get an opportunity to vote on before this process concludes. If you look at the base Democratic budget that has been put before us, it has large tax increases in it; in fact, up to $1.5 trillion in new taxes.

What we would attempt to do is to ensure that those taxes, higher taxes, do not come by eliminating or capping the Federal tax deduction for charitable giving. We have tens of millions of Americans mired in poverty, and government budgets are more constrained than ever before and what fills that gap is the charitable giving. It is the generosity of people around this country who keep organizations going that are providing these essential and basic functions for many Americans.

In fact, in 2011, Americans gave nearly $300 billion to support charitable causes. This generosity not only helps to feed the hungry and clothe the needy, it has a real budgetary impact because this is an instance where the private sector is fulfilling a need that would otherwise have to be met by government spending.

Unfortunately, as we know, the White House has proposed limiting the value of itemized deductions for those earning above $200,000 for singles, and $250,000 for married couples to 28 percent. Previous estimates were that this proposal would reduce charitable donations by up to $5.6 billion a year. As the Charitable Giving Coalition has recently stated, that amounts to more than the annual budgets of the Red Cross, Goodwill, YMCA, Habitat for Humanity, the Boys and Girls Clubs, Catholic Charities, and the American Cancer Society combined.

But even this impact understates the degree to which charitable giving could be harmed under the White House proposal because we now have a new baseline with a higher top income tax rate. A new study by the American Enterprise Institute estimates that the President's itemized limitation under the new tax rates will lower total giving by individuals by more than $9.4 billion per year.

We ought to be exploring new options to expand charitable giving rather than limiting the charitable donations in order to fund higher levels of government spending. If we are going to explore any changes in the charitable deduction or any other tax provisions that we have in the Tax Code today, it ought to be in the context of progrowth revenue- neutral tax reform, not as a way to pay for higher spending, which is what these proposals would do. I hope the vote on this amendment this time around will be just as broadly bipartisan as the one I offered back in 2009, where we got 94 votes in support.

The second amendment will put the Senate on record in support of eliminating the destructive Federal estate tax, better known as the death tax. That amendment I offer with the Senator from Missouri and several others of my colleagues.

I have long believed the Federal estate tax is an unnecessary, counterproductive, and inefficient tax. More important, the death tax strikes many of us as not simply being bad tax policy but a policy that runs counter to the very essence of the American free market system. This is not a tax on rich fatcats, as some will claim. We already have an income tax, and it is one of the most progressive income taxes in the developed world.

The death tax is different. It is a tax on success, a tax on assets that have been accumulated through a lifetime of hard work and generated from income that was already taxed when it was earned. Many of these businesses are ``land rich and cash poor,'' meaning that the value of the business is in the land and in the business assets. These businesses do not have substantial liquid assets sitting around to pay a second layer of tax that is imposed when a loved one passes way. As a result, the death tax often requires that business assets are sold simply to pay the tax.

Consider South Dakota, where we have seen farmland prices increased by over 50 percent in just the past 5 years. States such as Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and North Dakota have seen similar increases.

Finally, my amendment will give farmers, ranchers, and family business owners peace of mind, and it will do so in a deficit-neutral way. When we voted on a sense-of-the-Senate to eliminate the death tax in 2002, 11 Senate Democrats supported that, including a number of Senators who are still in the Senate today. Much has changed since 2002, but I believe the death tax was a bad tax law then, and it remains so today. I hope to get a strong bipartisan vote on this as well.

Before I shift to my colleague from Missouri, I simply want to say, as I have said before, that when we look at this budget process and the budget proposal put before us by the Senate Democrats, the question we ought to ask is, What does this do to promote economic growth? What does this do to create jobs? More than anything else, what we need in this country is increased economic growth. Increased economic growth will get the people who are unemployed back to work, which will increase the take-home pay of middle-class Americans.

We have seen a sluggish economy, chronic high unemployment, and a massive amount of debt over the past 4 years. It is time to chart a different course, and the way to do that is to put policies in place that will encourage economic growth. A $1.5 trillion tax increase is not the way to do that, and we certainly do not want to take away the incentive people in this country have to continue to give out of the generosity of their hearts to our charitable organizations all across the country.

It is also important that once and for all we get rid of the death tax, which is so punitive to people who work so hard and want to pass that on to the next generation of Americans.

I am happy to yield to my colleague from Missouri, who, like me, represents a lot of farmers, ranchers, and hard-working small businesspeople for whom the tax issues are important. He will offer comments on the impact of some of these tax policies and the impact some of the budget proposals coming from the Senate Democrats would have on the State of Missouri.

Madam President, I thank my colleague from Missouri. He has a great deal of experience. As he said, we worked together on these issues for a long time. We both recognize the importance of economic growth. We see a budget put before us by the Senate Democrats that grows the government and not the economy. We believe the focus should be on growing the economy, not the government. The amendments we offered have that thought in mind.

There are other colleagues who are here to speak to the basic budget proposal the Democrats have put forward and talk about some of the amendments they intend to offer.

Thank you.

Mr. President, the House Republican budget does something the Democratic budget does not do--it balances. It actually balances in 10 years, and it does it not by taxing more but by spending less, spending at a slower rate--3.4 percent over that 10-year period.

If we look at what the House Republican budget does, it is focused on growing the economy, not growing the government. What the Democratic budget, before the Senate this evening, does is it grows the government, not the economy.

In fact, if we look at the analysis that has been done, it is suspected the Democratic budget would cost us 850,000 jobs and reduce take-home pay for middle-class families by $1,500. The House Republican budget takes seriously the challenges that are facing this country, takes the steps necessary to save and protect Medicare for future generations of Americans, something this budget--the Senate Democratic budget--does not do.

I urge my colleagues to support this budget, and it is a serious one, that balances the budget in 10 years and puts our economy back in growing mode and our fiscal house back in order.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about the important budget debate we will have this week here in the Senate. We hope to get on that soon. We are disposing of some of last-year's budget work before that. But I think this is an important moment for the Senate because it has been 4 years since we did this; 2009 was the last time the Senate acted on a budget. During the time which has lapsed, we have added $6 trillion to our national debt. I would like to think as we get into this budget debate, we could do something about that. Unfortunately, the budget that is going to be put before us by the Senate Democrats doesn't do anything to address the debt.

I think perhaps the reason we are finally doing a budget here is because there was a No Budget No Pay Act passed earlier this year which required that a budget be passed. It was moved by the House of Representatives and drew attention to the fact that the Senate hadn't for 4 years done a budget, and suggested that before the Senate get paid, it actually ought to do its work and pass a budget. So we are here now for the first time in 4 years.

Unfortunately, the budget that has been proposed by the chair of the Senate Budget Committee fails to balance the budget and instead means more taxes, more spending, and more debt. That is a formula we have heard before.

If you look at the last several years, we have added $6 trillion of debt since President Obama took office. We have seen tax increases already of about $1.7 trillion if you combine the tax increases associated January 1 with the fiscal cliff, and then couple that with the tax increases that were included in the President's health care bill--$1.7 trillion in new taxes, $6 trillion in new debt, a runup in spending unlike anything we have seen in recent history. So you would think, given the fact that we have seen debt, spending, and taxes go up over the past several years, we would actually get a budget that is finally focused not on growing the government but on growing the economy. But the Senate Democratic budget does exactly that--it grows the government, not the economy.

Their proposal contains more of the same big spending and big government policies that have led to a dismal average economic growth rate of just eight-tenths of 1 percent over the past 4 years. That has been the economic growth on average for the first 4 years of President Obama's first term, eight-tenths of 1 percent. Less than 1 percent is what the economy has grown over that time period.

