Floor Statements

Madam President, I come here, probably more than any other Senator, on this topic of budgets, and it ought to be called the ``lack of budgets.''

Thank goodness that, currently, we have the blueprint out there in black and white for what we intend to do--for what the President intends to do, and he is going to try to sell it to the American public.

We have been on this pathway for decades. During the Reagan years, we talked about enlivening the economy, bringing taxes down, letting people keep more of their own resources. That worked. I think that still makes sense.

It works in most States. It was driving the economy with that dynamic pre-COVID.

But what we did lose along the way is that--regardless of our revenues, which stubbornly average 17 to 18 percent of our GPD--when you raise rates, people don't produce as much. There is not as much income to tax. When you lower them, you get more revenue to tax, and you actually are gaining more revenue for the government, to boot. So we were there pre-COVID. We only need to look to see what was working just 1\1/2\ or 2 years ago. It was the best the economy was doing.

It was raising wages. We always should be interested in doing that but not through government--through the productive private economy. It was raising it in places that we had never been able to do it before. So rather than throw that blueprint out the door and go with something like this that has never worked in the past, whenever you get government becoming that large a part of your economy--and it used to be 20 percent. Even though we were only taking in 17 to 18 percent, regardless of the tax rates in our own government revenue, we got used to running deficits. That is what happened decades ago, and we have all gotten used to it. If you want to see a budget that takes the theory that it doesn't make any difference how much more you spend than you take in, this is it. If you like it, it is the best budget we have ever done.

Again, we shouldn't be calling it a budget because budgets mean that you live within your means from year to year like all other entities do. State governments do it and some that don't generally have issues in their own States' economies, but we cannot take all of these resources from the private sector, run them through government with the inefficiency that goes along with that, and expect to have a good outcome.

Senator Grassley was here earlier and Senator Portman. They gave you a bunch of statistics. I am going to describe how this shipwreck ends up on the shore over time. It is just a question of how much we buy into this as the way we need to run our government, which has not worked over the last two decades--from the Gulf wars and from all of the stuff that we have tried to do through government for which we used to at least have pay-fors.

The biggest drivers of our current deficits nobody wants to talk about. They are Medicare and Social Security. We knew decades ago that the Social Security trust fund was going to go bust and that it is going to happen here in a little over a decade. Will we do anything to try to change it? That takes political will. I have been here a little under 2\1/2\ years and have not found a lot of that.

The bigger driver of our structural deficits would be a broken healthcare system. I, more than any other Senator, have talked about that--not solving it through more government but reforming healthcare to make it become a true industry that believes in transparency, competition, and getting the healthcare consumer involved. We can fix that part of it, but we can't get any interest even in my own party for much of that because we defend a broken healthcare industry. We don't ask it to be transparent, competitive, and engage the consumer like most other industries do and do well and that provide a good service to the American consumer.

So government will end up doing what it always does. It is so easy to borrow from others and to spend the money. You are going to have a sugar high. You are going to feel good, but there is going to be indigestion down the road. The way it is going to end up is we are going to have calamities within our credit markets, and we are going to have people no longer willing to lend us money.

We have now taken these trillion-dollar deficits, which are going to be closer to $1.5 trillion, and this new budget--again, I hate even calling it a budget--is going to add to that, not lessen it. When you talk about raising revenues, there is even anxiety on the other side of the aisle because raising taxes never goes well. It is generally tough to get everybody to agree on it, and that means our deficits are going to be even larger.

Is it going to take our completely depleting the Social Security trust fund that we have been paying into since the thirties, and is it going to take depleting the Medicare trust fund, which now happens in 5\1/2\ years, and is the American public going to allow us here to keep spending more money than we take in year after year and end up where the Chinese won't lend us any money down the road? Others won't as well because our interest is going to be about as much as we pay for defense, and then you are going to have a calamity.

You can blame it on everyone here who thinks this feels good now. When you want to feel good in the future, you make hard decisions in the present. Any well-run organization or any well-run State or local government makes those tough decisions in the short run so they don't have to solve things through a calamity in the long run.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Senator Hawley.

This was an easy one. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal gave us some news. We have had a cascade of others weighing in now, where this is maybe an epiphany that some have had that we need to look further into the roots.

Look at what our country has gone through. It has been a year and a quarter, and it has ravaged not only the United States but the world. And why, for the sake of simple transparency, wouldn't we want to get to the root cause of it?

The World Health Organization made an attempt at it. It was not effective. It looked to me like it was apologizing for what might have occurred in China.

President Biden finally has said that we need to put more light and attention on this. So thank goodness, for whatever the reason, we are going to get to the bottom of it. When it has caused this much grief across our country and across the world, it needs to be done.

The intelligence communities in our own country are storing information that needs to be revealed to the American public. It needs to be revealed to anyone who can look at it to make sense out of what has happened.

So our bill is very simple.

Since I have been in the Senate, whether it is weighing in on issues of healthcare, national security, COVID-19--who disagrees with transparency, the sunshine that reveals everything?

