Mark Dayton

Mr. DAYTON

Mr. DAYTON. I thank the Chair. Madam President, I thank Senator Durbin. I commend my distinguished colleague from Illinois, Senator Durbin, who has spearheaded the development of this amendment, and for the leadership he has shown in this and so many other areas. I stand proudly with the Senator today. The Durbin amendment is the essential test for this body. It is going to be the measure of our commitment to seniors and to other Medicare beneficiaries all over America. It is going to be a test of our sincerity of what we said we intend to do for those people who are either disabled, through no choice of their own and are required to be on Medicare at an early age, or senior citizens who have worked throughout this country who have served this country so well and now are in their retirement years, the largest users by age of prescription drug medicines. So they are the ones most dependent on the quality of coverage we provide for them. I heard again today from colleagues on the other side of the aisle, as I have heard others say throughout this Chamber, and as I have said many times in Minnesota, that our senior citizens deserve prescription drug coverage that is as good as Members of Congress receive; that is as good as the Federal employees receive through the plan of which we are all part. Yes, we pay into that plan, but it is also very well covered--``subsidized'' would be the right word--by our employer, the Federal Government; the same in the case of Senator Durbin's amendment, at a level of parity to our plan. If we want to provide senior citizens and other Medicare beneficiaries with the same level of coverage that we get in Congress, then Senator Durbin's amendment is the way to do that. S. 1, by contrast, provides half of those benefits overall--one-half of what we get in Congress. That is not right, that is not fair, and that is contrary to what I have heard most of my colleagues rhetorically say over the last month, and even the last couple of years, about the intent. We cannot have it both ways. It is either going to be only half as good under S. 1 for senior citizens as it is for Members of Congress or it is going to be as good as Members of Congress receive under the Durbin amendment. Do we have the resources? Yes, we have the resources. We surely had plenty of resources when I came to the Senate 2\1/2\ years ago, surpluses for a decade, as far as the eye could see. Now that we have been shifted into deficit mode, suddenly we are talking about a bill that is inadequate. It is not lack of money. It is a lack of priorities. It is a lack of the right priorities for people in this country, and Senator Durbin's amendment would say we are going to go back to the drawing board and do what is right for seniors and Medicare, and then we are going to turn around and do what we must to balance that equation. As the Senator from Illinois also pointed out so well, if we want to do anything to address the ravaging of budgets of people of all ages by these prescription drug prices, it has to be through the kind of structured program which the Senator has proposed; otherwise, it is just a continued license to steal for the pharmaceutical industry. S. 1 does nothing except say taxpayers are going to pay the costs of these rapidly escalating drug prices. Seniors will have to pay for a part of it as well. And then all of the taxpayers who are not senior citizens who are paying for part of this program for seniors are going to have to go to the drugstores for their families and themselves and keep paying prices that go higher and higher. I had a deck of cards made that I am handing out in Minnesota. They compare the prices of these drugs now in Canada and the United States. Aside from the exchange rates, they show a fair comparison of prices for the same medicine, same manufacturer, same packaging, everything exactly the same in Canada as the United States. The prices in Canada are sometimes as low as 10 percent of what they are in the United States, 20 percent quite common, a third--one can get the same medicine in Canada for one-third the price in the United States. Why? Because the Canadian Government stands up for its citizens. The Canadian Government says: We are not going to allow you to charge these exorbitant prices and make these excessive profits out of the pockets of our people. Tragically, our Government does nothing of the sort. This bill would continue that policy: Hands off; pharmaceutical industry, take whatever you can get. So I commend the Senator from Illinois. I am grateful to him for putting this amendment together. I am proud to cosponsor it. I commend it to my colleagues, and I ask the people of America to keep an eye on this vote because it is going to determine whether we mean what we say.

Mr. DAYTON

Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 957 and ask the clerk to report it.

