Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I have spoken on this earlier in the week. I will not spend a great deal of time today. Thanks to the majority leader, we will have two votes this afternoon on items that I think are representative of critical problems in our country. The first is a vote on an amendment by Senator Feinstein and myself that eliminates payment to the largest refining and oil companies in this country to blend ethanol, which they have honestly admitted--and they sent us a letter saying it--they don't want. The second is on whether we will subsidize, with Federal tax dollars, additional pumps to use ethanol. The reason the votes are important is because the way we get out of trouble as a nation is a couple of billion dollars at a time. We have a Federal mandate that says X amount of fuel has to be blended with ethanol every year. That will rise to 22 billion gallons in 2015. So there is no reason for us to pay somebody to blend it when they already have to, and we have seen the shift in the industry from small entities to the very large. When this program started, it was about less than a billion dollars in cost. It will now be, on an annualized basis, around $6 billion. While we are running a $1.6 trillion deficit, we need every penny we can get. So I am thankful this has been brought up. But it begs the larger question--actually there are two. One, can we trust markets--real markets--to work more effectively than Washington mandating and dictating policies? Throughout our history--if you look at it in total--no government can ever do any allocation of scarce resources as well as the market can. The markets are not perfect. There is no question, they make mistakes and cause occasional shortages. But overall, in the long run, markets work much better than a bureaucratic Soviet-style mandate of what we will do and what price we will pay for it. The second question it begs is, what is our country's energy policy? We send a quarter of a trillion dollars a year outside this country for oil and gas, liquids and natural gas. That is a quarter of a trillion dollars that we could invest here and pay for our own resources. We are the only nation in the world where our resources are owned by the citizens and our own government limits our ability to utilize it. The CRS just finished a study that shows that the oil and gas reserves in the United States are greater than that of Saudi Arabia, China, and Canada combined. So the question is, why aren't we using ours, rather than sending money overseas and undermining our own economy and not creating jobs? The projections are that if we would truly utilize our resources, we could create close to 190,000 jobs a year in the exploration and energy business--without subsidies, without tax credits; that is what would be the result. With oil near $100 a barrel, and we continue to send the money out of the country instead of going after our own resources, which are plentiful, we have to ask the question, what are we doing? The final point I will make is, when you buy ethanol-blended gasoline and you look at the price and you see, here is regular that has no ethanol in it, and here is ethanol-blended gasoline that is about 20 or 25 cents cheaper, it is important that the American people understand that you need to add $1.72 to that to get the real price you are paying for that blended gasoline, because that is what your government has put into the pipeline in the way of loans, grants, subsidies, blenders credits, and taxes on imported ethanol. So even though it looks cheaper, it is not. It is about $1.40 more, when you look at all the costs taken from you as a taxpayer and put into the pipeline and given to the special interests, in terms of what we will have, and where we will have it, and when we will have it. I support ethanol alternative fuel, especially now that it has 7\1/2\ percent of our market. But the best way for ethanol to survive is for it to stand on its own two feet, without subsidies, without us spending dollars we don't have to get something that we are going to get anyway. I am extremely pleased with my discussions with Senator Reid. I am thankful to Senator Cardin, as well as Senator Feinstein. She has been working on this for a long time. She opposed this when it started. She recognizes that what we have actually done is not help ourselves that much. We have markedly increased the cost of food. We can say 40 percent of the corn crop this last year went for ethanol, and corn is at historic highs. When you look at a poultry producer or beef producer or pork producer or lamb producer or turkey producer or milk producer or egg producer, their largest cost has doubled because of this policy. Quite frankly, America is lucky because the worldwide demand for grains--given our wonderful farm community and their ability to produce--is extremely high and our farmers are extremely efficient. So this policy will not affect farm prices significantly right now. But, hopefully, in the future it will bring them down to a more moderate level. Two-and-a-half years ago, corn was at $3 a bushel and most corn farmers made money. It is now above $7, even though their input costs have risen somewhat with the increase of oil prices. The farms in our country that raise grains have never been in better shape--if they can get a crop in. I know we have areas in the country where that hasn't happened. So I think overall we are starting to address some of the misdirected capital formation in this country by backing off on government picking of winners and losers, and I am thankful for the opportunity to speak on that. I yield the floor, as I see the Senator from Iowa is here.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, the reason this amendment ended up the way it is, is because we don't have an open amendment process in the Senate anymore. Rule XXII gives every Senator the right to offer an amendment. We have no Senate unless we have the right to offer an amendment. There is no usurpation of the power of the majority leader. He gets to set what bills are on the floor. Every Senator has the right to file cloture on their amendments--every Senator. They also have every right to offer amendments. We would not be in this position if we did not have a closed amendment process instead of an open amendment process. I would like to solve this problem. I recognize that this is going to be blue-slipped anyway. I thank the majority leader for his offer. I do not think it accomplishes what we want. I think we end up losing what we can get and what we should get. I think the American people deserve to have us take this $3 billion out of the hands of the large oil companies now, not to the benefit of any American except to their detriment and their children. cloture motion

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, we have introduced into the Record the industry that gets this tax credit--they represent 97 percent of all of the ethanol that is blended--does not want the $3 billion. They say it is not a disruption to them, and, in fact, it is $3 billion that we cannot afford to pay. It is something that already has accomplished its purpose through a government mandate. I would yield the remainder of my time to the Senator from California, Mrs. Feinstein.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent for 2 minutes.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, may I make an inquiry of the Chair?

