Concurrent Resolution on the Budget, Fiscal Year 2016
Floor Speech
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I move to instruct conferees on S. Con. Res. 11, a concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2016, to include in the conference report the provision in the concurrent resolution as passed by the Senate establishing a deficit-neutral reserve fund related to strengthening the U.S. Postal Service by establishing a moratorium to protect mail processing plants, reinstating overnight delivery standards, and protecting rural services.
During the so-called vote-arama, that amendment passed by voice vote. This time I hope we can get a strong rollcall vote on it because it is terribly important that we tell the Postmaster General of the United States that the U.S. Senate wants a strong and vibrant U.S. Postal Service.
What we are saying to the Postmaster General of the United States is pretty simple; that is, do not destroy up to 15,000 middle-class jobs, do not shut down up to 82 mail processing plants, stop slowing down mail service delivery in this country. Speed it up by reinstating strong overnight delivery standards for first-class mail.
I do not know about Arizona and I don't know about Wyoming, but I can tell you that in Vermont we have gotten a significant number of complaints from people who are upset by the slowdown of mail delivery standards. It is, to my mind, just unacceptable, and what we are saying now and will have to say in the months to come is you can't shut down another 82 processing plants, you cannot continue with these inadequate mail delivery standards, and it has to change. The American people and the business community are entitled to know that when they put a letter or document in the mail, it is going to get delivered in a prompt way. Today, that, sadly, is not the case.
For over 230 years and enshrined in our Constitution, the Postal Service has played an enormously important role for the people of our country and for our economy, and that mission today remains as important as it has ever been. The beauty of the Postal Service is that it provides universal service 6 days a week to every corner of our country, no matter how small or how remote. It will deliver mail on Wall Street and it will deliver mail to a home at the end of a back road in the State of Vermont.
The U.S. Postal Service supports, through its efforts, millions of jobs in virtually every sector of our economy. It provides decent-paying union jobs to some 500,000 Americans and, by the way, is the largest employer of veterans in this country.
Whether you are an elderly woman living on a dirt road in a rural area or you are a wealthy CEO executive on
Park Avenue, you get your mail delivered 6 days a week, and the American people pay for this service at a cost which is far less than any place else in the industrialized world. In other words, we get a pretty good bargain when we put a stamp on an envelope.
Unfortunately, despite the success and popularity of the Postal Service, it is under constant attack and has been under constant attack for years, including from those who would like to privatize the Postal Service and ultimately destroy it. Let's be clear. The same people who are attacking the Postal Service are often the same people who are attacking Social Security, Medicare, and so forth, and they essentially want to move to the privatization of virtually every major public institution in this country.
Today, the U.S. Postal Service is in the process of shutting down up to 82 mail processing plants and eliminating up to 15,000 decent-paying jobs. This is in addition to the 141 mail processing facilities that were closed between 2012 and 2013. In January, the Postal Service ended overnight delivery for first-class mail. It didn't get a whole lot of attention, but it happened.
The purpose of this motion is to put the Senate on record in strong opposition to these plant closings and to demand that the Postal Service reinstate strong overnight delivery standards and not destroy good-paying jobs.
We have been told that all of these horrendous cuts are necessary because the Postal Service is experiencing terrible financial problems. They are losing money every single year. Well, the truth is somewhat different. The major reason the Postal Service is in tough financial shape today is not because of email or the Internet, the major reason the Postal Service is hurting financially is because of a mandate signed into law by President Bush in December of 2006, during a lameduck session of Congress that forces the Postal Service to prefund 75 years of future retiree health benefits over a 10-year period. No other government agency or business in America is burdened with a mandate anywhere close to what the Postal Service has to expend, which is $5.5 billion a year. So the main point is that when you see articles telling you the Postal Service is having financial problems, the main reason--the overwhelming reason--is this necessity to prefund 75 years of future retiring health benefits over a 10-year period at about $5.5 billion a year. In fact, all--A-L-L--all of the so-called financial losses posted by the Postal Service since October 2012 are due to this prefunding mandate. That is it. Without that mandate, they would be making a modest amount of money.
