Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have my letter to Mr. McConnell, dated April 28, 2010, concerning BBG nominations printed in the Record.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, our Nation has been at war for nearly a decade now in Afghanistan and nearly as long in Iraq and we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the men and women who have fought on the front lines as well as to their families who have sacrificed so much. The Senate is considering S. 1963, the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2009. While I will support its passage, I believe this legislation represents a significant failure of Congress to uphold the responsibility entrusted to us by the citizens of this Nation and our obligation to military families and taxpayers. While there will be self-congratulating press releases from Members of Congress and some Veteran Service Organization lauding the bill's passage, I believe the shortcomings of this legislation--discriminating against most veterans and adding billions of dollars to our national debt--represent a failure of leadership and lack of responsibility. I had hoped that the House of Representatives would make some significant improvements to the legislation over the Senate. Sadly, they did not. The legislation that the Senate will consider still unfairly discriminates against severely disabled veterans from wars and combat prior to September 11, 2001. Many of these brave men and women have needed the assistance of caregivers for decades and have done so without help from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Many of these veterans were not the beneficiary of recent advancements in military medical care. The caregivers of these veterans will be left out of this benefits package. There are currently 35,000 veterans receiving aid and attendance benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is approximately the number of veterans in need of caregiver assistance. Out of this population, around 2,000 veterans received their injuries after September 11 and would qualify for extra caregiver assistance in this bill. Caregivers for almost 95 percent of severely disabled veterans from combat would not receive the level of caregiver assistance afforded to those veterans who were injured after September 11, 2001. When I offered an amendment that would provide equivalent caregiver benefits for all severely disabled veterans of all wars, the Senate summarily rejected that idea. Unfortunately the House of Representatives also ignored the danger that our massive debt poses to our Nation and did not eliminate or reduce any current programs in the Federal budget to pay for this legislation. The bill is not paid for by trimming any wasteful, duplicative, obsolete, or lower priority Federal programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will cost $3.6 billion over 5 years, which is slightly less than the version the Senate passed. The Senate also rejected my attempt to pay for this legislation out of the fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer dollars that we send each year to the United Nations. Instead the Congress has decided, as it always does, to pass the debt onto our children and grandchildren, rather than bear the cost and sacrifice today as our veterans have done. I fear that if we do not start paying for new spending then the sacrifice made by our veterans for future generations will have been in vain. At some point, the debt we are incurring today must be paid for and when that day comes, the promises we are making to veterans, caregivers, and others will no longer be affordable because Congress refused to be responsible by being fiscally responsible by trimming lower priority spending. When the Senate first considered this legislation last fall, some of the proponents of the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act attempted to rebut my facts about our growing national debt by saying that the bill does not actually appropriate any money for these programs. In a technical sense, they are correct. I suspect that these same proponents will issue statements celebrating its passage, which will disappoint any caregiver of a disabled veteran expecting the promised assistance soon. No caregiver will be helped unless the appropriations committee allocates the funding for this new program authorized in this bill. Until then, this bill is an empty promise to veterans and benefits no one except perhaps the career politicians who will claim credit for doing something to help veterans without really having to make any difficult choices. We owe an enormous sacrifice to our veterans who fought and died in our defense. This debt, which was incurred on a battlefield far from home, should be borne by this generation so that we ensure that the future they fought to secure for our children and grandchildren is not threatened by our own fiscal irresponsibility and shortsightedness. Congress has once again failed taxpayers, veterans, and their families today.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. That is my amendment as well. Thank you. Yesterday we defeated, by a vote of 51 to 46, actually smart financial management that would have paid for all the costs for the next 60 days for the unemployment insurance. What we were doing was utilizing money that we are already paying interest on that is sitting, not being used, by taking a portion of that to pay for this so that we don't go and borrow another $18.2 billion. The wisdom of the Senate said, no, we don't want to do that. We are going to have today two other opportunities on a way to finance that. This amendment basically takes the agreed-to tax loophole, which we agreed to before we left for the spring work period, and adds to that half as much of the financial management money that I recommended we do yesterday and the amendment was defeated. So we have about $9.5 billion worth of tax loophole closures that we have already agreed to in this amendment and $20 billion, which will save $10 billion in terms of the way CBO scores it--it is ridiculous the way they score it, but in terms of the way they score it, we have to move $20 billion so we can save $10 billion. The point is that we get an option: we can borrow another $18.2 billion to pay for this or we can take money we are already utilizing very inefficiently and pay for it. We are going to choose not to do it again, and we will probably get another 46 or 47 votes. But we are going to choose to transfer the cost of helping people today to our grandchildren because in my lifetime we are not going to pay back any of this money. We are going to be borrowing and paying interest on this $18.2 billion over the next 30 years. So the cost really isn't $18.2 billion; it is $18.2 billion times 6 percent, times 106, times 106, times 106. It will end up costing our kids $60 billion or $70 billion because we are going to refuse to pay for something we ought to be doing. What we are also not going to do is make tough choices about priorities, as every family in this country has to do. We are going to refuse to do that. We are going to say we are going to keep the bad habit, the thing that got us $12.85 trillion in debt, the thing that got us $75 trillion in unfunded liabilities. We are going to continue that process. We are going to continue that process until such time that we can no longer borrow the money. That is what it seems like to me. In other words, only until we cannot go to the world markets and finance debt against our children's future are we not going to change the habits in the Senate or in the Congress. Of every dollar we spend this year, 43 cents will be borrowed. What are the long-term consequences of that? Very plainly speaking, it is a lower standard of living for those who follow us, a marked decrease in opportunity, a loss of freedom, an inhibition in entrepreneurial spirit, and truly an unwinding of what was the gift that was given to us, which was this great opportunity and this great freedom. We don't often make the connection between freedom and debt as a government, but we do personally because when we are highly in debt as individuals, our choices start to get limited. If you are in a business that has a high degree of debt, your choices are limited by those who loan you the money because they start getting involved in your decisionmaking process. If you really look at our foreign policy today, that is happening to us with what we are trying to do in terms of sanctions on Iran. What are the two nations that own the most of our debt and are also least likely to agree with us on harsh sanctions for Iran? They are China and Russia. They are the No. 1 and No. 2 holders of our bonds. So we are giving up tremendous flexibility and freedom. I put forward that if we cannot find $18.2 billion in our Federal Government as we run it today, which will spend over $4 trillion this year, none of us need to be here. We need a whole new 100 Senators if we cannot find $18.2 billion. But the institutional stodginess of always doing it the same old way is inhibiting us from creating a bright future for our children. I won't detail the exact tax loophole closures we have, but we have agreed they can be utilized for this purpose--Senator Baucus, Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, and myself--and they come to a total of $9.756 billion. To properly manage our money instead of having money sitting that has been appropriated but not obligated--and there is almost $900 billion sitting out there this year in the agency that is not utilized--to not utilize that money is foolhardy. My hope is that my colleagues will consider at some point in the future that we have to start making harder choices. I understand the bias