Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I rise to speak about one of the most significant issues we have confronting us as a nation, our rising deficits and debt. At the end of the last fiscal year, which just concluded at the beginning of October, end of September, we determined we had a $1.4 trillion deficit--$1.4 trillion.

It is projected that we will have trillion-dollar deficits for the next 10 years under the President's budgets as President Obama has brought them forward. Yesterday we had a vote not to do cloture on a bill the administration supported, and which was brought forward here, which would have put another $300 billion onto the Federal debt to pay for what is known as the doctors fix.

The doctors fix is something which should occur. We have done it around here before. We have done it every year for about 8 years; that is, reimbursing doctors at a fair rate rather than having their rates cut. But we have always paid for it.

But yesterday there was an attempt by the leadership on the other side of the aisle to pass a bill which would have not paid for the doctors fix and which would have put $300 billion of new debt onto our children's backs; so that every time somebody walked into a doctor's office and was reimbursed under Medicare, that bill, whether it was for a flu shot or whether it was for serious disease issues, would have been taken and passed directly to our children rather than paid for today, as it should have been. So it was a totally irresponsible act to try to increase the debt by $300 billion in order to take care of the doctors fix. But that was what was attempted. Fortunately that failed. At least as of yesterday it failed.

There was bipartisan appreciation in the Senate. All of the Republicans voted against doing that, and 12 Democrats and 1 Independent voted against doing it, and that was good. That was a good sign to the American people that maybe we are finally taking the deficit and the debt seriously.

The reason I wanted to speak today on this matter is because we are getting some significant warning signs, some flashing yellow lights that are moving from yellow, maybe, to red from the world community that we better do something about our debt and our deficit or the world community is going to react to it.

About 4 months ago now the Chinese, who are the primary owners of our debt--in other words, when we spend $1.4 trillion more than we have in a year like we did last year or we spend $1 trillion more than we have every year for the next 10 years as is being

proposed by the President, we have to get that money from somewhere. We have to borrow it from somebody. Someone has to be willing to lend us that money, that $1 trillion, that $1.4 trillion.

Well, the countries that have that type of money and are willing to lend it to us are countries such as China and Russia and Saudi Arabia. They have surpluses in their economies. They are not running deficits in their governments, so they have surpluses. They have, historically, at least over the last few years, been willing to buy our treasuries, our notes to finance the government operation in the United States.

About 4 months ago the leadership of the Chinese Government said: Well, we are getting a little concerned. We are still going to buy American treasuries. We are still going to help you finance your deficit. But you have to do something about this because we are concerned about the value of what we are buying. We are concerned that those IOUs we are buying from you may not be worth what we are paying for them on face value if you continue to run your deficit that you have.

That was a fairly large warning sign from a country which obviously has not historically been close to us but which is one of our largest trading partners, and which is, whether we like it or not, buying up all of this debt when we run these massive deficits, or a lot of this debt.

Another warning sign came at us when the dollar, which has historically been the reserve currency of the world--in other words, countries hold dollars in order to maintain their own structure of reserves for their countries. The dollar started to be discussed as maybe not the best reserve currency, and there have been a number of rumors and some representations by some Finance Ministers around the world that people might not want to use the dollar any longer as their reserve currency. They may want to use some other currency--maybe the euro or some basket of currencies, maybe the euro, the yen, or maybe just use commodities or maybe use IMF drawing rights, a whole series of different ideas.

What does that reflect? That reflects that people are not too confident in our future ability to maintain and defend the value of the dollar. Why are they not confident about that? Well, they are not confident about it because they are looking at the deficits we are running. They are looking at the debt we are piling up, and they are saying: Hold it. How are you going to pay all of that off? If you put $13, $14, $15, $16 trillion worth of debt on your Nation, if you take your public debt from 38 percent of GDP up to 80 percent of GDP or more, how are you going to pay that off, United States?

That is a legitimate question because there are only a few ways it can be paid off. One of them, unfortunately, is by using inflation, and that devalues the dollar and it devalues all of that debt people have bought. That is why we are hearing more and more that people, first, are worried about using the dollar as their reserve currency because they do not want to see its value drop; and, secondly, they are worried about buying our debt.

So we are getting some serious caution lights from the international community about the fact that we are running these massive deficits and this massive debt. Just yesterday, I think one of the most serious caution lights came out because there are groups in this world, small groups of people--Moody's and Standard & Poor's--who basically look at the currencies and the debt of various nations and they do that also for companies and they rate the debt. The rest of the world's financial activities look at those ratings because they are considered to be of very high caliber and very high standard. They allow people in other places to be able to assess the value of the debt they might want to buy.

So if you want to buy debt from XYZ country, you look at Moody's or Standard, that has taken a hard look at that country's debt, evaluated it, and they will tell you whether it is rated AAA, AA, A. That determines how much it is going to cost a country to lend to you. That will determine the amount of interest rate on that debt because if it is not AAA, which is the best rated debt, then people are going to be less likely to invest in it. If they do invest in it, they are going to want a higher return because they are going to be at bigger risk because they know that debt might not be paid back. If it is paid back, it might be paid back in devalued dollars or devalued currency of that country.

So, historically, American debt, the Treasury note, has been the gold standard for the world. In fact, it is technically the gold standard. Most people use it as the reserve fund. When the world went off the gold standard, the dollar basically became the way people maintained and conserved their assets. They would invest in Treasury notes and know that the treasuries were always safe. It was always determined that Treasury notes were safe because the United States always was going to pay back its debt.

So the United States has always had a AAA rating. That is hugely important to us as a nation. It is hard to appreciate as just an ordinary American going to work every day and trying to make ends meet that the AAA rating of the United States is important to them, but it is. It affects everything in this country that has to do with credit.

If the United States were to lose its AAA rating, all credit would go up, and the costs in this country. It would be much harder to buy a house because the interest rates would be higher. It would be harder to buy a car because the interest rates would be higher. It would be harder to send a child to college because the interest rates would be higher. Everything is tied to the fact that treasuries have AAA ratings. It has always been presumed that they would.

In the post-World War II period, it has always been presumed that the United States, the strongest economy in the world, the most vibrant economy in the world, would always have the gold standard for the debt it issues, that it would always be a AAA-rated event. Well, as a result of our profligate nature as a country and as a Congress, as a result of having run up these massive deficits, we are getting a very large yellow flashing light from the rating agencies.

They are saying this--this was an October 22 news report from Reuters:

The United States, which posted a record deficit in the

last fiscal year, may lose its AAA rating if it does not

reduce the gap to a manageable level in the next 3-4 years.

That is according to Moody's Investors Service.

The AAA rating of the United States is not guaranteed.

Steve Hess, Moody's lead analyst for the United States, said in an interview on Reuters Television:

So if you do not get the deficit down in the next 3-4 years

to a sustainable level, then the rating will be in jeopardy.

Those are words that should make us in the Congress pause because they are directed right at us. The most sophisticated and important evaluator of America's deficit situation and debt, Moody's ratings service, is saying if we as a Congress do not do something within the next 3 to 4 years to bring our debt under control, and our deficits down, we may jeopardize the AAA rating of the United States.

I can think of nothing that would be more irresponsible for a Congress to do to the American people than to jeopardize and put at risk the AAA rating of this country. Maybe only after disarming ourselves in the face of a potential terrorist threat or the use of a weapon of mass destruction, I can think of nothing which would have a larger impact on our populous than for the Congress to put in place fiscal policies which would jeopardize our ability to sell bonds, American debt around the world at a reasonable price, and put at risk the value of the dollar and the status of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world, as a result of putting at risk the AAA rating of our bonds.

That is exactly what we are doing. This gentleman, Mr. Hess, said we have to, within the next 3 or 4 years, put in place a manageable plan, a realistic plan, that will address the deficit and debt of the United States.

Are we doing that now? We are doing just the opposite. Just yesterday this Congress tried to pass $300 billion of new debt for ordinary expenses, for daily expenses of paying doctors. We were going to give an IOU to our children and our grandchildren 5, 10 years from now. Total irresponsibility.

Last week it was the White House suggesting we do the exact same thing in Social Security for $13 billion. A couple of months ago we did the same thing on cash for clunkers for $5 billion. A budget was passed by this Congress, which does it for the whole Nation--it creates $1 trillion of unfunded liability and deficits for the next 10 years every year.

Now we have this health care bill coming at us, which is going to increase the size of the government by $1 to $2 trillion, which is represented that it is paid for, but that is only because they phase in the expenses 4 years after they phase in the income and thus are able to match 10 years of income versus 6 years of expenses. So they claim it is paid for.

When the bill is fully phased in, it will not be paid for. It is going to be a huge cost to the Federal Government, and even if it were paid for, it would be taking massive resources in the area of Medicare by $400 billion and it is going to raise fees by $500 billion. Instead of using those resources to reduce the debt, it will use them to create a brand new major entitlement at a time when we have on the books entitlements which we can't afford today.

Medicare has a $34 trillion unfunded liability. Yet we will add a new major entitlement on top of Medicare and Medicaid, and we will pay for part of it by cutting Medicare. Still, instead of cutting Medicare for the purposes of paying for that, we should be using Medicare savings for the purposes of making Medicare solvent. We should not be growing the government. We are going to do a $1 to $2 trillion increase in the size of government. I will absolutely guarantee that that will not be fully paid for and that a large percentage of that will go to our debt.

On top of having deficits which are already projected to be a trillion dollars a year for the next 10 years, we are seeing a Congress which is being incredibly spendthrift in its approach to all sorts of areas: $300 billion to pay doctors, new debt; and who knows how much out of this health care bill. I am willing to bet the family farm that it will be well over a trillion dollars of new debt when it is fully phased in; new programs in the area of Social Security, which is already bankrupt, unpaid for, added to the debt; new programs for this favorite group, cash for clunkers or whatever the issue is of the day. We are totally out of control on the spending side of the ledger.

