Floor Statements

Mr. President, it has been 2 weeks since we last spoke on the floor on this issue. There has been a lot written in the press and a lot of things that have been said. I will reiterate what I said earlier in that debate before we took an inappropriate spring break, and that is the fact that everybody thinks those who are unemployed and are eligible should be getting unemployment checks. That is not a partisan issue. It is a fact we want to support those who need our help right now.

The real question, however, is what will we do to make sure that effort is an effort that has some real meaning behind it and that these are not hollow words. The debate around here becomes partisan and labels get applied, and I admit that I am partisan--but not from a party standpoint; I am partisan for our children.

The question isn't whether we should make sure that unemployment benefits are there. The question isn't whether people can get health insurance under COBRA. The question isn't whether we ought to do the right thing for those who are depending on us. The question is, where do we get the money?

It is simple. We have two options. One option says: Time out; this is so important that it doesn't matter where we get the money; we have to supply it. The other option is--and by the way, the first option belies the fact that we have any waste in the Federal Government. I don't think we can do a poll that would come so close to unanimity as a poll on which we would ask the American people whether the Federal Government is efficient and effective. I doubt that we would get anybody on the ``yes'' ledger side on that.

The real question, then, becomes do we have the goodwill and the presence of mind to do this in a way that doesn't jeopardize our children? You see, we are not just fighting about unemployment benefits. We are not debating the issue of unemployment benefits. We are debating the issue of whether we take from those who come after us and give to those today.

Many times I have used this poster of this young lady. Her name is Madeline. Madeline was caught in DC wearing this poster. I have gone over the numbers. When she wore the poster, her debt was $38,375. Her debt today, without us extending this bill after last year, is over $45,000. So the question is competing priorities. We have the priority of making sure that we help those who need our help in a time of economic decline. And then we have the priority of making sure we have not mortgaged the opportunity of freedom for children such as Madeline.

Who will fight for the Madelines? Who will stand up for our grandchildren and say we can find $9.2 billion out of an almost $4 trillion budget and pay for it and not charge it to the Madelines of this world? That is what we are doing when we declare something an emergency.

I would also make the point that we passed a 9-month extension for many of these programs. It was paid for. In other words, we didn't add to the debt when we passed a bill that would extend this for 9 months. The Senate did its work. That bill hasn't come back because the House is unlikely to pass it with the pay-fors in it and, frankly, several were used to pay for the health care bill that passed.

Who will protect the Madelines of the world? Since the beginning of this year and the famed passage of a statute called pay-go, which says we will no longer create new spending without cutting the spending somewhere else, we have spent $120 billion of Madeline's future, and every Madeline who is out there--every 3-year-old and 4-year-old who is out there. We have done it by waiving the new statute that says you have to pay as you go. Congress--and the Senate specifically--increased our budget 5.6 percent this year. In a year where true costs were down we increased our own budget. Yet, we refuse to look at the hard choices that are necessary for us to make a future for the Madelines of this world.

What happens if we continue this? What happens if we continue to say we will borrow from the future instead of making the tough choices now? I will tell you what happens. Madeline's future--her opportunity for prosperity--is mortgaged. We tend to think in the short run, and the vision our Founders had was thinking in the long term.

So where do we find $9.2 billion? If I get an opportunity, I will offer five amendments that will pay for that. I wager that nary a person would ever miss the money. We could find $9.2 billion in the Defense Department. They have at least $50 billion worth of waste. But, no, we won't go there. We have $700 billion in unobligated balances of which well over 20 percent has been sitting there for 2 years. That is $140 billion. We can pay for this for a year, but we won't go there. We have ineffective spending in the stimulus bill that hasn't been rolled out yet that I will put forward as a greater priority than the money intended left in the stimulus bill is for. But we are not going to go there. What we are going to do--and we will pass a motion to proceed today to this bill. But what we are going to do is take the easy, the soft road of not paid for. We cannot continue to do that.

Last year--and we will continue this year--out of every dollar the Federal Government spent we borrowed 43 percent. So 43 cents out of every dollar the Federal Government spent last year we borrowed. We ended up with a real deficit of close to $1.6 trillion by the time you get out of the accounting gimmicks that Washington uses. That is what we added to the Madelines of the world. We are going to do that this year again.

The February deficit was the highest on record ever for the Federal Government. So we are going to have an excessive $1.4 billion or $1.5 billion or probably a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, and we are going to add another $9.2 billion with this bill.

How is it fair? How is it right that in this country we cannot do two right things, we can only do one right and one wrong thing? I posit that stealing money from our kids' future and mortgaging their future is morally wrong. I posit that helping people who need our help on unemployment benefits is morally right. Why can we not do both? We ought to be able to do both.

I sent a letter to the minority and majority leaders when the bill first came up. I will read it because I think it is important to understand the thinking on why we should pay for this--realizing that we passed a 9-month extension that was paid for, and because the House hasn't acted, we don't feel an obligation to protect the Madelines of the world. The letter says this:

I am writing to notify you that I would like to be

consulted on any unanimous consent agreements regarding the

consideration of H.R. 4851, the Continuing Extension Act of

2010, which would extend the number of federal programs for

one month.

No one is arguing that Americans who are currently

unemployed should not have their unemployment insurance

payments extended. But once again, Congress is refusing to

find a way to offset the $9.15 billion cost of the bill with

cuts to less important federal spending.

Time and time again, Congress intentionally waits until the

last minute to consider important legislation and then

declares the billions of dollars in foreseeable costs as

``emergency'' spending in order to avoid having to find a way

to pay for the bills' price tags.

In the last 6 months, Congress has passed four major

extension bills. H.R. 4851 would be the fifth such bill. The

total cost of these bills is almost $30 billion.

Additionally, over the last year Congress has increased

funding totaling $64.9 billion for the Highway and

Unemployment Insurance Trust Funds without offsets.

This shortsightedness sticks taxpayers with billions of

dollars in additional debt and treats the unemployed, doctors

and Medicare patients, hard working men and women who help

make our roads and bridges safe, and others relying on

federal funds as pawns in Congress' borrowing and spending

game.

When the previous last-minute one month extension (H.R.

4692) was brought up days before the funding authority for

numerous federal programs, including Unemployment Insurance

and the Highway Trust Fund, which expired at the end of

February, 2010, a United States Senator was attacked for

objecting to passing the bill without any debate or

amendments because the bill was unpaid for and added $10

billion to our nation's debt.

In other words, there is something wrong with Senator Bunning raising the question of whether we ought to pay for it.

As always, those who prefer to borrow to avoid making the

tough budget decisions won out, and the taxpayers were stuck

with another $10 billion in debt.

The Madelines of the world.

Congress has continually resisted the need to act like

every family in the United States of America and to budget

and live within their means. Our debt is now over $12.6

trillion. The 2010 deficit is projected to amount to $1.3

trillion and we are borrowing 43 cents on every dollar; yet,

Congress continues to increase spending without any

correlating spending cuts.

Congress' inability to prioritize and manage national needs

results in real consequences for Americans, whether it be

furloughs, market uncertainty that leads to lower investment

and job losses, or Americans being saddled with higher debt

and taxes.

If Congress keeps approving temporary extension bills

throughout the calendar year without finding offsets,

Congress will have added almost $120 billion to our national

debt. Additionally, the Senate has already approved more than

$120 billion in new federal spending not offset, even though

it passed Pay-Go legislation just over one month ago claiming

to prohibit such activity.

In the House, Appropriations Chairman David Obey has

indicated that some new spending needs to be offset with

unused, unobligated funds. Chairman Obey suggested rescinding

$362 million in reserve stimulus funds for the Women, Infants

and Children nutrition program; $112 million from a Commerce

Department program designed to provide coupons to households

to help buy analog-to-digital converter boxes; $103 million

from USDA rural development programs; and $44 million from

the Transportation Department's Consumer Assistance to

Recycle and Save Program . . . to offset the cost of a

different spending bill. The Senate should likewise find a

way to offset this one-month extension bill and create a

sustainable precedent.

The Senate can start with federal unobligated balances.

According to the White House, in Fiscal Year 2011, 33 percent

of all federal funds were unused and obligated. The total

dollar amount of these unobligated balances was estimated at

$703 billion. Rescinding only discretionary funding that has

been available for more than two years would likely result in

roughly $100 billion in offset spending. The Senate could

also tap into $228 billion in unobligated stimulus funds as

Chairman Obey has suggested.

At the very least, Congress should reconsider transferring

the almost $100 million budget increase it approved for

itself for 2010 to offset the cost of additional spending.

Congress should not be increasing its budget by 4.5 percent

when our economy shrunk by 2.4 percent and inflation was at

less than 1 percent.

I have also detailed through numerous oversight hearings,

reports, and legislation how the federal government wastes

more than $300 billion every year. I have suggested hundreds

of offsets to new spending, including consolidating

duplicative programs, and eliminating federal programs that

address parochial concerns.

We all think our Americans in need of financial assistance

are worth the $9 billion bill cost, but do we think our

children and grandchildren are worth paying for these costs

up front, rather than passing the cost to them?. . . .

Thank you for protecting my rights regarding this

legislation.

I ask unanimous consent to have this letter printed in the Record.

Mr. President, so what are we going to do? We have before us a need. It is a good need. It is something we ought to do. We are going to borrow 43 cents out of every dollar we spend this year. We are going to put the Madelines of this world in a position that by 2020, this number is not going to be $45,000; it is going to be $95,000. That is where she is going to be. That is every man, woman, and child in terms of what they owe in terms of the direct national debt.

Can we continue on this pace? We hear we will fix it later. Later is not good enough for the Madelines of this world. Later is today. Now is the time for us to do the very hard work. It is not easy to come up with spending offsets. It is not easy to not increase the national debt. It is very easy to simply put the credit card into the machine and say: Because they are out of sight, out of mind--the Madelines of the world--we will just charge it to them.

That is what is being proposed here. If you oppose that, all of a sudden you do not care about the people who are unemployed. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard that in the last 2 weeks; that it is obstruction that you want to pay for it. Should we be working hard to secure the future of the children such as Madeline?

