Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Under rule 14, I understand that Senate bill 1889 introduced earlier today by Senator Harkin is at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senate bill 71 be star printed with the changes that are at the desk.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. I say to the Senator, my friend, the ranking member from New Jersey, when we are finished with this, however soon it is or in a half hour, the Senator from Colorado is going to be heard next. Is that what we have tentatively understood?

Mr. DOMENICI. I say to the Senator, can you let me respond a bit since there has been a little response? I will certainly not use anything like an hour.

Mr. DOMENICI. For your State and mine, a half hour from now or so is a better time for your people anyway.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, let me start by saying that the Senator that has proposed this amendment, in my opinion, even though we may not have agreed on a number of things, as I have watched things evolve on matters pertaining to fiscal policy, has grown tremendously in his understanding and his forthrightness and his ability to articulate the fiscal condition of this country. I want to acknowledge right up front that there are some who worry about this budget resolution, but there are some who worry about 10 years from now. And, frankly, we have an awful lot of new sources of information and new sources of estimating that have become very, very reliable so that as adult leaders of our country we ought to be able to look at a budget 10 years from now and 15 years from now in terms of some big big-ticket items and be able to honestly and forthrightly indicate where we are. I just say to him, he has done a very good job in that respect, and I thank him for that. Like I say, I do not necessarily, when he gets up and makes his frequent speeches about how wonderful America has become since the Democrats voted in a budget, I join him in attributing to that the great success of the American economy. But I do acknowledge that he has a perfectly valid opportunity to so allege to the world. I have not yet really found enough time to really talk with the American people about how that is impossible in terms of having been the primary reason for America's sustained economic recovery. I am not going to do that tonight either, but in a sense--in a sense--I am going to talk about something that I believe my good friend, the proponent of the amendment that is before us, has stated as well as I will or better time and again in the Budget Committee and in the Committee of Finance. That is what this chart before us, in back of me, shows to all of us--a very, very simple chart. You see that red line, and you see 2021. That red line is the Medicare hospitalization trust fund balances at the end of each year. Now, you see, anything close to that zero line means that the balances are pretty close--the outgo and the intake. But look what happens to that red line out there in the future, but not so far in the future that people like Kent Conrad would not stand up and say, with Pete Domenici, for all the accolades we are giving ourselves about how great we have done on fixing the fiscal policy of our Nation, if we sit back and do not fix that, where that red line can, in a year or so when we have reformed this program, start to move up and parallel the line that is at about zero, we have failed the American people in a most serious way. Because of that we could put one up here on Social Security. We could argue about their trust fund. And, frankly, that is a very, very exciting argument for 2 or 3 hours, if we want to do it. But essentially, in terms of the impact on America, if we do not fix something, the impact is apt to be more severe if we do not fix this than if we do not fix Social Security. Both are serious. Both are predictable. We understand all the reasons for what is happening. And we can choose, as we have in the past when we did not know any better, we could wait 10 years. We could all be running around saying how wonderful everything is. Probably 25 years ago nobody could run around after us as we campaigned and say, ``You're not facing up to the facts.'' But I tell you, they can now, because we know that red line is a pretty accurate presentation of the most serious fiscal and social problem that this country has--bar none. Now, having said that, the budget I chose to present, after much consultation with the Budget Committee, which was adopted by the Senators on that committee, I regret, on a party-line basis--but I actually believe the total reason for that party-line vote had to do with this issue that is before us, because I do not believe that every Democrat who voted against the Domenici mark voted against it because they want to spend a lot more money on new programs. As a matter of fact, if this tobacco settlement, as fragile and as amorphous as it is, had not come along--and it was not available either to the President in his budget or to us in our markup--there would have been little to argue over, because we do not have any money to spend unless we want to break the agreement and knock those caps on discretionary spending off of their pillars and say, ``We just made a deal, but we're going to break it.'' I do not believe that would have happened. And I do not think Senator Conrad, who is here with an amendment tonight on the tobacco settlement--I do not think he would have joined in saying, ``We've got to invent some new programs and spend some new money and break those caps.'' Essentially, we got off on the wrong foot, because the President of the United States gave a speech called a State of the Union Address, and, in his normal manner, he was eloquent. The problem was, nobody had an opportunity to check his budget. So America got excited about an era of balanced budgets where all of a sudden we could spend a lot of money that we did not spend the year before. And it was interesting. Some of us