Mr. COBURN. How much time remains for the Republicans in morning business?

Mr. COBURN. I thank the Chair. These are interesting days in our country. We find ourselves in a very deep hole, and it is not the fault of the people; it is the fault of the Congress. We continue to spend money we do not have on things we do not need. When we do that personally, we end up filing bankruptcy. Pretty soon, we run out of new credit cards to take on, and we get to the point where we can't pay our debts. That is a question that is in front of our country today as our economy is struggling and we have this massive debt. We ought to be about every small, medium, and large step we can take to solve the problem, not to solve the problem by saying we can't pay our bills but to solve the problem so we create a prosperous future for our kids and those who follow us. There is a lot of controversy over the amendment I offered, and it is inaccurately claimed by the majority leader that this amendment was rule XIV'd. It was not rule XIV'd. According to the procedures of the Senate, you can file cloture on any amendment at any time. That is a privilege every Senator has. Why would somebody file cloture on an amendment? It is because, over the first 5\1/2\ months of this year, through the leadership of the Senate, we have been unable to have a free and open debate and free and open offering of amendments. Because the procedure is rarely used does not mean it is not ethical and not accurate. As a matter of fact, the reason the procedure was put there was in case at a point in time your rights as a Senator to offer amendments are being limited by the majority. That is why we have this rule. Because you can take 16 of your colleagues and file a cloture petition and, therefore, have a vote on your amendment. So what we are hearing going on in the background today is, the reason you shouldn't vote for this amendment, even though you agree we should get rid of and save $3 billion, much as the Senator from California outlined, $3 billion that the very people who are blending and receiving the $3 billion don't want, the argument is, it is because they don't like the way the amendment came to the floor. Explain to the people at home, you have an opportunity to save this country $3 billion and you know it is the right policy, but you are not going to vote for it because you don't like the way the amendment came to the floor. I would remind my colleagues that of the $3 billion we are going to save, 1.2 billion of it we are going to borrow from China, if we go on and spend it, and we are going to charge that 1.2 billion to our kids and grandkids. The interesting point is, we have grown, over 20-some years, to rely on ethanol for 7 percent of our fuel, and it has been a very expensive process. It is expensive directly because when you go to buy gasoline today, it is not the price you pay at the pump that you are actually paying. Take all the subsidies and all the tax credits and all the low-interest loans and all the nonrepayment of all the grants and all the moneys that have been put into this program, and when you buy that tank of gas, every gallon that you put into your car after you pay for it, you already paid $1.72 through your taxes to have that gallon there. So we are not getting rid of the mandate on ethanol. It is 7\1/2\ percent. It has helped us in some ways. It is a very inefficient fuel that causes us to consume more fuel, produce more CO2. But the fact is, we have an amendment in the Chamber that is designed to take away a subsidy, and the only reason we are taking away the subsidy is because in law we are saying you have to do it anyway. I would introduce, for the record, a letter from the refiners that states--this is the National Petroleum Refiners Association, representing 97 percent of the people who get this tax credit--97 percent of the $3 billion. They say they don't want the $3 billion. The vote is going to come down to something very clear. We are going to give $3 billion to some of the most profitable companies in America or we are not. The interesting fact is, they are saying: Please don't give it to us. Please don't give us this money. Think of the time when we are borrowing the money to give to them and they are saying don't give it to us. We are going to have a vote in the Chamber and very likely not win because of a procedure or because of parochial interests. The fact is, every gallon of ethanol that is blended to gasoline, whoever does the blending, gets 45 cents a gallon, and they don't need it because they are going to blend it anyway. So the real question is, Will we continue to be ignorant in Washington of the common sense the American people want us to have? The common sense is, if you are paying somebody to do something and by law they have to do it anyway and then they write you a letter and say: Please don't pay me anymore to do this, I am going to do it anyway, why would we continue to send them the money? Why would we continue to do that, especially when 40 percent of it we have to borrow from the Chinese to be able to pay it to the American oil company? It makes no sense. There is no logic you can come up with. The calculations out of Iowa State University on this $3 billion is that the amount of jobs that have come out of this in the past cost $14 million a year per job--14 million a year per job created out of this subsidy. No wonder we are broke. No wonder we are failing financially. No wonder we are failing our children and our grandchildren, because we continue to do things that don't have any correlation with logic or common sense. I know the arguments. I know the argument is that, well, we passed this last year as part of the extension. Well, as a Republican, I was one of the few Republicans who did not vote for that extension. Because not only did we pass additional tax cuts and additional unpaid programs, we cut no spending to be able to pay for it. So what we did was borrow a whole bunch more money and not solve any of the critical issues that lie in front of our country. Forty percent of last year's corn crop went to ethanol. As a matter of fact, there is so much ethanol production, last year we shipped 400 million gallons overseas. That is great, except when you take the time to think about that with that 400 million gallons, we sent $500 million worth of subsidy. So now we are subsidizing the ethanol that goes to Europe with your