A better approach when it comes to putting forward a budget would be to advance a budget that actually is focused on growing the economy, not the

government. Over the next few days we are going to have an opportunity to debate and improve this budget proposal on the Senate floor. I look forward to that debate.

As it stands today, the Senate Democrats' budget increases spending by 62 percent over the next decade; it raises taxes by $1.5 trillion-- and that is in addition to the $1.7 trillion in tax increases we have already seen enacted under President Obama. Even with the enormous tax increase, the Senate Democrats' budget would result in $7.3 trillion in new debt over the next decade. So you have a 62-percent increase in spending, you have $1.5 trillion in new taxes, and a $7.3 trillion debt, in addition to the debt we hand down to our children and grandchildren.

The amazing thing about that, even with this enormous tax increase, is the budget would never balance, which begs the question: What is balanced about a budget that never balances?

You hear the Democrats come here on the floor of the Senate and talk about, We need a balanced approach. The President of the United States gets up all the time and talks about, We need a balanced approach. What is balanced about a budget that never balances? That is a fundamental question I would expect the American people to ask.

In contrast, the House Republicans will be enacting a budget this week through the House of Representatives. Hopefully, eventually something like it will get enacted. But it balances in 10 years. I think 10 years is a responsible, reasonable timeline to achieve a balanced budget, and I think most Americans who balance their budgets month in and month out would agree with that proposition.

The budget put forward by Senate Democrats also fails to target waste, fraud, and inefficiencies across the Federal Government. For each of the past 2 years, the Government Accountability Office has outlined hundreds of billions of dollars of wasteful and duplicative spending throughout the Federal Government. The Federal Government is a $3.6 trillion enterprise, and there is plenty of waste to target and reform--low-hanging fruit most would agree is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars--but Senate Democrats have failed even to make an attempt at reining in this waste with their budget plan.

Budgets are a reflection of values. As Vice President Biden once said:

Show me your budget, and I will tell you what you value.

It seems from the Senate Democrats' budget that they value the same big spending and big government policies of the past 4 years that have prolonged this period of slow economic growth and high unemployment.

In contrast, the budget proposed by the Republicans in the House would balance the budget in 10 years--again, something I believe we ought to be able to do--and it grows the economy. It starts by cutting wasteful spending, which is not an extreme proposition and something we ought to be able to do.

The House Republican budget also reforms our broken Tax Code to promote economic growth, which will mean more jobs, better pay, and more opportunities for hard-working Americans and middle-class families.

The House budget also recognizes that if Washington fails to take action, Medicare and Social Security are headed toward bankruptcy in the not too distant future.

I commend my colleagues in the House for the vote that they will have this week, and for recognizing that reality, that our seniors across this country and those who are nearing retirement age and those of younger generations of Americans are not going to be protected when it comes to the programs that someday they will rely upon if we don't make the changes and the reforms that are necessary to align those programs with the present and future demographics of this country. So the House budget strengthens those priorities.

The budget debate for fiscal year 2014 that we are going to have on the Senate floor this week presents an opportunity, an opportunity to solve our fiscal challenges, to move past the job-destroying policies of the past few years, and to grow the economy.

As I said earlier, average economic growth under this President has been 0.8 percent--eight-tenths of 1 percent--of the overall share of the economy. This is a reflection of the negative impacts high levels of spending and high annual deficits have had during President Obama's tenure.

Unfortunately, the proposal that will be before the Senate this week only continues and doubles down on those policies. In fact, there is evidence this is the opposite of what we should be doing.

Harvard Professors Alberto Alesina and Sylvia Ardagna have studied economies around the world and various fiscal adjustments that have taken place in some of these countries. They found targeted spending cuts have led to economic expansions, while tax increases have been recessionary.

According to these Harvard economists:

Spending cuts have a positive effect on private investment

while increases to taxes . . . hurt investment through the

labor market and firms' profitability.

The evidence is there. Growing the government will not solve our economic challenges. If that were true, we would have a much stronger economy today, because with the massive health care plan that passed a few years ago, with the trillion-dollar stimulus program that was put into place early on during the President's first term, and all the additional runup in discretionary spending that we have seen, we still have slow growth, high unemployment, massive amounts of debt, and many Americans who are struggling with their own personal economies and lower take-home pay.

The focus should be on growing our economy. That starts with passing a budget that cuts spending and reforms the Tax Code in a way that promotes economic growth.

Again, I believe there is a better approach out there. The House of Representatives has put forth one. It is unfortunate that the Senate Democratic budget fails to address the long-term spending and economic problems facing this country and, instead, focuses once again on growing government.

In fact, the Washington Post editorial board had this to say of the Democrats' budget proposal:

In short, this document gives voters no reason to believe

that Democrats have a viable plan--or even a responsible

public assessment of--the country's long-term fiscal

predicament.

Failure to act and solve our fiscal challenges could result in another damaging credit downgrade, thanks to the out-of-control spending, and such a downgrade would have a very negative effect on the American people. A credit downgrade would drive up interest rates across the board on everything from student loans to home mortgages. That means it would be more expensive to buy a home or a car, to send a child to college, or to pay down personal debt.

So as we get ready to debate the majority's proposed budget for fiscal year 2014 on the floor this week, I hope the Senate will take an honest look at the relationship between spending and economic growth. We need to put the Federal Government on a stable fiscal path in order to create the kind of economic certainty and the economic conditions we need to grow our economy and to create jobs.

The majority's budget goes in the opposite direction. It grows government instead of growing the economy. We need to be talking about a budget here in the Senate whose primary focus is to grow the economy, not to grow the government.

So this will give us a chance over the course of the next few days to present two very different visions for the future of this country: one that is based upon higher spending, higher taxes, more debt, and one that is focused on putting in place a responsible spending plan that protects and saves important programs such as Social Security and Medicare, that reforms our Tax Code in a way that encourages and promotes economic growth, and that puts policies in place that will actually get this economy growing and expanding again, get more Americans back to work, and increase the standard of living and the quality of life for future generations of Americans.

We can't do that if we can continue to borrow and spend like there is no tomorrow, and that is precisely what the Democrats' budget would do.

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

Madam President, today I wish to honor the South Dakota State University men's and women's basketball teams on winning their respective 2013 Summit League Championships. This marks the Jackrabbits fifth consecutive women's Summit League Title and the men's basketball team's second consecutive Summit League Title. The Jackrabbits are also the only team in Division I to have both their men's and women's teams repeat as conference tournament champions this year.

The SDSU women's basketball team has a long history of success, including winning all five Summit League Tournaments since moving up to NCAA Division I. South Dakota State University, which concluded the regular season with a 22-7 overall record, won the Summit League Conference with a 14-2 record. With the tournament victory the Jackrabbits will go to their fifth NCAA Tournament in as many years.

Certainly, this successful season would not have been possible without the hard work of the players. The members of the 2012-2013 South Dakota State University women's basketball team are: Anne Aamlid, Gabrielle Boever, Mariah Clarin, Chloe Cornemann, Leah Dietel, Ashley Eide, Jessica Hart, Tara Heiser, Katie Lingle, Steph Paluch, Hannah Strop, Megan Stuart, Rachel Walters, and Megan Waytashek.

Although this accomplishment was truly a team effort, I would like to pay special recognition to their coach Aaron Johnston, who in his 13th season recorded his 300th win and became SDSU's all-time winning head coach. Coach Johnston's current record is 315-106. I also would like to congratulate assistant coaches Katie Falco, Mike Jewett, and Carissa Nord.