against it. It eliminates somebody's control of power. But where should the power be in this country? Should it be in the Senate or should it be in the American people? Do the American people want us to pay for this? Absolutely. Five to one think anything we are doing new we ought to be paying for. Yet it is going to skid through here today, and we are going to add another $18.2 billion over the next 60 days that we do not have to, but we are going to choose specifically to do so. I wish to leave with one last point on this amendment. When we say there is nothing else that we can eliminate in the Federal Government to pay for this legislation, what we are saying is all the waste, all the fraud, all the duplication is more important than helping people with unemployment insurance. If it was less important, we would eliminate it and pay for the unemployment. But by not paying for it, by not making the choice to pay for it, what we have said is we have elevated everything else above this as a priority. We refuse to do what every other business, what every other family, what every other organization, except the Federal Government, has to do; that is, make tough choices. In my State of Oklahoma, the legislature and the Governor right now are making tough choices. They are going to cut several hundred million dollars from our budget. I promise you, they are going to look at what is least important so they can continue to fund what is most important. We will have none of it. We have demonstrated none of it. We lack the character and courage to do what is best for the future. Amendment No. 3727 Now let me talk about amendment No. 3727, which is, again, another opportunity, another way to pay for this good thing we want to do. It also has two components. The first component utilizes the agreed-to closure of tax loopholes of $9.7 billion. But then it gives us a real chance to do some real good things to eliminate spending that is low priority. There are 14 spending provisions that I propose eliminating in this amendment. Many have been endorsed by President Obama and President Bush and, before him, President Clinton. In the past 3 months, the President has endorsed five of these offsets, the House passed four of them, and the Senate passed one identical to one section in section 203. What is the first one? According to the Government Accountability Office, we paid out $1.1 billion to dead farmers. That is over the last 7-year period. Forty percent of those payments were people who had been dead more than 3 years. Most people in America would say: Maybe you ought to eliminate that. Maybe farmers who have been dead for more than 3 years should not continue to get payments from the government. It will save us $1.1 billion over 10 years if we hold the Department of Agriculture accountable to not continue to make payments to people who are not deserving of them. We recently passed a Feingold amendment to the FAA bill that rescinds any DOT earmarks that remain 90 percent or more unobligated after 9 years of being appropriated, with the possibility of holding funds one more year for earmarks the agency head believes will be funded within the following 12 months. The only difference between what we passed and this amendment is that this section applies to all agencies, not just the Department of Transportation. The Secretary of the Department of Transportation endorsed the Feingold amendment. If it works for the Department of Transportation, why would we not do that everywhere on earmarks? It is $500 million in savings immediately. We cannot quantify through the CBO what it will be in the future, but it will probably be at least that every year. Another section is the President's request to eliminate a duplicative bus grant program. This would repeal the Inner-City Bus Security Grant Program. President Obama recommended this $12 million program be eliminated because the grant awards are not based on risk and it is duplicative of the Public Rail Transit Security Grant Program that is already out there and much less important than any other homeland security priorities. It saves us $120 million. In other words, the President does not want it, the Department of Transportation does not want it, but somebody who is getting that grant somewhere is going to say: No, we cannot do that, even though there is a duplicative program already in place to take care of it. Section 235 of this amendment would repeal the Resource Conservation Development Program. President Obama recommended this $51 million program be eliminated because it has outlived its need for Federal support. It was first begun in 1962 as a temporary program. It was intended to build community leadership skills through the establishment of RC&D councils that would access Federal, State, and local funding sources. These councils are now up and running--secure funding with continued operation without any money coming from RC&D. It saves $510 million. Why would we continue to spend the money? The President, the leader of our country, agrees with it. It has been voted on several times. But it will be voted against today because somebody somewhere is still sucking off this in a way that is not efficient and is not a priority for the country. Section 236 would repeal the Brownfields Economic Development Initiative. President Obama recommended this program be eliminated because it is duplicative of a larger, more efficient Federal program, and local governments have access to many other public and private funds that address the same purposes. This was designed to assist cities with redevelopment of abandoned, idle, and underused industrial and commercial facilities where expansion and redevelopment is burdened by real potential environmental contamination. They eliminated almost all of those, and we have a better program now taking care of it, which goes back to the habits of Congress. We create new programs to address the need of what some may think the present program is not doing rather than change the present program. Here the administration, as well as the Bush administration, agreed we should eliminate that program. That is $180 million over 10 years. Section 237: This provision would repeal water and wastewater treatment projects administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. President Obama recommended eliminating these projects. They are duplicative, and they are outside the scope of the Corps of Engineers. That is what private civil engineering firms do. They plan, build, and organize these events. The Corps of Engineers has stated they do not have the expertise to do these projects, which the Environmental Protection Agency normally funds through other grants in the Revolving Fund Loan Program. Since these programs were first funded in 1992, they have been exclusively funded through earmarks. In other words, somebody put something special in for one city or one place through an earmark. It may not be the highest priority for the country. It may very well just be a priority for the State, but it has been exclusively funded through earmarks, special interests, lobby-generated earmarks. It saves $1.29 billion over 10 years. Section 238: This provision would repeal the Rail Line Relocation Program. President Obama has twice recommended eliminating this program because it is not merit based--in other words, if you are well connected, you get it, but if you have a real need and somebody else has a lower need, you are not going to get it--and it duplicates other Federal programs that are larger and that are merit based. The grant program is primarily earmarked, again; 75 percent of it gets earmarked every year. What happens is the administrators of the grants do not get the grants based on need and merit because a Senator has already said it will go here instead of into a pool of the greatest need. Again, duplicating an existing program that is more efficient, that is based on merit. It is a slush pot of money for earmarks. We will hear lots of complaints about eliminating that program, even though the administration wants to get rid of it as well. Savings: $340 million. Section 239: Enacting rescissions offered and passed by the House leadership. This would rescind $112 million from a Commerce Department program designed to provide coupons to households to help people buy analog-to-digital converter boxes. This has been used. The program is not going anywhere because everybody has converted. Why should we continue to put money out to a program that nobody is going to utilize? That money was used for an offset for a summer job youth program already this year but did not come here. Estimated savings: $115 million. Section 241: Enacting the USDA nutrition rescissions amendments offered and passed by the House leadership. This would rescind almost $362 million of unobligated reserved stimulus funds for the WIC Program. This offset was selected because it was identified by the House appropriators and they unanimously voted to use these funds to offset another program. It is obviously a low priority. It is a reserve fund. It has not been utilized. It is sitting there, and we need to eliminate it rather than borrow the money. There are three or four other sections. There is a next-to-final section on Federal real property disposal. We have 21,000 buildings we own that we do not use, but yet we do not have a clear way to allow government agencies to dispose of property. Last year, on these 21,000 buildings that we cannot get rid of because we have created a block to do so, we spent $8 billion maintaining them, even though we are not using them. We could sell those, we could give them to the States, we could do a lot of things that would immediately save us $8 billion. But if we sold them and we saved $8 billion a year, over