It is not a revenue issue. It is a spending issue. Revenues have historically been about 19 percent of GDP. Spending has been about 20 percent of GDP. But under the budget which we have been given, independent of the health care bill, spending goes from 20 percent of GDP up to 23 percent. And when we throw in this health care bill, we are heading toward 24, 25 percent of GDP. Revenues, if they maintain their historic levels once the recession is over, go back to 19 percent of GDP, but we still have a 6 to 7-percent gap because spending has gone up so much.

I appreciate the fact that this administration comes with a philosophy--and they won the election--that we create prosperity by growing the government. The President said that. People around him said that. Members on the other side of the aisle say that. We create prosperity by growing the government. But we don't create prosperity if we let the government grow so fast that it can't be paid for. Government cannot be allowed to grow any faster than it can be paid for. In my opinion, prosperity doesn't come from the government to begin with. Prosperity comes from entrepreneurs who are willing to create risks and create jobs. Independent of that philosophical debate, the simple fact is, if we allow government to grow a lot faster than we have the capacity to pay for it, we create debt. It is that debt and these independent people looking at that debt who are giving us these massive caution lights and saying: Slow down, get your house in order.

People who are buying our debt around the world are saying it. People who use the dollar as reserve currency around the world are saying it. And now Moody's, the clear, independent arbiter of what the value of debt is and what its likelihood of repayment is, is saying it in the most stark way. The AAA rating of the United States is not guaranteed, Steve Hess of Moody's, said. So if they don't get the deficit down in the next 3 to 4 years to a sustainable level, the rating will be in jeopardy.

We need to heed those words. We need to get some discipline around here, and we need to stop having proposals which dramatically increase the size of the government and continue to put us on a path where we pass debt on to our children which will cause them to have a much lower standard of living than we had and which will cause them to be unable to send their children to college, to buy their first home and afford a car, because they will be confronting a nation where the debt is absorbing so much of the productivity of the economy or where inflation has basically priced them out of the markets.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I believe I am recognized now for 10 minutes.

Mr. President, I wish to speak on another topic, but I was fascinated by the presentation of the Senator from Tennessee. I think we are all

concerned about the direction of this calling out. I take it the Senator from Tennessee is suggesting this administration is ``Nixifying'' the White House; is that correct?

I may have just made up that word. Hopefully, it will be added to the lexicon.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Tennessee. He has made some valuable points on that issue.

Mr. President, I rise today to continue a discussion I have pursued on this floor a few times, and it deals with where our country is going and what we are passing on to our children.

I often quote the chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Conrad from North Dakota, because I have immense respect for him. He has said--and I agree with him and I think most Americans, when they think about it, agree with him--that the debt is the threat, the fact that we as a nation are running up this incredible debt which we are going to pass on to our children. To try to put it in context is very difficult because the numbers are so huge. I have talked about it numerous times here--the fact that we are running deficits at approximately $1 trillion over the next 10 years under the President's budget; that we are seeing 5 to 6 percent of GDP in deficits; that the public debt goes from about 38 percent of GDP up to well over 80 percent of GDP under the most recent estimates. But these numbers are incomprehensible to people because they are so big. We are talking trillions and trillions of dollars, and the implication of these numbers is staggering to our next generation--to our children and our children's children--because it means they have to bear the burden of paying this debt that is going to be put on their backs.

Last week, the deficit for this last fiscal year was pegged at about $1.4 trillion--an incredible amount. That is three times the largest debt in our history, in numeric terms. As a percentage of GDP, we haven't had those types of numbers since World War II. Nobody is arguing that deficit is not an event and something we don't like but that we probably have to tolerate because of the fact that we have been through this very difficult situation with the recession and the potential meltdown of our financial houses. It took a lot of money to try to stabilize the situation, and I am not holding that against this Presidency at all.

The problem is, as we go forward we are seeing these deficits expand. There is no reason to maintain that type of deficit once we are past this recessionary period, once the financial situation has been settled down. For all intents and purposes, we are moving past that situation, so the deficits should start coming down. But they aren't coming down. They aren't coming down. And today we are about to see one of the reasons they aren't coming down because today it is being proposed that we add another $250 billion to the debt by doing something called the doctors fix and not paying for it.

It is not an extraordinarily complicated issue. Basically, we don't reimburse doctors at a rate they should be reimbursed under Medicare because of a rule we passed back in the 1990s. It gets cut arbitrarily and in a way which has no relationship to what is a proper reimbursement rate. So every year since we passed that rule and it turned out it wasn't going to work right, we have corrected that. We have reimbursed the doctors at a reasonable rate. But every year we have done that, we have paid for that change, so that the cost of reimbursing doctors fairly did not get passed on to our children. I mean, if you pass that cost on to our children, when somebody goes to get an eye exam, someone who is in their eighties or seventies or sixties and who is on Medicare, when they get the bill from the doctor, essentially we are saying: Oh, I am sorry, the government is not going to pay that--the government you are a part of today. We are going to take that bill and give it to a child who is not even born yet, and they are going to have to pay that bill. But it is an expense today, and it should be paid today by the government.

We are having this proposed today on this floor, by this administration: that we should spend $250 billion to correct this doctors fix problem for the next 10 years, which is about what it will cost, but not pay for it, just simply take it and send the bill off to our kids. It is actually more than $250 billion because that $250 billion, when you put it on the debt, will generate interest responsibilities of about $50 billion. So it is actually a $300 billion item. That is not small change; that is a third of a trillion dollars. That is huge money. That is a tremendous burden to transfer over to our children.

Do you know why this is being done? It is being done for a very cynical reason. The health care reform package is being discussed somewhere in this building behind closed doors. It is being written in some office over on that side of the Capitol by three or four Members of the Senate and a lot of staff from the Democratic side, with no participation by Republican Members, no participation by the American people, and the press is totally locked out of the room. The bill is being rewritten over there, but we do know that within the parameters of the bill is the representation that it won't cost more than $1 trillion over a 10-year period. So all sorts of games are being played to try to keep it under $1 trillion.

The most significant and most cynical and most inappropriate game-- though it is not a game, really--the most inappropriate action is this idea that they are going to take $250 billion to fix the doctors reimbursement program, which is clearly part of health care, and move it entirely out of the health care system reform effort. They will move it over here somewhere and claim they don't have to pay for it. They will just send the bill to the kids. Don't worry about it, it is only $250 billion. Just send the bill to the kids. Don't worry about it. And then, voila, they will have $250 billion they can spend on health care reform that should have been used for the doctors fix.

But now, since they have claimed the doctors fix doesn't matter--it is somewhere over here, out of sight, out of mind, being taken care of by our children and grandchildren--voila, they can spend that $250 billion on goodies, on initiatives within the new health care reform bill, which will cost the taxpayers $250 billion in order to do it. And I presume it will get them a few constituencies to support them because they have just spent $250 billion on them.

So the true cynicism of this is that it doubles up the doctors fix cost. Not only does the doctors fix not get paid for, but it will then create $250 billion worth of new spending. So it is actually a doubling up of this whole exercise. It is a doubling down event here. You know, it is almost a Bernie Madoff--well, it is a Bernie Madoff approach to funding. I mean, basically, this is an entire scam. Unfortunately, in this instance--and obviously in the Bernie Madoff instance the people who invested with him were wiped out, but they made a choice to invest with him. Our children and grandchildren are going to get this bill without any rights. This $250 billion bill is going to be sent to them, and then the spending is going to occur, which they are also going to have to pay for. It is going to be added on top of the health care bill. It is Bernie Madoff comes to Washington and does our budgeting for us, and it is inexcusable that we would do this to the next generation.

Some are suggesting: Well, let's do a 1-year or a 2-year fix. This was the original plan of Senator Baucus with regard to his bill. Let's just sort of ignore the fact that the doctor problem exists for the next 10 years even though we are doing a 10-year health care reform bill here. What is the effect of that? Well, yes, for at least 1 or 2 years you pay for it. That was the proposal in the original bill that came out of the Finance Committee--1 year, I believe, they paid for it, 9 years they didn't pay for it. What did that mean? One year paid for was $11 billion, I think. So we

know the cost of the whole thing for 10 years is $250 billion. So what they got was $239 billion to spend under the Baucus bill as it came out of the Finance Committee because they just simply ignored the concept that the doctors fix had to be done too. That also is a pretty cynical act--not as cynical as the idea you are going to pass the full $250 billion fix and not pay for it, any of it, which is what we will be voting on later today, but still pretty cynical in that they would basically be spending $239 billion which they know we don't have.

I ask unanimous consent to speak for an additional 30 seconds.

So they know we don't have the $239 billion, but at least they admit it is there and they don't try to pass the whole bill off to our children.

So as we go forward in this health care debate, let's have no more sanctimonious claims that we are being fiscally responsible and producing bills that are in balance and that don't add to the deficit, not when we put a $250 billion IOU on our children's backs. It is totally inappropriate.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I congratulate the Senator from Arizona and the Senator from South Dakota for framing this debate on health care with very specific and excellent points.

The simple fact is that the cost of this program is grossly understated, but the cost is extraordinary, even when understated-- almost a trillion dollars. The real cost is $1.8 trillion, when it is fully phased in. In fact, if you include in it the doctor fix, which was taken off the table so the cost would look better, which is $200 billion-plus, the cost of this proposal, when fully phased in, is over $2 trillion over a 10-year period.

And the offsets that are going to be used to pay for this? Their plan is basically to cut Medicare Advantage, eliminate that program for seniors--a lot of seniors like Medicare Advantage--and try to save about $400 billion doing that and take that money and create a brand new entitlement to benefit people who do not have insurance or people who do not have enough insurance, as defined by this bill. In addition, they will raise taxes and raise fees. Most of the fees will be coming in from the hospital associations, the doctors, the drug companies, and the insurers, all of which will be passed through, of course, to consumers in the form of higher premiums or higher costs. Again, it is going to be the consumers of America, Middle America, the people who use health care in this country, who are going to pay the cost.