Mr. DAYTON. Thank you, Mr. President. I will proceed. Mr. President, this amendment is a matter of simple fairness. It says that whatever prescription drug coverage we in Congress vote for for senior citizens and other Medicare beneficiaries in this legislation, then the Members of Congress will get for ourselves, our coverage, under prescription drugs for the life of this particular legislation. I have heard many of my colleagues say we want to give seniors coverage that is as good as we get ourselves. I heard a lot of senior citizens in Minnesota say they want coverage as good as Members of Congress get for themselves. Well, unfortunately, the bill that is before us this week is not even close to that parity. If you calculate the total benefits provided, the value of this bill is about half of what Members of Congress get, what we pay as part of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan system. But, nevertheless, it is about twice as good as what the seniors of America and those with disabilities and others are going to be able to obtain from what we are likely to pass. Furthermore, as we have been discussing earlier, this does not even begin until January of 2006. Medicare beneficiaries will get a discount card instead. Well, then, Members of Congress should get a discount card--and nothing more--as well. I think after what I heard the Senator from Iowa say, I would include a few members of the administration since they are the culprits in this delay, but I will save that for another time. With the premiums, deductibles, and the absence of any coverage at all from $4,500 to $5,800, if it is good enough for the seniors of America, then it is good enough for the Members of Congress. I point out to my colleagues who would like to keep the benefit level they have today----

Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 30 seconds to conclude my remarks.

Mr. DAYTON. The amendment Senator Durbin has offered, which we will have a chance to vote on and discuss later this week, would provide seniors with a comparable package to what we have in Congress. So I urge the support of that amendment, for that reason among many others. But if we are not going to be as generous to senior citizens as we are to ourselves today, then we are going to have to, in my view, bring ourselves down. I would rather bring everyone else up, but what is fair for them is fair for us. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.

Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I join with my Senator from New Jersey. He persuaded me to be reasonable. This is the reasonable alternative proposal, July 1 of 2004. I have great respect for the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the Senator from Iowa. I sense his difficulty because I don't believe the senior citizens of anywhere else in America will be any different from the senior citizens of Minnesota who will be, I believe, absolutely beside themselves to learn this program they have waited years for Congress to enact will be enacted but it will not be ready for 2\1/2\ years. I suggest perhaps one of the reasons is that this is not a system that can be easily put in place or administered. The chairman is trying to accommodate, if I understand his remarks correctly, the administration, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. They said this program as designed cannot be put together and administered and operational until January 1, 2006. I suggest that is pretty strong evidence that is not a very good system for delivery of these services. We have insurance companies that are going to be providing policies--they are in the business of providing insurance for people. It can't take them 2\1/2\ years to design this program. Regarding CMS or HHS, the Department itself, we hear from this administration how their management of Government is so much improved over their predecessor's. Is it going to take them 2\1/2\ years to design this program when, as my colleague from New Jersey, Senator Lautenberg, pointed out, 40 years ago they were able to take the whole Medicare Program and put that in effect in 11 months? Not only do I support the amendment offered by Senator Lautenberg, but I have to say for those who are advocating this as the preferred alternative to extending Medicare to cover prescription drugs, if they cannot get the program up and running in a lot less than 2\1/2\ years-- either 6 months as I would propose, or a year--then this is the wrong program because this is not a viable alternative, and it is not viable for the senior citizens of Minnesota or anywhere else, in my judgment. To say people are going to get a discount card--they can get discount cards already. They don't need Congress to do anything more than that for 2\1/2\ years. Just taking the figure the Senator from Iowa offered, if I understand it correctly, of savings for seniors in America, Medicare beneficiaries, of $1.26 billion the first year, it sounds like a lot of money--it is a lot of money--but there are 40 million Medicare beneficiaries in the country. If you divide $1.26 billion in savings by those 40 million, that is about $30 per Medicare beneficiary in the first year. We are going to go back with this to the senior citizens of Minnesota, and those with disabilities who are being crushed by these prices, who see them going up all the time due to the greed and profiteering of the pharmaceutical industry. We are told here we have a bill, because it is the only one the majority of the Senate will agree to, that is not going to do anything--nothing at all, under our Government, on behalf of seniors and on behalf of all American consumers of prescription drugs, to bring these prices down. Instead, they are going to get a discount card that is going to save them on average $30 a year? We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, first of all. This bill is not what it is purporting to be, which is real relief for anybody who needs it now, not January 1, 2006. If my colleagues do not support this, I think we are sending a very strong message to America that this is not a viable program to begin with, and the pharmaceutical industry has, one more time, succeeded in putting their profits ahead of the needs of people in America. I yield the floor.

Mr. DAYTON. Reserving the right to object, I ask the Senator, in terms of the motion, that 2 minutes be evenly divided for my amendment, the first amendment. Is there something different for that?

