Establishing the Commission on Freedom of Information Act Processing Delays -- Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. I didn't come to the floor to comment on what Senator Vitter just said, and I can sure appreciate his view that a decision that ends up with a $7 trillion addition to the national debt over the next 10 years is not getting us very far down the road compared to what the people of the United States, who have to live within their income, believe this Congress should accomplish. But a $7 trillion addition to the debt over that period of time, compared to what the President suggested we spend over the next 10 years when he issued his budget to Congress, on February 14, we could end up with $13 trillion added to the national debt--so somewhere along the line, between February 14 and last night, when the President announced his support for this compromise, he has come to the conclusion that we could spend $6 trillion less over the next 10 years.

Even though a lot of people see this as not making progress, the President admitted he has found ways of changing his mind about $6 trillion in the course of just a few months. I suppose it also might lead our constituents to think in terms of, there has to be something wrong with the thinking in Washington if, on February 14, they think we have to spend X number of dollars that will add $13 trillion to the national debt and here it is just 3 or 4 months since then and the President goes on television and says this is a good compromise and we can be at $6 trillion less in spending. It probably leads people to believe there has to be a lot of money wasted in Washington, DC, if, in fact, between February 14 and last night, the President can find consensus in spending $6 trillion less over the next 10 years. That is a comment on what Senator Vitter just said and not disagreeing with Senator Vitter's comments in any way.

When we are in the Senate of the United States talking about what to do about the deficit situation and how much deficit spending we are having, it probably gets lost in the minds of people that what we are spending today and adding to the national debt is creating a great legacy of debt to leave to our children and grandchildren. This debate around this issue brings me to this question: Is it fair to tax our children and grandchildren just because they cannot vote? Our children and grandchildren, for the most part, do not have any voice in this, except what is given by our generation and people representing the older generations, other than our children, making these decisions. That is because we, in fact, are doing just that; taxing our children and grandchildren by adding to the national debt. That is what we are doing with our irresponsible budget deficits.

We have a choice between a brighter future for our descendants or more social spending now; more social spending or, as President Obama might put it, investments. Any way we look at it, money we spend today and we do not pay for, we are putting this bill on future generations--our children and grandchildren. This is a choice we should be thinking about as we arrive at a decision of whether to vote for or against this grand compromise that has come out of these negotiations.

It gets down to basic choices of what do we do to encourage private sector employment. It gets down to choices of what we do about the size of government. There is a real choice in this debate as we talk about how big government should be. The choice is, do we grow government or do we grow the private sector?

What are the philosophical differences as well as the economic differences between growing government versus allowing business and entrepreneurship to flourish in America? We have had these dramatic increases in expenditures over just the last 2 years; 22-percent increases in appropriations in the last 2 years, when the economy only grows about 2 percent. Everybody knows that is not sustainable. On top of that, we had a $814 billion stimulus package that did not do what it was supposed to do to keep unemployment under 8 percent. At this time, we have gone from the national debt being 35 percent of the gross national product to today being about 65 percent and before the end of this year it is going to be 72 percent. And it is on a path to go to 90 percent. So we have seen government grow during the last few years out of proportion to the 20 percent of the gross national product that the public sector, represented by the Federal Government, took, compared to that growth from 20 to now 25.

Those 5 percentage points of growth in the government may not seem like a lot but just look at the difference between incentives for growth of the private sector for creating wealth as opposed to the Government consuming wealth. That is a fact. Government consumes wealth; it doesn't create wealth. People who are using their labor and their minds and investing are the ones who create wealth in our country. Those 5 percentage points make a difference because it is a very dramatic growth in government. As government consumes more--and I said it does not create wealth--it takes money out of the private sector, where it can grow more and create jobs and, consequently, then limits the opportunity for expanding the economic pie. That is what the private sector does through investment and labor, expands the economic pie. We can have economic growth so we can have more for more people.

But when government gets bigger, we restrict the opportunities for economic growth in the private sector and we have less pie for more people.

So a 5 percentage point growth in the government for the last 5 years compared to a 50-year average lessens the chance for a brighter future for our children and grandchildren, and that has to be a part of this debate as we decide the size of government versus the size of the private sector--the wealth-producing private sector.

If we keep government at 20 percent, then that is going to leave more in the private sector that is going to create wealth. It is going to be a more productive use of our resources.

The promise of our free market system can only be realized if we choose less social spending, if we choose less intrusive regulation and more efficient use of our resources in the private sector as opposed to the public sector.

We should be doing those things not only in this budget agreement, this deficit reduction agreement, but in all the decisions we make in the Congress. We should be doing more to encourage productive uses of our resources in the private sector, rather than consumption of those resources in the public sector.