listened and said, what's happening? I mean, we have a literal freeze on all the programs the President is talking about--more education money, classroom sizes, interest reduction so you can build more classrooms, child care--you know, on and on--oh, more health programs for children who are smoking, and a huge advertising campaign for that. And I was thinking, ``Man, all of those belong over here on that side of the ledger where already we've agreed we can't spend any more money.'' The President said, ``Well, we'll spend it out of the tobacco settlement'' that may never occur. If it occurs, it might be very different than he assumed. And lo and behold, the Congressional Budget Office told us, he cannot spend it the way he says without breaking the Budget Act of the United States and breaking the caps by $68 billion over 5 years. That is where we found ourselves, with everybody getting excited that we could have some new programs, we could preserve the surpluses, right--which my friend from Colorado is going to speak to in a minute-- and we could spend on at least six new programs that pop in my head, and a whole bunch of add-ons, we could spend $124 billion over 5 years on things we were not paying for last year. Mr. President, that sounded like a fairy land, that we would have tombs and beautiful songs and we could dream and say, ``Boy, isn't that just fantastic?'' Sort of like Alice in Wonderland. But we soon found out it was all predicated upon a tobacco settlement that the tobacco companies agreed to with the attorneys general. And we had no more idea up here how that was going to get resolved than the Man in the Moon. And I regret to say, while I think we ought to try to settle that dispute--I am not averse to raising cigarette taxes--we are still not very close, when you look at the House and the Senate, to coming up with a way to do that which has enough votes to do what Howard Baker used to say, ``Whatever the rules and procedures are, don't worry about it if you've got enough votes.'' Nobody has enough votes yet. But I believe there are enough votes for this budget resolution, because it does the right thing. This Republican budget--which I wish some Democrats would vote for--says: Don't spend the surplus in the regular budget of the United States on anything but Social Security, or, as we put it, ``Social Security reform.'' My friend from Colorado has another suggestion--it is intriguing, and I hope everybody looks at it--as to the surplus. But we said that. And the President said it a little differently than us. But essentially, for the year 1999, don't touch it. For those who might think it is very big, let me remind you, ``Don't touch it '99'' means don't touch $8 billion worth of surplus, I say to my friend in the Chair, not $30 billion, not $60 billion, not $100 billion--$8 billion. So this euphoria about, ``We've got to protect that, we can't spend it,'' with others saying, ``Let's cut taxes''--it is $8 billion. So we said two big goals: Save Social Security--and I might add, under our budget resolution that is before us, we literally use the word ``reform,'' so that we do not just contemplate putting the surplus into the Social Security trust fund; we contemplate having it available for those who will reform and rewrite Social Security to use, if they need it, to make that program one that is far better for America's retired people in the future and which has a chance of making the fund itself more solvent. The second thing we said was once the next program that the American U.S. Government has a responsibility to pay for--not a State issue, not a city issue, one of ours--and lo and behold, we find the American U.S. problem is that one, Medicare. Medicare. We found the second big problem is that, one, that huge red line on the chart going down. It almost moves in a direction like when you are a young kid and you wondered where hell was--that is sort of looking like it is going down to hell, down into the depths of the Earth, in the red, going broke. We said, what do we do about that? There is nothing more important than doing what we can to start fixing that. We said whatever the Federal Government keeps from the settlement--if it ever happens, and we assume the President's number, but we said whatever it is and whenever it happens--put the Government share in that fund. What we are going to do with the amendment of my friend, whom I have just spoken to, is to say we are not going to put all the money in that hospital insurance fund for seniors that is going bankrupt; we are going to spend it on some other things. Frankly, I believe for a budget, a blueprint, that is a mistake. It will be subject to a point of order, and I will make it. It is not with any reluctance that I make it, because I think what we have planned in the budget before the Senate is better for our country, so long as we have no agreed-upon plan to do otherwise. I remind the Senators, and the occupant of the Chair was working hard and very knowledgeable about the tobacco settlement, we don't have a plan. We have a lot of people talking about a lot of things, and a lot of wonderful things we ought to buy, but we don't have a plan that has broad-based bipartisan support. I believe unless and until that happens, the money ought to go where this budget says--every nickel should go in Medicare. Now, I am amazed--and I want to allude back and forth to other proposals--that the President of the United States in his State of the Union Address, and in his budget which followed, which not even the Democrats have used in budget debates, that budget that he told the American people about, that he sent us, I am amazed in that budget there was $124 billion in new expenditures from this, that, and the other, but a huge amount of it from the tobacco settlement and not a penny for the second worst problem that America has. Not a penny. Not so with the budget that is before the Senate. The reverse. Not a penny for any other new program but all the money for that one. Now, from