Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, here is what we know of the so-called stimulus bill. This bill will give American workers $8 a week in their paychecks in exchange for passing along a $1 trillion debt to our grandchildren. The entire New Deal, in today's dollars, cost only half of what this bill costs. We know that if we were to spend $1 million a day, every day since Jesus Christ was born, we would still spend less money than the cost of this bill. We know that if you were to add the cost of this bill to the national debt that we already have, it would cost each American household more than $100,000 to pay off our country's debt. We know that in the bill there is $50 million that could be used to save red-bellied harvest mice in the San Francisco area, something that Speaker Pelosi has supported. We know that in the bill there is $8 billion for a levitating train from Disneyland to Las Vegas that the majority leader is very interested in. We also know that people are hurting. That we need to do something to help the economy. And that something includes a real stimulus bill. But we know this is not the right approach. Mostly, this is spending, not stimulus. Most of the spending in the bill does not come soon enough to help create jobs quickly. Most of the tax cuts in the bill--such as the $8 per week for working families--are welcome but not stimulative. We know this is a lot of money. An example of how much money is that it took us until about 1980, from the beginning of our Republic, to accumulate a debt that equals the amount of this bill. Or to look at it another way: The entire annual Federal budget in the early 1980s was about the amount we are spending in this bill. We know this is not temporary. Even though stimulus bills, as defined by Speaker Pelosi, are to be timely, temporary, and targeted, this is not. We know that because of the mandatory spending it adds to the long-term budget. We know that because the Senate rejected Senator McCain's amendment which said that after two consecutive quarters of economic growth above 2 percent, the new spending would stop. So this bill is not temporary. We know we are bailing out States with much more money than they need. In my State of Tennessee, it had a $900 million dollar shortfall. That is a lot of money for our State. But our legislature and Governor are handling that, with some pain. Yet we are giving Tennessee almost $4 billion, as if we had the money to spend. We know we are not seriously thinking about how much spending is too much spending in Washington, and how much debt is too much debt. We know that we establish policies in this bill--huge policies in education, energy, and health--in 2 weeks, without careful consideration that deserve enormous consideration. I used to be Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. Its budget today is about $68 billion. We are adding $40 billion a year to that Department for the next 2 years. Does that mean we are completely satisfied with what is happening in kindergarten through the 12th grade? If we are to add $40 billion a year, should we not be asking what can we do differently to reward outstanding teachers, to add charter schools, to offer parents more choices for afterschool programs for their children? Surely, we can have a debate about education, or energy, or health care if we are going to spend that much new money. We know there has been a lack of bipartisanship. The refrain seems to be: We won the election; we'll write the bill. That was not the tone of the election. That was not what we looked forward to on the Republican side of the aisle. We know what we should have done instead. We know we shouldn't have spent the whole piggy bank on a spending bill that doesn't include much stimulus. We know that we should have reserved as many of those scarce dollars as we could to focus on fixing housing first and making sure that we don't underestimate the difficulty we have in getting toxic assets out of the financial institutions in this country so they can start lending again and on Main Street we can start doing business again. We know those are the things we should have done instead. This bill doesn't pass muster with truth in labeling. It claims not to have earmarks, although that levitating train from Las Vegas to Disneyland looks a lot like an earmark. We know that the two provisions in the bill that seemed to do the most to help were cut by the conference report in substantial ways. I am speaking of Senator Isakson's $15,000 tax credit for home buyers who would buy homes in the next year, which was gutted. And Senator Mikulski's and Senator Brownback's effort to give encouragement to automobile and truck buyers all over America to revive the automobile industry. We know that if we are to add $87 billion over 2 years to Medicaid for the States that we may be making the program so rich that we will never be able to decide what to do about it when we have our national health care debate. We are preempting that discussion without very much debate. I know what bipartisanship is. I have participated in it. When I was Governor of Tennessee, I worked with a Democratic legislature. We became the first State to pay teachers more for teaching well. I said what I thought we ought to do and the Democratic speaker said what he thought we ought to do. We sat down together.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Chair. We took some of Speaker McWherter's ideas and some of my ideas. We came to a conclusion and we together announced the result. President Bush and the Congress did the same thing with No Child Left Behind when President Bush working with Senator Kennedy and Representative Miller. Senator Bingaman and Senator Domenici gave us a good example with the energy bill. Seventy of us cosponsored the America Competes Act. And the Gang of 14 helped keep the Senate functioning and produced good Supreme Court nominees. I am disappointed that we have not risen to the occasion. This bill should have been easy to do in a bipartisan way. I hope that this is not a symbol of what is to come with more difficult pieces of legislation, like health care, climate change, and entitlements. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from South Dakota for his eloquent words. The numbers being thrown around are so huge-- and numbers get thrown around so often in Washington, DC--that it is sometimes hard to distinguish between $1 million and $1 trillion or $1 billion or $10. One thing I was thinking of as the Senator from South Dakota was speaking, I believe he said as much as 10 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States would be the size of this year's Federal deficit. What that means is, this country--even in these bad times--is such a marvelous country that we will produce about 25 percent of all of the money in the world just for Americans, 5 percent of the people in the world. So what we are saying is, just this year we are going to run up a debt of 10 percent of 25 percent of all of the money in the world and add it to the national debt we already have and which we already know we are going to be increasing because of the responsibilities we have to try to help fix housing and encourage the financial institutions to support the efforts that the President is making to get the economy moving again. What we are asking is, why would we spend the whole piggybank on a $1 trillion piece of legislation that isn't targeted to create jobs when we have so many other pressing responsibilities for this limited amount of borrowed money--namely, fixing housing and getting lending moving again? That is where we would put our attention. So we have a lot of questions about the bill. As the Senator from South Dakota said, Republicans offered our legislation, which was voted down, and it focused on housing, it focused on letting people keep more of their own money and on a limited amount of spending for targeted, job-creating infrastructure projects. That saved $500 or $600 billion which could have been reserved for housing, for lending, or to reduce the debt. But this bill, I am afraid--and we will know more about it as it comes--is mostly spending instead of mostly stimulus. Not enough of the jobs come quickly enough to make as much difference as this borrowed money should make. Even most of the tax cuts in the bill aren't stimulative. They may be welcome, they may leave 13 more dollars in your paycheck each week. But is running up the debt this much more worth that? This is a lot of money--according to one report, more than the Federal Government spent in the entire New Deal, more than we spent in Iraq, more than we spent in Afghanistan, and we should spend this money carefully. As the Senators from South Dakota and Arizona have pointed out, what happens after 2 years? The Senate rejected our amendment that said once the economy recovers, the new spending stops so we don't continue to run up an unimaginable debt. States are having trouble and in a shortfall. Tennessee has a $900 million shortfall this year. But we are sending Tennessee, according to the latest estimates--even with the cuts and the compromise--about $3.8 billion. We are establishing policy without even thinking about it. In this legislation, which has never been to the authorization committees, we are having possibly the largest, I believe, Federal education bill in our history in terms of dollars. We are having one of the largest health care bills. We are having one of the largest energy bills. That is not the way we make energy, education, and health care policy--just by passing an appropriations bill with a huge amount of money. We are very disappointed about the lack of bipartisanship. We respect our new President. We want him to succeed because if he succeeds, our country succeeds. We expected that in this first major piece of legislation, a number of us would sit down on both sides of the aisle and compare our notes and say: Let's go forward. We know the Democrats have the majority and we have the minority, and so more of their ideas are going to be included than more of our ideas, but 58 Democrats and 3 Republicans is not a bipartisan effort. That is not the way we do things around here. The way we do things in a bipartisan way around here is when we had the Energy bill in 2005 and Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman worked side by side. All ideas were considered. We had our votes. It took weeks and we got a big result. Another example is when we passed the America COMPETES Act and we worked side by side, or even with a contentious area such as intelligence surveillance when Senator Bond and Senator Rockefeller worked side by side and we came to a conclusion together. The American people gained more confidence in what we could do and in the result that we came to. I am afraid in this case we have not had that kind of bipartisanship. What I fear is that this is not a good sign for the future because this is the easy piece of legislation. This is the first major proposal from the President. This is just a spending bill, albeit a massive spending bill. Next comes health care and controlling entitlements and whether we want to authorize more money to take bad assets out of banks and to help housing. Next comes whether we want to pass this version of climate change or that version of climate change. All of these are difficult pieces of legislation. I have said on this floor before that President Bush technically did not have to have broad-based congressional support to wage the war in Iraq because he was the Commander in Chief. So he went ahead, and it made the war more difficult. It made his Presidency less successful. ``We won the election, we will write the bill'' is not a recipe for resolving a difficult problem or for a successful Presidency. I would hope we can either do as the South Dakota Senator said, which is start over again on this bill and retarget it, make it temporary, make it timely, and save hundreds of billions of dollars while focusing on housing and lending. That somehow we can get the Congress on track with the President so that when we say bipartisan, we do bipartisan, and we don't have an attitude that says, in effect: We won the election; we will write the bill. Unless the Senator from South Dakota has additional comments--I am finished with mine, so I yield the floor and yield to him.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, if I could ask the Senator from Arizona one more question. Over the last couple days, we have heard testimony from the Secretary of Treasury about the importance of moving now to help strengthen financial institutions so they can lend money, so people can buy cars, buy homes, send their kids to college. We have heard about the importance of the housing plan that is coming. We have heard numbers of $1 trillion, $2.5 trillion. We have had testimony from experts outside the administration who have estimated that the so-called bad bank option for taking toxic assets out of banks might need $2 trillion and that we ought to capitalize that bank at several hundred billion dollars. I ask the Senator, is it possible, if we spend the whole piggy bank on this so-called stimulus package, we will not have the dollars left to get the economy moving again by fixing housing and strengthening our financial institutions?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I wonder if I might ask the Senator, he has been especially effective as a spokesman for the importance of fixing housing first. Many of us, especially on this side, believe housing got us into this mess and helping housing restart will get us out of the mess. Can you explain why there seems to be, in a nearly $1 trillion bill, so little focus on housing?

