Floor Statements

Mr. President, today is Earth Day, a day of celebration of the environment and the landscape of the great American outdoors. The President is on his way to Iowa to visit a windmill factory.

It is also a good day for us in the Senate to ask, ``exactly what is our energy policy in the United States and what should it be?'' Is it a national clean energy policy; or is it a national renewable energy policy; or is it a national windmill policy? It makes a difference. Because in terms of electricity, we use about a quarter of all the electricity in the world, and our computers and our homes in the summer and winter and our factories all depend upon a generous supply of reliable, low-cost electricity. That is what we need.

I believe this is our policy, and I believe most on the Republican side believe this as well, and I hope many on the other side do too. I believe that what we should do for the foreseeable future is to produce American energy, and use less energy, and that we ought to do it as cleanly as possible, as reliably as possible, and at as low a cost as possible.

Let's see if that is what we are actually doing and if that is what the legislation we are considering would actually do. Nothing has captured the media's attention, nor the attention of those of us who are elected to office, quite so much as renewable energy. I heard the Presiding Officer make what I believe was his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate on this subject not long ago. And the President of the United States--President Obama--has talked about powering our electricity by capturing the energy of the Sun, and the wind, and the Earth.

We will be considering, within a few weeks, legislation that would require all our electric utilities to generate a portion of their electricity from a very narrowly defined group of energies--mostly the Sun, the wind, and the Earth--and we have huge subsidies, especially for windmills--billions of dollars by taxpayers. That is the subject of another speech, but last year we added another $13 billion or $14 billion in subsidies over the next 10 years that we would be giving to banks and wealthy people and others who are wind developers.

The total number is in the $25 billion to $26 billion in taxpayer money that is now going just to subsidize wind turbines. The subsidies are huge. As a country, we have gotten infatuated with energy from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth.

I went to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory a year ago and talked about the importance of a clean energy future for our country, and among the suggestions I made was that we have a new Manhattan Project (like the World War II project that created the atom bomb), or a series of mini Manhattan Projects, and that they would be directed toward such things as making solar cost competitive within 5 years. Solar energy costs three or four times as much as other energies, so the technology needs to be improved. Also, we should make advanced biofuels more of a reality. In other words, making fuel from crops that we don't eat so we don't distort the food market.

We have made some progress on renewable energy, but there is a potentially dangerous energy gap facing us in America because, today, renewable energy from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth produces 1\1/2\ percent of all the electricity we use. The President wants to double that. Well, that is 3 percent. What if we tripled it? Well, that is on up to 5 or 6 or 7 percent. What about the other 90 percent? How are we going to heat our homes and cool our homes and how are we going to keep prices low enough so our factories and jobs will stay here rather than going overseas? It will be a long time before electricity or energy from the Sun and the wind and the Earth can power this big country of ours. There will be a gap between the renewable energy we want and the reliable, low-cost energy we must have.

Congressman Heath Shuler of North Carolina and I are co-chairs of the Tennessee Valley Authority Congressional Caucus. We went to Knoxville last week and held a very interesting forum on the renewable energy options in the Tennessee Valley Authority area. One of the two big plants that make polysilicon, which is essential for solar, provided testimony. We are very glad to see that in Tennessee. But each of those plants uses 120 megawatts of power. They will become almost immediately TVA's largest, or among their largest, customers. They need large amounts of low-cost, reliable electricity to make solar panels. Today, of course, the kind of energy President Obama wants to use only produces 1.5 percent of that needed by the United States. We need low- cost electricity for all jobs, not just green jobs.

Here is what we found that was promising--solar especially. I mentioned it cost a lot more today and that it takes up a whole large area. A nuclear powerplant might take up one square mile. The equivalent amount of solar power might take up 10 times that much area. But nevertheless, our State and the Oak Ridge Laboratory and the University of Tennessee are focused on doing our best to try to make solar cost competitive, and we should redouble that effort in this country. We should be spending our money on energy research and development for that purpose.

For example, we heard about underwater river turbines. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says there may be 30,000 megawatts of electricity that could be produced by turbines in the Mississippi River. That would be pretty good, if it works, because the river runs all the time, unlike the Sun, which only produces energy when the Sun shines. Of course, you can't store energy from the Sun. People overlook that sometimes. You have to use it when it happens. The wind often blows at night, when we don't need it. But the river runs all day long--old man river does--and if it can produce that kind of energy, that would be promising.

Biomass may help. The Southern Companies are building a plant that would have about 100 megawatts. In our part of the world, a bad choice would be wind turbines. We have one wind plant. The problem with it is, No. 1, the wind doesn't blow, at least not enough to make much electricity. It blows 18 percent of the time in the case of TVA's one wind farm--the only wind farm in the southeastern United States.

Second, much of that is at night, when TVA has about seven nuclear powerplants worth of electricity that is unused. So TVA is wasting, in my opinion, $60 million on big wind turbines that it could be spending on conservation, nuclear power, and pollution control equipment.

More than anything else, we do not want to see giant, 500-foot wind turbines on top of the most beautiful mountains, we believe--with all respect to the Senator from New Mexico--the

most beautiful mountains at least in the eastern part of the United States. Boone Pickens was asked if he was going to put wind turbines on his ranch? He said: No, they are ugly. If they are too ugly for his ranch then they are too ugly for the Great Smokey Mountains, and they are the wrong choice for us. Solar? Yes. Underwater turbines? Yes. Biomass? Yes. There may be others, but there are good choices and there are bad choices.

The bridge to the future for clean energy means this. While we do all we can on research and development to find a way to make solar cost competitive, to find a way to create advanced biofuels, we are still going to need a lot of power. Based on what we saw in the TVA region, you could start with conservation. We use 143 percent of the national average, per person, of electricity in Tennessee. We waste a lot of electricity. If we just used the national average, that would be the same as four new nuclear plants, five coal plants the size of Bull Run and nine natural gas plants such as the ones TVA is building in Jackson. So we start with conservation.

If we are talking about fuel, the simplest and easiest thing to do on Earth Day is to recognize we could electrify half of our cars and trucks in America--that might take 20 years--but without building one single new powerplant, not one nuclear plant, not one coal plant, not one windmill on a mountaintop. We don't have to do that because, in TVA's case, they have 6,000 or 7,000 megawatts of unused electricity at night when we are all asleep and the factories are not working. So plug your car in at night at cheaper rates, bring in a lot less oil from overseas, save billions of dollars. That would take care of us for the next 20 years. That would be a smart decision to make on Earth Day.

But the other thing we need to do is recognize that, if we care about clean air, and especially if we are worried about global warming, as I am, that we have to take nuclear seriously. Nuclear plants in America produce only 20 percent of our electricity but they produce 70 percent of our carbon-free, mercury-free, nitrogen-free, sulfur-free electricity. Let me say that again. They are only 20 percent of our electricity but they are 70 percent of our clean electricity. So in the Tennessee region especially, we should not be wasting money on windmills where the wind doesn't blow and it desecrates the environment. We should be spending money on making coal plants cleaner through pollution control. We know how to do that, except for carbon. We should also build more nuclear plants and retire the dirtiest coal plants. That is the smart thing to do. And we should emphasize conservation.

My point today is simply this. I think all of us want to make sure we have a stable energy future. A stable energy future means plenty of reliable, low-cost electricity so we can heat and cool our homes and keep our jobs from going overseas. And we want to make sure it is clean. So our goals should be to produce more American energy, to make us more energy independent by electrifying our cars, to make coal clean, and to use wind and solar when it is appropriate to do that. But if we truly want to make a difference, we should build 100 new nuclear powerplants in the next 20 years, at least five or six a year, because that is the best way to have clean air. That is the best way to have low costs. And we should launch another mini-Manhattan Project and reserve a Nobel Prize for the scientist who can get rid of the carbon from existing coal plants, because coal provides half our energy. We know what to do about nitrogen, mercury, and sulfur. But we have not figured out what to do about carbon. If we did, India would also do it, China would also do it, the rest of the world would do it, and we could have low-cost energy.

I mention low cost because so often we talk about new forms of energy as if cost didn't matter. It matters to the executives who met with me yesterday from the TVA region. TVA's residential rates are low, relatively. But the industrial rates are not. If they are too high, those jobs move out of our region, maybe overseas. And last December the people in Nashville, our capital city, did not think the residential rates were so low because 10 percent of them said they were unable to pay their electric bill in December because it was too high.

Thank you very much, Mr. President.

So on Earth Day my suggestion is that, as we celebrate the day, we should ask what is our energy policy--Is it a national clean energy policy? Is it a national renewable energy policy? Is it a national windmill policy?--we should recognize there is a potentially dangerous gap between the renewable energy we want and the reliable low-cost energy we must have, and between now and then we must build a strong bridge to a clean energy future.

We can agree on conservation, but during that time we will need 100 new nuclear plants, we will need offshore drilling for oil, and fast, because we need the gas and we can't electrify all of our cars as quickly as we might like.

