Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that reading of the names be waived.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and I call up amendment No. 436.

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.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask my colleague, my senior Senator from Oklahoma--who I do not think is on the floor right now--to allow time for Senator Brown to bring up an amendment. I yield to him at this time.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Well, I would answer through the Chair that I think we are perplexed. We know intellectually that there is a big problem, and we have this challenge: Do I go down this path and do the best thing for the country or do I go down this path to do the best thing for me? I look at politics differently than most of our colleagues. To the Senator from Alabama, I would say I don't really care whether I am here; I care whether America is here. But the point ought to be, how do we secure the vote and how do we establish trust with the American people? If my colleague will go with me--and I know he knows this--look at the confidence in the Congress of the people in this country. Why is there a lack of confidence? Why is it that 80 percent of the people of the United States didn't have any confidence in Congress? I can tell my colleague why. It is because we have milked trust and credibility from those very people. I get letters all the time from people who disagree with me. They will write me, and I actually--I am involved in every answer to every inquiry that comes into my office. I actually read them because I want to know what the people from Oklahoma say. But even though they disagree with me, they vote for me because they trust me because I am not gaming them as they have seen with the gaming on Medicare. Our problems are real. The solutions are difficult. But America can overcome that if we come together. If we stay divided as we have seen here with no budget votes, no hard votes, and we try to game it politically, what we are doing is undermining our country's future. It doesn't matter who wins the next election; what we need to do is save America.

Mr. COBURN. It does not. But it is interesting to note that the President's deficit commission was set up by the President and had six of his nominees on it. It had six Republicans and six Democrats. Five of the six Presidential nominees he nominated agreed with the deficit commission, three of the six Republicans agreed, and three of the Democrats--a pretty good meeting in the middle. Yet the President did not embrace the results of his own commission, did not embrace the results of the people he appointed. So what was the purpose of that exercise? Was it to make political hay or was it to solve the problems? The fact is, I have five colleagues in the Senate who have been working hard on that over the past 5 months to try to build a bipartisan agreement out of the basis of that. That is what has to happen--except politics. I go back and just refer to my colleague, if you look at the history of republics, the track record is not very good. The average age of the world's republics is 207 years. That is our average age. We are 27 years past the average. The question is, Can we cheat history? Can we not fall like the rest of the republics over the very same things? They all fell over fiscal issues. They let their spending get out of control, they let their debt get out of control, and then they could not afford the promises they made. I will say to my colleague, this is not an issue of the budget chairman. This is an issue of the leadership of the Senate that does not want a budget. We ought to be very clear that the American people know that Congress is not doing its job--this body, for sure--because we are not making the hard choices we were sent up here to make. What we are doing is punting. We are going to come to a crisis, and the crisis is going to be painful, and it is going to be much more painful than had we made the hard choices today. So I want to thank the ranking member of the Budget Committee for his leadership. We can solve any problem in front of us, Mr. Ranking Member, but we have to do it together, and we cannot deny that the problems exist.

Mr. COBURN. I got 71.8 percent.

Mr. COBURN. Well, to my colleague, through the Chair, I would answer, What is our obligation? Is our obligation to win the next election or is our obligation to solve the problems in front of our country? It is not even a matter of having votes. We can't even get bills on the floor for the Members that actually would save some money right now. Let me give an example. We had the small business bill up--the only thing we have done of significance since we have been back in this session. It took 2 weeks to get a bipartisan amendment that would save $5 billion out of the duplication that was reported by the Government Accountability Office--hundreds of billions of dollars. It took 2 weeks to finally get a vote on that. My colleague from Virginia and I cosponsored that. It won. That is one of the reasons we didn't finish the bill, is because they don't want to do that. They don't want to make the hard choices. So it is an abrogation of our responsibility to not do the hard part that comes with the job. The job comes with a whole lot of rasping on your skin. You are going to get criticized. But the ultimate fatal criticism is to make a choice not to get--put yourself in a position to be criticized. So what we are saying is we are going to do nothing. We are not going to do what we are constitutionally supposed to do by April 15 every year; that is, have a budget. We are not going to debate the issues. We are not going to cast our votes because somebody may affect somebody's election outcome. How big of cowards are we that we can't defend the vote we make? I don't have any problem. You throw the hardest vote from the other side at me, and I will make a decision on it, whether I think it is right or wrong, and then I will defend it. But to not vote at all is an absolute abrogation of our oath, and that is the leadership we are experiencing. It is not just Democratic leadership. We have some on our side who don't want to cast hard votes either. The point is, the American people need us to be casting hard votes now. Our problems are greater than at any time since World War II. The challenge to our country is greater than World War II. The outcome of our Republic depends on us solving the very real and urgent and difficult problems in front of us and doing so in a way that preserves the future of this country and reestablishes and reforms us to where we get our mojo back so we can start believing in ourselves again. To not do it and to not have the courage to sacrifice your own position for the betterment of this country--that is what we ought to be about, and I don't see that.

