Making Continuing Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. I thank my colleague from Maine for his statement and support for this effort. This is a historic moment. It has been 4 or 5 years since we have enacted and passed a budget agreement between the House and Senate. In a divided government, we have found many excuses and ways around it, but we are facing our responsibility today in the Senate. We are hoping that yesterday's procedural vote, with 67 Democrats and Republicans joining together, is an indication of the success we will find later today when this measure comes up for a final vote.

Before I go any further, I wish to salute my colleague, my friend, and my fellow leader in the Senate, Senator Patty Murray of Washington.

A few years ago Patty was given a tough assignment. She was given the assignment to chair the so-called supercommittee. I had been involved in a lot of deficit negotiations up to that point, and I thought, oh my goodness, she is walking into a minefield. Well, she did a professional job, a bipartisan effort. It didn't succeed, but she learned in the process not only more about our budget challenge but also more about the leaders in the budget process. And I think it was that painful experience with the supercommittee that set the stage for the much more successful negotiation over this budget agreement with Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan is no stranger to those of us in Illinois. His congressional district borders on our State in Wisconsin. I know PAUL. I like him. I respect him. We disagree on a lot of substantive issues, but I respect him as a person of substance and a person of values who tries to solve problems. He showed, with Senator Patty Murray, that Democrats and Republicans can sit down in a room together, respect one another's differences, and still come to an agreement. What a refreshing development in this town where so many times we fall flat on our face trying to come up with a solution.

I also want to commend Paul Ryan, while I am on the subject, for his leadership on the immigration issue. It is not easy for him to step up as a conservative Republican and support comprehensive immigration reform, but he has done it. He came to Chicago and made that announcement with Luis Gutiérrez, the Congressman from the city of Chicago who is the national leader on immigration.

I only say that because if we have more of that kind of dialogue, more of that kind of agreement, we will have a better Congress and the American people will know it. Right now we are languishing in approval ratings across the country, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that we spend too much time fighting and not enough time trying to find solutions.

This budget agreement is a solution. Is it perfect? Of course not. There are parts of this budget agreement I don't like at all. But I have come to learn that if we are going to get anything done in Washington for the good of the people of this country, we have to be prepared to accept in an agreement some things we might not agree with. We found that with comprehensive immigration reform. We will find it today with this budget agreement.

This plan isn't perfect, but it is going to enable us to avoid a shutdown of the government. Did we or did we not learn a lesson just a few months ago? We shut down the government of the United States of America for 16 days. One Senator came to the floor on the other side of the aisle speaking 21 hours in an effort to inspire others to join him in the shutdown--and, sadly, it worked. For 16 days, 800,000 Federal employees or more were sent home with the promise that eventually they would be paid, and millions of Americans were denied the basic services of our government during that government shutdown.

We managed to emerge from that with the promise that we would fund our government with a continuing resolution until the middle of January. But then the burden fell on Patty Murray and Paul Ryan and the members of that conference committee to come up with a solution, and they did. That is what is before us today.

Those who are voting no don't have an alternative. They don't have a plan. They are just angry or upset or basically opposed, but they don't have an alternative. If it means they would want another government shutdown, so be it. But thank goodness an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives voted for this plan. Yesterday, if I am not mistaken, we had 12 Republicans join us and all 55 Democrats, so 67 voted in favor of this bipartisan budget plan.

What is especially important to me as a member of the Appropriations Committee is not only is it avoiding another government shutdown, it is a 2-year plan. I said to Senator Murray when she called me with the details: That is one of the strongest arguments in favor of this I can imagine, to think now that the Appropriations Committee can sit down and do its work for the rest of this year with a budget target number.

I have a pretty substantial responsibility on the Appropriations Committee. I chair the subcommittee on defense and intelligence. In that subcommittee, our bill alone is about $600 billion, or just a little south of that, and it embodies almost 60 percent of all discretionary spending of the Federal Government. We are going to get a chance now--and I have already sat down with Congressman Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, who chairs the same subcommittee in the House--to work out a bipartisan appropriations bill for the defense of America. Is there anything more important than our national security? We have to start there, and we are going to be able to do it now in a thoughtful way because of this budget number. Those who are voting no would cast us again into the darkness--a continuing resolution.