Mr. DAYTON. I object to that. I was told by the Senator's staff I would have 2 minutes, 4 minutes equally divided.

Mr. DAYTON. I have no objection.

Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I understand, under the previous order, I have 2 minutes.

Mr. DAYTON

Mr. DAYTON. I thank the Senator from Montana, and I will call three amendments up at this time. The first is amendment No. 957.

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

Mr. DAYTON. I ask unanimous consent that amendment be set aside and we proceed to the next amendment.

Mr. DAYTON. I call up amendment No. 960.

Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 977.

Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be set aside in order to bring up the third amendment.

Mr. DAYTON. I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to discuss these three amendments this evening. They will be voted on later this week, and we will be calling them up for that purpose at that time. During my campaign for the Senate in 2000, I promised a good prescription drug coverage program for senior citizens would be one of my very first priorities. In December of 2000, after my election but just before I took office, I went up to Duluth, MN, up in the northeastern part of our State, and met with a group of senior citizens. At the end of the meeting, an elderly woman, who was about half my size and twice my age, stood up and said: Mr. Dayton, if you do not keep your promises, I am going to take you out behind the woodshed for an old-fashioned thrashing. It has been then with some trepidation that I have visited Duluth in the months that followed, and it is not just Duluth. Everywhere in Minnesota our elderly citizens, and actually all of our other Medicare beneficiaries who stand to benefit from this legislation, have been waiting. They have been waiting patiently and they have been waiting impatiently for the Senate, the House, and the White House to reach an agreement on a bill, pass it, and then have the President sign it into law. During the last several years, our seniors have watched the Senate pass a bill but not the House; the House act but not the Senate; both bodies fail to pass anything; both the House and the Senate pass a bill yet be unable to agree on one and nothing passed. Meanwhile, every year that Congress and the President did nothing, our senior citizens paid the price, and then they paid another price and then another. Prescription drug prices have risen higher and higher in this country while nothing was being done to help. The financial burdens then fell harder on people with limited and fixed incomes. People who worked hard all of their lives, saved up a bit, retired, and did not have many other earning opportunities, were literally destroyed by the rapid escalation of prescription drug medicine, medicines they cannot afford not to have, medicines they cannot afford to have. People's peace of mind was shattered. Hopes and plans had to be abandoned, ones that had been months and years in the making. Even modest comforts and simple enjoyments had to be sacrificed to pay this ravaging beast of the pharmaceutical industry that wanted more profits out of pockets, out of the sweat and blood of senior citizens and other Americans. The financial security and the protections from destitution and despair, which Social Security and Medicare have provided our elderly for several decades and which was one of the great accomplishments of this society, was being rapidly eradicated by drug companies' greed and Congress's and the administration's inaction. I thought on the day when we finally acted and passed a prescription drug coverage bill for senior citizens and other beneficiaries it would be cause for real celebration and satisfaction, and I could go back to Duluth. Well, it appears that this Friday may very well be that day where we will pass in the Senate prescription drug legislation, but the way it looks now I will not be celebrating the passage of the bill that is before us right now. It is usually true that something is better than nothing, and the bill that is before us now is barely enough of something to be better than nothing. I will probably vote for it for that reason, but I will not be celebrating because there is not enough in this bill to be worthy of celebration. For starters, it does not even begin until January 1 of the year 2006. It is unbelievable there would be a 2\1/2\ year delay from the time this bill is signed into law before it is operational. To let that stand is a violation of the Constitution which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment for American citizens. It is cruel and unusual punishment for the senior citizens of Minnesota and their counterparts of this country who have waited this long, year after year, waiting for this legislation, bills mounting. Finally something is passed and they are told they have to wait another 2\1/2\ years for the Federal Government and the insurance industry to set up this program. Shame on us if we do not move the development of this program from the sleepwalking mode into overdrive. Proponents of this bill say the approach using subsidized insurance plans to provide this coverage is one of the advantages--they have postulated in the Senate and committee--because it is more efficient. The insurance companies are in the business of designing and selling insurance policies. How could they need 2\1/2\ years to develop this? If they do, it seems to me that is a very compelling reason to look for a different delivery system. Some believe that would be good for other reasons, as well. My first amendment is named the bureaucracy booster to require whatever program we pass and whatever the President signs into law to be fully operational by January 1 of 2004, 2 years earlier than the President's schedule calls for. It would be 6 months after we pass our bill later this week. It took 6 months for our armed services to assemble their forces and prepare for the war against Iraq. They were ready to go when General Franks gave