Mr. COBURN. Seven years.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes this evening talking about where we are as a nation. I have to say I am discouraged at the work of the Senate. If we look around and take in the whole picture here, there is nobody here, essentially, and they are not going to be here for 9 or 10 more days. The question I put forward is, If your own personal household was in trouble, financially or otherwise; if you knew you weren't going to be able to pay the bills; if you knew your credit cards were maxed out, would you just sit on the couch and do nothing or would you work to protect your family? Would you go out and do whatever you could? Would you take advantage of every opportunity to secure the future for your family? Well, we have big problems in our country, and it doesn't matter how we got here. The fact is, we are borrowing $4.3 billion a day. The interest on our debt is $2.8 billion a day. We are at a point where if we don't start making the very difficult decisions for our country despite our fear of the political consequences, we will be like the person who, when his family was in trouble, didn't try to solve the problem. Mr. President, we don't have a budget. Yesterday we had political votes on budgets, but it was a game. For the last 2-plus years, no budget has come through the Senate. There is a reason for that, and the American people need to know it is not because of our great budget chairman, whose name is Senator Kent Conrad. It is not his fault there is not a budget. It is because of the leadership in the Senate. The leadership does not want the votes that come along with a budget. You see, the political thinking is, we don't want any of our members to have to be recorded on things that might affect the next election. So to hell with the country. What is more important is the next election. What is happening in the Senate is a complete meltdown of the very purpose the Senate was created. The fact is, we had votes on four separate budgets, and let me tell you, what is most astounding is that nobody voted for President Obama's budget. The President of the United States submits a budget to the Congress, and nobody in the Senate agrees to vote for it. How disconnected could that budget be from the realities of what our country's needs are if even the people of his own party won't vote for it? I was inclined to vote for it just so we could have a debate on his budget. But the fact is, we didn't have a debate on any budget. So as we sit here, we are borrowing $4.3 billion a day and running a $1.6 trillion deficit and mortgaging the very future of our children. The very reason we work so hard and the reason we live is to nurture and support those who come after us, and to ignore that responsibility is absolutely uncalled for. Congress deserves every recognition from the American people for being a farce. You can't have the kinds of problems we have in front of us and not attempt to address them. I want to spend a minute talking to every Medicare patient in the country. I have practiced medicine for 25 years. I have cared for thousands of Medicare patients. I understand, at 63 years of age, with three pretty significant disease processes going on in my own body, about worrying about one's health. I worry about the security around that health. It is important enough to me to really take the medicines and to follow the diet my doctor is offering me now that I am 63. I probably wouldn't have paid attention 20 years ago, but today I am doing that. The health care that is available to me is important to me, as I know it is to every Medicare recipient out there. But the facts are the following: Politicians want to use Medicare as a tactic to scare people into not doing what we as a nation are going to ultimately do anyway. We will have to fix Medicare. And we can fix it in a way that assures every senior who absolutely needs the help of Medicare and is dependent on Medicare will have that health care. Anybody who says something other than that either cares a whole lot more about themselves and their political career or they are absolutely dishonest, because it is absolutely impossible for us to raise the money to continue to run Medicare the way it is today. It will change in the next 4 or 5 years no matter what the politicians say, no matter what the next election--it has to change. The good news is we can give as good care or better with fewer dollars if we will make the right changes in Medicare. What most Medicare patients don't understand is that $1 out of every $3 spent on Medicare is not going to help you get better and isn't preventing you from getting sicker. Those are facts. They are backed up by four studies now, four long-term studies. If $1 out of every $3 is going into Medicare and it is not effective in actually helping you with health care, and that $1 out of every $3 we are borrowing from the Chinese this year to keep Medicare afloat--and that is just the hospital system, that is Part A--why would we not want to make the hard choices and fix it? The reason you are not seeing that come forth is somebody sees an advantage in an election to game Medicare. The fact is, it is not just Medicare that is broken. The whole entire health care system is broken because we do not allow markets to allocate it in an efficient way and we do not hold physicians such as myself accountable to be very frugal with the tests we order and the treatments we order. As we continue to think about ourselves and say I do not want any change--and that is the other point I want to make. As I get older, I find I resist change more than anything. But the one absolute that is going to happen is that Medicare is going to change and it does not matter what any politician from Washington tells you, it has to change. Otherwise we will be in an absolute depression. We will not be able to accomplish any of the things we are accomplishing now under Medicare. It will change. If it is going to change, why don't we change it in a way that continues to guarantee the promise of Medicare and puts more of a burden on those who have more dollars with which to do that and takes care of the sickest and poorest the best and puts a greater load on those who have less of a need for Medicare? Some would say that is not fair. Let me tell you what is not fair. What is not fair is the average American puts $138,000 into Medicare over their working career and takes $450,000 out. That is what is not fair. What is not fair is for a 5-year-old to complain about something not being fair. To quote P.J. O'Rourke: ``You were born in America. That's not fair.'' Life is not fair. The fact is, we have a system that is getting ready to crash and we have a political dynamic that people are actually saying we do not care because we want to win the next election more than we want to fix the problem. That does not apply to everybody, but people who are gaming this issue, people who are scaring people who are on Medicare, lack the integrity and courage to talk about what the real problems are in this country. The real problems are we have made promises without creating