Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2011

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. JOHNSON of Wisconsin. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to mark an amazing anniversary. And by amazing, I don't mean good. I mean unbelievable. I mean sad. On Sunday we will mark the anniversary--April 29--of the date where it has been 3 years since the Senate has passed a budget. I know a lot of Americans have heard that date, they have heard the talking point that it has been 1,000-and-umpteen days since we passed a budget. But it is not a talking point. It is simply unbelievable. It is jaw-dropping. The U.S. Government is the largest financial entity in the world, and it has been operating now for 3 years without a budget. It is a $3.8 trillion-a-year entity.

I come from the private sector. I am an accountant. When I tell the voters, the citizens of Wisconsin, that the Federal Government hasn't passed a budget, they really are amazed. That is why I call it an amazing anniversary date.

The Senate has not fulfilled a basic responsibility. It is required by law to pass a budget by April 15 of every year. It is a reasonable requirement. It is a reasonable responsibility. The House Republicans have fulfilled their responsibility and have put forward a plan. They have shown the American people what they would do to solve our looming debt and deficit problem. The Senate hasn't.

Why hasn't the majority in the Senate passed a budget? They have all the votes. They have them in the Budget Committee to refer a budget to the floor. They have the votes and they have the number of Members on the floor of the Senate to pass a budget. Why do they refuse? Is it because they have no solutions to our problem or is it that they have a solution, and they simply don't want the American people to know what it is? ``Trust us. We will take care of us.'' Is it also because they don't want their fingerprints on that solution? They don't want to be held accountable? I think more likely that is the reason we haven't passed a budget here the Senate for 3 years now.

I guess they could claim President Obama's budget is their plan. But the problem with that is President Obama's last two budgets have been so unserious--last year his budget lost in this body of the Senate by a vote of 0 to 97. Not one member of the President's own party gave it a vote. As a matter of fact, not one member of the President's own party was willing to bring that budget to the floor for a vote. Republicans had to do that.

Now this year's budget--3 weeks ago, in the House of Representatives again, the President's budget was brought forward to the House--by a Republican, not a Democrat. It lost 0 to 414. Again, I ask the American people to think about that. Think about what a stunning repudiation that is of leadership. What it really represents is a total abdication of leadership.

The American people deserve better. They deserve far better. They deserve to have a plan. They deserve to have a choice.

The President now has put forward four budgets. He has yet to propose any solution to save Social Security or to save Medicare. Again, the House has provided that plan. They have passed a budget. They have been responsible. Republicans have been willing to be held accountable. That is our job.

It is well past time for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to bring a budget to the floor--not just vote on one but to work on it and pass one so that we can go to conference and we can reconcile that with the House budget so the United States finally, after 3 years, will start operating under a budget in the next fiscal year.

I know the Budget Control Act sets spending caps. I get that. I get that. Washington is going to make sure it can continue to spend money. But spending money is only half the equation. What is this body going to do in terms of showing the American people what our plan is to live within our means, to get our debt and deficit under control? The American people are waiting.

The result of this embarrassing abdication of responsibility and leadership can be clearly described by a few charts. Let me start going through a couple.

I think most people have seen all kinds of different debt charts. I like this one because it starts in 1987, when our total Federal debt was $2.3 trillion. If we were to pass President Obama's budget and live by it, in 10 years our total Federal debt would be $25.9 trillion.

In the Budget Control Act, this body--Congress--gave President Obama the authority to increase our debt limit by $2.1 trillion. It took us 200 years to incur $2.3 trillion. We will have blown through that $2.1 trillion debt ceiling increase in less than 2 years.

Just in case anybody is still confused, we have a spending problem in this Nation. It is not that we take too little from the American people, it is because we spend too much.

I know the American people are frequently subjected to phrases such as ``Draconian cuts.'' I think this proves we are not cutting anything. In 2002 the Federal Government spent $2 trillion. Last year, or the current fiscal year, it is projected that we will spend $3.8 trillion. We have virtually doubled spending in just 10 years. And the argument moving forward is, according to President Obama, he would like to spend $5.8 trillion in the year 2022. The House budget would spend $4.9 trillion.

Another way of looking at that is 10-year spending. In the 10-year period from 1992 to 2001, the Federal Government spent a total of $16 trillion. From 2002 to 2011, the Federal Government spent $28 trillion. Again, the argument moving forward is that President Obama's budget in 10 years would spend $47 trillion. The House budget proposes spending $40 trillion. You don't have to be a math major or an engineer to do that math. Both $40 trillion and $47 trillion are greater than $28 trillion. We are not cutting spending, we are just trying to reduce the rate of growth. That is an incredibly important distinction. Don't be misled. We are trying to get our debt and deficit under control.

A couple months ago, President Obama said he had the solution. His Buffett rule was going to stabilize the debt and deficit. Here is a little history. I hope the American people look at this.

President Bush, in his first 4 years in office, ran a total deficit of $0.8 trillion--$800 billion. Now, back in Oshkosh, WI, I wasn't happy with that result. I didn't like seeing that deficit spending. His second 4 years didn't improve. He had a total deficit of $1.2 trillion between the years of 2005 and 2008. Again, I don't think there are very many fiscal conservatives who were happy with that result.