We are told that over the next 9 years, we are going to borrow an additional $9.8 trillion, based on the budget projections that are out there. Of that $9.8 trillion, almost half of it is money we are going to borrow and turn around to pay interest on what we already owe. That is eerily close to those of us who get into trouble with credit cards. We get another credit card, borrow the max on it to pay off the other credit cards. Then we get in trouble with that one and get another one. Pretty soon, we cannot pay anything.

The Chinese own over $900 billion of our bonds, the Russians $800 billion. Have we considered the fact that our problems, in terms of our foreign policy with Iran and our ability to put sharp, tough sanctions on somebody who wants to use and develop nuclear weapons could possibly be inhibited by the fact that two of the countries opposing those strong, tough sanctions own a lot of our bonds and that we are dependent on them? Could it also be that the week before last, when the Treasury option was very soft because the Chinese did not participate, that is a warning shot across our bow? We are in waters this country has never seen before. If we pass this bill and we continue to pass more bills, not having made the tough choices, we are steaming toward a catastrophe.

What will that look like? It is not that we cannot fix the problem. It is not as if we could not go and find $9.2 billion out of a nearly $4 trillion budget. It is that we refuse to. It is not that it is impossible. We refuse to. We refuse to do the same things families across this country do every day; that is, make a choice about priorities.

My office just last week, with the help of the Congressional Research Service and the GAO, identified 70 duplicate programs on nutrition across three Federal Departments. We now have 70 programs for food and nutrition across three departments, with thousands upon thousands of Federal employees, thousands upon thousands of pages of bureaucratic gobbledygook and regulations. I would propose probably we ought to have one good program on food and nutrition. We do not address that. The authorizing committees do not. The appropriating committees do not.

We have 105 programs that encourage people to go into math, science, technology, and engineering across six different agencies--105 programs. There is not one agency that does not have considerable waste in it, and there is probably not one American who would not think that we could not cut 1 or 2 or 3 percent from every agency and drive efficiency. But we will not do that.

The real question is: Why won't we? We will beat up people because they will not agree to spend Madeline's money and her future, but we will not agree to trim the waste, the fat, duplication, and fraud out of the Federal Government. It is no wonder the public has such a poor image of Congress because we are actually not doing what they are asking us to do.

It would be different if there was not waste in the Federal Government. If everything was fine-tuned, effective, and efficient, one could make an argument for borrowing this money. But nobody I know of believes the Federal Government is efficient and effective throughout its myriad departments and agencies. If the majority might feel that way, that it is not, why would we not do the hard work of paying for this bill?

What does it mean to borrow $9.2 billion this month and $10 billion last month and $10 billion before and the $120 billion we passed in the first 3 months of the second session of the 111th Congress? What does it mean? It means we do not think we have to play by the same rules as the rest of the American public. We have a tilted sense of reality. There is no obligation on us to eliminate waste to provide a good for those people who are depending on us.

We will go forward this evening on a motion to proceed to this bill unpaid for, charged to the Madelines of this world, and all you have to do is take $9.2 billion--it is not much in Washington speak; it is twice the size of Oklahoma's budget for a year--and we will charge it to a credit card to our kids.

Ultimately, what we are doing is stealing a college education from our kids. We are stealing a job opportunity from our kids. We are stealing the ability for our kids to own a home and to provide for their children what was provided for them. You see, the heritage we have that built this country was one of sacrifice, where we make decisions that require us to make a sacrifice to create opportunity. When you turn that upside down, the American experiment fails. When we steal opportunity from the future so we can benefit for today, we eliminate the genius that made this country great. It is time we reversed that.

It is not really a partisan issue. I know the press is going to say that. It is partisan for our future. It is partisan for our kids. And we can do both. We can find $9.2 billion that isn't as effectively spent as will be spent on COBRA or unemployment insurance or on flood insurance or on fixing the SGR for a short period of time. We can do that, but we won't because we are in the habit of not making hard choices. We are in the habit of doing the least best thing rather than the best thing.

The best thing for our budget, the best thing for our future, the best thing for our children's future is for us to say X, Y, and Z are not nearly as important as unemployment insurance benefits, are not as important as COBRA benefits, are not as important as fixing the SGR for a short period of time. When will we muscle up the courage to start making those kinds of decisions?

We can't continue doing what we are doing. We can't grow to $20 trillion worth of debt--over 100 percent of our GDP. At the rate we are going, in 2010, we will have $24 trillion worth of debt, and $24 trillion, at 6 percent interest, is $1.5 trillion a year in interest payments. We can't make it. We cannot handle that. And the reality will only come home when it is too late.

Senator Reid, when we passed the pay-go bill, said it was a new start. He said we are going to open our billfold, and if the money is there we will spend it but we are not going to spend money that is not in our billfold--to paraphrase his quote. Well, this bill goes to an empty billfold. The money is not there. So we can either increase our debt, which will make life for the Madelines of this world tougher or we can actually take on some tough decisionmaking as a body and actually eliminate lower priority programs. Would that have some impact on some programs? Yes. I mean, we could actually take a 1-percent across-the-board cut and come up with $30 billion easily. Americans know we could get 1 percent out of the Federal agencies. But we are not going to do that either.

The question is, When will we start acting in the responsible role with which we are charged? When will we start thinking with a long-term perspective about what is going to happen to our country if, in fact, we don't start making the hard choices now? No matter how much scorn, no matter how many derisive statements are made, the Madelines of the world are worth it. When we sit and relax and think this is not as big a problem as we hear described, we fall into the same trap as every other republic in history. And they all collapsed. No republic has survived more than 250 years, and they all collapsed for the same reason. They all collapsed ultimately because they lost control of their fiscal policy--taxes, spending, priorities.

So we have a choice in front of us. This isn't the first time we are going to have this choice, and it won't be the last. But a question that I think the American people ought to be asking is, When is the Congress going to start acting in a responsible manner? When are they going to start following the guidelines every other prudent financial decisionmaker makes, whether it be the head of a household, a wage earner, a small business, or a small nonprofit? They all live within a budget, and what they do is they say: Here is the most important priority and here is the least, and they go down the line. When the money runs out, they either generate efficiency to allow that money to be more effective and more efficient in how it is spent or they eliminate the lower priority items.

It would be a wonderful search for people to go on thomas.gov to find out the number of programs that have been eliminated versus the number of programs that have been created in the last 2 years. I guarantee you they will outnumber 200 or 300 to 1. In the Judiciary Committee this week, we will have two bills up that duplicate existing programs. I will have the same fight in the Judiciary Committee, and I will lose. We will extend new programs that are doing the same thing other programs are doing, and yet I will lose the battle and we will create new programs to do the same thing we already have government programs doing. Why is that? Because you cannot manage what you do not measure. We don't put metrics on hardly anything in the Federal Government programs, and conveniently so. Therefore, we can say: Well, we can't know whether they are efficient.

The time for our comfort with where we find ourselves financially is over. The American people already understand that because 72 percent of them, in a recent poll, said their No. 1 issue is debt and spending. They already get it. They are wondering when we are going to catch up with them. They are for supporting unemployment insurance benefits but not charging them to their children. They are for us making the hard choices.

So as we go forward, the hope would be that we would get out of the short-term thinking we find ourselves in and start looking down the road of what is coming. I have been quoted as saying that I think we have less than 5 years to fix our ship. I think that is probably generous. I don't think there is one problem in front of our country that we can't fix. However, if we ignore the realities of our financial situation, if the elected leaders in this country fail to make priority decisions, which means you are going to offend some of the supporters of the lower priority programs, then we are not going to solve the problems that are in front of us. If our focus is parochial only--in other words, only the concerns within our own States--rather than that of our Nation as a whole, we are not going to fix the problems in front of us.

I have five grandchildren, and in thinking of the future, I often wonder what things will be like for them.

Thinking backward, when I was 17 and 18 and going to college for the first year, there was this tremendous vision on the horizon that I saw in front of me. I could go to school because I had parents who could afford to pay for my college, and wherever I wanted to go, whatever I wanted to do was out there on that horizon. That is a limited possibility today for our kids. Is it going to be a possibility for the Madelines of the world?

Thinking forward, if you take everyone who is 25 years of age and younger in this country and go out 20 years, here is where they will be: That group, 45 and younger, will be responsible for $1,113,000-- each and every one of them will be responsible for $1,113,000 worth of debt and unfunded liabilities, every one of them, if we are on the same course we are on today. Take 6 percent of that, and you will see they are going to have to come up with about $67,000 a year just to pay the interest costs on that debt. That is before they pay income taxes. That is before they pay rent or pay a mortgage. That is before they pay for a car or a car payment. That is before they put food on the table. That is before they clothe their kids and themselves. That is before they give to a charity or their church.

We are stealing the American dream every time we fail to be cognizant of what the future holds, if we don't change course. So the debate really isn't about unemployment insurance; it is about when are we going to change course? When are we going to start recognizing the need to live within our means?

We are going to hear that we have always done it this way, that we have passed three other short-term extensions and that we call them emergencies so we don't have to pay for them. I would say it is time that we not always do it the way we have always done it because the way we have always done it has gotten us $12.6 trillion in debt and is sending us out to sea without a rudder and without enough fuel oil to get back to shore.

My hope is that our debate will focus on what the real problems are in this country, the real long-term problems, because you really solve short-term problems when you start attacking the long-term problems and when you really start making the tough decisions.

I say to my colleague from Montana, as head of the Finance Committee, he knows what would happen if we sent a signal that we were really going to start getting tough about our budget. He knows what would happen to bond rates. He knows what would happen to our ability to lead in the world if we all of a sudden became cognizant and acted in a way that was fiscally responsible. Investment would come flowing back into this country, bond yields would go down, not up, and the cost of our debt would go down. It would be a home run every way we look at it. It would be a home run for the Madelines of this country, and it would be a home run for those who are unemployed.