the revenues to pay for it. We can tax 100 percent of all the income of everybody above $100,000 in income in this country and you will not fix the deficit this year--if you took 100 percent of everything everybody earned over $100,000--that is how great the problem is. We have a $14.3 trillion debt that, if in fact the debt limit is extended, will be past $15 trillion by December. When is it going to stop? When are we going to start thinking about the future of our country and the security of our country instead of the next election and how we can look good as the media plays the game on politics? It is amazing; today most of the stories in the newspaper were about Medicare and the effect of an election up in New York, a congressional election. I don't think that matters a twit on what is going on in this country. What was not said in the papers is that nobody voted for the President's budget. That was not the headline anywhere. It was not the headline that the Congress does not have a budget. The House has passed a budget. You don't have to agree with it but at least they passed one. But you have all this criticism of a proposed plan that came through the House that actually will solve the problem, make sure everybody on Medicare actually gets the care they want and actually will take $1 of those $3 that we are wasting, one out of every three, and put it into actually taking care of patients. But the people who are critical of that plan have no plan themselves. And, if you have a plan, the plan is the following--it is the plan that passed, what we know as ObamaCare, but what is the health care bill that was passed in the last Congress. Here is the plan, just so we understand. According to the President's speech at Washington University, the plan is that if we have to, we have two mechanisms. He mentioned one of them. He didn't mention the other. We have the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Under the Affordable Care Act, the Independent Payment Advisory Board is mandated to control the growth of Medicare. Here is how it does it. It makes a recommendation on the cutting of payments for Medicare. That recommendation comes before Congress and we either have to accept that or do something similar to that, in terms of the total dollar amounts, to cut back on the payments for Medicare. What is the No. 1 problem a new Medicare recipient has today? The No. 1 problem new Medicare recipients have today is finding a doctor who will care for them, who will take their Medicare. That is their No. 1 problem. If you think we can take this tremendous unfunded liability and continue to cut--I am not against, as a physician, physicians taking a 5-percent or 6-percent pay cut under Medicare today. I am not against that. But if you think we can continue to do the savings we are going to have to get out of Medicare by doing that, you will not have anybody taking care of Medicare patients because they will not be able to afford to. Those payments to the physicians are less than 30 percent of the total payments of Medicare. Then they transfer over to the hospitals, so we are going to cut what we pay to the hospitals. Some hospitals can afford that, some cannot. What happens when the hospitals that cannot afford that close? Where do you get your hospital care? Prescription drugs--we are going to cut the price of prescription drugs. Consequently, no new drugs are coming on line because of the rate of return for the billion dollar cost that it is for any new drug just to get it through the FDA. All of a sudden the things you count on are not there. Let me mention the second way the President would have us control. That is they have what is called an Innovation Council, under the Affordable Care Act. What is that purpose? The purpose of the Innovation Council is to decide whether Medicare can afford new innovation in medicine to be offered to Medicare patients. That is the same thing as saying: Here is a new drug, it will cure your breast cancer, but we don't think we can afford it so therefore it is not available under Medicare. One is direct rationing; the other is indirect rationing. But the fact is we cannot fix Medicare by rationing. You will not fix it that way. What you will do is limit care and limit access--similar to what we have under Medicaid. If you look at the trustees' report on Medicare, what they are saying will have to happen is that the reimbursement rates under Medicare will end up being lower than the reimbursement rates under Medicaid. That is the answer they have right now. That is not a good answer. No American thinks that is a good answer. My colleagues on both sides of the aisle do not think that is a good answer. But that is where we are sitting. I make the point if we do not address Medicare and if we do not address Medicaid and if we do not fix Social Security--and it is true, if Congress had not stolen the $2.6 trillion from it and it was sitting in an account, we would be in pretty good shape. We would make it another 30 years. But there is a problem in terms of paying back that money. Congress stole the money, spent it, and it is not there. So for us to get the $2.6 trillion to keep it going until 2036 we have to borrow more money. We have to borrow that $2.6 trillion. The problem is we are at a debt limit now and we are getting very close to the time when people are going to quit loaning us money. We can fix Social Security where it is for sure as available as it is today--actually we can make it better for the poorest Americans. We can actually make it better and we can assure that it is going to be working forever. But that requires change. The political dynamic says don't, you can't touch Social Security. How fair is that? How fair is not fixing Medicare, not fixing Medicaid, and not fixing Social Security to those who follow us? I am the grandfather of five great-grandkids, wonderful kids; I love them to death. I raised three daughters--actually my wife did most of that hard work and that is why they turned out well. But the fact is, the relationship with your children is a special relationship, but it does not get close to comparing to the relationship to your grandkids. There is not anything I wouldn't do for my grandkids and they kind of know it. They have not taken advantage of it yet, but they know it. What I would ask is, anybody who is on Medicare today who is listening to this, here is what you need to know. No. 1 is there is nobody in Washington who does not want you to have a secure medical health care system. But the problems with it are so severe that it has to be fixed and it cannot wait. And that requires change. The problems of our country as a whole are so severe that we are not going to be able to borrow the money to pay back what we owe Social Security if we do not fix Medicare and Medicaid because nobody is going to loan it. They are going to say you haven't done what you need to do. What has to happen is we have to think about our grandkids. I don't like going through change very much but I will tell you there is one group of kids that I will go through change for, I will sacrifice for, I will