Earth Day is a day for celebration, but it is also a day for realism.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, tomorrow is Earth Day, and it is a good day to save our mountaintops. I live in east Tennessee, near the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Millions of Americans visit us

every year because of the natural beauty of our landscape. They do not come to Tennessee to see the smog, they do not come to Tennessee to see creeks polluted by mountaintop mining, and they don't come to Tennessee to see ridgetop wind turbines that are three times as tall as our University of Tennessee football stadium, which, with their transmission lines, would create a junkyard in the sky.

The American landscape is a part of our environment. It is essential to the American character. From John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt to Lady Bird Johnson, generations of Americans have worked to protect the landscape. Some of the same groups that have worked hardest to protect the landscape are neglecting it in pursuit of remedies for climate change.

I am working with three Democratic Members of Congress to try to protect the American landscape. The first is Senator Tom Carper of Delaware. He and I are introducing legislation to put stiffer controls on sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury emissions from coal plants. We have the technology to make the air cleaner, and we should be using it. There is no need to delay dealing with sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury while we figure out what to do about carbon.

Secondly, Senator Cardin of Maryland and I have introduced legislation to ban the practice of blowing off the tops of mountains and dumping the waste in streams to mine coal. Coal is essential to our energy future. I hope we will reserve a Nobel Prize for the scientist who finds a way to deal with the carbon from existing coal plants. But we will create many more jobs by saving our mountaintops to attract tourists than we will by blowing them up to find coal, especially because our State produces less than 2 percent of the Nation's coal.

Finally, Representative Heath Shuler of North Carolina and I hosted a forum in Knoxville highlighting the Tennessee Valley Authority and their choices for renewable energy. Conservation and nuclear power are realistic options for clean electricity for our region, and we should move ahead aggressively with both. But solar power, for the longer term; underwater river turbines in the Mississippi River; biomass, such as wood chips; and methane from landfills are all good choices for renewable electricity as well.

On the other hand, the idea of polluting our landscape with 500-foot wind turbines and their transmission towers is preposterous. It makes no sense to destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment, especially since the wind only blows about 18 percent of the time at TVA's one wind farm. And much of that is at night, when TVA already has thousands of unused megawatts of electricity that we could be using. TVA should take the $60 million it is spending to buy about 5 megawatts of unreliable wind power and instead buy 10 compact fluorescent light bulbs for every TVA household, which, if used, would save about 920 megawatts of reliable power--the equivalent of an entire nuclear plant.

Senator Carper and I will host a roundtable this Thursday in the Capitol on our legislation to establish stiff standards for sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury. The Tennessee Valley Authority needs to go ahead and put sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury controls on all its large coal plants that it intends to keep open. But TVA actions alone will not be enough to give us clean air in the Great Smoky Mountains and in Tennessee. We need strong national standards, such as those in our legislation because so much of our dirty air blows in from coal powerplants in other States.

During each of the 2-year Congresses in which I have been a Senator, I have introduced legislation to curb pollutants from coal plants, including carbon. Tomorrow is Earth Day and a good day to save our mountaintops. The way we should do that is to have stiffer controls for cleaner air, to ban mountaintop removal for coal mining, and to stop the practice of wasting ratepayer dollars for ridgetop wind turbines that destroy the landscape, which is also an essential part of the American environment.

I yield the floor.

I would say to the Senator from North Dakota that all of us have noticed the courage of his constituents, the citizens of North Dakota, and we admire that courage and their resilience in the face of such adversity.

Senator Corker and I saw this same thing in the faces of the men and women in Murfreesboro, TN, who were suddenly hit with a tornado in the springtime. While the size of the disaster was not comparable to the size of the disaster in North Dakota, it was to those families of that kind of disaster. So I appreciate his comments and our thoughts and prayers go out to the families in North Dakota.

Association of American Universities

About 1 hour ago I spoke to the Association of American Universities, which is a group which includes many of our finest public and private research universities, some of them in the State of North Carolina, I might note.

I would like to say to my colleagues on the Senate floor and to our country what I said to them in a private meeting. I told them that not long ago a few of us in the Senate had supper in the majority leader's office with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was completing a year as a scholar-in-residence at the Library of Congress.

One of us asked Dr. Cardoso what memory he would take back to Brazil about his time in the United States.

He replied unhesitatingly:

The American university. The greatness and the autonomy of

the American university. There is nothing in the world quite

like it.

The United States doesn't only have the best universities in the world, it has almost all the best universities in the world. A recent ranking by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai ranks 35 universities among the top 50 in the world, 8 among the top 10. Higher education, says commentator Fareed Zakaria, is America's best industry. Along with our national laboratories, managed by the Department of Education, our research universities have been our secret weapon in developing many of the competitive advantages that make possible the high American standard of living. In the midst of our pride about our universities, I suggest we remember the warning George Romney, then president of American Motors, gave Detroit's automakers a half century ago:

Nothing is more vulnerable than entrenched success.

At that time, the big three automakers didn't just make the best cars in the world, they made almost all the best cars. But the automakers didn't listen to George Romney. We know the rest of the story. The Japanese and others perfected smaller, fuel-efficient cars, and today we are bailing out the automakers that didn't listen. American higher education today would do well to heed George Romney's warning of 50 years ago, and so should the rest of us, since our country's success depends so much upon the quality of our colleges and universities as well as upon our access to them. I suggest, therefore, we begin by addressing our research universities. I propose that the national academies assemble a distinguished group of Americans to assess the competitive position of American research universities, both public and private, and then respond to the following question: What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that Congress, State governments, and the universities themselves could take to assure the ability of the American research university to maintain the excellence needed to help the United States compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century?

I hope this proposal sounds familiar. It is a narrower version of the request I, along with a bipartisan group of Senators and Congressmen, made in 2005, when we asked the national academies to respond to this question: What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that Federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century?

The academies responded to that request by creating a distinguished commission, headed by Norman Augustine, which reported within 10 weeks from its first gathering a list of 20 recommendations, along with strategies to achieve them. That report was entitled ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.'' After a great deal of bipartisan work in this Chamber and in the House, Congress and the President produced the America COMPETES Act of 2007, which included many of the Augustine Commission recommendations and established a blueprint for maintaining America's competitive position.

That blueprint provided a helpful basis for additional funding that became available earlier this year.

I can still remember the afternoon in the spring of 2005, when I sat through a long Senate Budget Committee meeting. What was bothering me most and

what I heard that day was that the uncontrolled growth of entitlement programs--mainly Medicare and Medicaid--would squeeze out essential investments in education and research critical to the Nation's prosperity. I had seen this as well during the 1980s, when I was Governor of Tennessee, as I struggled, as has almost every Governor since, to pay the growing cost of Medicaid, as well as prisons and public schools, and still have funds left to support quality in higher education. Those struggles have become a losing battle for public universities.

My own research shows that over 6 years, between 2000 and 2006, total State higher education funding has gone up 17 percent, while average tuition at public 4-year institutions has gone up 63 percent, and State funding for Medicaid has gone up 62 percent.

In a 2003 study of funding of public universities, Thomas J. Kane and Peter Orszag, now Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration--and he spoke to this same group of university presidents this morning--suggested the quality of students and the compensation of faculty has declined significantly at public universities relative to private universities. They concluded:

Taken together, the results suggest a startling and

troubling deterioration of the relative quality of public

universities. The most recent set of state budget cutbacks,

if anything, will accelerate this trend . . . as a result,

the traditional model of higher education finance in the

[United States] with large state subsidies to public higher

education and modest means tests grants and loans from the

federal government is becoming increasingly untenable.

The recent stimulus package with support for higher education offers some relief but only temporary. Here is how Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen described the situation in his budget address on March 23. The Governor said:

Higher education presents a challenge. Under the rules we

have been given, they are getting a lot of the Tennessee

stimulus money;

He means higher education.

they not only won't have to make cuts, but cuts they have

already taken in Tennessee have been restored; about $100

million extra in this fiscal year. Yet when this money ends

21 months from now, our campuses will suddenly need to begin

operating with about $180 million less in state funding than

they had this year. More than most other areas, higher

education has dodged a bullet and [they have] bought some

time, but there is a great deal of work to be done to

recognize and streamline for a much leaner future . . .

That was about 2 weeks ago. I considered asking that this new national academies report be only about the pressures on public research universities, but that would have set up competing recommendations and presented an incomplete picture. Private universities have their challenges, too, especially during this recession. But the changing role of State support for public research universities and its impact on quality deserves special attention in the report I am suggesting. I also believe a portion of the academies' assessment should include the relationship or lack of relationship of our research universities to our 17 Department of Energy national laboratories, which employ more than 30,000 scientists. These labs, three of which were founded during the Manhattan Project in World War II, are also secret weapons in our Nation's strive for competitiveness. I have seen firsthand how the alliance between the University of Tennessee Knoxville and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has produced joint professorships, distinguished scientists, centers of excellence, and a thriving science alliance between the two campuses.

During the next few days, I will meet with National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone and discuss with him creating a formal bipartisan letter of request to the national academies and how the academies will respond to that request.

