Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. I yield back all time I might have.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I will reserve as best I can the decibel level until later in the day when I feel more like arguing with the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts, but he will hear it before we are finished, as I will hear his. The Republican package is by far better than anything the President of the United States has offered to the people of this country on Medicare. Let me suggest that maybe before we are finished, we will put the President's Medicare package before the Senate and see how many Senators vote for it. As a matter of fact, it doesn't pay a penny of prescription drugs and doesn't provide for any method or manner of doing it. The 15 percent of the surplus that is put in there is clearly identified as being placed in there to elongate the trust fund. But you can't spend it under the President's plan. You get back IOUs, which means generations to come will have to pay whatever it is that is spent on Medicare over the years. We did better than the President in that he cut $20 billion out of Medicare and we did not during the next decade. When you add that together with more than $100 billion that is not allocated anywhere out of the surplus that can be used for Medicare reform, including prescription drugs, we have a very good package. The only thing missing is a proposal, a reasonable proposal, by the President of the United States to put into effect the use of that money and the kinds of reforms that are suggested by the committee which worked so long and was one vote short of what they needed. We can go on forever this year debating Medicare, but the truth of the matter is, we have a solution in mind. There are others who talk about the problem and indicate that it will be fixed in some miraculous way when they don't have a plan. I yield the remaining time to the Senator from Michigan.

Mr. DOMENICI. Who wants to speak on the Democratic side? Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.

Mr. DOMENICI. How much time remains?

Mr. DOMENICI. I am going to proceed for 3 or 4 minutes on my time awaiting the arrival of Senators with whom Senator Lautenberg is in touch. First of all, everybody should know this amendment, offered by the distinguished Senator from New Jersey, is not germane to the budget resolution. So at an appropriate time, when all the time has been yielded back, I will raise a point of order, at which time I assume the Senator from New Jersey will seek to waive that. I will suggest some things now about why our budget is right and why this amendment, even though it is not germane, is not the right thing to do. I want to start by quoting a Democratic Senator who spent a great deal of time and effort trying to reform the Medicare program. The amendment of the distinguished Senator from New Jersey says, ``I like the spending part of Senator Domenici's budget,'' although I am sure he would not like to see it in effect for awhile. He said, ``Leave that alone.'' If he had not done that, we would have said you can spend all the surplus. Obviously, he did that. Then the Senator said, ``You can't return any of this surplus tax money to the American taxpayer unless and until you have a reform for both Social Security and Medicare.'' Here is what one of the Democratic Senators, Senator Breaux from Louisiana, said: Medicare must not be used as a wedge issue any longer. The question before this Congress is not whether to cut taxes or whether to save Medicare. That is not the choice we are facing. I support a tax cut [although he says targeted] and I am dedicated to saving Medicare. It is not an either/or proposition. I am glad that is not the Senator from New Mexico making that statement, although I could make it. There is no question in my mind that is correct. As a matter of fact, it seems to this Senator that if all we had before us was the President's proposal on Medicare, which gradually, bit by bit--most of the proposals of the President's budget are going to be refused in the Senate. We are going to adopt the Abraham amendment. That says to the President: ``You were not right in saying you were saving Social Security trust funds; you were saving only a part of it and you were spending a part of it.'' This first vote is going to say you cannot spend any of it and proposes how a lockbox might be structured if and when we can get the legislation up to vote on that. Now we are talking about Medicare and, obviously, before we are finished here, no one is going to be for the President's Medicare proposals--or few are--because actually it does not do anything. It purports to do something, but it does nothing. It does not spend a penny on prescription drugs. As a matter of fact, it does not spend a penny of new money to fix Medicare at all. The budget before us spends $190 billion to $200 billion more than the President and fully funds Medicare. It does not cut $20 billion out of Medicare, which the President cut out. Then it says: ``Let's get on with reform and fix it; let's stop talking about things in the air; let's put it on paper and let's start voting.'' We say there is another $100 billion left over, not from Social Security, not for returning money to the taxpayers, another 100 that we say can be used, if needed, for Medicare. That is going to solve Medicare well beyond the 12 years that the distinguished Senator from New Jersey seeks. He seeks a 12-year extension of the program. That program, which is described in our budget, can solve it for much longer than 12 years. The problem is, we do not want to give the American taxpayers a break unless and until we have the reform accomplished, and we do not even have a proposal from the President of the United States. It is grossly unfair, in my opinion. Clearly, the time has come to reward the taxpayers who have been working hard to keep this economy going, putting in more and more of their tax dollars. They ought to get some of it back. We ought to be for keeping the economy expanding and growing, producing jobs and vitality. If you look around the world, West Germany is in trouble, and that means most of Europe is going to be in trouble, not just Asia, and we are going to be the bastion of growth and prosperity. We better be ready with some tax cuts for American business and for the American taxpayer if we want another 6 or 7 years of prolonged, sustained recovery. That is the kind of thing we ought to be doing, and it is done by this budget, leaving the Congress to decide what kind of tax reductions they want in the future. This budget does not prescribe that. Certain Republicans have ideas, and certain Democrats have ideas. This Senator, my good friend from Louisiana, has ideas. His would be for targeted tax cuts. I do not know what the occupant of the Chair would be for, but he would have some. Only one set of ideas is going to be passed. It is going to be passed ultimately by committees after debate and committee hearings and the like. The question is not whether some of us are for an across-the- board tax cut like John Kennedy was for; the question is, Are we going to provide anything for tax cuts? The Lautenberg amendment says no. I believe we should not adopt it, and we should get on with the budget format and plan contained in the budget before us. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, how much time do we have remaining on our side?

