Infrastructure

Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, this body does not have to automatically raise taxes to pay for infrastructure. Now, I know some of my colleagues would disagree with me. Some want to raise the gasoline tax. The President--well, I think he wants to raise every tax known to man and beast to spend on infrastructure and other things. And that is--he is the President. He is an American. He is entitled to his own opinion.

But I don't think we spent nearly enough time looking at our current spending and asking ourselves if we could reprioritize some of the ways that we are spending taxpayer money.

Let me put it another way. No person with even a casual relationship with the Federal budget and/or an IQ above a root vegetable believes that every single penny being spent today in the U.S. Government's budget is being spent efficiently. I mean, it is just not, Mr. President. You know that. You have run a State before. You have put together a budget before. It is not. For example, we waste $144 billion a year, every year, on improper payments. We send checks to people who are not entitled to receive them--for the earned income tax credit, for example. We spend money on people who don't exist or aren't qualified to receive Medicaid. We even send money to dead people, and they cash the checks--or at least their relatives do.

Now, I am not naive. I know that we will never ever--an organization as large as the Federal Government will never be able to avoid a percentage of improper payments. I understand that. But we ought to at least try, particularly on sending the checks to dead people. Even if we could reduce that $144 billion by 10 percent or 20 percent or 25 percent, we are talking about a very large amount of recurring revenue.

A very simple solution--I suggested this to the White House, which hasn't responded--we have passed legislation in this body, as you know, to try to stop sending checks to dead people. There is just one problem: It was made effective 3 years from now. I had to agree to it in conference to get the bill passed. There is no good reason for it other than some lobbyists insisted on it.

President Biden right now, I think, could pick up at least $10 billion, maybe more--we are not sure how much--by just saying: Effective immediately, my administration is no longer going to send checks to dead people. I mean, who is going to get mad? Who supports sending money to dead people? The American people don't.

No. 2, we could repurpose the money--a lot of the money that we have already appropriated. I have lost count on how much money we have appropriated for coronavirus--not just on public health but also for our economy. Look, I voted for many of the bills. I didn't vote for the last one because I felt the last one was unnecessary, it was too expensive, and it really wasn't about the coronavirus.

But I think all fairminded people can agree right now on two things: No. 1, a lot of the money we appropriated in the last coronavirus bill has not been spent, and No. 2, we are no longer in an economic crisis. The main crisis we have right now is that our small business women and small business men can't find workers.

So we are currently not in an economic crisis, and I think we can go back and take some of that money--and my State, Louisiana is going to take--some aspects of my State government--it will take them 10 years to spend all the money we sent to them in the last bill. I can tell you, given the option in my State, they are going to choose to spend that money on infrastructure and not on what Congress sent them the money to spend it on.

No. 3, there is a very interesting study by the CBO taking the years--I think it was 2013 to 2017. The CBO took the entire Federal nonmilitary workforce, on which we spend $220 billion a year because we have to have workers, and they took every job in the Federal Government and compared it to every equivalent job in the private sector. It was a massive study. So it is apples to apples. The CBO found that the Federal Government, on average, pays a Federal worker 17 percent more annually than we pay the same worker in the private sector.

Now, I won't begrudge anybody a living, but what if we could reduce that to 15 percent or 12 percent? What if we could just not automatically fill every vacancy? What if we actually stopped and asked ourselves, if this position has been vacant for 8 months, maybe we don't need it. I think there are enormous savings to be had.

The final thing I will point out: Doing is better than having. Doing is better than having. You are happier when you have earned something than when somebody has just given it to you.

We are the most generous Nation in all of human history. The American people spend about $1 trillion a year helping our neighbors and some folks who are not our neighbors but are less fortunate than we are. But we spend about $76 billion a year on Medicaid and on food stamps for adults who are able-bodied, who are 55 years of age and younger, and who don't have children. Many of them could work. Now, I know there are obstacles to them being able to work. Maybe they need help looking for a job. Maybe they need employment counseling. Maybe they need help with transportation. But we could save enormous amounts of money, and our citizens, our people, and our neighbors, who are receiving this money, would be better off if they had a job.

We don't have to reinvent the wheel. All we have to do is look to Denmark. Denmark does an extraordinary job. They are very generous in Denmark with their payments for unemployment, but they also have an infrastructure set up in government, which we could do, which works with people to get them a job and to get them off welfare. And Denmark has saved an enormous amount of money. Let me say it again. Doing is better than having.

Am I saying we could save 100 percent of that $75 billion? No. I don't know how much we could save. Nobody else does either because we have never tried.

Now, in about--I don't know--7 minutes, I have just given you four or five ideas. I am not suggesting that this is anything. I am not pretending that I just discovered gravity or something. This isn't Earth-shaking. I mean, you can find this with just a cursory amount of research. Just call the folks over at the Congressional Budget Office and ask them: What are some ways we can save money in our Federal budget?

I just think we would all feel so much better. I know the American taxpayer would feel a lot better, if just for a little while, as we talk about the importance of infrastructure, true infrastructure-- roads, bridges, broadband--if we just spent a little while, as we talk about infrastructure, on how to pay for it without putting our hand even further, deeper, and more frequently in the taxpayers' pockets, because it can be done. I watched the Presiding Officer do it in Colorado. I have seen too many public officials do it. I think we need to at least try.

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