The Budget

Floor Speech

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise today to implore my colleagues and to implore the negotiators who are working on this budget issue to come to a comprehensive solution that meaningfully addresses our deficit and our debt.

If all you knew about our politics was what you see on the television at night, you would think we were committed to an endless stream of invective, of name-calling, of division, that we had absolutely no interest or desire to solve the Nation's problems or solve the Nation's challenges, and you would be right to sort of give up all hope we could actually honor the heritage of our parents and our grandparents and make sure we are not the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to our kids and our grandkids. That is what you might think if all you knew about our country was what you saw on the TV at night.

Fortunately, I have had the privilege, as has everybody in this body, to travel my State and to learn that actually the American people are nowhere near as divided as Washington, DC, or as what you see on television at night. In fact, we share an awful lot in common in my State of Colorado whether we are Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, and part of that is because we are coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

By the end of the discussion I was having during the campaign over the last couple of years, there were about four things people thought might be good ideas. They thought it would be good to have an economy in this country where median family income was rising instead of falling, that we were creating jobs in the United States rather than shipping them overseas. They thought it would be a good idea if our energy would not require us to send billions of dollars a week to the Persian Gulf to buy oil. They thought it would be a good idea--and as a former school superintendent, I agree with them--to educate our kids for the 21st century. They thought it would be a good idea if we were actually willing to make hard choices to deal with our debt and our deficit.

There is a lot of disagreement around here that I do not really understand, but in Colorado, the way they would like us to do that is to see a comprehensive plan that materially addresses the problem. They know we cannot solve it overnight, but they would like to see us materially address the problem. They want to know we are all in it together. They are not interested in the Washington game of whose ox is going to get gored; they want to know we are all in this together, that all of us have something to contribute to solving this problem. They emphatically want it to be bipartisan, which is good because we have a divided Congress now, and it needs to be bipartisan to get this work done. The reason is that they do not trust either party's go-it-alone strategy. I think they are right to believe we are better off compromising on a set of comprehensive proposals than continuing to fight.

I would add a corollary to it, which is that whatever we do, we better satisfy the capital markets that their paper is worth what they paid for it. If they are not satisfied, we are going to be in an interest rate environment that is going to make all of the discussions we have had about cuts seem trivial in terms of the effect on the deficit and debt.

Then I come here, and we have these phony conversations about solving the problem. We had a discussion, you will remember, about whether we ought to shut the government down. And I did the math on the bid ask spread that divided the two parties over whether we are going to shut the government down, and that math equalled about 4 cents on the $20 meal at Applebee's. It would be like you and me, Mr. President, fighting over that 4 cents because we couldn't figure out how to pay the bill. It would be like the city of Alamosa in my State, in the San Luis Valley, where my predecessor, Ken Salazar, came from--it would be like the mayor saying: We can't agree on $27,000, so we are going to shut the government down, we are not going to pick up your trash, we are not going to educate your kids. The American people should know that is what that debate was about. Now we come to the debt ceiling debate where people are saying: We are not going to vote to raise the debt ceiling.

Somebody in a townhall meeting said to me: Michael, don't you know my neighbor and I are having to figure out how to pay as we go? We have to figure out how to pull in our purse strings to make sure we can afford to do what we need to do? I said: I absolutely agree with you. He said: Why aren't you guys showing the same restraint? And I said: We need to show the same restraint, but that is not about the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is about bills we have already incurred; it is not about cutting up your credit card. It would be great if it were. That is not what it is about. It is about saying: I have a cable bill this month, and I am just not going to pay it. I got my mortgage this month, but I am just not going to pay it.

That is not fiscally responsible. In fact, do you know what happens to people who do that? Their interest rates go up because lenders say to you: You are not a good risk because you didn't pay your mortgage on time. You are not a good risk because you didn't pay your cable bill on time. That is what our lenders are going to say to the Federal Government of the United States if we are willing to jeopardize the full faith and credit of the United States. It is fiscally and politically irresponsible for us to do that.

In this context, we are having a debate about dealing with the fact that we now have a $1.5 trillion deficit and a $15 trillion debt.

By the way, I would say on the debt ceiling that at least this Senator would settle for raising it just the amount the Ryan plan would increase our debt. I would be happy with the Ryan plan, which is the House Republican plan, to raise the debt by about $5.4 trillion. Everybody over there voted for it. A lot of people here voted for it implicitly; therefore, they are suggesting the debt ceiling ought to be raised by at least that amount, and I would be happy to support that and cosponsor that.

But what I want us to do is come together in a comprehensive way.

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Mr. BENNET. We sent it around to people, and it was a letter to the President that in part said:

Specifically, we hope that the discussion will include discretionary spending cuts, entitlement changes and tax reform.

A comprehensive plan. Sixty-four Senators signed that letter--more than a majority of the Senate. It is more than the 60-vote threshold necessary to pass legislation around here--a majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats recognizing what is blindingly obvious to the American people, which is that we need a comprehensive plan because the math does not work otherwise. And we need people of good will to come together and say: We understand we are not going to be able to solve this problem if we continue to fight with each other. We are not going to be able to solve this problem if we continue to pretend there are some magical mathematics out there that allows us to solve the debt crisis based on political ideology rather than our working together.

People ask me sometimes what they can do to help with this discussion. What I say to them is they ought to be holding the people in this body to the same standard they hold our local officials back in Colorado--that mayor in Alamosa or a superintendent in Denver--who never in their wildest dreams would think they were going to phony up the math and go back to people and say: Sorry, we could not make it work, so we are going to shut down or, sorry, we could not make it work, so we are going to destroy our credit rating, so you end up spending more money on interest instead of on the services you care about.

Our job is to fix this problem. It is not going to be easy. It is going to take people on both sides of the aisle to think differently about what is possible. My own view is the Deficit and Debt Commission gave us a roadmap here. It was a bipartisan group. The final result got the vote of Dick Durbin, one of the most liberal members of the Democratic Party, and one of the most conservative members of the Republican Party, Tom Coburn, who signed onto a plan that said: Let's take a quarter of it from discretionary spending, let's take a quarter of it from entitlements, let's take a quarter of it from interest savings, and let's get a quarter from tax reform. That sounds about right to me.

If we could produce a plan here that satisfied the test I mentioned earlier, I could go back to the townhalls in Colorado, and I guarantee you what people would say is: Thank you for finally working together. Thank you for producing something that is credible. Let's now move on to the other business in this country to make sure we can compete and win in the 21st century.

I would say I hope, to the extent anybody is listening to the floor today, they would think again about the importance of using this moment to try to create a comprehensive plan, to try to figure out what the compromises are. I for one am happy to work with anybody on either side of the aisle to make sure we get this done.

I see the chairman of our Budget Committee is in the Chamber. I thank him for his efforts on the Deficit Commission, and also for the work he has been doing with the Gang of Six--the Gang of Five, trying, month after month after month, for the last 18 months, to produce a comprehensive plan that actually addresses the problems.

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