Mr. ALEXANDER. As I listen to the Senator, what occurs to me is, we have some laws about truth in labeling, truth in packaging. This bill wouldn't meet any definition I have ever seen. The whole argument for this legislation is, we are in an economic downturn. We Republicans know that. Americans are hurting. We feel that too. So we thought, what can we do to help make a difference? The thought was, fix housing first. We suggested lower interest rate mortgages. We suggested, with the leadership of Senator Isakson, a $15,000 tax credit for home buyers for the next 2 years to create more demand to stabilize home values. Those ideas would have been actually stimulative. But most of the legislation the Senator from Arizona talks about is very different. Medicaid would come up in the regular appropriations process. As I am thinking about it, what has the Senator heard about one of the aspects of this bill that would be actually stimulative, the one I mentioned, Senator Isakson's proposal for a tax credit of $15,000 for home buyers, so that if they bought a home, they would get $15,000 off their taxes, cash in their pocket, as a way of stimulating the market? Is that in the compromise legislation?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, the stimulus bill is the subject of discussion. There are some things we know about it and some we don't. We know, for example, it is a massive amount of money, almost $800 billion. These are numbers we throw around. But according to the Politico newspaper last month, this is more than we spent on Iraq, more than we spent on Afghanistan, more than we spent going to the Moon in today's dollars, and more than the Federal Government spent in the entire New Deal in today's dollars. It's a massive amount of money. It is not like some of the money we were authorizing to be spent in October and November, when we were giving the Department of the Treasury, in effect, a line of credit to help financial institutions begin to lend again so people could get auto loans. This is money we are spending. It goes out the door. We have to pay it back. It adds to the national debt. It took from the founding of our country all the way to the late 1970s to accumulate a national debt as large as the amount of money we are spending in this bill. We have been moving rapidly on this legislation. It is not only spending. The amount of money spent for education is such that it may be the largest Federal education bill we have ever passed in terms of dollars. The amount of money spent for energy is enough that it will be one of the largest Energy bills. The amount of money spent for Medicaid in the House and Senate bills, nearly $90 billion over 2 years to the States, may completely distort the discussion we are about to have on national health care policy. These are all topics that normally we would take weeks to consider. For example, if we are going to add $40 billion to a Department of Education that only spends $68 billion today, we would ask the question: $40 billion for more of the same, or do we have some better ideas about how we might reward outstanding teachers or give teachers more discretion or parents more choices of schools? I ask the assistant Republican leader from Arizona, this is one of the most important, massive bills. Republicans want a stimulus package. We have made clear we think we ought to start by fixing housing first, letting people keep more of their own money, and confining the spending to only those projects that create jobs. I ask the Senator from Arizona, where are we? Has he had an opportunity to read the legislation to know how much is being spent, how much is actually targeted for jobs, and how temporary that targeting might be?

Mr. ALEXANDER. We have a limited amount of water, a limited amount of money. I note the Senator from Arizona as well as I both voted to give President Obama the money he needed to work on housing and to work on financial institutions, and we may have to do it again. So it is not just a matter of saying no to proposals; it is a matter of being greatly disappointed this legislation is not targeted, is not temporary. The Senator from Wyoming is in the Chamber. He has been an outstanding spokesman on the importance of the stimulus legislation, how to fashion that. I ask the Senator from Wyoming, as he looks at this legislation--and I know we have not yet seen the entire compromise--but how satisfied is he the legislation focuses on the problem that will actually create new jobs for Americans in a short period of time?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his leadership, especially as a spokesman on the importance of fixing housing first, which we believe the American people have gotten that message, but apparently the majority writing this bill has not gotten that message. The Senator from South Dakota has arrived. He is vice chairman of the Republican conference, one of the leaders, too, in this debate. I have heard him speak about the importance of this legislation for stimulus being temporary and targeted. Actually, to give credit where credit is due, I believe we borrowed that phrase from the Speaker of the House, who said last year that stimulus packages, programs to create jobs for the American people, should meet the test of temporary, timely, and targeted. I ask the Senator from South Dakota, specifically in light of the McCain amendment, which was offered--which you may want to describe-- whether he looks at this compromise which is coming our way as temporary, timely, and targeted on the problem of creating jobs for Americans?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, if I could ask the Senator from South Dakota: As I recall, Senator McCain offered one amendment which almost all of us voted for, which was very targeted and cost about $400 billion, but he also offered another amendment which would have guaranteed that whatever was passed actually be temporary.