One way Congress could improve the quality of higher education is to stop overregulating. I voted against the new higher education bill enacted by Congress last summer because, after 3 years of work, the Senate spewed forth a well-intentioned contraption of unnecessary rules and regulations that wastes time and money that ought to be spent instead on students and improving quality. At the close of the debate, I carried onto the Senate floor--to be accurate, I asked my staff to bring on the floor and some of the pages--a stack of boxes as tall as I am that contained the rules and regulations for the 6,000 higher education institutions that accept Federal grants and loans. Senator Mikulski, who has agreed to work with me to try to reduce the number of these regulations, came over and stood by the stack, and the stack was a foot taller than she.

The former president of Stanford has estimated that these regulations cost institutions--from Harvard to the University of North Carolina to Duke to Vanderbilt to the University of Tennessee and the Nashville Auto Diesel College--7 cents for each Federal dollar to do the busy work to fill out paperwork to comply with the regulations. The bad news is, the new law we passed doubles the rules and regulations with 24 new categories and 100 new reporting requirements. These new requirements include a total of 54 so-called college watch lists, which I believe will be too confusing for families to understand, and complicated rules involving textbooks which will only prove that Members of Congress have no idea how faculty members prepare courses.

Most of these complications of rules, including graduation rates in 48 different categories, disaggregation of student-reported data by 14 racial, ethnic, and income subgroups, and employment rates of graduates of institutions, will leave college administrators scratching their heads and create thousands of new jobs for people to fill out forms. All this will be put on the Web, and most of it will be shipped to Washington, DC, for someone to read. Having once been the Secretary of Education myself, I do not know who will read all these reports and all these new regulations, and I don't know what they would do about them if they did read them.

The academies, in the report I am suggesting, may also suggest that Congress and States make changes in the way we fund and regulate research universities, but much of the heavy lifting will have to be done by the universities themselves. They are the ones who should be most concerned about George Romney's warning:

There is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success.

I guarantee that if some of the recommendations are going to have to do with additional funding, Members of Congress and State legislators are going to be asking what universities are doing to reduce costs, especially the cost of attending university.

At the American Council on Education meeting in February, I said that what I hear in Congress every time the issue comes up is, every time we increase Pell grants, colleges raise tuition. That is what my colleagues say to me. That is one reason why, in exasperation, Congressmen and Senators pile new rules on already overregulated colleges. I suggested in February that university administrators might want to be ready with a concrete explanation of what they are doing to reduce costs before asking for more money. I offered two suggestions: One, that colleges offer some--not all, but some--well-prepared students the option of a 3-year baccalaureate degree, cutting one-third the time and one-fourth the cost from a college education; and, two, that community college be free for well-prepared students.

I cited to them a group of Tennessee counties and businesses in northeast Tennessee that make up the difference between the cost of the community college and Federal and State scholarships for qualified local students.

Two weeks ago, I visited a university president in Nashville who actually listened to what I had to say in February. On April 13, Randy Lowry, at Lipscomb University in Nashville, announced a new 3-year option for some qualified students, a plan for veterans to attend tuition free, and a plan to make it easier and cheaper for community college students to attend Lipscomb. Taking into account the student earnings during the year that he or she is in the workforce instead of attending the university, President Lowry estimates that a Lipscomb graduate with a 3-year degree might avoid up to $50,000 in debt. In offering a 3-year option, Lipscomb has good company in Hartwick College in New York, Judson College in Alabama, Bates College in Maine, and Valparaiso in Indiana. In February, the State of Rhode Island decided to create a pilot program for a 3-year degree model.

It may seem like a simple, even inconsequential request to ask the national academies to tell us the top 10 actions Congress, States, and research universities need to take to maintain university excellence, but my experience is that most ideas fail in Washington for lack of the idea. We have plenty of planners, publicists, and politicians to run with a good idea. I look forward to the idea: the recommendations in priority order--one set for Congress, one set for the States, one set for the research universities themselves.

There is no reason these recommendations should not have the same impact the ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm'' report had and continues to have. And remembering George Romney's warning of a half century ago, there is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success. We should all hope this new report from the National Academies does have that impact.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, on March 27 colleagues of Congressman Jimmy Duncan from the House of Representatives gathered in Knoxville to celebrate the naming of Lincoln Memorial University's John J. Duncan, Jr. School of Law.

This is an appropriate honor both for Congressman Duncan and for the university.

The proposed Duncan School of Law received Tennessee Board of Law Examiner approval last month. This allows its graduates to be eligible to sit for the bar exam in Tennessee.

LMU has already submitted a letter of intent to pursue accreditation for the proposed law school. It hopes to begin admitting students and begin classes in August of this year. That first class will consist of approximately 75 part-time students. The full-time program will begin in fall 2010 and consist of another 125 students.

Congressman Duncan earned his journalism degree at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his law degree at George Washington University. He has served as Captain in the U.S. Army National Guard and practiced law in Knoxville.

In 1981, when I was Governor of Tennessee, I appointed Jimmy Duncan as State trial judge. He served until 1988 and I was always proud of that appointment.

It is especially appropriate to combine the names of President Lincoln and the Duncan family. President Lincoln proposed creating the university as a gesture to the mountain people who fought with the Union in the Civil War. The Duncans, like the Alexanders and many others, were early Scotch-Irish settlers who remained loyal Lincolnites even though the State of Tennessee seceded from the Union. So have been most of the people in the Second Congressional District that Congressman Duncan and his father have served. The district has elected only Republicans to the Congress since Abraham Lincoln was President.

President Lincoln once said that education ``is the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.'' Naming Lincoln Memorial University's law school for Congressman John J. Duncan, Jr., unites two great traditions that will encourage educational excellence in our region.

Mr. President, I am pleased that the Senate unanimously approved my amendment to maximize college affordability and access by helping to preserve competition and choice in the student loan program. I look forward to working with my colleagues to preserve the Federal Family Education Loan--FFEL--program as a viable program for students and institutions of higher education.

My amendment is very straightforward and it calls on the Congress to maintain ``a competitive student loan program that provides students and institutions of higher education with a comprehensive choice of loan products and services.'' We know that institutions of higher education like the ability to choose which program to participate in, and 73 percent of schools choose to use the FFEL program.

I think that we should maintain that ability of institutions to choose which program to participate in so that we can give them, and their students, the best options, the best services, and the best programs.

The President's budget proposes to originate all new student loans in the Direct Loan program, which is a proposal that I do not support. When I was U.S. Secretary of Education, I opposed the creation of the Direct Loan program because I felt that the Federal Government shouldn't be in the business of being a bank. I still feel that way. The problem with the government operating as a bank is that we would have to borrow a lot of money and add to the Federal deficit. The FFEL program last year generated $52.9 billion in loans, while the Direct Loan program generated $21.8 billion. If we were to move all of the FFEL loans to the government's loan program, that's a lot more debt to add to our books. I don't think we should do that right now when we know that the FFEL program is working.

I also thought that the Federal Government wouldn't be able to manage that many loans very effectively or efficiently for the students, and I haven't changed my mind on that. There are 6,000 colleges and universities, and over 15 million loans each year to students and parents. The Department of Education can't manage that many loans, nor should they. It is a massive undertaking that calls on over 30,000 people throughout our Nation working for banks, guarantors, and nonprofit lenders. We don't need to increase the Department of Education staffing by 30,000 people, so I don't see why we should move all of the loans and operations to that agency.

As the president of one of our lenders in Tennessee recently wrote in the Knoxville News Sentinel, ``Nationalizing the student loan industry would be the equivalent of the government taking over the parcel shipping industry and doing away with FedEx and UPS, relying entirely on the U.S. Postal Service.'' We can't afford to take that risk when we are dealing with students.

In the past week we have all heard from many of the institutions of higher education in our States favoring the continuation of the FFEL program. My amendment does just that, and it sends the message that the U.S. Senate supports giving colleges and universities--and ultimately parents and students--the choice which student loan program works best for them.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I understand I have 60 seconds.

Mr. President, this is the runaway debt limit amendment. It says 60 Senators have to agree before a budget can raise our national debt to more than 90 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, which this budget does every single year.

We saw this week the leverage a lender can have over a borrower when the President of the United States fired the president of General Motors. Well, China, Japan, and Middle Eastern oil countries already own $1.4 trillion of U.S. debt. So vote yes on the runaway debt limit amendment if you do not want China, Japan, and Middle Eastern oil countries telling the United States how to run our business in the same way our Government is telling General Motors how to run its business.

Mr. President, I was just making my entrance at the time the Senator from Connecticut concluded.

I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 747 and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, I see the Senator from New Hampshire is here, and the Senator from Arizona, the assistant Republican leader, will be here in a few minutes, I believe. Senator Gregg earlier offered an amendment which essentially would say that the projected debt under President Obama's budget couldn't go up more than all of the debt that has been accumulated by all of the Presidents from George Washington to President Bush. That is one way of saying to the American people and to the Senate that the debt that is proposed by these budgets is so staggeringly high that we need to find some way to put a limit on it.

