Continuing Extension Act Of 2010
Floor Speech
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Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I thank my friend and colleague from Alabama. Senator Sessions has been an outstanding leader on many issues but specifically on this issue of fighting against this debt. He and I often talk about these concerns. He comes to the floor, and he articulates these concerns so the American people can understand how dangerous this situation is. But he does not just come and talk about the problem; he offers real solutions to cap our spending, to find mechanisms to get this Congress on the right course.
As my friend mentioned, I am new to the Senate. I was appointed and came here in September of last year. My experience is in business and my experience is in State government back home in Florida. The comparisons to how Congress manages its money--your money--versus how a family does or a business does or even a State government does, those comparisons are striking because this is the only institution I have ever been a part of where we do not have to make ends meet, where we just spend money we do not have, where we never have a discussion about, well, if we raise this budget for this particular part of the money we spend, how much are we going to have to lower this budget. That discussion does not happen in the U.S. Congress.
In 2011, we are going to take in an estimated $2.2 trillion in revenue from taxes--money that is coming from you, the American people--but we are going to spend $3.8 trillion. That is like a family in my home State, say, in Ocala, who makes $22,000 a year and they are going to spend $38,000. Oh, by the way, they have $1 million in debt. It is unsustainable.
The way the American people run their families, the way businesses have to run their budgets, the way State governments that are constitutionally required to balance their budgets have to cut spending in tough times--we do not have those mechanisms in this body, and we do not have enough people, such as Senator Sessions, Senator Chambliss, my friend from Georgia, and Senator Coburn from Oklahoma, who come to the floor and bring forth good ideas to talk about this spending problem.
This current bill to extend unemployment insurance and add money for doctors who give Medicare services--a lot of those folks in my State in Florida--and for money for COBRA, which is health care when you are unemployed, so government can put in that portion your employer would normally pay for--these are all good things. Every Member of this body, all 100 Senators, all 41 Members of the Republican side want to vote for this bill.
Last night, as my friend from Alabama said, we had a deal worked out with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to pay for this. What a novel idea: We are going to spend new money, and we are actually going to cut money from someplace else in the budget so we do not add to the deficit and the debt--shockingly good idea in Washington. But the deal fell apart because our friends in the House of Representatives, the Democratic leadership, would not agree to it.
Let me tell you, there is probably no State in the Union that needs this money more than Florida. I want to vote for it, but I cannot vote for it because it is not paid for.
My friend from Georgia just talked about the unemployment number that came out--more than 10 percent unemployment in Georgia. He has a new number coming out today. The number came out in Florida. We are at 12.2 percent unemployment announced today--12.2 percent, the worst unemployment in the history of keeping records in Florida. The second worst time was in 1973 to 1975, during that recession. There are 1,126,000 Floridians out of work. By the way, that is just the unemployed number. We know those who are underemployed--people who lost their jobs and now have to work part time and cannot get full-time employment--we know that number, if you add it with those who are unemployed, is probably 17, 18, 19 percent of the people.
When I go home to Florida and I am walking down the street, one out of every five people I see of working age and ability either does not have a job or does not have enough work. That is the issue on which we should be focused. But we cannot continue to pay for things here that we cannot afford. We cannot continue to burden our kids and the next generation with debt they will not be able to pay.
The hour of awakening and the hour we will be responsible and feel the impact for this spending is not just 5 or 10 years from now; it is now, it is today. Let me give an example.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, there is an article by Tom Lauricella. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this article in the Wall Street Journal.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD
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Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, the article talks about the fact that when we are selling our debt, which is what the Federal Government does when we do not have enough money to pay for our expenditures, when we spend more than we have, we borrow and we issue debt instruments--bonds, Treasury notes. Now we find out in today's Wall Street Journal that the demand for our debt is falling. As my friend, Senator Sessions from Alabama, said, Warren Buffett now is a better investment than the U.S. Treasury. What an important statement that is for us to think about, that we no longer are the best investment, that an individual in this country is a more worthy investment.
Now Treasury note demand is down. What happens when less people want to buy our debt? When they turn their nose up at our Treasury offerings, the bond prices go down and the yield goes higher. The interest rate goes up. That does a couple things. One is that we have to spend more money on interest payments. That means more of our spending in the year will go to pay for our debt. The third or fourth--depending on how you count it--biggest expenditure every year in our budget is our interest payments. There is more than $200 billion a year in interest payments alone. That is money that could be sent back to you, the taxpayer, or could be used to pave roads or hire teachers or send kids to college, and we are sending it to finance bad decisions we have already made.
But now, with the interest rates, the yield rates going higher on the debt we are offering, guess what it is going to do. It is going to increase the cost of borrowing money, which is going to increase the cost of mortgages.
So here I am from Florida, and I sure want to extend unemployment insurance to folks who are suffering, but I also don't want to do any more damage to our real estate market. We have some of the worst foreclosure rates in the country. So what is going to happen when that family of four in Naples, FL, who has been struggling through this economy, has a problem keeping a job? Maybe mom lost a job and now she is underemployed and dad is unemployed, and they are trying to make their mortgage payments. They have an adjustable rate mortgage and their interest rates are going to go up. What happens if someone wants to buy a new house in our struggling real estate economy? They can't go buy that house because that house is now more expensive because the interest rates have gone up.
