Biden Administration

Floor Speech

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

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

We have been on this pathway for decades. During the Reagan years, we talked about enlivening the economy, bringing taxes down, letting people keep more of their own resources. That worked. I think that still makes sense. It works in most States. It was driving the economy with that dynamic pre-COVID.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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