the next 10 years that is $80 billion, not counting anything we might get for selling them. We might have some costs associated with razing some of them. According to the Office of Management and Budget, 46,745 buildings that are underutilized with a total value of the ones we should be selling are worth $83 billion. We are going to hear people say: You can't do that; you can't sell those buildings. Why? Why would we borrow money when we could sell buildings we are not using for $83 billion? Almost enough in properties that we do not need and are having to maintain to pay for this entire bill. The estimated savings this year alone from starting this would be $4 billion--just from starting it--that process would save us at least $4 billion this year. Section 244: What we know is, at least 28 Federal programs, totaling over $9 billion, support job training and employment. Eighteen of these programs fall under the Labor Department's jurisdiction, and the agency spends $130 million administering its training and employment programs. We have 18 programs rather than 1. We are spending $130 million just to manage them--this is just inside the Department of Labor--rather than have one job training program with one set of administrators and not duplicating that administrative cost all the way across the board. Savings is probably $100 million to $130 million annually. There is well in excess of $22 billion to $24 billion in this second amendment-- No. 3727. So the question becomes this, if we continue down this road: Fair to our kids, fair to us because the Senate refuses to act responsibly? Oh, I have heard the harsh rhetoric: You don't care about people who are unemployed because you think we ought to pay for it. You know, I think there are two sets of people we ought to be caring for. I think we should be caring for the unemployed, making sure they have sustenance and their needs fulfilled, as long as they qualify. But I think we should care about those who are going to follow us, those who are going to have to pay back this $18.2 billion. Are they not both important, especially when we know we waste, through fraud and duplication, $300 billion a year in the Federal Government? I have just come up with $20 billion of it. We have enough fraud, waste, and duplication in the Federal Government to pay for this the whole rest of the year, to pay for the war supplemental that is getting ready to come, without borrowing another penny against the backs and future opportunities and freedom of our children. I am pretty cynical about whether we are ever going to do that. I think the American people will have to change who is here before we will ever get to the point where we are going to make the hard choices that families have to make. But I think that is a fight worth having to protect our future. I think it is a fight worth having for my grandkids and everybody else's grandkids. I was born in 1948, right after the end of the war, and we had the highest debt ratio we have ever had in this country. But because we had a limited government, what happened was we moved greatly and expanded both growth opportunity, innovation, and wealth through the hard work and great character and spirit of the American people, and we handled that. We can do that again. But we can't do it if we don't have the leadership that is necessary to do it. We have to start sometime to start paying for what we are doing. We have to start making choices. That is a rare occasion in Washington, but it is one I sense the American people are going to start demanding. I have been working at this for 5\1/2\ years, or almost 5\1/2\ years. I have not made much progress other than to make sure the American people are informed of the absolutely atrocious amount of stupidity, waste, and duplication that goes on here. It is time we act. And since the majority controls the outcome, and they will let a few Senators vote for these amendments, we will get a high number of them, but not enough to make a difference. So the question we ought to be asking is, What is so wrong with trying to pay for what we are doing? Well, we have always done it as an emergency. We have always charged it to our kids. Well, we haven't always been $12.8 trillion in debt. We haven't always been to the point that in 2010 we are going to have a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90 percent, which means we are going to have about $20 trillion in debt, and that is going to suppress and depress our economy by 2 percentage points in terms of growth. We have never been here before in terms of the risk to our economy. I see the chairman of the Finance Committee here, and I will close by saying we are going to start doing this. The question is when. The question is, Should we be doing it when we are in control or when the bankers outside of America are in control--the sovereign nations outside who will tell us how we do it and what we can't do, just like what is happening in Greece today. The leadership in Greece is making decisions not because they want to but because they have to. They are not necessarily nice choices for the people of Greece. That can and will happen to us if we don't change. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I appreciate Senator Reid working with us. We are going to try to work through the amendments we have left today and hopefully get this taken care of tonight. Our intent has not been to slow down but to pay for this. I wish to discuss amendment No. 3726, which has already been called up and is pending. I don't believe there is another pending amendment at this time; is that correct?

Mr. COBURN. Go to the vote.

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I am prepared for the vote anytime the chairman of the Finance Committee is ready to proceed.

Mr. COBURN. Here is a fairly painless way--just more efficient management of the money we have--of paying for this needed program without charging it to the children. We don't have to go to the bond market to borrow more. We don't have to incur an additional $900 million a year of debt, a tremendous benefit to those who follow us. The question is, when will we decide to start being responsible? I am going to be offering two other amendments, if this one is not agreed to, that will give specific choices. Wait to hear the howling. In other words, nothing is less important than unemployment insurance. Said the other way, everything is more important. In other words, we can't cut anything to pay for unemployment insurance. Let's talk about that for a minute. Just through competitive bidding, if we had mandatory competitive bidding in the Federal Government--in other words, we will not buy things that are not competitively bid--we would save $62 billion a year. But we have sweetheart deals out the kazoo. We have earmarks that have noncompetitive bidding. We have contracts that the government does without competitive bidding. We could save $62 billion a year by instituting competitive bidding. Here are examples. It was recently reported that the Defense Department rewards no-bid work to small contracts for repairs at military bases costing taxpayers $148 million more than they were competed for. This is in 1 year on repair contracts. That is just on the repair of small items on military bases. We could save $148 million a year. Federal funds were spent by the State of Wisconsin, $47.5 million, on two Spanish-made passenger trains, no competitive bid. The Legal Services Corporation, 37 out of 38 consultant contracts had not been competitively bid. The Department of Interior inspector general issued a report on sole-source contracting within the Department of Interior total savings; $44.5 million, had they used competitive bidding. If we go through all of the agencies, what we come up with is a potential savings of billions and billions of dollars; as a matter of fact, enough to extend this same bill for 7 months, if we use competitive bidding. But that will not be considered important. It is going to be too important to do that so we will borrow the money from our children. Let's look at ourselves. In 2010, the legislative branch received $4.7 billion in discretionary funding, a 6-percent increase over last year. Do we know of any other people who got those kinds of increases who work in small business or private enterprise in a down economy? Last year and this year alone, every day without this bill we are adding $4.3 billion to our debt a day. Is that an emergency? I think that is the real emergency, that we are absolutely stealing opportunity from our children and grandchildren. When Members of the Senate or the House don't utilize all their funds--and I average turning back about $600,000 a year--that money does not go back to the Treasury. It is consumed in other areas of the legislative branch. There is a disincentive for Members to be efficient with the dollars they are allotted as they represent their individual States. We ought to change that. There ought to be an incentive to be efficient. We ought to change it to where whatever we turn back goes to retire the debt, not goes back to spend on something that is not a priority. If you look at the Department of Agriculture, for which one of my amendments will have some recommended eliminations, there are hundreds of millions of dollars that are wasted every year. But when we offer an amendment that is going to have a program that both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have recommended be removed, we are going to have people say: Oh, no, you can't do that because maybe 1,000 people or 1,500 people want that gravy train, when we have 10 million people unemployed. So we are going to keep the gravy train for the small numbers and borrow the money from our children and grandchildren