Floor Statements

Mr. President, today I have introduced the Employee Rights Act, a comprehensive workers' rights bill that would address many issues plaguing America's workers.

Our Nation's labor laws were designed to preserve the rights of employees to join labor unions and engage in collective bargaining. Contrary to what some may think, I am not anti-union and I do not want to stand in the way of unionization if the decision to unionize is truly the will of the employees. However, I believe that the right not to join a union is equally important. It is this right that far too often goes overlooked under our current laws, and particularly under policies implemented by unelected bureaucrats at various administrative agencies.

I am under no illusions that this legislation will be noncontroversial. There will most certainly be opposition. Indeed, I fully expect the unions and their supporters to come out against the Employee Rights Act, and characterize it as a radical, anti-union bill.

But, that just isn't the case. There is not a single provision in this bill that will empower employers at the expense of the union. The only parties whose position will be improved by the Employee Rights Act are employees. Anyone whose real concern is preserving the rights of individual workers should support this bill.

Let me take a few minutes to go over the specific provisions.

First, the bill would conform and equalize unfair labor practices by unions with those of employers under the National Labor Relations Act. Currently, under Section 8 of the NLRA, employers face penalties if they ``interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees'' in the exercise of their rights under the Act. The same section punishes labor organizations only if they ``restrain or coerce'' employees in the exercise of those same rights.

There is no reasonable or logical justification for this difference, and workers should have the benefit of equal protection against abuse from both sides. That is why, under the Employee Rights Act, both sides will be held to the higher standard.

Next, my bill would ensure that employees are guaranteed a right to a federally supervised, secret ballot vote before a union can be certified. According to the NLRB, 38 percent of all unions certified in 2009 did not have to go through a secret ballot election. Instead, these unions were able to use card checks to unionize employees. True enough, in such cases, employers voluntarily opted to recognize the union without demanding a secret ballot election. But what about the workers who wanted a secret ballot vote?

There is, of course, a long-standing debate over the integrity and appropriateness of card check elections. But even the most committed union supporter must admit that the card check process is unregulated and less reliable than a secret ballot vote. Indeed, that's exactly why the unions prefer it. Anyone who claims otherwise is either lacking in common sense, on a union's payroll, or both.

We have all heard the accounts of unions obtaining signatures through deception and intimidation. And, we've all heard about union organizing campaigns and boycotts that have all but forced employers to give up their right to demand a secret ballot vote. Well, Mr. President, under the Employee Rights Act, that right will belong to the employees, and it will be guaranteed.

For the record, the American people agree with me on this issue. Earlier this year, the Opinion Research Corporation conducted a poll of 1,000 adults that addressed a number of these issues. All told, 75 percent--three out of every four--were somewhere between strongly supportive and somewhat supportive of a rule requiring that all employees be given the right to a secret ballot election when deciding whether to join a union.

There is no way around it. If you are pro-worker, and not just pro- union, you have to support the right to a secret ballot.

Next, my bill would require every unionized workplace to conduct a secret ballot election every three years to determine whether a majority of employees still want to be represented by the union.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than 10 percent of current union members voted for the union at their workplace. Most union members simply took jobs at sites that were already unionized, many of which require union membership as a condition of employment.

Under current law, if any of these employees want to decertify a union, they must go through an arduous process. It is a nearly impossible task. In addition to overcoming the many procedural hurdles provided by laws and regulations, they are required to speak out publicly against the union and subject themselves to public criticism, if not outright intimidation. Not surprisingly, very few even make the effort.

As a result, millions of American workers belong to unions they never voted for and will never get to vote for. No one who claims to support the rights of workers can argue that this is a good thing. Every citizen is guaranteed an opportunity to vote out their representatives in State, local, and Federal Government. Yet, a union, once certified, is in place for perpetuity. This just shouldn't be the case.

Once again, I am not alone in my thinking. In the same survey I cited earlier, 75 percent, again, 3/4 of those polled, supported a change that would require unions to be periodically recertified.

This proposal is not outlandish or punitive. It is simply common sense. It is fair to both employers and unions, and,

far more importantly, it is fair to workers.

Another provision of the bill would put a stop to the NLRB's current proposal to shorten the required length of time between the filing of a union certification petition and an election, commonly referred to as the quickie or snap election proposal.

With this proposed rule, which is set to be finalized later this year, the pro-union NLRB hopes to help unions catch unwitting employers unprepared. Although there is no specific timeline in the proposal, experts have concluded that, if the regulation is finalized, union elections could occur within 7 days of a union filing a petition. Even worse, the proposal would eliminate many of the pre-election opportunities to appeal the petition and to resolve fundamental issues, like the size and scope of the bargaining unit.

There is no need for this new rule. According to the NLRB, the average time between the filing of a petition and an election is 39 days. This gives both the union and the employer an opportunity to communicate their perspective on union membership to employees and ensures that workers are able to make informed decisions.

Though the current rule is eminently reasonable and appears to be working well for everyone, including the unions who already win the majority of elections, the Obama Administration can't risk losing the support of Big Labor. Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, recently remarked that this and other similar so-called reforms are effectively consolation prizes for the Democrats' loss in the fight to pass the deceptively-named Employee Free Choice Act.

Indeed, the Obama administration, for obvious reasons, has consistently been all too eager to stack the deck in favor of the unions. Since they haven't been able to do it through the legislative process, they're trying to do so via regulation.

Sadly, employees are caught in the middle. The NLRB doesn't care if they have enough time to consider all their options. They simply want to make sure the unions win more elections. To combat this, the Employee Rights Act would preserve substantive and procedural protections in the election process and ensure that workers have an opportunity to make informed decisions.

The bill would also prevent a union from ordering a strike or work stoppage unless it obtains the consent of a majority of the affected workforce through a secret ballot vote.

This is important because the rules governing when and how a union can order a strike are not uniform. They are determined by each union's constitution. There is no federal rule whatsoever requiring that unions obtain majority support before they can force members into unemployment and possible replacement.

Many would be surprised to learn that union strike funds, kept to provide financial assistance for striking union members, rarely pay more than 20 percent of an employee's salary during a work stoppage. And, more often than not, a member cannot receive any compensation for lost wages unless they participate on a picket line.

Isn't it only fair to give workers an opportunity to weigh in before a union orders a strike? Most people seem to think so. According to the same poll I mentioned earlier, 74 percent of Americans support this proposal.

Another provision of the Employee Rights Act would prevent an employee's union dues or fees from being used for purposes unrelated to the union's collective bargaining functions--including political contributions and expenditures--without that member's written consent.

Exit polls have shown that America's union members are almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, yet more than 90 percent of union political contributions go to Democrats. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, the reason why I expect strong opposition to this bill.

However I would like anyone who would oppose this provision to explain to me why it is fair to force workers to contribute to political campaigns at all, regardless of the party on the receiving end. Once again, the only people who would object to empowering individual workers in this way are those who have a vested interest in the status quo.

When asked about this issue, 78 percent of those polled agreed with this idea.

The Employee Rights Act would do several more things. It would make unions liable for lost wages, unlawfully collected union dues, and even liquidated damages if they coerce, intimidate, or discipline workers for exercising their rights under the NLRA, including the right to file a decertification petition. Any union found to have unlawfully interfered with the filing of a decertification petition would be barred from filing objections to the subsequent decertification vote.

The bill would also strengthen prohibitions on the use or threat of violence to achieve union goals, overturning an egregious Supreme Court decision that all but exempted unions from Federal racketeering statutes.

It would allow all affected workers, union and non-union alike, the same rights as union members to vote to ratify a collective bargaining agreement or to begin a strike.

These are not outlandish proposals. They would simply introduce some long-overdue common sense into our labor laws. Not surprisingly, polls have demonstrated that each of these ideas has broad support among the public.

We have had many fierce debates in this chamber about the role of labor unions in our nation's economy. In fact, I have been on the floor several times in the last week decrying the steps taken by the Obama Administration when it comes to helping out Big Labor.

But truthfully, I'm not interested in stopping unions from organizing or preventing collective bargaining. I simply want to protect the rights of individual workers and ensure that, if they do opt for union representation, that choice is freely made and fairly determined.

For too long, American workers have been treated by union leaders as little more than human ATMs. They claim to be progressives, supportive of equality and democracy and the working man. This bill is consistent with those principles, providing working men and women with a real and meaningful voice in decisions regarding unionization. It is supported by the National Right to Work Committee, and I am proud to have Congressman Tim Scott of South Carolina introducing companion legislation in the House.

I urge all of my colleagues to support the Employee Rights Act.

I object.

Mr. President, for the third time in a week, I must object to another short-term Federal Aviation Administration extension. I want to make it absolutely clear that a long-term FAA reauthorization is a priority for this country, and it is a priority for me. The current lapse in FAA taxes and expenditure authority from the Airport and Airway Trust Fund is a detrimental situation brought on by the Senate majority's refusal to engage in substantive negotiations on a long-term FAA reauthorization bill, which, by the way, did pass the House. Additionally, it is not clear to me that the legislation just offered would avoid a retroactive tax increase on travelers. I didn't set out to cause FAA taxes to expire, but reinstating them on a retroactive basis is more than I am willing to subject taxpayers to.

As I have already said, I share House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Mica's frustration, and the frustration of Republican leadership in both the House and Senate, that favors to organized labor have overshadowed the prospects for long-term FAA reauthorization.

Last year, the National Mediation Board changed the rules under which employees of airlines and railroads are able to unionize. For decades, the standard has been that a majority of employees would have to agree in an election to form a union. However, the new NMB--National Mediation Board--rules change that standard so that all it takes to unionize is a majority of employees voting. This means the NMB wants to count an employee who doesn't vote as voting for big labor.

Somehow, organized labor is able to claim that it is democratic to appropriate someone else's vote without that person's input and participation, even though the rule I am talking about has been in place for 75 years. They just changed it in favor of the unions. Unions win--at least the NLRB proceedings. They win 60 percent of the unionizing attempts.

I personally have not had any communication with anyone in the industry. I am here because I think what the NMB did is absolutely wrong, and someone needs to stand up to them.

This issue is much larger than the NMB itself, and the airlines and railroads impacted by the NMB ruling. If NMB succeeds, and the administration is allowed to put their thumb on the scale in favor of big labor in contradistinction to 75 years of labor law practice, every small businessperson anywhere will be at risk.

The long-term House FAA reauthorization bill does not create a new hurdle to unionization; instead, it restores the longstanding ability of airline employees to make decisions for themselves--and not just a few of them but all of them.

In a few minutes, I will ask unanimous consent for an amendment that includes NMB language from the original House-passed long-term FAA reauthorization, and this whole problem would go away. Again, in a few minutes, I am going to ask unanimous consent for an amendment that includes NMB language from the original House-passed long-term FAA reauthorization.

My critics will point out that both times I have previously asked consent, it has been for legislation that didn't include the removal of the NMB's heavy new hand. However, I have spoken frequently on this issue, and I bet my position is very well known. I was hopeful my earlier request for consent would stimulate discussion on a long-term reauthorization and the issues preventing a long-term reauthorization from taking place.

My concern is that the White House and their allies in Congress will continue to hide behind a perpetual series of short-term extensions, rather than working toward an actual bill. This is why I have decided to ask unanimous consent for an amendment containing the NMB language, because it is clear this is the only way to move this issue forward--by NMB language getting the law back to where it really has been for 75 years. As my critics will point out, this wasn't my first choice. But as my critics have made clear, this is the only way to actually acknowledge and deal with the issue.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 2553, which was received from the House; that the Hatch amendment at the desk

be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be read the third time and passed; that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I understand the anguish of my dear friend from Texas, and I don't disagree, except for one thing. The tax is not being charged, and that should be a savings to the customers and consumers who are using the air services. But whether it is or isn't, that takes away from the major issue, and there may be another issue on essential air service, I don't know, because I am not on these committees. I have been asked by our leadership to make these objections.

What is important here--and it is not some itty-bitty little thing-- is that we have labor law regulators out of control. When the NMB--the National Mediation Board--which is run by a bunch of Democrats--comes out and does away with 75 years of labor law with just the stroke of a pen and makes employee votes not important, that is not some little itty-bitty issue. That is a big-time issue.

For 75 years unions have been winning union elections by getting a majority of the employees in a firm, not by getting a majority of those who vote. Those other people, whether they vote or not--and they may be sick, they may be ill, they may not have been able to be there, they may have been out of town--their votes are important as well. The unions have always had to get a majority, and they have done that year after year after year in most situations and in most union elections.

Let me give an example: Let's say you have a company with 1,000 employees and only 100 show up, and 51 of them vote for the union. Is it right to bind all 1,000 employees in the company itself when only 51 out of the 1,000 employees have voted for it? Of course, it is not. This is a very important issue.

All those who propose getting this long-term extension, or even a short-term extension, have to do is correct the National Mediation Board. Get union elections back to where a majority of employees are a requisite in order to have a union, and I don't think there would be any problem in solving this problem. It would be solved in a nanosecond.

Now, maybe this essential air service language is something that might cause problems. Well, I would suggest both sides get together and try to resolve those issues. But this is not some little, small issue. This is a big issue.

It even becomes bigger when you consider the National Labor Relations Board, run 3-to-1 by Democrats, and the President will not appoint the recommended Republican to make it an even 3-to-2, so it is 3-to-1. They are running ramshackle fast over labor laws in this country. This kind of oppressing is something they will do, if they can, in a nanosecond. They have been saying they are going to do it. They have been trying to enact card check for years. In fact, they have been trying to enact labor law reform--which I fought back in 1977 and 1978--for years so they can give the unions a decided advantage that should not be given under any circumstances in union elections.

If this gets through--the NMB--then what would stop the National Labor Relations Board, which handles millions of employees--millions of employees--from doing the same and continuing to do things that are just outrageous, like they are doing? They are usurping the ability of this legislature, the Congress of the United States, to run these issues the way they should be run. They should not be acting as a superlegislature, enacting laws from a partisan board to do these things.

This is not some little issue. This is a big issue. I wish I wasn't in the middle of it. I just happened to be here one day when I was the last one here, and I had to object. But I knew when I did object it was the right thing to do under the circumstances.

If we allow these boards to usurp our powers of the legislative branch of government and do anything they want to do because they have a supermajority--a superpartisan majority--then this country can't last, and the freedoms we all value will not last.

The freedoms we all value won't last. I don't want to see anybody not paid. I don't want to see anybody not be able to do their job. But, by gosh, I don't want to see a runaway National Mediation Board, either, or a National Labor Relations Board that will use a precedent such as this in ways it really shouldn't be used. So these are not small issues.

I hope we can get together. I hope the two committees will get together and resolve this issue. I am not on either of the committees. I am just someone who around here has had to stand up on some of these labor union issues--not against unions. I am one of the few persons in this whole Congress who actually earned a union card and became a skilled tradesman and worked for 10 years in the building construction trade union, and I am proud of it. But I have to say that I am going to call on both sides to get this problem solved and get rid of allowing the National Mediation Board to usurp the powers of the legislative branch of government and get the law back where it was, where it is more fair and where it makes sense. If we do that, I don't see why this would be held up for 10 seconds.

So I call on both sides to try to resolve this issue. I don't feel good being in the middle of it just because I happened to be on the floor at the wrong time. All I can say is that, having gotten in the middle of it, as much as I love and admire the distinguished Senator from Texas and appreciate and admire and love my friend from West Virginia--and I do--this could be resolved, and there is no reason we shouldn't resolve it. This is an important issue, and all I can say is that I would like to help get it resolved, if I can, and if I can, I will. But both sides have to get together, and that includes both sides of Capitol Hill. I think this problem could be resolved, but these are not little issues.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask for order in the Chamber.

I ask unanimous consent that I may be able to complete my remarks.

Mr. President, later tonight we will vote on the majority leader's bill to reduce the deficit and increase the Nation's statutory debt limit. Earlier today the House of Representatives decisively rejected the majority leader's proposal. If I got it right, the vote was 246 to 173. Thirteen did not vote, but there were 11 Democrats who voted against the proposal as well. It will be defeated here in the Senate later this evening or whenever the majority leader allows it to be voted on. It is fine with me, whatever he decides to do.

As a substantive matter, I deeply oppose the efforts of the majority leader. His plan does not tackle the task at hand. The President would get a $2.7 trillion debt limit increase but less than $1 trillion in cuts, and most of those cuts are gimmicks, budgetary gimmicks. They assume savings from more spending that the President has not requested and that will be unlikely to materialize. It does not include a balanced budget amendment. Most important from my perspective, it assumes a massive tax increase in 2013 by allowing the 2001 and 2003 tax relief to expire, allowing the AMT to hit the middle-class taxpayers, and allowing for increases in estate taxes.