If you read the financial news, you have been seeing what is happening to Greece. Greece got rescued just in the last week, partly through the IMF, but mainly the money is going to come from Germany and France. They are going to get to borrow for a short period of time at 5 percent instead of the 7\1/2\ percent the market reflects.

I would say that there is no Germany or France to bail us out. There is no one who will come to bail America out. It is highly doubtful that Greece has the political will to do what it has to do to solve its own problem. The question is, In 2 or 3 years, are they going to be saying the same thing about our country? Do we have the political will to dig out of the hole we have, in fact, dug for ourselves? When I say ``we,'' I am not talking about the American public, I am talking about the Congress of the United States. You can't blame it on any President. You can't blame it on the courts. The blame for our financial situation lies solely with the U.S. Congress. Whether it is lack of oversight of financial firms or Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; whether it is the lack of oversight of the SEC; whether it is the tremendous amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Federal Government--$300 billion, at least, per year--it lies with us.

We are going to hear a lot of reasons why we should pass this--just pass the charges on to our kids. My hope is that the American people will reject that because when they accept that it is OK to just charge it to our kids, what they are doing is conditioning us to continue doing the same thing--continuing to spend the future opportunities of our children and grandchildren. Our heritage is much greater than that. Our kids and grandkids are worth much more than that. Let it not be said of this Congress that we failed to act in the time when the tough get going and that we made the tough decisions about not increasing the debt, streamlining the government, eliminating some of the $300 billion worth of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication that is in the Federal Government.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Stabenow control the time from 9:30 a.m. to 10 a.m.; that I control the time from 10 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.; that Senator Stabenow control the time from 10:30 a.m. to 11 a.m.; that I control the time from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.; and that Senator Stabenow control the time from 12 p.m. to 12:30 p.m.

I yield to the Senator from Michigan.

Reserving the right to object.

I think my colleague realizes that, in fact, this will add $9.2 billion to the debt, and she also realizes, in spite of her claim that we could vote, that there is nobody in town to vote because there are only 10 or 11 of us still in town. And because every Republican voted against adjourning so that we could stay and work this out, I would object.

Mr. President, let me set the record straight. Yesterday in this body we offered the same bill in a way that would not increase the debt. It was immediately tabled, with all Republicans voting not to table it and the majority voting to table it. So there is a little bit of confusion.

We worked out an agreement with Senator Stabenow and Senator Levin from Michigan where we came together with an agreement for 2 weeks where this would be paid for, so the reason this bill is not moving forward is because the House leadership rejected that compromise. In other words, we had a compromise. We developed a plan where our children will not pay for this, we will, by offsetting and not adding to the debt.

With that, I wish to recognize my colleague from Wyoming, Senator Barrasso, for what time he might consume.

Will the Senator yield for a moment.

He talked about a tornado in Oklahoma. When the Oklahoma City bombing happened and we sent emergency funds to Oklahoma City, we paid for them. We decreased spending somewhere else to pay for that spending. His point falls on a flat wall because when we had an urgency such as that in 1995, we paid for it.

Mr. President, I want to set a little bit of a tone. First, I thank the Senator from Michigan. Yesterday, it was through her work and Senator Levin's work that we were able to come to an agreement on a compromise in the Senate. I think that shows when we get down to issues we can work together; when we get to the position. It was her efforts, along with several others, that allowed us to reach that compromise.

But I wanted to make a point--a couple of points. No. 1, there is nobody on our side who does not want to extend the unemployment benefits. The difference is we want to extend them without hurting her future. Whether you are a conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, or an Independent, the consequences of our actions are going to affect everybody. I used this last year, and this little girl is saying: I am already $38,375 in debt, and I only own a dollhouse.

Well, let me show you what is going to happen this year. This year alone, she is $45,000 in debt. We moved from $39,000 to $45,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country. That only reflects the outstanding debt we do not owe ourselves, that we have stolen from Social Security and that we have stolen from other trust funds, that we put in an IOU.

There is another thing that is happening that Americans should be aware of. In the past year, the average interest rates on the debt obligations we are issuing have risen 1 percent. So we have $12.8 trillion worth of debt. Multiply that by 1 percent, and in this next year we are going to pay an extra $128 billion in interest just from that 1 percent.

So for every 1 percent interest rates go up, we have interest costs of $128 billion. What will happen as we continue to project trillion- dollar deficits over the next 9 years is, that is going to rise and rise and rise.

She is the one that is going to pay for that, and this will not be $45,000; it will be $75,000. Then it will be $85,000, and then pretty soon--and by the way, that only reflects the debt. That has no reflection on the unfunded commitments that we have made to veterans, social security benefits, Medicare, none.

If we add those in, we have another $37 trillion that has to be accounted for just over the next four decades. So debt is a big problem for us. I would also make a point, the Senator from Michigan mentioned the long-term debt extender that we have. It is 12 months. It is going down each time we do it. We sent that to the House. You know what. It did not increase the debt because we offset it. We paid for it.

So the House has a bill the Senate has passed that was paid for, and they stole some of the pay-fors for the health care bill. So the House has not sent it back because the House refuses to make the hard choices to pay for the things that are necessary to be done right now. That is what happened yesterday. The Senate came to an agreement. We decided we would pay for 2 weeks so nobody will have any hitch in their unemployment, no hitch in their COBRA, no hitch anywhere. When it was sent over there, it was rejected.

Now, I want to posit something to you. The reason it was rejected is we do not want to create the precedent that when we spend money we have to pay for it. Where in the world is that a normal thinking process? In other words, we want to make sure we always have the option to spend money that is not paid for. There could be nothing more economically unreasonable than that.

So this is not a battle about not wanting to help the people who need our help today, this is a battle about helping the people who need our help today without hurting the children of tomorrow, without rescuing them.

If we are talking about emergencies, the fact is, because we cannot control our appetite for spending, our interest costs have gone up another $128 billion this year. That is an emergency. The other thing is that we have over $300 billion worth of waste, of fraud, of duplication in the Federal Government every year. So if you dispute it, you can say there is only--let's say it is half that. Why would we not get rid of that and pay for this rather than charge this intermediate $9.2 billion to those little children?

I actually had the pleasure of meeting this little girl in my office after I saw this photo. She has parents. They are worried. So what is her future going to be like? Is she going to have the same opportunity I have? So what I would posit forth is that we can do both. We can meet the needs of those who are dependent upon us now because of the economic downturn, and we can protect her and all of those of her generation.

To not do so says we are going to take the easy way out. We are not going to act responsibly. We are not going to act like every other family in America acts. They look at what is there, what is the priority, what we can do, and what we cannot do. Then they make a decision about what is most important.

The process the Senator from Michigan wants us to do, even though she agreed yesterday, is to not put a priority on it that considers both the short term and the long term; that cares both for the children as well as the unemployed; that considers both the future of our country and her opportunity to take advantage of the freest Nation in the world.

This is not a Republican-Democrat thing. Republicans have been irresponsible in spending too. It is a whole new era now. Everything has changed. It does not matter what party we are in. If we do not get hold of the debt in this country, everyone is going to suffer.

I spoke on the Senate floor yesterday, and I will reiterate it: Whether you call it a filibuster or whether you call it obstruction, as a grandfather of five children, truly reflective of tons of grandparents out there and tons of grandkids out there, I am not going to agree in the future to spend money we do not have until we get rid of the things that are not a priority, the $300 billion, before we move. Someone has to start saying no to the addiction we have that every time we have a problem we will just spend money.

Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 4915

I would like to make a unanimous consent request. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to H.R. 4915, a revenue measure from the House; provided that the only amendment in order be a substitute amendment, the text of which is the 2-week extension that we agreed on yesterday of unemployment benefits that is paid for, that will not increase the debt, with agreed-to offsets from the Finance Committee that was agreed to yesterday; proceeded further that the amendment be agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed, with a motion to reconsider laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I am sorry we have an objection. The fact is, we agreed to it. The fact is, the Senator from Michigan is having to protect the House of Representatives. She knows we are not going to go forward with this unless we pay for that, until we get back.

The only way to do that is through unanimous consent. The only way we are going to accomplish that is what we agreed to yesterday and send it to the House and let them do it by unanimous consent, even though they said they will not do it.

The fact is, we agreed in the Senate. We came to an agreement, and because the House has said they will not do it, they do not want to-- they want to increase the debt to do it rather than to do it and not increase the debt. I think that speaks of where we are in the country.

We cannot do this. We have agreed on the way to do it in our body.

After we had an agreement yesterday that maybe the House did not like, it actually solved the problem and solved the problem for these little kids as well as those unemployed in Michigan and across the country. We now have the House saying: No, we cannot do it.

So I am sorry. I apologize to the Senator from Michigan for putting her in that position. I sincerely do. But I think we have to be recognizable of the fact that what looks like may be happening as both Houses recess is that it will not get done. It will not get done because we cannot get it done. It will not get done because the House refuses to take a position to not add to the debt as we solve this problem, as we meet both priorities--those people who are hurting and the priority of what is to come in the future. I think that is unfortunate for us.

I would yield the remaining time I have, which is only about 2 or 3 minutes, to the Senator from Georgia, and then I hope he will join me when we come back.

Reserving the right to object.

I must say to my colleague, I agree with him--what he said--but under the conventions that we use, Senators can ask others to object on their behalf, and, regrettably, I have been asked to do that and will do that on Senator Vitter's behalf.

Mr. President, I would be happy to give the Senator some additional time, and we will roll the time off of your later time, if you would like time now, I say to the Senator.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, again, I would note this is the fourth time I have done this and, regrettably, because we had an agreement yesterday that the House would not go along with, I have to object because we will be adding to the debt.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, since the majority took an additional 5 minutes of our time, that our original unanimous consent be changed to give us the time from 11:05 to 12:05, and the majority from 12:05 to 12:30.

Mr. President, I yield to Senator Chambliss at this time.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia. I ask unanimous consent to have a colloquy on our side between the Members who are here. If there is no objection, I wish to proceed with that.