I was in a committee hearing. And when you get the two individuals whom we have relied on mostly in this whole journey, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins, first acknowledging that transparency is paramount, and that, yes, we should declassify this information, and when we have listened to them help navigate us through this tricky journey, and they tell us earlier today, ``Give us the information,'' I think that is why here, this evening, this will go through with unanimous consent, because it makes sense.

And wherever it leads us, we should be happy that we finally might get to the bottom of this--whatever it reveals. We don't know where it will take us. It is relying on what is most important--on the information we housed. Let's make sure the American public can see it and that any group that wants to analyze what happened can, including the rest of the world.

So it was easy for me to get onboard, to get behind something so simple that says nothing more than if we got the information, let's show it. Let's not hide behind it. And when you get individuals like Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, the director now of the WHO, something is afoot, and we need to find out.

I am glad that we are here this evening punctuating this so that we get it done.

Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 1771 and ask that it be reported by number.

Madam President, in recent years, research involving human-animal hybrids has become much more prevalent. For example, in April, researchers in China created a monkey-human hybrid embryo that they allowed to grow and studied for weeks.

I have serious ethical concerns with this type of human chimera research. My amendment would ban the practice by applying the NIH's current anti-chimera policy universally.

Due to the dangerous and offensive nature of this research, my amendment imposes penalties on those who participate in this unethical research.

We must act now. Just this morning, the International Society for Stem Cell Research, an international standards-setting body, issued guidance that permits the creation of human-animal hybrids. I ask that my Senate colleagues reject this foreign position and maintain our own NIH's ethical standards.

All life is sacred. It is Congress's responsibility to enact commonsense bioethics.

Please support this amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Madam President, I rise here today, and I have been in the Senate a little over 2\1/2\ years, and I never imagined that I would have to drift back to my days at Wabash College, as I migrated from a biology major to a political science major and, thank goodness, to an economics major.

In that time, I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be able to talk about macroeconomics because back then there were a couple of points of view. You had Milton Friedman, who was a disciple of monetary theory--that if you get too much out there circulating, your currency devalues and you get inflation. And then there was Keynes, who was a big disciple of the government, either through tax policy or spending. And, my goodness, how either one of them would react to what we are contending with today, I think it would give them some pause in terms of where we are at.

This has nothing to do with the underlying policy goals. I am someone that comes from a State legislature in Indiana where we tackle things like infrastructure, defined there and then as roads and bridges. We came together. We actually paid for it through user fees, which we haven't done here since 1993. That is fuel taxes, which generally would be at least one thing you would look at when you want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure.

So here we are today. We had a hearing a couple of weeks ago, and I will

cite him in a moment. Robert Reich was in there, and I threw that question at him: How could we have come so far from Keynes' economics and Milton Friedman, which has controlled the dynamic of this country, its monetary policy, and its fiscal policy, until just recently?

Then comes along the Modern Monetary Theory, a new approach to macroeconomics. This theory proposes that governments can spend however much they want, go into debt as much as they want, and have these structural trillion-dollar deficits that would work nowhere else. It only works now because we are the only reserve currency. Being the only reserve currency, people come to us with their currencies, and that keeps our interest rates down. That doesn't acknowledge that there are places like China, which will be a larger economy than ours and lends us money currently.

In places like China and most other places across the world--unless you were Greece, Italy, maybe Spain and Portugal, which kept the euro from being a prominent currency because they lived beyond their means-- you cannot, just because you can get by with it in the short run, continue to do things into the mid and long term without consequences.

This fanciful theory has found its way out of the faculty lounge and into the halls of Congress. Considering that President Biden has proposed another $4 trillion in spending. There is $1.9 trillion that we have recently done--a done deal--borrowing every penny of it. We have not raised taxes. That is a false argument too. With the amount of taxes that you could raise, you wouldn't even cover part of our day-to- day trillion-dollar deficit. It adds to our debt.

When I got here, I think it was around $20 trillion. Soon it is going to be over $30 trillion. And listen to this: World War II was the highest debt we ever had as a country. We were savers and investors then. Now we are consumers and spenders. They paid that off. We had basically no debt until the wars came along that we financed by borrowing, not paying for it. Then, 2008 and 2009 came along, and that looks like chump change compared to what we are doing now.

Now we had an approach to one of the biggest challenges we have ever had as a country, navigating through COVID, and of course we did things that basically needed some new idea how to justify it--Modern Monetary Theory. It is a recipe for hyperinflation and continued higher deficits. By the way, the trillion-dollar deficit without any COVID, just in its own momentum forward, is going to be $1.5 trillion in 4 to 5 years.

I am not surprised the big spenders in DC have latched on to a theory that tells them it is OK to spend irresponsibly and hike taxes. They may not acknowledge that pre-COVID we were in a pretty good place. We were raising wages. Senator Sanders and I would share that. We need to raise wages in places, but you can't do it through the government. That is not the productive economy. Everything that the government gets comes from the productive economy.

I am surprised there has not been more pushback because it is a flawed economic theory. When I asked Robert Reich about it, he dismissed it: Well, it is too new. It is too novel. I can't really talk about it.

That shouldn't be the foundation upon which you are having your spending plans laid out currently.

