The Debt Limit

Floor Speech

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, later today, we will get a chance--another chance, I should say--to vote to raise the debt limit.

My understanding is, the House of Representatives has delayed the time at which they are going to vote on their plan, the so-called Boehner plan. But at some point I suspect that vote will move forward and we will end up receiving that legislation from the House of Representatives, and we will have an opportunity to act on that as well.

It will be the second bill we will vote on in the Senate that would raise the debt limit. The first one was the cut, cap, and balance plan that was first approved by the House before being sent to the Senate over 1 week ago.

This was a three-pronged approach that would have required a downpayment on our deficits by immediately cutting spending. It would have put us on a path to reform entitlements and cut spending over the medium term by putting a cap on spending as a percentage of our economy. Finally, it would have made sure we do not keep adding to our debt by approving a debt limit increase after a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution was passed by Congress.

This was the Republicans' first choice as to how to deal with this crisis. Unfortunately, Senate Democrats killed this commonsense bill which had the support, according to a CNN poll, of 66 percent of Americans. So we did not have an opportunity to debate it, offer amendments or get an up-and-down vote on that legislation. In the interest of solving the problem before us, it was recognized that probably we would have to find another approach.

There have been a lot of observations made by the media and others that somehow the Republicans need to compromise more in this situation. My
only question would be: Compromise with whom? With themselves? Because they are the only ones out there who have put forward a plan. And, in fact, this current proposal that will come from the House of Representatives actually is a compromise. The spending reductions in that proposal are two-thirds of those that were proposed in the House budget that was passed by the House of Representatives earlier this year. So it still addresses the fundamental problem, and Speaker Boehner came up with a new plan that would cut spending by $915 billion and create a process to reduce the deficit by $1.8 trillion on top of that.

This is not a perfect plan. As I said, it is certainly not our first choice, but it is a plan that cuts spending more than it increases the debt limit, and it does it without raising taxes on job creators. In a little while the Boehner plan will hopefully join the cut, cap, and balance plan as the only plan which has passed a body of Congress.

Senate Democrats do not have a plan to cut spending more than they raise the debt limit. Senate Democrats do not have a plan that can pass a single House of Congress. Of course, this is more than the White House can say, because the White House does not have a plan, period. So when the Boehner plan comes up for a vote here in the Senate, hopefully sometime later this evening, I would encourage my colleagues from across the aisle to support this measure.

They have been speaking constantly about the need to raise the debt limit, and here is their chance to do so. All they have to do is vote for this bill and send it to the President for his signature and we can put this issue to rest for the time being. Then it puts a pathway in place for us to get, as I said before, to a debate about entitlement reform several months down the road.

I understand there are some concerns among my colleagues on the other side about how long it will be before we would need to increase the debt limit again. But if you look at the past 20 years or so, 72 percent of the time our debt limit increases have been for less than a year. So this increase is hardly out of the normal time range. If you think about it, almost 75 percent of the time--almost three-fourths of the time--we have raised the debt limit, we have done it for less than a year.

What we are talking about here would be something that would take us into next year, at which point we would have to have another vote on the debt limit as we come to a conclusion about the entitlement reform component or element of this particular legislation.

So this increase, as I said, is not out of the normal time range. Markets are not going to care about for how long we increase the debt limit. They simply care that we do not breach the debt limit and, more importantly, over the long term we lay out a long-term plan to cut the debt.

Many of us have spoken on the floor of the Senate in the past and indicated that the real crisis, the real issue before our country right now is not the debt limit, it is the debt. It is the fact that we are borrowing literally 40 cents out of every dollar that we spend here in Washington, DC, and we continue to pile up and accumulate massive amounts of debt that get passed on to future generations and put in great peril the economy of our country and our ability to create jobs. So a longer term increase is not needed to calm the markets.

But what this bill does not do is raise the debt limit past the elections. I think that is where the real rub comes in. Because the President has made it very clear, as have some of my colleagues, that this is one of their major concerns. They want to have a debt limit increase that gets us past the 2012 election. That is a political concern, it is not an economic concern.

