Coronavirus
Floor Speech
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Mr. LEE. Madam President, the bill before the Senate this week is not really about COVID relief; it is about politics. Before this, COVID relief has not been a terribly partisan issue. In fact, we have passed 5 relief bills, each with at least 90 votes. That means they are overwhelmingly broad-based and bipartisan efforts. So if this one were to pass, it would be the first of those to have passed that has been highly controversial. Why? Because, in the first place, it borrows and spends another $1.9 trillion when there are still hundreds of billions of dollars of unspent relief money from past COVID-19 relief packages. The new spending authorizes money to go to projects in States and local governments, including many that may not even need it.
The fight against the pandemic has, of course, fundamentally changed in the months since this plan was first devised and proposed. It is already outdated. Now, as we are here, into the month of March, the circumstances have changed, yet the plan remains largely the same as it was. So it feels a little bit, to me, like we are fighting the last war using the last war's battle plan, leaving us unprepared for the battle actually in front of us.
This is a bill that will worsen our national debt and weaken our economy in the long run without even doing much to help small businesses and American families in the short term.
This is not without consequence. In fact, as the book by Drs. Reinhart and Rogoff, published nearly 10 years ago--a book known as ``This Time Is Different''--notes, once we get into this cycle, once we get accustomed to spending this much and acquiring this much of a debt- to-GDP ratio, we find ourselves in dire circumstances--circumstances in which it is even more difficult to raise the same revenue based on the same tax structure or even while tweaking that tax structure, it can be very difficult to pull out of the tailspin that could be produced when we start spending in sums this large and perpetuating a debt-to-GDP ratio that is, frankly, unsustainable.
This $1.9 trillion package has very, very little to do with COVID-19. In fact, only 1 percent of the spending in this bill will go toward accelerating vaccine distribution; just 5 percent is focused on public health. Instead, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, three times as much money will go toward partisan priorities that are ``not directly related to the current crisis.''
What are some of the examples of this type of spending? Well, we have $1.5 billion more set aside for Amtrak, which is itself already sitting on $1 billion of unspent bailout money. What this has to do with the virus and why the virus somehow justifies giving them an additional $1.5 billion when they are already sitting on $1 billion of still unspent bailout money is beyond my comprehension. There is $50 million in funding for environmental justice projects, also difficult to connect that up to COVID; $200 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services; $135 million for the National Endowment for the Arts; $135 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities; $86 billion in a pension bailout for private sector workers.
The list goes on and on, but you get the idea. You get money that goes to projects, as well as a significant amount to State and local governments. We will get back to that in a moment. When there is as much as $63 billion leftover in unspent funds, this money will not necessarily even help schools to reopen.
And $350 billion in aid goes to State and local governments, even though total losses to date have mostly been covered by the $360 billion that Congress has already provided in aid for State and local governments over the last year. While there is some disparity among and between the States and how they have responded to the COVID pandemic and how they fared as far as their revenues, State and local revenue has mostly recovered, and while 26 States saw general revenue decline, 21 States actually saw revenue gains. In fact, my home State of Utah, as well as some other States, is running surpluses. Utah's sacrifice and good governance should not go to bail out other profligate States to the tune of $350 billion.
I think about hard-working moms and dads in Utah, struggling to make ends meet while paying their Federal and State taxes. They are told over and over and over again that they have to be giving more. They are told that what they have spent and the time they have allotted--weeks or months out of every year just to pay their Federal tax alone--still somehow isn't enough, isn't nearly enough because, in addition to the money that they have worked so hard to earn and give to the Federal Government, there is so much more that has to be spent, like $1.5 billion going to Amtrak, even though it is already sitting on $1 billion of unspent bailout relief.
These same moms and dads throughout Utah are not pleased when they are made to understand that, in addition to bailing out Amtrak again when Amtrak is already sitting on this $1 billion in unspent bailout relief money, they are also going to have to bail out other States; they are going to have to bail out State and local governments that haven't been managed well, as Utah's government has. This isn't fair to them. This is a matter of fundamental fairness to them and to countless Americans, not only in Utah but in every State.
Some States still have unspent funding that they have gotten from previous COVID relief packages. California alone has $8 billion in unspent funding, and New York has up to $5 billion. In this bill, we are acting like States are facing a fiscal catastrophe that is specifically from COVID when they are not.
At the same time, we are acting like the unprecedented magnitude of Federal debt is a nonissue. It is not. We have got this situation exactly backward.
Look, any new relief funding just needs to be targeted, and it needs to be temporary, and it needs to be directly tied to COVID relief. This package is, instead, about fulfilling the political wish list of one political party over another and has very little, if anything, to do with the pandemic. It is offensive, and, yes, it is inappropriate for one political party--the political party that clings to the narrowest of margins of a majority in this body--to push its own political wish list onto an opportunity to provide COVID relief for the American people, and it would be equally inappropriate for Republicans to use it as an opportunity to push their own wish list.
Look, we haven't seen this before. We haven't seen anything like this before. We didn't, in the past, see any of the previous COVID relief packages pushed through reconciliation. There are a number of reasons for that, one of which was it is wrong. It is not an appropriate use of reconciliation. Another was, it wasn't necessary because we made it bipartisan, not just mildly bipartisan with a few straggler votes here or there but overwhelmingly so.
This one is different. I am not opposed to discussing what role government should play in providing actual relief from the pandemic. We can and should have that debate. I welcome it. I would love to have it right now. In fact, that is a question that I think merits its own debate. This bill is not about that, not anything close to that. It is riddled with poor economic reasoning and rank political favoritism. It will only worsen our debt and our economic health in the long run. It doesn't help America's small businesses and families in the short run. It doesn't do anything to materially advance the cause of getting our children back to school at a time when they have suffered so greatly, not only academically but socially and in so many other ways. That is where we ought to be focused.
This bill comes nowhere close to addressing that issue, and, instead, it directs itself in other directions that are not only helpful, but in many cases they are the opposite of that.
It is sad. It is disappointing. And on that basis, I can't support this bill but would urge my colleagues to figure out ways to make it better. We don't have to do it this way. It doesn't have to be a deeply partisan vote. We can still choose a different path. I, for one, hope we will.
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