Mr. ALEXANDER. And we are going down to the bank and borrowing the money in their name?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from South Dakota. I imagine my 30 minutes has expired, but seeing none of my colleagues, I ask unanimous consent for up to 10 more minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Or to put it another way: Don't dump the water out on the street and fertilize the field if you need to throw it on the house.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to lead a colloquy among my colleagues for up to 30 minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank the Senator from South Dakota for his effective leadership in helping the American people understand the full implications of this legislation on American families. I ask that I be informed when I have 1 minute remaining. A number of things have been said about the so-called stimulus package, which I feel, many of us feel, is more of a spending bill than a stimulus bill. But there is no doubt about the fact that it increases our national debt. The debt is not some abstract thing. Our national debt is $10.7 trillion. This adds to the national debt as much money as--well, let's put it this way. It took from the beginning of the Republic until 1982 to have a cumulative debt of $850 billion. And this bill is more than that. This is a lot of money. We are adding the $820 or 830 billion that we have heard about plus the interest over the next 10 years. That adds about $10,000 to each family's share of the debt. Well, with that $10,000 you can pay in-state tuition for 1.5 years at the University of Tennessee. You could pay for 21 years of public school lunches every day for the average middle school student. You could buy a gallon of milk a week for 57 years. That is a lot of money. I wish to make three points today as we think about this stimulus bill which, I believe, is more of a spending bill. First, this bill makes a number of policy decisions on education, health, and energy that ought not to be made in such a bill, but ought to be separately debated and considered. No. 2, we should have all of the proposed spending on the table. Mr. Geithner is coming up to Congress this week to tell us how much we need for banks. Then we need more for housing. Then we need more for the war. I think if we knew all of the money we are about to have to borrow, our appetite for spending $1.2 trillion, mostly on projects that do not create jobs in the next few months, would diminish. And, third, this is not the kind of bipartisanship that I expected. As I listened to the President, I thought he wanted to change the way Washington works. The way Washington works in a bipartisan way is for us to sit down and talk with one another and come up with something both Republicans and Democrats can agree upon; not we won the election, we will write the bill and let's see if we can pick off two or three Senators. First, a number of policy decisions. The first version of the Senate bill actually doubled Federal spending for education without any discussion. I used to be the Secretary of Education. Today, that Department has about a $68 billion budget. The original version of the Senate bill doubles that. It took 40 years to get to $68 billion. But the original Senate bill would increase education spending by $140 billion over the next two years--on top of that $68 billion we're already spending per year. So the bill would double the $68 billion this year, and keep it doubled next year. Then it is supposed to go back down to $68 billion the year after that, which seems unlikely. But there was no discussion about this. Would you not think, if they were going to double the Federal commitment to education, we would have a discussion about what would be best to spend it on? I mean, are we so delighted with the performance in kindergarten through the 12th grade and our preschool programs that we have nothing to do but say, let's double the money for more of the same? Even the small things that have crept into the legislation, some of which President Obama has said he supports, should be fully debated. For example, we have some new Senators at the forefront of federal support for the Teacher Incentive Fund. We have a new Secretary of Education who supports this effort to help reward outstanding teaching and outstanding school leading, but not a penny was included in the Senate bill. What about charter schools? A lot of us on both sides of the aisle want to give teachers the freedom to use their own common sense and good judgment in dealing with the children who are brought to them. That is what a public charter school does. Not a penny in the Senate bill. So education is the first policy area that should have been debated separately. Then on health care, the House added nearly $90 billion for Medicaid. The President has said we need to make health care available to every American. We Republicans agree with that. So we are ready to have a debate about that. That will cost some money. One of the major proposals, in fact, the one that has the most bipartisan support, the Wyden-Bennett legislation, would get rid of the Medicaid Program and replace it with individual accounts. This preempts that decision by giving $90 billion more to the States. So the States get $90 billion. That is a lot of money. Tennessee's share of that would be $1.5 or $2 billion. That is going to make the program so rich the States will not want to give it up, and we will not be able to have a full discussion about health care when that comes around. Then an energy bill. Last year, I asked the Energy Information Administration to estimate what kind of subsidies we were doing for renewable energy, because it seemed to me it was all going to wind and nothing else. I was about right. EIA said: We are subsidizing wind at 27 times greater than all other forms of renewable energy per kilowatt hour; 53 times greater than subsidies for coal per kilowatt hour; and 15 times greater than the subsidy for nuclear, which produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity. That was in the middle of last year. That was at a time when we only were committed to $11.5 billion to give to rich people and big banks, some of which we are bailing out, that get big tax credits when they build wind turbines. So that was $11.5 billion in the middle of last year. Then in October of last year we passed legislation that brought that up to $16 billion over the next 10 years, and this bill brings to $25.7 billion the amount of taxpayer dollars that we are paying rich people and banks so they can get big tax credits for building wind turbines. As far as the beautiful mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, I don't want those things littering our area, particularly because the wind doesn't blow there enough to make it efficient. But even in areas where it does make sense, do we really need, without any discussion, to go from $11.5 billion last year to $26 billion this year with a national windmill policy? Why don't we have a debate about energy, and