give something up for me. What we are asking you to give up is the comfort of what you know now, and move to the comfort of something that is going to supply the same thing to you, just in a different way. Anybody who games that will not put forward a solution to the very problems that are in front of us. To the seniors out there who are on Medicare, nobody is proposing any impact on you today for the next 10 years. Any proposal would be for those people who are 55 and less and we are saying we have to change it so we can keep it. If we do not change it, nobody is going to have it. By the way, we are going to have trouble surviving if we don't change it because we are not going to be able to manage this tremendous amount of debt which is over $55,000 per man, woman, and child in this country today. We have to think about our grandkids. We have to quit listening to the political shill who says somebody wants to hurt you. Everybody who has put forward ideas on Medicare has a legitimate basis with which to be critical of any other. But any politician in the Senate or the House who has not put forth their solution to get us out of the problems you should give no quarter to. You should not listen to the first word they say because what they are thinking about is the next election. They are thinking how do I take advantage, how do I scare you over the next election? Nobody wants to take away health care for our seniors. What we want to do is ensure it is there in the future, and to put forward the idea that the motivation there is to scare you into thinking that somebody wants to disrupt your care, that is just not true. There could be a great debate, and I started this talk on the fact that there has not been any debate on the problems that are in front of us. There needs to be a great debate. People need to hear what the options are. We need to put a budget on the floor and have the hard debates on it, and take the hard votes, and then try to mix something with the House; otherwise, here is what is going to happen come September--which is not fair to any Federal employee. We are going to have another continuing resolution. That is what is coming because we refuse to have a budget that allows the people who work for you, through the Federal Government, to plan and efficiently carry out what the Congress directs. We are just going to do a continuing resolution. It is a highly inefficient way to run the Government. As a matter of fact, I will tell you that any family who does not run on a budget is set up for getting in trouble. We are not running on a budget now. The bills are coming in and we have a continuing resolution until September 30. But we do not have a budget, we have no plan, we don't know what we need to do, what are the changes we need to make. We are not listening to the people running the program. We are not listening to the American people as we do that. We can fix health care in this country. The problem is the cost of health care. The reason it costs so much is that the vast majority of Americans think somebody else is paying the bill. I will end with this story. I see my colleague from Alabama is here. I have delivered thousands of babies, but there is a particular group I always enjoyed delivering for because they are unique. They were the best purchasers of health care I have ever encountered. They are from a little town called Inola and another called Chouteau, OK, and they are Amish. When they come to buy health care--they don't have health insurance, by the way. Very few of them have a college education. They work with their hands. They are into dairy or carpentry or farming or something, but they work with their hands. They have lots of good common sense. I can tell my colleagues without a doubt that of the 500 Amish babies I delivered, they bought that service from the hospital, from me, from the radiologist, and from the labs at 40 percent less than anybody else bought it. Why is that? It is because they were great consumers of health care and the money was coming out of their pockets. They didn't think somebody else was paying for it. They knew they were paying for it, so therefore they asked for a discount. They said: I will pay you cash up front if you give me a discount. By the way, if you want to do this other test, please explain in detail why I should fork out $100 for another ultrasound. And does my wife absolutely have to have this ultrasound? When you get questioned that way the doctor says: Well, if you understand that we may miss something but basically everything looks good, then I am fine with that as long as you are fine with that. The average pregnancy today in the United States has four or five ultrasounds. I was trained without doing any ultrasounds, and I had the same outcomes. So the point is that we can get better value if we reconnect the purchase of health care with some individual responsibility. If we disconnect that--and that is what we do through private insurance and low deductibles, and that is what we do through Medicare and low deductibles and supplemental policies. We do the opposite of that. Once we have met our deductible, there is no cost. So we are not prudent consumers. As we age, we worry a lot about new symptoms, so we access the health care system. Once you access, the costs just start ticking up. So the point I make is there are a lot of things we can do better in health care if, in fact, we have market forces and transparency helping us do that. I would suggest we can have a Medicare Program that is efficient, that works, and that doesn't have $70 billion worth of fraud in it by the end of the year, by the way--$70 billion, well over 10 percent--and improper payments above 10 percent as well. So $70 billion in fraud and $70 billion in improper payments in Medicare. We could solve the problem right there if Congress would do it. But we don't because we would rather have a political game and game people's fears on health care and Medicare than fix the problem. What I hope seniors will do over this next year, as they hear the politicians make all these wild claims about people's motivations and the damage to Medicare, is when you hear that, think about that in light of your grandchildren. Think about yourself and what you want versus what you want your grandchildren to have because there is no question that the $14.2 trillion and under the President's budget the $23 trillion we are going to have at least in 9 more years is going to be paid back by them, not you. What that really means is they are going to have a far lower standard of living than you do so you don't have to get out of your comfort zone. I trust America a whole lot more than I trust the U.S. Congress. We have a $1 trillion deficit of common sense in Washington, and we have an excess of common sense outside of Washington. If you will trust your common sense and look at what we are doing, what you will find is we can solve our problems, we can come together as a nation, we can fix what ails us, and we can do that without destroying the future of our children and grandchildren. I yield the floor to my colleague from Alabama.