this Senator's standpoint, I did not set about to ignore what many people said we ought to pay for if we get the tobacco settlement. Fellow Senators, I want you to know if there is never a settlement of the cigarette controversy, if it is never settled and never resolved, the budget before the Senate, because we chose to prioritize, to put first things first, has the largest increase for the National Institutes of Health over the next 5 years for research related to the effects of cigarette smoking that we have ever put together in the history of our biological and chemical research programs of America, the largest. On average, 11 percent a year. We are not waiting for a cigarette settlement to pay for that. When you vote for the budget before the Senate that I put together-- and I hope it is not just Republicans--we will have dramatically increased the National Institutes of Health because we chose to look at the President's cuts, and he had many. And we said, amen. But we want to spend it where we think we should spend it and we put it in NIH. This afternoon we argued about child care, and we put it there, too. We put $5 billion there in a new block grant to add to what we are doing, and we don't have to wait for the tobacco settlement to do it. A number of other items, such as an advertising campaign to address the issue of trying, with advertising, to mellow the effect of cigarette advertising on young people. We don't have to wait around for the cigarette settlement. We have funded that to the tune of $825 million. Now, frankly, we will never have enough for some. There are some who would think we should spend $2 billion a year on children's programs and on health programs for children out of this settlement. Mr. President, what is intriguing about it all is that in order to get that done, most amendments around here, and the amendment that is presently before the Senate, attempt to solve these problems by creating new mandatory permanent programs for ideas that are being implemented about which we have little certainty they will succeed. If anything, they ought to be annually appropriated so we can look at them each year. Mr. President, you understand that can't be done without breaking the budget agreement because we don't have any more room in our budget for that kind of expenditure. So this amendment and others spend it in a new entitlement program for kids' advertising or for tobacco research or whatever the five or six programs are that are there. Now, $825 million over 5 years for various antiteen smoking and public health initiatives--I have heard from some of my colleagues we have not put enough resources into these antismoking initiatives, without a settlement. I have even heard that we need to spend, maybe, and I repeat, ``multiple billions of dollars, perhaps even as much as $2 billion a year,'' on such a campaign. Frankly, fellow Senators, I find those proposals hard to believe. First, the President's budget identified $400 million over the next 5 years for antismoking initiatives at the Federal level through the Centers for Disease Control. Let me quote from the HHS 1999 budget press release. This was when the President was still living off the budget that turned out not to be doable because it violated the budget but they had money to spend. It said, ``We will expand our support for State and community programs from $34 million in 1998 to $51 million in 1999,'' a 50 percent increase. ``The Centers for Disease Control,'' the quote continues, in their public relations submission, ``will now fund all States and the District of Columbia to implement innovative tobacco prevention programs as a core component of the public health.'' We fund that much and more without waiting around for the tobacco settlement. Now, it more than doubles the funds identified in the President's budget for this initiative. Let me also point out that we have some history with public campaigns aimed at youth. According to this administration, we have increased our efforts to prevent and treat drug use from $4.1 billion in 1992 to $5.4 billion in 1998. Much of that funding was aimed at young Americans. Nonetheless, teenage drug use has increased from 15 percent in 1992 to 22.2 percent in 1995, the last year we have evidence, and everyone here knows it is higher now than 1995, and the campaign continues to spend money, to affect their lives on drugs, with advertising and other programs. I only say that not because I do not think we should continue trying, but I firmly believe it would be wrong to put huge amounts of money in an entitlement program in this area and just say for the next 5 to 10 years, that is where it goes. So, wherever I look and however I think about this, I say to those committees and those assigned by our leadership to try to work a tobacco settlement--good luck. I also say, if you put it together and you can find 60 votes, you will pass your program in the Senate. And if you do, who knows? I may be one of the 60. I haven't said I would not, but I believe since we are not anywhere close to that and we have no consensus on that, that we ought to do what is the most prudent thing. I have failed to discuss and I have failed to put up the chart that clearly depicts what is happening to Medicare spending on tobacco- related illnesses. It is there now. It is simple and frightening. The hospital insurance trust fund for the seniors of America has been made stable for about another 10 years. But we didn't really reform the program; we reformed the payment plan. It will, once again, as that red line on the previous chart, it will start to go down again, and when the baby boomers hit entitlement age, it will go broke. But look at that, one of the reasons it has gone broke is we never could have estimated the costs that program would bear on its shoulders from tobacco-related illnesses of senior citizens. And there it is, $25.5 billion, 14 percent of total Medicare spending, in 1995. Mr. President, 1995 is the best we can do. Say it got