I recognize the Senator from Florida and the Senator from Alabama to start that off. I yield to the Senator from Alabama.

I thank the Senators from Alabama and Florida for their comments.

Many have heard us use the word ``pay-for'' sometimes. When we say that, what we are actually saying is, we don't want the debt increased. So we don't want to get that confused.

I also want to make one comment in relation to what Senator Reed from Rhode Island said earlier today. He said nobody on the other side of the aisle will be objecting to the supplemental coming for the military if it is not paid for. I want to state for the record that I voted against it the last two times. It is not because I don't want to support the military, but it wasn't paid for. We didn't make the hard choices. I will vote against it again, and I will try to make that a pay-for. So it is an unfair characterization to say ``nobody.'' I am pretty consistent on that. If we are going to spend new money, we should cut some of the money we are spending now that isn't as important.

Under the Constitution, the No. 1 responsibility for us is defending the country. One of the reasons we are in trouble is we have ignored the enumerated powers clause of the Constitution, which sets out a very limited role for the Federal Government and reserves the rest of the programs we are talking about to the States and to the people.

With that, Mr. President, I would like to recognize the senior--the Senator from Arizona, Mr. Kyl. I started to say senior, but that is not so.

I comment on the Senator's point, there is not anybody in this body, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, who does not want a great future for our kids. Everybody does. The Senator from Oregon has a set of twins, beautiful kids. He wants the best for them. What we want is the same thing other Americans want.

I showed this little sign earlier. I actually got to meet this girl because I thought it was so unique that she had the wisdom or somebody in her family had the wisdom to make the contrast. She doesn't even have a home yet, and when she had this her share of the debt was $38,375. That is just external debt. That does not include what we borrowed and stole from Social Security and all the other trust funds. If we included that, she would have been about $42,000. I marked through that this morning because it is now at the end of this year, September 30 of this year, every man, woman and little girl and little boy will be responsible for $45,000. It is going to grow $6,000 per man, woman, and child this year alone. That is just talking about the external debt. That is not talking about what we are stealing from other people.

Is there a point in time when we are on a downslope, where we get to a point in time where there is no return? We know that. Senator Sessions talked about it in terms of 90 percent of GDP, and how that has a depression. I made the point earlier. We saw a 1-percent increase in interest rates last year. We owe $12.8 trillion. That is $128 billion we are going to pay more in interest in this next year than we paid in the last year, as you float through all the bonds and recognize that 1 percent increase. What was 2.4 percent 1\1/2\ years ago on 10- year Treasury bonds is 3.88 percent right now, this morning. I checked it before I came over here. That is 1.48. As our debt balloons, that interest cost is going to go up.

You heard Senator Sessions say in 2019 we will spend $850 billion on interest. We are going to spend $850 billion on interest. Of the $9.8 trillion we are going to borrow over the next 9 years, $5.6 trillion of that is going to be interest. So now we are borrowing trillions of dollars to pay the interest on trillions of dollars.

It has to stop. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle recognize that. It is not that they do not want to fix it too. I agree with the Senator from Arizona. I think we will come to that realization across party lines. I was proud of the Senate yesterday because we actually worked together and came to a compromise that we could all agree to, and we got shot down by those who are thinking short term.

I am not doing this to score political points, as the Senator from Michigan alluded. I am not doing anything that I have not believed all the time I have been here, and my colleagues all across this body know that. The problem right now in our country is the debt. It is the debt.

If, in fact, we want a future--I have a 7-month old new one. I have five grandchildren. She is as cute as she can be. Her name is Katie Rose. I got to see her a couple weeks ago as my daughter came through. She hadn't seen me in a couple months and didn't like what she saw. I can't blame her for that. But the fact is, everybody has a Katie Rose. If this is your child, the new birth we are going to celebrate, Senator LeMieux's this weekend--everybody has one. So the contrast is, Can we do both? Can we take care of the Katie Roses of this world and take care of the unemployed or do we just say: No, it is too hard. If it is too hard, we are over. And I believe it is not over. It does not have to be. We can come together and solve both the debt problem and the needs of our country. We can do that.

I wish to give one little example. In the month of December, I had my staff search through programs that are duplicative. In 2 weeks, my staff found 640 duplicative programs--640. Let me just give one example. In our Federal Government, we have 105 programs run by nine different agencies to encourage people to study math, science, engineering and technology. One hundred five? So after that experience in December on one of the bills out here we put through, that passed, my colleagues on both sides of the aisle agreed we should have GAO do that study for us to give us all of them. That is just what we found in 2 weeks--there are thousands--because that tells us where to start eliminating duplication, start asking for metrics on what you are doing. If you have a program for math, engineering, science and technology, we ought to measure whether it is effective. We might only want to have one program instead of 105.

In the Judiciary Committee in the past 2 months, we have had two different bills that have come forward to solve problems. When the bills were offered, we didn't even know we had agencies out there and a program ready to do it.

There were some positive things with the health care bill. There are tons of negatives in my experience as a doctor who has practiced 27 years. But one of the negatives is, we are going to have 88 new government programs and we are probably going to add about 50,000 or 60,000 or 70,000 people to that. I know we are going to add 16,500 to the IRS to make sure you bought your health insurance. Why would we do that?

It is time for us to make the difficult choices. The choice does not have to be do nothing or pay for it. The choice can be we can take care of both.

I will close with this discussion. This is what we did last year--43 cents of everything the Government spent we borrowed from Katie Roses. That is who is going to pay it back. We are not going to pay it back. This year it is going to be over 45 cents, maybe 46 or 47 cents this year, because when you take the real projections for what our addition to the debt this year is--in terms of recognizing all the debt such as an accountant would do, not like the Government does--we are going to have a $1.8 trillion deficit.

This means, externally and internally, we are going to borrow $1.5 trillion externally, but internally we are going to borrow $300 billion from trust funds and programs and everything else we have.

Let me give you a little example people never think about. It is called the Inland Waterway Trust Fund. It is the trust fund that has paid for all of our inland waterways. There is no money in it because we have taken it all out. We cannot do what we need to do on our navigable waters where we haul freight and barges because we have stolen all of the money. There are hundreds of those trust funds where we have emptied the coffers.

I will end with this last request. When we come back, my pledge is to work with anybody in this body who will seriously work with me on making the appropriate tradeoffs of what is important and what is not in terms of priorities.

You know that our nature as elected officials is not to offend anybody. If we continue with that process--I am talking about those who support programs we cannot afford--we are all going to be offended because every Katie Rose in the world, in our country, will have her future squelched.

And the last set of numbers you should pay attention to: If you are under 25 years of age today--that means from 25 to 1--20 years from now, you plus everybody who is born in that 20 years will be responsible for debt and unfunded liabilities of $1,113,000. Think about that. In the next 20 years, those under 25 and below and everybody born will be responsible for $1,113,000. Think about what that costs. If you apply a 6-percent interest rate to that, let's round it at $60,000--it is more than that; $66,000-something--you are going to have to pay $66,000 in carry costs either through interest on the national debt or through direct taxes before you ever pay the first income tax to run anything for the Federal Government. What does that mean in terms of opportunity for those Katie Roses and this little girl? It means they will have trouble buying a home. They will have trouble educating their kids to give them opportunity.

So I believe we are at a point where we have to start making the hard decisions. My pledge to my colleagues is that I will work with you in a way that is positive to make sure we do not put these people at risk. But I also will work with you to make sure you understand that I am going stand up every time, including the supplemental that is coming forward, and say that we must pay for it rather than charge it to our children.

With that, I yield our time to the Senator from Oregon. I would note that we have until 12:30 to finish this discussion.

Madam President, I have an amendment at the desk.

I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Madam President, 140,000 of our troops have lost their second amendment rights as they go through the VA hospital system. They are not a danger to themselves or anyone else. This amendment is something that has passed this body unanimously, has come out of the committee unanimously, but still we have 140,000 of our long-serving veterans who have lost their rights to own a gun, hunt with their grandchildren, or to hunt birds in North Dakota.

We have taken it away, not because of anything we did, because the bureaucracy did it. This amendment restores that. As they have gone through the VA system and the health care system, a bureaucrat has taken that right away.

This is supported by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, AMVETS, Military Order of Purple Heart, NRA, Gun Owners of America, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American Legion.

I yield the floor.

They lost it under their health care.

Pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and section 4(g)(3) of the Statutory Pay-as-you-go Act of 2010, I move to waive all applicable sections of those acts and applicable budget resolutions for purposes of my amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes talking about where we are as a nation and what the future is for our children.

We have at this point in time $12.6 trillion worth of debt. We now have equivalent debt for every man, woman, and child in this country of $42,000. For our children who are under 25 years of age, in the year 2030, each one of them will be responsible for $1,113,000 worth of debt and unfunded obligations. If we think about what that means, it means that for our children who are under 25 years of age, the ability for them to experience the opportunity that we as a nation have experienced in the past 230-plus years is going to be put at risk.

We have before us some things that need to get done. They have to get done. We have two options: We can add another $9.2 billion to that $12.6 trillion we have today and bump up more than that $1,113,000, or we can relook into the mirror and say: Should we as Americans start making some of the hard choices that are going to be necessary for us to get out of the mess we have created for our children?

When I travel around the country--and I travel in Oklahoma--Americans are concerned about our future right now. What are their concerns? What does it boil down to in their hearts? In their hearts, they have this gripping sensation that what they have experienced as an American may not be available for their children. It is a painful realization. Their hope for us is that we might change that outcome for their children. We have an opportunity to start that right now.

By way of background, most of us know there is a tremendous amount of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication in the Federal Government. Oftentimes, it is hard to weed out because every program, whether it is efficient or effective or not, has people who tout it. Our nature as politicians is to offend no one. That is our nature. How in the world do we accomplish what is going to be necessary in the next 5 to 10 years and solve this most difficult problem that we, the politicians, have created? America didn't create this. The States didn't create this. This problem was created in Washington.