Mr. COBURN. That is correct.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I do not believe small businesses need government assistance to exist. In fact, I believe the best thing our government can do is to shrink the size and cost of the Federal Government. With less government, minimal Federal regulation, and lower taxes, businesses--regardless of size, industry, and location--will innovate in meeting American consumer demands and achieve phenomenal growth. Instead of encouraging dependence on the Federal Government, I believe politicians should seek to find ways to free businesses to thrive independently. Additionally, with a national debt of almost $14.3 trillion, Congress should start considering ways to enable sustainable economic growth instead of authorizing or increasing more Federal subsidy programs that more often than not have limited or questionable benefits. As a former small and large business owner, I know the struggles small businesses face because of unnecessary government regulations and taxes. In fact, the Federal Government's interference in my ability to practice medicine prompted me to first seek office. Small businesses are invaluable to the economic health of our great country and embody the American dream. While I join the Senate and the President in recognizing the contributions of small businesses all over the country, I would like to join Senator Paul in opposing a resolution passed by the Senate today that lauds big government and the use of taxpayer dollars to subsidize certain small businesses.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I am pretty amused at what the Senate is doing. We sit here with a $1.6 trillion deficit and we are running bills based on political philosophy rather than what the real problems are in front of our Nation. Do my colleagues know why oil is expensive today? It is because the dollar is on its back and oil is priced in dollars. If we want the price of oil to go down, as it has this week and the tail end of last week--if we want the value of the dollar to go up, because the world trades oil in dollars--why is the dollar down? The dollar is down because an incompetent Congress continues to spend money we don't have on things we don't absolutely need. If we want the dollar to improve in value, what we have to do is hold the Congress accountable for doing what they were elected to do, which is live within our means. We can't come together and solve the very real problems. Do my colleagues realize that if, in fact, our deficit wasn't $1.6 trillion but about $600 billion, the price of the dollar would shoot way up and the price of oil would go down? We hear all these stories. I get all these letters from my constituents who say: Well, we have to eliminate the commodity speculation. We can do that in this country. We can say you can't speculate on oil unless you can take delivery. That will do nothing to the speculated price of oil because oil is an international commodity and people are always going to speculate on what they think the price of a needed commodity is going to be. So if we controlled all the economics in the world, we could control that speculation, but we can't. What we do know is price controls don't work. They don't work at all. So if, in fact, we want to fix the price of oil, what we have to do is fix our economic mess and strengthen the dollar, which will lower the price of oil and lower the price of gasoline. The debate we are going through is all about politics, creating somebody who is bad. Do my colleagues realize the five big oil companies make less than 8 percent return on their sales? They make a lot of money, but they are giant companies. But compared to most other of the S&P 500, their return on sales is far less, and they are not making record profits. They made record profits when oil was at $142. That is when they made record profits. It is this terrible habit we have of saying--and let me throw a corollary. If I am an Iowa farmer or from Indiana or Illinois or Oklahoma and I have a great corn crop and the price of corn is $4 and I decide not to sell my corn, I decide not to sell it, and now all of a sudden corn is $6.80, I am going to sell it now at $6.80. What are we going to do? Are we going to penalize that farmer for having a resource he took a risk on and selling at a higher price? Are we going to say we are going to double or triple tax you? The other thing I am amazed at--most people know me as a doctor, but I spent 10 years as an accountant and business manager. I have a degree in accounting. The lack of knowledge of my colleagues on American standard accounting principles is amazing. Every benefit they are talking about taking away will not go away because they are all legitimate business expenses, and they will all be expensed. Why did the Congress back in 1906 give this advantage to our oil companies? Why did they do that? Because drilling for oil is a capital-intensive business, and if we want more oil found, what we have to do is be able to generate the internal rate of return to put that capital in. So we offered accelerated writeoffs for expenses. It is interesting that we are not going after all the oil companies or all the gas exploration; we are only going after the big five. Why is that? Because my colleagues know that if we did the same thing to the ones that are actually producing most of the gas in this country, all the new technology which the R&D tax credit and the intangible drilling costs allowed to be developed--that makes this country with 100 years' worth of natural gas--would go away, and the smaller and medium-sized oil companies will never be able to have the capital to continue to perform and raise our level of energy resources ourselves. So what we are on the floor for is a charade. The price of oil is high because the dollar is weak. If we want to punish somebody for that, punish the Congress, punish the Federal Reserve, punish the executive branch, but don't go after somebody who is going to create 90,000 new jobs in our country this next year. We always look for the right political moment to make somebody look bad. The people who look bad are in the Congress because we don't have the guts to stand and say we need a cogent energy policy that says we are going to go after our own resources. We are going to use every asset we have to utilize cleanly and in a friendly way the tremendous reserves we have in this country. We know we have 160 billion barrels of recoverable oil in this country. They are not proven, but that is what the estimate is. We are the third largest oil producer in the world. We could become the second largest oil producer in the world if we had a cogent government policy and an environmental policy. We have oil out the kazoos. We are going to find more oil as we explore for more