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Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, as I begin, I want to talk about another subject here in a moment, but I also want to react to what the Senator from Illinois said with regard to the debt limit.
I think it is important to point out, as folks on the other side and the White House talk about the need for a ``clean debt limit''--in other words, a debt limit that increases the amount of borrowing without anything whatsoever attached to it--that in 7 of the last 10 debt limit debates, there were budgetary or policy items that were negotiated and attached--in 7 of the last 10 debt limits. Many of those were insisted upon by the Democrats at the time. In fact--I pointed this out yesterday--President Biden, when he was Vice President back in 2011, made statements that he couldn't understand how anybody could not understand the importance or the need to negotiate on a debt limit increase and other policy matters related, hopefully, to spending and debt.
It seems to me, at least, that a debt limit debate presents an opportunity to actually do something about the debt and to address the issue of spending. There have been a number of good suggestions made in a bill that has been sent over to us from the House of Representatives about how to do that--about how to save money, how to make government more efficient, reallocate, reprioritize how we spend money, and, hopefully, reduce the amount of debt that we actually have going forward and, perhaps, the need to again raise the debt limit.
It seems like every time we have this conversation, everybody laments the fact that we have to do this and that we have this huge debt. Well, one way to address that would be to actually have a conversation about what we might do to reduce the debt in the form of spending reforms and budgetary changes that could address both the spending and the debt issue. So 7 of the last 10 times, that has happened, and in many cases, it has been instigated by the Democrat leaders, including Senator Schumer.
One other observation about that--because I think it is important--is you talk about spending and debt. Think about just the absolute aggregate levels that we are now dealing with in terms of debt. I make this point because, back in 2010, the amount that we spent annually on interest on the debt was a little under $200 billion; and in 2022, last year, the amount that we spent on interest on the debt--in other words, just to finance the debt, to pay the interest on the amount of borrowing that we have in this country--was $475 billion. So, in that time period from 2010, we went from paying a little under $200 billion a year in interest on the debt to $475 billion a year in interest on the debt. That is a 142-percent increase. That is going to go up dramatically, as we all know, because interest rates are going up. So now the cost of borrowing is increasing dramatically. In fact, over the next 10 years, the estimate is that 50 cents out of every dollar that we borrow will go toward nothing but paying the interest on the debt.
So, when you are $31 trillion in the hole--$31 trillion in debt--it seems logical to me--and I think it does to most Americans because they have weighed in on this, if you believe any of the polls--to address the issue of the debt as you are raising the debt limit, which is precisely what the House leadership in the House of Representatives did when it passed a bill last week and sent it to the Senate for consideration, including a number of spending reforms that would reduce not only the amount of spending that we have but also the amount of debt significantly. It would reduce the amount of debt over that time period by about $500 billion. It is actually significantly higher than that--several trillion dollars over the next 10-year period. That is a significant amount of money. The amount of interest saved is about $500 billion. The total amount of savings on the debt is about $4.5 trillion.
So they are making an earnest effort at addressing what is a highly colossal problem for our country if we don't start reining it in and getting it under control. And I think it behooves the U.S. Senate to consider--and the President as well--what we might do to address spending and debt instead of declaring, as the Democrat leader did about the House bill, that it is dead on arrival in the Senate. There are a number of ideas in there that, I think, should be supported by both sides and that are meaningful in terms of what they do, obviously, by the amount that they would save.
But 50 cents out of every dollar borrowed over the course of the next 10 years--in each of the next 10 years--would be used for nothing more than to pay interest on the debt, which today--or as of last year, 2022--is already $475 billion each and every year. There are 55 percent of the American people, including 58 percent of Democrats, who think that, before we raise the debt limit, we ought to do something to put some restraints in place--some budgetary restraints--that control the amount of spending in this country and, therefore, the amount of deficit and debt that we rack up.
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