For those who are on the outside looking in, a continuing resolution is akin to saying to a family: Listen, next year we are going to give you the checkbook ledger from last year. Keep writing the same checks for the same amount, and we are sure everything will work out. It doesn't.

Instead, because of this budget agreement we can start looking at ways to save money which will not harm our men and women in uniform and will keep America strong and create a national defense.

We are going to also work in this bill to start to repair America's fraying social safety net--in other words, protecting the most vulnerable in America--because this agreement stands for the premise that we are going to treat defense and nondefense spending and cuts equally. That was an agreement we started. It is one they honored with us.

We have made real progress in the last 4 years to cut our Federal deficit in half. We are going to cut the deficit even further under this bipartisan plan but in a much more thoughtful way. I am going to be voting yes for the budget and I urge my colleagues to do the same.

I see the Republican leader on the floor, and I know he has a very busy schedule. I do want to leave with one closing thought. There is another deficit in America beyond our shrinking budget deficit that is even more dangerous to America's future; that is, the rapidly deteriorating situation many working families are facing. We have an opportunity deficit in America. President Obama called this opportunity deficit the defining challenge of our time, and I believe he is right.

We don't begrudge anyone wealth and success in America. We celebrate it. But we also believe in fairness. We believe in the dignity of work. We believe, if you work hard and follow the rules, you ought to be able to provide for your family with the basics of life and with the dream of an even better life for the next generation. That is the promise at the heart of America's economy, and for too many families today, it feels like a broken promise. We are losing the balance between personal wealth and our commonwealth to a winner-take-all ideology that is hurting our economy and our democracy.

Market capitalism has generated enormous wealth for America's economy. But for more than 40 years, the benefits of economic growth in America have gone increasingly to those at the top--while the middle class shrinks and the poor slip deeper into the quicksand of inescapable poverty. Think about this: in 1970, the top 1 percent of earners took home 9 percent of America's income. Today they take home nearly a quarter. The top 1 percent holds more than one-third of the Nation's overall wealth, while the bottom half of America controls less than 3 percent. The richest 400 Americans--the top one-tenth of one percent--now own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined. America is the wealthiest Nation on Earth.

Corporate profits and the stock market are hitting records highs. Yet millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did 20 years ago. We have more children growing up in poverty than in any other industrialized Nation. And our infant, maternal and child mortality rates are the highest among advanced Nations. Social mobility--the ability to work your way up the economic ladder--is now lower in the United States than it is in Europe.

What does that tell you about the American Dream? Income inequality is worse in America today than it is in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, and Ethiopia. And then there is this: Since the official end of the Great Recession in 2009, 95 percent of all income gains in the U.S. have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent. There's a reason the YouTube chart Wealth Inequality in America has gotten more than 13 million views. The American people know that our economy isn't working for average working folks. It's like a bumper sticker that said, ``The economy isn't broken, it's fixed.'' The rules have been rewritten over the last four decades to concentrate more and more wealth at the very top, at the expense of everyone else.

The United States is not alone in this; growing income and wealth inequality are global problems. But these problems are growing faster in America than in any Nation. We would do well to listen to Pope Francis, who, in his recent ``apostolic exhortation''--a sort of open letter to the faithful--described trickle-down economics as a system that ``has never been confirmed by the facts.'' It is created, in the Pope's words an ``economy of exclusion and inequality'' and ``a globalization of indifference.''

Pope Francis asks:

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? We are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase, in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Economic justice must be a central concern of the Catholic Church, the Pope says. But it is not the Church's responsibility alone. The Pope writes that mere handouts are not enough. I quote:

We must work to eliminate the structural causes of poverty. It is vital, that government leaders and financial leaders take heed and broaden their horizons, working to ensure that all citizens have dignified work, education and health care. I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor.

Those who are unmoved by moral appeals might want to listen instead to the economic case for reducing economic inequality. America's widening income and wealth inequities have recently drawn warnings from the Federal Reserve Board, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the IMF, the International Monetary Fund. Listen to this warning, from a recent IMF analysis. I quote:

Some dismiss inequality and focus instead on overall growth--arguing, in effect, that a rising tide lifts all boats. [But w]hen a handful of yachts become ocean liners while the rest remain lowly canoes, something is seriously amiss.