natural gas. Right now, we are only importing 47 percent--47 percent--of our oil needs. It was 65 percent less than 10 years ago. Why is that? A part of it is smaller demand because we have been in a recession, but the vast majority of it is the very technology they want to deny the fast writeoff for is what has created gas liquids that have filled the void. It is better than the best crude oil in the world. That is coming out of North Dakota, it is coming out of West Virginia, it is coming out of Oklahoma and Texas. It is great stuff, easy to refine, cheap gasoline in terms of the cost to get it from a product to a product we can use. I am pretty well disgusted with what I am hearing on both sides of the aisle because the real problem is not the price of oil. The real problem is the price of the dollar, and if we will fix that, we will fix tons of things that will help our economy. But we are recalcitrant to the point we will not do the things we need to do. Our government is twice the size it was 11 years ago--two times the size. No wonder we are running a $1.6 trillion deficit. No wonder we don't have an effective--we have the largest number of regulations to ever come out of any administration in the history of the country in the first 2 years of this administration. It is killing job formation. It is causing people not to invest. It is causing a lack of economic growth in our country because we have people making decisions who have no idea what they are doing or what are the ramifications of those decisions. They are lawyers whose first creed is don't do what is best for the country, do what is safe for the bureaucracy. That is how we are running this government today. We have 45 percent more regulations issued in the first 2 years of the Obama administration than anybody else has ever done, and we wonder why we are not getting job creation. We continue to refuse to debate on the Senate floor the very real issues in front of this country, the very real issues such as what part of government can we do without? How do we get a future for our children? The fact is, we have lived the last 30 years off the next 30 years of our kids, and that bill is due. It is not due 1 year from now; it is due now. We are tied up in knots because we have this false indication that a debt limit means something. If a debt limit meant something, we wouldn't be raising the debt limit, we would quit borrowing. But, instead, every time we come up to the debt limit, we are asked to raise the debt limit. We will not make the hard choices of what part of government is not valuable in light of the fact that we are cutting the legs off from under our children and our grandchildren. In this debate, we are going to hear a lot of finger-pointing about what is bad with Big Oil, what is bad with oil, what is bad with the price of gas. What is bad is, Congress isn't doing its job. We are not addressing real issues and solving the real problems in front of this country. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the Republican speakers include myself and Senator Blunt and the order for Senators McCain and Chambliss be vitiated.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 309 on S. 493 (text of the amendment can be found in the section denoted ``Text of Amendments'').

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. COBURN. I thank the Senator for his cosponsorship and support on this amendment. I haven't had a chance to share this with the Senator-- because I just received it--but I have a breakdown from the IRS of the 22 States that don't have any millionaires because they screen for it. Actually, it is not millionaires, it is those earning more than $1 million a year. In other words, these are people who actually have incomes of greater than $1 million a year in terms of adjusted gross income. There are probably many more who have less than that, but we are saying here is a cutoff. It is a legitimate cutoff. So there are 22 States that don't allow this right now in their process. I was wrong in my statement on the $600,000 or $800,000. The calculation of the cost of putting this in is $200,000 a year. So for a very minimal cost, we will save $20 million a year, at minimum. We are also going to create a system that will do what it is designed to do-- not to help those who are already very comfortable but to help those struggling to make ends meet and find themselves out of a job. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the report of unemployment compensation and adjusted gross income of $1 million or more.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, we are going to have a series of stacked votes at 4 o'clock. I want to spend a few minutes on three or four amendments and clarify some of the things I have heard rumbling. One is that we have an amendment that will, in fact, take away unemployment insurance for millionaires. Mr. President, 2,840 households who reported an income of greater than $1 million or more on tax returns were paid $18.6 million in unemployment insurance benefits in 2008. That number is higher in 2009. We don't have the final numbers yet. This included over 800 earning over $2 million and 17 with excess income of $10 million collecting unemployment benefits. We have an amendment that will prohibit that. There has been some concern to say that the costs associated with that, the way it was scored by CBO, would neutralize it; the savings versus the cost to eliminate that would be even. Even if that is true--and we have done a calculation, and we think it costs about $900,000 a year to have people applying for unemployment sign a statement that their income is not above $1 million. But even if it costs the same as what we are spending, we should not be giving unemployment benefits to people who are earning $1 million a year. It is foolish, and it exacerbates the tendency of enriching those who are already there versus what unemployment insurance is for--so those who are truly dependent on it can survive. I wanted to clarify that point. Regarding the second amendment, in March the GAO, in response to an amendment I put on the last debt limit, issued a report listing what they think are billions of dollars in savings in terms of duplication. I would be remiss to not say that our President embraced that. In his State of the Union speech, one of the goals of his administration is to eliminate duplication and consolidate. So we have two amendments that are going to be on the Senate floor. One is mine and one is the amendment of the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Inouye. They are both designed to save us $5 billion, but there are two big differences between those amendments. My amendment tells OMB to have the study, find the $5 billion, report to us what they can do themselves and what