Most important, from my perspective, the majority leader's approach assumes a massive tax increase in 2013 by allowing the 2001 and 2003 tax relief to expire, allowing the alternative minimum tax to hit middle-class taxpayers, something we have not allowed, and allowing for increases in estate taxes that are a business and job killer.

We are scheduled to vote on this bill late this evening, actually early on Sunday morning. Americans might ask why in the world are we doing this? Republicans were ready to take this vote yesterday evening. This delay in voting does not match with the asserted urgency of raising the debt ceiling. Yesterday, the Senate majority leader stated on the floor that the country defaults on its debt at 12 midnight on Tuesday.

Tuesday is August 2; is this true? What are these claims based on that the majority leader is making? Amazingly, we do not know for a fact whether the United States does run short of cash to pay all its obligations on August 2. We were told by the Treasury Secretary way back in May that August 2 might be a date when Treasury runs out of money to pay our bills. We have seen estimates of the Treasury's cash position on the floor that came either from a local think tank or from Wall Street financial firms.

The Treasury will not give us updated information. It is outrageous. The last time Treasury informed Congress of its estimates of its cash position was in May when it backed off of a prior guess and extended their estimate of running dry of cash by 3 weeks. Since that last update, I made a simple request of members of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, commonly called FSOC, which is chaired by the Treasury Secretary. I asked for an update on Treasury's cash and liquid assets to be delivered by close of business on Thursday, and I asked for that as ranking on the Senate Finance Committee.

I also asked for contingency plans of Treasury and our financial regulators outlining what they will do if the debt limit is not raised or if we face a ratings downgrade on our U.S. debt. Treasury has not responded to this request. It is outrageous. They know what they are going to do.

We were told the Nation will fall off a financial cliff on August 2 at midnight. That is a lot of precision, down to the hour. Is it true? I don't know. The American people don't know. Social Security recipients in Utah don't know and Treasury won't tell us. I might add the rating agencies don't know either. We are being asked to give the President the largest increase in debt limit in our Nation's history. Get that. We are being asked to give the President the largest increase in our debt limit in our Nation's history. His last one was the largest at that time. We were asked to consider policies that involved trillions of dollars, with no effects that will occur over decades, with no current information about how much money the government has and expects to have over the next few days and weeks.

Treasury told me yesterday that they are working on getting me some information. Yet I still don't know how much money Treasury now has to pay its bills and neither does anybody else on the floor. We don't know how much it expects to have over the next few days and weeks or whether Treasury still believes that midnight August 2 has any particular significance. The politicians all insist August 2 is the date. I am beginning to have my doubts. If that was the case, wouldn't it make sense for the majority leader to schedule votes commensurate with this urgency? Why waste more than 24 hours, which is what the majority leader did by refusing our offer to vote last night on his bill. It is not going to change the vote.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that maybe that August 2 date is not all it is cracked up to be. We can't say for sure because the administration, despite my request more than 48 hours ago, has refused to provide Congress with information regarding its cash position. But others seem to think so.

Yesterday, Moody's Investors Service stated, clearly:

It remains our expectation that the government will

continue with timely debt service. . . . If the debt limit is

not raised before August 2, we believe that the Treasury

would give priority to debt service payments and could thus

postpone a potential debt default for a number of days.

Does Moody's know more than our Treasury Secretary and FSOC that has been set up to help us to understand these things? They have been working on it for months. Why can't they give us the information?

This analysis is consistent with everything my colleague and friend from Pennsylvania, Senator Toomey, has been saying for months.

He understood early on that regardless of the rhetoric there would be no default on August 2. The administration is fully capable of prioritizing payments. There is a much more pressing issue than imminent default--a credit downgrade due to the failure of Congress to use this opportunity to take significant deficit reduction measures. That is the real takeaway from Moody's report:

Reductions of the magnitude now being proposed, if adopted,

would likely lead Moody's to adopt a negative outlook on the

AAA rating. . . . The chances of a significant improvement in

the long-term credit profile of the government coming from

deficit reductions of the magnitude proposed in either plan

are not high.

That is Moody's. Our debt has become so unmanageable that we face a credit downgrade with consequent higher interest rates if we do not enact a big-time deficit reduction package.

This year is our third straight trillion-dollar deficit. Our national debt is $14.5 trillion. The President's budget would add $13 trillion in additional debt if he gets his way. I don't know about you, but I cannot tolerate that. That is added to already almost a $15 trillion debt today.

I have spoken previously about the debt bubble the Nation finds itself in, but I wish to reemphasize that point in light of the warnings from ratings agencies that our credit faces a downgrade absent real deficit reduction. Currently, Federal debt held by the public equals a modern record of about 69 percent of GDP and it is headed to 100 percent and we all know it.

The Congressional Budget Office reports that current tax and spending law takes that figure to 76 percent of GDP over the next 10 years, and we all know it is going to hit 100 percent if we keep going with what the President is doing and, unfortunately, with what my friends on the other side are doing.

To put that number in perspective, at the end of fiscal year 2008, the debt held by the public reached about 41 percent. That is less than 2\1/2\ years ago. That was under the Bush administration. That is 41 percent compared to 70 percent today. As bad as the 76-percent figure is that we will reach--according to the Budget Office--President Obama's budget would raise debt held by the public to 87 percent of GDP by his own actuaries. I have to tell you they very seldom have been accurate or right. They are always low.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, if we continue current tax

policy and don't raise rates, fix the alternative minimum tax, provide estate tax relief, provide for a fix to the physician payment system-- that is the SGR--policies supported by clear majorities of Americans by 2021, debt held by the public will reach no less than 97 percent, which is precisely what I have been talking about.

Here is the sticky wicket. CBO projects the cost of simply paying the interest on all this debt will rise to $792 billion--that is if CBO is right and generally they are on the low side--in other words, 3.3 percent of GDP in 2021. What happens if interest rates go up? They are likely to up. Currently, interest rates are very low. The 10-year Treasury rates are currently around 3.5 percent.

During the past 2 years, this administration has spent recklessly, raising the total debt from $10.6 trillion to almost $14.5 trillion today. Because debt was cheap, the President was able to take on a lot of it. The true cost of this debt was hidden by low interest rates.

What will happen when interest rates rise? What happens if interest rates rise to levels seen during the 1980s or 1990s? Think of my suggestion that these rating agencies of government are always low. Interest rates are going to rise and the costs are going to rise too.

During the 1980s, rates on 3-month Treasury bills and 10-year notes rose to over 8 percent and 10 percent, respectively. During the 1990s, rates on 3-month and 10-year notes rose to 5 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively. That cost as laid out by CBO could be astronomical. Under President Obama's 2012 current budget, the CBO projects deficit rates over the next 10 years resulting in an estimated $10 trillion being added to this $14.5 trillion public debt--a 100-percent increase.

Under the scenario where interest rates rise to the historical average of the 1990s, the public debt is projected to grow an additional $8 trillion or a 77-percent increase. Under the scenario where interest rates rise to the historical average of the 1980s, the public debt would grow $14.5 trillion, doubling in size. This is the real impact of Moody's warning.

It is bad enough that President Obama has taken on so much debt that it may result in a downgrade of our credit, but it is even worse that faced with that downgrade he and his Democratic allies refused to deleverage. Should we get downgraded for failure to enact a serious deficit reduction package, our debt will only grow larger because increased interest rates will increase the cost of borrowing. We all know about budgetary gimmickry around here, and this place is filled with it. This economic debt is filled with it. The arguments about the future are filled with it.

Americans should be less concerned about the August 2 deadline than the fact that over the long term our debt bubble runs the risk of becoming a debt spiral that turns into a death spiral for our economy.

Let me close by making two points. First, given the treacherous fiscal waters we are in, Congress and the American people need to know where the U.S. Treasury stands. It is unacceptable that they are being asked to make decisions based on a proclaimed August 2 deadline with no facts to back it up.

I urge all Americans, all Utahans, and all Social Security recipients to get in touch with the Treasury right now and ask them to show us the money. Call Treasury, send them an e-mail, send out a tweet. Show us the money. We have a right to know cash in the Treasury comes from the taxes that hard-working Americans pay. Government is charged with stewardship over use of that cash. Withholding information is a shirking of that responsibility, and I do not think anybody on this floor believes that Treasury does not know what they are going to do. I don't believe any Senator believes they should be stopping the information from coming to us, especially at this time.

We should not run Treasury and manage taxpayer resources the way Bernie Madoff ran his hedge funds, by taking cash and when asked for information refusing to give it and just saying: Trust me.

I have a simple question: Does Treasury expect to run out of cash on Tuesday, August 2? The President and his Treasury Department must answer this question--which brings me to my second point. It is much more critical that we get a deficit reduction package right than that we adhere to this arbitrary August 2 deadline. There is one bill that gets that right from my perspective, and that, of course, is cut, cap, and balance. So far, the only bipartisan votes taken by the Congress in this debt ceiling debate are the vote for cut, cap, and balance in the House and the House vote to defeat the majority leader's bill. Those are the only two that are bipartisan.

This debate is not over yet. I expect Senator Reid's bill to fail tonight, but then it is back to the drawing board. My hope is that the President will then do what he has so far refused to do; that is, to take a leadership role in this debate, to stand up to his base and encourage his party to take real steps to reduce the deficit. I am not going to hold my breath.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to give my full speech.

Mr. President, according to President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner, the Federal government will default on its obligations in 5 days, on August 2, 2011.

It is clear that some Democrats, including President Obama, want to use this fiscal crisis to raise taxes.

Under the guise of closing loopholes, the administration wants to set the stage for tax increases to finance historic levels of government spending.

When this President came into office, he saw himself as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt. He was going to finish the work that LBJ was unable to complete. And a fawning media was happy to encourage his grandiose vision for national economic reordering.

I get a big kick out of this ``Time'' magazine article entitled ``The New New Deal.''

Using the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, he was going to transform the United States into a European-style social democracy.

Businesses, and the individuals who start them, would no longer be free entities with property rights. They would be arms of the state that exist for the purpose of funding ever expanding welfare programs.

Taxation would no longer be a necessary evil, with citizens and businesses recognizing a legal duty to pay what was owed, but understanding that they were ceding their property rights to the government to provide for certain public goods.

Instead, businesses and taxpaying citizens would be obligated to share their wealth with the state.

Because the progressives running the administration do not believe in natural rights to liberty and property because they think everything a family or business makes is in fact due only to the largesse of the state paying taxes is no longer something that must be done, but something that people should want to do.

They owe it to the government to pay taxes, since that money is not really theirs anyway. In this new progressive political community that the President hopes to create, taxation becomes shared sacrifice, and taxpayers become gleeful participants in ``spreading the wealth around,'' as the President once put it.

But the President and his party have hit a brick wall. The spending part was easy. The taxing part is hard.

For all of the talk about how Republicans are divided on the issue of raising the debt ceiling, you only have to scratch the surface to see the deep divisions among Democrats.

The reason that the President has offered up no plan to reduce spending, and the reason Democrats have not passed a budget in over 800 days, is because they are badly divided.

They all want the massive levels of new spending that the President pushed through in his stimulus and ObamaCare. But not all want to pay for it.

They all want to maintain existing levels of entitlement spending. But not all want to raise the taxes necessary to pay for it.

They know that some of their constituents like all this spending, but they know that the vast majority of Americans reject the President's funding of his leviathan state through higher taxes.

So they do nothing.

The President has no plan.

I want to repeat that again.

The President has no plan.

Maybe if we shout it from the rooftops, the media will start to take notice.

The President has no plan. And Senate Democrats don't either; certainly not one that addresses our current fiscal crisis.

The critical issue we face is more than imminent default on our obligations. That is unlikely to happen. It certainly should not happen. In my opinion, it will only happen if the President wants it to happen. On Wednesday, I asked the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is chaired by Secretary Geithner, to provide me and the rest of this institution with an assessment of the cash position of the United States. As Congress considers options for raising the debt ceiling, it needs to know precisely how Treasury plans to pay its bills, and when it is going to fall short of cash to do so.

I asked that the Secretary respond to this reasonable request by yesterday afternoon. The Secretary chose not to respond. I want to be clear that this unresponsiveness by his Treasury Secretary is unacceptable. President Obama needs to understand that this failure to provide the Senate with critical information is not tolerable and will not be forgotten.

Still, I am confident that the Nation will get through this immediate crisis, and there will be no default. But that is only part of the problem. The real issue remains. The United States cannot support the level of spending President Obama has given us and that Democrats from the New Deal onward have bequeathed to the Nation in the form of ever expanding entitlement spending programs.

That is the real issue. And the majority leader's proposal does not address this, any more than the President's White House bromides about a balanced solution address it.

The real threat to this Nation is not the threat of a downgrade due to default.

The real long-term threat is a downgrade of the Nation's credit rating because President Obama has written checks that this country can't cash.

The real threat is that interest rates will go up for businesses, families, students, homeowners and anyone who has to borrow money. The economic ramifications of a downgrade threaten to bowl over our fragile economy. Job creation remains weak. Annualized growth in real inflation-adjusted GDP was only 1.3 percent in the second quarter. This follows on the heels of .4 percent growth in the first quarter.

Along with many others, I have said that if we do not get our spending under control, we are on a glide path to Greece and other Eurozone countries whose credit ratings are destroyed and whose bonds have junk status. Those countries would not have solved their problems by allowing the government to borrow more. Their only way out was to reduce the size of their welfare states.

Yet this is what the President, and the Treasury Secretary, and congressional Democrats are suggesting as a solution. They would have you believe that everything will be set right if only we give the President the legal authority to borrow an additional $2.7 trillion.

Americans are not buying this snake oil. I know that Utahns are not buying it. They understand that our nation's fiscal problem is spending. Giving the President more power to borrow more money is not going to fix that problem. Reducing spending is going to fix that problem.

The numbers could not be more clear.

As we can see, here are the Federal taxes and spending as a percentage of GDP. The red line is the spending line. We can see it is out of control in the 2012 Obama budget. The blue line is the average of what it has been in the past. We can see it is tremendously below where the President's budget is taking us.

Federal spending, as a share of our economy is trending at a pace 15 to 20 percent greater than its historical average of 20.6 percent of GDP. If we leave in place this year's level of taxation, including the marginal rate relief of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and patch the alternative minimum tax--or AMT--the Federal tax take will equal or exceed its historic share of the economy.

Liberals suggest that the deficit and debt must be addressed through tax increases.

This is either deliberately misleading or sadly delusional.

Maybe we have found the truly shovel-ready policies of my friends on the other side, and they smell like a freshly fertilized farmer's field. Or maybe my friends on the other side simply refuse to come to grips with reality. But sticking their heads in the sand is not an option here. The markets, and the American people, understand the nature of our crisis.

Non-defense discretionary spending is at historic levels. And our entitlement programs are headed for bankruptcy. This fiscal year we have a projected budget deficit of $1.5 trillion.

We have a debt of over $14.3 trillion.

President Obama's budget assumes $13 trillion in new debts. This spending needs to be brought to heel. But the proposal of the majority leader does not get the job done.

It allows for the largest debt ceiling increase in history.

This makes sense. President Obama has given us the largest deficits in our history, and his borrowing needs are historic as well.

To pay for his political science experiment to turn the United States into Sweden, he earlier required a $1.9 trillion debt limit increase. That was the largest in the Nation's history.

But now he is coming back for another $2.7 trillion.

Conservatives understand that this is not sustainable. It is one thing to raise the debt limit. It is another thing to do so without reforms that would keep us from getting into a fiscal crisis of this magnitude again. That is why I, and many others in Congress, pledged to vote against a debt ceiling increase prior to the institution of immediate spending cuts and spending caps, and sending a strong balanced budget amendment with taxpayer protections to the States for ratification.

To be clear, that commitment to cut, cap, balance passed the House with bipartisan support. The Senate could have taken up that bill last week, but Democrats chose to table it rather than debate it. And the President chose to tell us what he did not support rather than what he does support.

Any increase in the debt limit needs to be accompanied by serious spending reductions, but the bill of the majority leader does not get us there. All it does is provide President Obama with an opportunity to borrow more money to pay for more spending.

The President would get a $2.7 trillion debt limit increase but less than $1 trillion in cuts.