What it is, in my opinion, is a bunch of malarkey that is embraced because we want to spend like drunken sailors. Coming through a crisis, we can't do that. We have already done that. What we did in a bipartisan fashion in 2020 probably made sense. Continuing that forward, you can't base it upon this new idea that debt, deficits don't make any difference. It is kind of like a kid coming up with a modern dietary theory that says it is OK to eat cookies for every meal. It wouldn't work.

Many noted economists from across the political spectrum have warned that the implementation of the Modern Monetary Theory will pose a danger to the economy, and this wouldn't be center and right economists. Let's listen to a few of them.

The Secretary of the Treasury and Director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, back in the Clinton years, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who has been OK with accommodating some of it--he said that is not a new theory that you can rely upon. Even Paul Krugman, whom we know that generally he would be eating this up, he has reservations, and not to mention a host of others. I just told you what Robert Reich said when he dismissed it as something too new to comment on.

Now, Secretary Janet Yellen discussed Modern Monetary Theory's idea that interest rate payments can be handled by the central bank buying the debt back in 2019, calling it ``a very wrong-minded theory because that's how you get hyper-inflation.''

Joel Griffith, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, summed it up well when he wrote:

There is no free lunch. We will pay either through the

visible burden of direct taxation, the hidden tax of

inflation, or higher borrowing costs.

I said earlier that we are the only reserve currency. Interest rates are starting to go up. The Chinese could do things that could knock interest rates up two to three points quickly if they decided to take a different point of view. There is a lot of danger in living in the moment because you don't feel any of the pain that will inevitably come in the future, and it is not far out

The acceptance of Modern Monetary Theory would lead to higher deficits and higher inflation. The underlying policy in terms of higher wages, trying to do things to improve the lot of Americans, that is fair game for discussion. Just don't mislead them, putting all that debt on our kids and our grandkids. That would be like running a business, running it into the ditch, going to your banker, and thinking that you could get a loan. You would be laughed out of the office if you tried to do it 2 years in a row. That is now standard operating procedure with trillion-dollar deficits built into the system, not to mention this.

The Senate must abandon this fundamentally flawed, irresponsible economic model in favor of mainstream fiscal and monetary frameworks that work everywhere else. The European Union, a recent example, headed to be a reserve currency, and even Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy have found that they can't do that and get by with it.

Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 136. I further ask that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President.

So I don't disagree with what Senator Sanders said in terms of policy that needs to be debated, but a classic tactic when you are focusing on how you are going to pay for something is to change the subject. And whatever you think about what happened over in the House of Representatives, whatever you think about the other issues, this is about being honest with future generations and where has that worked and been a good end result.

When it comes to some of the taxation part of it, that is a smokescreen because even if you raise all the revenue they are talking about with those taxes--and I am a believer that corporations should pay their fair share. Multinationals that flatten their tax rate, that is different from many C corps, many corporations. But the dishonesty in that argument is that you couldn't cover even 20 percent of our existing structural deficit. So you need to be honest.

If you want to do this, ask your kids, ask your grandkids if they are willing to put that burden on them. And there is no theory out there, other than this which is being used as a current rationalization, that would make that ever have a pleasant outcome.

Madam President.

I know we have a vote coming up, and I won't belabor it.

I think the basis for maybe a good conversation, because we are not going to solve it today, is when it comes to the tax package that was put through in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017--and I would have some authority on this, Senator Sanders. I spent 37 years in the trenches running a small business that ended up being a larger company. Three of my kids run it with a good young executive team--the American dream. And my observation was that we had kind of hit the sweet spot.

And the CBO, which actually put that original cost of $1.5 trillion-- $150 billion per year, over 10 years--said that we were actually generating record revenues pre-COVID and that they could have revised, and still might, that trajectory.

I think if we are going to go forward, you have to realize that there is a limit to anything you can do through government. And when you try to raise taxes, you have to be honest about it. Over 50 years, regardless of what the tax rate has been, the economy has generated about 17 percent of our GDP with tax revenues because when they are high, there is less economic activity. You actually find a sweet spot, like we did with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and the economy was proving it pre-COVID.

Madam President, today I am proud to join my colleague Senator Coons in relaunching the bipartisan Senate ALS Caucus.

Currently, there are no effective treatments or cures available to stop or slow the disease, and we still do not know what really causes

Madam President, I rise to honor the 50th anniversary of the signing of Coach Robert Montgomery Knight at Indiana University, who set the standard for excellence as a collegiate men's basketball coach.

Coach Knight had a legendary career as a college head coach for more than 40 years, 29 of which were at Indiana University. During those 29 years, Coach Knight had 11 Big Ten Conference championship teams, took 24 teams to the NCAA tournament, and earned 8 Big Ten Coach of the Year Awards. His 1975-1976 team at IU remains the last team to complete an undefeated season and win every game in the NCAA tournament. They got close this year.

Maureen, my wife, attended IU, and I can remember what a thrill it was to watch his teams play. Their drive and will to succeed were infectious. Coach Knight's success at IU continues to be a source of pride for the entire State of Indiana. Coach Knight never focused his coaching on winning a game but on the effort it takes to become a champion, saying that the will to succeed is important, but the will to prepare is even more important.