It is a huge gap even between the stated amount that is going to be raised in this bill, and the real expenditure in this bill. And that gap goes directly onto the debt of our children--the debt of this country, which has to be paid for by our children.

This is in the context of an administration which has exploded the size of government in the first 10 months of its term--exploded the size of government. They have proposed a budget which over the next 10 years will run on the average $1 trillion of deficit every year, which will take the Federal debt from about 41 percent of gross domestic product up to 80 percent of gross domestic product, which will take Federal spending from about 20 percent of gross domestic product up to about 25 percent of gross domestic product.

What do all those numbers mean? They mean quite simply that our children are going to be passed a country which will have so much debt and such a large government that it simply cannot afford it; that the quality of life of our children, as they move into their earning years, is going to be fundamentally undermined--their ability to buy a home, their ability to send their kids to college, their ability to just live the quality of lifestyle our generation has had is going to be fundamentally harmed by this administration's decisions to spend today as if there is no tomorrow or to spend today and pass the bills on to tomorrow. It is a true affront to the traditions of this country.

Let me quote from Thomas Jefferson because Thomas Jefferson is deemed to be the founder of the Democratic Party. Thomas Jefferson got a lot of things right, of course. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, the most brilliant document in the history of mankind stating freedoms to which we subscribe. He played a major role in defining our Nation and what makes our Nation special.

He said this about debt. This was a letter to John Taylor in 1816:

I sincerely believe . . . that the principle of spending

money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is

but swindling futurity on a large scale.

That is a pretty strong word, ``swindling,'' used by the founder of the Democratic Party relative to the use of debt.

Then he wrote to William Plumer, who, coincidentally, was the Governor of New Hampshire, in a letter. He said:

I, however, place economy among the first and most

important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest

of the dangers to be feared.

The proposals which are coming out of this administration do swindle our children's future, just as Thomas Jefferson said. To run debts of this size, to run deficits of this size, to put in place a program that is going to cost almost $2 trillion when it is fully implemented is basically to guarantee that this Nation is going to have such a burden of government that we will be unable to sustain our government in the form it is today.

What does that lead to when you run up those types of deficits and debt, when you run up that type of spending? It leads to two options: Our children are either going to inherit a nation where we have to devalue the dollar, and basically create a situation where everybody's savings and everybody's net worth is dramatically impacted by lessening the value of that through inflation or, alternatively, you are going to have to dramatically increase the tax burden of this country to a point where you will undermine the fundamental productivity of our Nation and put job creation and the capacity to have prosperity through job creation at risk because the tax burden will become so high.

In fact, it was pointed out, studies have shown that the tax burden will go up to 59 percent of income under some of the proposals that are pending just on this bill, to say nothing of when you start totaling up all the other bills, all the spending that will occur. Even today, the administration announced they want to spend $14.5 billion more without offsetting it in any way to fund an interest group they feel needs to be funded.

This raises the fundamental question: Why do you proceed in this way? Why would you create a program that is going to have such a devastating impact on the economic future of our Nation? You do it because it gets you votes in the next election, I guess. I guess that is why you do it.

Certainly there are ways to reform health care, to improve health care that do not require this massive expansion in the size of government. There are a lot of ways to do that. Let me give a few.

For example, we could focus on the chronic diseases which are the drivers of health care costs in this country, diseases such as obesity and Alzheimer's. We could try to get those under control. That would help control costs.

We could give employers the incentive through monetary payments-- actual cash--to say to their employees: Listen, if you go out and live a healthy lifestyle, we will give a reward in cash. If you stop smoking, if you get yourself into a workout situation where you drop weight, if you take tests such as having a colonoscopy, if you have a mammogram, we are going to reward you with money. That is a step which would significantly improve health care delivery and costs in this country.

We can say to the delivery systems: Listen, rather than doing a lot of quantity for the purposes of generating revenue, why don't you do a little quality with value tied to it? There are health care delivery systems in this country today which accomplish that. Rochester, MN; Salt Lake City, UT; Pittsburgh, PA--there are a whole series of these centers which have shown you can deliver better quality at lower costs if you are intelligent about it and reduce overutilization.

We could, as was discussed at length by the Senator from South Dakota and the Senator from Arizona, do something about abusive lawsuits. The simple fact is, abusive lawsuits are driving huge costs in the health care system. Thirty percent of health care is deemed to be defensive medicine. There is no reason doctors should have to give tests they don't believe they have to give, but they have to give in order to defend themselves from lawsuits. Those are foolish and expensive. Madam President, $54 billion is the cost estimate from CBO of savings just from that one item, and that is an understated cost because it doesn't, as was pointed out, calculate the defensive medicine side.

Those are a few good ideas, but there are a lot more good ideas. It can be done on a step-by-step approach which gives us better health care without this attempt to basically take over the entire system.

Let's not play any more games around here. What is this about? This is about creating a system, putting in place an alleged comprehensive reform, the purpose of which is to drive private activity out of the market because there are a lot of people on the other side of the aisle who believe profit is bad and the marketplace does not work in health care, and that we should move towards a single-payer system. That is what this is about. Raise premiums to a level where employers will be forced to drop their insurance and push people into what is called this exchange. There will be a public plan in the exchange when it comes from the conference committee, should it get that far--hopefully it will not but if it does--and then basically push everybody into the public plan and create an atmosphere where the playing field is so tilted against any sort of private activity that people who have their insurance today will lose it and you will have to choose a public plan, for all intents and purposes. That will be your choice 4 or 5 years from now.

The effect of that, of course, of moving toward a single-payer system, which is the stated goal of many of my colleagues on the other side and a majority of the people in the House of Representatives, the effect of moving to a single-payer system or a nationalized system is very destructive to our health care generally. Primarily, it means people will end up with delays. There will be price controls put in place relative to certain types of medicines you can receive. Innovation will be stifled because people will not be able to invest money and get a reasonable return, especially in the area of development of new pharmaceuticals and new biologics, which are so critical to the health care system today. We will have people standing in line. We will have people basically being subject to delays. We will have people, I absolutely guarantee you, finding their health care rationed depending on their age, as occurs in England under its system. And we will simply see a significant lessening of innovation and, most important, people will not have choices. You will basically be forced off the private system into a public system.

This is the ultimate goal here--not stated but clearly intended of what is going to happen if you move toward a system as has been outlined at least in the Kennedy-Dodd bill, as it came out of the HELP Committee and is now somewhere in this building--we don't know where-- being merged into a new piece of legislation with the Finance Committee bill. So when Thomas Jefferson makes this point that you should not swindle the next generation by radically expanding your debt, we should live by that because it is a pretty good point. When a bill is brought forward on this floor which alleges to be fiscally responsible and it claims it meets the obligation, it meets its costs, but it understates the costs by almost $1.2 trillion and overstates how much it is going to generate in revenues and you don't get these Medicare cuts unless--I have never seen Medicare reductions occur in this Congress. Then basically you are loading up the debt of our children. It is that simple. That is the inevitable response of this piece of legislation, that the debt will expand.

As Thomas Jefferson said, he believed in ``the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale.'' And this may be the largest scale of swindling that has ever occurred in America's history.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I wish to speak briefly. I know we are going to get a lot of debate on this issue as we go down the road relative to the health care package which was reported out of the Finance Committee and the health care package which was reported out of the HELP Committee, of which I am a member, and how they are being pulled together and what the implications are for health care and for Americans, generally, who are all affected by these bills. This is 16 percent of our national economy. There isn't an American who isn't impacted by health care. So when the Congress decides to fundamentally change--and that is what is being proposed--fundamentally change the way health care is delivered in this country, it will have an impact on everyone and a very significant impact on everyone who has to interface with the health care system in the immediate future.

The bill that came out of the committee known as the Kennedy-Dodd Committee at the time, which is now the Harkin committee, which I am a member of, was a bill which basically subscribed to the view of a large majority, I think, of the House Democratic membership and a fairly significant group of Members on the Democratic side in the Senate, which essentially said the government should start to take very significant control over the health care delivery system in this country.

In fact, they would propose a public plan, a plan that would basically put the government allegedly in competition with the private sector. But we all know the government isn't a fair competitor, because the government doesn't have to play by the same rules as the private sector, and that would put us on a slippery slope toward a single-payer system or a nationalized system, much like you have in Canada and England. They have some very severe problems in those countries. There isn't a lot of innovation in those nations in the area of health care. Health care isn't of the quality that we have here, and they have significant delays and, in many instances, actual rationing where certain people cannot get certain treatments because of their age or they don't qualify under the rules that are set up. It is not the type of system we want in this country.

The purpose of health care reform should be to make health care insurance affordable to everyone, while in the outyears reducing the rate of growth of health care costs, and to allow people who have an insurance policy today to keep it. Those are the goals we set off when we stepped into the arena of trying to change the health care delivery system. Neither the Harkin bill--although it wasn't offered by him, but was offered by Senators Dodd and Kennedy--nor the Baucus bill accomplishes any of those three goals. In each of those situations-- take, for example, that everybody should have access to affordable health care. The Harkin bill, as scored by CBO, says that of the 47 million people who don't have health insurance, approximately 34 million would still not have it after that bill is fully phased in. The bill coming out of the Finance Committee varies and looks as if it is in the vicinity of about half of the people who don't have health care today will still not have it after that bill is phased in. As to the outyear costs, neither the Harkin bill nor the Kennedy bill controls outyear costs. In fact, the costs go up rather dramatically in the area of health care.