And most of those cuts are gimmicks. They assume savings from war spending that the President has not requested and that is unlikely to materialize.

It does not include a balanced budget amendment. And most importantly from my perspective, it assumes a massive tax increase in 2013 by allowing the 2001 and 2003 tax relief to expire, allowing the AMT to hit middle-class taxpayers, and allowing for increases in estate taxes that are a small business and job killer.

You won't see that though in the talking points. They bury the breadth of that tax hit in their baseline assumptions.

But we know that President Obama and his liberal allies are planning massive tax increases on the middle class. While their rhetoric suggests that we can fix out debt crisis just by raising taxes on the rich and closing loopholes, the reality is that they are setting the stage to roll back tax expenditures.

And cutting back tax expenditures will be a tax increase on middle income itemizers.

When Democrats talk about tax expenditures, they are talking about your ability to purchase a home, or save for retirement, or give to your church, or put away money for your children's education.

That is where the money is. It is not in bonus depreciation for corporate jets. And it is not in tax benefits for energy companies. It is not in changing the treatment of carried interest for private equity companies. It is not in repealing the deduction for mortgage interest related to yachts used as second homes.

This issue of tax expenditures is confusing and demands greater clarity. As ranking member of the Finance Committee, it is my responsibility to correct the record on what the curtailment or elimination of tax expenditures would really mean for taxpayers and families.

I have spoken about tax expenditures a number of times in the last few weeks, but given the failure of the President and his congressional allies to take on our spending crisis, I want to reemphasize the essential point--if Democrats are allowed to balance the budget their way, it will result in new tax burdens for the middle class.

Tax expenditures are not ``spending through the tax code.'' They are an opportunity for you to keep more of your own money.

And they are not, by and large, special interest benefits that disproportionately benefit wealthy taxpayers. The Democrats' rhetoric on expenditures does not jibe with the reality of our Tax Code. The data are clear. Tax expenditures tend to skew towards taxpayers below the President's definition of the rich.

Let's work through some examples of what concrete proposals to cutback tax expenditures would yield in revenue and what they will mean to middle income Americans.

I am going to take a look at the budget outline presented by our friend and colleague, the distinguished chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. The Senate Democratic Caucus outline was discussed among the larger Democratic Caucus. Republican members, including long-standing Budget Committee members, were briefed by reading the details of the outline in the Washington Post. The Senate Democratic budget called for $2.38 trillion in tax increases when measured against the current policy baseline. The current policy baseline represents the level of taxation Americans are currently paying.

According to materials released by Senate Budget Committee Democrats, they are looking at three categories of tax increases.

The first category would raise marginal rates on single taxpayers with $500,000 and over in income and married couples with $1,000,000 and over in income. For those taxpayers, including many small business owners, the marginal rates would rise by 17 percent.

According to the Tax Policy Center, the TPC, a think tank often cited by our friends on the other side--certainly not a conservative think tank--at least 38 percent of flowthrough income, much of it small business income, would be subject to the marginal rate hike.

The marginal rate on capital gains and dividend income would rise by 33 percent. Keep in mind the IRS Statistics of Income group reports that 65 percent of capital gains income would be hit by this tax hike. Add in the tax increases from ObamaCare, and in less than 18 months the marginal rates on capital gains and dividends will rise by 59 percent. Is that a positive signal for investors to move capital into projects? That tax hike represents $380 billion of tax increases in the Democratic budget.

Now, look at this chart, the Senate Democratic budget tax increases. The total tax increases needed are $2.380 trillion. They suggest, No. 1, raise the marginal rates on singles over $500,000 and married couples over $1,000,000. That would be $380 billion. No. 2, closing corporate loopholes and curtailing offshore tax evasion is $262 billion. After that, the remaining tax increases needed from tax expenditures would be $1.738 trillion.

So, again, we would take the total tax increases needed--$2.380 trillion--reduce that by the $380 billion gained from raising the marginal rates on singles earning over $500,000 and married couples over $1,000,000 and closing corporate loopholes and curtailing offshore tax evasion with $262 billion, and the remaining tax increases needed from the tax expenditures alone would be $1.738 trillion.

The second category of tax increases in the Democratic budget is a set of concepts we have heard about for years in Senate floor speeches. President Obama frequently refers to them as well. We also see these concepts mentioned in the vast left-of-center DNC think tank establishment and by liberal pundits. They fall into two groups of proposals: The first group is closing corporate loopholes, and the second group is curtailing offshore tax avoidance or evasion.

Again, as you can see, they want to increase taxes by $2.380 trillion by raising the marginal rates on singles earning over $500,000 and married couples earning over $1,000,000, which is $380 billion. Then they want to close corporate loopholes and curtail offshore tax evasion, and they think they can save $262 billion on that. That still leaves $1.738 trillion.

The Finance Committee Republican staff compiled all known, specified, and scored proposals in these two groups. Staff calculated the proposals as summing $642 billion over 10 years. The numbers are Joint Committee on Taxation scores.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a summary of the staff calculations.

To President Obama's credit, he put his money where his rhetoric is. Most of the loophole closures and offshore measures were contained in his budget.

If we subtract the two categories of tax increases, there remains $1.73 trillion in tax increases the Senate Democratic budget must find by cutting back tax expenditures.

Here we go again. This is a very important chart. I will remind everyone of something I mentioned in my first discussion of tax expenditures. The Joint Committee on Taxation warns us that tax expenditure figures are not the same as revenue estimates for policy changes.

In March 2011, the CBO released a set of budget options for deficit reduction. On the revenue options, CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the proposals. There are a number of them that deal with cutbacks on tax expenditures.

If we start with the Senate Democratic budget's target of $1.73 trillion, we can see an illustration of some policy options that tax writers would have to consider. I have a chart that lists the revenue raised from some of these options.

Let's look at this chart. It may be difficult to read on a television monitor, so I will go through these. These are tax expenditure policy options from the Congressional Budget Office to raise revenue. In other words, we have a tax to take away these tax expenditures.

No. 1 would be eliminate the deduction for State and local taxes. I don't think many people are going to want that to happen.

No. 2, they will tax Social Security benefits similar to the defined- benefit distributions. That is $438 billion right there in increased taxes.

No. 3 is tax investment income from life insurance and annuities. That is $260 billion.

No. 4, curtail the deductions for charitable giving. Can you believe that? That is $219 billion.

No. 5, gradually eliminate the mortgage interest deduction. Take that away from people who buy homes?

That is $215 billion.

No. 6, eliminate the child tax credit. That is $117 billion.

No. 7, raise tax rates on capital gains. That is $49 billion.

No. 8, eliminate education tax benefits, which is $48 billion.

No. 9, reduce 401(k) contribution limits, which is $46 billion.

And No. 10, tax carried interest as ordinary income, which is $21 billion.

Well, the first one should cause some concern to my friends on the other side. It would eliminate the State and local income and sales tax deduction. The so-called blue States generally have very high local and State tax burdens. Eliminating that deduction would mean the constituents of my friends representing those States will find themselves with an effective tax increase of up to 35 percent. That is what they are doing to themselves. Eliminating this deduction would yield revenue of $862 billion over 10 years.

The second one would reduce the aftertax value of Social Security benefits received by seniors. This CBO option would tax Social Security benefits like we do employer-provided defined benefit retirement plans. Funny how much fur has flown over Social Security reform. Yet this cutback on Social Security benefits has flown under the radar. It appears not all tax expenditures are about corporate jets and yachts. That proposal would raise $438 billion over 10 years. I mean, come on, hit Social Security for something like that?

Well, let's look at the third tax expenditure cutback option. That would tax the inside buildup in life insurance. Here is an example. Under current law, if a father and mother buy a $100,000 life insurance policy and make the surviving spouse or children beneficiaries, death will trigger a tax-free benefit of $100,000. Under this option, this tax expenditure--if they get rid of that--the difference between the face amount of

the policy and premium payments would be taxable. According to the CBO option book, that new tax would raise $260 billion over 10 years. Who wants to do that?

The fourth on the list is a tax benefit near and dear to many of my fellow Utah families. It is the itemized deduction for charitable donations. Under this option, only those deductions that exceed 2 percent of adjusted gross income would be deductible. For many Utahns who tithe--and I am one of them--10 percent of our gross income, this would mean an automatic cut of 20 percent of our deduction. This would affect not just Utahns but charitable givers all over the country. This proposal would reduce the tax benefit of charitable giving by $219 billion over 10 years.

Now, the fifth one is well-known to tens of millions of our constituents. It is the home mortgage interest deduction. If a taxpayer saves up a down payment and borrows for a home, they can take the interest paid on the mortgage as an itemized deduction. This proposal would gradually eliminate the home mortgage interest deduction. In 10 years, the deduction would be gone. This proposal would raise $215 billion over 10 years.

The sixth tax expenditure cutback option involves the current $1,000- per-child tax credit. That credit drops to $500 per child in 18 months if the 2001-2003 tax relief plans are not extended. It is, by definition, limited to low- and middle-income taxpaying families. CBO tells us if we were to eliminate it, there would be $117 billion raised over 10 years.

The seventh tax expenditure cutback would partially eliminate the tax expenditure for the lower rate on capital gains and dividends. It would, in effect, eliminate 25 percent of that tax expenditure and significantly drive up capital gains and dividends rates. As I indicated earlier, the top marginal rate on capital gains and dividends is set to rise by 59 percent in less than 18 months if the President and my friends on the other side get their way. This option--though described as a cutback on a tax expenditure--would drive that rate up higher.

The marginal rate on two-thirds of capital gains income would be driven up 72 percent. It would raise $49 billion, though, over 10 years, for our tax-seeking friends.

The eighth tax expenditure cutback option would sharply curtail tax benefits for families who send their kids to college. It would eliminate the Hope Scholarship and lifetime learning credits and phase out the student loan interest deduction. For that half of the population that pays the freight in society, the 49 percent who pay income tax, our friends on the other side are telling them their load is just going to get much heavier. That would be their message to middle-income American families who want to send their kids to college. This option would raise $48 billion over 10 years.

The ninth tax expenditure cutback option would reduce limits on contributions to retirement plans. About 50 percent of American workers participate in retirement plans. They save for their own retirement. They do not look to rely only on Social Security. There is bipartisan consensus that for America to remain prosperous, families and individuals must save more during their working lives. Yet this option would go in the other direction. It would mean less in retirement savings. CBO says it would raise $46 billion over 10 years if we take that one away.

Now, the tenth tax expenditure cutback option is one we have heard much about from my friends on the other side. It would tax partnership interests--known as carried interest--like ordinary income rather than capital gain. Interestingly enough, with a solidly Democratic Senate last year, this revenue raiser did not pass. There is a lot of speculation about that. I will not join it, but it is curious that when constituencies that favor Democrats decisively raised legitimate concerns about the possible negative effects on private equity and enterprise value, this proposal didn't quite make it past the finish line. That proposal would raise $21 billion over 10 years.

If you assume no interactive effects, the list of options I walked through adds up to $2.27 trillion in tax hikes. That is a lot more than called for by the Senate Democratic budget outline. Recall that outline produced by Senate Democrats boiled down to $1.73 trillion in cutbacks on tax expenditures. But look at how broad these tax hikes are. They hit big chunks of the 49 percent of American households who pay income taxes.

Take a look at the chart again. This is a chart that confirms what many of us have suspected. Although they might not come clean about it, when you look at the code and you look at our deficits, there is only one place for Democrats to go if they are going to close the deficit their way, with no meaningful spending reductions. They are going to have to hit tax expenditures, and specifically those that benefit middle-class itemizers.

They hit residents of blue States. They hit seniors. They hit everyone who owns a life insurance policy. They hit everyone who takes an itemized deduction for giving to their church, local food kitchen, or other charities. They hit everyone with a mortgage, everyone who receives a child tax credit, and anyone with capital gains. They hit middle-income families and students who benefit from education tax benefits. They hit those who save for retirement. They hit those folks who start up businesses and take a future profits interest in the form of a capital gain. But to hear the President talk, you would think we could get there by taxing corporate jets and yachts.

I am accustomed to the media carrying the water of liberal politicians, but there has been a real dereliction of duty in allowing President Obama to get away with this. Even at this late date, he is still getting away with it. He has no plan. Tell me. He has no plan. Show it to me. He talks about his plan, but we have yet to see it in writing. In fact, there is no plan.

The press ridiculed Richard Nixon for his secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. But here we are in a catastrophic crisis, and President Obama gets a pass when it comes to his secret plan to balance the budget.

To suggest that a debt crisis triggered by $14.3 trillion in debt can be fixed by taxing the luxuries of evil rich people is so childish and lacking in seriousness that the President should have been called out on it immediately. But he wasn't. He was allowed to get away with it.

President Obama's balanced approach--he talks about a balanced approach all the time--one that includes meaningful reductions to his historic levels of spending, is a plan for economic stagnation and national ruin, and it is a plan to bankrupt seniors.

He wants shared sacrifice. From whom? We were shown that the middle class is going to get hit the hardest. I want shared prosperity by cutting back on spending and getting the Federal Government out of most of our lives in ways that are intrusive and costly, to being able to get jobs and raise jobs and do what has to be done in this country.

It is a plan to bankrupt our seniors. The President knows this, as do his colleagues in Congress. He knows his supposed plan does nothing to fix the long-term trajectory of his deficit spending. So the question folks need to ask is, what is he hiding? How does the left plan on closing the gap and balancing the budget their way? The answer is the elimination or reduction of tax expenditures. And that means middle- class tax increases. To hear my friends on the other side, you would think the only folks hit by Democratic tax increases will be corporate jet owners, yachtsmen, and millionaires. But when you peek behind the rhetorical curtain, you find that does not pan out. Most of the tax base is in the middle and upper middle income families who make up that 49 percent of Americans who are the only ones who shoulder the burden of the income tax.

We know that the recent numbers are the bottom 51 percent of all households do not pay income taxes. No, it is the 49 percent of Americans who shoulder the burden of the income tax; that is where the money is. As I have shown with the CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation options, that is where you have to go. Without a counterbalancing rate cut, this version of tax reform means fewer resources for home ownership, retirement savings, and charitable giving.

But don't say I did not warn you. Those who want to treat tax expenditures as some abstract budgetary honey pot risk having the folks who

make the honey, the taxpaying bees, to rightfully sting you. As one who hails from the Beehive State, I can tell you, you will feel the sting.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to finish my remarks.

Mr. President, before turning to the issue of the moment, I want to thank my dear friend for his good remarks here on the floor of the Senate. He is a great leader, a great human being, and he certainly outlined, I think in a fair way, some of the problems and some of the solutions we might have here on the floor.

But before turning to the issue of the moment, the need to restore the Nation's fiscal stability by reducing our deficits and debt, I want to return to a matter I discussed on the floor yesterday, and that is the FAA reauthorization bill.

I must respond to some of the comments made by two of my colleagues earlier today regarding one of the major sticking points in our efforts to pass the FAA reauthorization bill. Their arguments are, to put it quite simply, fallacious and cannot go unanswered.

As you might expect, these comments were regarding the provision in the House bill affecting the way votes are counted in union elections in the airline industry. My colleagues, the senior Senator from West Virginia and the junior Senator from Iowa, characterize the House's actions as some sort of radical endeavor, a change that lacks justification and common sense.

In fact, the Senator from West Virginia even argued that the House's provisions would ``undo 75 years of labor law.''

These were his exact words. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the claim is so far from being accurate I simply have to assume that my good friend, Senator Rockefeller, simply misspoke. I know this is the line the labor unions and the administration are peddling, but here is the truth: The House of Representatives or Senate Republicans are not trying to undo 75 years of labor law, it is the National Mediation Board--or NMB, I will call it--that has already done so in a highly partisan fashion.

It is the NMB, controlled by pro-union appointees of President Obama that in a partisan way unilaterally undid 75 years of labor law, and put their finger on the scale for the unions that bankroll Democratic political campaigns.

I know what I am talking about. I won the American Jurisprudence prize for labor law. I have led labor fights on the floor for our side for the last 35 years. House and Senate Republicans are only trying to restore long-lasting labor law following its highly partisan corruption by the National Mediation Board. This is not an opinion. This is fact.

Put the talking points and revisionist history aside, this is what you have: a highly partisan NMB changing 75 years of settled law, settled labor law, to benefit the Democrats' political allies. For 75 years, NMB-supervised elections required that a union receive the votes of a majority of the entire workforce before it can be certified. That has been the law. There is good reason for it. This was not just a mathematical trick to disadvantage unions, as my colleagues have argued. It is plain common sense.