The SDSU men's basketball team has seen much recent success of its own. The Jacks posted a regular season record of 22-9 en route to its first regular season Summit League Conference championship, with a conference record of 13-3. Also, following a 73-67 win over rival North Dakota State University in the tournament championship, the Jacks have reached the NCAA tournament for the second year in a row.

SDSU's successful season could not have been possible without the dedication and determination of the players. The members of the 2012- 2013 South Dakota men's basketball team are: Jake Bittle, Brayden Carlson, Connor Devine, Matt Donlan, Jordan Dykstra, Joey Feilmeier, Tony Fiegen, Marcus Heemstra, Zach Horstman, Cory Jacobsen, Taevaunn Prince, Ruben Silva, Chad White, Joshua White, and Nate Wolters.

Finally, I would like to congratulate Coach Scott Nagy on winning his first Summit League Conference regular season title as well as his second consecutive tournament championship as head coach of the Jackrabbits. I also would like to congratulate assistant coaches Brian Cooley, Austin Hansen, Rob Klinkefus and graduate assistant Nick Goff.

The coaches and student athletes of SDSU's men's and women's basketball team should be very proud of all of their remarkable achievements this season. On behalf of the State of South Dakota, I am honored to congratulate the Jackrabbits on their impressive seasons and wish them the best of luck in the NCAA Tournaments. Go Jacks!

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak as in morning business for up to 12 minutes.

Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak about spending and its impact on economic growth. I think it is important Washington closely considers the true impact Federal spending and our soaring national debt are having on economic growth.

Over the past few weeks, the White House and the President have been out campaigning across the country and making statements aimed at causing fear and anxiety about the sequester. The White House has painted the sequester--which, keep in mind, amounts to just 2.4 percent of all Federal spending--as something which would lead to an economic disaster in this country.

The White House attempts to cause fear and anxiety have fallen flat. What is more, many of the claims which were made were simply false. In fact, the critics agree.

Bill Keller wrote in the New York Times: ``The White House spent last week in full campaign hysteria.''

The Washington Post issued four Pinocchios with regard to false claims made by Education Secretary Arne Duncan about the sequester's impact on teachers' jobs.

The National Journal states: ``The White House's strategy to exaggerate the immediate impact of the cuts has backfired.''

In Politico: ``For all the hype, spin and blame exchanged over the across-the-board cuts, the reality is they don't mean the sudden economic collapse of America.''

It is important to see the sequester in its overall context. All the hype associated with this could be analogous, I suppose, to all the hype we had yesterday about the weather. Everybody expected we were going to have the blizzard of 2013, and it never materialized. All of the predictions with regard to doom and gloom relating to sequester have also not amounted to very much.

The American people have picked up on that. I think most of them agree, if you look at public opinion polls, that Washington does need to tighten its belt. Washington does need to reduce its spending. Washington needs to lessen the appetite it has to take more of the American taxpayers' money and spend it on what most taxpayers view to be not really necessary.

When you talk about a 2.4-percent reduction in overall Federal spending, most Americans, when they evaluate their own financial situations, come to the conclusion most of them probably could absorb, if they had to, a 2.4-percent reduction in their own spending. They would look at their budgets in very realistic ways. They would scrutinize and examine where they could find spending which is low priority, things they could live without. What we have seen here in Washington from the administration is various heads of agencies and departments going out and trying to identify the biggest, most high- profile thing for dramatic effect in an attempt to scare and frighten the American people.

The American people recognize, and hopefully the administration has come to the conclusion as well, a 2.4-percent reduction in overall Federal spending is something we need to absorb here in Washington, DC, and demonstrate to the American people we are serious about getting Washington's fiscal house in order.

I have long maintained the sequester is not the best way to rein in Federal spending. There is a better way to do so. The reductions called for in the sequester disproportionately impact certain areas of the budget. We all know about the impact on the national security budget, which represents only 20 percent of Federal spending but gets 50 percent of the cuts in the sequester.

I would have preferred a different approach. Given the refusal of President Obama and Senate Democrats to come to the table and find alternative savings, the sequester has gone into effect. The President and most Senate Democrats wanted to see an increase in taxes, something many of us believe would be very harmful to the economy. If you look at what the President has already received in terms of tax increases since he has been in office, it amounts to about $1.7 trillion.

If you look at the last 4 years and all the promises which were made about additional spending, stimulus spending, $1 trillion in additional stimulus spending back when the President first took office, how that would impact the economy, we were told it would take unemployment down below 6 percent. We all know what has happened. We continue to experience sluggish, slow, anemic growth with chronic high unemployment, and we continue to pile massive amounts of debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren.

While the President has been seeking to cause alarm and cast blame with regard to the sequester, one must question the economic arguments he is making. The President and his allies in Congress claim he inherited a bad economy and increased spending is necessary to stimulate economic growth. President Obama's agenda, since he has been in office, has been to spend more, tax more, and regulate more.

As I mentioned earlier, over $1.7 trillion in new taxes has been imposed to be signed into law since he took office. The most recent of that, the fiscal cliff, was $620 billion on January 1. If you add up the tax increases in ObamaCare, there is over $1 trillion there. If you look at the $518 billion in new regulations which have been approved since the President took office, you may see we put an enormous amount of cost, burden, new requirements, mandates, and harm to the economy and the small businesses which create jobs: $1.7 trillion in new taxes, the $518 billion in new regulations.

What has been the impact of those policies? It is pretty clear average economic growth under this President has averaged eight-tenths of 1 percent, .8 percent of the overall share of the economy, GDP. This is less than 1 percent economic growth, on average, in the 4 years this President has been in office.

To put it in perspective, if you look at past Presidents when we have had economic downturns and recessions, President Reagan inherited a bad economy too. When he came to office, we were faced with a series of real economic circumstances: high inflation, high interest rates, and weak growth.

President Reagan put in place policies which were progrowth. He enacted progrowth tax reform, fewer regulations. The economy grew nearly three times as fast as it has under President Obama's watch.

The point, very simply, is if you put the right policies in place, if you make it less difficult and less expensive for our small businesses and our job creators to create more jobs, there are more jobs and economic growth. If you make it more difficult, more expensive, and harder for our small businesses and our job creators to create jobs, there are fewer jobs, less economic growth, and lower take-home pay for American families and workers.

If the Obama recovery was as strong as Reagan's, our economy would be $1.5 trillion larger today, meaning more jobs and more opportunity for Americans. This is assuming if you were getting a comparable level of growth in the economy. The fact is President Obama's spending, tax, and regulatory policies are hamstringing economic recovery, jobs, and opportunity.

Yesterday the Federal Reserve released the latest edition of its so- called beige book or more formally known as

the Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions. The beige book stated the 2010 health care law is being cited as a reason for layoffs and a slowdown in hiring.

This report, which examines economic conditions across various Federal Reserve districts throughout the country, stated: ``Employers in several districts cited the unknown effects of the Affordable Care Act as reasons for planned layoffs and reluctance to hire more staff.''

It is clear President Obama's policies are the real threat to our economy, not the sequester. A 2.4-percent across-the-board reduction in Federal spending here in Washington, DC, clearly--if you look at the rate of growth we have seen in spending since the President took office of over 20 percent in 2009, in the overall scheme of things, is something which is very reasonable. The American people see this as reasonable overall.