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

Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the occupant of the Chair for the excellent suggestion, which is where I got the idea. Mr. President, we had two people speak under the 22 minutes. Maybe the Senator from New Jersey would like to speak or someone else.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I have conferred with the distinguished Senator from New Jersey, Mr. Lautenberg, the ranking member of this committee, and we concur that I should seek unanimous consent of the Senate, and I so do, that the time that we use for the vote be counted against the basic budget resolution time.

Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the Chair. Would the Senator like to use part of this 22 minutes? The Senator is free to speak on whatever he likes.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I yield myself 1 minute. I just want to say to Senator Durbin, I did not know my colleague before he came to the Senate. Obviously, we do not agree on a lot of things. But I compliment him on his participation. He had, I think, many things going on, but he is a valued member of the committee and I think he lent some of that atmosphere, that we were all working very hard to get our job done. It was about as good a 3 days as I have spent on committee work, and I thank the Senator for his share in that. Mr. President, this consent agreement has been cleared on the minority side and on our side. I ask unanimous consent that at 3 this afternoon, the Senate proceed to a vote on or in relation to the Abraham amendment No. 143, to be followed by a vote on or in relation to the Lautenberg amendment No. 144, with the time between now and then equally divided in the usual form. Finally, I ask that no second-degree amendments be in order to the amendments.

Mr. DOMENICI. Of course.

Mr. DOMENICI. I didn't hear the request.

Mr. DOMENICI. I am willing to set it aside. I just wanted to see if we could understand how much time was still on it when we got back to it. But we can resolve that later.

Mr. DOMENICI. One more Senator wants to make brief comments, but that will be brief.

Mr. DOMENICI. This amendment.

Mr. DOMENICI. I wonder if you could tell us, if we leave things like they are, there is about how much time left on this amendment?

Mr. DOMENICI. I ask the Senator, are you going to offer an amendment while this amendment is still pending?

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. The Senator is absolutely correct. In the first year, we recommended that $3 billion, in addition to what the President recommended, be spent for education, and over 5 years, $28 billion in new money on top of about $100 billion in the programs today. We do express our concern in the event this money were used in the traditional way that we have done for the last 25 years of telling them exactly how to do it with a lot of strings. We are hoping it will move down to the classroom level with only accountability as to what the Federal Government requires.

Mr. DOMENICI. I yield 15 minutes to the Senator from Michigan.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, Senator Abraham will have some comments and then our first amendment. How much time does the Senator desire?

Mr. DOMENICI. Thank you.

Mr. DOMENICI. When there will be less money coming in than the bills calling for it. Does the President's plan change that fact?

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I want to ask the Senator, in terms of the President transferring some balances into the Medicare trust fund and taking IOUs back, we all know right now there is an assessment of when the Medicare Program will stop generating enough money to pay its bills. Remember, that date is 2008----

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I am going to yield as much time to Senator Gramm as he would like, although I am going to ask him in the interest of others to do a little less than the 1 hour he would give to his class in economics over there at Texas A&M. But I want to read something to the Senate before I yield to him, just in response to my good friend, Senator Boxer from California. She suggested we would not accept her resolution with reference to what the tax cut should be all about. Let me read what the committee adopted unanimously. I think it is a pretty good definition of what we ought to do with the tax cut: It is the sense of the Senate that this concurrent resolution on the budget assumes any reductions in taxes should be structured to benefit working families by providing family tax relief and incentives to stimulate savings, investment, job creation, and economic growth. I think those are the kinds of things we all ought to be looking at in a tax package as it moves its way through. I yield to Senator Gramm.