Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013 - Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Madam President, at long last today we have received the President's budget. It is several weeks actually months--overdue. It was supposed to have been out on February 4. It is generally used to steer or guide the budget debate we have in Washington, DC. In this case, it is going to be a reaction to. It is going to be an after-the-fact discussion of the budget, as the House and the Senate have both passed theirs; the Senate for the first time in 4 years and the House has passed their budget every year on time. One would wish the President's budget would serve as a bridge between the House and the Senate. In this point of the process it is so much after the fact and late in the game the President's budget has come to us.
Regrettably, much of the President's budget is going to rely on the same formula the Senate Democratic budget did, which is to double down, to increase spending, significantly and substantially raise taxes, and add massive amounts to the debt. It never balances.
The budget which was passed by the House of Representatives did balance. It balanced in 10 years.
The budget which was passed by the Senate did not balance in 10 years. It never balanced. There was a real contrast in terms of trying to get to a balanced budget over a period of time, knowing full well it will not happen overnight. We got into a very big hole over a number of years, and it will take us a while to get out.
Nevertheless, the House budget did balance in a 10-year window and 10-year timeframe. The Senate Democratic budget never balances, nor does the budget we received this morning from the President.
For a lot of reasons this budget debate is important, not the least of which is it is a vision, a blueprint for the future of the country. This is true for each of the respective parties in the Congress, as well as the President, about where they wish to lead the country.
I mentioned yesterday on the Senate floor I thought the basic criteria which should be used to evaluate a budget, the question which should be asked is, What will this budget do to grow the economy, create jobs, and increase the take-home pay of middle-class Americans? What can we do, in other words, in terms of a budget process here and a budget itself which actually takes us in a direction which would enable more Americans to work and enable the economy to grow and expand again. This would make these fiscal issues look much smaller by comparison.
Last week we received employment data statistics which were due. The unemployment rate as a percentage actually dropped to 6.7 percent but only because another half million people quit looking for work. If we look at the real unemployment rate--which is to include the people who actually have stopped looking for work, people who are working part-time because they can't find full-time employment--the actual unemployment rate is 13.8 percent. This is 21.7 million Americans. This is how many people who are either out of work, quit looking for work, or are looking for work part-time because they simply can't find full-time employment. This is a great number of people.
This is a big part of our economy. A lot of folks are out of the workforce today who couldn't find jobs. Many have actually just given up looking for jobs.
What this has done, because there are so many Americans who have given up looking for jobs out of frustration, is it has lowered the labor participation rate to a rate we haven't seen, literally, since 1979. The last time the labor participation rate was at the low level we saw in the month of March, 63.3 percent, was 1979.
In fact, if we had a labor participation rate which was equal to what it was when the President took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate today would not be 7.6 percent, it would be 11 percent. This is how many people have quit looking for work as a result of this slow and sluggish economy.
The President's budget, one would hope, would try to answer in an affirmative way the question: Does this grow the economy? Does this create jobs? Does this increase the take-home pay of working Americans?
Unfortunately, rather than growing the economy, the President's budget, instead, grows the government. Unfortunately, this is what we have seen in the budget which was passed by the Senate a couple of weeks ago.
I say this simply because I think there are two very different ideas about how to solve the fiscal crisis we face. One includes expanding and growing government, raising taxes, and adding even more to the debt. One really focuses on the issue which plagues our fiscal house in Washington, DC: not that we tax too little but we spend too much. It goes after the spending problem we have in Washington, DC, the addiction to spending. We have seen this as the percentage of our economy grow consistently over the last several years since this President has been in office.
The House budget recognized this and does balance in 10 years. It does it without increasing taxes. The House of Representatives actually produced a budget which balances in 10 years and doesn't raise taxes. In fact, it calls for tax
reform. Many of us believe this would do wonders in terms of unleashing economic growth in this country, lowering rates, reducing rates, and broadening the base. It also takes on what really drives Federal spending, what really contributes to the debt crisis we have in this country, its runaway spending.
This is true for particular areas of the budget, the areas we call mandatory spending, the part of the budget which is on autopilot. It includes entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Currently, this includes about three-fifths of all Federal spending. At the end of the 10-year window it will represent about 91 percent of all Federal spending. That is how fast those programs are growing--two to three times the rate of inflation.
The President's budget doesn't do anything significant or meaningful to address that crisis. It is flatout serious.
Having said that, there were some what I would call incremental steps taken. I call them baby steps. The President agreed in his budget to address the issue of chained CPI, which recalculates the formula under which certain government programs are calculated. It achieves a certain level of savings over time.
They assume some savings in Medicare, most of which, again, are by reducing payments to providers. We have already cut payments to providers to the point many physicians and other health care providers these days are saying they are not going to serve Medicare or Medicaid patients because we keep cutting those reimbursements.
This is not the way to save and protect these programs for future generations. We must restructure or reform these programs in a way which aligns those programs with the future demographics of this country. Unfortunately, the President's budget fails on that account.
In terms of the direction these various budgets are headed, the Senate's Democratic budget, because it didn't balance in 10 years, nor does the President's, both use similar assumptions about spending. If we look at the new debt which is piled up by the President's budget, he adds $8.2 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
The Senate Democratic budget added $7.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Both have net spending increases. The spending amount over the 10-year period in both the President's budget proposal and the Senate Democratic proposal is on the order of $46.5 trillion. This is the amount of money, the amount of taxpayer money, the Federal Government would spend over the next decade under the budgets proposed by the Senate and House Democrats.
