Spending

Floor Speech

Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about our dilemma in the Federal Government. The American people are watching as we try to deal with our spending issues. I know there is a big debate over the 2-week spending issue, an issue where we are trying to cut $4 billion. Hopefully, some resolve will come to that.

What the American people are seeing is that unless there is some type of gun to our heads or some type of urgent situation in front of us, we do not have the ability in this body to deal with spending issues in a disciplined or courageous way. Everybody understands that, and they understand that the only way we are looking at whatever spending cuts will take place--I know right now there are discussions over what they might be, but the only reason this issue is being addressed is that we have this deadline of government funding ending in the next week.

I know the Presiding Officer is someone who served as a county executive and had to balance budgets each year and had to figure out a way to live within their means. I know that upon arriving here a few months ago, he had to be totally aghast at the fact that we are taking in $2.2 trillion this year and spending $3.7 trillion this year. If we put all the discretionary spending we have, if we took every bit of nonmandatory spending or discretionary spending off the table, we still would not have a balanced budget. Everybody in this country knows that where we are is totally out of line. We are spending a little over 24 percent of our country's economic output today. Over the last 40 years, we have spent about 20.6 percent of our country's GDP.

I, along with Claire McCaskill from Missouri, have put a bill in place. We have a number of cosponsors. We put in something called the CAP Act. We hope that over the course of this next year--over the course of the next several months--this is a bill that will actually pass. What it does, I think in a very logical way, is it says we are spending at levels relative to our economy today that are out of proportion, and let's go from where we are today to the 4-year average over a 10-year period. Mr. President, you have to agree that this is just a logical thing that gives us time to go from where we are today over the next 10 years to where the country has been, spending relative to our country's output for the last 40 years.

What this also does is it puts Congress in a straitjacket. Again, I think everybody who is watching knows that if we didn't have this CR--this continuing resolution bill--that is ending this week and if government wasn't going to shut down if it wasn't funded, there would be no negotiations taking place right now over spending. We all know that. So this puts in place a straitjacket on Congress--one that is very needed, unfortunately--to take us from here to there over a 10-year period. What happens if we don't meet the requirements of this declining spending relative to our economy is that sequestration comes into play. On a pro-rata basis--based on the relative weight of certain accounts to the overall spending levels, the OMB comes in and takes from every account of government on a pro-rata basis.

One of the problems we have had in this country is we want to deal with those things that are easy, and that is discretionary spending, in many cases. Nondefense discretionary spending ends up being about $600 billion, roughly, of the $3.7 trillion we are spending. Everybody in the world knows there is no way for us to solve our problem by only dealing with discretionary spending. So what this bill would do is put all items on the balance sheet. In other words, it would include all the entitlements.

I don't think there is a person in this body who believes if we continue as we are, if we don't redesign the programs the seniors are counting on--Medicare and Social Security--if we don't redesign these programs so they will be sustained for the long haul, then seniors are not going to have them. So this bill will force us in Congress to deal with designing these programs in such a way they will be here for the long haul. It puts everything on the table. Again, there is not a thinking person in Washington who doesn't know we have to address these issues.

There are a lot of people who say: Well, we cannot do these draconian things right now because we are in the middle of a recession. Hopefully, it looks like it is changing and hopefully changing very rapidly, but these changes would begin from where we are in the year 2013. So we would have a year or so to redesign these programs. We could act in an appropriate way to ensure they were here for the future but also put them in place in a manner that doesn't kill the American taxpayer, and we would cap spending. We have a multiyear averaging process in this bill to make sure, if there is a change in the economy in 1 year, we don't just have this volatile situation, but we would have the ability, 1 year in advance, to know what the appropriate spending levels are. It gives Congress the ability to act upon that throughout the year.

Again, if Congress doesn't act, then 45 days after a year ends, OMB comes in and puts in place something called sequestration--automatically takes money out of these accounts. I think that gives us the impetus to want to make sure we actually act. I don't think there is anybody in Congress who wants OMB coming in and taking money out of accounts. So that would be, in essence, the thing that would give us the sense of urgency we badly need in this body.

This is a problem that exists on both sides of the aisle and that is why I have sought bipartisan support for this bill. I have tried to put something in place that is very logical--I know that is not often the case here--something Americans across the country can understand and also those here in Washington will see as something that works toward a solution and gets us to where we need to go.

I think all of us understand the demographic changes that are taking place in our country. I think all of us know that over the next 10 years, 20 million more Americans are going to be on Medicare and 20 million more Americans will be on Social Security. We are right on the cusp of that bubble. I am certainly getting ready to be a part of that. The Presiding Officer may not necessarily be there yet, but the point is this is something that has to occur for the good of our country.

So this is called the CAP Act. Again, what it will do is ensure that long after the point in time when the CR window opens and closes, long after the time the debt ceiling vote happens a little later this year--long after those occur and the American people have moved on to other issues and, obviously, Congress has moved on to other issues--we keep in place this fiscal discipline, this straitjacket, to take us where we need to go.