On the contrary, if you look at policies the President has put in place, whether this is more stimulus spending, growing government, higher taxes, more regulations, we are getting a very different picture of what those policies look like in terms of the impact on our economy. We have seen negative impacts, high-level spending, and high annual deficits during the President's first term. As a consequence of these statistics, there is slower economic growth.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an opinion piece by Michael Boskin, which he wrote earlier in the week. In this article Mr. Boskin makes the case that spending cuts will actually help the economy: ``Standard Keynsian models that claim a quick boost from higher government spending showed the effect quickly turns negative. So the spending needs to be repeated over and over, like a drug, to keep the hypothetical positive effect going.''

Mr. Boskin points to an academic study which found returning spending to pre-crisis, pre-Obama levels--about a 3-percent reduction in spending as a percentage of our entire GDP--would increase short-term economic growth because expectations of lower future taxes and debt lead to higher incomes, more private spending, and investment.

[From the Wall Street Journal, Mar. 4, 2013]

Larger Spending Cuts Would Help the Economy

(By Michael J. Boskin)

President Obama's most recent prescription for economic

growth--more government stimulus spending, new social

programs, higher taxes on upper-income earners, subsidies for

some industries and increased regulation for all of them--is

likely to have the same anemic results as in his first

administration.

Recall: The $825 billion stimulus program did little

economic good at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars

per job, even based on the administration's own inflated job

estimates. Cash for Clunkers cost $3 billion merely to shift

car sales forward a few months. The PPIP (Public-Private

Investment Program for Legacy Assets) to buy toxic assets

from the banks to speed lending generated just 3% of the $1

trillion that the program planners anticipated.

And now? Mr. Obama proposes universal preschool ($25

billion per year), ``Fix it First'' repairs to roads and

bridges, plus an infrastructure bank ($50 billion), ``Project

Rebuild,'' refurbishing private properties in cities ($15

billion), endless green-energy subsidies, and a big hike in

the minimum wage. The president and Senate Democrats also

demand that half the spending cuts under sequestration be

replaced with higher taxes.

These proposals are ill-considered. The evidence sadly

suggests the initial improvement in children's cognitive

skills from ``Head Start'' quickly evaporates. Higher minimum

wages increase unemployment among low-skilled workers. A

dozen recent studies in peer-reviewed journals, including one

by the president's former chief economic adviser Christina

Romer, document the negative effects of higher taxes on the

economy.

As for adventures in industrial policy, former Obama

economic adviser Larry Summers wrote a memo in 2009 about the

impending $527 million loan guarantee to Solyndra and other

recipients of government largess. ``The government is a

crappy v.c. [venture capitalist],'' he wrote, in what is also

the best postmortem. In 2010, Harvard economist Edward

Glaeser concluded in the New York Times that infrastructure

is poor stimulus because ``It is impossible to spend quickly

and wisely.'' Federal infrastructure spending should be dealt

with in regular appropriations.

Will more spending today stimulate the economy? Standard

Keynesian models that claim a quick boost from higher

government spending show the effect quickly turns negative.

So the spending needs to be repeated over and over, like a

drug, to keep this hypothetical positive effect going. Japan

tried that to little effect, starting in the 1990s. It now

has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio among the countries of the

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development--and

that debt is a prime cause, as well as effect, of Japan's

enduring stagnation.

The United States is heading in this wrong direction. Even

if the $110 billion in annual sequestration cuts are allowed

to take place, the Congressional Budget Office projects that

annual federal spending will increase by $2.4 trillion to

$5.9 trillion in a decade. The higher debt implied by this

spending will eventually crowd out investment, as holdings of

government debt replace capital in private portfolios. Lower

tangible capital formation means lower real wages in the

future.

Since World War II, OECD countries that stabilized their

budgets without recession averaged $5-$6 of actual spending

cuts per dollar of tax hikes. Examples include the

Netherlands in the mid-1990s and Sweden in the mid-2000s. In

a paper last year for the Stanford Institute for Economic

Policy Research, Stanford's John Cogan and John Taylor, with

Volker Wieland and Maik Wolters of Frankfurt, Germany's

Goethe University, show that a reduction in federal spending

over several years amounting to 3% of GDP--bringing

noninterest spending down to pre-financial-crisis levels--

will increase short-term GDP.

Why? Because expectations of lower future taxes and debt,

and therefore higher incomes, increase private spending. The

U.S. reduced spending as a share of GDP by 5% from the mid-

1980s to mid-1990s. Canada reduced its spending as share of

GDP by 8% in the mid-'90s and 2000s. In both cases, the

reductions reinforced a period of strong growth.

An economically ``balanced'' deficit-reduction program

today would mean $5 of actual, not hypothetical, spending

cuts per dollar of tax hikes. The fiscal-cliff deal reached

on Jan. 1 instead was scored at $1 of spending cuts for every

$40 of tax hikes.

Keynesian economists urge a delay on spending cuts on the

grounds that they will hurt the struggling economy. Yet at

just one-quarter of 1% of GDP this year, $43 billion of this

year's sequester cuts in an economy with a GDP of more than

$16 trillion is unlikely to be a major macroeconomic event.

Continued delay now leaves a long boom as the only time to

control spending. There was some success in doing this in the

mid-1990s under President Clinton and a Republican Congress.

More commonly the opposite occurs: A boom brings a surge in

tax revenues and politicians are anxious to spread the

spending far and wide.

In any case, the demand by Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats

that any dollar of spending cuts in budget agreements this

spring (to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal

year and when the debt limit again approaches) be matched by

an additional dollar of tax hikes is economically unbalanced

in the extreme. Those who are attempting to gradually slow

the growth of federal spending while minimizing tax hikes

have sound economics on their side.

To wrap up and put this into perspective, Federal spending has increased nearly 20 percent since 2009. Sequestration, the across- the-board spending reductions which will occur under the sequester, amount to a reduction of 2.4 percent out of a $3.5 trillion budget. Even with the sequester, the government will spend more this year than it did last year.

I would hope the President would begin to be honest with the American people about the impact of his tax hikes, his spending, and new regulations are having on our Nation's economic growth and recovery; more important, coming to the conclusion and being honest with the American people about that, change his policies; actually come to a conclusion based on what we have seen, 4 years of his policies, which is slow growth, and a .8 percent economic growth on average for the past 4 years. There is also, as I said before, high unemployment, chronic unemployment--which is still around that 8-percent level--and massive amounts of new debt we are piling on the backs of future generations.

Not only do we need the President, in terms of his rhetoric, to be honest with the American people, we need him to change his policies and take an honest look at the relationship between spending and economic growth. This shows the sequester will not have long-term negative impacts on the economy. We need to put the Federal Government on a stable fiscal path in order to create the kind of economic certainty needed in this country to grow the economy and create jobs.

Less spending by Washington, DC, actually will lead to greater economic growth, a private economy, more jobs for the American people, and higher take-home pay.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from Kentucky for yielding for a question. I appreciate his diligence in continuing at this late hour to get an answer to some very important questions.

I think many of us when we got up and came in this morning were preparing and getting ready for the big blizzard of 2013 which, of course, never materialized here in Washington, DC. Evidently, there were a lot of agencies of government that were not here today. Perhaps when they get back, maybe the Senator from Kentucky will get an answer to his question. I think it is a straightforward question.

I am someone this evening who has supported the use of drones in fighting the war on terror. I think they have been very effective in killing terrorists, people who want to do harm to the people of this country. But I think the question that has been raised by the Senator from Kentucky--and the reason we are here this evening--has to do with a straightforward issue. He has a sense of the Senate on which he is prepared to have the Senate go on record, and it is very simple and very straightforward. It says: Resolved that it is the sense of the Senate that, No. 1, the use of drones to execute or target American citizens on American soil who pose no imminent threat clearly violates the constitutional due process rights of citizens.