We don't hear much about it, but I think it is very important for the American people to understand the reality of the finances in the Postal Service. Excluding the prefunding mandate, the Postal Service has actually made a $1.8 billion profit. So it is a modestly profitable operation excluding the $5.5 billion prefunding mandate.
Revenue at the Postal Service has been increasing in recent years. At a time when Postal Service revenue is going up, it makes no sense to eliminate thousands of jobs and slow down the mail service that millions of Americans rely on.
We should be working to strengthen the Postal Service and not to send it into a death spiral. Before this prefunding mandate was signed into law, the Postal Service was also profitable. In fact, from 2003 to 2006, the Postal Service made a combined profit of more than $5 billion.
I think there is broad bipartisan support, especially from Senators who come from rural areas and who understand just how important the Postal Service is to the people of our States.
Once again, when offered as an amendment at the vote-arama, this passed by voice vote. We are going to ask for a rollcall vote when the voting takes place. I hope we win this vote with a very strong vote and send a message to the Postal Service that we want our Postal Service to provide the quality mail service the American people deserve.
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, this is a motion to instruct budget conferees to keep in the bill the Senate-passed deficit-neutral reserve fund for legislation to allow Americans to earn paid sick time. This was an amendment which passed during a vote-arama of the Senate by a vote of 61 to 39. So it passed with pretty strong bipartisan support, and I would hope we could pass this language again.
The truth is, at a time when millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, when our middle class continues to decline, we also have another serious problem in that only 53 percent of workers report having paid sick leave. Well, you know, people get sick. That is a fact of life, and it is unfortunate that only 53 percent of workers report having paid sick leave. This means people are going to work when they are not well. I don't know about you, but I am not enthused about walking into a restaurant where someone who may have the flu or have some other problem is serving food or preparing food. I don't think that is terribly healthy for this country, not to mention that when there are so many contagious illnesses out there, I don't know that we want to have people who are ill and contagious going to work.
So this is a very simple motion and basically reiterates what we had in the first discussion. Again, it won by 61 to 39.
All over this country, States and cities are in the process of enacting paid sick leave legislation, and they are seeing economic benefits from that. They have seen mothers more likely to return to work and higher employment in the leisure, hospitality, education, and health sectors.
So, again, this is the same language Senator Murray offered. I strongly support this motion, and I hope my colleagues will vote for it.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, this motion is being offered on behalf of Senator Murray, and it would instruct budget conferees to build on the Bipartisan Budget Act and provide sequester relief in 2016 and 2017 by closing tax loopholes.
As the ranking member of the Committee on the Budget, I rise today to offer a motion to instruct conferees, on behalf of Senator Murray, to S. Con. Res. 11, the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2016, to provide 2 years of sequester relief by closing tax loopholes. This is a concept, an idea I very strongly support. Many Members on both sides of the aisle are concerned that Congress will not be able to pass and enact appropriations bills at the sequester levels. The President's fiscal year 2016 budget provides sequester relief. Moreover, the President has indicated he will veto legislation that does not lift the sequester caps.
Discretionary spending has already been cut by $1.6 trillion, and nondefense discretionary spending is currently on track to be the lowest in 50 years. Nondefense discretionary spending is on track to be the lowest in 50 years.
Instead of continuing to cut nondefense discretionary spending, we need to increase funding for programs, such as education and infrastructure, that reduce income inequality and that create the millions of jobs we so desperately need. We can fund these investments by looking at wasteful spending in the Tax Code that has allowed major corporations to pay very little, if anything, in Federal income taxes.
Each and every year, we are losing well over $100 billion in revenue because large, profitable corporations and some of the wealthiest Americans in this country are stashing their profits in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and other offshore tax havens.
Further, the GAO has reported that the effective tax rate of large, profitable corporations is just 12.6 percent--much lower than the 35-percent statutory rate because of these tax loopholes. That is much lower than what millions of middle-class workers pay to the IRS because of the loopholes written into the Tax Code by corporate lobbyists.
In 1952, 32 percent of all of the revenue generated in this country came from large corporations. Today, that figure is down to just 11 percent. Right now, there are so many loopholes in our Tax Code that it ends up that many large corporations making billions of dollars in profit pay nothing--zero--in corporate taxes to the Federal Government.