The Presiding Officer and I were in Pakistan and Afghanistan last week, and we witnessed some of the problems we are having there. We also witnessed the brilliance of our men and women in uniform and also many hard-working individuals at the State Department. While those threats are threats we are dealing with that are very important to the American people, I think most of us know the biggest threat today to our country is our inability to deal appropriately with our financial circumstances. I think we all know if we don't deal with that pretty soon, we are going to be putting our country's future in jeopardy. We will be putting in jeopardy the future of these wonderful pages who sit in front of me.

The thing that is fascinating about this issue is, unlike what we saw in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, where we are relying on other people, this is something we can do ourselves. We have 100 percent control over spending in Washington--100 percent control of this is held in the hands of 100 Senators and 435 House Members. This is not something where we are depending on other countries or we are concerned about what might happen elsewhere. This is something we ourselves can deal with.

So what I have tried to put in place, along with Claire McCaskill and others--and there are growing numbers of other people who are part of this process--is something that causes us to be responsible to the American people. So I hope others will join this. It is my hope we will do three things: I hope we will vote and pass on cuts in Federal spending today. I hope that will happen over the next short period of time. Whether it is some of the things we are looking at on the CR or maybe it is recommendations that have been put in place by the President's deficit reduction commission, I hope what we will do as a body is go ahead and vote to pass real cuts now.

Secondarily, what I hope will happen is that we will put in place something like the CAP Act to make sure we continue that fiscal discipline long after people move on to other topics; that we keep that straitjacket in place so we do those things that are, again, responsible not only to this generation but future generations.

Thirdly, I hope we figure out a way, through some type of amendment, to ensure that, on into the future, we have put something in place at the Federal level which causes us to be fiscally responsible in this country. All of us know what it means to have to make choices. All of us have households. Many of us have led cities and States. Many of us have had businesses. We all understand what happens in the real world, and it is something that certainly needs to happen here. That has been sorely lacking for a long time.

So I thank the Chair for the time on the floor today, and I hope to talk about this many more times. I have been doing it, I assure you, throughout the State of Tennessee and in multiple forums in the Senate.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.

The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.

Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, I had the opportunity to speak with you in the last several moments, and you had a couple questions about the CAP Act that I was just discussing on the floor. The Presiding Officer had some great questions about what it takes to overcome the CAP Act, in the event we were able to pass it.

It is just a 10-page bill. It is very eloquent. It doesn't have a lot of ``whereases.'' It is just a business document that takes us from where we are to where we need to be. But, in essence, to override it, it would take a two-thirds vote. It would take two-thirds of the House and the Senate to actually override or get out of the straitjacket, if you will. There were previous bills, such as Gramm-Rudman and other types of bills that tried to keep Washington fiscally focused, and those bills required 60 votes. So this would be a higher threshold.

So, yes, if there was some type of national emergency and we needed to move beyond this straitjacket for 1 year or 6 months or something like that, a two-thirds vote could do that. I mean, 67 votes is a pretty tough threshold, and hopefully it is the kind of threshold necessary to keep the kind of discipline in place that we need.

So it is a 10-page bill. Again, it is very eloquent. I think it lays out a solution for us that hopefully will be a part of anything we do over the next several months.

I understand, after talking with the Presiding Officer over the last several days, while traveling to these various countries, that he, along with many of our other colleagues--I know I did myself--came here to solve problems, not to message. In a body such as this, it is tough to solve these kinds of problems, but the only way to do it is to offer a pragmatic solution.

I know there are some people who are interested, sometimes, in messaging. I have tried to offer something that I think will take us from a place that is very much out of line in spending to a place that is more appropriate.

I might also say I thought the President's deficit reduction commission had some very good points as it relates to tax reform. I think all of us are aware of the $1.2 trillion in tax expenditures that exist.

I was doing an event over the last several days, and a gentleman raised his hand and asked me: What do you mean by tax expenditures? Isn't the money ours until we give it to the Federal Government? Why would you call it a tax expenditure?

I think people realize in our Tax Code there are all kinds of exclusions and subsidies and favored companies and favored this and favored that. If we did away with all of those, there would be $1.2 trillion we could use to lower everybody's rate, and we could make our Tax Code much more simple. The deficit reduction commission says we could take our corporate rates from where they are down to a level of about 26 percent--somewhere between 23 and 29 percent--and lower everybody's rates individually. I think most Americans, instead of filling out all these forms to see if they benefit from these various subsidies and credits, would much rather know that everybody is on the same playing field; that some favored company is not in a situation where they are more favored than another; that everybody is on the same basis.

I think there has been some good work done there. I hope we are able to take votes on that over the next several months. But there is a very elegant, pragmatic solution that has been offered that would go hand in hand with these types of measures and would cause us, over the next 10 years, to exercise the kind of fiscal discipline this country needs to confront what I think threatens our national security, certainly our economic security, even more than the things we saw on the ground in the Middle East last week.

With that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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