Debt Reduction

Floor Speech

Mr. McCONNELL. This morning, I wish to say a word about the upcoming vote on the debt ceiling and the bipartisan negotiation surrounding it, to reiterate why we are having these talks and what they ought to achieve. But first, a little context.

Right now, ratings agencies are threatening to downgrade U.S. debt, putting us on red alert that the kind of economic crisis we are seeing in parts of Europe could very quickly happen right here.

We know that failing to do something significant about our fiscal problems would be a serious drag on jobs and our economy. That is why, over the past several weeks, I have come to the floor of the Senate and spoken at press conferences, with a now familiar refrain: The time to act on significant reforms is right now. And I have been crystal clear about what qualifies as significant.

Above all, it means doing something to strengthen and preserve our long-term entitlement programs, so we can actually keep our promises to those who have been paying into these programs for years, and so these programs don't end up consuming every single dollar we take in. Entitlements are the biggest drivers of our debt. By definition, they have to be a part of any plan to lower the debt.

This is hardly a controversial view. Everyone from the President on down has said that entitlements must be reformed if we have any chance at all of reining in our debt and strengthening our long-term fiscal health.

In fact, 3 months ago, 31 Senate Democrats signed a letter to the President urging him to put together a plan to reduce the deficit, a plan they said they hoped would include entitlement changes, 31 members of the Democratic conference right here on the other side of the aisle, including the occupant of the chair.

As the occupant of the chair put it recently, ``I think it's absolutely clear that we have to redesign our entitlement programs.''

Here is how Senator Durbin put it a few weeks ago: ``We have serious economic problems ahead of us if we don't have some reform in both Medicare and Social Security.''

This was from former President Bill Clinton after the recent congressional election in New York: ``I don't think that the Democrats or the Republicans should conclude from the New York race that no changes can be made in Medicare,'' he said, ``[or] that no changes can be made in Social Security ..... that no changes can be made that will deal with this long-term debt problem.''

Here is President Obama's lead negotiator on the debt talks, Vice President Biden, from last January: ``Everybody talks about we have to do something about Social Security and Medicare, and we do.''

Here are the two chairs of the President's debt commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, in a recent op-ed in ``Politico'': ``A credible plan must address the growth of entitlement spending .....''

Here is the President himself, about a month after he took office: ``To preserve our long-term fiscal health we must ..... address the growing costs in Medicare and Social Security.''

And, as for me, I have been clear on this same point in public and in private from the moment I stepped out of a meeting with the President and other Members of Congress at the White House on May 12.

So it is not exactly a groundbreaking observation that if these discussions are to mean anything they have to involve entitlement reform since no one believes we actually get at our fiscal problems without it. This is what serious people expect and are hoping for out of these talks.

The moment requires, as I have said for weeks, three things: Real cuts in spending over the short term; that is, over the next 2 years--not more spending increases or ``freezes''; real cuts over the medium-term; that is, over the next 10 years with enforceable caps on spending; and meaningful reforms to entitlements, which are the major drivers of our debt. That is the definition of a significant package.

Some Democrats are insisting that they will only agree to cuts if Republicans agree to raise revenue. That is Washington speak for tax hikes and it is absurd.

First of all, is there anyone outside of Washington, DC, who really thinks that with 14 million people looking for work in this country, the solution is to raise taxes? The last thing you want to do in the middle of a jobs crisis is raise taxes. Does anyone seriously think that is a good idea? Even the President has said as much. It is just common sense. Remember, the President signed the extension of current tax rates back in December with a similar argument.

But even if we weren't in the middle of a jobs crisis, it would be foolish--and completely dishonest. We are in the middle of a debt crisis right now because we spend too much. The solution is to spend less.

How do we know this?

For 30 years beginning in 1971, Federal spending as a percentage of the economy has averaged around 20.8 percent. But after 2 years of out-of-control spending by the President and his Democrat allies in Congress, government spending is now projected to rise a full 4 percentage points above the historical norm.

That may not sound like a lot, but 4 percent of a $14 trillion economy is an enormous amount of money. Just as the economy sank, Democrats increased government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. And now they want to make it permanent. That is the reason we have a deficit like we do.

Government spending has gone up, and a bad economy has caused revenue to go down.

That is the reason the debt has gone up 35 percent since the President took office.

Now Democrats want to use that bad economy as an excuse to lock their spending levels in place. They want to use it as an excuse to raise taxes, which would only make the economy worse, cause us to lose even more jobs, and make it even harder to create new jobs.

So let's just be clear about what is going on here. Right now, Washington is borrowing roughly $4 billion every day above what it collects in taxes. And Democrats don't want to admit we have a spending problem?

We have a national debt the size of our entire economy and Democrats are wondering whether they want to do anything about the biggest drivers of the debt?

Look: Democrats can continue to argue among themselves about whether to step up and address this crisis they have helped create, but they can't argue about what is causing it or what is needed to address it.

Republicans have been crystal clear about where we stand. And Democrats have also been crystal clear about what's needed for these talks to be a success. It is my hope that they consider their own past statements on entitlement reform as we approach the end of these talks.

The path to success is clear. Let's not let this opportunity to do something go to waste.

I yield the floor.

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