Fiscal Challenges

Floor Speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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