I am offering with my amendment another way to put some limit on the debt. I call it a runaway debt point of order. This is not a matter of not letting the horse get out of the barn; this recognizes that the horse is already out of the barn and we are trying to put a fence around him before he gets into the next county or even into the next country.

This amendment would create a new point of order against considering any budget resolution that estimates gross Federal debt--our total debt, total amount of obligations--exceeding 90 percent of gross domestic product in any year covered by the budget. To put that in a little plainer English, what it means is the Senate would be forced to come up with 60 votes if the public debt in any year goes beyond 90 percent of the estimated gross domestic product.

The gross domestic product is what all of us produce in the United States every year. Despite the fact we are in an economic slowdown, we are a very privileged country. We make up only about 5 percent of the world population--those of us who live in the United States--but year in and year out we produce about $1 out of every $4 of wealth produced in the world. So 22, 23, 25, 26 percent of all of the wealth, all of the money produced each year in the world is produced in the United States for distribution among primarily the 5 percent of us who live here. We are a very privileged country. This amendment says if we intend in any year to increase the debt above 90 percent of all of that production in any year, that 60 Senators have to agree with it.

When was the last time the United States had a debt, a national debt, that exceeded 90 percent of the gross domestic product? It was when we were fighting in World War II and as we were coming out of World War II. Of course, during that time, it didn't matter what we spent. It didn't matter what we taxed. We were in a fight for our lives, and we did whatever we could think of to do, spent whatever we could think of to spend, and ran up any debt we needed to to win the war. And we did win that war.

Right after World War II, our national debt was about 90 percent of the annual gross domestic product of the United States. More recently, it has been about 40 percent.

So here is what happens now--the Senator from New Hampshire went into this to some degree. We talked about deficits and we need to make a clear distinction between deficits and debt. Deficits adds to the debt each year. We talked about the fact that the deficit is going up this year and next year during the recession, and we understand that is necessary to some degree. But then the deficit comes back down to approximately 4 percent of gross domestic product, and it stays at a little over 4 percent in President Obama's budget. That is also the Conrad budget, which OMB Director for

President Obama said, is about 98 percent of the Obama budget. This proposes an annual deficit as compared with GDP that is worse than the following countries: Guatemala, the Philippines, Aruba, Cuba, Nigeria.

This amendment I'm offering, however, seeks to talk about the debt. For example, the President's proposal is to double the debt in 5 years and to almost triple it in almost 10 years. So we start out with debt held by the public at about 40 percent of gross domestic product. But by 2014, we are at 66.5 percent of gross domestic product under Senator Conrad's budget. President Obama proposed a 10-year budget--which is a picture of America's future in the same way that a photograph of a first grade class would be a picture of a community's future 10 years out--that actually presented a very honest picture of our future as he sees it. I respect him greatly for that. I just don't like the picture he has presented because that picture, as I mentioned, doubles the debt in 5 years and nearly triples it in 10 years. So we go from a level of debt held by the public equaling about 40 percent of gross domestic product to 82 percent of gross domestic product.

Under President Bush--and we hear a lot of talking about President Bush, we had lower deficits. I was listening to the radio yesterday morning, and they said: How can you Republicans be talking about debt when under President Bush you ran up the debt? True, true. But Senator Gregg offered an amendment that gives us a chance to deal with that because he points out that President Obama would increase the debt more than, not just President Bush, but than all of the Presidents put together, going back to George Washington. That is a very sobering fact. So President Bush may have made some mistakes, but he was not judged on whether he caused Hurricane Katrina. He was judged on how he reacted to it. President Obama certainly didn't create the economic mess we are in, and he won't be judged by that, but he will be judged-- and the majority party will be judged--by how they react to it. I don't believe doubling the debt and tripling the debt is the way to grow the economy or restore good jobs.

I see the Senator from New Hampshire here, and I would like to ask him about these gross domestic product discussions--90 percent of this and 20 percent of that and a trillion of this--all of that makes the case, but it is hard to fathom.

Through the Chair, I would ask the Senator from New Hampshire how would he put it in terms that the average family can deal with, what it means to double the debt in 5 years and nearly triple it in 10 years, as the President's budget would do.

Guatemala, the Philippines, Aruba.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from New Hampshire and I be allowed to engage in a colloquy for the remaining minutes we have.

Guatemala, the Philippines, Cuba, Nigeria, and Aruba are countries that have an annual deficit level lower than we will have.

Lots of times Members of Congress sort of make fun of Europe and make fun of France and say: Well, that is French. We don't want to be French. It is embarrassing to stand here and say the situation exists where, if the United States were applying to be a member of the European Union, our annual deficit level would be too high to be admitted. We would be unable to qualify for the entire 10 years projected in this budget if we were to choose to do that.

Mr. President, if I may ask the Senator from New Hampshire, who will be the mortgage holder on that debt in 20 or 30 or 40 years?

If the mortgage holders around the world--China, the Middle East, and other countries--worry about our ability to pay it back, I suppose they could simply stop buying our dollars or ask us to pay them more or pay a higher interest rate for our mortgage debt.

We have been worrying about sending billions of dollars overseas to buy oil. So we should be worried about sending half of that money overseas to pay interest on the debt.

The Senator from New Hampshire was Governor of New Hampshire, as I was Governor of Tennessee, and we used to have a friendly competition about which had the most conservative fiscal policies. Of course, Tennessee did, but one thing we always tried to do was keep our debt low because that

meant we had more money for schools and for State parks and for hospitals. What happens when we run the debt so high that we are paying $800 billion in interest, which I believe is 8 times more than the Federal Government spends on education each year and 8 times more than the Federal Government spends on transportation each year. We are taking away the money that we would invest to make this a better country in the future.

How much time do we have, Mr. President?

Mr. President, I see the Senator from North Dakota here. We have been talking about Senator Gregg's amendment, which would try to put some limit on the size of the debt. And we have been talking about my proposal, the runaway debt point of order, which would say debt is not where it should be, so let's say whoa out there and let ourselves and the American people know when we reach a debt level of 90 percent of GDP and that we should not have a budget in any year that does that.

I know the chairman, Senator Conrad, has said in committee he didn't think that was a very effective way to do things. I wonder why that is true because it seems to me it would be extremely effective to shine a big spotlight on the Senate and say you have proposed a budget where debt exceeds 90 percent of the gross domestic product of this country for a year. You cannot do that, unless a bipartisan group of 60 of you agree to do it.

I wonder whether Senator Gregg believes these kinds of limits or spotlights would be a helpful tool in beginning to reduce the staggering debt these budgets propose.

Mr. President, I believe our time has expired. I ask unanimous consent to allow a couple more minutes because I see Senator Kyl from Arizona who wishes to speak briefly.

Mr. President, I understand the Senator from North Dakota, the chairman of the Budget Committee, may come to the floor. If he does and wants to speak, I will defer to him.

In the meantime, I will address the President's budget, which the Senate will begin to consider this morning at 10 o'clock. Those of us who have spent a lot of time around schools, children, and education know there is a very good way to get a picture of the future and that is to walk into a first-grade class in Arkansas, Tennessee or anywhere else in America and take a photograph of the first graders. If you do that, you have a picture of that town, that neighborhood, that community, and our country 10, 15, 20 years out.

The President's budget plan for the next 10 years gives us that kind of photograph of the future of our country. I commend the President for his candor, but I don't like the picture I see. I think, increasingly, our friends around the world and people in this country feel the same way. The Budget Committee chairman, Senator Conrad, has developed a different budget--somewhat different. He says it is about 98 percent similar to the President's budget. What the chairman, Senator Conrad, does is say let's look 5 years out, not 10 years, as the President has suggested. Senator Conrad has moved a few ``children'' out of the picture--the alternative minimum tax ``child'' is over here during the class photograph, so we will not be seeing that person. I think the ``doc fix'' to avoid cuts in physician payments, which we are going to spend money on, is over here, so we will not see that ``child'' during the class picture. The money for the banks--I think we all hope Secretary Geithner's plan to begin to get toxic assets out of the banks will work. If it doesn't, we may have to go to plan B, and we should have the money in reserve if that is necessary. That ``child'' is also out of the class photograph.

With all respect, the attempt of the chairman of the committee to present a 5-year budget, leaving out items that we know we will be spending money on, doesn't come nearly as close to giving us an accurate picture of what the country would be like 10 years from now with the budget we are acting upon.

The President's photograph of the future is a more accurate picture, one we should pay attention to. But it is a blueprint for America that is a very different kind of America--an America with less freedom, with more Government, with more taxes, with more spending, with more borrowing, and an America that our children and our grandchildren will have difficulty affording. This blueprint that President Obama has laid out for us includes a trillion dollars more in spending for health care on top of the trillion dollars in so-called stimulus money that was spent. It includes more than a trillion dollars in taxes, including a national sales tax on energy in the middle of a recession. It would double the debt in 5 years and nearly triple the national debt in 10 years.

There is nothing in the President's budget that would seriously get to work on something he said he wants to work on, which is out-of- control entitlement spending, which accounts for more than 60 percent of the spending in this budget.