Due to his focus on his players' success on and off the court--this is amazing--Coach Knight had an astounding 98-percent graduation rate for all players whom he coached for at least 4 years--more than twice the average graduation rate for Division 1 schools. On the world stage, Coach Knight led the U.S. men's national basketball team to a Gold Medal in the 1979 Pan Am Games and to a Gold Medal in the 1984 Olympic Games.

Victory is fleeting, but Coach Knight both propelled young men toward greatness on the court and gave them experiences and lessons that have shaped their entire lives.

We honor the drive, determination, and character of Coach Knight and all

that he did in educating and mentoring hundreds of Indiana University players over three decades to bring pride to the State of Indiana.

For all the memories, Coach Knight, we give you a heartfelt thank you.

Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 157, submitted earlier today.

I know of no further debate on the measure.

I ask unanimous consent that the preamble be agreed to and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

I yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, coming from the world of business, I have been dismayed by Washington's inability to fix problems in a timely, rational manner, and that has been over a stretch of many years before I got here.

I do, respectfully, disagree with my friend from West Virginia. We should fix this tax cut prohibition right now that was forced into the American Rescue Plan in the wee hours of the morning.

If we want to fix a commonsense problem, we are being told that our only choice is to hold Hoosier seniors hostage. This is the most deliberative body in the world; this cannot be the best the Senate has to offer.

We must get the Federal Government out of the way and stop complicating and confusing States. They should be allowed to do their jobs.

And, by the way, they do their jobs--balancing their budgets every year, living within their means. Most of the rest of the country accepts that as well.

Given the looming April 1 deadline for cuts to return to Medicare, I am not willing to let Hoosier seniors suffer. As a result, I will withdraw my amendment in the interest of seniors across Indiana.

I look forward to working with the two leaders after the recess to fix this issue. I will not object.

Madam President, I have come to the floor several times in the little over 2 years I have been here, and a common theme--and I think we all know it as Senators--is that our healthcare system is broken. It is driven by misaligned industry incentives that promote opaque, behind-the-scenes pricing maneuvers at the expense of patients and healthcare consumers.

Increased transparency is the key to fixing our broken healthcare system. It will allow Americans to have skin in the game and deal directly with their healthcare providers to make informed decisions. They cannot do that very well currently.

Pulling the curtain back on a healthcare system to restore market forces, which aren't really there now, to increase innovation and competition, particularly in regard to price, quality, and service--you do that with anything else. A consumer is engaged, they are informed, and you have many competitors competing for their business.

In order for Americans to regain their sovereignty in a healthcare system, you need the ability to be able to navigate accordingly. Congress must act to provide Americans with these tools before we try to throw more government at a broken healthcare system.

Government pays for a portion of healthcare; more is paid through the private sector. If we reform it, it makes it less expensive for both payers. To give you an example, sometimes what you hear here sounds like it is theoretical, hypothetical. I took on the cause roughly 12, 13 years ago in my Main Street enterprise that was just starting to grow, doing the things it was supposed to do, and that is transportation distribution. Then all of a sudden, healthcare becomes a subset of your business, and about the only solution you would get each year is, well, you are lucky it is not going up more than 5 or 10 percent.

I heard that too many years in a row. I was sick and tired of that being what I would have to live with as a CEO who had a healthy, successful business other than the healthcare component. What did I do? Healthcare plans are basically made up of three or four features.

You have your deductible. Ours had risen more than I was willing to take it up any higher. The only way you could buy premiums down would be to do that or change underwriters every 2 or 3 years. That gets to be a hassle as you become a larger company, and the profits were so great then for people who did it, you could end up bringing your cost down. Well, then you were right back in the old groove of, you are lucky it is only going up 5 to 10 percent the next year on renewal.

You also have coinsurance. Most people don't worry about that until they get significantly ill or have a bad accident. That is the percentage you have to pay once you exceed your deductible.

When you have those variables, you have one other item that almost everyone loves in their plan, and that is a low copayment. Those copayments are paid for in the high premiums, but it is because they constitute nearly 25 percent of most healthcare plans, and that is to keep skin out of the game for the people who use the system.

Well, I was going to do something different and decided to limit that expense when you really get sick or have a bad accident, covered coinsurance through the company, and asked my employees to engage from dollar one in shopping around and see if that would work.

Lo and behold, it has now been 13 years, and we have been able to keep a good plan in place, lower family healthcare premium contributions, and have not had a premium increase. What is it based upon? It is finding the meager transparency that was out there 12, 13 years ago and enhancing it over time. To give an example, if you pick up the phone, you get on the web, you will find anywhere from 30, 50, 60, 70

percent savings. Procedures like MRIs, CAT scans, colonoscopies can run anywhere from 700 to 3,000 bucks. Your insurance companies seem to always shove you to the most expensive one. They give you these huge discounts, take their margin out of it, and it still costs you a bundle.