better. I don't believe so. In fact, I am prepared to speculate with a bit of intuition that I think is right that it is higher now, not lower. So I submit the budget that is before us is better for America and has a better chance of solving our serious problems than a budget with the amendment before the Senate added to it, because I do not believe there is a better way to spend that money than on the program that is going bankrupt and is so necessary and was so infringed upon by smoking costs that we cannot ignore the reality of the relationship between the smoking and the bankruptcy of the hospital insurance program. Now, this does not mean, Mr. President, that the Senator from New Mexico thinks the distinguished Senator, whom I have spoken of this evening with great affection and as honestly and positively as I have spoken about a Democrat Senator since I have been here-- perhaps my friend Sam Nunn has had me do that once before, and perhaps my friend, the ranking member, has had me do that before. But in any event, that is not to say that this is a wild idea. It is just that I believe if you have the facts before you and you don't know how the tobacco is going to come out at all, we have no idea--and there are all kinds of things people want to spend it on, right? We could add to this list here, in the next 48 hours, another six or seven things, and we might, I say to my friend from Colorado. If this amendment fails, we are going to see more. They won't all try to do the same things. They will have other things we ought to do and pay for it out of this fund. So the best I can do is to say that I believe the best budget we can do is to save the surplus for reform and solvency of Social Security, save the Government's share of the cigarette tax to save Medicare, increase the National Institutes of Health, put some additional money in child care, add about $9 billion to education. A whole bunch of amendments are going to say we didn't do enough about education. I just want to say to everybody that we will take those one at a time, one at a time. But we put everything in this budget on education that the bipartisan administration budget agreement contemplated for the year 1999. There is an $8 billion-plus increase year after year on education, which is exactly what we contemplated. It is there. When the appropriators finally do it--we don't know what they are going to do, but we suggested some things that were very interesting. We don't wait around for the settlement of the tobacco issue for those educational add-ons. The President did. We don't. We put $2.5 billion in IDEA or disability education to try to move forward in our commitment to pay our share. It is embarrassing that we have mandated that disabled young people be educated in a certain way from here down to our school districts and we are supposed to pay 40 percent of the tab. Senator, if you are not embarrassed that your schools have never seen the Government put up more than 9 percent of that program, I am. We are going to start putting more in there, and do you know what. They are going to be relieved of expenditures and be able to hire new teachers, as they see fit, and do the other things they may need. We will live up to our responsibilities. They will have money left over to do theirs. That is in our budget. Yet, whatever you do, it isn't enough. Tomorrow, we will speak about building classrooms. Let me suggest, for those who want to build classrooms and think the President is for it, you will have a surprise tomorrow. Two budgets ago, the President said in his Department of Education that it is no business of the Federal Government to build schools in the school districts of America. He said it even better than that. And then he canceled the $100 million worth of programs to build schools. All of a sudden, it's the greatest program ever and we better do it from up here, even though we have never done that in any big way as part of American Government's help to our schools. We will debate that. Some will say we should pay part of that out of the cigarette settlement. Can you imagine. If you are talking about things related to cigarette smoking, isn't that one more related? Isn't that fund more bankrupt than any other fund around and any other obligation? So, Mr. President, when the time comes after tomorrow--we have a few more minutes, and I hope some people listened tonight--we will vote. The point of order will be the issue. I have no doubt that significant numbers of Senators will vote with my friend. I have nothing but praise for him, and if they do that, that is OK. But I don't believe there are going to be enough votes to get around the point of order. We will be back to where we started, which we think is a very good place to be. That is, we are going to spend the money, if we ever get the tobacco settlement, to pay for making that Medicare Program solvent. Mr. President, make no bones about it; we have appointed a national commission. It is bipartisan. I have already seen them on C-SPAN, and they disagreed violently. I don't know if the chairman is going to be able to ever get them together. We were all wondering who ought to be chairman and we said, ``Senator Breaux, you ought to be.'' I like him very much. He is a Democrat. Frankly, the more I look at the different views, I am glad that he is there because, frankly, it is going to be hard to put them together. If we have a few tens of billions of dollars to help them get this reform put together, it will be one of the best things we have ever done. It may just be the ointment, along with reforms, that will glue it together. And, conversely, if we throw it away on programs that we are not sure will work, we will be real sorry if they can't put together a Medicare reform package because we spent the money that might have helped them do it. With that, I don't know how much time remains, but from my standpoint, I yield the floor on this. I will shortly be prepared to move with the distinguished Senator from Colorado.

Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. DOMENICI. Let me say, Mr. President, whatever I have said about other Senators from the other side of the aisle, it is quite obvious that the most significant achievement that I have participated in was the balanced budget agreement of last year, and without my good friend, Senator Lautenberg from New Jersey, we could not have achieved that result. So he knows with that statement that I am very proud to work with him. You got it, Senator.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. And that is a very big assumption.

Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. DOMENICI. I do not need time in opposition for another 5 or 6 minutes, if he wants to speak some more. He is eloquent on the subject. Even though his amendment is quite deficient, he is spectacular in terms of his presentation. Let me just ask a question.

Mr. DOMENICI. You said even if you wanted to present a child care proposal, you would be precluded from doing that unless there were something in this budget resolution that allowed it. I don't believe the Senator meant that. For, let me tell you, this budget resolution does nothing to the right of anyone to bring up a bill with a new entitlement, which is what you are contemplating, so long as it is paid for. You would have to provide tax increases or entitlement restraint. And you can offer all the child care add-on mandatories you would like; they may not pass, but they would not be subject to a point of order. The budget processes are complicated and in some cases arcane, but there is a simple one: You pay for entitlements with entitlement cuts or tax increases. So you could do that. I am not suggesting that is the best way, or the only way, but I believe you said you could not, and I just wanted to make sure that, at least from my standpoint, you either--if you meant what you said, you at least take into consideration what I have said--or perhaps you could suggest that I am in some way in error?