But today it has arisen that these concerns are more than political, they are personal. You see, the White House is concerned that this would require Congress to approve another debt limit increase sometime in January, which they complain would ruin their Christmas vacation plans. I certainly do not want to ruin the President or anyone else's Christmas vacation plans, but I think it is a bit more important that we prevent our country from adding $9.5 trillion to the debt held by the public, as the President's budget would do. I think it is a bit more important that we prevent our country from being forced to implement severe austerity programs, such as they have had to do in Europe because of their inability to constrain spending. I think it is a bit more important that we reform entitlements so these important programs are around for our children and grandchildren.

Finally, I think it is a bit more important that we leave our country in better shape for our children than the one we received. This has been the American ethic. Each generation has sacrificed so that the next generation could have a better quality of life. Today we risk turning that tradition on its head. If we continue to run up debts and deficits such as those proposed, our children and grandchildren will have an astounding burden to pay off to our country's creditors. We do not have to leave them this burden.

We have proposed, as I said, the cut, cap, and balance plan, which would make great strides in reducing this debt burden. We will have, hopefully later today--if not today perhaps sometime tomorrow--in front of us the Boehner plan, which will make significant downpayments on these burdens.

What I would simply say is that we have consistently now put before this Senate different plans we have had a chance to vote on. We voted on the cut, cap, and balance plan. Unfortunately, it was a tabling motion, it was a procedural motion. It was not an up-and-down vote, because the leader did not want us to get on that legislation and have an opportunity to debate and amend it and ultimately vote on it. But we did have a vote on a tabling motion. Hopefully, we will get a vote on the Boehner plan which, as I said, hopefully will be in front of us in the not too distant future. But my point very simply is there has not been any effort put forward by our colleagues on the other side to, one, put forward a budget which we know now has been I think 820 days since the last time the Senate acted on a budget. You have to go back to April 29 of 2009. That was the last time the Senate voted on a budget.

It starts there. It starts there. That is where we set our priorities. That is where we determine how we are going to spend the people's tax dollars. So we have not had a budget. The House of Representatives passed a budget. They did it on schedule. They did it on time. As far as I know, there are no plans here to move a budget any time in the future.

Then we have the cut, cap, and balance plan that passed the House of Representatives, which was an attempt to deal with the debt limit increase, but do it in a way that forces us to focus on the real issue, which is spending reductions, spending reforms, puts in place a pathway to get a result on entitlement reform, forces a vote on a balanced budget amendment, which many of us think is a priority if we are going to get long-term spending under control, and then, hopefully later today, we are going to get a vote on the Boehner plan which will come over from the House of Representatives, which is yet another attempt to get the debt limit increased, but do it in a way that actually makes a dent in the long-term challenge facing this country, which again is not the debt limit, it is the debt.

That is the problem. That is fundamentally what we have to deal with. It is fundamentally a spending problem. Much has been made about a balanced approach. What does the other side mean when they say balanced? Usually it means we are going to take more of your money and spend it on more government. Many of us would support tax reform that would close tax loopholes, broaden the base, if you could lower the rates at the same time. I happen to believe that is important if we are going to get the economy growing again and creating jobs. I think you would see tremendous growth as a result of tax reform. But if you talk about raising taxes to pay for even more government, that is precisely the wrong approach. That is why we are in the mess we are in today, because we spend more than we take in. We have been doing it year over year. We have got to learn to live within our means and to quit spending money we do not have.

Many States have amendments in their constitutions that enable them
and force them and require them to do this every single year. It is time our Federal Government started operating in a way that makes fiscal sense. I think the American people understand very clearly what this is about. This is about spending. It is about getting Washington to live within its means, to quit borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar it spends, and to put this country on a path fiscally that will ensure we do not bankrupt the country for future generations, and that we get our economy back in a place where it can start growing and creating the jobs we need to get people in this country back to work.

I see the Senator from Utah. I expect he will have some remarks about this subject. There are many of us on this side, I know, who are anxious to vote and certainly are doing everything we can to facilitate this process where we deal with the crisis before us next week, but, importantly, do it in a way that addresses the fundamental issue here which is not the debt limit, it is the debt.

It is time Washington started living within its means, started to make sure we have got a pathway in place for not only cutting spending today but dealing with the long-term issue by putting a balanced budget amendment in our Constitution. I hope my colleagues will join us in this legislation that will come before us sometime we hope later today, and it will be yet another attempt to address this issue. I implore my colleagues here, I think we are going to get most of the Republicans to vote for this. I hope there will be some on the other side who will join us in this endeavor. It is too important to the future of this country not to.

I yield the floor.

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