to take care of unemployment benefits. In 2009, the Department of Agriculture made errors in payments and overpaid by $4.2 billion in that year alone. Think about that. That is just the Department of Agriculture. Should we not eliminate that to pay for unemployment insurance or should we borrow from our children? Which is it we should do? Should we make the hard choice and force the Department of Agriculture to clean up its act or should we borrow the money from our kids? It is a lot easier to just borrow it from our kids. Then we do not have to work. Oh, by the way, we do not get any of the complaints from the administration that: You are making our job too hard--let alone the fact that they are not efficient and oftentimes not effective. In 2008, the Agriculture Department had 7,000 different employees attend conferences around this country. There was $22 million of expenditures in 2005 alone. The USDA is ranked among the four worst Federal agencies in paying its travel credit bills on time. As a matter of fact, they get charged interest because they cannot even pay their bills on time. Ten percent of their travel cards are in delinquent status. They have embezzlement cases on their credit cards. But have we done the work to clean that up? No. Have we gone after the $4.5 billion in overpayments? No. Mr. President, $4.5 billion a year for 10 years is $45 billion. Just cleaning up one aspect of improper payments at only the Department of Agriculture will pay for this bill for 4 months. But we will not do the hard work. We do the easy work. And the easy work is to put the credit card into the machine and not think about how that is going to steal opportunity and potential from those who follow us. The Department of Defense--everybody says: Well, you can't go after the Department of Defense. My question is, Why not? It is the only Federal Government agency that cannot even come close to an audit anywhere. We cannot even audit their books they are in such a mess. But what we do know is we can save at least $36.5 billion from the Department of Defense by putting in competitive bidding, by making cogent management changes that every small business in this country runs on in the practices that are there. But it has not been changed. We have not insisted it be changed. We have not limited funding in areas that are noncritical to our troops to force the Department of Defense to come up and save this $36.5 billion. Mr. President, 10 to 15 percent of everything that is spent in the Pentagon is wasted. Why wouldn't we go after that? Because somebody will accuse us of not supporting our troops? Well, what are our troops fighting for? They are fighting for the future of their kids and our country. Yet we refuse to look where the payments can be made in a way that is more efficient in the elimination of waste and fraud, with the institution of competitive bidding so we are not borrowing $18.2 billion against our kids and grandkids. Why do we refuse to do that? Is it too hard? Do we love our jobs so much that we love our jobs more than our children and our grandchildren? I do not think that is the case. I think the case is that we are focusing on the wrong emergency. The emergency in front of us is that in 2020 we are going to have a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90 to 100 percent. Every economist in the world will agree that will suppress our potential growth by at least 2 percent a year. So we will go in a downward spiral. When you have that kind of a debt-to-GDP ratio, what happens is the debt service--the money that pays the interest--is not available to invest in capital and equipment to grow jobs, to improve efficiencies, to expand our Nation's economic base. We are adding to that problem by being irresponsible in terms of paying for an $18.2 billion program. Over the past 4 years, I have identified in the Federal Government waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication in excess of $350 billion a year. When I bring those amendments to the floor, they get voted down--not because they disagree with them but because we do not have the political will to make the hard choices. The Congress, in a historic move, passed the health care bill that is going to continue to allow $150 billion of fraud a year to come out of Medicare and Medicaid. We did not do anything to fix it. There are no significant changes in the health care bill that will address a source of $150 billion in losses. Why? Because it is too hard? Kids are not important? We are at a turning point in our country like we have never been before. We have never been walking into a financial situation that will totally limit our ability to get out of a situation. We can come out of this recession. But if we do not change the trajectory of the way we spend money and put the government back within the limited role the Constitution says it is to have, then the future will not only be economically not bright but not bright from a standpoint of liberty. I have told my colleagues--and we are going to have this on every bill that comes before the Senate--it does not matter if it is a supplemental spending bill for the war, we ought to be paying for it. Rather than borrowing it from our kids, we ought to be paying for it. We ought to be making the hard choices about what is not as important as supporting our troops rather than charging the extra funding to our grandkids. So we are going to go through at least three cycles of votes on every bill that comes to the floor that is not paid for, that will add to the debt. I am not going to serve my last year in the Senate and say I did not do everything I could to try to put us back on track. So when we vote that this is an emergency and we do not have to pay for it, we are not hurting us. You are not hurting Tom Coburn. You are hurting the generations that follow us. It would be different if we had an efficient, effective, well-run Federal Government that was within the bounds of what the Constitution said we were supposed to be doing. But we are not anywhere close to that. There is so much fraud, so much waste, so many well-connected goodies going to the well-endowed and well-heeled in this country because they have a connection politically, and we need to clean it out. Everything ought to be competitively bid. There is no reason for it not to be competitively bid. To pass up that $65 billion a year because we do not do it--there is another thing we do. We spend $8 billion a year maintaining properties the Federal Government does not want. Think about that. For 3 years, I have tried to get through real property reform and cannot get it through. We either need to tear these structures down so we quit spending money on them or sell them, but we should not continue to spend $8 billion a year on buildings and properties we do not need. We have not done a thing to solve that problem in the last 3 years. I have a book full of further examples. Just think about this: We want people to go into math, engineering, science, and technology. Everybody agrees with that. We know if we can get our younger students going into those areas, that is where they are going to have their greatest benefits of having a wonderful living in utilizing those skills. The Federal Government has 105 different programs through six different agencies to incentivize math, engineering, science, and technology. The administrative cost for 105 different programs is ridiculous, and not 1 of them has a metric on it of whether it is working. So every time somebody raises the issue, some Senator comes and creates another new program, and we pass it, and we never look at what we are doing already. We do not eliminate things that are not effective. We do not put metrics on it to say we are going to look at this every year, and if it is not working we are going to get rid of it or we are going to fix it, and we are not going to create another program. Yet we have 105 different programs. In the month of December, my staff found 640 separate instances just like that where we have duplication of programs across government agencies. In the last debt limit extension, we passed one of my amendments that said the GAO must report to us a governmentwide assessment of all the duplications in all the programs because Congress does not know it. We do not know what is out there. So we see another problem. It does not matter that we may have 105 programs working on it; we go create another one. That is called incompetence. It is also called laziness. Just inside the Department of Education are 230 duplicative programs and $10 billion in waste, fraud, and mismanagement--230. Why? Because we refuse to do the hard work of oversight. So when we vote on this amendment, what we are going to be voting on is whether we have the courage to start making choices. If you vote to defeat this amendment, what you are saying is you lack the courage to do the hard work to pay for something out of waste today and mismanagement of Federal funds and you think the Madelines of this world ought to pay for that lack of integrity and lack of hard work. And there is not another reason for it. We are going to hear why you should not vote for this. We are going to hear why it is going to be hard if we take $18.2 billion out of the management accounts of all these agencies. It is just going to be, out of what is there, about 3 percent of the cash that is sitting idle-- about 3 percent of what will be idle in 2011. What is idle this year, it will be less than 3 percent; it will be about 2.5 percent. Yet we are going to vote it down. We are going to vote it down because we care more about making a political point than doing the hard work of getting our country back on track. We do not have forever to get our country back on track. If