Mr. DOMENICI. The Senator is correct. But I didn't raise that point. I answered a statement you made that you would be precluded from offering it under this budget resolution. All I said is, anybody can offer a spending bill, an entitlement, mandatory spending bill. It will not be subject to a budget point of order if it is paid for, and the ``paid for'' is either cutting other similar programs or tax increases that you use for it. You raise a different question. You raise the question now, which I did not think was in your reserve fund, because the reserve fund is set up for all of the tobacco settlement receipts. If you want to take something out of that, then, like others, you might want to amend that. If you try to amend that, we suggest that money should go to Medicare. So that will be the battle, and we will have that out. There will be a number of amendments which handle it that way. Let me just also suggest that you mentioned appropriated accounts. I don't want to get this to be a mumbo-jumbo ``budgetese'' discussion here, but your amendment is not one that has anything to do with discretionary programs. It creates an entitlement program. So the discretionary caps which we are all--excepting maybe three Senators or four--coming down here saying we want to keep--and I don't know where you stand on that, whether you want to break them or not--you break those by spending discretionary money. You don't break them by creating a new mandatory program, a new entitlement. Although nobody thought we would be creating new entitlement programs once we got the budget balanced; most people thought we would not do that anymore because we want to keep it balanced. But if you want to do it some more, you have to pay for them in the ways I have described.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry. Are we scheduled now to vote on the Gregg amendment at 4 o'clock, except that each side has 1 minute to discuss the Gregg amendment?

Mr. DOMENICI. That will be followed by the Dodd amendment, which is not amendable, and there will be 1 minute on each side after that vote has expired.