When the consumer gets engaged, you will see prices start to come down. LASIK surgery is the best example, where you have no insurance involved. Ten, fifteen years ago, that could be up to $2,000 an eye. Now, it is advertised heavily, providers go after their customers, and you can probably get it done for as little as $250 to $500 an eye, with better quality. That sounds like a lot of other areas of our economy that actually work.

Last Congress, I put healthcare transparency at the forefront of my agenda and have definitely been the most outspoken Senator that we have a broken system; put almost all the blame on the industry itself because it does not give us transparency. It does not want to compete. The healthcare customer is somewhat to blame because they don't want to pay for anything. And I don't think the answer is bringing more government into it until you reform the system.

We need to shine light on the dark corners and the misaligned incentives embedded in the current system. Among the bills I will reintroduce this Congress is the Healthcare PRICE Transparency Act. Every Senator should want to be on that bill to hold the industry accountable. This will empower patients through transparency. It will drive competition among hospitals and insurers by requiring them to publicly disclose their prices so patients can compare between providers and insurers.

Last Congress, a number of my colleagues joined in my effort to bring more transparency and affordability to healthcare consumers. I am excited to reintroduce the Healthcare PRICE Transparency Act soon and hope all of my colleagues will join in so that we can collectively lower healthcare costs before we try to get more government involved

I yield the floor.

Madam President, this past year has been hard on Hoosiers and Americans across the country. When the economy was shut down, Congress got to work. Given my background as a business owner, I was involved in negotiating the Paycheck Protection Program, known as PPP, as part of the CARES Act, one of five bills that passed in 2020 with overwhelming support, I think 90-plus votes. We worked it out, Democrats and Republicans, together.

Those COVID-related packages totaled $4 trillion, and we didn't have a penny saved up ahead of time to prepare for it. That is part of a deeper problem with this institution, is that we borrow anything that we spend money on, even 23 percent of our annual operating budget. To put that in perspective, imagine if you had a business doing $100,000 in revenue, and you are losing $23,000, and then you go to your banker and expect them to bail you out. It wouldn't make sense.

We came into 2021 with over $1 trillion from those packages unspent, unobligated. Instead of working with us like before, Democrats did shut us out of the process. In fact, the Senate as a whole did not work the bill through committees. It was laid to us, on the Senate, by the House, all $1.9 trillion of it.

Before this, some Republicans went to the White House to talk with the President about a bipartisan plan, knowing all the money would be borrowed again, but nothing came to fruition. Instead, we stayed up all night;

finished the bill at noon the next day, Saturday; spent 29 hours on the floor, and not a single Republican amendment was adopted in this massive spending bill.

Instead of focusing on the virus and getting our economy back on track, this became an exercise in ramming something through that was a liberal wish list. Only 1 percent of the bill--1 percent of the bill-- went toward the vaccine. Less than 9 percent goes toward COVID-19 public health issues generally.

While the Congressional Budget Office projects the economy to return to prepandemic levels by midyear, only 5 percent of the $130 billion for K-12 schools gets spent this year, and none of it is tied to reopening our schools, which many States had shut down early and opened up late.

Included in this package is a whopping $350 billion for State and local governments. I had a conversation with our own Governor 2, 3 weeks ago. A place like Indiana, and I believe West Virginia as well, probably runs balanced budgets. We do it with the guardrail of a constitutional amendment. Many other States, if they don't have a constitutional amendment, they have a statute. In other words, you do what households do. You do what all businesses do. You live within your means. And here, when you run your State governments in a way that in good times, you can't make ends meet, and you look to the Federal Government to bail out your bad governance, it is a whole nother issue.

Even left-leaning economists and think tanks are worried about what this is going to do down the road because most of the time, you don't feel the repercussions until later. And, of course, that could show up in inflation. It could show up in a way similar to what we dealt with in the late seventies and the early eighties.

Forty-four States had surpluses last year, when you look at COVID funding. Many places, like California, had surpluses. Then they reconfigured how this was done not based on pro rata population but rewarded the States with the highest unemployment levels. It sounds bizarro to me.

Governor Holcomb in Indiana has done a great job balancing the economy with public safety, and that is why our unemployment rate is now close to a full employment rate. It was the lowest in the Midwest going into it because we have a good business climate, and we have a low cost of living. Things work there. Sadly, the Democrats' bill punishes States like Indiana for safely reopening. The higher a State's unemployment rate, again, the more bailout money you get proportionately.

But it goes one step further, and this is the part that caught my attention. I am interested in hearing the explanation for it. I think it was a sneaky maneuver when you put it in such a large bill that had other doozies like stimulus checks for undocumented immigrants, for felons, all kinds of stuff that I think, when you look at it, shouldn't have been in there. But when it is that massive--it takes 10, 11 hours to read out loud--you are going to get some of that. What this does is say that if a State takes Federal money, they cannot lower their State taxes in any way through 2024.

First of all, I believe this is unconstitutional and coercive. Second, we should never punish States for putting taxpayers first. We serve the public and should be good stewards of their money, and especially a place like this that runs the way it does day in and day out should not be telling States that run their operations responsibly that they cannot do what they want with spending or taxation.

My bill strikes the provision that prohibits States' ability to change revenues as they see fit for their State's unique needs.

