The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE BUDGET” mentioning the Federal Reserve System was published in the Senate section on pages S1028-S1029 on Feb. 6, 2001.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE BUDGET
Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I look forward to the debate the Senator from Minnesota was discussing. I agree; just because we should and will have a civil debate doesn't mean we should not have that debate and lay out our differences of opinion very aggressively and passionately. I look forward to doing that.
The good news today, while there is a lot of gloom and doom in certain corners, is that tax relief is on the way for working Americans. They deserve it. We have a tax surplus, $5.6 trillion in overpayment by the American people.
Now, we will argue over exactly how that $5.6 trillion tax surplus should be used. We agree that Social Security should be set aside, put in a lockbox. If you listened to the campaign debate last year, you would have thought Vice President Gore came up with that idea. He needs to check with Senator Domenici and others who actually came up with the idea of having a lockbox on Social Security.
We should continue to pay down the debt in an orderly way, as was suggested by Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, over a period of years, and we can eliminate it earlier than was indicated. We ought to do that on a steady basis. We can have additional investment in areas where we really need it--in education, in health care, even in defense.
To the President's credit, he is saying in the defense area, let's take a look and see what our needs may be in defense; let's look and see if there might be someplace where we can save some money in defense while we clearly are going to have to do more in terms of having readiness and modernization and quality of life for our men and women in the military. We need to assess what we are going to need in the future. He is going about it in an orderly fashion. That is a good idea.
There is no question that working Americans need some tax relief. You talk about breaks for the wealthy. What about the single educated young woman making $30,000 a year in the 28-percent bracket? That is not rich. We have these brackets now that force people into higher and higher brackets at very low income levels. That is fundamentally unfair. We are talking about tax relief for all Americans across the board. It is very fair to do it that way.
I thought we had fundamental agreement last year that we need to do something about reducing the marriage penalty. The President proposes that we double the child tax credit. I don't believe there are a lot of Democrats who are going to speak against that. He encourages more use of charitable contributions without being first penalized with taxes when you take some of your savings and put it into charity. He has a whole package of good ideas, and it is a very fair proposal because it is across-the-board rate cuts.
There is another benefit here. We are not just talking about the fairness in the Tax Code; we are talking about the need for some economic growth incentives. Look at what President Kennedy did, what President Reagan did, and how much their tax relief was as a percentage of GDP. As a matter of fact, President Bush's proposals are actually below what the Kennedy-Johnson package provided for way back in the 1960s. In each case, we had economic growth; we had an increase of revenue coming into the Federal Government.
The problem was, in the 1980s, we had an insatiable spending appetite by the Democratically-controlled Congress that kept pushing up spending. Unfortunately, we could not convince President Reagan to veto more of those bills. I hope President George W. Bush will press aggressively for his proposal on tax relief. I know he is doing it. He is going today to have an event with a young woman in business to show how this tax relief would help her.
As a matter of fact, we checked on a lady who was here a couple years ago, expressing concern about Government mandates and regulations and taxes, named Harriet Cane from the Sweetlife, a small restaurant in Marietta, GA. She had eight employees. She was struggling to make ends meet. She was doing more and more herself. She did the mopping, the preparation.
Well, we checked with her to see how she is doing. Guess what. She is out of business. She said: What drove me out of business was a lot of things, but Government mandates and regulations and taxes contributed mightily to it. When she heard what President Bush is talking about, she said: That certainly would have helped me. For the young entrepreneur, this tax relief will be very positive.
There is a fundamental difference. There are people here who think that any money we can take from people to bring to Washington, we have the brilliance on how it should be spent.
I have a fundamental faith in the people to decide what they should do with their own money that they worked hard to earn. Now they are paying 28 percent, 15 percent, 33 percent, 36.5 percent. When you add it all up, you still have people in this country paying 40, 50 percent of everything they earn for taxes, to bring it to Washington so the brilliant Members of Congress and the bureaucrats can decide how they think it should be spent.
I don't agree with that. I think the family can decide how to best spend money for their children's needs, whether it is buying clothes or a refrigerator, a different car, or a tutor for education. The same thing is true in education.
States such as Minnesota put a lot of money into education. Other States don't put as much into education. Quality education is not consistent across this country, between States and within States, including my own State.
My State has put a high priority on education. We are beginning to make progress. We are going to be paying teachers more. Our universities have been competing more aggressively for research money in physics, acoustics, and polymerscience.
I still believe education should be run at the local level and decisions should be made there. I think we should have a program that leaves no child behind; we should improve reading, but we should also improve math and science skills.
The Federal Government can help with that. By the way, not everybody even agrees with that. My predecessor--a Democrat, I might add--in the House and in the Senate thought there was a great concern about the Federal dollar and Federal control following the Federal dollar. I don't agree. I think we have a role to play in early childhood education and elementary and secondary and in higher education. We have been doing a better job in higher education than in elementary and secondary.
I think money should be given to the States and the localities, local education administrators and teachers and parents, with flexibility so they can decide how to spend it. People in Washington don't like it. They want to tell you to spend it here, there, or somewhere else. Pascagoula, MS, might have different needs from Pittsburgh, PA. We may need more teachers, or maybe we need more remedial reading programs, or maybe we need to fix a leaky roof. But the Federal Government doesn't know what the priority is.
We are going to have a good debate. I look forward to it. When I check with my constituents, the people working, paying taxes, pulling the load, people out in the forests who are being told, ``By the way, you can't cut trees anymore and you can't have roads to get to those trees,'' and people working in the shipyards or oil refineries, they are wondering what will happen. They don't have to have a national energy crisis. The problem is we haven't been producing more energy because we want to shut down our resources--coal, oil.
Let's debate education and energy policy and we will get a result. I believe the American people will be better off when we get those done.
If we don't have a budget plan of how to use this tax surplus, it will be spent by the Washington Government. That is a mistake. I think the working people deserve help. Should we be concerned about low-
income needs? Yes. We should address that in a variety of ways, and we are going to do that.
Yes, I think it is time to get on with the debate. I commend the President for what he proposed. He will bring it up to the Congress Thursday. We will have a chance to study it. I am pleased that he said let's make the income tax cuts retroactive to the first of the year. I think that will be even more positive for the economy.
____________________