Let's suppose, for example, that only 50 percent of a proposed bargaining unit votes in a union election, and the union wins by a very slim majority of the votes cast. In that case, a union representative would be certified with only the demonstrated support of one-fourth of the bargaining unit. That is what would happen if we follow the language the NMB fallaciously put into their ruling. One-quarter of a workforce could vote to certify a union and bind every other coworker to have to live with that decision. Apparently a commitment to Democratic and true majority rule only matters to the left when it suits them. What is going on in this country is outrageous, not just at the National Mediation Board but the NLRB as well. Democratic radicals, very brilliant labor lawyers, who do not give a darn about what the law is, are now starting to change the laws by regulatory fiat.

Apparently a commitment to democratic and true majority rule only matters when it suits certain people's politics.

The Senator from Iowa compared these votes to Senate and schoolboard elections, suggesting that only a majority of those voting is necessary to prevail. This is a misguided comparison. First, union elections are not a choice among competing representatives. They are, instead, held to determine whether the workers want to be represented at all. Even setting that aside, how many schoolboards are going to be empowered to make decisions that affect every hour of every day an employee goes to work? How many Senators are elected to serve a small, narrowly defined group of constituents? And, in the end, if your vote is not counted in a Senate or schoolboard election, you will get another chance to vote a few years down the line.

Employees voting in these union elections have no such options. That is why the law has been completely different from what my two friends and colleagues have said on the floor. Requiring the support of the majority of the whole unit before certifying a union representative only makes common sense. This is why the procedure at NMB used for these elections went unchanged for 75 years. Boards appointed by Democratic Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton all agreed with that process that the House bill is only attempting to restore.

In fact, the NMB appointed by President Carter unanimously ruled it did not have authority to administratively change the form of the NMB's ballot used in representation elections, and that such a change, if appropriate, can only be made by Congress. That makes sense.

Yet today we have an administration bent on greasing the rails in favor of the unions, and a Democratic Senate all too willing to go along with it. They are so willing that they have opted to stall passage of the FAA reauthorization to prevent Congress from restoring a system that served the Nation and airline industry well for decades. This is another example of the administration showing its true colors. Rather than provide certainty to travelers, the transportation industry, and airports, they are holding up a long-term FAA reauthorization in order to benefit their union allies. It is wrong. This type of thing should not go on. Nor should the National Mediation Board be issuing what ought to be congressional decisions.

I wish we were not having this debate. I wish we could get this FAA reauthorization done. I want to get it done. I don't want anybody furloughed, but these are important issues. This isn't some itty-bitty nonessential issue. I am not going to yield on this issue. I will not let an out-of-control National Mediation Board and their patrons in Congress and the White House rig the rules so a small minority can jam unionization on unwilling employees.

I expect we will be debating this issue for some time. I am willing to have the debate in full view of the public. But, at the very least, I expect my colleagues to acknowledge the truth as to what has transpired at the National Mediation Board. It is not the House of Representatives that has taken a radical position; it is the Obama administration, and some of my colleagues on the other side should know better.

Let me add a couple of other things. I don't enjoy the fact that people are being furloughed. But it is not Republicans who are holding this bill up. It is those people demanding outrageous changes in the law by individuals who were never elected to make those changes. We ought to fire that whole doggone National Mediation Board--or at least the Democrats on the board, who don't seem to care about what the law is.

And it is the same with the NLRB. At least one of them, and maybe more, could not make it through this process and had to be recess appointed. They could care less about what the laws are, and they want to change them without proper congressional approval. It is outrageous. It is not something my friends on the other side should encourage. It just makes sense.

All those Democratic Presidents, until now, have honored that 75-year history of how votes should be taken in union elections. Unions win over 60 percent of their union elections. The system is not unfair. They lose some, sure. But to stack the rules so they can win every time is not right either. It certainly isn't democratic. It is wrong for those employees who didn't have the opportunity, or didn't vote. It is wrong. You can have 10 people vote in a 100-person union, and if 6 vote for it, under their rule, that would change the rule for all 94 of the others. That is what we are ignoring. So much for that. All I can say is I don't want to have anyone whining from the other side, because they are the ones who are holding up the FAA reauthorization. And they are doing it for the most crass of reasons.

The Debt Ceiling

Turning to the matter that is consuming the Nation, I want to address the so-called August 2 deadline we hit next week.

In early April of this year, Treasury Secretary Geithner informed Congress that Treasury might run out of ways to stay at the debt limit and have enough cash to pay its bills around July 8. About a month and a half later, on May 16, the Treasury Secretary updated his guess to August 2.

This August 2 deadline, which the administration has insisted is when Treasury runs out of sufficient cash to pay bills, was estimated back in the middle of May. It is only reasonable to expect that Congress would be kept apprised of Treasury's cashflow status and estimates. If we indeed face an economic catastrophe on August 2, it is only reasonable to expect warnings from those in government responsible for issuing such updates and monitoring threats to our financial stability.

We have a group in government that is charged with that responsibility. It is called the Financial Stability Oversight Council, or FSOC, set up in the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. The FSOC is chaired by the Treasury Secretary and composed of members such as the Federal Reserve Chairman and banking regulations czars. Indeed, the FSOC was sold by Democrats as a body that would be able to spot threats to our financial system and then warn and protect us all.

The President, Treasury officials, the President's Press Secretary, and others in the administration daily warn of catastrophe, crisis, and the potential for conditions even worse than we saw during the financial crisis. They seem to be channeling Dr. Peter Venkman, who, faced with another catastrophe, once predicted a disaster of biblical proportions--human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

Yet through all these predictions, the FSOC has essentially remained silent. That body of unelected bureaucrats either doesn't see an impending threat to stability from the debt limit impasse, or from a ratings downgrade for the United States, or it is too busy writing a mountain of new regulations to make a warning.

I sent a letter, which I wish to have printed in the Record, to eight voting members of the FSOC yesterday, asking two basic sets of questions. I ask unanimous consent that that be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, one is whether they see any imminent threat to financial stability from the debt limit impasse, or from an impending downgrade to our Nation's credit rating. Of course, we face warnings of downgrades of our credit rating not merely because of the debt limit impasse; we have had dozens of such impasses in recent decades, with no effect on our credit rating. Yet we do face warnings of a ratings downgrade because of President Obama's acceleration of deficits and debt along our unsustainable fiscal path and unsustainable entitlement promises.

With spending as a share of the economy up to levels not seen since World War II, and a lack of willingness by the administration to break its deficit spending addiction, ratings agencies have been brought to the edge and warn of impending downgrades. Those downgrades would immediately harm job creation, the economy, the cost of credit for every American family and business, and, indeed, overall financial stability.

However, instead of a forthright discussion of this threat, the FSOC chose to instead bury an academic discussion of it in their annual report. Let me remind everyone how important Democrats said the FSOC would be as an early warning system, protecting us from the imminent threats to stability. It was supposed to be a watchdog, a cop on the beat combing global financial markets for imbalances and stability threats, and then giving warning to everyone.

The President, the Treasury Secretary, ratings agencies, Secretary of State, Fed Chairman Bernanke, admirals, investors, former administration officials across party lines--all have issued warnings of threats to financial stability from our fiscal crisis. Yet the FSOC buried whatever observation it has about our crisis in its annual report.

Another set of questions I asked the FSOC involves Treasury's cashflows through August and the date at which Treasury now believes it is most likely to run short of cash. I asked about contingency plans that Treasury, the Fed, and bank regulators have if there is a ratings downgrade. Reports of meetings of Treasury Secretary Geithner, Fed Chairman Bernanke, and New York Fed President Dudley suggest that contingency plans certainly are in the works.

Yet as the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, the administration has provided me with no information on what those plans might be, in spite of my responsibility for oversight of debt and cash operations at Treasury. I wish I could say I was surprised, but the fact is, the promise of the most open, deliberative, and rational administration in history has given way to a highly secretive and partisan operation that denies the people of this country the leadership they are owed.

Perhaps I am supposed to wait, as in the past, for news reports on Sunday afternoon before the opening of financial markets in Asia to find out what we would do if an economic catastrophe in fact unfolds.

It is an unsatisfactory and unacceptable state of affairs that the American people and Members of Congress do not have updated and sufficient information about Treasury's cashflows and liquid assets, or the contingency plans of our financial regulators. It is disturbing to me that in recent days Members of Congress in both Chambers have gone to their respective floors to discuss Treasury's cash and liquidity position using information supplied either by large Wall Street financial institutions, or by nongovernmental think tanks.

Press reports of the U.S. Treasury's financial condition have also been relying on these sources. Why? Why do Members of Congress not know details of Treasury's projected cashflows for August? Why are we relying on dated numbers Treasury gave us months ago? How can we decide whether August 2, a threshold date estimated by Treasury back in May, is even close to some sort of deadline date for dealing with the debt limit?

Maybe the date is July 29. I don't know, and neither the administration nor the FSOC has told us. Maybe the date is August 15. I don't know, and neither the administration nor the FSOC has told us. I don't know. The American people don't know. This is unacceptable.

Wall Street firms have recently put out their own projections and say that August 2 may not be relevant at all. Maybe it will be August 8 when Treasury runs into a cashflow problem. Maybe it will be August 13. Does Treasury still believe August 2 is the date when cashflow problems are most likely to arrive, given new information on

government receipts since early May? If not, we need to know, and we need to know how that assessment has been made. If so, then why is Treasury not telling us and showing us why?

My letter to FSOC members, which includes the Treasury Secretary, includes a request for updated information about Treasury cashflows and liquid assets. Given warnings from the administration that there is special urgency to act by August 2, time is of the essence, so I asked to receive responses from the FSOC members by 5 o'clock today, which is now an hour and a half ago. I have received no reply about Treasury cashflows and liquid assets. Nothing. Radio silence.

Television cameras can't be turned on in this town without capturing some administration official reminding Americans about the looming default, but they are unable to provide Congress with the numbers that would show when the default would happen, after all these months of recommending we should know, and after warnings months ago.

Let me say this again. I asked for, and have not received, critical information about the state of our Nation's short-term finances that I specifically requested from eight voting members of the FSOC, including the Secretary of the Treasury.

I have received no response at all regarding the cash and liquid assets Treasury has and expects to have available. But worse than the refusal by the Treasury Secretary and the FSOC members to inform us about the Nation's cash position is their refusal to keep the American people duly informed about the state of our finances. It is, quite simply, a shirking of their responsibility to the citizens of this country. Rather than providing transparency--which we were promised-- the administration has chosen to scare Social Security recipients about their benefits in politicized debt-limit negotiations.

We are debating debt and deficit plans that involve trillions of dollars. Yet we only have guesses about how much cash the Federal Government expects to have in August from a nongovernment think tank and from Wall Street firms. This is unacceptable.

Mr. President, one of the most troubling aspects of this lack of disclosure is the way it is affecting our Nation's seniors. I listened to my constituents in Utah, and many of them who rely on Social Security are very worried, and they are, frankly, scared. The Obama administration has been hard at work frightening them about the prospects of default. More concerned about his election prospects than resolving this crisis, President Obama commented recently that he could not guarantee Treasury would be able to make Social Security payments in early August.

Really? This fearmongering is shameful--absolutely shameful. For the President to threaten not to send out Social Security checks is a stain on his Presidency. Those relying on Social Security benefits rightfully count on timely payments. They worked hard and paid taxes, and timely benefit payments are due to them. These payments can and should be assured, no question.

Why is the President using the politics of fear on our seniors? I think we all know the reason. Given the information that is available, it appears that roughly $50 billion of Social Security payments are due during August. Recent estimates from outside sources put flows in the Treasury of between $170 billion and over $200 billion in August from various tax receipts and other sources. That alone is more than enough to pay $50 billion in Social Security payments, with cash left over for the $30 billion due on our debt in August and more.

Perhaps the President is worried about the timing of cashflows in August. Yet even if all $50 billion of Social Security payments come due on August 3--and they won't--Treasury can easily get its hands on cash to pay those bills. According to the Daily Treasury Statement for July 26, Treasury has $5 billion sitting idle at the Federal Reserve. Treasury can call that up. They can call up the Fed right now and get that $5 billion in cash.

Treasury has roughly $90 billion in mortgage-backed securities that it bought in the financial crisis to bail out the housing markets. It sold $10.6 billion of those just last month. Treasury can go out and sell more next week if it is worried about not having cash to pay seniors. It could raise almost $80 billion.

There are many more options for Treasury to get cash, and if the administration had any concern for seniors it would have had its officials working hard since at least May to ensure enough cash is available in August. Treasury could easily have $50 billion of cash on August 3 to pay our seniors if it wants to do that.

Why, then, did the President choose to strike fear into all of our Nation's seniors? Why would the President say to our seniors that he could not guarantee there would be cash available to pay benefits in August when he can absolutely guarantee there would be cash available?

It seems clear the President has chosen to use fear and to scare seniors in order to boost his chances at reelection and to strengthen the hand of our friends on the other side who are insistent on raising taxes as a means of deficit reduction. If we raise taxes, I guarantee you the other side will spend every dime of it. It will not be used to pay down the deficit, and especially with a Presidential election in a couple of years.

Using Social Security and the financial security of our seniors as bargaining chips in a political poker game over the debt ceiling is, to put it bluntly, shameful. To do so to try to raise taxes at a time when unemployment is 9.2 percent and trending up--and that doesn't even include the underemployment rate, which is hovering around 17 percent when you count those who will not even look for jobs anymore, and others who will not work--well, it represents an odd way to express concern about jobs.

The only reason Social Security payments would not be made in August by the administration would be a conscious choice by the administration to stiff seniors and to blame Republicans. It would be a conscious political choice, not a choice forced by the debt limit or lack of cash.

Well, Mr. President, it is time for me to conclude, but I want to be clear. The American public has been shortchanged by the new Financial Stability Oversight Council that was created by the job-killing Dodd- Frank financial regulation act. That is one of the worst bills I have seen in all of my 35 years.

The FSOC, chaired by Treasury Secretary Geithner, has refused and ignored my request for basic information about government finances and government contingency plans in the face of dire warnings of threats to our Nation's financial stability.

I don't enjoy coming on the Senate floor and excoriating this administration and the President and FSOC. But this is shameful. The American people deserve transparency, and they deserve accountability. Yet the administration and its regulators chose instead to withhold information from the people and their elected representatives in Congress. The refusal by members of FSOC, including the Treasury Secretary, to provide simple basic information about government finances is unacceptable and requires investigation and action.

Mr. President, we have to get to where this government starts to work again. We shouldn't have to rely on Wall Street for these figures or rely on Wall Street to know what the administration's plan is. We shouldn't have to rely on anybody except those who are designated to provide this information. Unfortunately, they haven't done that.

I admit, I only gave them a few days, but they have been working on this for months. I don't know about their office, but I tell you one thing. We get things done on time. We are at rug-cutting time on the floor of the Senate and in the House of Representatives. We know August 2 is the heralded date by this administration. Since they chose the date, I think they should justify what they are going to do and how they are going to do it; to make sure if we don't somehow increase the debt ceiling, which I am not going to do, we at least know what their plan is.

I hope the administration will get a little more active on some of these things that are so important on Capitol Hill--important to Democrats as well as Republicans. We need to have the facts. We need accountability, we need transparency, and I am calling on the administration to get on the ball.

With that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I object, Madam President.

Madam President, I will take a few minutes to explain why I am, once again, objecting to the legislation offered by my dear friend from West Virginia, my Finance Committee colleague. I wish to make it absolutely clear that a long-term FAA reauthorization is a priority for this country, and it is a personal priority for me.

Once again, I point out that I have worked with Chairman Baucus on reporting a Finance Committee title to the bill that passed the Senate earlier this year. The current lapse in FAA taxes and expenditures authority from the Airport and Airway Trust Fund is a detrimental situation brought on by the Senate majority's refusal to discontinue granting excessive favors for big labor and their refusal to cut any wasteful spending.

As I have said, I share House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Mica's frustration that favors to organized labor have overshadowed the prospects for a long-term FAA reauthorization.

Last year, the National Mediation Board changed the rules under which employees of airlines and railroads are able to unionize. For decades, the standard has been that a majority of employees would have to agree in an election to form a union. However, the National Mediation Board rules changed that standard so all it takes to unionize is a majority of employees voting. This means the NMB wants to count an employee who doesn't vote as voting for big labor. Somehow, organized labor is able to claim it is democratic to appropriate someone else's vote without that person's input and participation.