It is important for the American people to know this budget that we begin working on at 10 a.m. this morning is a budget of which 60 percent is out of Congress' hands. It is on automatic pilot. It is spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and it is going up-- everyone agrees--at an unsustainable rate, which means we cannot earn enough money to pay at that rate 10, 15, 20 years out; and there is nothing in the budget that would begin to take charge of that problem, such as the commission that Senator Gregg and Senator Conrad have proposed; whereby, we would, as a Congress, come up with a plan and present the plan for controlling entitlement spending, and we would vote it up or down--much in the same way that we deal with the difficult problem of closing defense bases.

This 10-year picture of America's future is causing concern around the world. In China, where the savings rate is as high as 50 percent, compared to ours of about 1 percent--although it is up temporarily in the recession to about 5 percent. In China, a country that buys many of our dollars, leaders there express extraordinary concern about the value of the dollar and whether they should continue to buy our dollars.

Of course, if people overseas do not find buying our dollar as attractive,

the price of our dollar goes down and the cash we are paid when we work is worth less and we can buy less and our standard of living will be less.

We are a very lucky country. Here we are in the middle of this recession where people are hurting, where people are having difficulty finding jobs, and still in this year, we will be producing nearly a quarter of all the money in the world to be distributed among just 5 percent of the people in the world. One way we keep that high standard of living compared with the rest of the world is to make sure the dollars we produce and earn and spend are valuable dollars. If we spend too much and tax too much and borrow too much, they become worth less and China and other countries will not buy those dollars.

Not only is it causing concern in China, we have our European friends expressing concern about the U.S. financial condition. This is a turn of affairs. I have heard a lot of comment on this floor and over in the House of Representatives about: Oh, my goodness, we don't want to be like France, we don't want to be like some European country. We are already worse than that in some ways. In order to be admitted to the European Union, a country's annual deficit has to be less than 3 percent of its gross domestic product. We are already exceeding that. The President's 10-year budget plan would have us settle in, after the recession is over, at about 4 percent. So we would be permanently disqualified from joining the European Union, according to the plan that is laid out before us.

The plan also shows that every year of the 10 years of this budget, our total gross debt, which is all of the public debt we have--that is, debt that we individuals have when we loan money to our own Government or that we owe to the Chinese when they buy our dollars, or other countries around the world--that debt every year exceeds 90 percent of our gross domestic product, 90 percent of everything we work and earn and produce every year in this country that produces 25 percent of the world's income. We would be at that level for each of the 10 years. That is an alarming number. That is the highest amount of debt compared to our gross domestic product that we have had since the end of World War II. And, of course, during World War II we were just paying no attention to what we spent, what we borrowed, what we taxed because we had to win the war. Still we find ourselves today with that level of debt.

Polls show this not only is causing concern around the world, it is causing concern at home. I normally do not think it is wise for elected officials to rely on public opinion polls when they vote. We are sent here, of course, to respect the views of the people who elected us but also to make some independent judgments.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation--which is headed by with David Walker, the former Comptroller General of the United States--has done some very important work over the last few years to try to bring to the American people the seriousness of the problem of our debt. Earlier this month, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation released a public opinion survey that was done jointly by Democratic and Republican pollsters. It showed the following: that voters rank the need to address our budget challenges as a top priority for the Obama administration second only to the need to get the economy back on track and get Americans back to work; that Americans see the threat to our future posed by our growing deficit and debt as more grave and more significant than global warming, more grave and more significant than declines in education, more grave and more significant than manufacturing, and more grave and more significant than the prospect of a rogue nation developing a nuclear weapon.

In other words, the American people, like people in the rest of the world, look at our fiscal condition, look at this budget discussion we are beginning at 10 a.m. today--in just a few minutes--and they are concerned about this issue. We are the world leaders. Our dollar is the world's currency by choice. People who buy and people who follow our leadership are concerned.

Another way to think about the importance of the debt is this way: In the 10th year of the President's budget, we will be spending $800 billion on interest alone. Our credit card will have that big a monthly payment just for interest. That means we will be spending more on interest in the 10th year than we will on national defense, which is $700 billion. We will be spending eight times as much on interest as we will be spending on education, eight times as much on interest as we will be spending on transportation. Every dollar we spend on interest is a dollar we will not be spending on investments to protect our nation's competitive edge in the future, it is a dollar we will not have in our pocket to spend for our families, it is a dollar the small businessperson will not have in his or her pocket to create a job, and it is a dollar that makes us a little less wealthy.

No one is suggesting that President Obama single-handedly caused these large deficits this year or that he is responsible for the economic mess in which we find ourselves. Our friends on the other side, the Democrats, always like to begin their speeches by blaming whatever they can on President Bush. But I think the American people are ready for a talk about where do we go from here.

President Bush did not cause Hurricane Katrina, but he got in some trouble for how he dealt with the cleanup after Hurricane Katrina. In the same way, President Obama had nothing to do with the economic mess in which we find ourselves today, but he will be judged and his administration will be correctly judged based upon how well they lead us in responding to the economic mess in which we find ourselves today. We would suggest that spending this much, taxing this much, and borrowing this much will not help get us out of our economic mess.

The right way to deal with this is not to increase our debt levels to levels that have not been seen since World War II. The right way to deal with it is not to spend another trillion dollars on health care at a time when we are already spending 17 percent of the gross domestic product, which is that much more than every other industrialized country in the world is spending. The right way to do it is not to put a national energy tax on the American people in the middle of a recession.

There is a better way, and I will be offering an amendment in a few minutes in the Budget Committee to show how we can deal with climate change and clean air without new taxes.

We can do it by starting with conservation, with construction of 100 new nuclear powerplants. That is 70 percent of our carbon-free energy today. We can do it by electrifying half our cars and trucks and plugging them into nuclear plants and to coal plants at night when they have plenty of extra electricity. We do not have to build one new powerplant in the next 20 years for the purpose of charging plug-in electric cars unless we wish to. We need to have aggressive research to make solar power cost competitive, to find a way to capture the carbon produced by coal plants, to have the safe processing of nuclear waste. We need to be very aggressive on conservation and efficiency, which is the easiest way for us to deal with clean energy.

We need to develop our oil and gas offshore. We can do it 10 miles offshore so we cannot see it, but we need to do it because the natural gas is important for home heating and, to some extent, for electricity. We are going to be using oil even if we do electrify half our cars and trucks, and we should be using our own oil instead of sending billions of dollars overseas and making us hostage to countries that are not always friendly to us.

This is an important day in the Senate. This is a day when we begin to talk about the budget. We Republicans appreciate the fact that the President has given us a photograph of the future, in the same way we would take a photograph of first graders, and imagine what the country would look like in 10 years. We admire and appreciate his honesty in doing that, but we do not like the picture we see--too much spending, too much debt, too much borrowing, levels that concern the world and levels that concern the American people. It is not necessary to do that. It is not a wise way to create jobs in this country and to begin to get us out of this economic mess--but it will give us in that picture of our future a very different kind of country with more Government, more debt, less freedom, and a country that our children and

grandchildren will have a difficult time affording.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I would like to commend Senator Mikulski for all the hard work that you, Senator Kennedy, Senator Hatch and Senator Enzi have put into crafting this bipartisan legislation. In a time when we are seeing record numbers of Americans looking to give their time and energy to service, I am pleased that we are strengthening and expanding national service programs to create more opportunities for those willing to serve. I thank the Senator for her work on this effort.

In particular, I am pleased with the creation of the new national service corps, which will address educational, health, veteran, and environmental needs. One professional education corps currently in operation, Teach For America, has been an AmeriCorps program since 1994 and is the Nation's largest professional service corps. Teach For America recruits top-college graduates of all backgrounds and career interests to commit to teach for at least 2 years in our Nation's most underserved classrooms. To date, 20,000 Teach For America corps members have enriched the lives of more than 3 million low income students at our Nation's lowest performing schools. I am very encouraged by the fact that while only 1 in 10 Teach For America corps members initially planned on a career in education, two-thirds of them remain in the field in some capacity. This demonstrates the life-changing impact that this kind of service can have on an individual.

Teach For America is also experiencing remarkable growth as more and more Americans look to give back to their communities. Applications were up 40 percent this year, with 35,000 people applying to serve through Teach For America alone.

However, I am concerned that there may be some confusion about the ability of Teach for America participants to serve in the Education Corps that we are creating with this bill. As I understand it, Teach For America will continue to be eligible under the national service corps description in section 122(c)(1)(D) and that because of that eligibility will be eligible as a program model for service corps for funding under the Education Corps and any of the newly created corps programs under section 122. Is this understanding correct?

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

Would the Chair please advise me when I have used 10 minutes.

Mr. President, one of the encouraging things that happened in Washington this year is that the President sent us a budget that was more transparent and more open than previous budgets. It was a 10-year budget instead of 5 years. It gave us a blueprint for the future in that way, the way we ought to be thinking about things. It included some things that had not been included before: the cost of the war; the so-called AMT fix--to address the millionaire's tax the Congress passed in the 1960s designed to catch 155 people who were not paying any taxes, but today will catch 28 million people, mostly middle-class Americans, unless we fix it; and what around here is irreverently called the ``doc fix,'' to deal with the mandated 20- percent cut in what Medicare pays its physicians. That cut in physician payments is not going to happen, we know that, so the President included that in the budget. There was money for helping to fix the banks, to get the toxic assets out of the banks and get credit flowing again, get the economy moving again, and that was in the budget.

