John Ensign

Mr. ENSIGN

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 President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. I yield myself 5 minutes from the time of Senator Chambliss.

Mr. ENSIGN. Madam President, let's start over and get this thing right. I yield the floor.

Mr. ENSIGN. Madam President, the President last week talked about the need for speed. He equated spending with stimulus. He even said: That is the point, spending is stimulus. If you are going to spend a trillion dollars, you better spend it right. Ask the country of Japan, during the 1990s, when they had six different stimulus bills. Stimulus was not equal to spending in their country because they spent the money incorrectly. They had many examples of bridges to nowhere and roads to nowhere. It isn't just a question of spending money and spending it fast; it is a question of how you spend it. You better spend it correctly. One of the huge problems we have in this bill is that it does very little for housing. When the bill first came out, it did almost nothing for housing. There has been a little bit of change to it since then, and that is good. I brought forward a proposal earlier that I believed--and many believed--would have done a great deal to solve the housing problem. We all know it is the housing problem that has dragged the rest of the economy down. It is the housing sector that has effected the rest of the economy. During the early part of this decade, housing was booming, and it actually helped the rest of the economy. But it was a false bubble, and all bubbles burst, whether it was the dot.com bubble, this housing bubble or any of the bubbles from the past. They always burst. This bubble, by the way, was caused by the Government, and that is why we as the Government have a responsibility to fix it. But the speed with which this bill is coming forward--a trillion-plus dollars--means we are going to make some major mistakes. You cannot do it this quickly and do it right. The President has just put together a new economic team, including some very talented people as his economic advisers. I suggest we start over. I suggest we combine the administrations economic team with Democrats from the House and Senate in order to come up with the best ideas and put forward a bill that will actually fix the economy. When we put together a bill such as this one, a bill so complex and so large and it is done behind closed doors with one party, you are going to have problems. That is why you have seen so much objection to this bill from our side of the aisle. In the House of Representatives, this bill was jammed through. It was $819 billion. Not a single Republican voted for it, and 11 Democrats voted against this bill. The only thing bipartisan in the House version of this bill was the opposition. Now we come over to the Senate, and Republicans are excluded from the process of writing this bill. It has been an open process on amendments, but almost all of the amendments have been rejected. We should sit down and start over so we get this economic package right the first time. As I have said before, you do not get do-overs when you are talking about a trillion dollars. The budget deficit going into this year was slated to be $1.2 trillion. We are talking about over $800 billion in this bill. The Senate bill is actually more than the House bill. I think the Senate bill is $827 billion. When you count interest, it is actually $1.2 trillion. So, Madam President, when you start adding up this debt we are passing on to our children--and, as the President has said, in the next 4 or 5 years, we are looking at annual budget deficits of over $1 trillion--this is going to lead to higher taxes, it is going to lead to severe inflation. As we are running up this debt, we have to sell Treasury bills to be able to pay for the debt. If other countries in the world decide they are not going to buy our Treasury bills, this country's economy will completely collapse. It will be worse than the Great Depression. We have to get this right. We cannot get it right with outlandish spending. We need to shrink the size of the package and target spending so it is effective, so it is actually not building bridges to nowhere but rather bridges that are needed, roads that are needed and mass transit that is actually needed. This bill includes money for electric golf carts.

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, we have an important bill in front of us. We all know that. The reason is because our economy is struggling. A lot of people have talked about the jobs that have been lost, the unemployment rate rising, and people losing their homes, and the fear of losing their homes and jobs. No State has been more severely affected in this last 12 months than my own home State of Nevada. We lead the country in foreclosures. Our unemployment rate is over 9 percent now. Many people thought that Nevada was almost recession proof, because we had been in an unprecedented economic expansion. We led the Nation for 15, 16 straight years in not only job creation on a percentage basis, but also population growth. It was kind of an economic miracle in our State. