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“THE BUDGET AND SPENDING” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Commerce was published in the Senate section on pages S14609-S14611 on Sept. 29, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE BUDGET AND SPENDING
Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, while we are trying to arrange a vote here on this important amendment, I would just revisit what our distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee was talking about: the budget and spending.
Mr. President, the present budget for the fiscal year is $1.518 trillion, in other words, one trillion five hundred eighteen billion dollars. The budget under consideration, of which this State, Justice, Commerce appropriation is a part thereof, is $1.602 trillion. So, one trillion six hundred two billion dollars means spending is going up $84 billion.
Which reminds me of my distinguished chairman of the subcommittee, the Senator from Texas, always talking about those in the wagon who are going to have to get outside the wagon and start pulling it. The funny thing, like Pogo, ``We have met the enemy,'' we have met those in the wagon, ``and it is us.'' We have been spending literally hundreds of billions more than we are taking in each year. While the budget itself increases some $84 billion, interest costs increase $348 billion, or $1 billion a day, as has just been referred to by the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee.
That is what is bothering this Senator--the reality of it all. We push and pull and tug and talk about those in the wagon, out of the wagon, and hard choices and biting bullets. But the comeuppance is that we continue to spend way more, and we act like we can actually eliminate the deficit by cutting spending. That is absolutely false. It is going to take taxes.
They do not want to say the word ``taxes'' around this town except to cut them, because a little poll you take, whether it is a Republican poll or a Democratic poll, says that is political poison. A hot-button item is what they call it. So what you do is you get out and you are for the family and you are against taxes. You are against crime and for prisons and on and on, this nonsensical charade we are engaged in.
The truth is, having been in the vineyards here, trying our dead-
level best with others. We tried a freeze. Then we tried a freeze and spending cuts. Then we tried a freeze, spending cuts and loophole closings. Then we tried a freeze, spending cuts, loophole closings and a value-added tax. And then just most recently, we opposed new programs that we cannot afford--AmeriCorps.
I stated yesterday the AmeriCorps Program took away 346,000 student loans in order to fund 20,000 to 25,000 student loans. Actually, it is the Federal Government cost of some $20,000 per student on AmeriCorps, plus $6,000 from private and local government resources, so it is
$26,000. I remember when I got out of law school, if I could have gotten paid $26,000 I would have jumped for joy. I would have jumped for joy.
I can tell you now--voluntarism? At $26,000 a head, you call it volunteer? Let us cut out the charade and get down to brass tacks and realize it is going to be way, way more than any kind of spending cuts.
The idea of a broad-based consumption tax I proposed over 10 years ago, almost 15 years ago. Now they are copying the idea to replace--I have been through about seven tax reforms in my 28, almost 29 years. The need is not to replace; the need is to replenish. What we need is more money, not different money. So the flat tax is now a wave--a hot-
button item, again in the poll, where we are just going to do it one way and replace the income and replace the corporate and replace everything, every other kind of tax. The truth of the matter is, rather than cutting taxes, we need to increase the taxes. And the bill to increase the taxes is presently, and has been, in the Finance Committee for the past 4 or 5 years. I have introduced it right regularly. They quit having hearings on it.
I will never forget the one hearing we had 5 years ago with Senator Bentsen as chairman. As I was leaving the Finance Committee room, a couple of the Finance Committee members said, ``If we had a secret ballot we would pass that thing out unanimously. We need it now.'' That was before the 1992 election for President Bush's reelection.
Of course, we were up to then $400 billion deficits, and the Democrats did not win the 1992 election so much as the Republicans lost that election. I campaigned in it. I know it intimately.
Once again, we are going through the tortures of big talk about how we are really going to balance this budget by the year--they put it out where nobody can get their hands on it--2002; 7 years hence. We used to do it in a year. Then we went to 3 years. Then we went to 5 years. This crowd over here has it for 7 years. And the President has it for 10 years. You meet another Congress and they will have it in 15 years and up, up and away.
But they do not want to write that. They write in a very reverent, respectful, studious term--the media does--that the present budget on which we are now torturing would balance in the year 2002. That is absolutely false. It has no chance of doing it. Simple arithmetic--it is not going to take care of the interest payments. The interest payments are $1 billion a day. There is no plan here. The cuts? You take the consummate cuts right across the board, there is not $1 billion a day to get on top of the increases.
Like the famous character in ``Alice in Wonderland'', in order to stay where we are, we have to run as fast as we can. In order to get ahead, we have to run even faster.
That is the reality. Nobody wants to talk about it because the poison in politics is taxes. I will never forget, back in 1949, 1950, when Jimmy Byrnes--former Senator Byrnes, Secretary of State, Supreme Court Justice, Governor--he had just come in as Governor. I had a little committee. I said, ``This is South Carolina, our little lowest per-
capita income State next to Mississippi. We have ground to a halt. We need money. We are going to have to put in a sales tax.''
We could not even get the senators to meet with us. We just had House members. I chaired that House group. We sold the idea to Governor Byrnes, and he put it over. Mind you me, we never could have done it without the Governor's leadership. But we put in a sales tax at that particular time for public education, so that then, when we went out and solicited industrial development in South Carolina, we could talk not only of good schools, but fiscally-responsible government.
We did not balance that budget in South Carolina until I finally came in, in 1958. I again raised taxes over the objections. What we did was we got the first triple A credit rating from Texas all the way up to Maryland. So, as a young Governor, I had, as a calling card, a triple A credit rating, which South Carolina has now lost, again with this item of growth--growth. And we are going to have a property tax cut and we are not going to pay the bills and we are going to put the nuclear facility up for sale and start storing nuclear waste all over again at Savannah River; going backwards.
That virus is at the local level, at the Federal level and throughout the land. We have to kill it if we are ever going to get competitive internationally.
If we can pay our bills, develop a competitive trade policy, cut out this nonsense about free trade and join the real world and get a competitive trade policy--Cordell Hull said reciprocal trade policy--
then we will begin to survive and rebuild this economy and clean up our cities and get rid of the drug and crime problems and come forward like a great America that I came into in my early years.
With this plan, these programs now have been taken over by the pollsters and we are going right straight down the tubes. We are talking nonsense. The media is going along with it. They think it is great progress. It is not great progress--a half a hair cut--because we had that great progress last year and we had that great progress the year before. We had the great progress the year before that. Like Tennessee Ernie Ford, ``another day older and deeper in debt.'' The debt continues to go and grow and go and grow. It took us 200 years of our history before Ronald Reagan came to town. When he came to town after that 200 years and 38 Presidents, Republican and Democrat, we were less than $1 trillion. And $903 billion was the deficit and debt. We had with President Ford an economic summit, and everything else of that kind after the OPEC cartel crisis, and what have you. When President Reagan came to town, he said, ``First I am going to balance the budget in a year,'' and then said, ``Oops--this is way worse than I thought. It is going to take 3 years. We are going to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse.''
We had the Grace Commission. I served on the Grace Commission. I got me a picture here earlier this year, but Peter Grace and I started implementing his savings. We had to report annually. By 1989 we had implemented some 85 percent of the Grace program. But then we stopped, and we quit reporting.
But the truth is the Budget Committees have come along. Republicans and Democrats have voted for taxes in the Budget Committee. We got eight votes for a value-added tax because back 5 years ago, we could see the coming default and the debt growing up, up, and away.
So now after Reaganomics, voodoo, riverboat gamble, now we have voodoo all over again. We are talking about it again by the very author of voodoo, the chairman of the Finance Committee. That started off as--
what is that football player's name? Kemp. Yes. That is right. Kemp-
Roth. I remember when the distinguished majority leader said we are not going that direction. He said, ``You cannot go that way. We have got to start paying the bills.'' But the Presidential political pressures that come from Gingrich to go to Gramm to come to Dole have got us all talking nonsense here on the floor of the U.S. Congress. We are talking again in the Finance Committee of devastating health care. Last year, they were saying, ``Oh. What is the matter? We have the best health care on the planet.'' Last year, we had a survey by the very group they quote this year that said Medicare was going broke by the year 2001. This year they are saying it is going broke by the year 2002. Now they say what they are trying to do is save it.
Well, they come in with a contract that increases the deficit and Medicare some $25 billion because, yes, without that contract crowd, we voted to increase taxes on Social Security, liquor, cigarettes, gasoline, and everything else and cut spending $500 billion which has the stock market and the economy, they say, going up and away. But the truth is that of that $25 billion that we got from the increase in Social Security taxes, we allocated it to Medicare and they said,
``Abolish that.'' No. We do not believe in that. They are playing the game, the pollster proposition of Social Security and saying that we are trying to frighten the American people.
The debt now has gone not just to $1 trillion as it did in 1981, but to $2 trillion, to $3 trillion, to $4 trillion. It is right now at $4.9 trillion, and it is going up $5 trillion and on and away, because of what? We are in the wagon. The kids, the children, the grandchildren are the ones pulling the wagon. We are acting like the taxpayers are the ones pulling the wagon. Well, they can hardly move the wagon. The wagon is drifting back. It is not being pulled. It is gradually going backward into debt, and we are on board.
For the last 15 years, the Senator from New Mexico and I have been working in the Budget Committee, and it has gotten worse and worse. The rhetoric has gotten better. We really have them fooled--everybody out in the land, particularly in this editorial column crowd saying we are making progress, that we are going to balance the budget.
We are not even near it. We are doing some cutting. We are devastating programs. But we are not balancing any budget because we will not do all of the above, and all of the above includes taxes. And we need that tax increase allocated to the deficit, and the debt.
Let us get on top of this fiscal cancer, excise it once and for all, and then start spending the amount of money that we need on Government itself rather than on past profligacy and waste. If you had a $74.8 billion interest cost in 1980 and in 1996 in the President's budget, it is $346 billion, that means the interest cost alone has gone up to $273 billion. That is exactly the level of domestic discretionary spending. You take Congress, the courts, the Presidency, you take the Department of Commerce, Agriculture, Interior, Treasury--go right on across the Government itself, take the departments and domestic discretionary spending, it is right at $273 billion. We could double that budget, if we were not wasting it on the interest cost on the national debt.
That interest is what I call ``taxes.'' This crowd that says they are not against taxes is really for taxes. There are two things in life: Death, and taxes. You cannot avoid them. There is a third thing. It is the interest cost on the national debt. It cannot be avoided.
So what we are doing talking about no, we are not going to increase taxes, is, yes, we are going to cut taxes. The truth of the matter is we are going to cut taxes in order to increase the taxes more so the debt can go up so the interest costs or the taxes on that debt go up. You pay it, not avoid it, and you do not get anything more.
But we are in the wagon. All of us are in the wagon, and the children and the grandchildren, are hopefully going to pull it. I hope the country just does not come down in fiscal chaos. But whatever it is, we are in the wagon, and we are raising taxes every day $1 billion. We have a tax increase on automatic pilot in this Government of $1 billion a day. We are talking about cutting taxes. That is how ludicrous, ridiculous, and outrageous this whole rhetoric has gotten in the treatment by the media itself. They do not want to report the truth. They do not want to report the facts. They go along with the political charade.
I yield the floor.
Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Shelby). The Senator from Massachusetts.
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