As has often been said, the easiest thing in the world is to spend somebody else's money. So the earnestness with which I come to the floor is to say we ought not be doing that, especially when we know there is waste and there is fraud and there is duplication and there is abuse in much of the Federal Government.

I was reminded of the trouble the State of New Jersey is in. What the people of the State of New Jersey have said is: We recognize the problem, and we need to change things. So they elected a new Governor on the basis that he would make the tough decisions about priorities to change the future path--that he might change the path of the future for the citizens of New Jersey. He put forth a bold budget. As a matter of fact, one of the Senate Democratic leaders is helping him fix the problem.

So we have a Republican Governor with a bold plan who has come forward to the people of the State of New Jersey. They elected him by a fairly large margin and said: For us to have this great future we all want for our kids, we are going to have to do some things that aren't necessarily pleasant, but they are necessary. It is kind of like when you have a child and they have to take a medicine, or the first time you take a child to the pediatrician's office for their first set of shots. That is an easy visit. The hard visit is the second visit because they have a memory of getting the injections the first time. So all of a sudden you have resistance, you have resistance, you have resistance to a medicine or a vaccine that actually fixes the problem, but there is a small amount of pain with it.

So the Governor of New Jersey has started out on a bold, fresh course not because he is a Republican--it doesn't matter the label. The fact is, the people in New Jersey, in a bipartisan manner, recognized they had to make changes. So we have unemployment insurance. We have COBRA. We have flood insurance. We have the doc fix for 30 days. We have all of these things in front of us that we all agree we want to get done.

Where lies our disagreement? It is very simple. One says we will declare it an emergency, not pay for it, and send the bill to our grandkids. The other says: Maybe it is time we quit doing that.

What is the expectation of the American people in terms of how we should respond to that? A recent poll said 72 percent of the American people, not divided by party, pretty neutral between both parties, say the No. 1 issue in front of us as a nation is our debt.

We had a warning from the rating agencies just 2 weeks ago that the United States of America is about to lose its AAA credit rating on its bonds. If you watched bond prices yesterday, what you saw was the yield shot up. The interest payment we are going to have to pay for when we borrow a huge amount of money is going to rise.

One of the most significant things we could do to help ourselves is send a signal to the world that we are not going to wait until our bond rating crashes, that we are going to start taking the steps that are necessary for us to get back on a road to fiscal health.

With all good faith, I think the majority leader and the minority leader tried to work out an agreement where we could perhaps accomplish this. We did not get there. Therefore, we find ourselves where we are going to have to have a debate, and we are going to have to discuss in front of the American people if we do these good things--and they are good--should we get rid of things that are a whole lot less good or should we take the immoral choice and not make any choice at all and pass it on to our children and grandchildren.

That is the question of where the American people are today. The majority and the President have had a great victory on health care, with not partisan differences but policy differences with my side of the aisle. That is now the law of the land. Whether you believe CBO and how it is scored, the fact is, even if it saves that amount of money, that does not come close to solving any of our problems.

We have had these multiple month-long extensions, of which none have been paid for, at about $9 billion to $10 billion a month. We find ourselves, because we want to go home or we want to go on a codel or we want to campaign or we want to fundraise, we want to make it easy and just pass it on down to the next generation.

I cannot agree to that anymore, ever again; that, in fact, if we are going to spend money on things we know we ought to do, then the obligation ought to be on us to get rid of funds that are spent on things that are very much less important. That is the hardest thing a political body does, is that they end up isolating and irritating those who are well connected who have an interest in those lower priority items. It is hard for us because, as is our nature, we want to offend no one. But we are going to have to talk that out. I guess we are going to have to talk it out on the floor, and we are going to have to debate it. We are going to talk about what our true long-term future is if we do not change.

I would rather us not be at this point, but when I wrestle with my own conscience and as I visualize my grandchildren and the grandchildren of everybody in this body, I think it would be immoral for us not to have this debate.

I don't know what the outcome of the debate is going to be and the ultimate

result. But I can tell you it is a legitimate debate we ought to be having. We ought to not just be having it on this extender package. We ought to be having it on any new spending, in any form, that the Congress does.

One of the large segments of the Recovery Act that some of us disagreed with was the amount of money that got transferred to the States to help them through this fiscal crisis. When we look at that, when we did that, I believe--and this is my personal belief, and I am sure many of my colleagues would not agree with it--we transferred the worst habit of Washington to the States, saying there are not consequences to your spending more money than you have. Although all these States have balanced budget amendments--in my own State, even though we had to make some tough decisions because of the tremendous amount of money that came through the Recovery Act, we did not make the decisions we should. So now we are going to make them this year, and we are going to make very difficult choices about priorities in the State of Oklahoma, with a Democratic Governor and a Republican House and Senate. They are going to get the job done. They are going to accomplish it because the people of Oklahoma do not allow their government to run their government on the backs of their unborn children. We do not allow it. We forbid it. We see it as immoral.

If you think about it, it is because what we are doing is stealing future opportunity from our children. People can say that is not right, but when you run the numbers--and everybody knows the numbers--it is right.

CBO put out 2 weeks ago that we are going to have a $9.8 trillion deficit this decade, not counting last year. They also put out that $5.6 trillion of that $9.8 trillion is money that is going to be used to pay interest. We are now similar to the person who gets in trouble on their credit card. The analogy does not stop there because what happens to the person with the credit card debt? The interest rate rises because they are not paying, when they only pay the minimum.

We have now gotten to the point where the vast majority of our debt accumulation in the next 9 years is going to be associated with interest payments rather than defending the country, rather than refilling Social Security, the money we have stolen out of there, rather than picking up the deficit that is in Medicare. We are going to spend that money to pay for interest. It is a double whammy. It is money we are paying that is not helping anybody. It is not helping anybody.

I was nominated to be on the Commission President Obama issued by Executive order that has six of our Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate and six of us on the Republican side and six appointed by the President. I have had multiple conversations with many of those people already. Quite frankly, they are worried and scared for our country based on the numbers we are seeing.

How is it we would now start down a road ignoring the reality of what is in front of us?

Let me describe what is in front of us. I wish to talk about it from an international standpoint first, and then I wish to talk about it from a domestic economy standpoint.

We had the Chinese Army say 6 weeks ago to the Chinese Government: Dump a bunch of American bonds; hurt them. You have the Chinese Government that undervalues its currency, stealing our jobs, and we are borrowing money from them. They now have an impact on our foreign policy. All we have to do is talk about Iran.

The sanctions we want to place on Iran that are necessary to be placed on Iran to contain the threat of them developing nuclear weapons are not available to us. The reason they are not available to us is because China and Russia have leverage over our debt. We do not have a clear, clean, crisp foreign policy because we have this little IOU of $900 billion to China and $700 billion to Russia that we are worried might influence their handling of that and the consequences of it.

When we look at history and we look at all the republics that have ever been, the one key thing in common that happens to them that causes them to fail is what? Is that every one of them got in trouble on a fiscal basis before they withered on an international basis or on a dominance basis. Every one of them withered. They, in fact, fell because they could not support their armies, they could not support the networks they put out and developed as a governing body.

The question is, Will that happen to us? There is a potential for that to happen to us. I will tell you, yes, we are in a position now where if we do not change gears and start making priorities on both programs and benefits, drawn in the light of the priorities of our present financial situation, and start making selections about what is most important versus what is least important, we are going to be similar to the Athenian Empire.

The real thing that is going on outside Washington and throughtout America is the fear of what is happening to us. They sense it. They worry about it. We have exaggerated that by at times not paying attention to that fear and that worry. But the consequence of not starting at a point in time in which we are going to make a difference and start doing what we were elected to do, which is to select priorities and eliminate nonfunctioning, poorly functioning duplication and fraud from the Federal Government--I said I was going to talk about the other side.

What does the domestic side look like for us as we go out, having $9.8 trillion worth of more borrowing in the next 9 years, with $5.6 trillion of that in interest payments? What does that do to our domestic economy? What is the impact? The impact is, we will see changes in our standard of living because of it. They are not positive changes.

If we were to stop right now and not borrow another penny and try to manage the debt we have today, we would still see a marked increase in inflation in our country--not immediately, but all you have to do is watch the bond market to see what is going to happen and you watch the yield curve. When you see 10 years go from last year this time 2.4 percent to 3.9 percent, which is a greater than 50 percent rise in yield as we continue to flood $300 billion this week in borrowing from the Fed, what does that mean for the average American?

What that means for the average American is inflation. What that means to that $5.8 trillion in terms of interest payments is that it is a larger proportion because as the interest costs rise, the proportion of interest payments versus total debt rises. We now spend in the United States--last year, per household--$38,980 in Federal programs per household. The median family income in America is $50,000, and the Federal Government is responsible for 80 percent of that as a ratio in terms of money we spend. We only collected--and this is not last year but the year before data--$18,000 per household.

So what do the numbers say? The numbers said that last year, 43 cents out of every dollar that the government spent we borrowed. It is going to be about 48 cents or 47 cents, we don't know for sure, this year. But I would note that we had the highest monthly deficit in our history in the month of February, and we need to send a signal to the international financial market that we are aware----

Mr. REID addressed the chair.

I would be glad to yield for a question.

About another 30 or 45 minutes. I will be glad to signal that ahead of time so the Senator would not have to wait on me. I will make sure the Senator is notified before I finish.

I kind of lost my train of thought.

The fact is, about 47 cents out of every dollar that we spend this year we are going to borrow. From whom are we borrowing it? Half we are borrowing from the American taxpayer, but the other half we are floating to the same people who hold our debt today. So we are doing a couple of things that are very dangerous for us. We are increasing our dependency on financing with those who don't have the best interest in mind for us, and we are raising the level of the amount of money we borrow that we have to pay back in interest to where it is not going to be long

that all the money we are borrowing is interest.

Why is that important to the individual family? If you have a savings that has recovered somewhat from the lows of 2009--and I think the average savings has recovered about 60 percent of its losses, or 75 percent of the losses in this country--when we start inflating the value of that retirement, the value of that asset is going to decline in terms of real dollars. We are perilously close to getting into the same situation we got into in the late 1970s and the early 1980s where we had double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, and double- digit interest rates.