let's have a technology-neutral way to encourage all forms of renewable energy, especially emerging forms. We have an education bill, a health care bill, and an energy bill, but we don't have a stimulus bill. We shouldn't have all this on the table. Mr. Geithner has apparently delayed his recommendation about what we do about credit and banks until we have had the vote on this stimulus bill. This was supposed to be a transparent administration. To be transparent, let's put it all out there. How much do we need to appropriate for banks? I voted for that twice now. I might vote for it again if I think we need to do it. It was not an easy vote, but I did it. How much do we need to spend on housing? How much do we need to spend on the war in Afghanistan and to finish the war in Iraq? How much do we need to spend on the health care plan the President and we in Congress have said we want to work on? And how will we shape all this into some control of entitlement spending? It would be nice if we had it all on the table. If we knew, as the testimony suggested before the Budget Committee last week, that we really need to appropriate $400 or $500 or $600 billion to take care of $2 trillion of toxic assets in banks to get the economy moving again, we might have less appetite for lumping an energy bill and an education bill and a health care bill and a lot of projects that don't really stimulate the economy in with this borrowed money. Finally, on this side of the aisle, just as on that side of the aisle, we like the new President. He was our colleague. He came to see us. We walked out of that meeting between the President and Republican Senators saying: Here is an accomplished man who wants to help our country. We want him to succeed because if he does our country will succeed. But we want to be a part of it. We expected to be a part of it. President Bush technically didn't need the Congress to wage the war in Iraq. So he didn't get support, for example, for the Iraq Study Group principles when Senator Salazar and I----

Mr. ALEXANDER. When Senator Salazar and I and 17 Senators and more than 60 House Members of both parties suggested it. He could do it, but without that support, it made the war harder and the Presidency less successful. This stimulus bill is the easy thing to do. What the White House and the majority in the House and the majority in the Senate need to recognize is that if you want to be bipartisan, we want our ideas considered. If you want 20 Republicans, you are probably going to lose 10 Democrats. That is the way things work around here. So the majority can either say: We won the election and we will write the bill and try to pick off two or three Republicans, or we can sit down together and make it work. We are ready to do that to make it work. But when you get to banks and housing and entitlements and health care and the war, it is going to get harder. I hope this is not an example of the kind of bipartisanship we will have. This is borrowed money. This is a spending bill, not a stimulus bill. It would be better if all of the money we are going to be asked to spend were on the table.

Mr. ALEXANDER. And it also would be better if we all had the opportunity to see exactly what the total bill is before we vote on this part of it.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I seek recognition for 5 minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, will you please let me know when 60 seconds remains.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I have been listening to the debate as well. I think it is important that all our colleagues and the American people understand what we mean by bipartisanship, because there is a disconnect between the tone I have been hearing for the last week from the administration and from the majority and from the substance I have been hearing. Here is what I heard. I heard we are going to work together to try to deal with this economy. First we are going to have to stimulate the economy. We all know next week the Secretary of the Treasury is coming forward to do something about banking and then maybe about housing. Then there is an appropriations bill, and then we have health care, which the Senator from Montana has been hard at work on. We have a great many things to do. So what do we mean by bipartisan? I thought what we meant, we thought what we meant, was that the President would define an agenda and then we would sit down together and take our best ideas. The President put his out there. We think we have a better idea. We said fix housing first. Housing got us into this mess. Housing can get us out of it. So we offered a way to offer up to 40 million Americans a 4- or 4.5- percent mortgage, 30-year rate, saving them an average of $400 a month. We brought it up. Senator Ensign proposed it. Not one single Democratic vote. Senator Isakson has been offering an amendment for the last year and a half to give $15,000 in tax credits to home buyers. That was accepted. I hope it survives the conference. But the tone has changed overnight. Suddenly the President, instead of inviting us to work with him, is saying basically: We won the election, we will write the bill. The attitude seems to be: Let's see if we can pick off one Republican or two Republicans or three Republicans. Then the tone is, well, suddenly: The tired old ideas. I didn't hear the President talk about his tax cut proposal for 2 years during his campaign as a tired old idea. It is still a part of his proposal. It is also a part of our proposal. We have offered ways to fix housing first. No. 1, we suggest letting people keep more of their own money, as the President has suggested. Senator McCain's own bill, which received not one single Democratic vote, offered to spend $420 billion, and it included a cut in the payroll tax for 1 year and a cut in the lower rates of taxation. Then we would like to do as Alice Rivlin, the former head of the Budget Office, suggested. We would like to take all of the spending that does not create jobs now and put it off and do it later. If we are going to borrow money at a time when we are heavily in debt, it ought to be targeted, timely, and temporary. Senator McCain yesterday offered legislation that received almost every Republican vote but no Democratic votes, that would have made it temporary. It would have said whatever spending we have, we will have it until the economy recovers. But once it starts to recover for 2 quarters--the gross domestic product goes up for 2 quarters, then the spending stops. What has happened? This is the easy piece of legislation. This is one that most of us agree needs to be done. What we were expecting in this era of bipartisanship, given the President's campaign and his comments, was that he would offer his idea, we would offer ours, and we would put them together and come up with a result. Ours are: Fix housing first. That is not in the bill. Ours are: Make it temporary. They rejected that without a Democratic vote yesterday.