No. 2, the American people deserve a clear, concise, and unequivocal public statement from the President of the United States that contains detailed legal reasoning including, but not limited to, the balance between national security and due process, limits of Executive power, and distinction between treatment of citizens and noncitizens within and outside the borders of the United States, the use of lethal force against American citizens, and the use of drones and the application of lethal force within the United States territory.

It is a very straightforward resolution, a sense of the Senate, and all that the Senator from Kentucky is simply doing is trying to get a response and get a vote on that and make that the statement of the Senate. He obviously wants to get the President of the United States, the White House, and Mr. Brennan--whose nomination is pending before us--to make a clarification on that point.

It is not like this issue popped up overnight. The Senator from Kentucky has been trying for some time to get an answer to this question. He has submitted numerous letters addressed to Mr. Brennan.

This is a letter from February 12 where he poses numerous questions, one of which is: Do you believe that the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil? What about the use of lethal force against a non-U.S. person on U.S. soil? These are straightforward questions to which the Senator from Kentucky deserves an answer, and this is a perfectly fitting and appropriate time in which to try and get that answer.

The nomination of the CIA Director is an incredibly important and strategic position in this country, and under the Constitution of the United States, article II, section 2, the President has the power by and with the advice and consent of the Senate to make treaties provided two-thirds of the Senators concur. ``He shall nominate, and with the advice of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers, counsels, judges of the Supreme Court, and other officers of the United States.''

It is the advise and consent power that the Senate has under the Constitution that the Senator from Kentucky is exercising on this nomination.

Again, it has been pointed out many times on the floor of the Senate today this is not something that is a partisan issue. It is not a Democratic or Republican issue. This is something that has ramifications. It is a constitutional question. It has to do with due process under the law. It has to do with the advise and consent power of the Senate under the Constitution. So when the Senator from Kentucky continues to press the administration for a straightforward answer, he continues to get sort of these vague, ambiguous answers, if you will. Again, these are questions that did not just pop up overnight. Back on January 25 of this year, 2013, the Senator from Kentucky posed to Mr. Brennan a series of questions at that time. The follow-on letter, which I quoted from earlier, was from February 12. He put forward questions, such as:

Do you agree with the argument put forth on numerous

occasions by the executive branch that it is legal to order

the killing of American citizens and it is not compelled to

explain its reasoning in reaching this conclusion? Do you

believe this is a good precedent for the government to set?

He goes on to ask another question:

Would it not be appropriate to require a judge or court to

review every case before the individual in question is added

to a targeting list? Please describe the due process

requirements in place for those individuals being considered

for addition to a targeting list. Would you agree it is

paradoxical that the Federal Government would need to go

before a judge to authorize a wiretap on U.S. citizens

overseas but possibly not to order a lethal drone strike

against the same individual? If not, please explain why you

believe something similar to the FISA standard should not be

applied in regard to lethal actions against citizens of the

United States.

These are straightforward questions. These are questions to which I believe the Senator from Kentucky deserves an answer. Many of us this evening, at this late hour, are here to support him in that endeavor and his attempt at least to try--as this nomination moves through the process--to get the answers to the questions that would allow him to perform the advise and consent function that is in the U.S. Constitution as it applies to nominations and as it has been implemented here by the Senators in history.

I want to say to the Senator from Kentucky--and I have a question for him in a moment--that it is remarkable to see this process unfold. In my time here--and I came in the 2004 election; started my service in the U.S. Senate in January of 2005--I have not seen a time where we had a Senator who as a matter of principle stood down here for the number of hours he has today and insisted on getting some answers. I give him great credit for the job he has done in pressing this issue.

He has not been given that answer yet. It sounds as though it has kind of come up to the line a couple of times. It is very simple. They could put this thing to rest. All they have to do is come forward and answer that very simple question about the legal authority to target American citizens on American soil with drone attacks. It doesn't seem to me, at least, that it would be that hard of a question to answer. They say as a matter of policy

they have not done that and they don't have any intention of doing it in the future. Why don't we put this issue to rest once and for all, and the Senator from Kentucky will allow the process to go forward and Mr. Brennan can get his vote.

In the time I have been here, at least, it certainly is remarkable to me to see the amount of effort the Senator from Kentucky has put forward in trying to get an answer to a very straightforward question. I give him great credit for that, because a principled stand is something we don't see enough of around here. So to stand here and use his powers as a Senator in a way that is very fitting with the tradition and history of this great institution--we look at the U.S. Senate and those who have come before, the place of great characters of our history, including Calhoun and others who have graced the U.S. Senate and some of the great debates that have occurred in the past. It is nice to see a discussion and debate about a major constitutional issue, a major constitutional question.

I, as do many of my colleagues who are here this evening, support the Senator from Kentucky in his quest to get answers. I think it is certainly appropriate. I think it certainly should be expected that the administration respond to what are very straightforward questions with regard to the issue that has been raised by the Senator and I hope that answer will be forthcoming. If it is not, it is entirely possible, I suppose, that this could continue for some time into the future.

But in any event, I ask the Senator from Kentucky what it will take in terms of some sort of affirmation, some sort of answer, some sort of response from the White House, from the nominee, the Director of the CIA, to satisfy the question he has raised. It seems to me, at least as a Senator from South Dakota, that the question he poses is a straightforward and simple one and merely requires a very simple answer.

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

Madam President, we are hearing a lot of discussion here in Washington and around the country this week about the so-called sequester, which I think bears some explanation. Oftentimes we talk in terms and in such a way that I think ordinary Americans have a hard time understanding the arcane world and arcane lexicon we have here in Washington, DC. Basically we are talking about these spending cuts-- across-the-board cuts--that will take effect at the end of this week. It was a process that was put in place many months ago. In fact, if we go back to the Budget Control Act, which passed in August of 2011, we won't find very many people now who will claim paternity of that idea.

In fact, there is a big debate and a lot of finger pointing about whose idea this was and whose fault it was that we are where we are. I would simply point out that I think there are a lot of Republicans and Democrats who voted for the Budget Control Act, so clearly many of us voted in support of that as a last resort. Many of us didn't want that to happen. We wanted to see a deal worked out where we would actually address the major problems facing this country with regard to our spending and debt. But since that couldn't be negotiated between the President and the leadership of Congress, we ended up with this process where we had some immediate spending cuts taking effect--about $900 billion, with another $1.2 trillion to follow--hopefully achieved through reforms, including tax reform, entitlement reform, by a so- called supercommittee that met and convened for a while. However, when that committee failed to reach a conclusion, it set in process, set in motion, what we know today as sequester.

It was actually built to go until the 1st of January, in which case all of these things would take effect if nothing had happened. Clearly, nothing had happened. So when January rolled around, we ended up with this process we now know as sequester.

I wish to point out that the President has been running away from this; somehow this just imaginarily appeared, this idea of sequester. But if we go back and look at the origin of this, we see it was clearly something the President and his people put forward. Fine points have been laid out by Bob Woodward in his book and subsequent op-ed this last weekend in which he stated very clearly this was an idea that originated with the White House. In fact, Jack Lew, in his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, actually mentioned the fact that when they were looking at something they could use--a trigger, if you will--they drew upon the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings agreement that was agreed to back in 1985 by the Congress, and that incorporated this idea of a sequester, which included an across-the- board spending cut. So, basically, it came from the White House. It came from the President and his people. That is where the idea of sequester originated. So to suggest now that somehow they didn't know about this or they didn't have anything to do with it, that it isn't their responsibility, is completely contradictory to the facts, as has been delineated by Bob Woodward in his book and many others who are familiar with those discussions.

