Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for 10 minutes on my amendment. Madam President, I rise to talk about the Pryor…
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for 10 minutes on my amendment.
Madam President, I rise to talk about the Pryor amendment we are going to take up this afternoon and have a vote on.
I wish to show my colleagues this chart I have in the Chamber that talks about America's fiscal condition. This chart came out of the CQ Today edition of Tuesday, February 2. As you can see, it takes the fiscal year 2011 revenue estimates over here, with this pie chart on the left, and it takes our proposed outlays with this other pie chart on the right.
Of course, it is obvious to anyone who is paying attention, if you look at these two numbers, it looks like we are taking in $2.5 trillion but we are sending out $3.8 trillion. That is a big problem. That means, once again, we are in deficit spending. We have to get our fiscal house in order.
I do not know if my colleagues on both sides saw this reported this week, but earlier there was a story in the New York Times--and it has been reported in other publications--that Moody's is looking at the possibility of downgrading America's credit from AAA down to something lower than that because of the enormous national debt we have and the persistent annual deficits.
This piece of the chart I think is very revealing, when you look at the money that is going out through the Federal Government.
We see this purple slice. There are a couple of slices here of the purple pie chart, and we see one is $671 billion. That is nondefense discretionary spending. Then, on the national defense discretionary spending, it shows $744 billion, but everything else in here is mandatory spending or it is our interest on the national debt.
This little green sliver here--it may be hard to see on television-- is actually what we are paying on the national debt. It is $251 billion in interest payments and paying back the national debt.
Nonetheless, we see that the majority of the money we are spending is for mandatory spending. These are entitlements and various programs, things such as Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlement programs and other mandatory spending.
The amendment I have been working on this week tries to address our fiscal situation not merely by tapping into this discretionary spending, which, depending on which part of discretionary spending we are talking about, could be as little as 12 percent of the money we have going out of the system or it could be as much as 25 or 30 percent. It depends on how you calculate and all we include. We can't fix our fiscal house using discretionary spending only. I think one of the advantages of the Pryor amendment is we want to take the whole picture--all the mandatory spending, all the discretionary spending, and all the revenues--and use them to try to get our fiscal house in order.
One of the best things about this chart that was in CQ Today is this graph. It shows where we start during the Carter years, and it goes all the way through the Obama years. So we have Carter, Reagan, George Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Obama, and we can see this purple line. Unfortunately, most of these years it is below zero. The line is our annual deficit. This yellowish-orangey line shows as a percent of GDP what our deficit is.
One of the great things about this graph that gives me courage and gives me hope is that during the Clinton years, we went above the line. We actually went into surplus spending. We did it for the last 4 years of his administration. The thing I get hope from is we can do it again. We can do this. We can address this. If we do it in a bipartisan way, if we do it in a smart way, if we put everything on the table as they did during the Clinton years, we can address our deficit and our national debt and we can do it in a way that will be good for the country long term. Because every time we spend a dollar around here, we are making our children and our grandchildren pay for that. At some point down the road they will have to pay for it.
We need to stop the reckless course we are on, everybody agrees. Whether it is the chairman or the ranking member of the Budget Committee, whether it is outside economists, or whether it is people such as those on Wall Street who analyze all of this, everybody agrees that we are on an unsustainable course. So what the Pryor amendment tries to do is address our deficit spending, not just the spending part but our whole picture to look at our annual deficits.
One thing I wish to comment on is when I look at this graph, this is a graph of political courage. Because the easiest thing in the world for a politician to do--the easiest thing that any of us can do around here--is to cut taxes and increase spending. That is what has happened in recent years. That didn't happen during the Clinton years, but that has happened in recent years. The easiest thing to do is to go into deficit spending and push the problem down the road to somebody in the future. The time is now for us to stop doing that. The time is now for us to reverse these purple lines and get them going up, above zero.
The truth is, we can't do it in 1 year. We probably can't do it in 5 years given the economic and fiscal condition we are in right now, but over a period of years, we can get this moving in the right direction. I promise my colleagues the markets will love it. I promise my colleagues the global economy will love it. They will love to see some American leadership. Everybody in the world looks at how we spend money around here and they shake their heads, because they know we are on an unsustainable course.