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Ours are: Let's get the spending off the bill that does not create jobs now. My staff finds that only about $135 billion of the $900 billion goes to things that happen in the first couple of years--building roads, improving national parks, other things that create jobs now. The American people did not hear in the last campaign that the kind of change they were voting for was that the first thing we would do when we got to Washington is borrow $1 trillion, add it to the debt, and then take the position: We won the election, we will write the bill. If that is the tone, if that is the substance for the next several years, that will not make a very successful Presidency. That will not be good for our country. We want this President to be successful because we need him to be successful for our country to recover.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, this morning a number of us went to the National Prayer Breakfast--I saw the Senator from North Carolina there--which is always a wonderful event. It was especially a good event today because our new President was there for the first time. I think we would agree that he got a tremendous reception. We prayed for him, we cheered him. We recognize he has become President at a difficult time in our Nation's history. And we want him to succeed. Because if he succeeds, our country succeeds, which is why this debate on this bill is so disappointing. This is the first big proposal by the new administration. One New York Times columnist said, it is the first test. And what is this about? We all know what is it about, the economy is in tough shape. Many people have lost their jobs. Homes are being repossessed. IRA accounts are lower. People are worried. So we are hoping that in this first test we--the President and the Congress--will get an A-plus, flying colors. What are we seeking to do? We are seeking to get the economy moving again. Is that not right? Is that not what this is about? Is that not what a stimulus bill is? We have got a bad economy. We have housing foreclosures. Whatever action we take, we want to get the economy moving again. And we want to keep in mind while we are doing this that we have a big debt in this country. I do not mean just the Federal Government has a debt, because it is a Government debt owed by the people of this country. USA Today the other day did an estimate that showed each of our American families has a share of about $500,000 of that debt and future obligations based on promises the government has already made. So the Alexander family has got a $500,000 share of that debt and future obligations. The Grassley family does. The Hagan family does. The Baucus family does. We each have that. So we have to keep that in mind. What shall we do? The Senator from Montana said, everyone seems to agree, we need to spend some money. And the proposal that has come toward us certainly does meet that test. It would spend $900 billion. And if you add the interest to that over 10 years, which is the way we usually think about things, that is $1.2 or $1.3 trillion. How much money is this we are talking about spending? Well, the former chairman of the Budget Committee, the Senator from New Mexico, Mr. Domenici, called me yesterday. He has been doing some figuring, and he figured it took from the beginning of the Republic when George Washington was the President until the early 1980s for the United States of America to pile up a cumulative debt of $850 billion. What we are proposing to do is to spend in this one bill, by the end of this week or next week, as much money as the debt this country piled up between George Washington's Presidency and Ronald Reagan's Presidency. That is a lot of money. According to the newspaper Politico, it is more than we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is more money than we have spent, in today's dollars, going to the Moon. It is more money than the Government spent on the New Deal in today's dollars. It is almost as much money as NASA has spent in its entire existence. We are proposing to spend that in this one bill, nearly $1 trillion. The Senator from Montana said, well, we are all concerned about the debt. I wonder if we are if the first thing we are going to do is borrow $1 trillion. This is not money we have in the drawer here. It is not over here in the Senate cloakroom. It is out in the future somewhere. We are going to borrow half of it from the Chinese and other people around the world, and then somebody--us, our children, and our grandchildren--is going to have to pay it back. So what standards should we use if we are going to borrow some money to get the economy started, money that we are going to have to pay back, a lot of money? Well, the Speaker of the House, Ms. Pelosi, gave us a standard for what a real stimulus package is. Last year, when we saw the beginnings of this downturn and we acted in a bipartisan way to swiftly try to spend some money to be of some help, she said: It must be timely, targeted, and temporary. This is timely. But it is not targeted. It is not temporary, which is what I wish to talk about. Last night we had a chance to help make it more targeted and more temporary. Senator McCain offered an amendment to the Senate that said, we are for a stimulus package. We believe it ought to be targeted, for example, on housing and letting people keep more of their own money, and on plans and programs that will create jobs in the first year. That would be what we are for in terms of stimulus. But he said, let me make one other suggestion, and he offered an amendment to us which would say this: When the economy recovers, the stimulus spending stops. That was the McCain amendment. When the economy recovers, the stimulus spending stops. Because if what we are doing here is borrowing money from every American family and spending it with a hope that it helps the economy get going this year, once the economy gets going, has not the rationale disappeared for spending that money? We spend a lot of other money around here. We know that we have annual appropriations bills. We have got banks in trouble. We have got housing in trouble. So the McCain amendment said: After two quarters of a 2-percent increase in the gross domestic product, the money that we have borrowed to spend to get the economy going again stops. That got 44 votes. So this body has already decided that this is not a temporary stimulus bill. It is ongoing. So let no one think the trillion dollars proposed to be spent is temporary. Let no one think it is about stimulus. I guess every time you spend a government dollar, there is a little bit of stimulus, I suppose. But I asked my staff working on appropriations to go over the $900 billion. Here is what they found. They said there is approximately $135 billion of spending that will directly create jobs, including building construction, road construction, locks and dams, environmental cleanup, and national cemetery repair. And only $53 billion of the $135 billion is spent in the next 18 months. If this is a bill about creating jobs this year, if that is