Mr. DOMENICI. Clearly, Senator Dodd has perceived my position correctly. I will make a point of order with reference to his amendment. It clearly is subject to a point of order, and then I presume he would like to vote on a waiver. That is probably what the vote is going to be when it comes to the amendment of Senator Dodd, because we have waived no points of order as we have gone through this process. Mr. President, I say to Senator Dodd, while I believe I am entitled to the rest of the time, of course, in the interest of half the time to each side, if the Senator from Connecticut needs some time, he can call on me and I will relinquish some of my time. I will discuss various reserve funds shortly, but I would like very much to talk about this amendment which, in essence, as to its substantive effect, is very, very similar to the Murray amendment which was denied germaneness by the Senate in the last vote, and it fell. With regard to what it attempts to do, it is a different subject matter but the same kind of process. There is a little-used process called a reserve fund. There is nothing wrong with trying to expand. We will get a proliferation of reserve fund attempts this year. It is interesting, and perhaps, Mr. President, you would be interested in why there will be a proliferation of reserve funds. First of all, most reserve funds create a new spending program, and almost all reserve funds--there have been very few--when it comes to a new program, they are entitlements that are created. Essentially, reserve funds say that if you want to fund a new transportation program or Amtrak, that if, in fact, you put into that reserve fund the resources to do it, then the chairman of the Budget Committee says the budget accommodates it, and it would, obviously, be neutral, by definition; it would not increase the deficit or the expenditure. The problem this year is most interesting. The era of the balanced budget is bringing forth a plethora of suggestions--get this--that we increase entitlement programs, not necessarily in dollars spent on each one, but brand new ones. Isn't that interesting? At the time we finally have our budget under control, when we have spent the best part of 18 years, that I am aware of, saying, ``Let's get entitlements under control''--that is, the automatic spending items; they just spend pursuant to a formula or the letter of the law, and they spend until you change the law, whereas appropriations you do every year--every year. The plethora of these new ones is because we found a way, believe it or not, to say you can't spend any more money on this other kind of account, the annual appropriations bills, in which these programs belong. This child care program belongs in that category called an annual appropriation. But if you put it in there, you have to do two things, and that is why there will be reserve funds, because you have to cut some domestic program to make room for it, or you break the budget, which has a dollar number in for each year. So now that that is firmly fixed and we have it under control and Wall Street and Alan Greenspan and those who make interest rates in America are saying, ``The one thing you really did''--now let's follow through--``is you placed that cap, annual amount, that dollar number, that you can't exceed, you put it in each year,'' now they said, ``Prove it; do it.'' What we do is say we don't want to provide any cuts, reductions, or eliminations, so we are coming around and creating new mandatory expenditures. Frankly, the problem with mandatory expenditures is, they go on almost forever, but, secondly, you frequently underestimate them. Yet, if they spend out above the estimate, they just spend out. An example is Medicaid. Medicaid was created on the floor of the Senate with an estimate of less than a billion dollars in cost. It became an entitlement. I don't remember, when we finally reformed it and made it a block grant, how many billions it was, but it was many tens of times bigger than the estimate. When we changed it, we usually changed it to spend more. You can see why we were so worried that if we wanted to get to an era of balanced budgets and surpluses--``Good for America,'' everybody in the world said; ``It is great for America that our unified budget is balanced; you have to try to keep those caps in place, and you have to try to not create any new entitlement programs.'' But if you cannot spend any more on this side of the ledger, then go over to this side and say we will create a new one over here, and we will try to pay for it one way or the other so it won't increase--it won't affect the budget surplus. The problem with this one is very, very simple. Just like Senator Murray's reserve, it said we would like to spend more money on child care and we would like to have our programs expanded rather substantially--I don't know how many billions; it just says child care program. Then it says here is a reserve fund, but the reserve fund is only half filled, because it says what we want to spend the money on but it does not say where we get the money to spend. It does not say increase taxes $15 billion to pay for it. It does not say decrease entitlement programs in some way to pay for it, because what no one wants to do is, no one wants to go home and tell their constituents that in order to have a new program, ``We had to raise your taxes.'' They just want to say, ``We are giving you a new program.'' No one wants to go home and say, ``We got you a new program, and we had to cut these other programs,'' because, obviously, there will be people who like the programs that were cut, too. So here we are with, as I said, a number of these proposals going to be forthcoming, and they are going to sound, for all intents and purposes--and I really give Senator Dodd credit in this area. He has been a leader in bringing everybody's attention to child care needs and getting it started in one very serious way. We had a big compromise battle one time. He gave, we gave, and we actually got a bipartisan bill, the first one that was bipartisan. He deserves credit, no doubt about it. What we are doing now is saying we want more of those but we don't want to tell anyone what we have to do to pay for it. We just want to put it in this reserve fund, and that will happen some other time, but let everyone know the sponsors want an expanded child care program. I have no doubt that they do. It is just that the budget law says you can't do it this way. It is going to be subject to a point of order, and I am very hopeful it will fail on that. I am very hopeful that those in the country who look at this will conclude that it was not a proposal that had much of a chance to ever be