As to letting people keep their insurance if they like it--no, that doesn't happen either. In fact, large numbers--in the millions, according to CBO--would migrate out of their private system into a public plan because basically the employer would drop their plan. That is also true, I believe, of the Baucus plan, although we haven't gotten a final score on that. When you set penalties for an employer at a level that says to them it is fiscally prudent for them to pay the penalty rather than insure people, many will give up the insurance and push people into the subsidized program, called the exchange. Thus, a lot of people will lose the insurance they have today.

None of the three goals is met by these proposals. What do these bills do--especially the Baucus bill, which is

the center of attention? First, they create a massive expansion of the size of the government. We are a government today that is running a deficit of $1.4 trillion this year. That is three times more than we have ever had in the history of this country--$1.4 trillion, which is about 12 percent of our economy. Historically, deficits have been about 3 percent of the economy. Today, it is $1.4 trillion or 12 percent of our economy. That deficit doesn't come down dramatically. We continue to run deficits under the President's plan, prior to this health care bill being passed, of approximately $1 trillion a year for the next 10 years. Average deficits over that 10-year period are between 5 and 6 percent of GDP, and we take the public debt from 40 percent of the GDP up to 80 percent. What do all these numbers mean? They are not just numbers thrown up in the air. They are obligations--debt we are running up on our children, because we have a government that is so large today that we cannot afford to pay the bills for it.

Almost every economist of any note or credibility says that when you run deficits that exceed 3 percent of GDP for an extended period of time or when you take your public debt from 40 percent to 80 percent of GDP, you are basically creating an unsustainable situation--a situation where you cannot pay the debt, and where your children and our children's children, who will be subject to these deficits and debts, will end up with a government they cannot afford and which will lead inevitably to devaluing the dollar. We are already seeing a reaction to that in the international marketplace, and probably a massive increase in the tax burden, which reduces productivity and reduces, therefore, job creation.

Those are not good scenarios for our kids. It means a lower standard of living, less opportunity to buy a home, to send their children to college, and less opportunity to do what our generation has been able to do, because they are having to bear such a burden of the Federal Government--on top of this government that is, today, already projected to run deficits as far as the eye can see of $1 trillion a year, to a public debt that will go from 40 percent to 80 percent of GDP. The proposal is that we are going to spend another--when it is fully phased in--$1.8 trillion over 10 years on this brandnew entitlement program. And then the almost laughable--were it not being presented in such a way that is claimed to be sincere--proposal is: but we are going to reduce the cost of government.

A brandnew entitlement will be created, which costs us approximately $1.8 trillion over a 10-year period. It scores at $823 billion in the first 10 years because it is phased in. In the first 4 years, they take revenues in from the bill, but they don't start the program. The numbers are all skewed in the first 10 years. If you look at it in the 10-year tranche, where the program is fully implemented, it is $1.8 trillion. We are going to create this massive expansion of the size of government with these brandnew entitlements being put into place and, in the process, grow the government at a rate that it hasn't grown in recent history, taking government from about 20 percent of GDP up to about 23, 24 percent--unsustainable levels--and we claim we are going to do it while reducing the cost of government, which is absurd on its face.

Some would argue that we need to do that in order to take care of health care, and that this is revenue neutral because, as a practical matter, we have put a cut in Medicare of $400 billion and tax increases of $500 billion, and those will pay for this over that 10-year period.

What they fail to tell you, of course, is when it is fully implemented, neither the cut in Medicare is large enough, nor are the tax increases, to make those numbers. To give them the benefit of the doubt, let's say that this Congress is going to cut Medicare by $400 billion and create a new entitlement for uninsured people--take it from seniors and give it to the uninsured people. And this Congress is ready to raise taxes by $500 billion. Let's give the benefit of the doubt to the Congress, which I know isn't going to happen because, just 5 years ago, I was chairman of the Budget Committee and I suggested we reduce the rate of growth of Medicare by about $15 billion, and we could not get any votes on the other side of the aisle for that, and now they are suggesting they are going to cut it by $400 billion. That is what is called ``bait and switch.'' It doesn't happen. This proposal won't occur.

As a practical matter, giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying they are able to raise close to $1 trillion in new taxes, or spending cuts in Medicare, over the next 10 years, recognizing in the following 10 years it is not nearly enough, why is that incorrect to have a program if it is paid for? I will tell you why. This government is running so much debt to the extent that if we are going to use resources like that, we ought to reduce the debt of the country, not use them to create a new program on top of a government that is too large as it is. We know for a fact--an absolute fact--that Medicare has a $34 trillion unfunded mandate. Try to think of that. That means we know that we have expenditures in Medicare that will exceed income in Medicare by $34 trillion.

So why on Earth would we cut Medicare spending by $500 billion, or $400 billion, and use that money to create a new program? We should use that money, if we are going to take that action--and some of that action is responsible--and use it to make Medicare more solvent. If we are going to raise taxes by $500 billion--tax the rich, as the House claims, and they always end up taxing middle-class America, or are we going to add special fees against special industries, such as the pharmaceutical, hospital, medical device, and other industries? If we are going to do that and assess a penalty on people who don't buy insurance, and we are going to assess small businesses that don't buy insurance a penalty, should we not use that money to reduce the burden of the debt of this country as it is being driven by the present health care system, not by adding a brandnew entitlement that absorbs all those resources?

There are a lot of ways we can do health care reform here that are much more responsible than what is being proposed. The recent claim by the White House and Members of the other side is that this bill isn't going to affect people's premiums at all. The premiums will go up, but no more than usual. That is so unbelievable on its face. Think about this. This bill suggests that insurance companies are going to have to pick up a massive increase in the cost of insuring people because--for a lot of technical reasons, but basically it sets up a system where not enough people will be coming into the insurance pool; a lot will be opting out to cover the additional costs, which is going to have to occur as a result of the very rich benefits package under this bill and the fact that there is no longer any exclusion. Everybody gets covered by insurance. So on the face of it, insurance companies aren't going to be able to absorb those costs. They are going to pass them off to the people who pay the premiums.

Then the bill suggests they are going to put another 14 million people under Medicaid--take Medicaid coverage from 100 percent up to 133 percent of poverty. We already know Medicaid only pays 60 percent of the cost of health care. We already know that for the people under Medicaid, 40 percent of the cost is being borne by people with private insurance, who are paying for not only the cost of their health care but for the 40 percent of health care costs that are not reimbursed under Medicaid. So when you add another 14 million people, that goes onto the premiums of the people in the private sector. Thus, the premiums have to go up because they cannot absorb all the costs.

Then we know that a large number of people will come into the system but not enough to cover the fact that everybody is going to be required to be covered. There is going to be something called ``adverse selection,'' where some folks basically buy coverage at the last minute because they are suddenly finding they are sick and haven't been paying into the pool very long. They will be able to do that under this system and, thus, drive up the cost of insurance for everybody else.

We know the insurance prices will go up there. We know the premiums are going to go up significantly. That is just common sense. Whether you accept the study by the insurance companies or look at what--it is like 1 and 1 makes 2. It is an obvious fact. Then we ought to know something else. The

hospitals, under this proposal, have agreed to chip in--in order to basically be at the table--for something like $20 billion or $40 billion. The drug companies have agreed to chip in $80 billion. When you add that all up--all of which is passed back to consumers--none of them will absorb all of the costs, and you end up raising the cost of health care.

In the end, people's premiums will go up--people who have private insurance. You might say: Why would somebody do that? Why would somebody drive up premiums on people? I will tell you why. Because the goal here is to basically eliminate private insurance. The goal here is to create a structure where essentially people who get private health care through private insurance or their employer will be forced out of that health care insurance and into an exchange, where there will be a public plan, when this is all over. The government will essentially absorb all insurance. This is not a good idea. Why isn't it a good idea? Because the government basically, in order to control costs, can only do two things: it can limit access or it can control prices.

I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes.

It can limit access or control prices. Either way, it significantly undermines the quality of health care.

There are about 180 million people in this country--or more, I guess--who already have health care and are fairly comfortable with the health care they are getting under the private system. There are about 190 million, actually. But they are going to be at deep risk.

There is something else here that is very serious that we have to think about. As you start to put these types of pressures on the system and you start to regulate prices and you start to regulate access and you start to regulate reimbursement and you have the government doing all of this, you start to stifle innovation. A lot of the drugs that come on the market today come on after a massive period of time of research--I think it averages 15 years--and a huge amount of investment. I think it is $800 million to bring a new drug to the market. That $800 million does not appear from out of the sky. People who are investing money say: I am willing to invest in that drug because I think it will work and it will do social good, but I also think I am going to get a reasonable return on my investment. But if you set up a system where you have price controls and where the return on investment is artificially low, you basically don't allow people to recover their costs or their costs plus a reasonable return on their investment. Then the money will not go into those research activities, the money will go somewhere else. It will go into new software. It will go into new machinery. It will go into real estate ventures where the return is better. You inevitably chill the investment in the innovation, especially in the area of pharmaceuticals, which is where most of the great research is being done today that is making better health care outcomes more available.

I am honored to respond.

The Senator from Georgia asks a very appropriate question because the practical effect of the reductions which are being proposed is that people who are on Medicare Advantage, which is a program many seniors like, will be eliminated. They will no longer have the opportunity to use Medicare Advantage or it will be contracted so much that it will be a shell of its former self. This is being done not in order to make Medicare solvent--and there are very serious issues about Medicare solvency--it is being done in order to move that money over and start a new entitlement for a new group of people who are not seniors and who have not paid into the health insurance trust fund and who have no relationship at all to Medicare.

The Senator asks another good question. ``No'' is the simple answer. We all know that once you start a mandatory program, it always grows and grows significantly. That, of course, is why we are in such trouble as a nation, because we have a number of mandatory programs to which so much has been added that we simply cannot afford them any longer under our present structure of a government.

Now we are going to take that problem and compound it by $1.8 trillion, which is pretty irresponsible of us and fiscally irresponsible, but it is also irresponsible in the sense of stewards of our children's future because our children are going to inherit a government that cannot be afforded and they are going to get bills or get a devalued dollar.