The FAA reauthorization bill that passed the House earlier this year undoes this heavyhanded rule and lets airline employees decide for themselves how to use their own votes. The House bill would merely undo a big partisan favor done at the behest of big labor and put efforts to unionize airline workforces on the same footing they have been on for years.

The House bill does not create a new hurdle to unionization. Instead, it restores the longstanding ability of airline employees to make decisions for themselves. The House bill only undoes the NMB action that was taken to reverse 70 years of precedent for narrow political gain.

In addition to an impulse to cater to big labor, the Senate majority also is resistant to any attempt to cut any government spending, no matter how wasteful that spending may be. The House bill I am going to ask unanimous consent for in a few minutes has aroused the ire of the majority because it contains a provision that would limit essential air service eligibility to communities that are located 90 or more miles from a large- or medium-hub airport. This would save $12.5 million a year. That is right, million with an ``m'', not a ``b'' or a ``t.''

The majority is resisting a provision that already passed this body as part of the Senate's long-term reauthorization bill that would save $12.5 million a year, and they are willing to put the FAA's finance at risk in the process. The House bill I am going to offer also contains an additional proposal to limit essential air service subsidies for communities where the cost per passenger is greater than $1,000. This provision would affect a grand total of three airports in the whole country. It is my understanding these three airports would also have ceased to receive EAS subsidies under another provision in the Senate- passed, long-term FAA bill that limited subsidies to airports averaging 10 or more passengers a day.

To sum this up, our friends on the other side, the Democrats, are holding this up over wasteful spending and handouts for President Obama's big union allies.

The point is, the Senate majority has cut the FAA off from its primary source of financing and created confusion for travel companies and tax-paying passengers by objecting to a short-term extension measure that doesn't do one single thing that is not done by a bill that passed the Senate by unanimous consent on April 7 of this year.

I wish to briefly discuss and hopefully clear away some of that confusion. Passengers who bought tickets while the taxes were still being collected may be entitled to a refund if they are traveling during a period in which the taxes have lapsed. I wish to make it clear that the inability of the Senate majority to process legislation should not constitute an additional burden to the already beleaguered travel industry. It is the responsibility of the IRS to refund ticket taxes, and while I recognize they want to do the right thing for taxpayers, I encourage the IRS to work closely with the travel industry. The travel industry is not responsible for the lapse in FAA taxes, and they should not bear extra costs because of that.

The lack of a long-term bill is bad for airports all across the country because they don't have the funding stability to plan and complete projects. Kicking the can farther down the road is not a viable alternative to actually doing what is in the best interests of all parties.

As a Senate conferee to the FAA bill, I stand ready to do everything I can to get to work with my House and Senate colleagues on a long-term FAA reauthorization, as soon as they are willing to get down to work.

Mr. President, last night we heard from President Obama in a prime-time address from the East Room of the White House. The topic was raising the Federal debt limit. According to Treasury Secretary Geithner, the Federal Government may breach the statutory debt limit as early as August 2, 2011. That is 1 week from today.

Remarkably, the President, in yet another prime-time address, again hectored the American people about the need for politically charged tax hikes as a cure-all for our deficit and debt problems.

We have to hand it to the President; he is a true believer. For the President, there seems to be no problem in Washington that can't be fixed with tax increases. Even his own party has moved beyond him on this. To be certain, Democrats have not become the party of tax relief. For example, the plan offered by the majority leader does not address the 10-year tax increase of $3.5 trillion that is said to kick in on January 1, 2013. But last night on CNN, one reporter got it about right. This is how she put it: ``Nobody is talking about tax increases except Barack Obama.''

For weeks the President and his surrogates on and off Capitol Hill have been talking about tax increases as the solution to our debt crisis, but the President was on his own last night. It was a speech very much divorced from the reality of our situation.

Republicans are insistent that the solution to a spending crisis is not giving government more money to spend, and here is the dirty secret: Many members of the President's own party are not keen on tax increases either. They know the President's politically driven tax increases, in the context of trillions in deficits and debt, will do little to restore the Nation's fiscal footing. They know more significant tax increases will hit the middle class and small business job creators very hard. But even as his troops have left him, President Obama soldiers on, leading the fight for higher taxes and spreading the wealth around.

The President talked last night about the need for a balanced approach. Here is what he means by that: To balance the budget his way, we will have to raise taxes by roughly $2 trillion. So what does he think of the plan of the Senate's distinguished majority leader? After all, the majority leader has put forth a plan that does not contain tax increases--or at least that is the claim. Presumably, the President would, therefore, oppose the majority leader's plan as unbalanced. But that would assume the President is not playing politics with this debate. That would assume he is more concerned with solving our Nation's debt crisis than appealing to his base, getting his approval ratings up, and positioning himself for reelection.

Somehow, in spite of his absolute insistence on the need for tax increases and a balanced solution to the debt limit debate, the President supports the majority leader's proposal.

The President likes to present himself as the only reasonable man in Washington. But as he proved again with his latest politically driven inconsistency, he is as partisan as they come. To the disappointment of his campaign advisers, it is clear the American people are demanding a leader who will be straight with them rather than focus on election year positioning.

If the President and his party came clean with the American people, this is what they would acknowledge: Nondefense discretionary spending is at historic highs. The Nation's biggest spending programs are completely out of control and set for bankruptcy. Over the next 10 years, the President's budget would drive this country into debt by an additional $13 trillion. Most importantly, they would acknowledge that the Nation's problem is principally too much spending, not too little taxes.

I don't envy my friends on the other side of the aisle. They are in a tough place. On the one hand, the liberal base refuses any structural reforms to the spending programs that are driving the country's debt to the brink. On the other hand, absent these structural reforms the middle class and job creators will have to be hit with historic tax increases. Obviously, they cannot be open about this second point or they risk the ire of American voters.

Those who represent San Francisco and the upper west side might be able to go home and sell these tax increases,

but for Democrats responsible to entire States, not just small liberal enclaves, such tax increases are a much tougher pitch.

So what is a Democrat to do? Democrats can't propose meaningful spending reductions, but they can't support job-killing tax increases. So this is what they will do. They choose to ignore the real problem. They offer no plan. They refuse to present a budget--they actually refused to present a budget for more than 800 days. They dodge and weave. One minute the President is for real reforms to Medicare. The next minute he is accusing Republicans of trying to destroy Medicare for recommending reforms, and they hope their friends in the media ignore the failure to offer a real solution.

As we can see from this chart, the problem is spending, and we need a solution commensurate with that problem. As we can see, spending is the red line; taxes happen to be the blue line. Spending as a percentage of GDP is much higher than the historical average. The average level of spending has been around 18 percent since World War II. Since President Obama took office in 2008, spending has surged to over--actually 25 percent at one point of our economy--way above the 18 to 20 percent norm. Tax receipts have dipped, but they are expected to come back. CBO estimates, however, that spending is currently set to stay at around 24 percent.

As we can see, spending is the red line that goes off the charts during 2009, 2010, and on into 2020. Taxes have always been right where they are. They went pretty high, came down, and now they are back up. As we can see from the chart, President Obama's 2012 budget does not help one bit in reducing this level of spending. The President's budget is not balanced by any means.

Again, the problem for the President is this: Even while he was explaining to Joe the Plumber the moral and civic imperative of spreading the wealth around, he was promising not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 or families making less than $250,000. But if he is going to balance the budget by attempting to pay for current levels of discretionary spending that Lyndon Johnson only dreamed of and spending programs that are permanently in the red, he is going to have to hit the middle class hard. He is going to have to break his promise--not exactly a political win.

Even as he talked about moving the Democratic Party to the left and abandoning the comparative moderation of the Clinton administration, he remembers well the fate of Walter Mondale. When accepting his party's nomination for President in San Francisco in 1984, Walter Mondale promised Americans that he was going to raise their taxes. President Reagan went on to win in a 49-State landslide. President Obama is not going to suffer the same fate as Walter Mondale, so he avoids discussion of the tax increases on the middle class that he really believes in. Instead, in this debate he is focused on a number of politically opportunistic red herrings that will have minimal impact on the Nation's debt crisis.

The purpose of these red herrings is to distract Americans from the real driver of our deficits and debt and the real choices Democrats have to, but are refusing to, make. Let's just look at a few of these examples.

The President has been talking incessantly about the need to tax corporate jets. Well, if we were to raise the appreciable rate on corporate jets from 5 years to 7 years as the Democrats propose, it would yield, at least according to the economists, $3.1 billion--that is with a ``b''--over 10 years.

Just to be clear, as we are discussing these paltry numbers--numbers which the President would have us believe are key to restoring the markets' confidence in the American economy and our ability to manage our debt--the United States will run a budget deficit this year of $1.5 trillion. Our national debt is $14.3 trillion. The President's budget assumes an additional $13 trillion in debt on top of that, and the President is talking about the tax treatment of corporate jets which, if he got his way, would raise $3.1 billion over 10 years.

This is about as effective as one of my fellow Utahans standing in his driveway in Little Cottonwood Canyon during a blizzard and flicking a snowflake off his shoulder and claiming he was finished shoveling for the day.

To hear the President talk, one would think this proposal is absolutely critical to balancing our budget. To put it in perspective, over the next 10 years of debt this Nation is set to take on it would equate to roughly 20 hours and 23 minutes of debt reduction.

Let's not forget about the essential matter of cutting back the mortgage interest deduction for yachts used as second homes. Again, the President acts as if this is one of a handful of policies that will restore America's prosperity. But if Congress enacted this change, we would cover the 10 years of debt from the Obama budget for all of 15 hours and 47 minutes.

Of course, the Democratic talking points would not be complete without an attack on the oil companies. The President has talked about making American oil companies pay their fair share by reducing or eliminating domestic energy incentives. This proposal would raise $21 billion in revenue. That would cover a whopping 5 days, 18 hours, and 47 minutes of debt that the President is prepared to take on over the next 10 years.

Then there are the rich. Tax the rich. Make them pay their fair share. This class warfare might be appropriate in Europe and countries with a feudal history, but in the United States, a nation conceived in liberty and the proposition that all men are created equal, families and entrepreneurs just don't buy it--and for good reason. Taxing the rich hits job creators and undermines economic growth. But as deficit reduction policy, it falls short as well.

In the name of bipartisanship, I am going to use data from the Tax Policy Center, or TPC, to demonstrate my point. According to TPC models and estimates for 2011, American households earning more than $1 million account for 12 percent of the Nation's pretax income and pay 19 percent of Federal taxes and carry an average tax rate of 29 percent. Even more critical from my perspective, these taxpayers also account for 38 percent of all flow-through income. Flow-through income is predominantly earnings from ownership of small businesses.

So raising rates on the rich will hit squarely on those who create and expand the small businesses that need to be the engine for our economic recovery. But let's be clear about something. Higher taxes on these wealthy individuals will not only have adverse economic consequences, it will not even provide the deficit and debt reduction suggested by the left.

Even if all of the income of those earning more than $1 million a year were confiscated with a 100-percent rate--with the unlikely assumption of no taxpayer behavioral response--for the year of confiscation, these higher taxes would yield about $893 billion. My gosh, our deficit this year is $1.5 trillion--just in 1 year. The most we would get is $893 billion, and that is if we are lucky.

This is a one-shot opportunity. If we confiscated this wealth, those individuals would no longer work, save, create more wealth, and generate more tax revenue. And confiscating all the income from those earning over $1 million does not even fix 1 year--not even 1 year--of the 10 years of projected Obama debt. It would cover 244 days, 16 hours, and 34 minutes.

All the demagoguery on jets and yachts and oil companies yields about 1 week of deficit reduction from the President's 10-year debt.

Even throwing in a one-time confiscation of all the income for taxpayers above $1 million, we can only add 244 days. Add it all up, and what the President is proposing amounts to less than one-tenth of deficit reduction from the debt President Obama will add over the next 10 years.

Last night, the President tossed some more class warfare into the mix. He mentioned taxing hedge fund managers. Here is how he put it:

How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we

ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate

than their secretaries?

The proposal he is talking about would tax carried interest as ordinary income. The Joint Tax Committee has provided an estimate on this, and over 10 years this change in the Tax Code would generate another $21.4 billion. That is about as much as the oil company tax Obama is proposing of $21.1

billion. This would cover approximately 5 days and 21 hours of the President's 10-year debt.

This morning, someone on television was bemoaning the fact that Democrats are not going to the mat for tax increases the way the President has. He suggested the congressional Democrats do not have the courage to support tax increases.

With all due respect, the person lacking in courage is the current occupant of the Oval Office. The President had an opportunity this summer. Was he going to lead on the debt crisis or would it be more of the same--red herrings piled on top of straw men in an effort to distract the American people from his own complicity in this debt crisis.

Yet the President chose not to own up to the American people. The quarterback punted. He offered no solutions. Concerns about reelection were of greater priority than the imminent downgrading of the Nation's credit rating--a downgrade that will work as a tax increase on homeowners, students, and the Treasury itself, which is responsible for servicing the $14.3 trillion in existing debt.

Unable to propose tax increases on the middle class and unable to reform entitlements due to liberal dead-enders, he chose to offer platitudes and class warfare that might play well with some constituencies but do nothing to address the fundamental problem this Nation faces.

This country cannot avoid the choices that are coming. We have to get our spending under control. That is why I supported cut, cap, and balance. That is why I think S.J. Res. 10--the balanced budget amendment I introduced along with my colleague and friend from Utah, Senator Lee, and all 47 Senate Republicans--is absolutely essential. It would fix this problem once and for all.

But the President opposes it. He talks a lot about empowering people. Well, the Founders of this country empowered the American people to make changes to the Constitution. The Constitution provides for that. Why not give them the opportunity to pass this amendment? Remember, if the Democrats do not like it, all they have to do is get 13 States to disagree. We have to get 38 States to ratify. Why not let the people decide this? Why are they so afraid to let the people decide this?

Let me offer an answer. Because Democrats are terrified the American people would ratify it and their big spending practices would go the way of dinosaurs. The American people are sick and tired of spending. Mothers and fathers understand that the Federal Government is going to bankrupt their children and leave them an America that is less free and less prosperous.

The American people are frustrated. They might not have the data at their fingertips, but they understand what I just laid out quite well. We are not going to solve our problems by raising taxes. Increasingly, the President is an island in his call for more tax increases. Republicans do not support him. Independents do not support him. Now even Democrats do not support him.

It is time to move on. We need to rein in our debt, and we need to act boldly in doing so. So far, the President has failed to lead on this issue, choosing instead politically convenient talking points. But I would remind my dear friend in the White House, it is never too late to mend this problem.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, the American people deserve an accounting of what happened on the floor this morning. The citizens of Utah, whom I am honored to represent, and citizens all over this country thought the Senate would be voting on the cut, cap, and balance bill later this week. I am an original cosponsor of this bill in the Senate. I have signed the cut, cap, and balance pledge. I have always supported a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

This year, it is one of my proudest achievements to have introduced S. J. Res. 10, a balanced budget amendment that is supported by every Republican in this body for the first time in all the balanced budget amendments brought to this floor. It is the strongest balanced budget amendment ever written--one that fundamentally deals with our spending crisis. I am honored to have worked with my colleague and friend from Utah, Senator Lee, in crafting this amendment. We worked with Senator Cornyn and 44 other Republicans as well. I am honored to be working with old and new friends, such as Senators Cornyn, Kyl, Paul, Toomey, Rubio, and many other Republicans in pursuing this constitutional amendment for the American people.

The cut, cap, balance legislation the Senate tabled today culminates in a balanced budget amendment, but also includes the short-term deficit reduction that families and markets are demanding.

Cut, cap, balance provides meaningful deficit reduction for the next year and spending caps for the years that follow. It sets us on a path toward a balanced budget. It addresses the gross overspending of the Federal Government in the short term, taking on the deficits and debt that are holding back economic growth and permanently burdening American families and businesses.

Most importantly, cut, cap, balance would fix the problem of government overspending permanently. It would

eliminate the bias in Washington for ever more spending by requiring Congress to send a balanced budget constitutional amendment to the States for ratification prior to any increase in the debt ceiling.

The more the American people hear about this plan, the more they like it. They know the President has no plan. They know the markets are done with promises to cut spending down the road. They know raising taxes is not the solution to a government spending problem. The President and congressional Democrats know the people know this. That is why they have pulled out all the stops to kill this bill's momentum.