On big issues like health care, the President said: Let's work in a bipartisan way. I invite the Congress to come up with a bill. Many Members of Congress said the same thing. The President held a health care summit earlier this month. I agree with the President we should try to reform

health care this year. Most Republicans agree with that, that we need to make it possible for every single family to afford health insurance. People who are losing their jobs today or were between jobs ever understand what difficulty this causes families. So that was encouraging.

Now, I hear some very different sounds coming from around the Congress. It makes me wonder who is in charge here. I hear that instead of a 10-year budget, we may have a 5-year budget. The problem with the 5-year budget is most of the problems in the 10-year budget are in the second 5 years. This budget spends too much, taxes too much, borrows too much. It doubles the debt in 5 years, the national debt, and it nearly triples the national debt in the 10-year period. So we need to know where we are headed with this budget, and we will not know if we just talk about the next 5 years.

I hear that we are going to act like the so-called millionaire's tax, the AMT, is fixed. That is not fixed; we have to deal with it. The ``doc fix'' to avoid cuts in physician payments? We are just not going to include that in the budget, so I hear. We are going to have to deal with that. We all know we are going to have to deal with that. We ought to put that in the budget. The cost of the war should be there. We need to recognize the first order of business in this country is to fix the banks and get credit flowing again.

Secretary Geithner came forward with a plan on Monday that I hope works. At least for the first time we are beginning to address the central problem of what we do about the toxic assets in the banks that are causing the banks to freeze up and not loan, bringing everything to a halt. Get the toxic assets out and lending increases, houses begin to sell, jobs begin to be created again, people go back to work, the economy improves.

So it was a very prudent thing for the President to put in his budget a $250 billion placeholder for the banks. He may need to ask us for that. In my view, I thought he should have asked us for it in January.

I thought, instead of passing a $1 trillion stimulus bill, borrowing and spending money we don't have, that it would have been better for President Obama to do now as President Eisenhower did in 1952 when he said: I shall go to Korea. And he went to Korea. That was the issue then. It was not the only issue then, just like today there are lots of different things Presidents need to do. But Eisenhower said: I will go to Korea. He arrived there just a few days after Thanksgiving. He said: I will honorably focus my attention on the war until it is ended. The people elected him for that and he did that and he gained the confidence of the American people.

I and most Americans have great confidence in this President. If President Obama, in the same way that President Eisenhower said he would go to Korea, says he will fix the banks and he will get credit flowing and he will honorably concentrate his focus on that until the job is done--I think we believe he can do that. So he was right to put the money in the budget, which I understand now may be coming out.

So we have a budget that is not really a budget anymore. It is not a clear picture. While I have been very complimentary of the President for his straightforwardness in the budget, that does not mean I have to like what is in the budget because I do not. But before I get to that part of it, let me talk about the two things that concern me most about what may be coming down the road and which I hope do not come. One of them is the idea that we would use the budget to pass a health care bill to transform the health care system and the American economy. The second is the idea that we would use the budget to impose a national sales tax on electric bills, gasoline prices, and all energy--in other words, to impose a cap-and-trade system on virtually the whole economy.

We need to reform health care. We need to debate climate change and cap and trade. But we need to do it in the way the Congress is supposed to do it, not by slipping it through with 51 votes when we are supposed to be making a budget, just because we can do that.

Think about that for a moment. The President has created this tremendously good environment for dealing with health care. He ran on a campaign: I am going to change the way things are done in Washington. People need to work across party lines to get things done on big issues that affect the country.

That is what the President said. He is right about that. There are a lot of new Senators who were elected saying the same thing. There are a lot of Senators who have been here before, like me, who said exactly this--I am here to try to work across party lines to get results on big issues. There is not a bigger issue than health care, after we get through fixing the banks.

The President had, as I mentioned, the health care summit at the White House--off to a much better start, this President, than President Clinton was when he tried to deal with the same issue early in his administration. The President also had a fiscal responsibility summit in February that I attended where health care was a major topic. We were all there, and various people got up and said: We need to work on this, do this together. The President wisely said: I am not going to send a proposal. I am going to let the Congress develop a proposal. We will work with you on these things.

Well, all of a sudden, we hear that the health care plan might be coming through on the budget. How can we possibly do that? If the President and Senate Democrats try to use this arcane budget procedure to reform health care, it will be the Parliamentarian and his wonderful staff who will end up writing the health care bill.

Health care is 17 percent of the American gross domestic product. These are big issues. Are we going to have a single-payer system? Is everybody going to have Medicare? Is anybody going to have a choice of a doctor? Is anyone going to have a choice of an insurance policy? What about the guaranteed costs? Will all Americans have the same kind of health coverage that Federal employees, including Senators, have? Is that a good idea? Will we give more permission to large employers to connect behavior to health care premiums so that we can have more prevention of disease? How much do we spend on people who are older and where we are spending more time?

Mr. President, I do not believe there is another Republican speaker. I ask unanimous consent to speak another 5 minutes.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet) Without objection, it is so ordered.

The health care bill ought to be written by, as Senators Baucus and Grassley have said, the Health and Finance Committees, by the full Senate, with full participation. I mean, technically, you know, the Democratic majority can say: We won the election, we will write the bill. President Bush was Commander in Chief, and technically he could wage war in Iraq without the bipartisan support of Congress. But that helped him lose the support of the country. It damaged his Presidency. And it will do the same for President Obama if he is not allowed to continue on the path he began on, which is a bipartisan effort in the Congress to bring a health care bill this year.

I mean, the Republican leader of the Senate, in his first speech, went to the National Press Club here in Washington and he said: Mr. President, I am ready to work with you across party lines on entitlements. The most explosive, runaway cost in Government is Medicare and Medicaid. And it is better to reform health care before we put reduced costs on Medicaid. If we just put caps on the existing system, it would blow up.

So we are ready to do that. I don't know what more the Republicans could say to send this clear message: We are ready to work across party lines. And the President has said it himself. So why are we having this debate about whether to pass a health care bill as part of the budget. That is not right for the country, and it needs to stop today.

The idea of passing a so-called cap-and-trade energy tax in the middle of a recession as part of the budget--that is equally unwise. This is a major new idea and proposal, to impose this national tax on the country that produces 25 percent of all of the money in the world and 25 percent of all of the energy in the world. And we have no idea what it would do. We do know one thing it would do: it would raise prices a lot. It would raise the price of your electric bill by a lot, and it would raise

the price of your gasoline at the pump by a lot. That may not be as much of a problem today as it was a year ago. When gas goes back up to $3 or $3.50, you can be sure there will be plenty of people worrying about it. And when they hear that a national energy tax applied to gasoline, to fuel, has the effect in the first several years of raising the price of gasoline but not reducing the carbon that causes climate change, they are going to be really mad about that because they will say: Then why did you do that? I care about climate change, they may say, but why would you impose a remedy on me that raises my price but doesn't do anything about the carbon I am worried about?

Some might say: Well, what we should have done is have a low-carbon fuel standard that would gradually kick in, give the economy a chance to adjust, so that we can, for example, be driving electric cars which we can plug in at night using power generated by existing nuclear plants and coal plants. We don't have to build one new power plant, not one new coal plant, not one new windmill for the purpose of charging these new electric cars. So we could have a low carbon fuel standard, plug our plug-in cars in at night, and that would be a better result than putting a big, new national sales tax on the economy in the middle of a recession.

There are a lot of questions about this proposal even if we weren't in a recession. Creating a big slush fund here in Washington--nothing more dangerous than that. You saw that with the stimulus bill. Put a trillion dollars out here, and Congress goes crazy. Everybody has an idea about what to do. We can all spend money. And if we bring all of this money in here, Congress will find a way to spend it. And I guarantee, it is a lot of money. This tax would raise $60, $80, $100 billion a year and bring it to Washington. The President says: Well, we ought to give most of it back to the people. Well, which people? In what way? Why not all of it? That should be a debate.

Should this tax be economy-wide, if we ever have it? Why not do as I have suggested and just put a cap and trade on power plants--that is 40 percent of carbon--and a low-carbon fuel standard on fuel--that is another 30 percent. So why do you need an economy-wide cap and trade to affect small business and farms and manufacturing?

And then who gets all of the money raised from this energy tax? A lot of the big companies came up to Capitol Hill when they first heard about this cap and trade proposal. They saw a lot of money coming into Washington and they thought they might get free allowances to produce carbon. But now the President wants to spend all of that money, and the companies are not so sure they like the idea anymore.

What about offsets? Offsets are a racket. You know, they have become a racket. Somebody saves a little carbon in Madagascar. Well, you get credit for it in the United States. There is not much of a way to police that, and it is not a very good idea.