The Senator from Georgia is expressing a problem which I think most State Governors are extraordinarily worried about, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, which is that this bill, as it starts up, covers the additional people who will be pushed into Medicaid, which is about 14 million nationally, but that coverage drops off in the outyears, and it will put many States in dire straits.

The Senator from Georgia talked about the numbers in Georgia. New Hampshire will have the exact same problem, only we do not have a balanced budget amendment. We are not that foresighted. I wish we were. So we already have a problem. We are already running major deficits in the State of New Hampshire, and if you throw these new Medicaid costs on, you are going

to make it very difficult to do things such as spend on school systems and, especially in New Hampshire, on our college systems and our mental health care systems which are key to our quality of life in New Hampshire.

This will be a massive unfunded mandate. I saw the number $33 billion as being what the States will end up picking up over the 10-year period. That is a big number for States to pick up. It will put massive strains on State budgets. It is another example of the Federal Government saying: Here, look at the wonderful things we have done for everybody, and then sending the bill to the States, which is totally inappropriate.

The Senator from Georgia leads in the way I want to close this discussion. There are ways to do what the Senator from Georgia is suggesting. There are ways to reduce the cost of health care in this country and to make it better.

Let's take, for example, malpractice reform, abusive lawsuit reform. None of that is in the Finance Committee bill. We should have something there. The President says he is for it. We should do something in that area. CBO scores this as a $54 billion savings. That is not chicken feed--not in Georgia, not in New Hampshire. That is a big number. So we should have malpractice reform.

We should have proposals which basically incentivize employers to have their employees with healthier lifestyles. It is called HIPAA reform. That is not in the Finance Committee. It is very easy to do. You give people the incentive and employers the ability to say to someone: If you stop smoking, if you live a healthier lifestyle by reducing your weight, if you take the tests you need to take in the area of better health care, such as colonoscopies, we actually will give you a cash reward. We cannot do it under the Finance Committee bill and, to a lesser degree, under the Kennedy-Dodd bill or the Harkin bill but not as much as we would like.

There are specific diseases we should target, such as obesity and Alzheimer's. There are a whole series of healthy lifestyles. There are things we can do in a step-by-step manner which will get us much farther down the road toward quality health care for all Americans rather than this massive expansion of health care through a massive expansion of an entitlement which will lead inevitably to, in my opinion, a huge debt being passed on to our children.

Three groups are going to pay for this $1.8 trillion: One is seniors citizens who are going to pay for the cuts through Medicare; two is small businesses that are going to have to pay through massive increases in premiums for their insurance, and they will probably have to give up a lot of coverage of their people; and three is our children, who are going to have to pay the debt.

I appreciate the thoughts and questions of the Senator from Georgia. They are right on point. I thank him for getting involved in this discussion. In fact, I yield the floor to him right now.

Mr. President, I rise to associate myself with the comments of the Senator from Arizona on rule XXVIII and on the issue of planes. I also want to point out that we are violating the budget this body has with this bill.

I understand the situation in which the Senator from Nebraska finds himself. His bill is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and people threw a lot of baggage on it, and it was inappropriate that it was thrown on.

One of the most inappropriate things is a $4 billion bill that is being sent to the taxpayers of America to bail out the Postal Service. This wasn't a surprise. This didn't come on as, oh, my gosh, we don't have $4 billion to pay our pension funds. This occurs because of something that occurred in 2006, when we bailed out the post office the last time. Everybody knew it was coming. This train has been coming down the track, the track has been straight, and we have seen it for a long time. So suddenly this bailout, which the taxpayers will have to pay for, gets thrown on the Senator's bill. I regret that. It makes his bill out of whack relative to the budget.

This is the last day of the fiscal year. We have already spent all the money. In fact, we spent a little bit more too, but we spent all of the money in the budget. We are over outlays and all of the BA has been spent. Suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, on the last day of the budget, we are going to spend another $4 billion.

We passed the budget, so let's stick with the budget. That is the idea. I think the American people are getting tired of us spending money we don't have, especially since it is theirs and their grandchildren's. It goes right on the debt, by the way. All I am asking this body to do is live by the budget we passed.

I intend to make a point of order under rule 311 of the Budget Act, which says you cannot exceed what you said you budgeted for. It is a simple Budget Act. We pass a budget, and if you go over it, there is a point of order that

you should not waive. So we should not spend $4 billion we don't have.

Again, this was not the doing of the Senator from Nebraska. He plays no role in this other than being the unfortunate baggage car passing through Congress when somebody decided to stick this on his bill.

At this point, I will make a point of order that the pending conference report would cause the aggregate level of the budget authority and the outlays for fiscal year 2009 as set out in the most recently agreed to concurrent resolution on the budget, S. Con. Res. 13, to be exceeded. I raise a point of order under section 311(a)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Mr. President, I will simply note that there were two other Budget Act points of order against this item in the bill. I presume he is asking on behalf of leadership to waive them all.

It is really inappropriate that we should waive the whole Budget Act and spend $4 billion we don't have on the last day of the fiscal year. So I hope Members will look at this. This can be corrected in other ways. We can find ways to offset this money. It can be done on another bill with the proper offsets. Therefore, I hope my colleagues will sustain what they passed, which was the budget for this year, on the last day of the budget enforcement for the year.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this is a very simple point of order. It simply says: A budget was passed. This is the last year of the budget. We have spent all the money under the budget. We should not add another $4 billion to the budget that is going to go directly to the debt our children will have to bear.

So let's vote in favor of supporting the budget that we passed. Let's vote against adding $4 billion of more debt to our childrens' backs. We can correct the problem this issue confronts without adding to the deficit and the debt, and we can correct it without doing violence to the budget which was passed by the majority.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

How much time do I have remaining?

Mr. President, if it had no budget impact, the point of order would not lie. It actually does have a $4 billion budget impact. That will be added to the debt. It can be corrected. We can still pass the continuing resolution by supporting this point of order.

I ask Senators to vote no on the motion to waive.

Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to a special person, U.S. Army SPC Justin Pellerin of Concord, NH, for his service and supreme sacrifice for our Nation.

Tragically, on August 20, 2009, this courageous young soldier, only 21 years of age, gave his last full measure of devotion when an explosive device detonated near his vehicle in Wardak Province, Afghanistan. At the time of the incident, Specialist Pellerin was serving as an infantryman assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division based at Fort Drum, NY.

Justin joined the U.S. Army in June 2007 after graduating from Concord High School and deployed in January in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. This decorated patriot is the recipient of the National Defense Service Medal, Afghanistan Campaign Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, NATO Service Medal, and most recently, the Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

Heroes from the State of New Hampshire have served our Nation with honor and distinction from Bunker Hill to Afghanistan. Undoubtedly, Justin has advanced that fine tradition. Daniel Webster said: ``God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.'' Justin chose to serve our Nation, guard our precious liberties, and answer the call of freedom. Our debt of gratitude will never be fully repaid to Justin or his loved ones.

The sudden death of a young person is especially difficult for family and friends. In November 1864, President Abraham Lincoln was informed by the War Department of a mother who had lost five sons in the Civil War. He wrote the mother: ``I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.''

My heartfelt sympathy, condolences, and prayers go out to Justin's wife Chelsey; his parents Dale and Melissa, and family and friends. The death of Justin, on a battlefield far from New Hampshire, is a true loss for our State and Nation, and a grievous pain for those who knew him best and loved him most. Although he will be sorely missed by all, it is my hope that his family and friends may find some comfort in knowing that Justin's devotion, sense of duty, and selfless dedication have made the safety and liberty of each and every American more secure. May God bless SPC Justin Pellerin.

Let me first congratulate the Senator from Tennessee for bringing this matter to the attention of the Senate because if there were ever a shell game being played on the American people, this is it.

The administration has alleged they are going to save $87 billion. Then they have gone out with great zeal and enthusiasm and spent every cent of it--spent every cent of it. It turns out there is not $87 billion saved. CBO, when it looks at this and does so in a forthright way, using standard accounting procedures which we would use in most instances, determines the savings are closer to $47 billion.

That is correct. But they are subject to very arcane rules. They came up with the $87 billion using the arcane rules. I asked them to look at this in an honest way, using standard accounting rules, the same rules used by the Congressional Budget Office for other credit events. They concluded that if we use those and were able to use those and were not bound by the arcane score-keeping rules--it is not their fault, they are bound by law to use a different standard here-- the real savings is $47 billion. That is what they said. They said that using the proper accounting methods for looking at this, the true savings is $47 billion, which, of course, begs the question of, what are you going to use that for? They are going to spend $87 billion, so actually they are going to run up a deficit on this whole exercise of a lot of money on the taxpayers in the claim that they are saving money.

The Senator is going to the essence of what really drove this decision. This is not a decision about saving money, this is a decision about spending money. That may seem counterintuitive, but what you have to understand is that if the administration could get a score from CBO that says they are going to save $87 billion or they are going to save $47 billion, then they get to spend that money. So no money is being saved--none. The money is being spent on different programs.

What should have happened here, if they were going to have integrity about their proposals, is exactly what the Senator from Tennessee is basically suggesting, which is the whole $87 billion should have been saved. It should not have been spent, it should have been saved and added to reduce the debt.

There is no reason the government should be making $47 billion off our students any more than they should be making $87 billion off our students, if they are going to go solely to a Federal direct loan program.

The Senator from Tennessee is absolutely right. It truly is a cynical act because basically they are claiming savings when they are actually creating a capacity to spend more money, which they spend. This is Washington-speak at its worst. It reflects the attitude, really, of this administration, which is that they are not interested in controlling spending or reducing the debt. When they find $87 billion, which they claim they have--they actually only have $47 billion--they want to spend it as soon as they can, and they have. This spending has already occurred even though the program has not been put in place to save this money. They have already outlined how they are going to put this money out the door, not using it to reduce the debt.