President Obama has launched a campaign over the 30 months he has been in office to defend the welfare state and of course the woefully inefficient government-run health care system that is an example of that welfare state. I think we can learn some lessons from the rest of the world as well in looking at what is right for America. We should learn from history and not repeat the mistakes that have been made in other countries.

Since the 1950s, we have seen a lot of countries around the world use transfers of wealth from one generation to another or the transfer of wealth from one group of people to another.

We have seen grants. We have seen a redistributive philosophy in a lot of countries. What did that do? It did very little to raise the living standards of those in Asia, Latin America, Africa. More open economies have proven otherwise. More open economies as we have had in Japan since the 1950s have lifted more people out of poverty in 10 years than welfare state programs have done in 50 years.

Japan--just using it as an example--forced its producers 50, 60 years ago to compete. Private sector resources are more productive than those of the public sector making the decisions on how to use those resources, or a command economy, as you might call it. After Japan, we had Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. More recently, in the last 20 years, China and India have been encouraging more competition and more productive uses of resources with less of it promoted by the government. There are more decisions being made by the private sector in Brazil, and even parts of Africa are learning that is the route to go. We should learn from that. We should not turn backwards and rely more on government than we have in the past. By doing that, we retire opportunity in America. We retire opportunity by growing government at the expense of individual initiative. I hope we don't go that route. I think this budget debate has something to do with whether we are going to turn this around from the direction that it has taken over the last few years. Those last few years have not just been the 30 months of this Presidency but a little bit going back into the previous Presidency as well.

In regard to President Obama's programs, we have had few results from the government becoming more involved in the economy. We have dealt with near zero interest rates for a long period of time. I have already mentioned the $814 billion stimulus. There are other things that have been done in recent months to turn this economy around. We still have unemployment above 9 percent. The recovery that was supposed to come from all of these programs that have had greater government involvement in our economy have made a recovery very elusive.

In fact, there are even questions in the media recently of whether we could be going into another recession. President Obama tried mightly and wastefully--and in the end, very ineffectually--to turn this economy around through a massive number of government programs, but it has not worked. Progress would have been greater if we had tried programs by President Reagan or even President Kennedy's policies. In both of those instances they cut marginal tax rates. They eliminated burdensome regulations. Instead, what do we have out there right now even today coming from the White House? Promises yet of higher taxes; almost a demand that Congress pass higher taxes right now, and more regulations.

I just recently read about a businessperson saying there are 29 onerous regulations coming out of EPA that will be detrimental to job creation because they are so costly. Another way of putting it is it might cause businesspeople to worry about the uncertainty of what government is going to do. When we have that uncertainty--and right now there is a heightened uncertainty--it retards growth. It retards growth because people will not invest. When there is not increased investment and hiring, there is less productivity. What these issues are all about is creating jobs, and we are not creating jobs right now. That is what people are going to see as a test as to whether we are out of a recession--regardless of the leading economists who made the decision that we have been out of a recession now for 2 months.

For people who are unemployed, it is not a recession; it is a depression. They are going to measure coming out of a recession or coming out of a depression by whether they have a job. Jobs are not being created.

President Obama promises what he wants is something that is fair and balanced. When I hear him talking about ``fair and balanced,'' I wonder if he is trying to steal those words from Fox News. Why is it fair to distribute more welfare to the present generation and today's voters by growing government at the expense of the wealth-creating private sector? That harms our children and our grandchildren who are going to end up paying for it with less productive uses of the resources of this country.

We should not be thinking, as Europe has thought, about growing government, having government consume more of the resources of the economy, leaving less to individuals to make decisions whether to save or spend and what to save and what to spend on. That is the way it is done in Europe. We should not go that way.

I always use a statistic that may seem so small to be insignificant, but I use a statistic of 1 percent. If we compare the United States with Europe over the last 25 years, our growth has averaged about 1 percent more in the United States than in Europe. Now that 1 percent may not sound like very much, right? However, over a generation, just 1 percent difference in growth--between the economy of Europe and the economy of the United States--adds up to 25 percent differential in per capita income.

It seems to me the issues of this debt reduction debate--or if you want to call it increasing the deficit ceiling, the borrowing capacity of the Federal Government--too often tend to be about what is the situation right now, but it is really a debate about what is fair for our children and grandchildren because those are the decisions on borrowing that we are making today.

I have to go back to where I started with a question of whether it is fair for us to tax future generations for the borrowing that we are doing today, and simply say it is not fair to tax future generations just because they cannot vote.

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

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