The point, very simply, is we have a process that was put in place a long time ago. We can go back to August 2011 when the Budget Control Act was passed to find out why we are where we are today.

The other thing that is interesting to me, which I think has now added to the narrative of trying to reconstruct the history of all this, is the idea that somehow there should have been taxes incorporated in this, that we needed to have a ``balanced approach'' in the sequester. That was never contemplated. This was all on the spending side. If we look at the history of this and we actually listen to, again, the people who are familiar with those discussions--and Bob Woodward, this weekend in his op-ed said: The President is moving the goalpost. The revenues and taxes were not a part of this. But now, all of a sudden, the White House is insisting upon: We want taxes to be a part of this.

What is ironic about that is they got taxes. They got a big fat tax increase on January 1 of this year. That wasn't balanced. There were no spending cuts. That was all taxes: $620 billion. So from our perspective, the tax issue has been dealt with. The President got revenues--revenues that weren't contemplated by the sequester in the first place. Yet, today, he gets up and argues that this needs to be a ``balanced'' plan, which is a euphemism around here for: We want more of your tax dollars. We want more taxpayers' money to come to Washington, DC. We want higher taxes. That is what that message is essentially saying.

When the President and many of his allies on Capitol Hill say: We want a balanced plan, that means they want tax increases--on top of the $620 billion in new taxes the President got on January 1 of this year.

Now, what is interesting to me about this whole process is it was reported this morning that the President has called a meeting on Friday. He now wants to convene a meeting on Friday to talk about these Draconian cuts that are going to go into effect, and he has been traveling all over the country picking the most high-profile, highly visible items he can that would suggest this is going to have this profoundly dramatic impact on people around this country. So now he is coming back to Washington. When? March 1. When is that? It is the day the cuts are designed to go into effect.

Where has the President been for the last year and a half? Where is the leadership in waiting until the very day these cuts are supposed to go into effect to say: Oh, let's have a meeting to talk about what we might be able to do to avoid the impact of these across-the-board spending reductions.

So March 1. OK, here we are, eleventh hour, once again, at the last minute, the President sweeps in and says he wants to do something to try to avert this sequester. But, again, remember: We have known about this for a year and a half. This is not a new revelation. We have known this was coming for a very long time.

The supercommittee failed to produce a result in November 2011. So it is almost a year and a half now we have known the sequester is coming. In fact, last summer we passed legislation in Congress that asked the administration to give us some detail and some specificity about where these cuts were going to take place, and we got some vague outline about that. We didn't get any report from the President that enumerated these because, frankly, I don't think they had gone through the process of trying to figure out what they were going to do with it.

So here we are now 18 months later, at the eleventh hour, and the President all of a sudden says: Let's have a meeting and talk about what we might be able to do to avoid the impact of these across-the- board spending reductions. Where is the leadership in that? Why weren't we doing that 12 months ago, 11 months ago, 10 months ago, 1 month ago, last week? Why weren't we talking about this earlier? Why do we have to wait until the very last day to have a discussion about this?

Well, evidently, the President is better at campaigning than he is at governing because he has been driving all over the country--I shouldn't say driving, flying all over the country, over 5,000 miles--over 5,000 miles--campaigning on this issue to try to scare people into believing that an $85 billion across-the-board spending reduction, which represents 2.4 percent of Federal spending this next year, is somehow going to be disastrous for our economy and for our country.

Frankly, I am not in any way diminishing the impact of spending reductions. Spending reductions will have some impact--there is no question about that--for sure. But to go out and say we are going to have 90-minute lines at airports, and we are not going to have meat inspectors, and all these things they are trying to put out there to scare the American people, to dramatize and, frankly, to traumatize the American people about a 2.4-percent reduction in overall Federal spending?

Now, if a person is a member of an average American family or an American business or anybody in this country, and they know they are going to have 2.4 percent less to work with next year, what do they do? They sit down around their kitchen table and figure out what those things are they spend money on that they can live without. It is a fairly simple exercise. In most cases, people are going to pick the low-priority items. They are going to pick the things they can probably live without. They are not going to pick the things they really need and rely upon and depend upon. But I think most Americans would agree they could find a 2.4-percent reduction in their annual spending if they had to. I think that is something ordinary, average Americans have to deal with all the time: Let's just tighten our belts a little bit; let's figure out how we can get along with 2.4 percent less spending.

Well, we are talking about 2.4 percent less spending on a $3.6 trillion annual Federal budget. What does that represent? So $85 billion is a lot of money. It is a lot of money anywhere. It is a lot of money in my State of South Dakota. In the small town I grew up in, those are dimensions we didn't even contemplate in most cases.

But we think about it this way: $85 billion, the amount of money we are asked to reduce in terms of the overall Federal spending this next year, is the equivalent of how much our country borrows every single month. Every 28 days, we borrow $85 billion. So every single month, we borrow--we put on the backs of our children and grandchildren--as much money as the Federal Government is being asked to live without for an entire year: 2.4 percent of annual Federal spending.

To be fair, people will say: Wait a minute. It is not 2.4 percent because it is just affecting a certain area of the budget, and they are right. It will represent a bigger percentage simply because so much of the budget has been walled off from this, the area where the real Federal spending is; where three-fifths to two-thirds of all Federal spending has essentially, for all intents and purposes, been protected or insulated from this. There is a small 2-percent cut that would occur in some of the mandatory areas of the budget, but for all intents and purposes, what really drives Federal spending year in and year out and what is going to represent, according to the Congressional Budget Office, about 91 percent of all Federal spending 10 years from now-- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps; mandatory Federal spending entitlement programs--that is pretty much walled off.

So we are increasingly shrinking the discretionary part of the budget which represents a smaller and smaller portion of Federal spending each and every year. But the reality is it still is 2.4 percent out of a $3.6 trillion annual budget that we are talking about. So it seems to me, at least, that all the hand-wringing that is going on in Washington right now and all the drama the President is trying to create by flying over 5,000 miles across the country, campaigning about the effects of this sequester, really gets lost in what I think every American has to deal with every single day and every single week and every single month and every single year; that is, sometimes they have to make do with a little bit less, and maybe Washington, DC, can figure out how to do that.

But we have to ask the question again: Where is the leadership? The President, on Friday, March 1--the day this happens--decides to have a meeting when we have known about this for 18 months. The Senate, under the leadership of the majority--the Democrats in the Senate--hasn't passed a budget now for 1,400 days. We have gone 1,400 days without a budget. We are going on 4 years without a budget. We spend $3.5 trillion, $3.6 trillion of the American taxpayers' money every single year, and we haven't had a budget that suggests how we are going to spend it now for going on 4 years. Where is the leadership?

The President of the United States submits a budget--which he will do sometime soon. He has missed the deadline already, but we assume it is coming in the next few weeks. But over the last couple of years when he submitted a budget to Congress, when it was voted on in the House and in the Senate, it didn't receive a single vote.

Now, it perhaps is not surprising it didn't receive a Republican vote because it had a lot of tax increases in it, but it didn't get a Democrat vote--zero, zilch--in the House or Senate. There wasn't a Republican or a Democrat who voted for the President's budget. Why? Because it wasn't serious. The President is not doing anything to meaningfully address out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt.