his order. If this country can get ready to win a war in 6 months--and actually the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan was assembled in about 6 weeks--it certainly can start to save our senior citizens in that same amount of time. I am also troubled by the quality of the program which will hopefully be available to everyone on Medicare, if my amendment passes, next January 1. The coverage in the bill before the Senate is not very good. I don't fault the leaders of this bill who took it through the committee process. It was a very difficult task, with Members from all over the country. They were constrained by the budget this body passed earlier this year. You can slice and dice the programs and the delivery and the structuring but the bottom line is you will get what you pay for. Maybe it is better one way or the other but the bottom line is you get what you pay for. The Finance Committee had $400 billion over 10 years and they did the best they could, but the fact is that is not enough to provide the kind of coverage the senior citizens of this country have a right to expect. It provides only half the coverage we Members of the Senate and our colleagues in the House get through the Federal employees plan. The bill before the Senate requires a $35 a month premium and a $275 deductible, so an enrollee pays $695 each year before receiving a single dollar of assistance. From that point, for all of his or her nonreimbursement prescription drugs above the $275 deductible, up to $4,500 in 1 year, the program would pay half. At that point, incredibly, the program pays nothing then for drug costs that exceed $4,500 for one person in one year, all the way up to $5,800. I understand that was done for the purpose of fitting within this budget cap. But it seems unfair to have a 50 percent program up to one point, then have the program disappear entirely for $1,300 of expenditures, but come back after $5,800, for the balance of the year, when the program pays 90 percent. The next year it starts all over again. For the first $5,800 in annual prescription drug costs out-of-pocket payments, nonreimbursed, a senior citizen of Minnesota or America has to pay $3,688 plus they have to pay $4,200 in monthly premiums. So the total payment for the senior citizen is $4,108 and the program will pay $2,012. The senior pays almost twice as much as the program assistance. So hundreds and thousands of dollars of expenses will be paid by a very limited and fixed-income senior citizen. It is not a good deal. It is not what we ought to be providing for our seniors. It is not as generous as the alternative bill which our colleague, the Senator from Illinois, Senator Durbin, has offered as an alternative amendment which I am proud to work on and cosponsor. That is the kind of program I would want my mother or father to be on. It is as good a program as members of the Senate have. It would have no deductible and pay for 70 percent of the costs from the very first $1 owed up until $5,000 and 90 percent above that. That is a much better administrative feature. What the pharmaceutical industry wants to the death to oppose is the Federal Government CMS, the Medicare administrators getting involved in negotiating down the prices. They have free and clear now, unlike virtually any other country in the world, ability to just raise prices for prescription drugs and raise them and raise them. They are making huge profits. Most of their worldwide profits are made in the United States of America not only with our seniors but all citizens because this body and the House and White House will not stand up and do something about it. Senator Durbin's amendment would do something. I expect the pharmaceutical industry to oppose it to the death. I have a second amendment which I call the taste of our own medicine amendment which says if the program we pass for Medicare beneficiaries is less advantageous than the one we receive under the Federal employees health plan, the coverage for all Members of Congress, the Senate and the House, will be reduced to the same level as the coverage provided for senior citizens and others under Medicare. If it is good enough for the seniors of America, it is as good as we should do for ourselves. My third amendment is what I call my bureaucracy buster. Earlier I had bureaucracy booster to get the program operating early. This applies to all of Medicare. It would apply, I am told by the CEO of Mayo Clinic, to 130,000 pages of rules and regulations that make up the governance of Medicare. I was going to bring 130,000 pages over here as a graphic illustration, but it is a violation of Senate rules for decency and decorum. If anyone ever saw 130,000 pages piled up, they would agree. It is bigger than all the Harry Potter books, a lot bigger than anyone involved in Medicare had a chance to look at either to apply to their hospital or clinic or to enforce, and it is one piece of this epidemic of verbiage, duplicative regulation, multiple reporting requirements we have placed on doctors, hospitals, administrators, special education teachers, school superintendents, small business, large business, this plague of ever more and more and more regulations, more complicated, more lengthy, more time consuming. We are burying our society, burying our economy, burying our delivery systems to other people and we have to start turning that around. This amendment requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to come back to Congress by October 1 of 2004 with a revision to the Medicare regulations and rules that amounts to two-thirds of all the words that are now being used for those purposes. It would be a two- thirds reduction in the amount of regulation and reporting. That means we have to squeeze everything down into 45,000 pages. It will just have to be done. If my colleagues will join me in agreeing to this amendment, once it has proven to be a viable idea, it is something I would like to apply to other regulatory and reporting mechanisms in the Federal Government as well. I yield the floor.