the reason we are taking this extravagant debt and adding more to it than we spent in the entire New Deal in today's dollars, that is not very targeted. The bill is neither temporary nor targeted. What is our responsibility on the Republican side to deal with this? Our responsibility is to offer a better idea. Our President has said--and we agree--that one way we need to change Washington is that we need to work across the aisle to get results on big issues, results that work. That is why I am in government. I did that when I was a Republican Governor in Tennessee with a Democratic legislature. I believe I have a good record of bipartisan cooperation in the Senate, whether it is President Bush or President Obama. I worked with Senator Lieberman and now with Senator Barrasso and Senator Pryor to create a bipartisan breakfast every Tuesday morning. The Senator from North Carolina came to the breakfast the last 2 weeks. We have talked about the debt and how the entitlement programs--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--are creating a crisis in that debt. Social Security is a part of the problem. Medicaid and Medicare is a bigger part. Almost 70 percent of all the money we spend in the Federal Government within about 7 or 8 years will go to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. That leaves only 30 percent for everything else. It also suggests that by the year 2015, we will be spending 100 percent of our annual gross domestic product; it would take that much money to pay off our debt. Let me remind colleagues that the United States produces year in and year out about 25 or 28 percent of all the money in the world. So we are headed toward a situation where, in a few years, it would take 25 percent to 28 percent of all the money produced in the world in 1 year to pay off the national debt of the United States. In a budget hearing the other day with Senators Conrad and Gregg, we asked the witnesses: What is the problem? How much debt can you have? They said: That is kind of general, but 40 percent is where the United States is, 40 percent of GDP. All of this we are talking about in the next few weeks may take us up to 60 percent. That is getting close to trouble. Eighty percent is trouble, and 100 percent is a big problem. Unlike the 1960s or the 1970s, when we owed our debt to ourselves, when it was much smaller, now we owe half of it to people around the world who may or may not want to continue buying our debt. Our debt has to be in our minds when we think about borrowing money. We need to apply the Pelosi principle to the stimulus. Temporary? No, it is not. Yesterday, 44 votes said yes. The rest said no, we would like for it to go on a long time. Targeted? No, it is not. Only $135 billion out of $900 billion is aimed toward creating jobs. Only $53 billion of that is spent in the next 18 months. So what can we do to improve this? On our side, we have a number of proposals to do that. The pending amendment of Senator McCain is one. The amendment by Senator Ensign, which will be voted on today, is another. The amendment by Senator Isakson that was agreed to yesterday is the third. Here is basically what we think we should be doing with this borrowed money: No. 1, we would fix housing first. We would reorient the stimulus bill away from spending money indefinitely, mostly on programs that do not create jobs in the first year, and spend it instead to restart housing because housing is what got us into this problem. Housing will help get us out of the problem. We have some specific ideas about doing that. Second, we would let the American people keep more of the money they have. That is stimulative. Letting them keep it permanently is the most stimulative thing we could do. Senator McCain proposes reducing the payroll tax and reducing the lowest level of income tax rates. Those are for working people, people who make less--not more--money. The third thing we would do is cut the size of the bill and focus it on those projects that create jobs now. When we say fix housing first, we mean, to begin with, the $15,000 housing credit. If you want to buy a house during the year 2009, you get a $15,000 tax credit. That is real money. You can put it in your pocket this year, if you buy a house. The second thing we would propose is the Ensign amendment, which would lower mortgage interest rates for all creditworthy Americans. Forty million Americans could take advantage of a rate that would be between 4 and 4.5 percent. We would put a cap on it, so it would not cost taxpayers more than about $300 billion, but most economists with whom we have talked say it is more like $30 billion. What would be the value of a lower interest rate backed by the Treasury? It would mean, all across the country, instant jobs. People could borrow money. They would have incentive to do so because the average savings of someone who refinanced their home and got a 4- to 4.5-percent interest rate would be approximately $400 a month for 30 years, over the 30-year term of the rate. That is like a permanent tax cut. That money would be in their pockets. It could be spent. It would help stabilize the value of that home. That would help stabilize the value of homes on that block. That would put to work builders and contractors and plumbers and brokers and bankers. That would give banks origination fees so they could have income. And having income, they might have enough money and confidence to start lending. Then this economy could keep moving at a relatively small cost. That is what we mean by fixing housing first. Senator McCain and Senator Graham have in their proposals legislation to help those individuals whose homes are being foreclosed. If we could sit down in a bipartisan way and agree that we want to follow the Pelosi principle and make this temporary and targeted and that we should start by fixing housing first, I believe we could agree across the aisle to deal with housing and create instant jobs. We might have less debate about tax cuts, although the President has suggested that we reduce some middle-income taxes. We have suggested the same. The third thing would be, as Alice Rivlin, former Budget Director for a Democratic President, said: We really ought to have two bills. One would be a bill for long-term investments, many of which I fought for for years in terms of American competitiveness. They are good for the country but don't take effect right away. The other bill, which we need to move on quickly, would be those programs, such as road construction, building construction, locks and dams, and national park maintenance, that would create jobs today. Then we could come to the American people and say: Mr. and Mrs. America, you have a big debt, $500,000 per family, but we, across party lines, have looked at the situation. We need a stimulus. Perhaps it should be $400 billion or $500 billion at the start. But we will not start with how much we are going to spend; we are going to start with what can we do that would work. Fix housing first, lower interest rate mortgages, a $15,000 tax