The President threatened to veto cut, cap, balance. But that did not do the trick. So after the House passed cut, cap, balance, the President all of a sudden supported the so-called Gang of 6 proposal. His advisers knew they had a problem. All of his clever talk about raising taxes on oil companies and corporate jets and yachts was not distracting the American people from a simple fact: My friends on the other side of the aisle have no credible plan for balancing the budget. The President has no credible plan for balancing the budget. He has not offered anything that would help us get to a balanced budget, nor do I believe he ever will offer anything. They have speeches and executive summaries of bills that will be written down the road; they have plans and proposals for future spending cuts that remain a mystery to everyone; they have budget frameworks; but they have no plan.

The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee has a budget outline. But here is the Senate Democratic caucus budget proposal. Let me refer to this goose egg up here on the chart. That is the Democratic caucus budget proposal--a big goose egg.

As meager as this is, I have to hand it to them, it beats the President's budget proposal. The President has offered us nothing, and we have a big goose egg here in the Senate.

The American people are done with this. The people of Utah know the same people who brought you the stimulus--the policy equivalent of taking $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars and throwing it into the Potomac River--the same people who brought you $2.6 trillion in new spending and $\1/2\ trillion in new taxes with Obamacare, are not credible when they now boast of their commitment to deficit reduction and balanced budgets.

The most recent proposal is from the Gang of 6. We are still looking at this proposal. I will not condemn anyone who makes a good-faith effort to get to the bottom of our serious problems. Their efforts might be on the side of the angels, but the devil is in the details, and many of us have real questions about this proposal. Specifically, we want to know what the revenue impact will be, because by some accounts it will raise taxes by between $2 trillion and $3 trillion.

At the very least, the American people understand that the President's desperate embrace of this plan is to avoid, once again, dealing with the deficit. Whatever its substantive merits or demerits, this proposal is a commitment to dealing with deficit reduction later. But later is too late. We need to deal with deficit reduction now. The people of this Nation are telling us this over and over. They are lighting up the Capitol switchboard. I am confident that my colleagues on the other side are hearing the message loudly and clearly: Balance the budget now. Get spending under control now. A last minute op-ed from the President telling us to ``go big'' on a debt deal is a little too late. We are facing our third straight year of trillion dollar deficits. Our debt is now over $14.3 trillion.

The President has shown no serious signs of getting this fiscal crisis under control. He offered up a dead-on-arrival budget in February. When even his friends in the mainstream media panned his budget for its total lack of attention to our looming debt crisis, he offered his budget mulligan with a much ballyhooed speech on deficit reduction. But a speech is not a plan. Meanwhile, it has been over 800 days since Senate Democrats have produced a budget, thus abdicating their most basic of duties.

The American people are finished with this dithering. They know what the solution is. The President and the majority leader no doubt saw the polling yesterday on the cut, cap, balance plan.

Here is the bottom line: Nearly two-thirds of the American people support it. But that is only half the story. Here is the rest: Everyone likes cut, cap, balance--not just Republicans, not just Democrats. It makes sense.

American families want deficit reduction, and with this plan they get it. No vague platitudes or speeches or rallies about reducing the deficit. This plan reduces the deficit and it fixes the underlying problem, which is Washington's predisposition toward more spending.

The President frequently demands that Congress put partisanship aside and come to a deficit reduction agreement. But the American people are one step ahead of them. The cut, cap, balance plan, along with the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, wins support across the board. Sixty-three percent of Democrats back cut, cap, balance. Fifty- three percent of those who oppose the tea party support it.

Democrats threw everything they had at this bill. They absurdly called it the ``cut, cap, and destroy Medicare plan.'' What bull. The left is becoming a caricature of itself when it comes to demagoguery on the issue of Medicare. I think the American people have caught on that liberals claim that when the Republicans turn on the lights in the morning, they are working to destroy Medicare. Bull. These claims no longer have credibility. The left is out of talking points. Their constituents are telling them to pass cut, cap, balance. They know it won't destroy anything. It will save this country.

So instead of having a vote on it, Democrats decided to pull the plug on the vote. Ordinarily, it is not a good idea to actively undermine the will of the people.

But in this case, there is a method to their madness. The President and his hard-left supporters are in a real pickle. They refuse any structural reforms to our biggest spending programs--the programs that are driving our country toward a fiscal collapse--but they know they cannot come clean with the American people about the tax increases that will hit squarely on the middle class if these structural reforms fail to occur. So they do nothing. Unable to talk straight with citizens who are demanding a balanced budget, they do nothing. They focus on $21 billion in tax benefits that go to energy companies over 10 years when we have a $1.5 trillion deficit this year--this year.

This is how Peter Roff at U.S. News and World Report put it:

The president and congressional Democratic leaders are

still dug in, trying to pull a rabbit out of their hat that

will get them what the political coalition behind them

demands: new taxes, new spending, and no real cuts.

This is not going to happen. So unable to thread the needle between the President's hard-left base that refuses spending reductions and the majority of taxpayers demanding deficit reduction, what do they do? They punt.

Today, they managed to avoid a vote on the bipartisan cut, cap, and balance plan. There was a great deal of bluster surrounding this dodge. To distract the American people from the fact that they were running from a fight, the rhetoric was laid on pretty thick. This is what we heard about this bill. According to my friends on the other side, cut, cap, and balance is ``as weak and senseless as anything that has ever come on this Senate floor.'' It is ``anathema to what our country is all about.'' This is ``some of the worst legislation in the history of this country.'' Now, let's be clear what they are talking about. They are smearing a bill that would balance the budget. They are trashing a bill that requires a balanced budget constitutional amendment.

I personally am glad to know where the other side stands, but they do not stand with the American people. They certainly don't stand with my home State of Utah. The American people think balancing the budget is precisely what America is all about. Reining in spending, restoring the Constitution, and securing the liberty and prosperity of America's families is exactly what Congress should be doing.

I am disappointed in what happened here today, but I am also confident this fight is not over. The left might be able

to hide from a vote on balancing the budget by a simple motion to table--which they are hoping obscures their desire to not balance the budget--but they cannot hide from the markets and the legacy of debt President Obama has given this country because that is a real threat to our credit rating.

Yesterday, Standard & Poor's made clear that avoiding the default was only one variable in their rating of U.S. credit. This is what Standard & Poor's said:

We have previously stated our belief that there is a

material risk that efforts to reduce future budget deficits

will fall short of the target set by Congressional leaders

and the administration. In this light, we see at least a one-

in-two likelihood that we could lower the long-term rating by

one or more notches on the U.S. within the next three months

and potentially as soon as early August . . . if we conclude

that Washington hasn't reached what we consider to be a

credible agreement to address future budget deficits.

Now, after years of reckless spending by President Obama and his Democratic allies, the chickens are coming home to roost. We face an imminent debt crisis, and a failure to take it on will impose a crushing burden on America's families and businesses. Our economy is stagnant, and the failure of the President to lead on deficit reduction now threatens higher interest rates and will slow it even further.

This is Standard & Poor's analysis of the impact of a debt downgrade due to a failure of deficit reduction:

We assume that under this scenario we would see a moderate

rise in long-term interest rates (25-50 basis points),

despite an accommodative Fed, due to an ebbing of market

confidence, as well as some slowing of economic growth (25-50

basis points on GDP growth) amid an increase in consumer and

business caution.

For an economy that is slogging along with anemic growth and job creation, this warning should wake people up. It should make the President and the left get serious about deficit reduction. But, instead, the President is still casting about for a plan.

It is important to remind people that we have a plan. It is called cut, cap, and balance. It culminates in a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, and it is supported broadly by the American people. Some folks on the other side claim to be for a balanced budget. They claim to stand with the people. But on a party-line vote they voted to table this proposal today.

When America's Founders came together in the summer of 1787 to draft our Constitution, they faced many challenges. But at heart they had a respect for republican government, they had a respect for the sovereign power of the American people, and they understood that the fundamental principle of popular sovereignty gave the Constitution its legitimacy. For that reason, the Constitution they wrote was clear that the voice of the people should be loudest on the most pressing issues.

The provisions for amending the Constitution provided that on the most important issues, the people rule directly. The Constitution belongs to the people. It only became law because it was ratified by the people, and it can only be changed by the people.

Our Nation is deeply in debt, and this debt now threatens the very liberty of our families and the vitality of our economy. It is a threat to current and future prosperity. Most importantly, it is a threat to limited constitutional government. The people know this. They know it in their guts. They know the problem here is spending. Our problem is too much spending, not too little taxation, and they know what the solution is: cut, cap, balance, and a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

There will be talk now about moving on, but I am not moving on. Democrats want to write the obituary on this bill and turn to some new plan or framework this President produces one way or the other, I guess. But no plan this President produces will get us to balance. Cut, cap, and balance does.

I am not so sure what my friends on the other side are afraid of. The founder of their party, Thomas Jefferson, had a deep respect for the democratic process and the sovereignty of the people. What are they so afraid of? Why not pass cut, cap, and balance? Why not send a balanced budget amendment to the States for ratification? If liberals have a better argument, they can lead a fight against the amendment in the States. All they need is 13 States to defeat the balanced budget amendment. Why not let the people decide?

During the last Presidential campaign, the President frequently told his admirers: Yes, we can. Well, now the American people are saying it back to him. They are telling him they want to balance the budget and that we can balance the budget. We can and we should pass cut, cap, and balance and send a balanced budget constitutional amendment to the States for ratification.

I will just repeat it: If the Democrats so hate the idea of a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, all they have to do is get 13 States to vote against ratification. We have to get 38 States to vote for ratification. That may seem like an overwhelming job, but I don't think so. I think the amendment would be ratified so quickly, Democratic heads would be spinning and, I might add, maybe even some Republican heads as well.

All I can say is this country is in trouble. This country is on the way down to self-destruction unless we get it under control, and I don't see one program from the other side that even comes close to showing how we get this under control--except more taxes and more spending. I guarantee, if we raise taxes, they would spend every stinking dime of it. That has been the history of my 35 years in the Senate, as the most senior Republican. All I can say is we are not going to let them get away with it anymore. We are a minority now, but I believe we can get back in the majority.

I think the Democrats would do themselves a great favor if they would vote for cut, cap, and balance and a constitutional amendment and let the people--let the people--decide. Let them make this decision. Come on, Democrats, all you need to do is get 13 States. What are you so afraid of? I think what is so fearful is that this waltz that has been going on of big spending all these years is going to come to an end.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we recess subject to the call of the Chair.

I object.

Mr. President, I want to take a few minutes to explain my objection to the legislation just offered by my esteemed colleague. I want to make it absolutely clear that a long-term FAA reauthorization is a priority for this country and a priority for myself, and I have said as much repeatedly. The consent request just offered by my colleague, even if accepted, would not prevent a lapse of current law. As my colleagues are likely aware, the House has completed legislative business for the week, so the only way to prevent a disruption to FAA funding is to pass Chairman Mica's bill the House passed earlier this week. I worked with Finance Committee Chairman Baucus to report a tax title from the Finance Committee to the bill that passed the Senate earlier this year.

However, since then progress on a long-term reauthorization has been slow. I share House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Mica's frustration that favors to organized labor have overshadowed the prospects for long-term FAA reauthorization.

Last year the National Mediation Board changed the rules under which employees of airlines and railroads are able to unionize. For decades the standard has been that a majority of employees would have to agree in an election to form a union. However, the new National Mediation Board rules changed that standard so that all it takes to unionize is a majority of employees voting. This means that the NMB wants to count an employee who doesn't vote as voting for big labor. Somehow, organized labor is able to claim that it is democratic to appropriate someone else's vote without that person's input and participation. The FAA reauthorization bill that passed the House earlier this year will undo this heavyhanded rule and lets airline employees decide for themselves how to use their own votes. The House bill would merely undo a big partisan favor done at the behest of big labor, and put efforts to unionize airline workforces on the same footing they have been on for years. The House bill does not create a new hurdle for unionization; instead it restores the longstanding ability of airline employees to make decisions for themselves.

As I said, it is unfortunate that kowtowing to big labor has effectively grounded efforts to get a long-term FAA reauthorization off the ground. The lack of a long-term bill is bad for airports all across the country because they don't have the funding stability to plan and complete projects. Kicking the can further down the road is not a viable alternative to actually doing what is in the best interest of passengers, commercial users of air transportation, and our airlines and airports.

As a Senate conferee to the FAA bill, I stand ready to do everything I can to break the cycle of short-term extensions, and to do something that hasn't been done around here for more than 7\1/2\ years, and get FAA reauthorization off the ground.

So, Mr. President, having said all of that, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 2553, which was received from the House; that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I am getting a little tired of the National Labor Relations Board usurping the power of the Congress of the United States and enacting labor laws by fiat of the Board that are hardly going to be upheld by the courts, but nevertheless it will take years to reduce them and take them away. In this particular case the National Mediation Board has changed the longstanding rule when you vote to unionize, it is the vote of all employees. This means that you could have a vote, and this is what I think the House is trying to stop and to change. That means you can have a vote with less than half of the employees and it would be the majority of those who vote. Now, that has never been the law, it has never been the case, and it is clearly a heavyhanded approach towards the FAA, and I think that is one reason why the House has taken this very strong position.

I understand my friend on the other side, and we are friends and we have worked together on some of the issues, and I have a tremendous amount of admiration for him and his ability to lead and express himself. He is one of the best people of expression in the history of the Senate, and I have great respect for him. But that is one of the main reasons why the House is up in arms and I have to say our side is up in arms as well.

We have to stop this changing laws without the consent of Congress just by the fiat of those on the National Labor Relations Board and the National Mediation Board. It is not right and upturns hundreds of years of labor law, and, frankly, it is wrong and I am on the side of the House in this matter because of it.

Mr. President, I could not agree more with the Senator's point on the real driver of our deficit and debt. We have this debt because government is spending too much. But this is not a matter of personal preference; this is an indisputable and empirically verifiable fact. The systemic

problem this country faces is too much spending, not too little tax revenue.

I understand our friends on the other side of the aisle are in a tough spot. They know this, but their left wing base refuses any changes to the spending programs driving these deficits and debt. They don't want to scare off middle-class Americans by recommending the tax increases necessary to close the gap without major changes for spending programs.

When it comes to offering any real plans, they have resorted to burying their heads in the sand, as indicated on this photo. They choose to ignore the real problem. They hope their friends in the media do the same thing--ignore the fact that they are ignoring the problem. As you can see from this chart, the problem is spending.

That is right. They are talking about revenue, but the tax increases they are recommending are more distracting than illuminating. I think it is fair to say that all of the talk by the President and his congressional allies about corporate jets and yachts is a classic red herring. On this chart, it indicates this:

The name of this fallacy comes from the sport of fox

hunting in which a dried, smoked herring, which is red in

color, is dragged across the trail of the fox to throw the

hounds off the scent. Thus, a ``red herring'' argument is one

which distracts the audience from the issue in question

through the introduction of some irrelevancy.

As you can see, that is what they are doing. I am glad the Senator brought this up. As I just read, my research found that the term ``red herring'' comes from the sport of fox hunting. Again, a red herring argument is one that distracts the audience from the issue in question through the introduction of some relevancy.

In my view, all of these tax issues that President Obama and those on the other side of the aisle are discussing are red herrings. They want to distract Americans from the real driver of our deficits and debt and the real choices Democrats have to but are refusing to make.

Let me walk through some examples. If we were to raise the depreciable life on corporate Jets from 5 years to 7 years, as the Democrats propose, it would yield us $3.1 billion over 10 years.

To hear the President talk, you would think this is the key to balancing our budget. We all know he is overstating the case. It would provide only a month of debt reduction is about all it would do? Given its essential role in his deficit reduction proposals, you would hope so. But I am sorry to disappoint my friend from Alabama, because, according to our calculations, that amount equates to only 20 hours and 23 minutes of the debt over the next 10 years. Unfortunately, that doesn't even begin to solve the problem. Of course, as you can see here, $13 trillion, the Obama debt; there would be $3.1 billion over time with the corporate jet taxes; and remaining above the debt-- assuming they didn't spend more, which is an assumption you can't make--would be $12.9 trillion. Is the problem solved? Of course not.

Well, in other words, by our calculations, the savings from this proposal would be even more meager. If Congress enacted this change, we could cover the debt from the Obama budget for all of 15 hours and 47 minutes. Again, this is not solving the problems of the burdensome debt the President is piling on.

You would think so. But the other 3,651 days of debt under the 10-year Obama budget would not even be touched.

There is a third red herring that has been thrown out there. Maybe that one closes the gap. We have all heard the President talk about hitting American oil companies by reducing or eliminating domestic energy incentives. This is a real priority of his and of congressional Democrats.