Now President Obama has increased that dramatically. During the 4 years of his administration, the total deficit will be $5.3 trillion. That is on total spending of about $14.4 trillion. We are borrowing 37 cents of every $1 we spend and our debt now exceeds the size of our economy. Again, President Obama's solution? I realize this is hard to see, but he has proposed the Buffett tax. If we were to actually enact that tax over 4 years, it would raise some $20 billion. I know you cannot see it, but there is a line there. It does not even fill in the marker lines here. It is $20 billion to solve a $5,300 billion problem. I am sorry, that is not a serious proposal. It is just class warfare.

Let me show one of the problems President Obama refuses to address: the looming bankruptcy of our Social Security Program, the program millions of seniors rely on, that Americans plan their retirement around. We hear all too frequently that Social Security is solvent to the year 2035. No, it is not. It is solvent because of an accounting fiction called the trust fund, which is simply government bonds held by the Government. The analogy I use, it is akin to you had $20 and you spend the $20 and you write yourself a note and put it in your pocket and say I have $20. No, you do not, nor does the Federal Government. It has bonds which, by the way, it can print any day of the week, but it has to sell those bonds.

Social Security went cash negative, which means it paid out more in cash benefits than it took in, in cash receipts by 2010--by about $51 billion. Last year, it was $46 billion in deficit. Through the year 2035, all this red ink represents $6 trillion in additional deficit spending in the Social Security fund. It is insolvent. It is bankrupt. It needs to be addressed. This President refuses to address it.

When we project out and we see another $10 trillion to $11 trillion in increased spending and debt according to President Obama's budget, I am concerned we are not even fully realizing the other risks involved.

Before I get to this chart, let me mention the first one. If we fail to meet the growth targets President Obama is projecting in his budget by just 1 percent, we add $3.1 trillion to that 10-year deficit figure. That is a 30-percent increase. I know when they passed the health care law the American people were told--they were hoodwinked into believing it would actually reduce our deficit. It will not. The way they were going to pay for 6 years' worth of spending is with 10 years' worth of receipts and reductions in Medicare. The receipts come in taxes, fees and penalties on, by the way, drug manufacturers, medical device manufacturers, health care plans. I don't know what economics course members of this administration took, but we do not bend down the cost curve by increasing the costs to providers. That is what they were doing for about $590 billion of that revenue stream to pay for ObamaCare.

The other $665 billion was going to come out of cuts to Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid.

We have not imposed the provider reductions under the SGR fix, the doc fix--about $208 billion. What makes anybody believe we will actually impose the $665 billion in savings in Medicare? If we move the 10-year window forward to when ObamaCare kicks in, when the full spending occurs starting about 2016, the total cost of the health care law will not be $1.1 trillion, it will be $2.4 trillion, and that is a conservative estimate, not even taking into account millions of employees who will lose their employer-sponsored care and get put into the exchanges at highly subsidized rates. But using a conservative cost figure of $2.4 trillion and growth in taxes, fees, and penalties by a reasonable amount, $816 billion, that leaves a $1.6 trillion what I am calling deficit risk. How is that going to be filled? Are we going to borrow it or are we going to take it out of Medicare? Somehow I do not think we will be taking it out of Medicare. Somehow I think we will have to borrow it, if we can.

That brings me to our last chart, interest rate risk. I was never concerned, not even for a moment last year during the debt ceiling debate, that the Federal Government was going to default on any of its obligations. We were going to pay Social Security recipients. We were going to pay our soldiers. We were going to meet every obligation of the Federal Government. The day I fear is the true day of reckoning, the day when creditors around the world take a look at the United States and say: You know what, I am not going to loan you any more money or what is more likely to occur is they will say: I will loan you some money but not at these rates.

If we take a look at the history of the borrowing costs of the United States, from 1970 to the year 2000, our average borrowing cost for the Federal Government was 5.3 percent. Over the last 3 years, from 2010 to 2012, our average borrowing costs were about 1.5 percent. That is a difference of 3.8 percent between these two figures. If we just revert to that average--and by the way, back then the United States was a far more creditworthy borrower--our debt-to-GDP ratio ranged somewhere between 45 percent and 67 percent. Currently, our debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 100 percent. If we revert to that average borrowing cost, that would cost the Federal Government $600 billion in added interest expense per year. That is 60 percent of the discretionary spending level of $1.47 trillion this year.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. JOHNSON. This is the problem. This is a huge problem. It is one that is being ignored because we simply refuse to address it. This body refuses to pass a budget to lay out a plan to fix it; to stabilize one of our primary metrics, a key one--that debt-to-GDP ratio, stabilize that and start bringing it down. The other is the percentage of government in relation to the size of our economy. One hundred years ago that was 2 percent. Last year, it was about 24 percent, which means 24 cents of every $1 filters through some form of government. I do not find the Federal Government particularly effective or efficient. That is what the private sector does. It is the private sector that creates long-term self-sustaining jobs. It is the private sector we need to rely on to grow our economy and create jobs.

As to the vision for America, we are going to have a very clear choice on the vision for America, between what this administration wants to do with a government-centered society and what Republicans want to do in terms of an opportunity society led by free people, free enterprise, led by freedom. That is our choice. But until the majority party in the Senate lays out their plan, the American people will not have a plan. They will not understand what the plan is for the other side.

Again, let me close by saying it is well past time for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility and pass a budget.

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

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source