Second, my bill strips out the reporting requirement where States have to tell the Federal Government about every revenue source and amount of money they take in. This place ought to be doing that routinely to all the people who send it revenue.

This bill has the support of over 25 groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, Citizens Against Government Waste, Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Heritage Action for America, Independent Women's Forum, and the National Taxpayers Union, among others. We expect many more to join in coming days. I am sure many stakeholders in Indiana and in West Virginia not mentioned will throw in support as well.

Lastly, I would like to thank the Finance Committee ranking member, Senator Crapo, for cosponsoring this legislation--and others, including Senators Blackburn, Capito, Inhofe, Marshall, Rubio, Rick Scott, Tillis, and Senator Young from my home State.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 730 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

My friend from West Virginia explained why this won't impact Governors and legislatures in terms of what they can do with their own fiscal policy. I would say my friend the Senator from West Virginia probably ought to check with Governor Justice and his legislature to see if they are on the same wavelength there.

When we got input in bringing this up as an issue and when you are talking about the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Tax Reform, Citizens Against Government Waste--I won't repeat the rest of the list--I think it would get down to semantics in this sense: What do you do if you want to cut tax rates? Then, just like pre-COVID, we cut taxes, and revenues went up for 3 to 4 years.

How do you measure that complicated equation? In many cases, when you cut rates, you find a new sweet spot where you generate more tax revenue. How would you sort all of that out? Then, if it were not based upon penalizing States that are most apt to lower their tax rates because of how good their economies were pre-COVID, it would be a different issue as well.

So I am willing to listen in terms of how that does play out, but for now, I am going to view it as something, I think, that is not going to sit well with many States, their Governors, or their legislatures and that has a possibility of being taken to court as being something that might be unconstitutional. If I am off base, I am willing to listen, but I will probably have to bring some other parties in to make sure that this isn't a case of semantics and is real according to the way you explain it.

Yes, I will yield.

Will the Senator yield?

I think it begs the question in that, by cutting taxes, you are going to lower gross tax revenues, and that has been a discussion we have all had for many years.

I know in places like Indiana--and we just had it occur here with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act at the Federal level--that the CBO--and I was working with it--was getting close to saying its original forecast of when you had a tax cut, which was $1.5 trillion over 10 years, $150 billion per year, wasn't working out that way because there is the phenomenon called: When you find the sweet spot of taxation, you can cut taxes and generate more revenue. Then you penalize a good fiscal move by the way you are interpreting your reading.

I am willing to get into the nuance to see if that would muster that particular case, but I don't think it would.

Yes, I will yield.

Mr. President, today I rise to ask that the Senate grant unanimous consent to pass a bill that restores parents' rights to be part of medical decisions for their children.

More than 70 percent of Americans agree that parents should have the legal right to stop an abortion from being performed on their minor child. Consequently, more than half of the States have laws on the books that require some form of parental notification. Unfortunately, the State laws cannot be fully enforced when children travel over State lines or abortion providers assist minors in circumventing State laws.

More troubling, evidence has surfaced in recent years that abortion clinic staff deliberately fail to report suspected cases of statutory rape as required by Federal law. In some cases, staff even help to hide these crimes from parents and law enforcement

An undercover operation revealed that a disturbing 91 percent of Planned Parenthood employees agreed to help conceal an instance of statuary rape when a caller posing as a 13-year-old girl indicated she wanted to conceal a relationship with a 22-year-old boyfriend by getting an abortion. This too often means that children seeking abortions are left alone and vulnerable when making a very difficult decision.

My bill, the Parental Notification and Intervention Act, would combat the troubling trend that cuts parents out of medical decisionmaking. The bill prohibits an abortion provider from performing an abortion on an unemancipated child without written notification to parents. This creates legal protections for parents and ensures that children are not left alone or unsupported when making difficult medical decisions with long-lasting consequences.

Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 294 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. Further, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 833 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, my amendment helps ensure that the EPA cannot, through regulation or otherwise, ban fracking in the United States. This is an issue of energy independence, locking in our CO2 emissions reduction provided by clean natural gas, and it gives us time to find the cleanest, least expensive options down the road.

Due to our American renaissance, the United States passed Russia as a leading energy supplier in 2011 and passed Saudi Arabia in 2018.

But fracking has been a boon to the economy as well. According to the Global Energy Institute, if fracking were banned in 2021, the U.S. economy would lose 19 million jobs in 4 years, local and State tax revenues would plummet, and gas prices would double. This is why President Biden promised: We will not ban fracking; we will protect and grow jobs.

Yet many in this body have called to ban fracking. The American people deserve to know who stands with energy security and American workers. I ask my colleagues to support this amendment.

Madam President, it is true. I am a mainstream entrepreneur, and I have been involved with business my entire life, including the farm markets. I started a turkey farm back in 1979 from scratch, and I was involved in it for 32 years. I sold my share of it to my partner's kids and grandkids. My wife has had a business in downtown Jasper, my hometown, for years.

I have been an entrepreneur. I have dealt with how hard the marketplace is even when things are going well.