But the Senator from Tennessee is right on a second point too. It should have been zero. In other words, there is no reason, if you are going to take this course of action and you are going to maintain intellectual integrity, that there should be any money being spent here. The full $47 billion should flow to the benefit of the students.

No one is more expert in this area than the Senator from Tennessee, having served as one of the leading Governors on the issue of education when he was Governor of Tennessee and then going on to be the Secretary of Education. He understands how the Department of Education works. I certainly subscribe to his view. It does not smell right. Clearly, if they are going to increase their activities by this size, they are going to have a massive increase in cost.

Another question on which I would be interested in the thoughts of the Senator from Tennessee is, what happens to the students? I know some people get a little frustrated just trying to get their driver's licenses renewed in this country. Can you imagine having to go find the Department of Education and getting a student loan from that Department? I would be interested to get the Senator's thoughts on what kind of nightmare that is going to be for our students.

I think the Senator from Tennessee has hit one of the core issues here, independent of the fact that this is just a scam to create more room to spend more money to spend on other programs, and it is scamming the students by hitting them with $47 billion of interest payments which they should not have to pay if this is followed. But the Senator has raised another valuable question here, which is obviously students were reasonably comfortable with the system the way it worked because 75 percent of the students had opted to pursue the private sector loan process. Granted it was a little more expensive for them-- not dramatically by student; obviously cumulatively it was, but not dramatically by student. But I think they took that option because it was so much more convenient.

In our society, which is reasonably capitalistic--but becoming less so under this administration; obviously we are moving down the road toward a Socialist state--but independent of that, people often pay a little more for the convenience of it, for the convenience of having an efficiently delivered loan, for the convenience of knowing whom to talk to when you have a problem, for the convenience of basically being able to go get answers quickly to your questions. Essentially, that is what these higher education authorities created in every State. Tennessee has one. New Hampshire has one. They are really good people. They are, for the most part, except for their executive director, volunteers. Their purpose is to make sure students have very prompt access to student loans which are significant enough for them to pay for their education and that it is also done in a way that is convenient so they do not have to end up just getting lost in a massive bureaucracy. I suspect every congressional office is going to have to become a massive clearinghouse for student loan problems. We don't have that now. We have problems with a lot of programs and agencies, but student loans is not one of them.

It really is a big issue of the marketplace having voted with their feet, so to say. The students in this country voted to use the guaranteed loan system, pay a little bit more for the purposes of the convenience they were being given by having that sort of easy access and substantive information right at hand, versus going to the government and getting overwhelmed by a government bureaucracy which is often indifferent to consumer issues and is difficult to deal with.

The Senator is once again correct. There is a macro issue of economics here. Although it is tangential to the Senator's primary concern, which is the very legitimate concern of: Why are we taking all of this money from students if we are going to do this type of program? And why are we spending all of this money even before we take it in? And why are we putting students through having to stand in line like at the DMV to get a loan?

There is a macro issue here, which is for the government to take over all of this debt means we are going to add $500 billion to $600 billion to the government ledger. We are now nowhere near that in the student loan area because we are not primarily responsible for the debt.

As a result, you are going to have some significant crowding out. It could easily aggravate our ability to borrow money for the purposes of financing these massive deficits the President wants to run, the trillion-dollar deficits every year for the next 10 years that are in the budget.

I do not think it will be a massive issue, but it will be a significant issue. It could affect the rate of interest which we have to pay as a government. It could affect other nations looking at us and saying: Do we have too much debt on our books?

Most of this debt will go into a revolving fund, and hopefully it will be repaid, as it is traditionally. But the initial debt will still have to be put on the books at some point.

Well, the $87 billion is what has been spent. That is what they are going to spend.

I would say the Senator from Tennessee has hit on a very appropriate disclosure issue that should be on every one of those loans.

I appreciate the courtesy of the Senator from Tennessee.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 2361.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Madam President, this is an amendment that shouldn't have to be offered, to be very honest with you. Today there are a lot of projects being pursued under the stimulus package, and every one of those projects that is a road project, unfortunately, finds itself having to put up a sign that says this is a good project being paid for with tax dollars. These are self-congratulatory signs. They are political signs. They are there so lawmakers can pat themselves on the back and say: Wow, look at this project we are doing.

But these signs cost money. Actually, when you add them all up, they cost a lot of money. They are a total waste of money. There is no reason to have these signs by every project that occurs in America. It is projected there will be somewhere around 20,000 to 22,000 projects. The signs cost about $400 in New Hampshire, and they cost as much as--I think it was around $3,000 in New Jersey for each sign. New Hampshire is a little more efficient. I suspect in North Carolina they probably don't cost much more than $400, but if you add that up, we are talking about a cost of somewhere between $6 million and $15 million being spent on signs. That is an inexcusable waste of money. That money could be used for something valuable, for example, rather than a sign.

The practical effect of this is, the signs should say ``Wasting taxpayers' dollars; project funded by the future generations of Americans,'' if they are going to be honest signs. But I am not asking for any signs. There shouldn't be any signs.

Instead, the highway departments across this country are being basically required to put up these signs as the projects are built. In fact, there was one example in New Hampshire--there were lots of examples in New Hampshire, but there was one community in New Hampshire where the leadership of that community said: We don't want to put the signs up because we think they are a waste of money, and they were told, if they didn't put up the signs, they wouldn't get the money. That is happening all across the country.

So this amendment should be unnecessary. It should be obvious-- obvious--that we don't have to put these signs up; that we shouldn't be spending money in this way. If we are going to spend $6 million to $18 million to $20 million on something, let's spend it on what actually produces some value rather than creates a self-congratulatory event for the local political leaders and for the Congress. We do enough self- congratulating around here. We shouldn't have to make the taxpayers pay for it. Instead, we should be a little more responsible with the taxpayers' money.

It is a very simple amendment. That is why I am not going to spend a lot of time on it, because I think it is so obvious it should be accepted and passed, that it should occur. It is one of those amendments where you sort of scratch

your head and say: Why did we even have to offer this? Why should we have to offer this amendment saying you don't put up signs spending taxpayers' dollars to congratulate yourself for a project the taxpayers paid for. But we do, of course, in this instance because the Department has insisted on these signs across America.

That is what the amendment does. I reserve the remainder of my time, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, the issue isn't the stimulus package, although I have reservations about that. I would be happy to debate that with the Senator from California at some length because I think adding almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars of new debt to our children's backs on a package that will spend out through 2019 is hardly stimulus, especially when we see only 20 percent of that package will spend out by the end of this year, and maybe 50 percent next year.

We had Chairman Bernanke saying, essentially, that we are out of the recession. That all comes from borrowing that our children will have to pay. In my opinion, it is not fair to pass that debt on to our children, that $787 billion. That is not the debate. This debate is about whether we should be congratulating ourselves with tax dollars. It is self-aggrandizement at the expense of the taxpayer. This is going out and buying advertising to promote ourselves and having the taxpayer pay for it.

We can clearly spend these dollars more efficiently doing something else. Sure, it is not a lot of dollars, but when we add it all up, $18 million is a lot of money. We can do something more constructive besides putting up a sign that says we are wonderful because we are spending their money. If we want to say we are doing great things for them, we can say here is a sign telling them that. But rather than having the people pay for that sign and telling them they are going to have to pay for it, let's have the Democratic Senatorial Committee or the Republican Senatorial Committee pay for that sign. Let's do that if we think it is that important as a piece of political promotion. But it is not. I don't think the Democratic Senatorial Committee would pay for that sign because they would see it as a waste of money. I don't speak for them, but I don't think the Republican Senatorial Committee would pay for this either. I would recommend that they not do it.

These signs are a waste of money. Do they create jobs? Well, actually the signs in New Hampshire are made in prisons. They cost money because the materials cost money. I guess that is why we get them for $300. In New York,

it is $3,000 a sign. As a practical matter, I don't think we can argue that making these signs is somehow stimulating the economy. All it is doing is saying: Hey, we are wonderful; we are going to take your money and use it to tell you what a wonderful job we are doing with your money. It is not fair or appropriate.

I hope people will support the amendment. As has been mentioned by the Senator from California, this is not a major amendment, but it is one that states an attitude toward how we spend money. I think it is important in that context.

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

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

Mr. President, this amendment does a very simple thing. It says taxpayers don't have to pay for signs which tell them their money is being spent well. It makes no sense that taxpayers should be spending millions of dollars to put up signs to tell them their money is being spent well. It has to be extraordinarily frustrating to taxpayers to see that happening. It certainly is not a good use of their money. The money can be used on a lot of other things--building a road, repairing bridges, improving buildings that need to be improved, improving parks. Let's not put up signs on every one of these sites across America saying we congratulate ourselves for doing the project. It is self-congratulatory, it is political, and it is inappropriate. These truly are signs to nowhere. A total waste of money. They should not be required. We should reject them as being required. That is what the amendment does.

Mr. President, I ask for one point of personal clarification.

I did not vote for President Bush's stimulus package either.

Mr. President, do two wrongs make a right?

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the Pease Greeters for their consistent and unwavering support for our brave men and women in uniform passing through New Hampshire on their way to combat assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan or returning home to their loved ones. The Pease Greeters provide a loud and welcoming voice not only to servicemembers from New Hampshire but to all of the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who pass through the Pease Air Terminal in Portsmouth, NH.

During the Spring of 2005, when members of the Seacoast Detachment of the Marine Corps League met a flight returning from the Middle East, no one could have known that this small volunteer group of veterans and citizens would be the nucleus of a group that has met every one of the more than 130 flights landing in New Hampshire, however briefly, with soldiers heading to or returning from combat operations overseas. The Greeters, now numbering over 200 members, have helped to ensure that each of the thousands of servicemembers has received the welcome home and best wishes that they so richly deserve.