You will hear everybody say: Oh, that isn't going to happen to us again. Well, I certainly hope it doesn't, but some of the same situations are playing out today that were playing out then. So if in fact you are on a fixed income, a retirement income, and we start inflating because of our debt, who does it hurt the most? It hurts those individuals who are on a fixed income, who don't have the luxury of going back to work or don't have the capability of going back to work. What happens to them? Their standard of living goes down, along with their ability to cope.

As I talk to families across America, what they are doing, still to this day, is they are sitting down at the table and they are visiting with one another and they are saying: Here is the money in, and here is the money out. How do we increase the money in, and how do we decrease the money out? What they are doing is picking what is important. They are picking what is a priority and going without the things that are not as important.

I agree that we have 9.7 percent unemployment and we ought to be helping those people. I agree we ought to be helping with COBRA. I agree we ought to do the doc fix. We had an opportunity last night to fix it for 3 years and 9 months and pay for it, but this body rejected that. I agree those are good things. What I don't agree with is doing those good things on the backs of our grandchildren. When and if we do those good things, and we haven't paid for them, what we will have done is been dishonest with the American people, not only in our action but in our oath.

You see, it is easy to spend other people's money if in fact you are sitting up here secure with a pension and a good salary and there are no consequences to us. We will all do fine. But the vast majority of Americans will not do fine, and the future of America will not shine bright. The future will be a little dimmer because we have this tremendous yoke of heaviness and drudgery on our backs because we, in fact, would not have made the hard choices.

This isn't the first Congress. The Republicans didn't make hard choices when they were in control. It is not partisan. It is a disease of elected officials, that they think they can get away without making the hard choices because the cost for not making the hard choices comes down the road. We have been doing that now for 30 years in this country. We have not made hard choices. We have made a lot of mistakes.

No question, Republicans have made more than their fair share of those mistakes. But rather than point fingers, what we ought to say is: What is the problem? What are the symptoms of the problem, and how do you fix them?

Many economists say it is impossible for us to grow our way out of this situation. We had a nice bump in the fourth quarter, thanks to hundreds of billions of dollars that got pumped into the economy, and there truly were a lot of jobs saved by the stimulus act. Maybe not as efficiently as I would have liked, but there were jobs saved. Nobody can dispute that. The question is, are we going to continue the policies that got us into trouble?

As I practice medicine, the one mistake doctors make and that gets them into trouble is when they treat symptoms instead of the disease. Here is the best example I know. Somebody comes to you with a fever and cough, malaise, and not feeling good. Well, I as a doctor, I can give them medicine for a cough. I can fix that. And I can give them something for the fever and the muscle aches. I can fix that. But if I don't diagnose what is causing the fever, the muscle aches, and the cough, what I have done is covered up the disease. That is what we are doing. The patient may get well because the body is a miraculous part of creation, and it has tremendous defenses. The mortality rate for pneumonia at the turn of the last century was 60 percent. Today, in somebody under 80, it is about 1 percent because we have the drugs to treat the real disease not the symptoms.

What is going to describe our action? Are we going to treat the symptoms or are we going to treat the disease? My hope would be that we could lock hands and say: Here is a start. Here is $9.2 billion that we, in fact, can find a way to come together and pay for and make sure these people get these benefits that are needed in this time of difficult economic situation. We can do that, and we can set a new start--a new start of reaching across the aisle and saying this is an appropriate moral goal, just as it is an inappropriate moral goal to not pay for it. It is immoral.

Let me say it again: To steal from your children and your grandchildren with a wink and a nod and thinking there are no consequences for your borrowing against their future is immoral. It wouldn't be immoral if everything we were doing was working great; that there wasn't $350 billion worth of duplication, fraud, abuse, and waste in the Federal Government every year--$350 billion every year, fully documented. It wouldn't be. But that is where we find ourselves.

So on the one hand over here we have this waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication. Yet because we want to get out of town we don't want to do the hard work of ferreting something out of that, something that is suspected of not being effective, to pay for the $9.2 billion. And I told my leadership that I didn't have any desire to keep anybody here this weekend through Wednesday. That is not my desire. But, in fact, if we are not going to do it, if we are going to take the immoral choice and spend money that we don't have and not eliminate programs that are not effective--programs that would not deliver to the American people, programs that would not accomplish their intended purpose--and just charge that to our grandkids, I feel obliged to stand in the way of that. And it will not be easy.

We didn't have much sleep last night. It will require a lot of effort on my part. But I think the future of our country is worth that. The future of our country is worth taking the consternation of those who will be upset with me because I am taking this stand. And I want to say at the outset, if somebody had plans, I apologize that those plans might be disrupted. I had plans, and they are going to get disrupted. But I don't apologize for having a legitimate debate on whether we ought to grow a spine and start making the same kind of decisions that every family in America is making.

It doesn't matter if you are a liberal or a conservative, you are still making those decisions. It is not about social issues. The greatest moral question in front of us today is not this range of social issues that so often divide us. The greatest moral issue in front of us today is whether we will preserve this wonderful experiment and create an opportunity, through hard work and sacrifice, so that the generations that are to come will have the same benefit from it that we have had. So it may turn into a partisan debate, but that is not my goal. It needs to be a legitimate, intellectual debate about the value of being efficient, the value of doing the hard work of making choices that are of the highest priority, and eliminating those things that, although they might be good, are less good in favor of things that are absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, in my almost 5\1/2\ years in the Senate, my side rarely does that, and neither does the other side.

How do we get out of the problem we have? How do we get out of the gridlock? How do we get out of the anger? How do we then focus on what the real problem, the real danger to the undermining of America is? The real danger to the undermining of America is the fact that we have a government that is entirely too big; the only thing it is effective and efficient at is wasting money; that we can't afford the Government we have today; that we continue to borrow money we don't have

to pay for things we don't absolutely need. How do we get out of that?

I recognize the debate. Unfortunately, I had a drafting error in what I intended to offer so we are offering pay-fors from what I think is not necessarily the best source, but it is better than not paying for it. There is $100 billion in unobligated balances sitting at the agencies in this country. It has already been used to pay for certain things we have already voted on. Nobody would feel the pinch if we did it that way.

I would be inclined to ask for a unanimous consent, but I will not do that until I am sure the other side will not object to it, to have a change in the paperwork in mine from what I originally intended but, because of a drafting error, I cannot use. But nevertheless, the legitimate debate is whether we borrow and steal from our kids or we get out of town and send the bill to our kids for something we are going to consume today.

There is a disease that is called consumption--it is syphilis. It is consumption because it consumes you. We have a disease similar to that. Our disease actions in Congress are consuming away the opportunity of America, much of it because we lack perspective but most of it because we lack the will to make the difficult choices that are in front of us. I wonder--actually, I am sometimes astonished--why people do not go home from here at night tremendously concerned about our future, enough so that it causes us to come together to do the best, right thing for America. Is the best, right thing for America to borrow this $9.2 billion? Is that the best, right thing for America? Or would it be that we eliminate programs that are not nearly as effective or lessen programs that are not nearly as effective as these are going to be for those people who are depending on us today? Not just the best, right thing in the short term, because another disease that plagues us is we fail to consider the long term oftentimes--not all the time. But we become short-term thinkers, thinking about, where is the political advantage? How do I look good? How do I accomplish what I want to accomplish for me or my State? I think it is important that we understand there is no State in this country that can be healthy if our country is not healthy--if the country isn't economically healthy, if it is not socially healthy. If it is not, then we have not done our job.

My apologies to the leader for putting him in this position. It is with a very intended sense of commitment that I want us to try to pay for this. I understand there is disagreement in that regard, but I look forward to trying to solve this problem, and if we can, I look forward to having the debate as it goes forward.

I yield to the majority leader.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Reserving the right to object, I wish to ask the chairman of the committee a question.

Is this bill you have just called up and asked unanimous consent to move forward on paid for?

Given that fact, as I stated in my earlier speech, I object.

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

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

I assure my colleagues that----

Madam President, while the Senator from New York is here, I might go over 5 minutes to 6 minutes or 7 minutes. I wonder if he will object and modify his request.

Madam President, I wish to spend a short period of time, and hopefully it will not even be 5 minutes.

What we have seen on the floor this afternoon is a motion to accomplish what the chairman of the Finance Committee wanted us to accomplish, without adding to the debt. We did not reach agreement on that motion. It was tabled. Then what we saw was a motion to proceed to take care of these issues by adding $9.2 billion to the debt. That is the real debate: are we going to pay for what we do? There is not an agreement to move forward and pay for it, and there is not an agreement to move forward and not pay for it.

There is a process here called cloture, which means that by Wednesday, if all time is consumed, this problem would be solved and it would be dealt with. It is unfortunate that the potential is that we may go home and not deal with this issue, having us vote against tabling a motion to supply these needed priorities but also making sure we do not add to the debt as we do it.

I look forward to the rest of the afternoon. I will not consume any additional time but will note that I do not care how we pay for it as long as it is legitimate, as long as we do not add to our kids' debt. I am hoping and willing to negotiate on any area of waste in the Federal Government that we can eliminate to pay for it. We cannot pay for part of it; we need to pay for all of it because we violate the principle of stealing from our kids.

I advise the Senator from Alabama that we have unanimous consent and I cannot break off, and the Senator from North Dakota will be recognized after I yield the floor, so I cannot in good conscience yield to the Senator from Alabama.

Madam President, I yield back the remainder of my time.

Madam President, under this scenario, we will pass this bill and add to the debt. Because of that, I object.

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

I think we had an agreement with the majority whip that

some unanimous consent requests would come in; is that correct? I will be happy to yield out of our time to the majority whip.

Reserving the right to object, it is my understanding if we were to do that we would add $9.2 billion to the debt. I am wondering if that is correct. The same unanimous consent request was asked earlier today, and the head of the Finance Committee said it would add $9.2 billion to the debt. So given the fact that it will add to the debt rather than us making choices, I object.