carried out, because there was no money to do it. If you are going to spend $12 billion or $16 billion, keep a balanced budget--and you know how that is already planned; it is called the baseline--if you already know that, and then somebody comes along and says, ``We want $16 billion more,'' it is pretty obvious you have to raise taxes or you have to cut something. That is one argument for today. But I want to give you a couple others. First of all, according to the General Accounting Office, there are now 22 separate programs and tax expenditures which support and fund child care. The combined Federal programs provide child care services and subsidies to over 5.1 million children, or half the children under 5 with working mothers. The Federal Government, as one part of government in America, pays for 40 percent of all child care expenditures that are governmental. In 1997, the Federal Government spent $13.8 billion on child care programs. And I will give you the range of them: Dependent care tax credit, child care programs ranging from Head Start to the program I just mentioned, and a couple of others. The military has the largest single program, $302 million, 166,000 kids. The Federal Government spending on child care has increased $6.1 billion, for an 82-percent increase since 1990. Not too shabby. Under current law, by 2003 the Federal Government will spend almost $17 billion for child care programs and subsidies. The budget resolution would increase this spending to $20 billion and an increase of almost 20 percent. In particular, the budget resolution more than doubles the size of the child care and the child care development block grant, increasing the funds from $1 billion in 1998 to $2.2 billion by the year 2003. The budget resolution also assumes that tax relief of up to $9 billion could be afforded as a portion of the funds and a portion of the funds could go to tax relief to stay-at-home parents if the tax-writing committee so decides. All of these funds are within the $1.7 trillion budget. They are all within the $1.7 trillion. We do not increase taxes to pay for them; we do not worsen the deficit to pay for the new spending. The amendment before us is different from that, albeit, in the mind of the principal sponsor, totally justifiable. But the $1.7 trillion is not enough, and we must ask the taxpayers to give us, the Federal Government, more so that we can spend even more on child care than is assumed in this resolution. In short, while I am not necessarily arguing that under no circumstances should we ever put any more money in child care, I am suggesting that this year in this budget resolution we do provide some significant increases. Let me make one other statement and then call one precise item to the attention of the Senate. I know this sounds like a lot of money and, on the other hand, my friend Senator Dodd might say it is not enough money, but just prior to the budget markup I asked for a breakdown of all of the money being spent on what would commonly be called child care. Mr. President, Senator Dodd may still maintain that we need more and he may have evidence that we need more, but, obviously, there are a lot of things we need more in America, and we can't afford to pay for them all. The Senator from Connecticut voted many times not to pay for something because we didn't have enough money. I went through and looked at the total amount of money that we will spend under this 5-year budget, under the discretionary part of this budget--that is, the annual appropriations for child care of various types, special education for infants and toddlers, development block grant, head Start--we will spend $31 billion in just that one category over these 5 years. Then I looked and said, what about mandatory programs, those that you do not have to appropriate each year? I found a child care development fund, which is a perpetual fund, not one that you feel you must vote on each year, a child care feeding program, social service block grant, and I found that $23 billion is spent over the next 5 years for that. Then I looked on the tax side to see how we were doing, and I found that dependent-care tax credit, $15 billion for 5 years; employer- provided child care exclusion, $22.3 billion; dependent-care assistance program, $800 million. Now if you add them all up, it is $76.8 billion that goes out of the Federal Treasury in this area helping little children with developmental funds, feeding programs and child care. This number is without the add-ons. This is if we started off the budget process and said we are going to make no reductions and no increases; that is it. I want to raise one other program with you, I say to Senator Dodd. Maybe you are unaware of it. Maybe you and others, if you are made aware of it, might say we should do something about this. But I think you recall--you probably were part of it--when we did the welfare reform, we put $1.7 billion in there for child care. Remember the package. We said, let us help with child care, let us help with training; and all that went into welfare. I understand that 55 percent--just a moment. CBO estimates, and this is a current estimate, that States will use only 80 percent of the available funding in 1999. States have obligated all funds, but if they do not obligate, they lose any rights to the funds. So they are not going to be able to draw down all the money. Frankly, I think we ought to try to do something about that. That has already been provided for. I do not know what we can do about it.

Mr. DOMENICI. I will be glad to.

Mr. DOMENICI. I say to the Senator, let me tell you, we are both right. It is just that those numbers of what HHS is telling you about are the moneys that the Treasury of the United States has turned over to be spent. But now we have to have the States literally draw them down. The Congressional Budget Office is saying that they estimate that the States will draw down and use only 80 percent, and there is a chance they will lose some money, according to what my staff says. So maybe we can work on something there saying that they are extending something so they will not lose it. That might be one thing we could work on. Now, Mr. President, let me ask my friend, Senator Dodd, if he needs another 5 minutes or so.

Mr. DOMENICI. I will split the time with you.

Mr. DOMENICI. Could I ask a question?

Mr. DOMENICI. It is the regular order, however, unless changed by UC that we will start voting by 4 o'clock?

Mr. DOMENICI. I will give you half the time and keep half for myself and Senator Enzi.

Mr. DOMENICI. I have the remaining time?

Mr. DOMENICI. Twelve seconds. Do you want to use your 12 seconds?

Mr. DOMENICI. I yield 1 minute of mine.