The Pease Greeters travel from all over New Hampshire to meet every military flight in to Pease, at any hour, day or night. Arriving troops are met with applause, handshakes, and a boisterous welcome, and if the flight is taking them into a combat area, the Pease Greeters assure them that they will be met right there upon their safe return. These honored guests are provided with refreshments and the opportunity to make free phone calls to their loved ones. Each of these events has been recorded and the photographs line the Pease Air Terminal Hall that is known as the ``Heroes Walk.''

It is my privilege to recognize the time and energy these men and women of the Pease Greeters have devoted and continue to devote to assuring our Armed Forces that their country and its citizens appreciate the sacrifices they and their families are making on our behalf. Thank you to each and every member of the Pease Greeters for providing such a warm welcome home to those returning and a warm memory of home to those departing to carry out their missions.

Madam President, if nobody is seeking time in opposition, I suggest on this amendment that all time be yielded back, if the Senator from Arizona is agreeable.

Madam President, I ask further proceedings on this amendment be set aside and I be allowed to call up amendment No. 2302.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Madam President, the senior Senator from Arizona alluded to the fact that basically this bill is unpaid for--$2 billion. There is a figleaf representation that the money in this bill is somehow being taken out of another account, and, therefore, it is offset--the account being the Renewable Energy Loan Guarantee Program under the stimulus package. But that is a total fraud--a total fraud.

This is the ultimate bait and switch because, as the senior Senator from Arizona pointed out, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee in the House, for whom I have a lot of respect and I think his forthrightness is refreshing, quite honestly, said on the floor of the House, when he was asked the question: What is going to happen to the fact that $2 billion has now been taken out of the Renewable Energy Loan Guarantee Program, what is going to happen to the loan guarantee program? Congressman Obey said:

If the gentleman would yield, I share the gentleman's view

that the Renewable Energy Loan Guarantee Program is of vital

importance to creating a new, green economy. We have talked

with the White House. We have talked with the Speaker and I

want to assure you--

This is the chairman of the Appropriations Committee; when he assures you, you can be assured it is for sure--

and I want to assure you that all of us certainly have every

intention of restoring these funds.

They are doubling down on the debt. It is bad enough--this should be called the ``debt for clunkers'' bill to begin with because basically what we are doing is creating debt for our children. We are suggesting, we are proposing, we are allowing $4,500, $1 billion, now $3 billion out the door to buy cars today, but the bill to pay those cars is going to come due on our children and our grandchildren as they have to pay the debt off, which this is going to go to increase.

This is nothing more than a program which is being funded entirely by debt and an increase in the Federal debt, as Congressman Obey forthrightly stated when he said: We are going to find the $2 billion we took out of this account, and we are going to refill that $2 billion, which they will have to borrow to do. Everybody knows that.

I don't happen to support the program, but I at least would like to have some integrity in this process, and I would like to have the program paid for. If we are going to represent to the American people that this program is paid for, let's pay for it. So my amendment does that. That is all it does. It creates a mechanism to make sure we are not going to replenish an account we allegedly took the money out of in order to pay for this account.

The way I have set this up, it does not have to necessarily affect the loan guarantee program. In fact, it is not specifically the loan guarantee program at all what I have done. What I am suggesting we do is that next year, in order to make sure this program is paid for, we reduce what is known as the 302(a) allocation cap by $2 billion. That way we can be reasonably confident that before this money can be spent twice, there will have to be a vote, a 60-vote point of order brought against it on the floor of the Senate, and people will have to forthrightly say: Oh, we are actually borrowing from our children to do this. Or alternatively and refreshingly, we will not borrow from our children to do this; we will actually pay for it by reducing the 302(a) allocation cap.

It is an attempt to bring some integrity to the process, some honesty to the process, and actually pay for the program we allege we are paying for rather than use this gamesmanship, which is the ultimate bait and switch of saying we are going to pay for it today from funds we are taking out of the account tomorrow, and then we are going to refund that account tomorrow so we end up borrowing the money from our children. In this case, it would be twice because we had to borrow the money on the stimulus to begin with. That is all it does. It tries to put a little integrity into the process and make the pay-fors for this program honest and straightforward and reasonably real. Nothing is real around here when it comes to money and paying for things, but hopefully it would be more substantive and more substantial relative to the integrity of the process than under the proposal as it is presently drafted.

On the underlying program, though, I do have to make this point because it is an interesting point, not made by me, but I want to paraphrase it. It was made by the editors at the Web site Edmunds. Edmunds is an automobile Web site where you can get an evaluation of cars, sort of like consumer reports on cars. They will tell you how much your car is worth. They will tell you what the rating on your car is. They have a valuation of your car. They are totally independent. They have no dog in this fight.

They looked at this program and said: Something is wrong here. We have $4,500 per car being the amount that is reimbursed to people. You can buy about 220,000 cars, $4,500 a car. Their point was that over the time period this bill has been in place, in the typical course of business, 200,000 cars would have been turned in, old mileage, used cars that would have been turned in anyway. If there was no repossession, no ``debt for clunkers'' program, 200,000 cars would have been turned in to purchase new cars during this same timeframe. That is their estimate, and they are professionals. They look at it in a totally independent way. That was their estimate.

So the incremental increase in the number of cars that are being turned in under this program is about 20,000 to 22,000 cars. That does not work out to $4,500 a car; that is costing the American taxpayers about $45,000 a car to get those extra 22,000 cars off the road. Ridiculous.

The program has so many inconsistencies about it, but the ultimate inconsistency is we are borrowing from our kids to pay this. If this bill passes, we will have added $3 billion to the debt of our children. It is not appropriate. It is certainly not appropriate to spend it to buy a car today and pay for it 10, 15 years from now and have our children have to pay for it 10, 15 years from now by adding to the debt of this Nation.

My amendment attempts to address that issue by trying to enforce the pay-fors in this bill by reducing the 302(a) allocation next year.

I reserve the remainder of my time. I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to include additional cosponsors to my amendment: Senator Alexander, Senator Corker, Senator Cornyn, and Senator Enzi.

Madam President, I don't happen to agree with this proposal, but what I certainly don't agree with--and I assume most of my colleagues don't agree with--is that we should be paying for this by putting the debt on our children's backs. Yet that is exactly what is going to happen.

The chairman of the Appropriations Committee in the House has been very forthright. He said he spoke to the White House, he spoke to the Speaker, and he said the funds with which this program is being funded were taken out of the stimulus, and what he is going to do is replenish the stimulus. So we are essentially going to borrow twice to do this program, and both times we are borrowing from our kids.

My amendment simply enforces our ability to actually pay for this program, which is what we should do--No fig leaves, just a real exercise in actually paying for a program, rather than passing the bill on to our kids, as we seem to do around here so regularly. I hope people would vote for this amendment.

Madam President, pursuant to Section 904(c), I move to waive the 306 point of order, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, yesterday was not a great day for our Nation. For the first time in our history, the deficit of this Nation passed $1 trillion--$1 trillion. That is a number I do not think anybody ever expected to see as a deficit for our country.

To try to put it in perspective, as a percentage of our GDP, that is about 13 percent. We have not had that size deficit since we were in World War II. The implications of that deficit are staggering for us as a nation but, more importantly, it represents a clear and present danger to our children and our children's children and to this Nation's fiscal solvency.

Remember, we are not through the fiscal year yet. It is estimated that this deficit will continue up for the rest of the year. It is estimated that $1.8 trillion will be the deficit we will be facing in 2010, and over $1 trillion the next year. These are numbers which are so huge they are incomprehensible--incomprehensible to myself and to most Americans. But they translate into a very significant problem, which is that we will be passing on to our children, as a result of all this debt, a nation which they cannot afford.

What is the cause of this debt? What is causing this massive expansion in deficits? Primarily it is spending. It is not that we are a nation that is undertaxed. It is that we are a nation that is simply spending too much.

My colleague on the other side of the aisle, the chairman of the Budget Committee, Mr. Conrad, is fond of saying the debt is the threat. He is absolutely right because that is the threat to this Nation.

It is important to put in context, though, that this is not a momentary event. We are not running up these deficits just today. But as we look into the outyears under the Obama budget, the deficits go up astronomically for as far as the eye can see, leading to debt which is unsustainable.

Over the next 10 years, the average deficit of this Nation will be $1 trillion. Again, let's try to put that in context. That is about 4 to 5 percent of our gross national product every year.

If you were in Europe and you wanted to get into the European Union, which is a legitimate group of industrialized nations, they have rules for how fiscally solvent you must be as a nation. One of their rules says your deficit cannot exceed 3 percent of your gross national product. Yet under President Obama and his proposed budget, our deficit will average 4.5 percent to 5 percent of our gross national product for the next 10 years, over $1 trillion a year.

To what does this lead? It leads to massive expansion of debt, as this chart shows, a debt which will be 85 percent of our GDP. What does that mean, 85 percent of our GDP? The public debt of a nation is the debt held by other people, specifically Americans and other countries, primarily, in our case, China. They are the biggest holder of our debt. Historically, whether a country or individuals are willing to buy the debt of a nation depends on whether that nation is seen as being able to pay off that debt, that there is a reasonable likelihood of that, or whether the Nation has the strength to pay off that debt.

There are rules of thumb here too. Again, in order to get into the European Union, you have to have a ratio of less than 60 percent public debt to your nation's debt, to your nation's GNP, gross national product.

Yesterday, under this proposal, under this administration, as we are seeing in action as we passed the $1 trillion debt line yesterday, that public debt goes well past 65 percent very quickly within the next 2 years, and then it continues to head up to 80 percent. In other words, our public debt will be so high we would be considered so irresponsible as a nation fiscally that the European nations, which are industrialized countries, under their rules would not be able to allow us into the European Union. Not that we wish to seek entry, but clearly that is a standard at which we should look.