tax dollars so they can have cheaper gasoline than we have, because they are taking $1.72 per gallon and getting the benefit of our tax dollars to have cheaper ethanol in Europe than they can get from other places. So there is nothing about this that makes sense, other than if you are a wonk and study the politics and the procedures and the parochialism that goes on inside the political body. That is what has gotten us into trouble. We are more interested in power and position and party. I am sick of both parties. We better start focusing on the real problems in front of our country. We are going to have a $1.7 trillion deficit this year, and the way you get rid of that is 1 billion or 2 billion or 3 billion at a time. Here is something that makes absolutely no sense. Here is something that has no true demand for it. Here is something that is $3 billion that the people we are paying it to say they don't want, and we are not going to take them up on it? What part of stupid are we? This is like a Ferrell movie. It doesn't make sense. It is comedic. We have had a lot of debate. Let me just talk for a minute about what is going on in the agricultural community throughout this country if you are a poultry, milk or livestock producer. You can't bring your cattle to feedlots right now because corn is too expensive--$7.65 a bushel yesterday. You can't afford to fatten your cattle, so they are not bringing them in from the range. We are slaughtering dairy cows all across this country because 70 percent of the cost of dairy cattle is the corn you feed them. We are going to get all sorts of untoward interruptions and price increases in our food if we continue this policy. Seventy percent of the cost for chickens is feed. We are having chicken processors close and go into bankruptcy. We are having chicken raisers, the actual chicken farms--a lot in Oklahoma, a lot in Arkansas, a lot throughout the South, even over in Delaware and in Virginia--can't afford to feed the chickens. So what is going to happen because we have this false subsidy? The fact is, right now, 15 percent of the food increases in this country that you have seen in the last year are directly associated with this policy-- directly associated with this policy. That doesn't have any effect on the fact that what could we do by sending $7 corn out of this country to our balance of payments, which would help our trade imbalance? Instead, we are burning it, and it is a highly inefficient fuel. It is a highly inefficient fuel. Everybody knows that when they fill up with 15 percent or 10 percent ethanol, they get much poorer gas mileage. Everybody knows that. In Oklahoma, we have all these stations where it says ``ethanol free.'' Why do people pay 10 or 15 cents more a gallon? Because they win on mileage. They actually get better performance when they don't have ethanol in their fuel. We all know that. It is just in some States you don't have that option. We are fortunate. We can still buy real gas. I understand we have about 3 minutes remaining. I will close with the following statement. This is going to be a historic vote, not about ethanol, not about subsidies. It is going to be a historic vote that sends a signal to the American people. Either the people in Washington get it and are going to stop wasting money on programs they don't need to waste money on and they are going to start acting in the best long- term interests of the country, they are either going to do that or they are not. So when we see the results of this vote, you are going to have a hard time explaining: I voted against that because I didn't like the way the amendment came up. The fact is, here is $3 billion we don't have to spend over the next 6 months. If we don't spend it, that is $3 billion we are not going to have to borrow from our children and that they are not going to be paying interest on for the next 30 years. This comes down to the point in time, does this Senate recognize the amount of trouble we are in, and are Senators willing to give up parochial interests, procedural interests, are they willing to do what is necessary to put this country back on course? My hope and prayer is they are. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I had a good time this afternoon listening to the debate on the amendment I have offered and visiting with Senators. I think there is an important distinction that needs to be made in the arguments that have been brought forward. The first is we have a mandated level of ethanol that has to be produced and blended into gasoline, and it grows from now on. There will be zero job losses if this amendment is approved. The second thing is, my colleague--and I love him to death--from South Dakota says we are going to save $1 billion. We can save $3 billion if we eliminate the VEETC blending subsidy. Now, why should we do that? Here is a subsidy that goes to all the blenders of gasoline in the United States--all of them--and they all have called and written and said: We do not want the $3 billion for the rest of the year. We do not want it. We actually have a letter from the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, which they are all members of, saying: We do not want this money. So the best way to get money against the deficit is to not give money to people who do not want it on something that is already mandated anyway. I spent a great deal of time listening to my colleague from Iowa, Senator Grassley, and his figures were very good. But they were only up through 2008. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 40 percent of last year's corn crop was utilized, converted to ethanol. Why would the American Bakers Association, the American Frozen Food Institute, the American Meat Institute, California Dairies, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the International Dairy Foods Association, the Milk Producers Council, the National Chicken Council, the National Council of Chain Restaurants, the National Meat Association, the National Restaurant Association, the National Turkey Federation, the National Wildlife Federation--which is just about one-third of the people who are endorsing this--why would they be for this? Because it is not just less than 3 percent of the cost of food, it has been, this last year, the significant driver. Corn prices are at $7.65 a bushel. They are 2\1/2\ times what they were 3\1/2\ years ago. And I am not against the farmers. I am for ethanol. I do not want to do away with ethanol blending. I do not want to do away with ethanol as a substitute. But we have a way to get the same amount of ethanol produced and put into our cars without spending $3 billion between now and the end of the year--$5.8 billion is what it has averaged over the last few years. We spent $34 billion of money we didn't have subsidizing something that is mandated. I mean, it even goes beyond the Reagan quote, which was that the government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it. We have the incentive to blend the ethanol, and that incentive is you by law have to blend it. They do not have a choice. So we are going to use ethanol in this country. Another factor the American people ought to take into consideration when they go buy a gallon of fuel today--you already have $1.72 worth of subsidy in there. That does not have anything to do with oil and gas drilling; that has to do with the subsidies that go to this program for ethanol. And I am for using cellulosic. I am actually for using corn ethanol. I just do not think we ought to pay twice for it. I think we ought to pay once. The number the Senator from Minnesota talked about in terms of subsidy, there are--I have worked on the President's commission on debt. I have worked with the Gang of 6. You cannot be for changing the Tax Code to get rid of tax expenditures and vote against this amendment. I mean, how do you explain? Here is one we do not need the incentive for and we are going to pay for, and yet you say you want to solve the problems of the country. But the first time we have a vote to really eliminate one that will make no difference in terms of the amount of ethanol that is produced in this country--it will just save us $3 billion--you can't be on both sides of that issue. Let me address the oil and gas industries for a minute. They get accelerated depreciation and writeoff. That is true. And that amounts to taking legitimate business expenses and saying: You can write them off sooner. Why did we do that? It started in 1903, by the way. That is when we started. We started it because it is a capital-intensive business in terms of the exploration. It is associated with a lot of dry holes. Now, the very companies that we say we want to take some of their ``subsidies''--there is a big difference between a subsidy that is a tax credit and allowing someone to advance depreciation because they are going to get to write it off anyhow. The net effect to the Federal Government's revenue, if you take all of those away, is still zero. The Federal Government does not get any additional money because under accounting standards they get to write off those expenses anyway; they just do not get to write them off fast. So the body has already chosen to not do that because they are legitimate business expenses. We are not saying: Take away legitimate business expenses from the ethanol distilleries or the blenders. We are just saying: Do not pay them money for something that they are going to have to do anyhow that they have already said to us they do not want. Tomorrow during the debate, I will add to the Record the statement from the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association. The other point I would make: There is no question we are not energy independent, and there is no question that biofuels and cellulosic ethanol can contribute to what our results can be in terms of maintaining that independence. But we are the only Nation in the world where we as citizens own more oil and gas than Canada, China, and Saudi Arabia combined, and our Government will not let us have it. Think about that for a minute. According to the Congressional Research Service, there is more oil, gas, and gas liquids untapped in the United States than is known in all of Canada, all of China, and all of Saudi Arabia combined. So the reason we are in trouble and importing oil is because our own government will not let us have our own resources. Why would we continue that? That is a debate for another time. No matter what we believe in terms of green energy, what we do know is that we are 30 years away from getting away from carbon-based fuels--at the earliest. So we can either pay a price or we can buy from the Saudis or buy from other Middle Eastern countries or we can develop our own. Talk about jobs. The estimate is that if we would truly go after our own energy, we would generate over 100,000 jobs a year the next 10 years in the oil and gas industry in this country--cleanly. The other comment I have heard is that this amendment was not brought up properly. Well, let me talk about something for a minute. When the Senator from South Dakota and I came to the Senate, the first 2 years you could offer an amendment on anything, on any bill at any time because that is the way the Senate was intended to operate. As a Senator, a Member of this body, you had the right to offer an amendment. Now, you may lose it or it may get tabled, but you had to right to do it. That is not a majority leader's prerogative; it is a prerogative of every individual Senator that you ought to cherish and protect because if the majority leader is the only one who will decide what amendments get offered and when they get offered, this is no longer the Senate. There is no longer an ability to offer what is in the best interests of our country or our constituency. The very fact that we do not want to have controversial amendments that we have much disagreement on coming to the floor because we do not want to have to go home and defend them or we do not want to vote on them because we might lose--the Senate ought to be a free place to offer ideas and get them voted down. In my first 2 years in the Senate, I had tons--in fact, I had every amendment voted down. There was not an amendment I won. But I had the freedom to offer the amendments. And do you know what. We passed 10 times as much legislation in that Congress than we have the last two. So limiting amendments is not the prerogative of the majority leader. Deciding what bills come to the floor is the prerogative of the majority leader. If we want to go home and tell our constituents that we have voted against saving $3 billion, that we are going to borrow 40 percent of it from outside of this country because we do not like the way an amendment was brought up--how else do you bring up an amendment if you cannot in the Senate? Every true