We had a cloture vote on a bill by our friend from New Jersey to extract $21 billion in revenue from U.S. oil companies. The Finance Committee had a hearing where the other side touted the benefits of this tax increase by grilling the CEOs of the top five oil companies. If you listened to my friends on the other side, one would think an additional $21 billion would solve all our fiscal problems. Their rhetoric suggests this is the only thing standing between more money to send kids to college and provide school lunches.

But I wonder if my friend from Alabama might put into perspective how much of the 10 years of debt under the President's budget this proposal would cover.

Well, here is how many days of the 10-year debt of the Obama budget that would be covered. Keep in mind, this proposal originated from our friend from New Jersey, the head of the Senate Democratic campaign operation, and his tag teammate, the head of the Senate Democratic message operation--the so-called war room--the senior Senator from New York. I will let others decide whether this proposal was more political than substantive, but people should at least know the facts about this proposal before deciding.

As a deficit reduction proposal, this is very weak tea. This is a much ballyhooed proposal, and it would cover the deficit for, in actuality, 5 days 18 hours and 47 minutes.

As you can see, here is the oil rig proposal. We have a $13 trillion debt--actually it is about a $13.5 trillion debt right now--and you would save $21 billion from the extra taxes on oil and gas. Even at that, we would have a remaining debt of $12.9 trillion. So is the problem solved? Of course not.

Well, I sure am. Anyone watching C-SPAN will see our friends on the other side making the argument day in and day out. When I hear this argument, I often think of a saying from the distinguished former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Russell Long. When talking about tax reform, Senator Long said: Some might reduce the politics to this: ``Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.''

And since there are a lot more folks who aren't millionaires than are, the Democrats have calculated the politics of class warfare works. All of our problems could be solved if the rich paid their fair share, according to the Democrats. As politics, this might sound--I don't even think it sounds good, but as tax policy and its proposal to reduce our deficits and debt, this is the fourth red herring. It does not come close to fixing the deficit from the Obama budget.

Our friends on the other side frequently cite the Tax Policy Center-- or TPC--for tax data. That makes some sense. TPC is a professional think tank that is a joint venture of two center-left think tanks, the Urban Institute

and the Brookings Institution. With the exception of its director, Donald Marron, TPC is largely staffed by highly qualified tax professionals who worked in Democratic Treasury Departments and Democratic Hill offices. TPC is a solid professional outfit, but you can't ignore its institutional perspective. To be fair, I would say the same thing about the Heritage Foundation. Their institutional perspective is more likely to line up with folks on my side of the aisle. Nevertheless, I am drawing from TPC data, some of the assumptions with which I might not agree.

According to TPC models and estimates, for 2011, American households earning more than $1 million account for 12 percent of the Nation's pretax income, they pay 19 percent of Federal taxes and carry an average tax rate of 29 percent.

Even more critical from my perspective, these taxpayers also account for 38 percent of all flow-through income. Flow-through income is predominantly earnings from the ownership of small businesses. So raising rates on the rich will squarely hit those who create and expand the small businesses that need to be the engine of our economic recovery.

But let us be clear about something: Higher taxes on these wealthy individuals will not only have adverse economic consequences, it will not even provide the deficit and debt reduction suggested by the left. Even if all the income--every dime they earned, of those earning more than $1 million--were confiscated with a 100-percent rate--with the unlikely assumption of no taxpayer behavioral response--for the year of confiscation, these higher taxes would yield about $893 billion. That would be a one-time confiscation. Surely none of these folks would continue to work, save, or invest in the future if the government were to confiscate all their income. They would have to cover all their other expenses, including State and local taxes, from savings. After taking everything from the folks behind the tree--in this case, the folks earning more than $1 million--how many days of the 10-year Obama budget debt would be eliminated?

I say to my friend from Alabama, confiscating all the income from those earning over $1 million does not even fix 1 year of the 10 years of projected Obama debt. It would cover 244 days, 16 hours and 34 minutes. That is it. Not even 1 year.

Look at this. Federal policymakers could kiss that revenue source goodbye after an event such as confiscation. So there you are: $13 trillion. Take the $893 billion. If we took every dime that millionaires make this next year, the $893 billion, we would be down to $12.1 trillion in remaining debt. Is the problem solved? Of course not.

That is right.

I wish it were too. I am surprised about this debate. The press is not pushing Democrats on what a joke their proposals about jets and yachts are, but the American people--the people I represent in Utah--understand these are red herrings. These proposals deal with the President's legacy of debt for less than 2 days--less than 2 days--over the next 10 years. Add in the much-publicized tax hit on the hated oil companies and you get another 5 days.

So after all the demagoguery on jets and yachts and oil companies, you get about 1 week of deficit reduction. And even throwing in a one- time confiscation of all the income for taxpayers earning above $1 million, you can only add 244 days. Add it all up and there is still less than 1 year. All those tax increases don't even get to one-tenth of the debt President Obama will add over the next 10 years.

It is class warfare. We all know that. All the talk from the White House and from our friends on the other side is on behalf of proposals that would address, at best, less than 10 percent of the debt forced on American families by the President's budget.

I ask my friend from Alabama if he might conclude with the classic definition of a red herring.

I thank my colleague for his kind remarks.

I have to say that not only would it not impact it, but it would impact a lot of jobs.

I remember when we did the so-called yacht tax back in the early 1990s, the left thought that was a wonderful thing. We got after all these rich yacht owners. When they found out that thousands and thousands of jobs were lost because of that bill, they immediately turned tail and got rid of the bill pretty quickly.

What we haven't said is we are assuming the $13 trillion is going to stay the same. Actually, in the next 10 years there is a good chance it will double to over $20 trillion and possibly as high as $25 trillion or $26 trillion the way this administration is spending. Frankly, we are going to have a very difficult time ever coming out of this hole we are in right now.

All I can say is I like the President personally, but he hasn't presented a program. He is calling on Congress to do it all, and we have our various problems here in getting together, but he hasn't led out on these programs, and neither have the other people down at the White House.

In fact, one of the problems is I can't name one person at the White House

who has ever created a private-sector job. And let's face it, they are good at creating public-sector jobs, but they are not very good at creating private-sector jobs.

The real answer is to work our way out of them, and instead of talking about shared sacrifice, let's talk about shared prosperity by allowing the engine of this economy, the small business community, to pull us out.

Even so, we haven't even talked about the fact that the deficit this year, in 1 year, is $1.5 trillion, $1.6 trillion. I might add that we are going to have at least probably close to $1 trillion deficit every year under the President's own actuarial program, every year up through 2020. You can imagine how we are going to continue to increase the debt without doing anything about it. Frankly, that is if his actuaries are right, and they are usually always wrong on the low side. That includes actuaries on both sides, to be honest with you. The expenses have always been more.

I think what is important here is that we get real about working together and coming up with a way of resolving these tremendous debt problems. The future of our young people in this country depend on that, and I don't want to let them down.

I want to thank my colleague for his colloquy with me and I appreciate it very much.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak until I finish my remarks.

Mr. President, in recent days I have spoken several times on the matter of tax expenditures. I am going to address this subject again today. It is a timely topic. Everyone is talking about our out- of-control deficits and debt. There are divergent opinions on how best to deal with our Nation's increasingly perilous fiscal situation, but there is one thing everyone seems to agree on: Both the deficit and the debt are unsustainable. If we keep going down this fiscal path, the United States will face a crisis similar to that in Greece and sooner rather than later. The numbers could not be clearer. Federal spending as a share of our economy is trending at a pace 15 percent to 20 percent greater than its historical average of 20.6 percent of GDP. If we leave in place this year's level of taxation, including the marginal rate of relief between the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and patch the alternative minimum tax, or AMT, the Federal tax take will equal or exceed its historic share of the economy.

Liberals suggest the deficit and debt can only be resolved with a significant tax increase. This is either deliberately misleading or sadly delusional. They are either selling snake oil to the American people or they refuse to come to grips with reality. Sticking their heads in the sand is not an option. As you can see, here are Federal taxes and spending as a percentage of GDP. The red line happens to be the spending line. And as you can see, we are way up here in the Obama 2012 budget. The blue line happens to be the average between 1960 and 2009. As you can see, it is way down here. Our spending is out of control. The markets and the American people understand the nature of our crisis. Nondefense discretionary spending is at historic levels and our entitlement programs are headed for bankruptcy.

When former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi responded to the utter failure of President Obama and congressional Democrats to come up with a Medicare reform plan, she responded, ``We have a plan. It's called Medicare.'' That attitude is the recipe for bankrupting the Nation, a bankruptcy that will take our seniors down with it. The left might prefer to ignore reality, but here is the undeniable truth: Our Nation faces a spending crisis that tax increases cannot fix. I wish the media would get this. They are so enamored with the idea of a grand bargain on deficit reduction, a little spending reduction here, a little tax increase there, that they miss the fundamental point. The problem is spending, as you can easily see by this red line. It is way out of whack, and going back to the dry well of raising taxes on the rich is not going to work.

The fact that Democrats in the Senate have not put forward a budget in over 800 days is neglecting one of the core constitutional responsibilities, and it is all the evidence we need that they are afraid of the bill coming due on all of their spending. They understand their hard left base will not accept structural changes to our biggest spending programs under any circumstances. But they also understand that the American people will not stomach for a minute the tax increases that will be necessary in the absence of such reforms. This is a difficult position to be in, so rather than deal with the facts, they traffic in obfuscation. This morning I heard the ranking Democratic member on the House Budget Committee following the President's lead and suggesting that removing some tax breaks for energy companies would fix our deficit crisis. Getting rid of those tax breaks would raise $21 billion over the next 10 years. Yet this fiscal year alone, in 2011, we will have a projected budget deficit of $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion. So where is the rest of our money going to come from?

Last week I came under fire for stating what I thought to be a relatively noncontroversial fact. Here is what I said:

In 2009, 51 percent of Americans had zero or negative

income tax liability.

Here is what that means. In 2009 only 49 percent--a minority of all households in this country--49 percent of tax units shouldered 100 percent of the Nation's tax burden. And 51 percent of the tax units--a majority of all tax units in this country--either owed nothing to the IRS or, better yet, got money back from the IRS in excess of their tax liability. Mr. President, 23 million of them got refundable tax credits, much more than they pay in employment taxes, which are Social Security. By the way, as they pay into Social Security, they only pay a third of what they will ultimately draw out according to the actuaries, but they are not paying income taxes. This should be no less controversial than saying the Sun rises in the east. This is not conjecture. It is a demonstrable fact, yet apparently touched a nerve. Because last week after raising this issue on the Senate floor, MSNBC and the liberal blogosphere, presumably armed with the talking points from the Senate Democratic war room, went ballistic, suggesting that I wanted to balance the budget by raising taxes on the poor. I am not surprised, but this completely misses my point, and the point is this: No matter what these Democrats tell you, the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the Nation's tax burden and 51 percent pay absolutely nothing in income taxes. Furthermore, because of this perverse distribution of Federal income taxes, there is no way to fix our deficit hole and pay down the debt by increasing taxes on the so-called rich.

Here is the bottom line. All of the ``let's talk about taxes on the rich'' and closing loopholes and going after corporate tax breaks is meant to divert attention from the sad fact that the President's out- of-control spending puts Democrats in a position of having to raise taxes big time on the middle class since they are going to balance the budget without structural reforms to our largest spending programs. Tax increases on the wealthy will not get our Nation to fiscal balance. Even if we let the Bush tax breaks expire from the top income bracket, the total amount raised over 10 years would be $615 billion. That is over 10 years. Yet our deficit this year alone is $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion. This is why the issue of tax expenditures is critical. So everybody knows, I made it clear, I thought, in my last remarks that I don't want to tax the truly poor, those who would help themselves if they could. I do not want to tax them. But you can't tell me that 51 percent of all households are the truly poor. I don't want to tax them either, to be honest with you, but it is apparent we are going to have to find a better way of broadening the base of the tax system. Democrats talk about tax expenditures as though they were the holy grail of deficit reduction. Just close these loopholes and happy days are here again. The public is being misled in this type of debate, but don't take my word for it. Today the Associated Press had a story with the following lines:

SPIN METER: Obama, Dems skirt issue on tax hikes.

This is what the body of the article has to say:

Proposals under consideration include raising taxes on

small business owners and potentially low- and middle-income

families.

You won't hear about that from President Obama. Instead, the President focuses on the very rich and speaks euphemistically. Here are a few of the phrases the President has used of late of what amounts to raising taxes for some:

What we need to do is to have a balanced approach where

everything is on the table.

He goes on to say:

We need to take on spending in the tax code. The tax cuts I

am proposing we get rid of are tax breaks for millionaires

and billionaires, tax breaks for oil companies, hedge fund

managers and corporate jet owners. You can't reduce the

deficit to the levels it needs to be reduced without having

some revenue in the mix.

All those are quotes by the President. They are doing their best to hide their intentions, but the writing is on the wall. Democrats are angling for historic tax increases on the middle class, and the way they want to accomplish this is by reducing or eliminating tax expenditures. Cutting back tax expenditures is a convenient way for Democrats to tax middle-class tax-paying families without having to say they are raising their tax rates. As I noted last week, this is what we were talking about when Democrats discussed tax expenditures. They are talking about your pension. They are talking about your Medicare. They are talking about your ability to purchase a home or save for retirement or give to your church or put away money for your

children's education. This is exactly what we are talking about. That is where the money is. It is not in bonus depreciation for corporate jets, and it is not in tax benefits for energy companies.

When Democrats talk about tax expenditures and tax loopholes as a way to bring down the deficit and debt, they are putting a bull's-eye on the backs of middle-class American families. We heard a lot this morning about Republicans walking away from the President's grand bargain on deficit reduction. Well, I know that the people of Utah applaud Speaker Boehner for not signing on to this bogus deal. This morning the President's allies in the media were asking why Republicans walked away from this deal. With the President willing to put entitlement spending on the table, why aren't Republicans willing to put taxes on the table? It is worth noting that the President and his Democratic allies steadfastly refuse any structural changes to entitlement spending.

Second, for Democrats, putting taxes on the table and tax expenditures means tax increases on the middle class, and that is a nonstarter. This issue of tax expenditures is confusing and demands greater clarity. As ranking member of the Finance Committee, it is my responsibility to correct the record on what the curtailment or elimination of tax expenditures would mean for taxpayers and families.

If you listen to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you would think tax expenditures are ``spending through the Tax Code.'' You would think they are mostly loopholes in the tax law designed by and for special interests such as ethanol blenders. Another mantra you will hear too often uncritically reviewed by many in the media is that tax expenditures disproportionately benefit wealthy taxpayers.

A few days ago I talked about what tax expenditures are and what tax expenditures are not. They are not spending. You can find the text of that speech from July 6 on the Finance Committee Web site. They are not, in the main, loopholes for special interests. The other day, I talked about the major features of family financial planning that would be upended if tax expenditures were curtailed. I referred to employee pension plans such as 401(k) accounts. I also mentioned charitable gifts and home ownership. If my friends on the other side are successful in cutting back tax expenditures, American families, workers, and investors can expect the cost of all of these activities to rise. If the cost rises, as a nation, we will be poorer because we will have less retirement savings, fewer charitable contributions and more expensive homeowners. You can find the text of that speech last Thursday on the committee Web site as well.

Today I am going to consider the oft-repeated line that tax expenditures disproportionally benefit the wealthy taxpayers.

For purposes of this discussion only, I will adopt the President's definition of rich; that is, singles with adjusted gross incomes over $200,000 per year and married couples with incomes over $250,000 per year. I wish to be clear that I do not lump all of these folks in with Bill Gates, Jr., LeBron James, Warren Buffett, or Gilligan's Island resident millionaire Thurston Howell, III. Here is good old Thurston who was the millionaire on Gilligan's Island. I am using the President's definition of rich because most of my friends on the other side use it. They also claim tax expenditures reside disproportionately with rich taxpayers.

The Democrats' rhetoric on expenditures does not jibe with the reality of our Tax Code. The data is clear. Tax expenditures tend to skew toward taxpayers below the President's definition of the rich. If my friends on the other side examine the data, they will find their assertion about who benefits from tax expenditures does not square with the facts. They will find their assertion that tax expenditures disproportionately benefit the wealthy falls flat on its face.