So the problems of our debt and our deficit are not just going to be visited on our kids, they are being visited now. Other countries around the world, their economies are booming. Their growth is coming back--places such as Brazil are on fire. Their stock market is up incredibly because the world is finding it a better place to invest than the United States. Our debt is making us a bad investment. So not just for our kids or our grandkids, right now this economy is going to have problems recovering because of the debt we have now.
But let's talk a second about the future. Sometime between now and Monday my wife and I are going to have our fourth child. I have the cell phone in my pocket. If it rings, I have to go. That baby is going to be born in a country where he or she will be responsible for about $40,000 in debt. What is the future of our baby, along with our other three sons who are 6, 4 and 2, going to be like in this country with all of this crushing debt, with $10 trillion more in debt expected by the end of this decade?
We are going to pay $800 billion in interest payments by the end of this decade if this spending continues. That is more than we spend on the defense of the United States, more than our Defense Department budget. More and more will go to interest; less and less will go to spending. Then what will happen? Taxes are going to have to go up, and by the way, 70 million people are going to retire and they are going to go into Medicare. Those two programs right now don't have enough money in them.
So while I am high on the American people, and I am optimistic this country can do anything, I am seriously worried about this government. I am seriously worried about the fact that we spend money we don't have, and I am seriously worried about the fact that there are too few Members of this body and the body down the hall who want to make the tough decisions to start cutting our spending now to save our future.
By the way, it wouldn't be that hard to do. It wouldn't be that hard to do for us to come together, Democrats and Republicans alike. The American people should know we have colleagues on the other side of the aisle who want to do this. We talk to them. They are concerned too. But we have to come together and address this, and we are going to have to make, as the President would say, grownup decisions about the future of this country. Some things are going to have to get cut, and we are going to have to spend less.
Let me give an example of the framework--for when we come back from the break--of a piece of legislation I will introduce to give us the mechanism for doing this. If we went back to the spending that we had in 2007, which is just 3 years ago, and we froze spending at that level for the next 10 years--until 2020--we would balance the budget in 2013, and we would cut the deficit of $12 trillion in half by 2020.
Now, the question I ask when I am back in Florida talking to constituents is--as my friend from Georgia said--whether at a supermarket, at a townhall meeting, or at a church--would you be able to live off the money you made in 2007? Well, the answer unanimously is, yes; it is more than I am making now. The economy didn't go into recession until December of 2007. So why can't government go back to what we spent in 2007 and cap it? Then we could do something we don't do in this Congress: We could look at the money we are spending now as opposed to trying to spend new money and find out whether we are doing it efficiently.
We could cut the wasteful programs. My colleague from Oklahoma has already been identifying hundreds of duplicative programs in government. We could go and find ways to combat waste, fraud, and abuse. For example, we know there is $60 billion to $100 billion a year in Medicare fraud--health care for seniors. My State, unfortunately, is the leading place for health care fraud in the country.
I have a proposal I have talked to my friend, the chairman of the Finance Committee, about--Chairman Baucus--and other Democrats, and I think we are going to get some bipartisan support to pass that this year, and that may save us $20 billion by stopping waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare. Does anyone think there is not waste and fraud and abuse throughout the spending of government? When is the last time someone went and looked under the hood of one of these agencies and said: Could we do the same work with less? Do we need to spend as much money as we spent last year?
Businesses do this every year. They are doing it right now, just as families are doing it. They are saying: Do we really need to do what we did last year? We have less money; what do we cut? Government doesn't do that.
Our friends on the other side are more interested in new programs. We should all spend a year or two focusing on the programs we have. My friend from Oklahoma, Senator Coburn, is a champion at oversight and gets under the hood of these agencies and looks at the spending. It is not just in the social services agencies, it is in all the agencies--in the Defense Department and everywhere.
We have a duty to the American people to make sure that every dollar we spend, we spend wisely. Let's spend a couple of years questioning the money we are spending now. Let's have our agency heads, our Secretaries, our Cabinet members, instead of devising new programs, go into the programs they have and see whether they are helping the American people. If they are not, let's cut them. Let's freeze hiring across the Federal Government. A lot of folks are going to retire out of the Federal Government when the baby boomers retire. It is an easy way to shrink the size of government, to let those folks retire and not replace them. Technology in the private sector gives us great opportunities to do more with less. In government, we do less with more.
So I am appreciative of my friend from Oklahoma for bringing up this point and objecting. It is not politically popular to do. None of us wants to stand in the way of unemployment compensation. I need it in Florida for my folks who are out of work. But we are impacting our way of life now, and we are going to impact our children's lives. When my baby is born this weekend, or on Monday, I am going to be extremely happy--and I know my wife is--about bringing a fourth child into the world, but it will still be in the back of my mind: Is he or she going to inherit the same America I have, with all the same opportunities I was able to enjoy? I hope so.
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