So here we are. The Budget Control Act finally did put in place some spending reductions, and now everybody is hyperventilating about what we can do to avoid them. How can we turn this off? How can we shut off the sequester?

I, frankly, believe we could do this in a much better way, a more responsible way when it comes to the spending reductions. We ought to do it in a way that doesn't put a disproportionate burden on the defense budget. National security represents 20 percent of total Federal spending, but it gets 50 percent of the cuts under the sequester. That is not the way it ought to happen. I am all for--and plans have been offered and twice passed by the House Republicans--to replace this sequester with other--what we believe are more responsible spending reductions. But that passed the House of Representatives; it can't pass in the Senate.

The President has had no interest in looking at some alternative. The only alternative he is interested in is the one that would do the most harm and the most damage to the American economy; that is, more taxes. If he gets taxes on this, if he gets taxes to turn off the sequester like the taxes he got on January 1, it will not be enough because it is never enough.

People who believe in big government and believe the way to solve deficits is to raise taxes are never going to raise enough revenue. If you do not address what is really afflicting our country--and that is out-of-control spending--you have not done anything to solve the problem, which the $620 billion tax increase on January 1 demonstrated. The amount of money, the

amount of revenue generated from that tax increase January 1 will fund the government this year for less than a week--less than a single week.

This is not a revenue problem. This is not a tax problem. This is a spending problem. It is time for some leadership. It is time for the President to quit campaigning, to come back here, and to start governing. But here we are--Friday, the day it is all set to take effect--we have a $16 trillion debt. The Congressional Budget Office says at the end of the next 10 years it is going to be $26 trillion. We are adding $1 trillion a year. We are borrowing 40 cents out of every $1 we spend. Revenues coming into the Treasury, according to the Congressional Budget Office, are going up, actually; and by 2015 they are going to be 19.1 percent of our entire economy, which is more than a percentage point higher than the 40-year historical average.

Revenues are going up, and for the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, revenues will exceed, by about a percentage point, the 40-year historical average. So revenues are coming up to above historical averages, and yet we continue to run trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.

Well, we have to get our spending under control. We have to get the economy going again. The Republican staff on the Joint Economic Committee put out a study that suggested if we had revenue growth like we have had--average revenue growth--for the past 60 years, if we had that in the past 4 years, the deficits today would be half of what they are. That is the impact of economic growth. That is why growing at 1\1/ 2\ to 2 percent is not enough. We have to grow at 3 to 4 percent. But to grow at 3 to 4 percent, we have to have policies that promote growth, that allow the economy to expand. We cannot keep piling on new taxes and new regulations and making it more difficult and more expensive for people who create jobs in this country to create those jobs.

So the economy will continue to grow at a sluggish, anemic rate. We will continue to have these high deficits, particularly if we do not get our spending under control. It is about exercising fiscal discipline and responsibility when it comes to our spending. It is about putting policies in place that promote job creation and growth in this country. That is what it is going to take to get this country back on track. Yet the President is out campaigning around the country. He comes back now at the eleventh hour, and on March 1 he decides to have a meeting at the White House to talk about something we have known was going to happen now for 18 months--18 months.

We have the most predictable crisis, according to the Simpson-Bowles Commission, we have ever seen--the spending and debt crisis that is in front of us. We have known about it for a long time. You can see it. It is like a slow-moving train wreck out there. You are just watching it. You just know it is going to happen, and yet nobody is doing anything to turn off the engines.

It is high time we did that. I hope the President will engage. I hope we will get for the first time now in almost 4 years, 1,400 days, a budget in the Senate that puts a plan in place--a real plan, not a fake plan, not a phony plan, not a plan that has a bunch of tax increases, but a plan that actually addresses what drives Federal spending and debt in a way that will put us on a more sustainable fiscal path and ensure that future generations of Americans have a higher standard of living, a higher quality of life than what previous generations have had, not a lower and a less one. That is the path we are headed on today if we do not change course.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about the fiscal challenges facing this country, and particularly the spending problem we have and how it impacts not only the economy but also the lives of the American people.

Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released the latest Budget and Economic Outlook, which confirmed the threat that long-term fiscal imbalances pose to the Nation's economy. The Congressional Budget Office found that the national debt will climb by $10 trillion, to $26 trillion, over the next 10 years if Federal spending continues on its current trajectory.

Spending on mandatory programs will remain on auto pilot, resulting in high annual deficits. To kind of put things in perspective, if you go back to 2007 and you look at what the Federal Government spent, it was about $2.7 trillion annually. If you look at what the Federal Government spent in fiscal year 2012, which ended September 30 of last year, it was $3.5 trillion, an increase of nearly 30 percent.

Inflation during that same time period was 10.8 percent, meaning that government grew at almost three times

the rate of inflation. Again, I want to emphasize what I think is an important point here, because in the discussion we are having about spending and debt, there is somehow this assertion that has been made that this is not a spending problem, that actually this is more a revenue issue.

Well, again, if you look at what has happened just in the past 5 years, spending has increased nearly 30 percent, Federal spending, or at a rate of almost three times the rate of inflation. So clearly spending has increased dramatically just in the last 5 years. The trend is projected to continue over the next 10 years and beyond, with spending exceeding its historical average over that time period, and then ballooning in the years beyond that.

Such levels of spending will cause the Federal debt to grow, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, ``Such a large debt would increase the risk of a fiscal crisis during which investors would lose so much confidence in the government's ability to manage its budget that the government would be unable to borrow at affordable rates.''

Again, why is this important? Well, obviously, if the deficits continue to continue year after year, adding more and more to the Federal debt, eventually investors are going to lose confidence in our government. They are going to demand a higher return, higher interest rate when we borrow money. That obviously has an impact all across the economy. Because when interest rates go up, everything else that is pegged to it goes up. If you look at middle-class Americans who are trying to borrow money, for example, to buy a home or to get a college education or for a small business to make investments in order to create and expand jobs, the interest rates go up for everyone. Inflation also goes up if the Nation's fiscal challenges are not addressed, meaning that the hard-earned dollars are not going to go as far. That is going to put further pressure on hard-working middle-class families.

The threat of the budget challenges facing this country and our economy is very real, because of this report that came out last week from the Congressional Budget Office. It confirmed we are headed toward Greece if we do not take the steps that are necessary to change the direction we are on.

A lot of that reality, however, unfortunately, is lost on lots of people here in Washington, DC. As I said earlier, there has been this debate about whether we do, in fact, have a spending problem. Over the weekend, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, repeated what has become doctrine to many in the Democratic Party; that is, the idea that the U.S. Government does not have a spending problem.

She said, ``It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem.'' This comes from the top Democrat in the House of Representatives. ``It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem.'' Well, obviously the White House scrambled quickly the next day to come out: Yes, yes, we know we have a spending problem.

But there is reporting out there that suggests the President of the United States has also made this assertion, that this is not a spending problem. I do not know how you can examine the Federal budget projections and not come to the conclusion that we have a spending problem. It is driving our national debt, a debt that is very harmful to our economy.

You have to look no farther than the Congressional Budget Office report last week to see that this is a spending problem, not a revenue problem, because that same CBO report said that the revenue--money that is raised by the Federal Government--is returning to its historical average of 17.9 percent of GDP. That is the way we have measured the amount of revenue coming into the Treasury as a percentage of our entire economy. You measure that over time, and getting back to the historical average, the 40-year average would be 17.9 percent.