credit for home buyers, help for those in foreclosures. Next, keep more of your own money in your pockets. That is the payroll tax and cutting rates. Finally, we might spend $100 billion or $150 billion by accelerating Government programs we will have to do anyway and get those jobs coming this year. That would be a responsible, bipartisan way to go about this. This bill, as it is presently headed toward passage, is a colossal mistake. It is not temporary. It is not targeted. It is not primarily creating jobs. It is not a stimulus bill. It is mostly a spending bill. It is not money we have; it is money we are borrowing. It is a huge amount of money, more money in today's dollars than the Government spent on the New Deal, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the war in Vietnam, almost as much as we have spent on NASA over its life, a huge amount of borrowed money not targeted. Although it is timely, we are rushing it through. I am disappointed. I had expected better. I have heard the President say he wants to work on entitlements. We take him at his word. We have had two straight Tuesday morning breakfasts where we have sat around the table and said: This is going to be hard to do. We trust the President to get in here with us, and we will figure this out. But this is a bill written in the House. It looks as if they just got down in the drawer, and every spending program they could think of for the last 40 years that didn't pass, they stuck it in. It might be good 20 years from now. It might be good tomorrow. But it is in there. We won the election. We will write the bill. ``We won the election, we write the bill'' may technically work on a few pieces of legislation. But it will not help move our country forward. It will not be the basis for a successful Presidency. We won the election. We write the bill. This is easy, spending a trillion dollars. The majority just says: Hey, we have some money to spend. Let's grab all the programs we can think of and off we go. But what is coming is really hard. Next week, the Secretary of the Treasury is likely to tell us we need several hundred billion to deal with toxic assets in banks. I am one of six Republican Senators who voted to give the new President the second amount of $350 billion so he could have that in his pocket to deal with this crisis. But it doesn't increase my appetite to help with the next $400 or $500 billion if we are going to start out by wasting nearly a trillion on programs not needed to fix the economy today. And probably, since we are not dealing with housing in any significant way in this bill, the new administration may say: We decided we need to get housing going again. I think I would be inclined to say: Mr. Democratic Leader, Mr. President, that is what we said last week. But you said we had to pass a bill in a week. Why didn't we wait a week and see what the Treasury Secretary had to say about banking credits or about housing? Then the next week we have $900 billion on an appropriations bill. And then, as Senator Baucus has said--and he is exactly right--health care is coming down the pike. I can't figure out a way that the health care bill, even the one I cosponsored with Senators Wyden and Bennett, is not going to cost us a lot more. So why don't we put this all on the table and work across party lines? Technically, you don't have to do it. Technically, President Bush didn't have to have congressional approval to wage a war in Iraq. But he found and our Nation found that he would have a much more successful Presidency and we would have probably had a much easier war if we could have found some way to work together. I am disappointed with this, beginning on a stimulus bill that does not meet the Pelosi principle of timely, targeted, and temporary. It is a colossal mistake in the way it is headed. We should fix housing first. Let people keep more of their own money. Strip out the spending programs that don't create jobs now. Deal with them separately, and get in the habit of accepting each other's best ideas on dealing with the biggest problems. We stand ready to do that. We admire the new President and the tone he has set. We want him to succeed. This bill will not help our country succeed unless it is drastically amended this week. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I cosponsored Senator Wyden and Senator Bennett Healthy Americans Act last year to support a legitimate bipartisan effort that combines ``private markets'' and ``universal access.'' I am willing to do so again this year, because health care reform is too big of an issue for one party to tackle on its own. Our only chance of achieving true, meaningful reform is if both parties work together. However, I do have reservations about this legislation--I see it as a work in progress and would not vote for it in its current form. For example, the current budget figures are unrealistic. In order to maintain budget neutrality, as drafted, the bill would shift a new burden on middle-income Americans. We have not yet discovered a way to solve this problem without increasing the cost of the bill. Another problem I have with the bill is that the mandated level of standard benefits is too high. As drafted, typically young, healthy Americans would be forced to pay for a richer level of coverage than they might now choose or possibly be able to afford. I commend the efforts of Senators Wyden and Bennett to reach across party lines on this important issue, and look forward to working with both of them to further improve this proposal.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his leadership and his understanding of business that has come the hard way, through experience in his town. The Senator from Arizona, Mr. McCain, is on the Senate floor to speak on a different amendment. But he, too, has a proposal that will deal with fixing housing first. So our point is this: We understand Americans are hurting, that our economy is in a slump. But we also understand that if we do not deal with the national debt, we will be doing the worst thing that we could ever do to the working men and women of America: that is, having long-term inflation where dollars do not amount to anything and you cannot buy anything. So our focus, instead of adding to the debt by over $1 trillion, is to reorient the stimulus package toward a true stimulus and fix housing first. That is what the 4-percent mortgage for creditworthy Americans is for. That is what the $15,000 tax credit for home buyers is for. That is what the Republican proposals to help people with foreclosures are for. That is part 1, fix housing first. Part 2 is let people keep more of their own money. Those are tax reductions. Then part 3 is take off this bill all of the spending items that do not have anything to do with creating jobs now. So we welcome the calls for bipartisan work. We are ready to work. We have good ideas: fix housing first, let people keep more of their own money, and focus the bill on spending projects that create jobs today, not those that do not. I yield the floor.