I stand to make the point on behalf of Hoosier farmers and businesses and to express my strong opinion that we need to get the USMCA across the finish line.

This agreement is vital to secure our hard-fought market access for American agriculture. At a time when agriculture could never have more challenges, from chronically low prices to the increasing concentration among farmer-suppliers with big corporations, this is one piece of uncertainty we need to eliminate.

In stressing the importance of the USMCA, I would state that despite the fact NAFTA had its faults, it was quite successful in securing markets for farmers. The USMCA is better. It provides stronger access to Canadian markets for U.S. milk, wheat, poultry, and egg products. It ensures that Hoosier wine and spirit makers are treated fairly on Canadian shelves. And it secures the Mexican market for Indiana pork, cheese, and grain.

The USMCA improves on NAFTA in other areas of the economy as well. It adds modern rules for digital trade and stronger protections for American intellectual property. We know how important that is with regard to dealing with the Chinese.

It contains new rules of origin that ensure more manufacturing is conducted in North America and has brand-new rules to bring more of that production back to the United States.

When President Trump ran for office, he ran on a few simple things, and negotiating a NAFTA improvement was one of his core promises to the American public. At the time, Congress had two requests: Follow the guidelines from the trade promotion authority and move quickly--move quickly--to minimize uncertainty. President Trump upheld his end of the bargain. He has delivered an agreement that is better than the original NAFTA in nearly every respect.

This week Congress is ready to vote, and yet we can't. Why? Because House Democrats will not bring it to the floor. Don't believe me? Look at this letter, dated July 8, from several House Democrats.

They say in plain English: Do not send this agreement to the Congress. Do not send this agreement to the Congress.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter dated July 8, 2019, to Robert Lighthizer.

Madam President, this is an outrage. We are ready to pass the USMCA. Today you will hear from Senators who support this deal. In the Senate we have more than enough votes to pass the USMCA. There is no reason to wait.

The Democrats have known the contents of this deal for over 2 years. They knew the provisions offered by the United States and saw the text as it developed. Once the final text was released, the Democrats were stunned. They couldn't figure out how to oppose the USMCA.

First, they argued that Mexico needed to pass its labor reforms. Mexico did so in April. Then, they moved the goalpost, arguing that labor and environmental provisions in the deal were not strong enough, even though the provisions in USMCA are substantially stronger than those in the NAFTA, an agreement that some of them supported.

They still want to move the goalpost. In fact, the USMCA is the first-ever trade agreement to contain provisions requiring a minimum wage for Mexican auto workers. The Democrats still aren't happy. This time they are asking for enforcement. In response, the Mexican President issued assurances that Mexico would enforce the new labor law Democrats had demanded. But Nancy Pelosi is keeping those goalposts moving. The fact of the matter is that the Democrats are blocking USMCA because they do not want to give President Trump a win--the worst of all reasons and what makes this place so objectionable to so many people.

In the meantime, NAFTA remains the law of the land. While they play their political games American workers are still competing under the old NAFTA rules. It is time for Nancy Pelosi to end these political games. We need to pass the USMCA.

In closing, I simply would remind my colleagues that this trade debate is unlike any other this Chamber has ever made. The USMCA is the first-ever renegotiation of a major trade agreement. We are not talking about whether we should have an agreement with our Mexican and Canadian partners, because we already do. Instead this debate is about the future of that relationship. Do the American people want the rules in the original NAFTA or do they want the modern protections included in the USMCA?

The USMCA is a substantially better agreement than NAFTA, and the American economy--Hoosiers--need these new rules so that we can move forward into the 21st century with a stronger American economy in the North American region. It is time to pass the USMCA now.

I yield my time.

Mr. President, Senator Grassley and I attended the rollout of President Trump's Executive order to get the healthcare industry on the move. The chairman of the Finance Committee, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Senators like me--I am a mainstream entrepreneur--came to the Senate to discuss issues just like this.

I have probably been on the floor more than any other Senator, and every time I do it, I tell the industry: Wake up. I took you on 10, 11 years ago, in my own business, to give good healthcare coverage to my employees. Year after year, it was a litany of, you are lucky your premiums are only going up 5 to 10 percent this year. You have all heard it before. It took risk, and it took some novel thinking, but it can be done. Most entrepreneurs aren't going to put the time I put into it to make it work for my own employees.

When you hear Democrats, Republicans, three or four committees, and the President of the United States talking about a healthcare system that is broken, you should get it through your thick head that there need to be changes made. It shouldn't be coming from Congress, even though it will keep coming.

I think the message is out loud and clear: Wake up and start fixing these things, or you are going to have a business partner whose name is Bernie Sanders and another idea of Medicare for All that we would regret once we got it. But, like most things here, like most big problems in this country, we wait too long to solve the issue.

To give you a few things on what led me to be passionate about it, when I had to give up my own company's good health insurance, I had a very generic prescription that I needed to get renewed. There were eight pharmacies in the little town of Jasper, roughly, so I knew I would be able to get quotes. I had no health insurance. I was in between being a CEO of a company and a Senator. I said, I am going to try to see what this is going to be like. I knew it should cost 20 or 25 bucks, maybe a little less.