As a few examples, General Electric made over $5.8 billion in profits in the United States last year but paid just nine-tenths of 1 percent of that amount in Federal income taxes. Time Warner made $4.3 billion in profits and paid nothing in Federal income taxes; in fact, it got a rebate of $26 million. Xerox made $628 million in profits in 2014 and paid nothing in Federal income taxes; in fact, it received a tax rebate of $16 million.
I strongly support this motion which has been introduced by Senator Murray to provide sequester relief, particularly for nondefense discretionary programs, and I would hope very much that this motion to instruct will receive wide bipartisan support.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, as I have indicated on many occasions, I think this Republican budget is, frankly, a disaster. It causes severe harm for some of the most vulnerable people in this country. It throws 27 million people off of health insurance. It forces elderly people to pay more for prescription drugs. It cuts $90 billion in mandatory Pell grants at a time when young people are struggling to be able to afford to go to college. Pell grants are one of the significant ways that they are able to go to college; $90 billion is cut. It cuts Head Start significantly, such that 110,000 fewer young children will be able to enroll in Head Start. It cuts title I education program money directed to schools with low-income kids, the schools who need help the most.
At a time when so many of our families are struggling to put food on the table, this budget cuts nutrition programs, including the WIC Program, by $10 billion. That is the nutrition program that goes to pregnant women, mothers, and infants.
It makes other massive cuts in nutrition. It makes cuts in affordable housing. It makes cuts in job training.
Now, in the midst of all of this, what it does also, unbelievably, while wreaking havoc on the lives of millions of working families, it decides that we can afford to give huge tax breaks to the very, very, very wealthiest--the top two-tenths of 1 percent--by abolishing the estate tax which would provide $263 billion in tax breaks for the wealthiest two-tenths of 1 percent of the American people. But then, after giving huge tax breaks to the very, very, very rich, what it does is raise taxes for low-income and working-class families by increasing taxes by $900 apiece for more than 13 million families by allowing the expansion of the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit to expire.
So massive cuts in health care, education, and nutrition for working families; huge tax breaks----
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Mr. SANDERS. As I was saying, huge tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires and then increased taxes for low-income and working people. This is moving the country in exactly the wrong direction.
Today, our side of the aisle brought forth 10 separate motions to instruct, which, if passed, would make this budget a much better document, and I hope very much that both sides of the aisle will support these motions.
With that, I yield the floor.
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, this motion is being offered by Senator Brown of Ohio. Our big banks are too big. The largest banks are now 38 percent larger than they were before the crisis. In terms of outstanding loans, one out of seven Americans is being pursued by a debt collector. U.S. banks are so big that the six largest financial institutions in this country today have assets of roughly $9.8 trillion, which is equivalent to 60 percent of the Nation's GDP.
Being big and powerful is good for the banks and bad for this country. For example, Bloomberg says the too-big-to-fail subsidy is massive. By being big, they get huge subsidies. It amounts to $83 billion a year, and that is why I support this provision to stop too big to fail.
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, in the State of Vermont and I expect all over this country, especially in rural areas, what we have seen is a significant slowdown in mail delivery by the U.S. Postal Service. What this provision is about is the establishment of a deficit-neutral reserve fund which establishes a moratorium to prevent the shutting down of up to 82 mail processing plants all across this country. It is asking that we reinstate overnight delivery standards, undo what the Postal Service has done, that we protect rural services, and that we allow the Postal Service to innovate and adapt to compete in a digital age.
The basic financial problems of the Postal Service are that they have to pay $5.5 billion every year in retirement benefits. That program already has $50 billion in its account. Do away with that, and the Postal Service will make a modest profit.
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, Social Security is arguably the most important Federal program we have. It is life and death to millions of senior citizens, people who have to figure out how they pay for food, how they heat their homes, how they pay for their medicine. Social Security is not going broke. It could pay out all benefits for the next 18 years.
What this provision does is make it clear that we go on record to not cut Social Security benefits, not raise the retirement age, not privatize Social Security. Let's stand with the seniors of this country. Let us protect Social Security, not cut it.
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