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

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

Mr. DAYTON

Mr. DAYTON. Thank you, Mr. President. In fiscal year 2000, the Federal on-budget revenues, which come almost entirely from personal and corporate income taxes, from estate taxes, capital gains taxes, and excise taxes, totaled 101 percent of expenditures. This year, they will scarcely cover two-thirds of expenditures. The tax base of the Federal Government is being destroyed. Who will tell the American people? It is hard for anyone to discern the truth from all of the conflicting words and numbers; but the American people must learn the truth. They also must act, because the looting of America will not stop until Americans stop it. It is not too late. It is almost, but not quite, too late. I yield the floor.

Mr. DAYTON. Thank you, Mr. President. I thank my colleague from Montana. Mr. President, this tax bill is one of the most dangerous, destructive, and dishonorable acts of Government that I have ever seen. It is a shameful looting of the Federal Treasury by the rich and powerful in America--compliments of their friends in Congress. It uses every trick in the budget book to line the pockets of the upper class. It cuts the top tax rates immediately, retroactively, and permanently. It lowers the top rate by almost twice as much as the next three. That gives the most rate reduction to people who are making over $370,000 a year, only half of that rate reduction to people making over $150,000 a year, and no rate reduction at all to people in the bottom two brackets--the 10 and 15 percent rates. There is just a tweaking of the bottom 10-percent bracket, which provides $100 a year to couples and $50 a year to individuals. That is also the only change to a tax bracket which is temporary. The top rate cuts are all permanent. So let me repeat. An individual with an annual income of less than $35,000 gets a tax cut of $50 a year. A married couple, without dependents, with an annual income of less than $50,000 gets a tax cut of $100. A person with an annual income of over $1 million receives a tax cut averaging over $93,000 in the first year alone. Now, one of the very few good provisions in the bill is an increase in the child tax credit of $400 per child. That is the one provision of any real benefit to middle-income families. But the conference report drops the Senate provision to improve the part of the child tax credit going to families making $10,000 to $30,000 a year. There evidently was not enough room in this $350 billion tax giveaway to help them. They get nothing so the rich get more. The conferees also threw out the Senate's elimination of tax avoidance loopholes, as the chairman of the Finance Committee just described, and he deserves great credit for making the best effort possible, along with his Senate conferees, to keep these good Senate provisions in the final report but they did not make it. So Americans working overseas are continued to be allowed to pay no taxes on their first $80,000 of income--$80,000 tax free off the top, regardless of expenses or circumstances. They kept the loopholes allowing many corporations to move offshore and pay little or no taxes on their income. You see how perverse this tax bill is. Every part of it is carefully constructed to give as much as possible to the rich and as little as possible to everyone else. According to the Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, over half of all American households will get a tax cut of $100 or less. The households in the middle-income range will get tax cuts averaging $217, and households with incomes above $1 million will get tax cuts averaging $93,500 a year. It is like the White House is having a big banquet for the gobbling up of America and everybody is invited--except there is one menu for the rich of America and there is another one for the rest of America. The rich start with oysters on the half shells. After they are done, the rest get the shells. Then the rich are served prime rib and filet mignon. The rest get Hamburger Helper. The rich wash it down with Dom Perignon champagne, and the rest with Boone's Farm. Then the rest are asked to leave before dessert because it is too rich for them. Dessert is a dividends and capital gains tax cut. The unearned income of the rich and super-rich is to be taxed at only 15 percent rather than between 20 and 35 percent, although, in fact, many of the rich and super-rich will pay even less than that. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a headline: ``Some Investors Could Cut Tax to Zero or Close.'' Ronald Pearlman, a tax law professor at Georgetown University, is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying of the conference report: I guarantee it produces very, very low tax rates, possibly even zero. So the wealthiest Americans will pay little or no personal income taxes. This tax bill ends this country's progressive Tax Code, and it replaces it with a perverse Tax Code. It was said earlier that lower and lower-middle income taxpayers are going to get a zero-percent rate on their dividends and capital gains-- for all three of them who can use it. While we are at it, why don't we eliminate their taxes on private jets, ski chalets, and gifts of over $500,000? Most lower income or middle-income taxpayers