we get to 90 to 100 percent of our GDP, the job of making these decisions becomes 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 times more difficult because we will have less growth. We have a precarious economy right now. It is coming out of a recession. We want that growth to boom. We want those jobs to be created. When we borrow more money, we are putting a brake on that. So if we can utilize the money we already have, we get the stimulatory effect of getting people unemployment insurance that buys the necessities of life, but we are not adding to the debt, which depresses the economy. I will close for right now on this amendment. I will ask for the yeas and nays at a time that is agreeable to the majority leader. I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, if anybody has been watching the Senate today, there was a point of order made that the spending we are going to pass to pay for unemployment insurance extension benefits and benefits for health insurance for those people, in terms of buying through their former employers, as well as the sustainable growth rate formula, failed to be overriden. We will have another vote on that because the majority side was missing one Member, and they will eventually win on that. What that says is, we are once again back to the point where we refuse to make the hard choices to pay for things we need to do today by eliminating things that are not as important. The point of order was on the fact that it is an emergency so, therefore, we can say: Time out. But those who voted to override it fail to recognize the other major emergency that is happening in our country. We have $12.8 trillion worth of debt as of today. We are going to add another $1.4 to $1.5 trillion this year, this calendar year; that the increase in the cost of that debt over the last 12 months will require an additional, next year, $125 billion worth of expenditures. There has to come a point in time when we grow to the responsibility that has been given to us; that is, make hard choices. It is very easy to pass an unemployment insurance bill by charging it to our children. The majority leader has graciously agreed to give me an opportunity to offer three different ways to pay for that. I am going to put those out today. One amendment now, which we will vote on, another amendment later, and then a third amendment later. Most of the ideas for cutting spending, quite frankly, have come from my colleagues on the other side, and many of them you have already voted for. So it is going to be an interesting exercise today. The majority leader also spoke to me before lunch saying it did not matter because I was going to lose anyway. That sends a signal. The leadership of our Senate today says: We do not have to pay for things. Prior to leaving here, we agreed on a compromise of tax loophole closures that would have paid for this for a period of 30 days. The bill we voted on back then was for 30 days. We have now before us an identical bill before us for 60 days. It is going to cost $18.2 billion. That is what CBO says. The question I have to ask is, is it morally right for us to steal that money from our children's future or make hard choices about wasteful spending today? The choices are not hard other than in our stubbornness that we don't want to agree. When businesses are taken over, when a larger business buys a smaller business, the first thing they do is become great cash managers of the business. In other words, they make sure the money in the business is always working for the business. So if there is excess cash lying around in accounts, they take that money and reduce whatever outstanding debts they have or forgo borrowing money and use that cash in a more efficacious and serious manner. The first amendment I will offer is asking us to do nothing but the same. At the end of last year, the Federal Government had on its books money it borrowed but had not spent of $676 billion. That is what is sitting in accounts, money we have borrowed that is not being utilized efficiently. At the end of next year, at the end of fiscal 2011, according to the OMB, it will be $614 billion. That is almost half of the debt we will borrow this year. This first amendment simply says: Let the administration utilize its executive prerogatives and instead of us borrowing $18.2 billion from our children and then paying interest on that--and, by the way, the interest on that $18.2 billion that will go on in perpetuity, because we are not retiring any debt, is about $900 million, almost $1 billion a year. Why would we borrow money when we have money sitting there that is not being utilized effectively and pay almost $900 million every year? Why would we borrow again next year an extra billion to pay for the money we are going to borrow to fund this program? Let me give an example of where this money lies. In our own accounts to run the legislature, we have $1.450 billion sitting there. In other words, it has not been promised to do anything. It is sitting there. It was sitting at $1.876 billion at the end of last fiscal year. It is projected to be $1.481 billion next year. We are keeping that money in the bank and not using it. The Department of Agriculture has $20 billion and is estimated in 2011 to have still $12 billion sitting in an account that we are paying interest on that is not being utilized, not obligated for anything at the time, unobligated. What all these figures show when you total them up is that we are sending money so fast to agencies, they can't spend it. In other words, we are throwing money at the agencies far faster than they can spend it, and it would be wise and prudent of us to send less money--still with the same rules, still with the same instruction, to utilize their money better. The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Congressman Obey, has already agreed to do that on the summer jobs program in certain accounts. The idea behind this amendment is to take some of the $1 trillion that is sitting in accounts that is not obligated--in other words, it will not be utilized this year; it won't be utilized for at least 2 years--and utilize that rather than charge our children. I have used Madeline's picture a lot, but I don't think you can overutilize this picture. This little girl was caught on the street outside of Washington protesting. Obviously, her parents put her up to it. At the time she was wearing a sign that says: I am already $38,375 in debt and I only own a dollhouse. At the end of this fiscal year, she will be $45,000 more in debt, and she will still only own a dollhouse. Why would we want to do that? This bill adds $500 for every man, woman, and child in this country. Why wouldn't we want to not charge it to them and utilize what we have in excess now, the inefficient use of the cash balances we have, to pay for something we all agree we want to pay for but the disagreement is over whether we should steal it from our children or actually make hard choices? These are not even hard choices. These are easy choices. We were told, when we came to an agreement prior to the April recess, that the reason this wasn't acceptable in the House is they didn't want to set the precedent of starting to pay for things when we are spending money. I would put forth that the American people are ready for us to start doing that. They are ready for us to start making tough choices. They think we need to make tough choices. Out of every dollar we spend, we are borrowing 43 cents against the future. That is what happened last year. It will actually be probably higher this year. Maybe not. But somewhere about 43 cents out of every dollar the Federal Government spends is borrowed. Is there a time that we should stop and pause and say: Maybe a review is in order of our priorities, looking at the priorities of the Federal Government? I know that builds a lot of resistance in this body. But what I would like somebody to tell me is, when is that time? Is it when the Chinese won't buy our bonds anymore? Do we wait for the firestorm to come where we are at critical mass and then the choices are limited and few? Or do we start making the proper decisions now and live up to the authority and responsibility given to us? There is a saying that the easiest thing in the world is to spend somebody else's money. I also think it is the most addictive thing in the world. We can see that. It doesn't matter whether it is Republicans in charge or Democrats. We have not seen the kind of behavior in Congress that will get our Congress out of the financial problems we face. In terms of an almost $4 trillion budget, $18 billion doesn't seem like a lot, but if you keep doing that every 60 days, in a year you have done over $120 billion that you will add to the debt. Our kids will get to pay it back, but they will get to pay it back on compounded interest. The interesting thing is what the OMB and CBO agree to. Actually, CBO came out with the latest numbers. We are going to borrow $9.8 trillion if we don't change things over the next 9 years, and fully 50 percent of that will be borrowed money to pay interest on the money we have already borrowed. Should we not do what is right for the unemployed but also what is right for the Madelines of this world in terms of protecting their future? I call up amendment No. 3723 and ask for its consideration.

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

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

Mr. COBURN. I send to the desk a modification of the pending amendment.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and my next amendment be called up.

Mr. COBURN. I am only going to take 5 minutes.

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I yield the floor to my colleague from North Dakota.