If you look at the year 2015 as a case in point, the revenues get back to 19.1 percent of GDP, which is a 25-percent increase in 2 years, significantly exceeding the historical average. If you look at the 10- year outlook the CBO came up with, they said revenues would average 18.9 percent over the next decade, which is almost a full percentage point more than the 40-year historical average.

The point is this: Revenues are not only at historic levels, will be there by 2015 and stay there for the next decade, but they will exceed the historic average for revenues over the next 10 years. So clearly, what we are talking about here is not a problem of Washington taxing too little, it is a problem of Washington spending too much.

I know that truth is hard and that math is hard to accept for the people who want to grow government, but we absolutely have to govern in reality. What the math shows is that mandatory spending, which as I said is on auto pilot, continues to squeeze the Federal Government and the Federal budget to a point where we are going to face a Greece-style fiscal crisis if Washington continues to punt on the hard decisions that have to be made.

Mandatory spending comprised roughly 60 percent of Federal spending in fiscal year 2012. If you look at the big drivers of mandatory spending, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represented 40 percent of that total, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Congress and the administration have an opportunity in the coming months to reform these entitlement programs not only to get this country back on a more sustainable fiscal track but also to save and protect these programs not only for current retirees but for future generations of Americans as well.

That is why I was disappointed last night that the President, in his State of the Union Address, failed to lay out a plan to address the fiscal challenges our country faces. I hope the President and my colleagues here in the Congress will come to the table and work with us to solve these problems, particularly as we consider ways to address the sequester, the continuing resolution which follows after that, and the fiscal year 2014 budget resolution.

We cannot simply wait and watch these programs crumble under the weight of looming insolvency. We know Social Security operated at a cash deficit in 2010. The Medicare trustees have told us that Medicare will be insolvent by the year 2024 and the HI trust fund actually as early as the year 2016. If we are going to keep the promises we have made to current retirees and to future generations of Americans, we have to make these programs solvent. That means we have to reform them in a way that saves and protects them and makes sure they are fiscally sustainable not only for today but for the future as well.

I have to say, as I listened to the debate about the issues of spending and debt, there is an argument that is made by those on the other side that this is just because of the two wars, and the two wars drove up spending; you know, they were not paid for and that is the reason we have this $16.4 trillion debt. Well, obviously the wars have contributed to that. But if you look at through 2012, that is about $1.4 trillion. Obviously, I would say, to be fair, Republicans have contributed to this as well as Democrats. When Republicans were in charge of the Congress, we did not do a good enough job of keeping spending under control.

But the fact is even if you count in spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, that is about $1.4 trillion. The total debt now, as I said, is over $16 trillion, scheduled to go to $26 trillion 10 years from now. Over the course of the first 4 years of this President's term, his first term in office, the debt has increased almost $6 trillion. So it is hard to feature any objective analysis of these facts and this data and say it was the wars that somehow caused all of this.

Washington has been overspending for a long time. It is high time for those habits to change. If you look at the war that is winding down, the cost of that, the resources we are putting into these conflicts, those dollars are not going to be showing up again as expenditures in the next few years. We still have the Congressional Budget Office telling us at the end of the next decade we will have added an additional $10 trillion to the debt. So clearly that has certainly been a factor, but it has not been the main factor.

There is again no objective analysis that would suggest spending on the wars has been the driving reason for why we are facing the debt crisis we have today. I would simply say too

that when you are in a hole, it is advisable to quit digging.

Obviously, we continue to look at ways to add more and more spending and, therefore, more and more debt. The health care bill is not something anybody on my side here in the Senate supported when it passed in 2009 and early 2010. But that too is going to drive up spending and is going to drive up debt as we head into the future.

You heard from the President last night a whole new series of new spending initiatives, ``investments,'' he called them, in a whole range of areas. As he was sort of laying that out, those of us who were listening to that message were thinking to ourselves: Okay, if you put a calculator on this thing, it keeps going and going and going. Yet the President said we did not need to add a single dime to the deficit. Well, I do not know how anybody could accept that with a straight face. It flat does not pass the smell test.

We have a spending problem here in Washington, DC. The facts bear that out. The revenues are going up. They are going to go up 25 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in the next 2 years. In 2015 they will be at 19.1 percent of GDP, an average we have not seen--or a number we have not seen in a long time. Then they will stay roughly at that for the next decade. This is not a revenue problem. This is not a problem where Washington taxes too little. This is a problem where Washington spends too much.

If you look at the other side of the equation, spending continues to go up as a percentage of GDP. We see a little bit of relief here in the next few years, but then when the cost of the Affordable Care Act starts hitting, when you start seeing the demographics of the country, as they continue to change, if we do not do something to save and protect Social Security and Medicare for future generations, it is going to bankrupt us.

We are headed for a train wreck. We have to do something about that and recognize what that problem is. That problem purely and simply is that Washington spends too much. It is a spending problem. That is why, again, when I heard the top Democrat, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, say over the weekend that it is a false argument to say this is a spending problem, I was shocked, because I think most Americans would argue, as they look at this, and they can do the math, Washington has a very serious spending problem which needs to be addressed. It needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

I thought the report that came out from the Congressional Budget Office last week was instructive for a number of reasons. It pointed out the impact that debt is going to have as we face this debt crisis in terms of interest rates, in terms of inflation, in terms of loss of jobs, and a more sluggish economy. We know from history that when you get a certain amount of debt, it becomes such a drag on your economy that it reduces economic growth. So we have seen this anemic, sluggish economic growth which is going to be continued now for the foreseeable future. We have slower growth, fewer jobs, massive amounts of debt. Eventually what that is going to mean for the middle-class American is higher interest rates when it comes to buying a home, when it comes to buying a car, when it comes to financing a college education. It is going to mean lower take-home pay when the economy slows down and there is not the demand for workers out there. There are so many adverse impacts on our economy from carrying the kind of debt load we are carrying today. I think we have a responsibility to lead.

I hope the President of the United States will lead on this issue; that he in his budget will put forward the types of remedies that are necessary not only to deal with our short-term crisis in the sequestration but also to put us long term on a sustainable fiscal path by proposing reforms, reforms to these programs that are driving Federal spending, that are going to add massive amounts to our debt over the course of the next decade and beyond, and at the same time look at things we can be doing that would generate economic growth, that would create jobs in this country. Because when the economy is growing and expanding, then all of these other problems look much smaller by comparison.

Republicans here in the Senate are ready to work with the President, work with Democrats.

We are anxious to go to work on entitlement reform to save Social Security and Medicare. We are anxious to go to work on reforming our Tax Code in a way that would unleash economic growth to obtain the robust growth we need in the economy to create jobs and make the debt crisis we face look much smaller by comparison.

I hope in the days ahead the President of the United States, the leadership on Capitol Hill, and the Congress will do what we should have done a long time ago. It is long overdue for action. It is high time that we become busy and do the work of the American people, which is about providing a more secure, prosperous, and a safer, debt-free future for future generations. Anything less is negating or undermining the responsibility we have to the American people.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I recognize Elaine Balsley, an intern in my Rapid City, SD, office for all of the hard work she has done for me, my staff, and the State of South Dakota over the past few months.

Elaine is a graduate of Stevens High School in Rapid City, SD. Currently, she is attending Black Hills State University where she is majoring in mass communications. She is a hard worker who has been dedicated to getting the most out of her internship experience.

I would like to extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to Elaine for all of the fine work she has done and wish her continued success in the years to come.

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

I ask unanimous consent that the period for morning business be extended until 3 p.m. today and that all provisions of the previous order remain in effect.