The Economy
Floor Speech
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Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, obviously, when you look at what needs to be done in the fall and, frankly, if you look at what needs to be done in the next few weeks, there are important items ahead of us.
One of them that my colleague from Florida just did a good job talking about is setting the debt limit for how much Federal Government debt should the country be able to tolerate.
One way to do this is to set a limit. Another way that some of my colleagues appear to really prefer is just to set a date and say we are going to postpone any limit until that date, and we will just see what happens. We will see how deep the debt gets between now and then. But we really don't want to talk about a limit, and when you look at what that limit is likely to be, you would understand why you wouldn't want to talk about that.
We have really seen this coming for some time. It shouldn't be a crisis, except, frankly, our friends on the other side seem intent on making it a crisis and seeing if they can include all of us suddenly in a spending discussion that we haven't been in up until now. How much debt can we have? How much can we afford? But what we have seen this year is, how much money can one side spend without involving the other side in any way?
We have never approached the debt limit in at least the last 25 years, that I am aware of, in a way that didn't involve talking about spending. In fact, I would argue that there is no real reason to have the debt limit if it doesn't force a discussion on spending. Other countries don't have it; we have it.
One reason I have always thought it actually served a purpose was it always generated a discussion on spending--not just a discussion on full faith and credit but how much money are we going to spend. In fact, when President Obama was President and the debt ceiling had to be extended, we had a discussion about what our spending caps were going to be. We had a decade, because of that, of spending caps. We didn't always stick with them, but to not stick with them, you had to change the law, so that forced another discussion. We have all heard for a decade about the caps deal, the spending caps deal. Well, that was a discussion that was had so there would be a bipartisan agreement on the debt limit.
In June of 2019, we saw the debt limit coming again, and by that time, Speaker Pelosi, who was the Speaker of the House in charge of a majority in the House, said she wouldn't cooperate in doing anything on the debt limit unless the administration agreed to spend more money.
So there you have a spending discussion, but you also have one body of the Congress where the leader of the entire majority is saying: We are not going to be part of the debt limit unless we have an agreement on spending, and we want to spend more. From that moment on, Secretary Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury, was up here over and over again, negotiating with the Speaker of the House on just how much more it was going to take for her to be part of the debt limit.
Now, here we are in almost October, 9 months through the year. Republicans really haven't been asked in any serious way up until now this year how to set parameters for government spending. We would like to spend less; the other side would like to spend more. But no Republicans--zero Republicans--have been involved in a plan to eliminate important parts of the 2017 tax bill that clearly were producing the kinds of economic results we had hoped for at the beginning of the pandemic.
No Republicans were part of the plan to spend right at $2 trillion in the March COVID relief bill even though we really saw our economy already coming back.
By the way--no surprise--when you spend $2 trillion, inflation is one of the things you are going to get when you put that much money into the economy on top of what we put in in 2020 in a bipartisan way to try to stabilize the economy.
Well, the economy was clearly stabilized by the first of last year, and no Republican, again, let me say, was part of how to spend that $2 trillion.
No Republican has been part of the discussion of how to spend what our friends on the other side say would be a $3.5 trillion, reckless tax-and-spending amount. Others estimate that 3.5 really would be 5 trillion. But, again, the point is not how big it would be; the point is, no Republican has been part of that.
If you look at what is actually in that legislation as it comes out of the House, some of the things are pretty amazing. There is $3 billion on a project called Tree Equity. Now, I don't think that is to make all the trees the same size. I assume that is a project to be sure that everybody has their fair percentage of the trees, whatever that would mean and how you describe that.
There is $200 million for the Presidio, the park in Speaker Pelosi's district--$200 million.
They are talking about $8 billion in that bill for a new Civilian Climate Corps and $7 billion to buy electric vehicles for the Postal Service.
Their plan comes to us with $105 million for ``entrepreneurial training'' for people who are currently or have just been incarcerated.
There is even $5 million in that bill for electronic voting systems for union elections. I am not opposed to union elections and am not opposed to unions having them. It would seem to me that they have up until now figured out how to provide their own equipment for their own elections or rent it or lease it. It is certainly a new sort of government involvement in that activity.
Frankly, the list goes on and on. At $3 trillion, you are likely to have a lot of ideas. Seems to me that a lot of the ideas are, you come up with a number, which is what it takes to eliminate the 2017 tax cuts, and then start talking about, how many new things do we need to do to support that number?
Well, this shouldn't be an emergency. September is pretty late to reach out to the other side and not even now say ``Well, let's talk about our spending priorities,'' but say, ``Well, you need to help us with this because at some point, there is some money that had to be spent that was your responsibility too.''
I guess we could have said that to Speaker Pelosi in 2019 when she said: Not going to do it unless we get more spending. And we wouldn't have had an agreement in the Obama years if we hadn't set a cap on spending.
The truth is, this isn't Speaker Pelosi's money, and it is not Senator Schumer's money, and it is not my money. We are talking about the money that belongs to the American people. They need to have a say in this.
In a 50-50 Senate, one side deciding ``We are going to make all the decisions about spending money'' means that one side is likely to wind up making all the decisions about how to reach the debt limit.
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