This carbon tax, this national sales tax, goes all the way to 2050. So it takes $60, $80 $120, $150 billion a year out of the economy-- maybe not doing everything it's expected to do--in the name of dealing with climate change.

Well, the first thing is, imposing this new tax in the middle of a recession is a supremely bad idea.

Second, that doesn't mean we have to stop our efforts to deal with climate change and clean air. In fact, we can accelerate our clean energy efforts. They begin with the 2005 Energy bill. I see the ranking member of the Energy Committee on the floor, Senator Murkowski. She was a major part of that, and she will be a major part of this debate as we go along. But we can promote conservation and efficiency without having a national tax on every electric bill.

As Al Gore has said, buildings are 40 percent of carbon. So let's go to work on that. I know that in Tennessee we waste more energy than any other State. We have the highest use per capita of electricity. If we just changed 12 lightbulbs in each house, we could save the equivalent of a nuclear power plant. That would be a smart thing to do. Let's start with conservation and efficiency. Let's electrify half of our cars and trucks. We can do that because the automobile companies are building the cars and trucks. Let's plug them in at night when the electricity is cheap. We don't have to build one new power plant, the Brookings Institute says.

Three, let's make solar power cost competitive with power from fossil fuels. We have been really miserly about energy research and development, and we ought to be bending over backward to put money wisely to make solar costs competitive, as the National Academy of Engineering says, to find a way to capture carbon from existing coal plants, to find ways to reprocess nuclear waste.

While we are worrying about carbon, why don't we set as a goal to build 100 new nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is 20 percent of our electricity, but it is 70 percent of our carbon-free, nitrogen-free, sulfur-free, and mercury-free electricity. Why are we going slow on it?

So we would say no to higher taxes, higher prices, and more subsidies--certainly not in the middle of a recession--and yes to more conservation, more efficiency, more nuclear power, more electric cars, and more research and development on solar, advanced biofuels, nuclear, and carbon capture. That is a pretty good agenda for dealing with clear air and climate change, and it doesn't impose an unwise, multibillion dollar national tax on electric bills in the middle of a recession, which would hurt the economy.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a couple of letters. One is a letter from a number of Senators--looks like more than two dozen--opposing using the budget reconciliation process to expedite passage of climate legislation. A second letter comes from the Republican members of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. It objects to collecting $646 billion in new climate revenues from the American people in the middle of a recession.

Senator Byrd, our senior Member of this body, wrote the budget legislation that created the reconciliation process. He has told us that. He has reminded us of that. He talked about how he sat in his office for 10 days and did it to get it right. This is what he said:

I was one of the authors of the legislation that created the budget reconciliation process in 1974. I am certain that putting health care reform and climate change legislation on a freight train through Congress is an outrage that must be resisted.

That is Senator Robert Byrd, the senior Democrat, the senior Senator who wrote budget reconciliation.

Senator Conrad, Senator Baucus, Senator Dorgan, Senator Carper, and many others have said basically the same thing: We agree. Don't use the reconciliation to ram through health care reform.

So let's take the budget in the next 10 days, let's debate it, let's have our differences of opinion, but then let's follow the President's wise beginning on health care and reform it this year in the way he has suggested and the way he campaigned on. And let's take the energy issue and the climate change issue and let's look carefully at how we have the right clean energy strategy, which some of us believe is different from just taxes and high prices and more subsidies.

As far as the budget in general, we believe it spends too much, it taxes too much, and it borrows too much. If I could conclude with only one example of how that excessive borrowing will hurt the economy and hurt the country--an example that helps to illustrate why this 10-year budget the President set is a blueprint for a different kind of country, one with less freedom, one with more Government, and one which our children cannot afford--if there were any one example of why that is true, this would be it: It would be the amount of interest on the debt we will be paying in the 10th year of the budget sent by President Obama.

In that year, interest on the debt will be $806 billion. The amount of spending on defense by the Federal Government in that year is projected to be $720 billion. So we will be spending more on interest than we do on defense.

Federal spending on education in that year would be $95 billion. So we would be spending eight times as much on interest as we would on education.

In the 10th year of the budget, $100 billion is allocated for transportation spending by the Federal Government on things like roads and bridges that need to be fixed--we agree on that, and we would like to have the money to do it. But we will be spending on interest alone eight times what we will be spending on transportation.

When I was Governor of Tennessee, we were a low-tax, low-debt State. The reason we did not have much debt is because for every penny we did not have to pay in interest, we could pay it for a teacher's salary, we could improve a prenatal health care clinic, we could build a road, we could have a center of excellence at the university. So low debt means more money for the things we really want to have to invest in this country to make it a better place.

The President's budget is straightforward. Give the President credit. The attempts by Congress to make it gimmicky and less transparent are deplorable. The idea of trying to pass a health care reform proposal that affects 17 percent of the economy and to impose a national sales tax on the entire energy system during a recession is a bad idea.

What we should do is take this 10-year budget, whittle it back to size so it doesn't spend so much, doesn't borrow so much and doesn't tax so much and move ahead with a blueprint that maintains our freedom, that limits our Government, that preserves choices and that our children and grandchildren can afford.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, would the Chair inform me when I have 1 minute?

Mr. President, I will comment on the Republican leader's remarks. I agree with him that this budget borrows too much. We say that publicly on the floor and we say that privately in our discussions. Many of us are afraid that this 10-year budget is a blueprint for our country that our children and grandchildren simply cannot afford.

First, I will say a word about the President's press conference this evening. I hope that during his press conference, the President will reject the bill passed by the House of Representatives last week about the AIG bonuses as not the kind of thoughtful and mature response that the American people deserve from Congress in a time of crisis. It is certainly not worthy of approval from the President of the United States.

I hope the President will focus attention on something that is a mature and thoughtful response and is worthy of the attention of the President of the United States, and that is Secretary Geithner's proposal yesterday to use a partnership of public and private resources to begin to get the toxic assets out of banks, fix the banks, and get credit flowing again.

I voted last October and then again on January 15 to give, first, President Bush and, next, President Obama the money he needed to fix the banks. I could say, at this point, the proposal of the Secretary yesterday at first blush seems to me to be underfunded, undercapitalized by tax dollars and too late. But it is more important to say I believe it appears to be on exactly the right track, that it appears to be well thought out, and that at first blush it seems to be attracting support from the private sector, which it needs to do to be successful.

History shows us some lessons about when we have bank problems--and we have had plenty of them. When I was Governor of Tennessee in the 1980s, dozens of banks failed because of a problem with the Butcher brothers, who were basically kiting banks. But the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation came in and over the weekend usually recapitalized the banks, got rid of the bad assets, put them back out there, and our economy grew again. That is harder to do today because the businesses are bigger and the crisis is much larger. But the fundamental solution to our economic troubles is the same.

We need to fix the banks and get credit flowing again, and the way to fix the banks is to get enough of the toxic assets out so they can have confidence to lend money, and business can start growing, and people can get jobs again. That is the history lesson.

There is another history lesson, and that is that we need the President of the United States to focus his full attention on fixing the banks and getting credit flowing again. I have used the example of President Eisenhower going to Korea. Someone said to me: Senator Alexander, no one pays attention to history. Well, they ought to.

President Eisenhower said in October of 1952: I shall go to Korea to fix the Korean war. That was in October. He

was elected President, and within weeks he went to Korea. He said: I will concentrate my full attention on this problem until it is honorably ended.

President Eisenhower was a very capable man. He was capable of doing more than one thing at a time. But he knew the country needed him to do one thing and the country needed to have confidence he would do it.

President Obama is extraordinarily capable as well. When I, or others, have suggested he is doing more than one thing at a time, he often says: I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I don't doubt that. I think we may not have had a more impressive President in terms of intellectual ability, and he has impressive people around him.

What we need for the President to do--and tonight would be a good time to start--is to assure us, as President Eisenhower did when he said ``I shall go to Korea,'' and say: I shall fix the banks and get credit flowing again. We know that a President this impressive and this talented, if he decides to throw himself into this problem with everybody he's got for as long as it takes, he will wear everybody else out and he'll get the job done. From the day he makes that clear, confidence in this country will begin to recover at a fairly rapid rate. I say that with great respect to the President and to the proposal Secretary Geithner made yesterday, which I think is mature and thoughtful and the kind of proposal we ought to be focusing on in a bipartisan way.

As to the budget, the budget also makes a difference to whether the economy recovers. It is hard for the economy to recover if the Congress spends too much, if the Congress taxes too much, and especially if the Congress borrows too much. The Republican leader pointed that out in his remarks.

This 10-year budget is a blueprint for a country our children and grandchildren cannot afford. It doubles the public debt in 5 years, and nearly triples it in 10. It grows the public debt to 82 percent of the gross domestic product by 2019. The gross domestic product is the sum total of all our efforts in a year, all the money we produce, and we produce 25 percent of all the money in the world each year, more or less.

This 10-year budget creates more new debt than all the Presidents of the United States from George Washington to George W. Bush combined. Let me say that again. All the Presidents of the United States, from George Washington to George Bush, did not run up as much debt as this President proposes to do in the next 10 years.