and proper procedure was followed in bringing up this amendment, and had this amendment been allowed to come up, if other Members had not objected to it, we would have never used cloture to bring up an amendment. You should not have to use cloture to bring up an amendment. You should be able to bring up any amendment you want and let Senators have the courage to vote the way they want on it rather than to say: I am going to hide behind not having to vote, so I am going to object to having a vote on an amendment. Well, if we start down that process, we are never going to have any amendments and every amendment is going to end up having 60 votes just to be brought up. If we are going to move to that procedure--and I know procedure in this body pretty well--then I will insist that we do it all the time. That will dead stop the Senate. So the idea that you can hide behind the excuse that even though you want to save the $3 billion but you do not like the way the amendment was brought up is a pretty flimsy excuse to go home and explain to your public that you think we should not ever have cloture motions on amendments. We ought to be able to bring any amendment up at any time. I see the majority leader coming to the floor. He is a dear friend of mine. He has the hardest job in Washington, there is no question. But the privilege to bring an amendment to the floor ought to be protected for both sides of this aisle, and you vote it down, you table it, but you do something with it. Let me just finish by saying that I agree this is supposed to expire at the end of this year. I hope it does because we do not need it. Our corn farmers do not need it. The worldwide demand for corn is high. We are going to continue to produce ethanol. We have a federally mandated requirement that we produce ethanol. This amendment does not touch that, never intended to touch that. But ethanol as a fuel should be processed to the next stage, which is methanol, because methanol is not water soluble and it has the same octane rating as gasoline. Ethanol is not a great fuel. It is not an economical fuel. But we can take that same carbon atom and add to it and create methanol from corn and get a much better fuel that can be transported much easier and have much greater effect on our economy and have much better gas mileage and less effect on the engines and drivetrains and all of the other--the smog prevention we have on automobiles today. So let me say it again. I am not against using biocrops. I am for biocrops. I am not against cellulosic-based. I am not against ethanol. I am not against algae. But ExxonMobil has spent a couple of billion of their own money on algae-based biofuels without the government's help, which is one of the points with this amendment. We no longer need to help. We no longer need to spend the money. So I look forward to the debate tomorrow. I will be on the floor all day to answer questions and to debate the pros and cons of this amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, let me make a couple of points. When the Federal Government writes a tax credit, that means we take money from our Treasury, which is empty; therefore, we borrow it, and we write a check to people. When we have an ``accelerated appreciation,'' what we do is allow people to pay less back in, a big difference. How many of the ethanol refineries and blenders are not represented by this group? It is about 11 percent. They all reside in the upper Midwest. That is why there is such a resistance to it. When I met with the representatives of the ethanol industry, the reason they don't want the credit to go away is because they are afraid that they won't be able to drive as hard a bargain with the large blenders of gasoline, that they will actually be able to determine what their grind cost is--in other words, what their true cost is. The difference between what the Senator from Minnesota and the Senator from South Dakota offer is $2 billion. That is the only difference. Theirs is just denial and spend $1 billion on pumps and infrastructure--money we don't have--and mine is to say quit doing it because we are going to blend the ethanol anyway. That is the only difference in the two programs. One continues to subsidize noneconomic blenders, obviously, because they want it--a very small portion. But the vast majority of people are producing ethanol-blended gasoline. And they say: How did they ever get to the point in our country where the Federal Government is going to tell you that you have to buy a gasoline that is only 65 percent as efficient as the gasoline you were buying? And, oh, by the way, because it is only 65 percent efficient, it actually pollutes more. That is why in this list of people supporting this are all the environmental groups, because they know it is bad policy. The reason I support a mandated level of ethanol is that until we have a cogent drilling policy in this country that says we are going to actually utilize our own resources, we need to keep ethanol. But what really ought to happen is we ought to let markets determine it. We will all be better off. We will have less government regulation, we will have less Tax Code expenditure and the markets will determine what the most efficient product is by what people will buy--what people will buy, what they want to buy. It is called freedom. We have gotten ourselves in this mix where, actually, what people don't realize is we are down to only 47 percent of our oil coming into this country is coming from outside now. We have moved from 62 down to 47 percent, and the reason is because the oil and gas industry has actually gone out there and found an environmentally smart way to produce tons of gas liquids, which are easier to convert into fuel than anything--easier than oil, easier than any other product we have. So the Senator didn't really answer why the people who are getting the money don't want it and yet we should continue sending it to them. Ask yourself the question. We are broke, we are going to run a $1.4 or $1.5 or $1.6 trillion deficit this year and here is a way to save $3 billion, and the people we are going to send the money to--and borrow the money to be able to send it to them--don't want it. Yet they cannot answer why they do not want it. This represents 97 percent of all the blending in the country. They don't want the money and we are going to sit here as a body and continue to send them money they do