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for giving me a short time to deal with these two amendments. I have an amendment at the desk that I call up.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 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. COBURN. Mr. President, so what are we going to do? We have before us a need. It is a good need. It is something we ought to do. We are going to borrow 43 cents out of every dollar we spend this year. We are going to put the Madelines of this world in a position that by 2020, this number is not going to be $45,000; it is going to be $95,000. That is where she is going to be. That is every man, woman, and child in terms of what they owe in terms of the direct national debt. Can we continue on this pace? We hear we will fix it later. Later is not good enough for the Madelines of this world. Later is today. Now is the time for us to do the very hard work. It is not easy to come up with spending offsets. It is not easy to not increase the national debt. It is very easy to simply put the credit card into the machine and say: Because they are out of sight, out of mind--the Madelines of the world--we will just charge it to them. That is what is being proposed here. If you oppose that, all of a sudden you do not care about the people who are unemployed. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard that in the last 2 weeks; that it is obstruction that you want to pay for it. Should we be working hard to secure the future of the children such as Madeline? We are told that over the next 9 years, we are going to borrow an additional $9.8 trillion, based on the budget projections that are out there. Of that $9.8 trillion, almost half of it is money we are going to borrow and turn around to pay interest on what we already owe. That is eerily close to those of us who get into trouble with credit cards. We get another credit card, borrow the max on it to pay off the other credit cards. Then we get in trouble with that one and get another one. Pretty soon, we cannot pay anything. The Chinese own over $900 billion of our bonds, the Russians $800 billion. Have we considered the fact that our problems, in terms of our foreign policy with Iran and our ability to put sharp, tough sanctions on somebody who wants to use and develop nuclear weapons could possibly be inhibited by the fact that two of the countries opposing those strong, tough sanctions own a lot of our bonds and that we are dependent on them? Could it also be that the week before last, when the Treasury option was very soft because the Chinese did not participate, that is a warning shot across our bow? We are in waters this country has never seen before. If we pass this bill and we continue to pass more bills, not having made the tough choices, we are steaming toward a catastrophe. What will that look like? It is not that we cannot fix the problem. It is not as if we could not go and find $9.2 billion out of a nearly $4 trillion budget. It is that we refuse to. It is not that it is impossible. We refuse to. We refuse to do the same things families across this country do every day; that is, make a choice about priorities. My office just last week, with the help of the Congressional Research Service and the GAO, identified 70 duplicate programs on nutrition across three Federal Departments. We now have 70 programs for food and nutrition across three departments, with thousands upon thousands of Federal employees, thousands upon thousands of pages of bureaucratic gobbledygook and regulations. I would propose probably we ought to have one good program on food and nutrition. We do not address that. The authorizing committees do not. The appropriating committees do not. We have 105 programs that encourage people to go into math, science, technology, and engineering across six different agencies--105 programs. There is not one agency that does not have considerable waste in it, and there is probably not one American who would not think that we could not cut 1 or 2 or 3 percent from every agency and drive efficiency. But we will not do that. The real question is: Why won't we? We will beat up people because they will not agree to spend Madeline's money and her future, but we will not agree to trim the waste, the fat, duplication, and fraud out of the Federal Government. It is no wonder the public has such a poor image of Congress because we are actually not doing what they are asking us to do. It would be different if there was not waste in the Federal Government. If everything was fine-tuned, effective, and efficient, one could make an argument for borrowing this money. But nobody I know of believes the Federal Government is efficient and effective throughout its myriad departments and agencies. If the majority might feel that way, that it is not, why would we not do the hard work of paying for this bill? What does it mean to borrow $9.2 billion this month and $10 billion last month and $10 billion before and the $120 billion we passed in the first 3 months of the second session of the 111th Congress? What does it mean? It means we do not think we have to play by the same rules as the rest of the American public. We have a tilted sense of reality. There is no obligation on us to eliminate waste to provide a good for those people who are depending on us. We will go forward this evening on a motion to proceed to this bill unpaid for, charged to the Madelines of this world, and all you have to do is take $9.2 billion--it is not much in Washington speak; it is twice the size of Oklahoma's budget for a year--and we will charge it to a credit card to our kids. Ultimately, what we are doing is stealing a college education from our kids. We are stealing a job opportunity from our kids. We are stealing the ability for our kids to own a home and to provide for their children what was provided for them. You see, the heritage we have that built this country was one of sacrifice, where we make decisions that require us to make a sacrifice to create opportunity. When you turn that upside down, the American experiment fails. When we steal opportunity from the future so we can benefit for today, we eliminate the genius that made this country great. It is time we reversed that. It is not really a partisan issue. I know the press is going to say that. It is partisan for our future. It is partisan for our kids. And we can do both. We can find $9.2 billion that isn't as effectively spent as will be spent on COBRA or unemployment insurance or on flood insurance or on fixing the SGR for a short period of time. We can do that, but we won't because we are in the habit of not making hard choices. We are in the habit of doing the least best thing rather than the best thing. The best thing for our budget, the best thing for our future, the best thing for our children's future is for us to say X, Y, and Z are not nearly as important as unemployment insurance benefits, are not as important as COBRA benefits, are not as important as fixing the SGR for a short period of time. When will we muscle up the courage to start making those kinds of decisions? We can't continue doing what we are doing. We can't grow to $20 trillion worth of debt--over 100 percent of our GDP. At the rate we are going, in 2010, we will have $24 trillion worth of debt, and $24 trillion, at 6 percent interest, is $1.5 trillion a year in interest payments. We can't make it. We cannot handle that. And the reality will only come home when it is too late. Senator Reid, when we passed the pay-go bill, said it was a new start. He said we are going to open our billfold, and if the money is there we will spend it but we are not going to spend money that is not in our billfold--to paraphrase his quote. Well, this bill goes to an empty billfold. The money is not there. So we can either increase our debt, which will make life for the Madelines of this world tougher or we can actually take on some tough decisionmaking as a body and actually eliminate lower priority programs. Would that have some impact on some programs? Yes. I mean, we could actually take a 1-percent across-the-board cut and come up with $30 billion easily. Americans know we could get 1 percent out of the Federal agencies. But we are not going to do that either. The question is, When will we start acting in the responsible role with which we are charged? When will we start thinking with a long-term perspective about what is going to happen to our country if, in fact, we don't start making the hard choices now? No matter how much scorn, no matter how many derisive statements are made, the Madelines of the world are worth it. When we sit and relax and think this is not as big a problem as we hear described, we fall into the same trap as every other republic in history. And they all collapsed. No republic has survived more than 250 years, and they all collapsed for the same reason. They all collapsed ultimately because they lost control of their fiscal policy--taxes, spending, priorities. So we have a choice in front of us. This isn't the first time we are going to have this choice, and it won't be the last. But a question that I think the American people ought to be asking is, When is the Congress going to start acting in a responsible manner? When are they going to start following the guidelines every other prudent financial decisionmaker makes, whether it be the head of a household, a wage earner, a small business, or a small nonprofit? They all live within a budget, and what they do is they say: Here is the most important priority and here is the least, and they go down the line. When the money runs out, they either generate efficiency to allow that money to be more effective and more efficient in how it is spent or they eliminate the lower priority items. It would be a wonderful search for people to go on thomas.gov to find out the number of programs that have been eliminated versus the number of programs that have been created in the last 2 years. I guarantee you they will outnumber 200 or 300 to 1. In the Judiciary Committee this week, we will have two bills up that duplicate existing programs. I will have the same fight in the Judiciary Committee, and