By the year 2019, we will be spending more than $800 billion just on interest payments on our debt every year. We only spend $720 billion on Defense in that year. We will be spending more on interest than we do on defense, and we will have enough left over to fund all the Federal spending on education. That is too much borrowing.

What do we do about that? There are a number of things we can do. I suggest we put a limit on runaway debt so that it cannot be more in any year than 90 percent of our gross domestic product. Another idea would be to enact a bipartisan Conrad-Gregg proposal which would say to Congress and the President: We need to set up a special mechanism to deal with entitlement spending--the runaway spending for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which is the biggest part of our debt problem. The proposal would set up a special commission that would figure out how to bring entitlement spending under control, make recommendations to the Congress, and we would vote it up or down, and act in the same way we close defense bases, which is also very hard to do. The Conrad-Gregg proposal has broad support in the Senate. It has broad support in the House. The President of the United States says he wants to control entitlement spending.

The Republican leader of the Senate, Senator McConnell, in his first address this year, went to the National Press Club and said: Mr. President, I am ready to work with you on entitlement spending. In other words, he wants to bring the debt down in the outyears. But so far we have not seen that priority.

I think the priority today ought to be to fix the banks and get credit flowing again. I support the President's objective to reform health care this year. I think health care has to be reformed in order to bring entitlement spending under control. But why can't we go ahead and work on Social Security? Why can't we pass the Gregg-Conrad bill? Why can't we send sub-signals that we are serious about reducing entitlement spending? Instead, this budget would move $117 billion of funding for Pell grants from discretionary spending to entitlement spending; in other words, move it from the area where we would spend it only if we can afford it to the area where we automatically spend it without having to vote on it. We shouldn't be adding anything to entitlement spending this year.

Finally, new taxation is not good, for this year especially. I care about climate change, but now is not the time to impose a $600 billion tax on electric bills and gasoline prices in the middle of a recession.

Republicans will offer a clean energy agenda based on conservation, nuclear power, electric cars, finding more natural gas, aggressively funding research in solar energy, and finding ways to capture carbon. We can do all that without imposing a new tax on the American people in the middle of a recession.

I look forward to the President's remarks tonight. I hope, as I believe most Americans do, that he rejects the House bill of last week and expands on Secretary Geithner's proposal. I applaud him and I applaud the Secretary for a mature, thoughtful proposal, and I hope the President will, as Presidents must, select the most urgent issue before us and focus on it with all he has until he fixes the problem. He can do that. Only a President can do it, and this President is especially talented. I believe if he makes clear he intends to do it, the country will have confidence that he will get the job done.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask the Chair to let me know when 9 minutes has elapsed.

Mr. President, we have an impressive new President of the United States. He has proven without a shadow of a doubt that he is capable of doing many things at once.

I was privileged to go to one of the summits he had. That one was on health care. He had another one on entitlements. He has been to a wind turbine factory. He was in California yesterday. He has overruled some of President Bush's environmental decisions. And yesterday he did what many Americans are doing: he picked his bracket in the NCAA basketball tournament, and he picked North Carolina, which predictably caused their rival, the coach of Duke, Coach ``K,'' to say the following:

Somebody said we're not in President Obama's final four,

and as much as I respect what he is doing, really, the

economy is something that he should focus on, probably more

than the brackets.

That was our U.S. Olympic coach yesterday. There is some truth to that. The President is very impressive and is capable of doing many things at once. But, we don't need a lot of things done at once right now. We have one big issue--it's the economy, Mr. President.

While all of us have our role to play in this--Senators, businesspeople, all of us across the country--there is only one person who can do what the President of the United States can do. He is the agenda setter. He is the mobilizer. If the President of the United States focuses on one single big issue and throws everything he has into it for as long as he can, he will wear everybody else out and he will solve the problem, if it can be solved. I am confident in this country the problem can be solved.

He has been there for 4\1/2\ months now. We still have a big economic problem. It was going on before he came in, correct. Some people say Americans don't pay attention to history, but I am not so sure about that. In October of 1952, General Eisenhower was running for President and said: I shall go to Korea. He was elected. The Korean war was a big problem then.

On November 29, he went to Korea, and said he would concentrate his attention on the job of ending the Korean war until it is honorably ended. There were a lot of other things going on in 1952 and 1953 that needed to be solved. But President Eisenhower focused on the Korean war, ended it, and the country was grateful.

It is time for President Obama to focus on fixing the banks and getting the economy moving again. He can do that. The country needs for him to do that, and the country would be grateful if he did.

There are other issues, but we only have one President; we have one big issue. Mr. President, it's the economy. That is where the focus needs to be.

We are currently debating the President's budget, and we have some differences of opinion. As the Senator from Wyoming said, we believe on the Republican side it spends too much, it taxes too much, and it borrows too much. It is a blueprint for a different kind of country. It is an honest blueprint, in my opinion. It is a 10-year picture of where America would go under the President's proposed budget. It will bring much more Government, add much more debt, and it will be turning over to our children a country that they will have a hard time affording and in which they will have fewer choices. It is not the kind of country I want to see.

The new higher tax rates would raise taxes by $1.4 trillion over 10 years. It is the largest tax increase in history.

Going back to history a little bit, we can learn lessons from history. President Hoover in 1932, as we were entering a recession, raised taxes. He raised taxes on the wealthy people. The top tax rate rose from 25 percent to 63 percent. What were the effects of the 1932 tax increase? Tax revenue decreased, the Federal deficit increased, and the Great Depression continued for a number of years. The middle of a deep recession is no time to be raising taxes on anyone. I know the President is saying: Well, this only goes into effect later. But everybody makes plans today based on what happens tomorrow. We also know that if they say we are only going to tax the rich people, we have heard that said before. In 1969, everybody became concerned because there were 155 people in America who didn't pay any taxes. So we had what was called the millionaire's tax to catch them. We put in a new tax rate 40 years ago. If Congress had not acted, that tax rate that was set to capture 155 people who didn't pay taxes 40 years ago would have captured 28 million Americans this year.

In this country, you rise. You make more money and you rise into the higher tax rates. So if you put a high tax rate to capture 155 people, what we find 40 years later is that you capture 28 million Americans who are paying higher taxes, and many of those individuals are making incomes of $60,000, $70,000, and $80,000 a year.

President Kennedy and President Reagan both lowered taxes when they became President and were in economic slowdowns. When President Reagan came in, we had a serious economic slowdown. I was Governor of Tennessee at the time, and unemployment was higher then than it is today. Inflation was a lot more then than it is today. Interest rates were terrifically high then. President Kennedy and President Reagan decided to lower taxes during the economic slowdowns. President Obama is proposing the largest tax increase in history, and the tax especially goes on the engine that creates the most new jobs.

In America, all businesses are important for creating jobs. In my home State, we have Federal Express. It employs almost 300,000 people around the world. On the Republican side of things, we would like to have immediate expensing of all the big airplanes Federal Express buys, or the software Microsoft buys--which is not based in my State. Because if these companies can deduct those expenses in the first year, they will make more money, they will hire more people, and Tennessee will do better. Jobs are what we are talking about. But most of the new businesses come from small businesses.

Secretary Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, says this tax they want to impose only affects the rich people, and only 2 or 3 percent of the small businesses are affected. Well, I checked into that a little bit. If you work for a company with 20 or more employees--up to 500 employees is a small business--chances are 50-50 that you are working for somebody whose taxes are going to be raised by this proposed tax increase in the President's budget. If those taxes go up in the half of the small businesses that create most of the new jobs, then there is no money to buy new equipment, there is no money to hire a new person, there is no money to raise salaries, there is no money to pay health care benefits and there might not be enough money to pay employees and jobs may be at risk. Raising taxes on owners of small businesses in the middle of a recession is not the way to create new jobs.

Then there is the national sales tax on electric bills and energy. Clean air and climate change is an important issue with me, especially clean air. I live at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, where we have unhealthy air that's polluted with nitrogen, sulfur, and other pollutants. I have introduced legislation to have higher clean air standards. I have also, every Congress since I have been here, introduced legislation to have caps on carbon that comes out of the coal-fired powerplants. Not caps on the whole economy, just the powerplants, which produce about 40 percent of the carbon. Some other Senators would like to have what is called a cap-and-trade tax on the entire American economy.

I thank the Chair very much.

Mr. President, the recession is no time to impose a $600-plus billion tax on everybody's electric bill. This is not the time to do that, if the time is ever right to do that. MIT suggests a bill such as the one the President has proposed would cost each American family $3,100 a year. In the middle of a recession, that is not a good idea.

In conclusion, I think Coach K's advice to our impressive new President is good advice. We know he can have summits, make trips, and deal with a lot of different things. He has smart people dealing with him. But we have a tough economic problem, and it is the economy, Mr. President. We need the President to focus on the economy and concentrate on it, until the banks are fixed and the credit is flowing. We need a budget that doesn't spend so much, tax so much, and raise debt so much. Otherwise, we will deliver a country to our children and grandchildren that they can't afford.

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