not want? Go home and explain that to your constituents. From which child are we going to take opportunity because we do not have the courage to do the smart thing? We have a mandate. They have to blend it. They are making a ton of money. One final point, and I will let the Senate staff go home. Every time you go home to buy a gallon of gasoline today, the price you pay at the pump is not the price you pay. If you look at all the subsidies that are going to ethanol, when you go look at that $3.75--or that $4 around here, $3.50 in Oklahoma and Colorado--add $1.72 per gallon to it because that is what you paid in terms of the government support for the ethanol program in terms of subsidies, $1.72 a gallon. You buy it for $3.50, add $1.72, and you are paying $5.22 a gallon. You just don't know that we have picked your pocket through the government expenditures. Out of your taxes you paid, we pay them $1.72 per gallon. It makes no sense. What this does is eliminate 45 cents of that. It doesn't take it all away, the grants and the loans, the low-interest loans. The other thing people do not recognize is most of the ethanol plants, even with this subsidy, have been bought out because they were not economical because they did not know how to run them. That is why most of them ended up with the large companies, because they did not know how to run them, they were not efficient, and now they are profitable even without the blenders credit. It is a simple question: Do we save $3 billion or save $1 billion? I tell you, with what is in front of us as a Nation with our $14.3 trillion debt, I am going to opt for the kids who follow us and the grandkids. I am going for the $3 billion, not $1 billion. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Would the Senator define what a subsidy is to him, because part of the problem with the debate is that we keep saying ``subsidies.'' We don't have subsidies--not in the Senator's State or in Oklahoma. We have accelerated depreciation, which even if you took that away, the dollars to the Federal Government would not increase. How is there a subsidy to the oil and gas industry?

Mr. COBURN. Does it include charitable contributions--a subsidy, the same category?

Mr. COBURN. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. COBURN. The Senator obviously didn't hear what I said. I said I support ethanol, and I would not support that. I have been upfront with the Senator in the past, and you know my position on that. So the question here--and I ask him a question: How do you fit what the people who would get this $3 billion, who the Senator says they don't want--why would they say that if it is going to have a negative impact on their industry?

Mr. COBURN. I will oppose that amendment. My worry is because of the process of the Senate, we may not get that amendment to vote on. My colleague, as part of our leadership, would recognize that we have a problem with amendments.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Ten minutes.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I want to finish my points and then leave the floor because I have something else I have to do. It is amazing the negative effects we all are hearing from all across the country. Every Senator is hearing how regulation is drowning out opportunity for investment that creates jobs in this country. Every program has some positive aspects to it. The question isn't whether they have positive aspects, it is what is our priority now that we are bankrupted. Where should we be spending the money so we get the best bang for the buck. How do we pull back the regulatory framework so that it is common-sense oriented rather than bureaucratic oriented? That is what Senator Snowe is trying to do and to give some type of power to the very people who are being regulated. Because we certainly won't do the oversight. We haven't done the oversight. It is interesting that when the GAO put out this last report on duplication, they are right, they didn't say in these particular programs. But I put out a report 9 months before that detailed the duplication in these programs, and it was published, so you can find the duplication. The important point is we are strangling business and job development--small and medium. The big guys can take all this regulation, and they are already staffed up. The small- and medium- sized businesses can't. We have to give them a way to force common sense onto the bureaucracy. That is all this does. Everybody hears it from all of their constituents, that regulation is killing business formation and job creation. Why would we not want to put in some balance? I don't understand it. The real problem with the regulatory agencies is us, because we won't oversight them. There was no oversight hearing on the EDA. Nobody ever asked the question: Where are the metrics? We hear all this anecdotal evidence about how great it is when we give money to the States that they can do things, but where are the numbers that show the job creation for every thousand dollars that gets spent? It is self- reported, but there is nothing that looks at it that says statistically here is the proof. If the EDA is the best way to create jobs in this country, I am all for it. But I want to see some data that says that right now. We have job training programs, 47 of them in this country, and we spend $18 billion a year on them. We have 104 science, technology, engineering, and math programs across nine different agencies we are spending $16 billion on a year. We have no data on any of those programs anywhere, but we have it out there. We have no idea what we are doing because we won't ask the hard questions and we won't study it. Nobody would have 104 science, technology, engineering, and math programs. We have 64 programs--and 20-some of them are outside the Department of Education-- to improve teacher training quality. The reason we are in trouble is because we haven't done our job on oversight. So anyone can claim anecdotal evidence that something is good, but you should know that when we spend $1,000 of the taxpayers' money--money we don't have today because we are borrowing it from China--we ought to be certain that it is actually going to create something because our kids are paying the bill. The next generation is going to pay the bill, and they will pay that bill through a markedly lower standard of living. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, as a matter of right, I ask that my amendment be modified with the changes I now send to the desk. Further, I make the point that I retain my right to the floor after the modification is made under the precedents of the Senate.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I now send a cloture motion to the desk on the pending amendment.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I have listened to this debate all morning, as an original cosponsor with Senator Snowe on her bill. I wish to talk about the EDA first, and then I will talk about what most of us do not realize because most of us have not taken the time to look. There are 80 economic development programs in the Federal Government through 4 agencies that spend $6.6 billion a year. Not one of them has a metric on it to see if it is successful. We have heard all morning about $3,000 per job. That is all self- reported stuff. No oversight on it. No committee oversight on it. No hard work to see--there is not a metric on one of these programs to see if it is working. Now we have a bill on the floor to spend another $500 million a year on something we have no idea what--we have anecdotal evidence, but what does the OIG say? The OIG says, first of all, this program has been used as a congressional slush fund to direct money to friends of Members of Congress. That is what they say. Fully one-third of the projects never come to completion. So the money that was spent on it ends up being totally wasted. We are reauthorizing a bill that nobody can show the statistics that it is, in fact, effective. It is not just that we are reauthorizing this bill, we have 79 other programs. Ask yourself a question. We are $14 trillion in debt. We are nearly bankrupt. We are running a $1.5 trillion deficit. And we have a bill on the floor to spend $500 million, and we do not know whether it works. We claim, anecdotally, we see positive things every now and then. Well, you know, there are positive outcomes to illness too. But the fact is, we do not know what we are doing. What the Congress ought to be doing is saying: If, in fact, it is a role for the Federal Government to have economic development activities, then we ought to center it in 1 area, and we ought to have 1 or 2 programs, not 80 with 80 sets of administrators, 80 sets of commissions, and $6.6 billion a year, with half of it not accomplishing any purpose for the American people other than make the Senators and Congressmen feel good because they think they may have done something. So the whole idea that we would put forward a bill that has never truly been oversighted in terms of the way everybody else would oversight the way they spend their money to see if it is effective in the whole, not anecdotal evidence of one company or one benefit--put it all together, and if we have a role, let's put together a program that will work, No. 1; No. 2, that has metrics on it so we can measures whether it is effective when we are actually borrowing the money to do this. By the way, if we actually pass this bill and $500 million gets spent, we are going to borrow $200 million from the international financial community to do it. When we know one-third of it is wasted, that just does not make any sense. So the whole idea of Congress passing this EDA bill, in light of not doing oversight on the other 79 economic development programs under the other 4 agencies, is the definition of insanity. We don't know what we are doing. Now, let's talk about regulation for a minute. There is well over $2 trillion in the United States sitting in small, medium, and large businesses right now that is not invested for jobs. Why is that? Why are people afraid to go out and invest and get a return on capital? It is because they do not see any clarity in the future. The administration we have today has issued 40 percent more regulations--40 percent more regulations--than any administration in history in the first 2 years. One of the reasons people do not have confidence is they cannot handle the regulatory framework that is coming at them so fast. The other thing I have observed is that when regulations are written, they are oftentimes written without people with the real knowledge of what they are writing the regulations for. Eighty percent of the regulations written in this country are written by lawyers within the agency in which they are doing it. Now, I like lawyers. That is good enough. But how about having someone who has real experience in the area in which they are writing the regulation rather than a lawyer write a regulation for it? A great example is that one of the good things about the new health care bill was going to be where we combine things into accountable care organizations, where we end up putting hospitals and doctors and physical therapists and mental health workers all together, and then we work as a team so we can cut the costs and not have duplication and get better outcomes. The regulations on that were 220 pages long, with 65 things you have to do every day on every patient to report back to the Federal Government. Well, that is just idiotic. It is asinine. Yet that is the regulation that came out on what I view as one of the few positive things about the affordable care act. The Senator from Maine outlined the cost of business regulation to small businesses and large businesses. It is $1.7 trillion a year; that is, fully 12 percent of our GDP is the cost of regulations that are coming from the Federal Government. All this bill says is--it is a way to force the administration and the agency--it does not matter if it is a Republican or Democratic administration. They are both the same. It does not have anything to do with what party is in power in the administration, but to hold the agencies accountable, that they will look at the impact of the regulations they write so they are not counterproductive to our country. We are at a time period where we are at great risk as a nation--great risk--because we are so overly exposed on our debt and our deficit. For every 1 percent increase of interest rates that we are going to see next year, it is going to cost us, the taxpayers of America, $150 billion additional. And there is no question we are going to see interest rates rise in this country. So we do not create the confidence of the small and medium businesses to go out and build that next production line or build a way to produce this next new