I will lose. We will extend new programs that are doing the same thing other programs are doing, and yet I will lose the battle and we will create new programs to do the same thing we already have government programs doing. Why is that? Because you cannot manage what you do not measure. We don't put metrics on hardly anything in the Federal Government programs, and conveniently so. Therefore, we can say: Well, we can't know whether they are efficient. The time for our comfort with where we find ourselves financially is over. The American people already understand that because 72 percent of them, in a recent poll, said their No. 1 issue is debt and spending. They already get it. They are wondering when we are going to catch up with them. They are for supporting unemployment insurance benefits but not charging them to their children. They are for us making the hard choices. So as we go forward, the hope would be that we would get out of the short-term thinking we find ourselves in and start looking down the road of what is coming. I have been quoted as saying that I think we have less than 5 years to fix our ship. I think that is probably generous. I don't think there is one problem in front of our country that we can't fix. However, if we ignore the realities of our financial situation, if the elected leaders in this country fail to make priority decisions, which means you are going to offend some of the supporters of the lower priority programs, then we are not going to solve the problems that are in front of us. If our focus is parochial only--in other words, only the concerns within our own States--rather than that of our Nation as a whole, we are not going to fix the problems in front of us. I have five grandchildren, and in thinking of the future, I often wonder what things will be like for them. Thinking backward, when I was 17 and 18 and going to college for the first year, there was this tremendous vision on the horizon that I saw in front of me. I could go to school because I had parents who could afford to pay for my college, and wherever I wanted to go, whatever I wanted to do was out there on that horizon. That is a limited possibility today for our kids. Is it going to be a possibility for the Madelines of the world? Thinking forward, if you take everyone who is 25 years of age and younger in this country and go out 20 years, here is where they will be: That group, 45 and younger, will be responsible for $1,113,000-- each and every one of them will be responsible for $1,113,000 worth of debt and unfunded liabilities, every one of them, if we are on the same course we are on today. Take 6 percent of that, and you will see they are going to have to come up with about $67,000 a year just to pay the interest costs on that debt. That is before they pay income taxes. That is before they pay rent or pay a mortgage. That is before they pay for a car or a car payment. That is before they put food on the table. That is before they clothe their kids and themselves. That is before they give to a charity or their church. We are stealing the American dream every time we fail to be cognizant of what the future holds, if we don't change course. So the debate really isn't about unemployment insurance; it is about when are we going to change course? When are we going to start recognizing the need to live within our means? We are going to hear that we have always done it this way, that we have passed three other short-term extensions and that we call them emergencies so we don't have to pay for them. I would say it is time that we not always do it the way we have always done it because the way we have always done it has gotten us $12.6 trillion in debt and is sending us out to sea without a rudder and without enough fuel oil to get back to shore. My hope is that our debate will focus on what the real problems are in this country, the real long-term problems, because you really solve short-term problems when you start attacking the long-term problems and when you really start making the tough decisions. I say to my colleague from Montana, as head of the Finance Committee, he knows what would happen if we sent a signal that we were really going to start getting tough about our budget. He knows what would happen to bond rates. He knows what would happen to our ability to lead in the world if we all of a sudden became cognizant and acted in a way that was fiscally responsible. Investment would come flowing back into this country, bond yields would go down, not up, and the cost of our debt would go down. It would be a home run every way we look at it. It would be a home run for the Madelines of this country, and it would be a home run for those who are unemployed. If you read the financial news, you have been seeing what is happening to Greece. Greece got rescued just in the last week, partly through the IMF, but mainly the money is going to come from Germany and France. They are going to get to borrow for a short period of time at 5 percent instead of the 7\1/2\ percent the market reflects. I would say that there is no Germany or France to bail us out. There is no one who will come to bail America out. It is highly doubtful that Greece has the political will to do what it has to do to solve its own problem. The question is, In 2 or 3 years, are they going to be saying the same thing about our country? Do we have the political will to dig out of the hole we have, in fact, dug for ourselves? When I say ``we,'' I am not talking about the American public, I am talking about the Congress of the United States. You can't blame it on any President. You can't blame it on the courts. The blame for our financial situation lies solely with the U.S. Congress. Whether it is lack of oversight of financial firms or Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; whether it is the lack of oversight of the SEC; whether it is the tremendous amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Federal Government--$300 billion, at least, per year--it lies with us. We are going to hear a lot of reasons why we should pass this--just pass the charges on to our kids. My hope is that the American people will reject that because when they accept that it is OK to just charge it to our kids, what they are doing is conditioning us to continue doing the same thing--continuing to spend the future opportunities of our children and grandchildren. Our heritage is much greater than that. Our kids and grandkids are worth much more than that. Let it not be said of this Congress that we failed to act in the time when the tough get going and that we made the tough decisions about not increasing the debt, streamlining the government, eliminating some of the $300 billion worth of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication that is in the Federal Government. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, it has been 2 weeks since we last spoke on the floor on this issue. There has been a lot written in the press and a lot of things that have been said. I will reiterate what I said earlier in that debate before we took an inappropriate spring break, and that is the fact that everybody thinks those who are unemployed and are eligible should be getting unemployment checks. That is not a partisan issue. It is a fact we want to support those who need our help right now. The real question, however, is what will we do to make sure that effort is an effort that has some real meaning behind it and that these are not hollow words. The debate around here becomes partisan and labels get applied, and I admit that I am partisan--but not from a party standpoint; I am partisan for our children. The question isn't whether we should make sure that unemployment benefits are there. The question isn't whether people can get health insurance under COBRA. The question isn't whether we ought to do the right thing for those who are depending on us. The question is, where do we get the money? It is simple. We have two options. One option says: Time out; this is so important that it doesn't matter where we get the money; we have to supply it. The other option is--and by the way, the first option belies the fact that we have any waste in the Federal Government. I don't think we can do a poll that would come so close to unanimity as a poll on which we would ask the American people whether the Federal Government is efficient and effective. I doubt that we would get anybody on the ``yes'' ledger side on that. The real question, then, becomes do we have the goodwill and the presence of mind to do this in a way that doesn't jeopardize our children? You see, we are not just fighting about unemployment benefits. We are not debating the issue of unemployment benefits. We are debating the issue of whether we take from those who come after us and give to those today. Many times I have used this poster of this young lady. Her name is Madeline. Madeline was caught in DC wearing this poster. I have gone over the numbers. When she wore the poster, her debt was $38,375. Her debt today, without us extending this bill after last year, is over $45,000. So the question is competing priorities. We have the priority of making sure that we help those who need our help in a time of economic decline. And then we have the priority of making sure we have not mortgaged the opportunity of freedom for children such as Madeline. Who will fight for the Madelines? Who will stand up for our grandchildren and say we can find $9.2 billion out of an almost $4 trillion budget and pay for it and not charge it to the Madelines of this world? That is what we are doing when we declare something an emergency. I would also make the point that we passed a 9-month extension for many of these programs. It was paid for. In other words, we didn't add to the debt when we passed a bill that would extend this for 9 months. The Senate did its work. That bill hasn't come back because the House is unlikely to pass it with the pay-fors in it and, frankly, several were used to pay for the health care bill that passed. Who will protect the Madelines of the world? Since the beginning of this year and the famed passage of a statute called pay-go, which says we