they need us to do to help them. Senator Inouye's amendment waits 6 months from the time we pass the bill--5 months for the study to come back, and then for us to do it, which means we won't have any savings at all until we are well into fiscal year 2013. Every year we waste $5 billion on something we shouldn't is a year we are borrowing $2 billion of it just to pay the bill. So I understand it is a cover vote, but what it means is we will never get the $5 billion in savings, whereas my amendment will get us $5 billion worth of savings this year. The way we get rid of a $1.6 trillion deficit is $1 billion or $2 billion or $5 billion at a time. Everybody recognizes the duplication. What we are asking the administration to do is take the very low-hanging fruit they can recognize right now, do the rescission, recommend to us, and then we act on it, rather than waiting 2\1/2\ years to get that done. So it is very straightforward. We know there is significant duplication in the Federal Government. Let me just give some of the findings of the GAO report. Remember, this isn't Tom Coburn's report; this is a GAO report, and they only looked at one-third of the Federal Government--the first third. They have two more reports to come to us, with the second and third, and then yearly. We will get this report yearly on the problems of duplication in the Federal Government. We have 47 job-training programs across 9 different agencies that we spend $18 billion on, and not one of them has a metric on it to see if it is effective. We are doing a study now in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on what were the reports of the people who have been through this as to where it is helpful and where it is not because in our legislation, where we pass these job-training programs, we didn't ask for metrics to see if they were effective. So this is an area where we can consolidate one or two. Only three of those have charges that are totally separate from the others. The rest of them overlap one another. There are five departments, eight agencies, and over two dozen Presidential nominees overseeing bioterrorism. We know we can consolidate that. We will actually be much better when we do in terms of our efficiency and communication between agencies. That is $6.48 billion a year. We have 20 agencies, 56 programs dedicated to financial literacy, and we don't even know what they cost. The GAO couldn't determine what they cost. So 56 different programs on financial literacy, and we are teaching people? We have a $1.6 trillion deficit, and we are teaching Americans financial literacy? If we should teach them that, which is not a bad goal, why do we need 56 programs to do that? We have 80 economic development programs across 4 different agencies. We are spending $6.5 billion. Just consolidating administrative costs across those agencies could save $100 million, $200 million, $300 million. We have 15 agencies for more than 30 food-related laws. Even the President mentioned salmon. If they are in saltwater, they have one agency; if they are in fresh water, they have another agency. That is foolish. Why duplicate the work of one agency with another? We have 18 nutrition programs--they are very important to our kids and those who are dependent on them--at $62.5 billion. Do we need 18 programs to do that? Could we do it with 10, 8, 2, 3? The questions haven't been asked, but let's ask the OMB to look at the low-hanging fruit and to take the $5 billion out and work with Congress to get it done in the next appropriations cycle. There are 20 homeless programs across 7 agencies at $2.9 billion; 82 teacher quality programs, 16 agencies and $4 billion. Why would we have 82 teacher training programs? It just shows the magnitude of the problem that we have in terms of getting our budget under control, not managing effectively, and not doing the oversight we should. We have 52 programs for entrepreneurial efforts. I don't have any problem with that, but why do we need 52? We have 35 programs to oversee infrastructure. Overseeing infrastructure is important, but why do we need that many programs? There are 28 programs to oversee new markets--28 different programs funded by the Federal Government across 6 different agencies to oversee new markets. We could consolidate a lot of that. So the President has said he wants to do this. We ought to give him the tools that will help him do it more quickly because every day we wait it costs us more money. Finally, we will have a vote ultimately on the ethanol blenders' credit. I have been remiss not to give the No. 1 leader on that--who has a bill of her own--Senator Feinstein, credit because she has led on this for a long time. Her bill is slightly different than the one we are going to offer, but she has led on that issue. She understands the importance of the environmental impact of burning ethanol, when we are actually burning more fuel and putting out more CO2 than we would with pure gasoline because of the inefficiency of ethanol. So I wanted to recognize her, and when we come to the vote on the blenders' credit I will ask her to speak on that, if she would. Finally, I would say in regards to that issue, for people who don't understand, we are going to spend $5 billion this year paying the major oil companies 45 cents a gallon to blend ethanol into gasoline. There is a Federal law that requires a mandate. It is called the renewable fuels mandate. Last year it was 12.5 billion gallons; this year it is 13.2. It is over 22 billion gallons 5 years from now that have to be blended. We have a letter from the people who receive this tax credit--who are going to receive this $5 billion--who say they do not want the $5 billion; they do not need the $5 billion. Yet we are going to have some resistance around here of not stopping a payment to those who receive it, and who don't want it, for something that is already mandated by law. They have put it in a letter saying they do not want it. It is already in the record. Now, why would we continue to spend $5 billion of our kids' money on something they do not want, that isn't going to change the outcome, and that we will have to borrow 40 percent of to make the payment? It is beyond me that we would do that, and so it is my hope we will be successful in overturning that. With that, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, this is a straightforward amendment that eliminates individuals who have adjusted gross incomes of greater than $1 million per year from receiving unemployment benefits. Last year, we had 2,383 people who received unemployment benefits and also had an income tax return that had adjusted gross incomes above $1 million. We had 40 that had adjusted gross incomes above $10 million per year. It is a very straightforward amendment. I hope we would support it.