The first place I called, they stumbled around and couldn't even give me a quote on a common prescription. Finally, after about 3 to 4 minutes, they said $34.50. I called another place that I thought would be a little quicker on its feet. It took 10 seconds, I got a quote for $10, and they said: By the way, you can pick it up in 10 minutes.

That is more the way the rest of the economy works, but healthcare consumers have gotten used to not doing any of that heavy-lifting themselves. And believe me, the industry has evolved from Big Pharma, to big hospital chains, to the health insurance industry, which is in the middle of all of it. There are pharmacy benefit managers, and the drug companies give

them $150 billion worth of rebates, and through their costs and profits, less than half of that makes it to the consumer or to the pharmacy.

The case is out there. We, as Senators and Congressmen on the other side, shouldn't need to be going to the floors of our Chambers to tell you the obvious: If you don't do these things, I don't believe we here--at the speed at which we normally operate--can do it quickly enough for you to save yourselves from that other business plan, which is Medicare for All.

So what do we do to prevent that? No. 1, the industry should be out there doing what all other companies do--be transparent. In any other part of our economy, where do you not ask for and have plenty of information to work with. What does it cost, and what is the quality? I know that where I live, people would drive 60 miles to save 50 bucks on a big-screen TV that costs a thousand bucks.

When I instituted a plan in my own business that encouraged my employees to do that, to have skin in the game, amazing things happened. Every time you pick up the phone or get on the web and look for that comparison, it is kind of hard to find, but it is there. The industry just needs to give more of it and not hide behind a system that has benefitted them. When we created that in my own business, people shopped around for prescriptions and routinely saved 30 to 70 percent, as they do on MRIs, CAT scans, and most other procedures.

I put the time and effort into it. Most CEOs--and you always hear about how employees are happy with their employer-provided insurance. That is because the employers are generally paying for anywhere from 85 to 100 percent of it. So folks working somewhere don't really have skin in the game.

Consumers of healthcare need to do what they do in all other industries and in all other things that they buy--take the time to ask how much it costs, what is the quality, and then the industry get with it so that we can fix the system before the other option actually takes place. There aren't enough CEOs and there aren't enough legislators to, I think, get the industry in shape, and the industry itself knows what these problems are. Get with it before you have a different business partner whom you won't like.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I sit here every Thursday from 3 o'clock to 6 o'clock and hear several speeches that are made. I happen to sit on the Budget Committee with Chairman Enzi. I hope everyone listened carefully to what he just said. The Comptroller General was in yesterday.

One of the reasons I ran for Senate is that being a Main Street entrepreneur from Indiana, you never could have gotten by with the way this place runs its business. The Federal Government is somewhere around six to seven times the size of Walmart and runs its business by the seat of its pants, in the sense that we have not done a budget that we have appropriated in nearly 20 years.

If you listened closely, you know we have some hard deadlines. The chairman referred to it as cliffs. Well, sometimes that is so figurative that you don't believe it is going to happen or that it is going to be real. These are things we are going to have to contend with.

When the Medicare fund is depleted fully in 2026, benefits get cut immediately. Social Security is farther down the trail, and there are going to be all kinds of issues. We are lucky, currently, that other countries and our own citizens will lend us money when we run trillion- dollar deficits routinely.

He mentioned the ``Penny Plan.'' In any business, if you were charged with fixing your company's problems by cutting back by either freezing expenses by a 1-percent cut or a 2-percent cut, that would be done easily because you have hard accountability. If you would perform in a business or a State government like we do here, I can guarantee you there wouldn't be a lender that would let you perpetuate and keep doing it. The fact that we have a credit card that we can put it on year after year eliminates the accountability that you have anywhere else.

I was on a school board for 10 years. I was in State government in Indiana, where we always have a cash balance and operate in the black and have a balanced budget. Even though we do that so routinely there, we passed a balanced budget amendment to our State constitution simply because government, even in a place like Indiana, oftentimes views how they spend the people's money different, and this place does it worse than any other place in the country.

So do we want to get to the point where we deplete the Medicare trust fund and where we run out of funds to pay pensioners or do we want to make the hard decisions?

It is funny. When I got here, I looked at the budget process. Budgets, even though they are not adhered to, might be a resolution, and it is not the law. Always, even if they do incorporate savings, you never see it until year 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Well, again, in the real world, if you are running at a 20-percent loss on your P&L, you do not have the luxury to wait 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 years to fix it.

I ask the American public to hold their Senators accountable and their congressmen, because this time, unlike in 2008, which we all know was bad enough, the main people holding the bag will be retirees and the elderly who depend on the government for healthcare, and individuals who depend on healthcare who are not well to do, through Medicaid, will be left holding the bag.

Only 22 Republicans--it should have been all 53 of us who were on the Penny Plan bill that Senator Paul put out just a few weeks ago, but only 22 of our own conference, which talks about fiscal conservatism-- got on that bill. I would hope that the American public holds their representatives accountable so that we don't hit the cliff and go over it and pay the consequences, which will be dear.

I yield the floor.