will no longer create new spending without cutting the spending somewhere else, we have spent $120 billion of Madeline's future, and every Madeline who is out there--every 3-year-old and 4-year-old who is out there. We have done it by waiving the new statute that says you have to pay as you go. Congress--and the Senate specifically--increased our budget 5.6 percent this year. In a year where true costs were down we increased our own budget. Yet, we refuse to look at the hard choices that are necessary for us to make a future for the Madelines of this world. What happens if we continue this? What happens if we continue to say we will borrow from the future instead of making the tough choices now? I will tell you what happens. Madeline's future--her opportunity for prosperity--is mortgaged. We tend to think in the short run, and the vision our Founders had was thinking in the long term. So where do we find $9.2 billion? If I get an opportunity, I will offer five amendments that will pay for that. I wager that nary a person would ever miss the money. We could find $9.2 billion in the Defense Department. They have at least $50 billion worth of waste. But, no, we won't go there. We have $700 billion in unobligated balances of which well over 20 percent has been sitting there for 2 years. That is $140 billion. We can pay for this for a year, but we won't go there. We have ineffective spending in the stimulus bill that hasn't been rolled out yet that I will put forward as a greater priority than the money intended left in the stimulus bill is for. But we are not going to go there. What we are going to do--and we will pass a motion to proceed today to this bill. But what we are going to do is take the easy, the soft road of not paid for. We cannot continue to do that. Last year--and we will continue this year--out of every dollar the Federal Government spent we borrowed 43 percent. So 43 cents out of every dollar the Federal Government spent last year we borrowed. We ended up with a real deficit of close to $1.6 trillion by the time you get out of the accounting gimmicks that Washington uses. That is what we added to the Madelines of the world. We are going to do that this year again. The February deficit was the highest on record ever for the Federal Government. So we are going to have an excessive $1.4 billion or $1.5 billion or probably a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, and we are going to add another $9.2 billion with this bill. How is it fair? How is it right that in this country we cannot do two right things, we can only do one right and one wrong thing? I posit that stealing money from our kids' future and mortgaging their future is morally wrong. I posit that helping people who need our help on unemployment benefits is morally right. Why can we not do both? We ought to be able to do both. I sent a letter to the minority and majority leaders when the bill first came up. I will read it because I think it is important to understand the thinking on why we should pay for this--realizing that we passed a 9-month extension that was paid for, and because the House hasn't acted, we don't feel an obligation to protect the Madelines of the world. The letter says this: I am writing to notify you that I would like to be consulted on any unanimous consent agreements regarding the consideration of H.R. 4851, the Continuing Extension Act of 2010, which would extend the number of federal programs for one month. No one is arguing that Americans who are currently unemployed should not have their unemployment insurance payments extended. But once again, Congress is refusing to find a way to offset the $9.15 billion cost of the bill with cuts to less important federal spending. Time and time again, Congress intentionally waits until the last minute to consider important legislation and then declares the billions of dollars in foreseeable costs as ``emergency'' spending in order to avoid having to find a way to pay for the bills' price tags. In the last 6 months, Congress has passed four major extension bills. H.R. 4851 would be the fifth such bill. The total cost of these bills is almost $30 billion. Additionally, over the last year Congress has increased funding totaling $64.9 billion for the Highway and Unemployment Insurance Trust Funds without offsets. This shortsightedness sticks taxpayers with billions of dollars in additional debt and treats the unemployed, doctors and Medicare patients, hard working men and women who help make our roads and bridges safe, and others relying on federal funds as pawns in Congress' borrowing and spending game. When the previous last-minute one month extension (H.R. 4692) was brought up days before the funding authority for numerous federal programs, including Unemployment Insurance and the Highway Trust Fund, which expired at the end of February, 2010, a United States Senator was attacked for objecting to passing the bill without any debate or amendments because the bill was unpaid for and added $10 billion to our nation's debt. In other words, there is something wrong with Senator Bunning raising the question of whether we ought to pay for it. As always, those who prefer to borrow to avoid making the tough budget decisions won out, and the taxpayers were stuck with another $10 billion in debt. The Madelines of the world. Congress has continually resisted the need to act like every family in the United States of America and to budget and live within their means. Our debt is now over $12.6 trillion. The 2010 deficit is projected to amount to $1.3 trillion and we are borrowing 43 cents on every dollar; yet, Congress continues to increase spending without any correlating spending cuts. Congress' inability to prioritize and manage national needs results in real consequences for Americans, whether it be furloughs, market uncertainty that leads to lower investment and job losses, or Americans being saddled with higher debt and taxes. If Congress keeps approving temporary extension bills throughout the calendar year without finding offsets, Congress will have added almost $120 billion to our national debt. Additionally, the Senate has already approved more than $120 billion in new federal spending not offset, even though it passed Pay-Go legislation just over one month ago claiming to prohibit such activity. In the House, Appropriations Chairman David Obey has indicated that some new spending needs to be offset with unused, unobligated funds. Chairman Obey suggested rescinding $362 million in reserve stimulus funds for the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program; $112 million from a Commerce Department program designed to provide coupons to households to help buy analog-to-digital converter boxes; $103 million from USDA rural development programs; and $44 million from the Transportation Department's Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Program . . . to offset the cost of a different spending bill. The Senate should likewise find a way to offset this one-month extension bill and create a sustainable precedent. The Senate can start with federal unobligated balances. According to the White House, in Fiscal Year 2011, 33 percent of all federal funds were unused and obligated. The total dollar amount of these unobligated balances was estimated at $703 billion. Rescinding only discretionary funding that has been available for more than two years would likely result in roughly $100 billion in offset spending. The Senate could also tap into $228 billion in unobligated stimulus funds as Chairman Obey has suggested. At the very least, Congress should reconsider transferring the almost $100 million budget increase it approved for itself for 2010 to offset the cost of additional spending. Congress should not be increasing its budget by 4.5 percent when our economy shrunk by 2.4 percent and inflation was at less than 1 percent. I have also detailed through numerous oversight hearings, reports, and legislation how the federal government wastes more than $300 billion every year. I have suggested hundreds of offsets to new spending, including consolidating duplicative programs, and eliminating federal programs that address parochial concerns. We all think our Americans in need of financial assistance are worth the $9 billion bill cost, but do we think our children and grandchildren are worth paying for these costs up front, rather than passing the cost to them?. . . . Thank you for protecting my rights regarding this legislation. I ask unanimous consent to have this letter printed in the Record.

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I would be happy to give the Senator some additional time, and we will roll the time off of your later time, if you would like time now, I say to the Senator.

Mr. COBURN. I thank the Senators from Alabama and Florida for their comments. Many have heard us use the word ``pay-for'' sometimes. When we say that, what we are actually saying is, we don't want the debt increased. So we don't want to get that confused. I also want to make one comment in relation to what Senator Reed from Rhode Island said earlier today. He said nobody on the other side of the aisle will be objecting to the supplemental coming for the military if it is not paid for. I want to state for the record that I voted against it the last two times. It is not because I don't want to support the military, but it wasn't paid for. We didn't make the hard choices. I will vote against it again, and I will try to make that a pay-for. So it is an unfair characterization to say ``nobody.'' I am pretty consistent on that. If we are going to spend new money, we should cut some of the money we are spending now that isn't as important. Under the Constitution, the No. 1 responsibility for us is defending the country. One of the reasons we are in trouble is we have ignored the enumerated powers clause of the Constitution, which sets out a very limited role for the Federal Government and reserves the rest of the programs we are talking about to the States and to the people. With that, Mr. President, I would like to recognize the senior--the Senator from Arizona, Mr. Kyl. I started to say senior, but that is not so.