have their dividends in tax-free accounts today. There is no additional benefit to them. Very few of them have capital gains of any sizable amount to benefit from this reduction. These are reductions targeted right toward the rich and the super-rich, the wealthiest 5 percent, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and their unearned income, the income they did not work for every day--get out of bed, go to work, punch a clock, work, come out, and go home to their families--they pay at a lower rate on their unearned income than working Americans pay on their earned income. There is something wrong here--very wrong here. This conference report is also dishonest. It is intentionally deceptive. It was required to be limited to a cost of $350 billion. That is what the Senate said: $350 billion; that meant of reduced revenues over 10 years. Well, evidently that was not nearly enough for the House conferees to feed the greed of everyone lined up at the public trough over there. So the conferees and the White House officials decided to cheat on the rules, not just a little but a lot. They created these fictions, transparently ridiculous pretenses, that these big tax cuts would take effect there, run for 2 or 3 years, and then stop--end entirely. Well, I guarantee you--because everyone here knows--Congress will act next year to make those new tax cuts permanent, just as this tax bill that we are passing today--I expect we will--contains an additional tax cost of $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years. That is the cost during that time of making tax cuts in the 2001 tax bill--the one 2 years go-- permanent. If and when these new tax cuts that are in this bill today are made permanent, then their 10-year cost will be another $1 trillion. Where will that extra $2.3 trillion come from? From raiding the surplus of the Social Security trust fund for the next 10 years and then so-called ``borrowing'' the rest of it. But ``borrowing'' isn't really the right term, because we have no intention of paying it all back ourselves. If we did, we would not be behaving this way. No, most of our borrowing will be paid by the generation who are children today and by generations yet unborn. Borrowing money from future generations without their knowledge or their consent--reducing their future incomes and standards of living-- is not borrowing. There are a lot of people now in American prisons who are doing serious prison time for that kind of borrowing. This is a tax bill that will cost about $2.3 trillion during the next 10 years that we do not have, so the rich and the super-rich can have their taxes reduced or eliminated. No wonder we can't get a copy of it. I have not seen a copy. I couldn't get a copy last night of the conference report. They don't want anybody to see it. They shouldn't. It shouldn't be passed, either. When I arrived in the Senate almost 2\1/2\ years ago, I was so optimistic that we would make lives better throughout America by sharing our abundance. President Clinton and Congress, at that time, with an expanding economy, produced the first budget surplus in the on- budget account in 40 years, and the surpluses were projected to continue for each of the next 10 years. The other big fund of the Federal Government, the Social Security Trust Fund, was also expected to run sizeable surpluses for the next decade. What a great opportunity. There could be prescription drug coverage for seniors, the long-promised Federal share of 40 percent funding for special education, and more important work, and still be fiscally responsible. Now it has all been thrown away--or given away-- to those who do not need it and kept away from those who do. This year's combined Federal budget deficit will be around $400 billion, even though the Social Security Trust Fund will be running a $160 billion surplus. That means the non-Social Security account of the Federal Government, the so-called on-budget account, which is almost all the rest of the Federal Government's operations, will run a deficit of about $550 billion--after running a surplus just 3 years ago.

Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be given 1 minute more.

Mr. DAYTON

Mr. DAYTON. The Senator asked me a question.

Mr. DAYTON. Madam President, I acknowledge this current administration in charge of the Department of Defense is entitled to its point of view. I point out my amendment returns us to current law. That has worked and has given to Secretaries of Defense, including the present one, discretion to do what the Senator from Arizona described has already been enacted or put in effect in terms of defense procurement. It also, however, says that American jobs are important. At this point in time when we have lost 2.8 million jobs in this country since this administration took office, I think this is symptomatic of their lack of awareness and concern for employing Americans and doing so whenever possible or putting them back to work. For this Congress and the Senate to take the position, with 2.8 million people out of work in the last 2\1/2\ years looking for jobs, exhausting their unemployment benefits because they cannot find jobs, to say we cannot even be bothered to try to buy American before we go elsewhere I think is shameful. I yield the floor.

Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 725.