Mr. COBURN. I was looking for Senator Warner in the Chamber.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I want to speak on two or three topics, the first of which is the statutory debt limit. We heard the Treasury Secretary today say that essentially early, late July would be the last time at which we could manipulate things to not surpass our debt limit. I wanted to ask the rhetorical question: What does the statutory debt limit mean? What it means is we put into law a limitation on ourselves on the amount of money we can borrow. President Bush--I believe my facts are correct--asked for the debt limit to be extended seven times. This will be the second under President Obama's leadership. It has been extended multitudes of times prior to that. As a physician I am querying myself to ask the question: Why do we put a limit on our debt when every time it comes up, we raise the limit again? The answer to that question is the limit does not mean anything because we continue to disregard the difficulty we are in. If a debt limit meant something, we would make changes and take actions to limit the amount of money we are spending so we would not break the debt limit or have to raise the debt limit. As a physician, when I think about the debt limit, the debt limit is a symptom of simply another problem. That other problem is that we in Congress--this Congress, the Congress before this, and the 10, 20 Congresses before that--have not taken seriously the idea that this country has to live within its means. In fact, we are not living within our means. We were not living within our means before the housing crisis of 2008. We were not living within our means except one short period of time when we had a true net surplus of about $36 billion, thanks to the tech bubble and the fact that in 1995, the 104th Congress did a rescission package of a significant amount, under $30 billion, but the accumulated benefit of that allowed us to run those surpluses. The question before our country today is: Is the Congress going to pass another debt limit? Are we going to raise the debt limit again and not do what every other family, every other business, and every other organization in this country has to do and, in fact, the rest of the world? And that is, they do not have the liberty of spending money they do not have on things they do not absolutely need. I believe the question the American people ought to be asking of Congress and this President is: How dare you even consider raising the debt limit until you have done a thorough job of finding out whether the programs--the multitudes, hundreds of thousands of programs--we have actually function efficiently, actually do their intended purpose and, in fact, are a legitimate role for the Federal Government to be doing in the first place? We are always going to have the partisan debate on whether taxes are not high enough or spending is not low enough. But all of those belie the real problem, which is this country cannot continue to live beyond its means. In point of fact that this Congress does not want to do that, we have a small business bill on the floor about which we are all tied up in knots because we do not want to make votes that actually will cut $20 billion worth of spending this year. We do not want to have those votes. We have had all these shenanigans to try to keep from coming to the floor amendments that actually do something. The American people ought to look at us and say: What is going on? Do you not get it? Do you not understand that the country as a whole is now experiencing what a large number of our families did over the last 2 years, that the amount coming in is less than the amount going out and adjustments in how we spend and what we spend have to be made? We have an ethanol amendment that I understand is controversial. The fact is, it will be voted on after cloture is filed on this bill. But it is an amendment that will save a true $4.9 billion this year alone. The money for that tax credit that goes to the international and national oil companies in this country to blend ethanol with fuel--they sent a letter and said they do not want the money. How does one justify voting to send money, $4.9 billion, to ExxonMobil and Chevron and ConocoPhillips and all the rest of the big ones that are going to show tremendous profits with oil prices where they are today? When they say they do not want it, how does one justify continuing to send money to them? How does one vote against not sending that money back to the Treasury, not borrowing the money from the Chinese to pay the large oil companies to blend ethanol? It is not a justification. The reason we are not having a vote is because they know it will be adopted. That amendment will be adopted. That is why we are not having a vote. America ought to look at the Senate and say: You are not having a vote on something that will save America almost $5 billion this year, before the end of this year that the people who are getting that money do not want and have written to the Congress and said, We do not want the money, and yet we are not going to be allowed to take that amendment up in regular order and not be able to have a vote on it because a small special interest group does not want that to happen? Talk about dysfunctional. Talk about having our heads in the sand. Talk about not addressing the real problem with the debt limit when we cannot even do something that simple, of saving the American people $5 billion on one amendment and we will not do it? Some real change has to happen, and not enough change has happened yet. The Government Accountability Office issued a report a month ago outlining massive duplication throughout our government, the first third of it with massive amounts of duplication. The question on the other side is: Are these legitimate roles for the Federal Government? We are not even going to debate that issue. The fact is, they showed massive amounts of duplication in large areas across the government in which we have multiple programs to do the exact same thing. We have an amendment that will save $5 billion this year if we will vote on the amendment and say, Let's cut $5 billion out of at least $50 billion to $100 billion we know is there, and let's do it this year, and let's have the administration mandate they have to do it. That is another $5 billion. In two amendments, we would have covered everything we would have cut with the CRs. They are common sense. They match what the American people want us to do. If we had true world bankers, they would be telling us to do it as well. And yet we have not been able to achieve a vote on that amendment. Then we have the fact that we have unemployed millionaires to the tune of taking, I believe the number is, $20 million in unemployment checks--people earning $1 million a year taking $20 million from the taxpayers of this country for unemployment. We should not let that go on one second longer. Unemployment is for people who desperately need it. It is not for those who do not. What we have also found is the tremendous cost, as we researched the data on the unemployment for millionaires, that we are spending almost $5 billion a year to manage the unemployment program in this country at the Federal level, when 85 to 90 percent of the work is done at the State level. We did not even offer that amendment to downsize that activity. The suggestion I have for my colleagues is let's go back to the debt extension, the statutory debt limit. I am of a mind--and I think the average American, regardless of what the consequences are and all the fear mongering we hear about, oh, you have to do this, you have to do this--I do not think we should do it until we have followed some of the commonsense prescriptions that the average family does in this country before we extend the debt limit. My knowledge of the functioning of this town says it is doubtful we will ever do that. I call on my colleagues to start thinking about what the real disease is in Washington. The real disease is we do not have the courage to make the very hard choices that are in front of our country today and then live with the results of that in terms of how it is going to impact our political careers. Everybody has a program they want to protect. The message for America today is every program is going to get hit. The Defense Department is going to get hit. Every program is going to get hit. My taxes are going to go up. Sorry, they are going to go up. This country cannot get out of this mess with the behavior we are exhibiting in this body. And if we fail to do what is necessary for our country at this critical time in our juncture, history will deem us absolutely incompetent. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I understand that I have 20 minutes.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 274 on S. 493.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 279 on S. 493.