The House budget, passed largely by the House Republicans, spends about $5 trillion less than that over the same time period. How does it do that? It does so by reducing the rate of growth of Federal spending. If we limit the rate of growth in Federal spending to 3.4 percent, as opposed to a 4.6-percent number in the Senate Democratic budget or the 5.2 percent-increase in mandatory spending called for in the President's budget, we may achieve significant savings over a period of time.
This is not cutting government but simply slowing the rate of growth by growing government at a slower rate and moving it back into a more reasonable level. This would actually achieve $5 trillion in savings over the next decade in terms of what the Federal Government was spending. This is the way the House approached their budget.
What the Senate Democrats and the President have both done is called for massive new tax increases. The only deficit reduction which will occur under the President's budget will be cut because of tax increases. He wipes out the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts which were in place as a result of sequester.
He replaces those and achieves somewhere on the order of $600 billion in deficit reduction. This deficit reduction would be entirely accomplished by tax increases, raising taxes yet again after we put in place tax increases on the fiscal cliff on January 1. The President received a huge tax increase, something he had been wanting for for some time, $620 billion in new taxes. Add this to the more than $1 trillion in new taxes which are in the ObamaCare bill passed a couple of years ago and this President, on his watch, has signed into law more than $1.7 trillion in new taxes.
This is not a revenue problem, this is a spending problem. What we need to be focused on is what do we need to do to rein in out-of-control Federal spending. How are we going to reform and restructure these programs in a way which protects and saves them, not only for people who depend upon them today but for those who will need them in the future. This is really the question before the House.
Today we receive the President's budget. It will be the latest point at which the President has submitted a budget. Literally, it has been 100 years, let's put it that way. Around the early 1900s was the last time the President submitted a budget to this Congress at this late date.
Again, having already acted in the House and Senate, I am not sure what meaning it has other than to perhaps give the President the luxury to be able to say he actually at least presented a budget. But on most of the criteria we ought to be looking at, in terms of evaluating this budget, that I mentioned earlier, it is not a serious attempt. It doesn't do anything to rein in these out-of-control programs that are growing at two to three times the rate of inflation, it has a massive tax increase, a $1 trillion tax increase on top of the $1.7 trillion in new taxes the President has already signed into law, and it adds $8.2 trillion to the debt over the next decade. So for that reason I think it fails the fundamental test of fiscal responsibility, but more important perhaps even than that, it fails to answer the question I posed earlier, which was: Does the President's budget grow the economy, does it create jobs, and does it increase take-home pay for middle-income Americans? The answer to that is simply no.
When you are raising taxes consistently--raising taxes on the people who create the jobs in our economy--it makes the economy grow at a slower rate, we have more sluggish growth, which is what we have seen now for the past several years. When we are growing at 1 1/2 to 2 percent as opposed to 3 to 4 percent, it makes a huge difference in terms of the number of people in this country who are employed, the number of jobs that are created, and, obviously, it makes a huge difference in terms of the fiscal imbalance, because when the economy is growing at a faster rate, it means more people are working and investing and, therefore, making money and paying taxes. So tax revenues go up when the economy is growing and expanding.
That ought to be the goal. That ought to be our goal--not only to get those 21.7 million Americans who are out of work back to work but also to get the fiscal imbalance we face in a more manageable place. If we are going to get our fiscal house in order, we have to do those two things: We have to restrain Federal spending and we have to put policies in place that grow the economy.
There is a relationship between the two. It has been well documented, well studied, well researched that when we have spending that is out of control, when we have a debt as a percentage of our GDP that exceeds a certain level, it harms economic growth. It reduces the amount the economy grows on an annual basis and, in so doing, also reduces the number of jobs created. So this is the question that should be asked. Again, when we compare or stack up the President's budget against that question--does it grow the economy, does it create jobs, does it increase the take-home pay for middle-class Americans--the answer is simply no.
I would compare again the budget that was passed by both the House and Senate. In the case of the Senate, a study was done that suggested it would cost 800,000 jobs a year, again because of the tax increases that are included and the higher level of Federal spending. Simply raising taxes to fuel yet more Federal spending does nothing to grow the private economy. What we want to see is a smaller Federal economy and a bigger private economy where the real good-paying jobs are created. Clearly, this budget relies heavily--doubles down on Federal spending, adds more to the debt, doesn't achieve balance, increases taxes by $1 trillion, and takes us in absolutely the wrong direction.
I hope before this is all said and done, the House of Representatives and the Senate--both of which have passed budgets and now that we have the President's budget--can somehow sit down together and figure out how we get a proposal that would actually deal with out-of-control spending and would focus on growing the economy, creating jobs, and increasing the take-home pay for middle-class Americans. That ought to be the criteria we use.
I would hope before this is all said and done, people in this city would realize we don't have a taxing problem. The problem isn't that we tax too little, it is that we spend too much, and that is what needs to be addressed. I hope we can reconcile these budgets, but it will require the President to be engaged on a level he hasn't demonstrated so far. I hope he gets to what this real issue is and wants to get serious about reining in out-of-control government spending and we can make some headway yet. I have not lost hope. There were some incremental gains, some baby steps the President took in this, but it is far short of what needs to be done to get our economy back on track and get government spending back under control.
I yield the floor.
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