idea, because what they are seeing is so much blowback from an unaccountable, misdirected Federal Government. So what Senator Snowe wants to do is totally connected with common sense. But you know what, we don't want to do that. We don't want to do that. And the excuse is that we have not been through committee. Well, let me tell you, one-third of the bills that come to the floor of the Senate have never been through the committee, and now we are saying an amendment has to come through the committee. It is ludicrous. It is also false. It is that we really don't trust the American people. That is what it really says, we really don't trust the American people to use common sense. The reason we don't is because we have no connection with common sense whatsoever in this body, and because we can't figure it out, we don't think they can. So Big Brother has to tell you every time, every location, at every situation what you can do. The thing that has changed in my adult lifetime is when I was a medical device manufacturer in the seventies, the presumption was on the government to prove that I was doing something wrong. With our regulatory framework now, the presumption is on you, the American citizen, to prove you didn't do something wrong. That is why this overregulation, this attendance to detail matters to nothing, except a gnat on the top of a pin. It is out there and is so costly, in terms of the cost of compliance, it makes no difference in terms of somebody's outcome. But, mainly, it is costing us jobs. It is costing us the very thing that built this country--the premise that you can put together an idea and build on that idea with hard work and minimal capital and make it a success. The thing that is blocking that is the regulation coming from the Federal Government. This is a straightforward bill. Let's hold the bureaucrats accountable. If they will not be held accountable, you will have a way to hold them accountable. I don't get it. I don't get why anybody would object to this because it is not stopping regulation; it is saying you have to figure out whether it is prudent. If you are not following the Regulatory Flexibility Act, then we are going to make you do it because, we will give you a basis in a court of law to be able to do that. What is wrong with that? Nobody has addressed what is wrong with that. They have just said, no, we don't like it, we don't want it. So we are going to do everything we can to make sure an amendment, which will fix the problems in this country and start creating jobs, and will actually move money into investment to create new opportunities for jobs for Americans, when we have 17 million Americans who want to work but can't, we are going to defeat it. We are so disconnected with what is important in this country, and it is so frustrating. I am surprised I still have hair on my head. Senator Snowe knows more about small business in this Senate than any other Senator. She has worked on it for years. She knows the problem. She has offered a solution that is common sense, that will work, that won't cost a lot of money, but will rein in the bureaucracy when they do the wrong thing or they don't follow the law. For us to say, no, we are not going to do it because there may be a small amount of risk that something might go wrong, that is exactly the same way the bureaucracies work. Let me tell you how they work. They never do what is best for the country, they do what is safe for the bureaucracy. That is why we have so much regulation, because they don't want to be criticized. You can't walk through life without being criticized. Nobody is perfect. No action is perfect. So let's hold them accountable and help them be better. Let's be uplifters to them and put some tools there that will enable us to have a good regulatory framework that actually accomplishes the purpose of the regulations but doesn't destroy what small amount of manufacturing business we have left. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I want to discuss for a minute the modification to my amendment. Corn prices today are at their highest level since 1974. Corn supply is at its lowest level since 1974. We have tremendous problems with food inflation in this country. What we put forward this afternoon is a modification to the blending tax credit, as well as the import tax fee on ethanol, and we look forward to that debate as we go forward. The Federal Government now spends $6 billion a year paying over 40 cents a gallon to have ethanol blended, which is already mandated by law that they have to blend it anyway. So this, in essence, will save $3 billion this year for the Federal Government. No. 2 is, it will take significant pressure off corn prices, which will lower food prices both here and abroad. With that, I yield to the Senator from Oklahoma, who wishes to speak as in morning business.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I want to make a couple of comments. I said in my earlier comments there are some good things about the EDA. But the fact is, they are all self-reported. There is no data. There are no methods. Any time you send money to the State of Oklahoma, I guarantee you the people who are going to get the money are going to like it. But there isn't one metric, one set of metrics that measures the effectiveness of the money that has been spent through EDA in terms of job creation. Fully one-third of the dollars don't get through to completion over the history of the program. The very idea we would defend the bureaucracy--the bureaucracy didn't help us on 9/11 because they were stovepiped and they didn't communicate. The bureaucracy failed to ensure the safety of the levees in New Orleans--this same bureaucracy that doesn't need to be controlled. The bureaucracy didn't protect us from the financial crisis of 2008 because we didn't do the oversight. The bureaucracy didn't protect the gulf from the Deepwater Horizon. We had a bureaucracy that was supposed to be in charge of that, but they didn't do their job. The SBIR--you had my full support on SBIR; the Senator from Louisiana knows that. She had my support on that because that is one of the proven programs inside the SBA that actually has metrics on it that works. So the debate is whether we hold back the regulatory framework. I find it ironic that you agree with us in principle but won't vote with us on this amendment because it didn't go through a committee. It is amazing.