In much of the coverage of tax expenditures, it has been taken as an article of faith that they disproportionately benefit wealthy taxpayers. Similar assertions have come from the White House and congressional Democrats. The one exception is my friend, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, Sander Levin. Congressman Levin has cautioned against treating tax expenditures as rich persons' tax benefits. His position is well founded. The source for this assertion, that tax expenditures are tax benefits for the rich, is a Tax Notes article dated May 3, 2011.

I ask unanimous consent to have it printed in the Record.

The article is written by Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center or TPC. TPC is a tax policy think tank that is the product of two center-left think tanks. The article presents conclusions from a TPC distribution analysis of tax expenditures.

The analysis concludes that about two-thirds of tax expenditures benefit the top quintile of households in the study. Viewers on C-SPAN may wonder what a quintile is. It refers to one-fifth of the given population. The TPC analysis is, therefore, measuring the top one-fifth of the population.

According to that study, where does that top one-fifth of the population begin? It begins at $123,000 of household income. It should be noted that household income is a bit broader than the adjusted gross income which is the basis of the President's definition. According to TPC, that top quintile earns 55 percent of income and shoulders a huge amount of the Federal tax burden. They say it is 67 percent.

Now, perhaps not too surprisingly, TPC finds that tax expenditures for the top quintile approximate that top one-fifth's share of the tax burden. With the exception of the refundable credit tax expenditures, a taxpayer has to pay income tax to benefit from the tax deduction credit or exclusion.

Those asserting that tax expenditures are mainly wealthy taxpayer benefits are principally relying on TPC's distribution analysis. If confronted with the TPC data, it seems to me they have four choices. Their first choice would be to revise downward the income basis of their definition of ``rich.'' They could say we really did not mean families at $250,000 of income; we meant families of $123,000 of income. That would be similar to the adjustment made for ObamaCare. Joint tax distribution tables for ObamaCare showed that for every family below $200,000 who received an exchange credit, four families paid higher taxes. For

every middle-class family who receives a premium subsidy, five pay higher taxes. That is just a fact. I guess I said five. It really would be four who would pay higher taxes.

A second choice would be to revise the proportion of tax expenditures so that the tax expenditure dollar amount reflects the benefits attributable to taxpayers defined by the President as rich. The President's rich taxpayer definition is the top 3 to 5 percent of taxpayers. It means the group of taxpayers who are roughly 25 to 33 percent of the size of the group in the TPC analysis.

Put another way, the TPC population of rich taxpayers is three to four times the size of the group the President and my friends on the other side define as rich. If a consistent definition of the rich were used, the dollar amounts of tax expenditures in play would be considerably lower. Since the goal of the group pushing the cutback of tax expenditures is to relieve spending constituencies of the pressure of curtailing spending, my guess is they will not choose to reduce the tax expenditure kitty.

Their third choice would be to simply curtail or eliminate tax expenditures for higher income taxpayers. This, of course, could largely eliminate the preferential rates for capital gains and dividends.

Let's take another look at this chart because it shows a big share of the capital gains tax expenditure goes to the top one-fifth. It looks as though about 95 percent of tax expenditures accrues in the top one- fifth. We see that about 50 percent of it accrues to the top one-tenth of 1 percent. Do we think it would make sense in the current economic climate to double or triple the tax hit on investment?

At one point, at least, the President's answer was no. In August 2009 the President was asked by a resident of Indiana:

[e]xplain how raising taxes on anyone during a deep

recession is going to help with the economy.

Here was the President's response:

Normally, you don't raise taxes in a recession, which is

why we haven't and why we've instead cut taxes. . . . You

don't raise taxes in a recession. We haven't raised taxes in

a recession.

So what is their fourth choice? Their fourth choice would be coming clean with the American people. Under this option they would admit that tax expenditures disproportionately go to families who are not rich under the President's own definition. They would acknowledge that cutting back tax expenditures as part of a deficit-reduction exercise would hit the middle class and betray the President's promise not to raise taxes on middle-class families.

As we can see, the proponents of these tax increases are in political quicksand, and there is additional evidence that they are sinking as they struggle against the facts. I would ask my friends on the other side to take a look at the Joint Tax distribution tables on many of the major tax expenditure categories. Joint Tax publishes these tables every year. They are available on the Joint Tax Web site.

I have a chart that summarizes the percentages of tax expenditures that go to taxpayers under $200,000. I will have to bring that with me the next time. That is the break point that Joint Tax uses--the percentage of tax expenditures that go to taxpayers under $200,000. It closely squares with the definition of ``rich'' used by the President and his liberal allies.

Anybody above $200,000 is rich under my Democratic friends' definition. Anybody under $200,000 is not rich. You can find this data in the tax expenditures pamphlet published annually by the nonpartisan Joint Tax staff.

Now I wish to talk about the tax expenditures that Joint Tax distributes by income. I have listed them in order, from the largest in dollar volume down to the lowest in dollar volume. The first one is well known to tens of millions of our constituents. It is the mortgage interest deduction.

If a taxpayer saves up a downpayment and borrows for a home, they can take the interest paid on the mortgage as an itemized deduction. That means 30 percent of the benefit of the mortgage interest tax expenditure goes to taxpayers over $200,000. Taxpayers with incomes below $200,000 receive 70 percent of the benefit of the mortgage interest deduction.

Now, how do we measure whether the mortgage interest deduction disproportionately benefits taxpayers over $200,000? There is a line in bold letters that reads: ``Compare Total Federal Tax Burden.'' That is the baseline of how much tax is shouldered by the group of taxpayers above and below $200,000. We have a very progressive tax system. Taxpayers earning more than $200,000 shoulder 64 percent of the tax burden. Taxpayers earning less than $200,000 shoulder 36 percent of the tax burden.

Taxpayers earning less than $200,000 receive 70 percent of the mortgage interest deduction while shouldering 36 percent of the tax burden. Who benefits from these tax expenditures? We are going to get into that. That means by a ratio of almost 2 to 1, taxpayers under $200,000 benefit from the mortgage interest deduction; and since $200,000 basically fits the definition of ``rich'' used by my friends on the other side of the aisle, we can see that other taxpayers who are nonrich, or the middle-income group, disproportionately benefit from the mortgage interest rate deduction.

Now, let me talk about another tax expenditure. I am referring to the earned-income credit, or EIC. It is a refundable credit. That means taxpayers receive it whether they pay income tax or not. That is why the credit is basically scored as spending by the Congressional Budget Office--the CBO--and Joint Tax.

There is a bit of irony about this tax expenditure because it is refundable. It is more popular with my friends on the other side than other tax expenditures. That is because those other tax expenditures go to taxpayers who actually pay income tax. The refundable credit is popular with my friends on the other side because it is a robust income-reducing mechanism.

President Obama, in his famous exchange with Joe the Plumber, captured the economic theory supporting this policy when he said we need to ``spread the wealth around.''

Here is the irony. My friends on the other side derisively describe all tax expenditures as ``spending through the Tax Code.'' Yet the tax expenditures they most support are the refundable ones, such as the earned-income credit. It should come as little surprise that the left's favorite tax expenditure is the one that is scored as spending by congressional spending scorekeepers.

Because the earned-income credit tax expenditure is refundable, we shouldn't be surprised to find that so-called rich taxpayers do not benefit from it. The chart confirms this point.

The third tax expenditure is right here: the current $1,000-per-child tax credit. It is, by definition, limited to lower and middle-income taxpayers. We should not be surprised to find that none of it goes to higher income taxpayers, and the chart confirms this point: zero to taxpayers over $200,000; 100 percent to taxpayers under $200,000.

Let's take a look at State and local taxes. It is the fourth one on here. The chart shows that 50 percent of this broad-based deduction goes to middle-income families.

No. 5 on this list is a tax benefit near and dear to many of my fellow Utah families. It is the itemized deduction for charitable contributions or donations. Of all the tax expenditures listed on this chart--this big chart right here--this one, charitable itemized deductions--distributes in the highest proportion to taxpayers above $200,000 in income. The chart says 55 percent, right here; 45 percent for those under $200,000. Keep in mind, overall, taxpayers with income over $200,000 bear 64 percent of the tax burden.

Now, this means proportionately, the charitable deduction benefits taxpayers under the $200,000 level more than taxpayers above the $200,000 level.

Now let's take a look at No. 6 on this chart. It is the tax-free portion of Social Security benefits, right there. Anyone advocating a cutback on tax expenditures is advocating a cutback on the aftertax Social Security benefits for a big chunk of the senior population. Guess what. We are not talking about wealthy seniors. According to this chart, 2 percent of that favorable tax treatment of Social Security goes to seniors with incomes over $200,000. My guess is that few of the seniors benefitting from this policy own yachts or regularly fly corporate jets.

No. 7 is the itemized deduction for real property taxes. Right now, their

constituents take the edge off that heavy local tax hit with the itemized deduction. If many of my friends on the other side have their way and hack away or eliminate tax expenditures without also cutting their constituents' Federal tax rate, guess what happens. In the case of local property taxes, the net effect will be to raise the property tax rate by as much as 35 percent.

Some of my friends may suggest that only those with villas are taking the property tax deduction. This chart says otherwise. It says 80 percent of the real property tax benefits go to taxpayers under $200,000.

How about No. 9 on the list? No. 9 on the list is the itemized deduction for medical expenses. ObamaCare cut back on that one. But if my friends on the other side reduce or eliminate side tax expenditures to avoid dealing with out-of-control government spending, this deduction will be cut back even more. The chart shows on these medical itemized deductions that 89 percent of this tax benefit goes to taxpayers earning less than $200,000.

No. 10 is the dependent childcare credit. This is a modest tax credit that working moms and dads can tap. Like the child tax credit, it mainly is used by middle-income families. The chart confirms it. It indicates that 96 percent of the benefits of this credit go to families earning less than $200,000.

The final item on the list is the student loan interest deduction, as shown right here on this chart. This tax benefit is income limited. Not surprisingly, all of the benefit goes to taxpayers earnings learning less than $200,000--100 percent of the benefit. I do not think a lot of the recent college graduates using this deduction are in the market for a yacht. But if you listen to my friends on the other side, you would think because this benefit is labeled a tax expenditure, those who benefit from it have a schooner docked in the local harbor.

I am not saying that only middle-income families benefit from tax expenditures. Wealthy taxpayers benefit from the lower capital gains and dividends rates.

Let me refer to this chart of the 10 largest tax expenditures for the period 2010 to 2014. But the lion's share of tax expenditures goes to that part of the middle class that is already shouldering much of the Nation's tax burden. Most of the tax expenditures are either income limited or of limited value to wealthy taxpayers. Likewise, low-income families do not pay income taxes. They receive tax expenditures that are designed for the nontaxpaying population.

So who is left? The answer is the taxpayers who are not rich by the President's own definition. The answer is middle-class families.

On our side, the reaction to all these choices would be simple. Many on our side, including Ways and Means Committee Chairman Camp, have put it this way. Keep your hands off tax increases, including cutbacks in tax expenditures, for deficit reduction. Reserve those tax expenditures for tax reform. In that way, taxpayers receive a benefit--lower rates in exchange for a broader base. That broader base would include reform of tax expenditures, if Chairman Camp and I have our way. Any other approach is just another tax increase. And they on the other side will spend every dime of it.

The President this morning gave another press conference. He asked what the holdup was in arriving at a deficit reduction compromise. The answer seems pretty obvious. Contrary to the President's vague assertions, the leftwing base he is depending on for his reelection refuses any meaningful structural reforms to the spending programs that are currently bankrupting our country. That means the only serious deficit reduction option available to Democrats is massive tax increases on the middle class. Democrats will not acknowledge the inevitable tax increases their agenda assumes, and Republicans will not give the President any cover in his drive to ``spread the wealth around.'' That is what is holding up this process.

So let me offer a suggestion. Instead of berating Republicans for not signing on to historic and economy-crushing tax increases, when unemployment is at 9.2 percent, maybe the President should take his own party to the woodshed. Maybe he should ask the liberals in his party who refuse any meaningful structural reforms to entitlements to get serious. Maybe he could go on television and explain to the American people that we have over $60 trillion in liabilities and that tax increases are not going to bring that into balance.

Instead, the President and his party sit around and spread the myth that simply getting rid of tax expenditures and loopholes--and they certainly are not loopholes, the ones I have been talking about--will fix our deficits and debt. We have two reasons to worry about that wrongheaded approach. One, to the extent deficit reduction energies are diverted to cutting back tax expenditures, pressure is taken off the root cause of the deficit and debt problem. That is, pressure that should be brought to bear on out-of-control spending programs is released. Two, the productive sectors of the economy--workers, small business owners, and investors--are burdened with yet more Federal taxes.

For many reasons, cutbacks in tax expenditures are a deficit reduction dog that will not hunt.

If you look at all individual tax expenditures, you can see these are the 10 highest tax expenditures by percentage.

Let me go back to the preceding chart. If you look at all these tax expenditures, for the mortgage interest itemized deduction, 70 percent are people earning under $200,000; for the earned income tax credit, 100 percent; for the child tax credit, 100 percent; for the State and local taxes, other than real property, 50 percent; for charitable itemized deductions, 45 percent--yes, the rich had 55 percent by their definition--for Social Security benefits, 98 percent; for the real property tax itemized deduction, 80 percent; for the education credit, 100 percent; for medical itemized deductions, 89 percent; for the dependent childcare credit, 96 percent; for student loan interest, 100 percent.

Look, my point is, we have to come up with a better Tax Code. I am dedicated to changing this awful Tax Code we have that is too complicated, too large, too expensive, does not do the job, and is a bunch of muttering around and puttering around by Members of Congress, and simplifying that Code so everybody knows which end is up.

On tax expenditures, I am going to be happy to look at tax expenditures, but they should be reserved until we do real tax reform. If you have to give up some of these expenditures, then there better be appropriate reductions to account for that, and we have to do it by flattening out that tax system that we all know is completely out of control and completely difficult to comply with. As a matter of fact, I do not know of anybody on the Senate Finance Committee who fills out their own tax forms. I do not think most of us could do it because if you had 10 different tax preparers on a semicomplicated tax return, you would probably have 10 different approaches to it. That shows the pathetic system that is wrecking our country.

To make it clear, when the President took over, the bottom 40 percent of all households did not pay income taxes. Yes, they paid payroll taxes, but 23 million of them got refundable tax credits, much more than they paid in payroll taxes. Keep in mind, I do not believe we should tax the truly poor. But now that is up to 51 percent in a little over 2 years under this administration of people who do not pay any income taxes. Are they all truly poor? I do not know. All I know is, it does not sound right that the majority of people, the majority of tax units in this country, do not pay income taxes, and the minority has to carry the whole burden.

If they are truly poor, I understand and I would be the last one to tax them, and I think I have a 35-year record here of being fair to the poor and fair to families and, above all, fair to children. My name is on an awful lot of important bills around here, and I have led the fight on a lot of bills that help people in distress. So you can imagine how aggrieved I felt when one of our great television stations was distorting one sentence--it seemed to me one sentence--out of a 30- minute set of remarks on the floor that made it very clear that I do not want to tax the truly poor. But surely we have to have everybody participate. I actually think everybody ought to participate, even if

it is only $1. We ought to all have some skin in the game. We ought to all help save this country, and we cannot do it without the middle class. And the middle class is not just the top 49 percent of all wage earners.

This is an important issue, and it is one we have to resolve, and we have to resolve it fairly, we have to resolve it in a way that is meaningful and in a way that will help save our country too. I think I have more than made the case that you cannot pile it all on the so- called 3 to 5 percent, the so-called rich, which includes 800,000 small businesses, where 70 percent of all jobs are created. And everybody knows that is true. Every time you tax them and take moneys away from them like that, when they are paying pretty hefty taxes as it is, they hire less, they do less, they quit their businesses, some move offshore, some move their businesses to other countries, and some just plain give up.

We cannot let that happen. We have to have a fair tax situation. We have to have Democrats and Republicans work on it together. We have to quit playing this card that basically pits one group of people against another.

All I can say is this. I am concerned. I am pointing out difficulties in our Tax Code. I am pointing out difficulties in some of the arguments the President is making. And I have to say that anybody who reads my remarks fairly will know these points I am making are real points. These charts are important. As you can see, taxpayers earning under $200,000 will be bereft without these benefits unless we can revamp the whole Tax Code in a way that you do not have to have tax expenditures. Tax expenditures are certainly not spending--at least these ones we are talking about right here and now.

So if you compare the total Federal tax burden, those earning over $200,000 pay 64 percent; those earning under $200,000 pay 36 percent. All of that is important for us to understand.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.