If you look at it historically, our public debt--and what most economists agree is reasonable--has been between 30 and 40 percent of gross national product. That is a manageable public debt. But when you double that debt as a percent of GDP, you are putting us on a path, a spiraling path downward into fiscal insolvency and a nation which cannot sustain its own debt.

To try to address this in another way, President Obama's proposals for spending will more than double the debt in the next 5 years and triple it in the next 10 years. In fact, if you take

all the debt that has been run up in our Nation from the beginning when George Washington was President through George W. Bush's term in office, take all that debt, President Obama has proposed and is spending--this government is spending--at a rate that will double that debt in just 5 years. It is an inexcusable action to pass this much debt on to our children.

This chart, called the ``Wall of Debt,'' puts it in numerical terms. We can see how it goes up and up and up and up. By the end of this budget, the debt will have increased three times--three times from about $6 billion to $16 billion, about $5.5 to $16 trillion--excuse me, trillion dollars. It is hard to use the term ``trillion.''

This is intolerable.

How do we address this situation? We need to control spending, and we need, to the extent we raise taxes, use those taxes to reduce our debt, not expand the size of government. Yet what are the proposals we are seeing coming from this administration and Members on the other side of the aisle?

We have seen a House of Representatives proposal in the area of energy called the cap-and-trade bill, which should be more accurately described as the cap-and-tax bill because it creates a national sales tax of inordinate size. We have never seen anything of this size before. Every time you hit your light switch, you are going to end up paying a new tax under this bill for the purpose of addressing climate change and energy policy. Yet it does not really accomplish any of that.

The primary polluter in America today is the automobile. All that the new tax that is being put in place from the House bill does is increase the cost or increase the tax on gasoline. It does not reduce the mileage. It does not reduce the pollution. It just increases the tax.

As Senator Alexander spoke prior to my speaking, in the area of energy production, electrical production, cap and trade simply becomes a windfall, a pure and simple corporate welfare program for a lot of large, major electrical producers. They get this asset, a certificate to sell, which we have seen generate huge amounts of income to them, in exchange for theoretically reducing the amount of emissions that go into the atmosphere.

If you wanted to address this issue, you don't do it with a massive new tax on American workers, which is then basically given back to the industry which uses it, which gets an advantage from it. Rather, you should use the ideas Senator Alexander has talked about and we have been talking about on this side. Build 100 nuclear powerplants in the next 20 years, move the automobile fleet to at least half electrical by the year 2020 so that you have actually brought online nonpolluting electrical power and you have put in place automobiles which do not pollute also.

That is not the proposal. The proposal is this massive new tax, not used to reduce the debt or the deficit but basically used in many areas to expand the government with lots of new programs but also to underwrite a huge corporate welfare program.

Then the other proposal we have from the administration that is major public policy is the issue of health care. Again, proposals are about expanding dramatically the size of government. In fact, the bill being worked on in the HELP Committee, by its own scoring, is at least $1 trillion unfunded. That adds to the debt. That is going to go on top of this debt.

To the extent there are new taxes being talked about--and there are a lot of them, especially in the House of Representatives--those taxes are not being used to reduce the debt. They are being used to grow the size of government, to increase the government. As a result, the debt does not go down; the government's size goes up when we should be focusing on this debt issue.

It is unconscionable that we as one generation would be running up these types of deficits and passing this type of debt on to our children. There may be an excuse for it during a period of recession-- --

Madam President, I ask for 1 additional minute.

Madam President, there may be an excuse for it during a recession--and we are in a recession, a severe one--but there is no excuse for it as we move out of this recession, and we are moving out of this recession. There is no excuse for having deficits that are $1 trillion for the next 10 years. There is no excuse for running deficits of 4 to 5 percent of GDP for the next $1 trillion. There is absolutely no excuse for putting a debt on our children's backs that is 80 percent of the GDP of this country because what we are doing is passing on to our children a nation with fiscal policies that are unsustainable and which will basically give them less of a lifestyle than we received from our parents. No generation should do that to another generation. Yet there are no policy proposals coming forward from this administration which would turn this debt line down. None. Instead, their policy proposals increase the size of government and increase the tax burdens of Americans without reducing our debt by any significance. It is an unfortunate situation and a difficult situation and one which we better start addressing for the sake of this country and for our children's future.

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

Mr. President, first, I thank the Senator from Minnesota for yielding me this time and, second, I wish to talk today about waste. We are all concerned about waste. I have an amendment which I understand I cannot call up because the parliamentary situation is such that the floor leaders did not wish to have another amendment brought up.

This sign here, which is a type of sign that is proliferating across our Nation everywhere, reflects waste. It is totally inexcusable. It is a political advertisement for money that is being spent as a result of the stimulus package. That is all it is. The sign says: ``Project Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Completion August 2009.''

That is a political statement, the purpose of which is to promote spending on the stimulus package. I did not vote for the stimulus package. I thought a program which is going to spend almost 50 percent of the money after the year 2011 made little sense and was not stimulus at all. But I certainly would not have expected that as a result of this program we would be funding these signs all over America to promote this program.

These signs are not cheap, by the way. In New Hampshire we get them for less than most places. They cost about $300 a sign. But in Georgia they cost $1,700 a sign; in Pennsylvania they cost $2,000 a sign; in New Jersey they are costing $3,000 per sign. Literally, there are 20,000 projects going on--most of them paving projects across this country, paving projects most of which may have occurred anyway, but in any event they are paving projects. If you start multiplying the number of signs going up, and each one of these projects require having two or three signs put up, you are talking very significant dollars, you are talking tens of millions of dollars for self-promotion of these programs.

Ironically, these signs are actually required before people can get the funds. We had a gentleman in one of our towns in New Hampshire, I think it was Derry, who said, before he would be released the dollars to do the project in his town that the town had applied for and it had approved, they had to agree to put up this sign. He didn't want to put up the sign. He thought it was a waste of money, but he was required to put up this sign.

Why are we doing this? The American people are sort of tired of us wasting dollars. They are especially tired of us wasting dollars trying to blow our own horn around here. If the administration believed these signs promoting the stimulus package were so valuable, let them spend campaign funds--because that is what they are, they are campaign signs--to put them up. But instead we are putting these signs up.

What these signs should say if we are going to put them up is: Project funded by the future generations of American taxpayers--and they add to the debt of our children. That should be added under here, ``add to the debt of our children.''

The signs have no value at all, none, other than self-promotion of these projects.

Maybe some of the projects are legitimate. I think probably most of them are legitimate. To the extent they are done within this period of recession, I support them. The problem I had with the stimulus package was so much of the money was being spent outside the period when we know the recession will be over. But even if the projects are legitimate, which most of them I am sure are--although some have been questioned, such as the crossing path for turtles. That received a fair amount of press. I have to say I didn't understand why we had to build an underpass for turtles, but I don't live in whatever State that was in. But as a very practical matter, the underpass for turtles had a sign which said the project is being built at the expense of the American taxpayers, promoting the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

This is foolish. This is the type of thing that drives taxpayers crazy, and it should. It is so inexcusable. People get outraged by us doing things such as this and by the Government doing things such as this. You drive by this sign and, if you have a chainsaw in the back of your truck, you want to cut them down. Of course, they put them up in steel so you have to have a blowtorch, but in any event they should not be out there, and they certainly should not be out there costing $300 to $3,000

per sign. That money, at the minimum--first, it should not have been spent. But if it is going to be spent, it should have been actually spent on the project itself or other projects which were deserving. But certainly there was no reason to spend it to promote the project through these signs.

I will have an amendment which says, essentially, no more signs, no more wasting taxpayers' dollars on signs that cost $3,000 promoting projects for the purposes of political aggrandizement. I hope to be able to call it up as we move forward on the Defense bill. I recognize it is not immediately a defense issue, but unfortunately this is the only authorizing bill floating around the body. These signs are going up like weeds across the Nation. Every time they go up, they cost our children a few thousand dollars on the national debt. So if we are going to stop that type of profligate spending, we have to act now. Therefore, I am going to call up this amendment when the proper time occurs on the floor.

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

Mr. President, it is my honor to rise today in special tribute to SCPO Daniel Healy of Exeter, NH. I am proud to recognize the dedication ceremony of the ``SCPO Daniel Healy USN SEAL'' Memorial Monument and Bridge in honor of his courageous service to the United States of America.

On June 28, 2005, Daniel lost his life when his helicopter was shot down during a rescue mission to save the lives of fellow soldiers in Kunar Province, Afghanistan. For his fearlessness under fire, Senior Chief Petty Officer Healy was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star with Combat ``V'' for Valor, the Purple Heart, and the Afghanistan Campaign Medal. In recognition of outstanding performance throughout his military career, Daniel was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, the Joint Meritorious Unit Award, the Meritorious Unit Commendation, the National Defense Service Medal, and the Good Conduct Medal.

On Sunday, July 19, 2009, the town of Exeter, NH, will honor Daniel by renaming the Guinea Road Bridge and Exeter Town Pool, in remembrance of his life and service. Although we can never truly do enough to honor his sacrifice, this bridge and monument will stand as a lasting testament to a dedicated individual that selflessly paid the ultimate sacrifice in support of his brothers in arms.

This dedication speaks volumes about Daniel's character. At a time when we have two wars ongoing, it is an extraordinary reminder of the kind of person who serves this country and commits him or herself to the protection of others, even until death. I am sure that Daniel would be the first to say that although this bridge and pool will bear his name, the honor truly belongs to everyone who proudly wears the uniform of our great Nation.

Daniel's kind and determined attitude will always be remembered by those who knew him and it is with the utmost respect that we remember his life with this entry into the official Congressional Record. On behalf of my wife Kathy, and myself, I want to express our deep gratitude and respect for a father, husband, son, brother, and true American hero. With this, I ask my colleagues to join me in thanking Daniel's family for his service to the Nation and his devotion to our freedom.