I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Alabama.

I yield 7\1/2\ minutes to the Senator from Nebraska.

I continue to yield.

I will consume the remainder of our time.

I thank Senator Johanns and Senator Sessions for being here.

We have heard the word ``emergency.'' The emergency that is in front of us is, we are a boat upside down fiscally, and there has to be a set of competing priorities for how we right that boat. But the No. 1 way we do not right the boat is to continue to add to the debt when we have programs that are not working and are wasting money, that are consuming precious resources we need to spend in other areas.

I am particularly interested in the very fast revisionist history that has been presented by the Senator from Michigan.

Let me tell you what happened here today. What happened here today was that a bill was offered and a motion to proceed on a bill that would accomplish this was totally paid for. That motion was tabled, with all of the Republican Senators voting against that, and some Democrats. We worked, through the next couple of hours, negotiating with the majority leader, with great help from Senator Durbin, the senior Senator from Michigan, and a compromise was reached that we would, in fact, make sure no interruption would happen over the next 2 weeks to those who are dependent on unemployment insurance. That was communicated to the House of Representatives and the majority there, and it was rejected.

Then the final thing that happened is we had an adjournment resolution, for which everyone on our side of the aisle voted against to stay here. Now, that probably was not a truly sincere vote. I would put that out to my colleagues. But the fact is, the Senate does not have to go home. And the reflection for this not passing should not fall on the Senate; it should fall on the fact that the Senate came together and agreed on a solution that was not acceptable to the leadership in the House of Representatives.

So if there is a problem with what we have done today, it is that when we compromised in the Senate, the House would not take it. And we did compromise. We compromised on spending. We compromised on time. We compromised on making sure the people who needed to have this extension were going to get it.

I started out the debate earlier today on the basis of, where are we going in our country and what is our problem? Our problem is that we are drowning in debt, that our foreign policy is affected by it today, our ability to borrow is affected by it, and the manipulation of our ability to stabilize our own economy is affected by it. But, most importantly, what we do today has dramatic impact on those who know us.

It is unfortunate that we did not work out a deal tonight. So we are going to have a week of exposure for people who actually need the help. It is actually going to be harder on the bureaucrats to handle this. But it did not happen.

But I think the bigger question is, Should we just lay down and add more money to the debt because we could not get agreement across the Capitol? And so what we are going to do, when we come back, the day after we get back, we are going to have a cloture vote, which I think will be very difficult to achieve, but it may be achieved, because the same principle is going to lie here.

With over $300 billion worth of waste, fraud, and duplication in the Federal budget every year, there are many of us who believe sincerely that it is time to stop spending money on lower priorities, time to stop calling things an emergency when we actually have the money in waste and fraud and duplication that we can use to pay for this.

We needed to start somewhere. The unfortunate aspect that we did not accomplish that this evening means some people will suffer. But I want you to contrast that with what the suffering is going to be in 2019 within our country when we have double-digit interest rates because we can no longer maintain our borrowing; when we are, in the next 9 years, going to pay $5.6 trillion in interest on $9.8 trillion we are going to borrow. Of that $9.8 trillion, $5.6 trillion is going to be interest payments.

What is coming is a tsunami to our country. So I feel a failure tonight because I could not accomplish both goals, both protecting our children and their future opportunity and taking care of those who need us right now. But the principle is still there.

We have to, in fact, start making tough choices. If we learn to do that together, the country benefits. And the future of our children is at hand. But we can no longer make the decision that we steal from our children to take care of things we are responsible for today. And I understand the resistance to that, but the fact is, our future depends on us starting today. It does not matter if you are liberal in philosophy or conservative in philosophy, the economics will be borne home to everyone. It has to stop. And we have to start with us.

I appreciate the congeniality of my friend from Illinois. Tough week for us all--probably more tough for us than you. I congratulate you on your victory on the yearlong battle with a difference in philosophy on how we fix health care. But I know that 20 years from now, the Senator from Illinois and I will suffer the same pain if our kids are diminished by our lack of action here. So I will say, let's let it not be so. Let's let it not be so. Let's start making hard choices. Let's start doing what is in the best long-term interests of our country.

With that, I yield back a minute of our time to the Senator from Illinois.

I thank the Senator for his question. If you look at Thomson Reuters and several others who have studied the health care field, the estimate for defensive medicine costs is $250 billion a year. It is not just that we order tests that protect us from frivolous lawsuits, but those tests have consequences. Some of those tests actually hurt patients or expose them to radiation or, in fact, limit our ability

to do what is best for the patient because we are more interested in protecting ourselves.

I think there are two reasons. One is because there is large support of those who wrote this legislation by those who benefit from suing doctors. That is pretty straightforward. And the doctor's only defense is to order tests which they need but which the patient doesn't necessarily need. The second is because they couldn't get--or wouldn't put it in the bill because they knew it would pass and the American people would agree with it. You know, it is beyond me.

But let me go to the point of this current amendment. I have delivered somewhere over 4,000 babies, and 2,000 of those were Medicaid babies. Over half the babies I have delivered in my life I have cared for through Medicaid. The State of Oklahoma just cut, in February or March, Medicaid reimbursements 3 percent. They are going to cut it another 8 percent. Forty percent of the primary care doctors don't see Medicaid patients because the price that is paid for the coverage doesn't cover the cost, let alone any margin. It doesn't cover the cost of nurses, the rent, the malpractice, and everything else.

The second point is, of the specialists who are available, 65 percent of the specialists in this country won't see Medicaid patients. So when I am taking care of Medicaid patients, I have trouble finding somebody better than me in a specialized area to care for my patients.

What is the other thing we know about Medicaid? Even if you normalize for social factors, their outcomes are worse. The cost in terms of the number of procedures, the failure of therapeutics--all are worse.

So why is this a good idea? It is not just a political stunt. If Members of Congress are enrolled in Medicaid, the first thing that is going to happen is Medicaid and reimbursements are going to go up so that the availability of the finest and the best and the brightest in this country is available to Members of Congress. So it is not just a stunt to say we put our membership in Medicaid; it is a very important ulterior motive to improve Medicaid.

Think about it. If you are one of the 16 million people who are going to get health care under Medicaid, supposedly, in this bill--and I doubt that seriously, simply because we are going to see a marked decrease of 50 or 60 percent of doctors who won't see them--think about what is going to happen: You are not going to be able to find a doctor. You may have coverage, but you won't be able to get anybody to care for you. Is that coverage? Is that care? Is that prevention? Is that management of chronic disease? No. None of that will happen.

So the whole idea of placing us in a leadership position into Medicaid is so that we will lead and fix it and make it what it should be. There is only one health care system worse in America than Medicaid, and that is the Indian Health Service. That is the only one that is worse. Everything else outside of those two programs is better. So why would we consign 16 million Americans to a health care program that is failing today? So the way to fix that is to put us into it. And I guarantee you, the self-interests of the Members of Congress will fix Medicaid and make it what it should be.

With that, I yield back to the original author of the amendment.

I thank the Senator from New Hampshire.

As I contemplate what is happening at 62 years of age and looking back through my life, this is undoubtedly the greatest assault on liberty this country has ever had. It is not direct; it is indirect. But it is what the Senator from New Hampshire talked about: we are going to decide for you what you get.

What the American people still don't understand is there are three areas in this bill that in the next 5 years will put the government in charge of everybody's health care--what you can have, what you can't have, and who can give it to you. That is what is coming. So if you are a caregiver or you are a patient, you might think long and hard about the three provisions in this bill that are going to do that: a Medicare advisory commission, the cost-effectiveness comparative effectiveness panel, and the U.S. preventative task force panel. All of those are going to carry the force of law, and it will not just apply to government-run plans. If you have private insurance with your employer today, you are going to be told what treatments you can have because some group of bureaucracies in Washington are going to decide that. That is what is in this bill.

The Senator from New Hampshire mentioned several claims that have been made.

I ask unanimous consent to temporarily set aside the pending motions and amendments so I may offer an amendment which is at the desk, No. 3556.

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

This is a constructive amendment that saves millions and millions of dollars in Medicaid. The fraud in Medicaid prescriptions is out of this world. It can be fixed. This amendment will prohibit prescriptions for recreational drugs for rapists and child molesters. Nobody can disagree with that. It is not in the bill. It is the current state. But if this bill goes through without this amendment, your tax dollars are going to be paying for Viagra for child molesters. That is what is going to happen. There is an Executive order that this will override. The bill overrides the Executive order. So there is no prohibition in the bill for this at this time.

A Government Accountability Office audit of Medicaid found 65,000 instances of improper prescriptions costing $65 million over the last 2 years, including thousands of prescriptions written for dead patients by people prescribing and posing as doctors. The audit focused on 10 types of frequently abused prescription drugs in just 5 States, which means this audit, which is just over 5 States, multiply by at least 10, and you get $650 million worth of fraud in prescriptions in Medicaid alone. We are not going to address that.

Sixty-five doctors or pharmacists were banned from Medicaid for writing or filling prescriptions or illegally selling drugs--but just in those five States.

About 1,800 prescriptions were written for dead patients and 1,200 prescriptions were ``written'' by dead doctors--just in those five States.

This amendment would direct the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to enact the GAO recommendations to prevent and eliminate these fraudulent prescriptions. Specifically, it would direct CMS to establish a fraud prevention system for the Medicaid Program and issue guidance for States to prevent the processing of claims of all prescribing providers and dispensing pharmacies debarred from Federal contracts or excluded from the Medicare and Medicaid programs; ensure that drug utilization review and restricted recipient program requirements adequately identify and prevent doctor ``shopping'' and other abuses of controlled substances; develop a claims processing system to identify both duplicate enrollments and deaths of Medicaid beneficiaries and prevent the approval of fraudulent claims.