This graph is a graph of political courage. Back during this time, when they did this Balanced Budget Act, back in 1993--and I have a lot of colleagues who were here and casting those hard votes back then-- those were
acts of courage. It wasn't always popular because they made some hard choices, and that is what we have to do again. That is, hopefully, what the Pryor amendment will get us on track toward doing.
Madam President, I know I just have a couple of minutes left. How long do I have?
I will try to wind down. The Pryor amendment freezes all discretionary spending caps at the level proposed by President Obama in the year 2011. So it does have a discretionary freeze. It freezes all discretionary spending caps for fiscal years 2012 and 2013 at 40 percent of the difference between President Obama's budget proposal and last year's budget proposal.
The reason we are doing that is because Senator Sessions and Senator McCaskill have worked very hard on their amendment--in fact, I voted for their amendment a couple of times in its previous forms--but they used some different numbers. I thought in order to be fair we need to split the difference with their numbers, and these two freezes we are talking about will reduce discretionary spending by at least $77 billion over 15 years. That is major. That is a big chunk out of discretionary spending.
Where we make up the difference is then we ask the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to find at least--at least--an additional $77 billion of deficit reductions over the next 3 years to close the gap between projected revenues and entitlement spending. So we pretty much give this to the commission and say: Look, commission, you are set up. The President has put you together. We have six or eight Members from the Senate on that commission, other Members from the House. You all sit down and you all work through this. You have a year to do it. You need to work through this and find the other $77 billion worth of savings.
In comparing the two amendments, the Pryor amendment actually saves a little bit more money over the next 3 years than the Sessions amendment, but one of the reasons is because we are looking at deficit reduction, not just spending. I think their amendment--again, which I have supported in the past--focuses on spending, but ours is more about deficit reduction and trying to take a full picture into account.
I will be glad to.
I thank the Senator.
Thank you, Madam President. I yield the floor.
Madam President, I wish about 3 minutes to respond to my colleagues.
I commend both Senator Sessions and Senator McCaskill for the work on their amendment. As I said, I voted for previous editions of it. I think it has one major flaw, and that is it only deals with discretionary spending. I know it does affect the deficit, and that is very important. But it focuses just on the spending.
When we did multiyear discretionary spending caps--they were a key part of the 1990, 1993, 1997 deficit reduction patches--they worked. However, those deficit reduction patches looked at all spending-- mandatory and discretionary--as well as revenues. That is what our amendment does. It takes the whole picture.
If we are going to walk the walk on having our fiscal house in order, we need to look at the entire picture, and I think we need to do it in a bipartisan way, as they did in previous Congresses when they made serious efforts to get the deficit under control. It needs to be bipartisan. One of the problems I have is, if we fix discretionary spending, it will be difficult for us to reach a bipartisan agreement on mandatory as well as the revenue pieces of our budget.
Senator McCaskill mentioned this is a baby step. I don't know if it is a baby step. What they are proposing is a very solid first step to try to get our fiscal house in order. I am just concerned it might close the door.
I wish to make this point in closing. If we look at these purple lines on this graph, we see these years are the Obama years. Certainly, he inherited a lot of things the first year, so the first year probably is not fair to give to him.
If you look to these years, to the President's credit, he says he wants to freeze discretionary spending. He says he wants the purple lines to get shorter. That is good, but it is not enough. It is not enough. The President's budget, in his proposal, in my estimation, is not enough. We need to get this moving back in the right direction.
If you look at just discretionary spending and throw in the military discretionary spending as well, that is about 25 percent of the budget--just discretionary alone. Domestic discretionary is only about 12 percent. But put those two together, and let's say it is about 25 percent. The real flaw in the McCaskill-Sessions is that we are using 25 percent of the budget to fix 100 percent of the budget. We need to put 100 percent of everything on the table so we can then use our good judgment and make those hard decisions to try to get us back to a balanced budget.
We are not going to do this in 1 year. We are probably not going to do it in 5 years. I wish we could do it in 5 years. But these numbers are not enough, and we need to move it back in the right direction. My approach actually helps this picture quite a bit more than their pictures help.
With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.
Madam President, I would like to speak on my amendment here for a few minutes, somewhat in response to Senator Sessions but really more just to ask my colleagues to please consider voting for the Pryor amendment.
This reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with a friend of mine in Arkansas. He is kind of a member of the deficits-do-not- matter club. This was probably 6 years ago. I was a pretty new Senator here.
I said: Look, we have to start to get this thing turned around. Some of the policies we have done here are not good, not sustainable for the country.
He told me back then that deficits do not matter. And where I disagree with him and others like him I said: Look, anytime any of us walk into a bank or some other financial institution and want to borrow money, the first question they ask is, How are you going to pay it back? That is what they want to know: How are you going to pay it back? The problem we have had around here for years now is that we have no plan to pay this money back--none. We have no plan to pay this money back, and that is why we are just pushing it off down the road to where, you know, we do not have to make the hard decisions.
But I want to tell you right now, our children and grandchildren do not appreciate what we are doing to them. We have to take responsibility for us living beyond our means. The way I look at this is that in America for too long, we have lived beyond our means. Our government has done that. Corporate America has done that. There is too much debt in corporate America. We have seen that over the last year and a half. Also, individuals and families have done that. We have done that on a personal basis with too much debt. And we all need to take responsibility. We all need to manage that and manage our way out of that situation.
My amendment basically, as much as anything, communicates to the American public, it communicates to the global economy, it communicates to all of the economists and all of those experts on Wall Street, all other places all around the world, that we are capable of making these difficult decisions and that we are willing to make the hard calls in order to get this done.
I know one of the criticisms we are going to have on the Pryor amendment is that it may lead to raising taxes. Certainly, I hope it does not. But we have to be willing, in this Chamber and in that Chamber down the hall and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we have to be willing to make these hard choices, these hard calls. That is what we call leadership and that is what we call democracy.
People elect us to come to Washington to make difficult calls. The easiest thing we can do is to be fiscally irresponsible. It is like in our own personal house. Hey, I would love to have a bass boat. I would love to buy a new car every year. I would like to have a lake house. But I cannot afford those things. In this Nation, we have gotten to the point where we cannot afford to have it all.
The Pryor amendment really gets us back in the zone where we can manage this fiscal picture we have, and hopefully what we can do, over the next 10, 12, 15 years, however long it is going to take, we can actually get back to a surplus and make a significant dent in paying off the national debt. I think we have to do that. It is imperative that we start now.
That is what the Pryor amendment is about and really the biggest advantage over the Sessions-McCaskill amendment. Again, I have total respect for these two Senators. They have spent a long time on this. They have been working on this for a long time. But I think the limitation of their amendment and really the big shortfall there is that it only deals with discretionary spending. As I showed you earlier in
the pie chart, that is a very small piece of the fiscal pie. We need to put it all on the table, and we need to show the American public we are serious. We need to show them that we are willing to take this on; that we have the discipline it requires to restore fiscal responsibility here in this government; that we can reduce the deficit, and that we can return our Nation once again back to a fiscally sound path. That is really what this issue is about today.
I very strongly encourage Members on both sides of the aisle to look at the Pryor amendment. I encourage you to vote for mine. I think it is a more comprehensive approach than Senator Sessions' and Senator McCaskill's. As I said, I voted for that one twice before in previous iterations of it. It has changed a little bit. I voted for it before. But I have come to the conclusion that we need a comprehensive solution. We need to put it all on the table. And we need to show the leadership--this country is crying out for leadership. We need to show some leadership on this issue and show people we are serious and willing to do what it takes in order to get this done.
Mr. President, I ask my colleagues to look at my amendment. It reduces discretionary spending caps by $77 billion relative to President Obama's budget in 2011, 2012, and 2013. It also requires the fiscal commission to find an additional $77 billion to reduce the deficit. It moves the vote from 67 back to 60, as it is under our normal Senate rules. It also increases the chances of a bipartisan agreement on deficit reduction. We need that around here. We need a bipartisan agreement on deficit reduction. This reduction could potentially add $13 billion more in deficit reduction than what the Sessions-McCaskill amendment does.
As much as I respect and appreciate all the work Senators Sessions and McCaskill did, I certainly would appreciate people voting for the Pryor amendment.
Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, the waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, and section 4(g)(3) of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, I move to waive all applicable sections of those acts and applicable budget resolutions for purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.