In countries with high levels of inequality like the United States, the IMF warns, ``growth becomes more fragile,'' economic crises like the Great Recession become more frequent, and economic expansions are shortened by as much as one-third. Slower growth leads to fewer jobs created and even greater inequality--a vicious cycle. In fact, IMF economists found that inequality seems to have a stronger effect on growth than several other factors, including foreign investment, trade openness, and exchange rate competitiveness. Rather than being conflicting goals, the IMF economists concluded, reducing inequality and bolstering growth, in the long run, might be ``two sides of the same coin.'' That is certainly true in an economy such as ours, in which 70 percent of the U.S. economy depends on consumer spending.

It has taken years to reach these levels of inequality in America and it may take years and sustained effort by Congress to restore broad-based growth to our economy, the kind of growth that benefits all Americans, not just the wealthiest few.

The Affordable Care Act is a powerful start. No longer will tens of millions of Americans--most of them working people--have to worry that they are just one illness or accident away from bankruptcy. Small business owners will be able to spend less time searching for affordable health plans, and more time creating jobs.

Next, we need to restore the bottom rung on the ladder out of poverty and into the middle class by raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. According to a Wall Street Journal/ABC News poll, 63 percent of Americans--two-thirds of Americans--strongly favor boosting the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. $7.25 an hour, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, works out to $14,500 a year--40 percent below the poverty line. Clearly, we can't boost the American economy on poverty wages. Studies and our own history show that raising the minimum wage will create jobs--because in America, consumers are the biggest job creators.

If you want to help poor children escape poverty, one of the best investments you can make is in effective pre-school. We know that. It's been proven. Yet, according to the OECD, the U.S. ranks 28th out of 38 leading economies in the proportion of four-year-olds in education. The budget before the Senate restores funding so that many of the children kicked out of Head Start classes because of sequester cuts will be able to return to school. This is still only a fraction of the children who need quality pre-school. President Obama has set universal pre-school for every child in America. That should be our goal. Because the future belongs to those who are best-educated.

Here's another staggering fact about the new economy: For reasons that include automation, globalization and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs, more than half of Americans will experience near-poverty for at least some part of their lives. More than half. Here's another sobering fact: According to the National Employment Law Project, about two-thirds of the American jobs lost in the Great Recession were in middle-wage occupations--the kind of jobs that don't require a safety net. But these middle-wage occupations have accounted for less than one-fourth of the job growth during the recovery. Weakening the social safety net at the same time America is losing middle-class jobs can only hurt families and our economy. We need to strengthen America's social safety net so that temporary economic setbacks don't spiral and trap families in inescapable poverty.

We need to invest in infrastructure.

And we need to restore the ability of working people to choose to join or form a union so that they can bargain collectively for fair wages and safe working conditions.

Labor and management, working together, built the American middle class. Labor and management, working together, can help to restore and grow America's middle class.

Years ago, Bobby Kennedy said that America's gross national product measures a seemingly endless variety of commercial transactions. But, he said, the gross national product does not measure many other things, such as ``the health of our children.''

It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

For 40 years, a series of political and economic choices has widened economic inequality in America. Those choices have hurt many families. They have made our economy less fair, less stable, and less prosperous. And they have hammered away at one of the promises that made us most proud to be Americans: the promise that if you work hard, you can make a better life for yourself and your family. This budget will help us redeem that promise and reclaim that pride. I ask my fellow Senators to vote with us for economic fairness and shared prosperity.

After we pass this budget, after we get our appropriation bills underway, we are going to come forward and--I hope in a bipartisan manner--address some of these pillars of income equality in America: an increase in the minimum wage, an opportunity to make sure through the Affordable Care Act that every family has an opportunity for health insurance in America, a press conference which I will have later today with Senators WARREN and REID on the whole student loan debt crisis facing so many families. We have reached a point now where the student loan debt in America is greater than the credit card debt. It has devastating impacts on working families across America.

These and so many others should be part of an agenda to repair the opportunity deficit, and I hope Republicans will join us in a bipartisan effort.

I yield the floor.

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