For years, the Federal Government had required States to provide prescriptions for Viagra and other impotence drugs to Medicaid patients, including to convicted sex offenders, child molesters, and rapists. States had provided the coverage based on a 1998 letter from the Clinton administration. As a result of that, an Executive order was issued in 2005, which this bill, if

unamended, will reverse. Mr. President, 800 convicted sex offenders in 14 States received Medicaid-funded prescription drugs for erectile dysfunction. That is according to a 2005 survey.

The predators' victims have been as young as 2 years old. So we have convicted sex offenders, rapists, and child molesters who were taking Federal tax dollars and buying a drug so they can act again.

In Florida, 218 cases; New York, 198 cases; Texas, 191 cases, and it goes down the list.

This amendment would prohibit the new health care exchanges from providing coverage of ED drugs to convicted child molesters and convicted rapists. It is pretty simple.

The claims that are made on this bill are outlandish. As somebody who has practiced medicine for 27 years, 50 percent of my patients were Medicaid patients. What you are going to do if you do not fix some of the things in this bill is destroy the best doctor-patient relationships in the world. That is what you are going to do.

You are going to put 16 million people into a failing Medicaid system that the States cannot afford. Almost every State is cutting Medicaid reimbursement. At this time, only 40 percent of the doctors in the specialties will see Medicaid patients. It is going to go to 20 percent. So we are going to put 16 million people in a system, and then they are not going to be able to find a doctor. Because of the costs, in my own State, we are going to have an 11-percent net reduction in Medicaid reimbursements, which is only 75 percent of Medicare.

What do you think is going to happen in all the States in the country when the Medicaid reimbursement goes down and we add 16 million new people to Medicaid? You are going to call it care. You are going to rub your shoulder, rub that medal on your shoulder, and say: Oh, we fixed health care. You are going to promise them they are going to have care, but they are not going to have care. They are going to have a card, but they will have no care. We are going to have Indian Health Service-type care in Medicaid because nobody is going to be there to care for them.

The claims under this bill keep me sleepless at night--not because of Washington but because of those 10,000 Medicaid patients I have taken care of through my career for whom I know you are going to destroy what care is left for them. You can claim otherwise, but the facts are going to prove you wrong. We are seeing it in every State in the country right now--the cuts to Medicaid reimbursements.

So at least you ought to help save $650 million a year by getting rid of fraudulent prescriptions, eliminating prescriptions for convicted child molesters for erectile dysfunction, and recreational uses with drugs such as Viagra. The American people do not want to pay for that.

To vote against this amendment, to not fix something that is very obvious, is criminal--it is not just not right, it is an active aid to help those who would hurt our children.

I yield to the minority whip.

Mr. President, what needs to be fixed in this bill is a whole lot more than that, but this is a great attempt to try to solve a problem.

Let me describe a scenario, what is getting ready to happen. Every State is cutting Medicaid reimbursement. We are going to add 16 million people to Medicaid. We cannot get them all seen now. Then we have a doctor cut that is coming to 21 percent for people who are under Medicare. What is going to happen? What do you think the average physician in this country is going to do? I can tell you that they are going to do three things: Fewer will see Medicaid patients so there will be fewer doctors taking Medicaid at the time we increase the enrollment by 50 percent. That is No. 1.

No. 2, fewer doctors are going to take Medicare as we have this ballooning increase of baby boomers going into Medicare.

No. 3--and this is probably more important than anything--we are going to see a large percentage of doctors, with this bill passed with no continuity as to how they are ever going to get funded under Medicare, quit. They are going to quit. They can take their training, their effort, their education and knowledge and apply it in some other field of endeavor and not have to live with the hassle of a 21-percent cut hanging over their head.

Even if we fix it for 3 years, 3 years from now the same problem is going to come up, except it is going to be worse. So there is no fix in it. There is an unrecognized $300 billion to get doctors even, let alone take away the cut--no increase--with this amendment. My hope would be we would fix this situation for 3 years.

They are not going to find a doctor, and that is the whole problem. Whatever we see in the urban areas now, multiply it tenfold in the rural areas. We are going to increase eligibility for Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty level, we are going to add 16 million people to a system that is not handling the people who are in it today, so we are going to promise them: Here is your Medicaid.

Now where is the care? It is not going to be there. There is not the available physicians in this country to care for 16 million new Medicaid patients.

If we, in fact, do not fix long term the SGR, physicians are going to do one of two things. They are either going to completely quit seeing Medicaid and Medicare patients or they are going to retire. Quite frankly, physicians my age who are still practicing are not doing it for the money; they are doing it because they love the patients. But they are going to be forced to quit because they will not even be able to pay their overhead to care for those patients.

Will the Senator yield for a second?

What it is going to do is exacerbate the cost shifting going on with Medicare and Medicaid right now, which means insurance rates for everybody else in the country are going to go up.

All I will tell you is, the best guess of CBO--wonderful people, but they can only make decisions within the parameters they are given. There is no question private insurance, individual and family insurance, is going to go up, but everybody else's is because we are going to increase the trend of cost shifting from government programs to the private sector.

You are going to end up with three taxes. You will pay income taxes, you will pay a Medicare tax, and then you will pay a tax on your insurance--actually, you will pay four--and then you are going to pay higher health insurance premiums because the government does not cover the cost.

That is everybody in this country who has private insurance, either through their employer or the individual market.

Yes, they will pay the fee. They will pay the tax and say it is easier. Consequently, the young people in our country, because we do not have a big enough payment under the ``individual mandate,'' are going to say it is smarter for me to save my money, pay the fine, and not get insurance because when I get sick, I can get it. You are going to get what is called adverse selection, which is even going to drive the rates up further. Anybody 40 or older, watch out, your health insurance rates are getting ready to bloom.

That is correct.

And people who are not necessarily getting a subsidy.

What happens to all this? What is the ultimate? The ultimate is failure of the insurance market.

That is the goal, so the government can control it all. I yield back.

If I may, I would like to add one other thing here. Think about it. We are talking about the cuts that are set to go. But since there is no tort reform in this bill, we spend $250 billion on defensive medicine and liability costs continue to rise. You could bring them back whole, but if you give them no increase, they are still going to quit seeing Medicare patients.

One other point I would like to make is with the student loan program being totally taken over by the government, 31,800 people in this country this July will lose their jobs. So we are going to lose 31,800 jobs in the private sector, but we will add 16,500 jobs at the IRS. I don't think anybody in America would like to see that happen.

Mr. President, this amendment saves $6.5 billion over the next 10 years for what it does on fraudulent Medicaid prescriptions-- $6.5 billion--$650 million a year on fraudulent prescriptions. It also creates a prohibition so that erectile dysfunction drugs are not paid for by the American taxpayers to convicted rapists, those convicted of sexual assault, and pedophiles in this country.

You can say a lot of things about a lot of amendments. This is not a game amendment; it actually saves money. All the States are struggling with Medicaid. This is a way to spread $650 million a year to the States.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, do I have time remaining?

I would make the following point: The vast majority of Americans do not want their taxpayer dollars paying for this kind of drug for those kind of people.

Reserving the right to object.

We got this 1\1/2\ minutes ago to see the language. You have an amendment on the floor that actually accomplishes everything you want to do. Why are we doing this? Because you do not want to mess up a package that is clean. It has every application, the Burr amendment, to this.

With that, and the fact that this is exactly the kind of shenanigans the American people do not want, I object.

Madam President, I rise to bring attention to the crucial role of health care professionals in providing quality health care across our Nation. Other than being a father, grandfather, and husband nothing has been more personally satisfying for me than meeting and caring for patients. As a practicing physician I have seen firsthand the importance of each and every health care practitioner--not just doctors and nurses--in meeting this country's diverse health care needs. I am thankful for the contribution that dedicated health professionals have made to not just my medical practice, but all of our communities.

These professionals are found not only in hospitals and doctor's offices, but everywhere from local schools to athletic training clinics, long-term care facilities to rehabilitation centers, and providing loving care in hospices and private homes. There are more than 100 distinct allied health professions including respiratory therapists, music therapists, athletic trainers, clinical laboratory scientists, radiologic technologists, medical assistants and many others. They provide expert care in a number of therapeutic, diagnostic and preventive services in a multitude of settings. These professionals practice expertise in disease prevention and control, dietary and nutritional services, mental and physical health promotion, rehabilitation, and health systems management. Approximately 6 million individuals are currently serving in allied health professionals, representing about 60 percent of the healthcare workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 10 of the 20 fastest growing occupations for 2008--2018 are in the health professions.

As Congress continues to engage in a national debate on health care, I have consistently been offering patient-centered solutions that would allow individuals to access care tailored to their individual needs. Consumer choice, not government coercion, has made goods and services that were once scarce affordable and accessible. For instance, in the past 18 months the number of unique iPhone applications available to consumers has gone from 500 to more than 140,000--with 3 billion applications downloaded. If patients were empowered to take control of their health care spending, it would enable health care professionals to more freely exercise their immense talents--no

doubt putting Apple and the iPhone to shame.

Regardless of the outcome of the health care debate, these health care professionals will continue to make a difference in their patients' lives. I want to personally thank, and express my support for, these vital health care professionals. Our system could not function without their tireless efforts. I urge my colleagues to join me in recognizing this important group of individuals.

Mr. President, I understand the Senator from Virginia is going to speak now, and I ask unanimous consent that when he finishes, I be given 45 minutes at the completion of his time.

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

Mr. President, I compliment my colleague from Virginia. I am a cosponsor of his amendment. I think it is a very noble attempt to try to put better hands on the stimulus.

It is interesting to note that when we had the first hearing with the IG who is overseeing the stimulus, he said, regrettably, $50 billion would be wasted; that is, $50 billion out of $867 billion--actually, some $940 billion--was going to be wasted. We started with the assumption that about 6 or 7 percent of this money was going to be defrauded. I congratulate my colleague because some of the steps he is talking about in his amendment will actually lessen that, hopefully. I agree with him.

It is exciting for me to see a bipartisan attempt to start bringing teeth into the laws we pass, not toward the American public but toward the agencies that administer the funds.

I congratulate him. I think he has a good amendment. I think we will have a great vote on it.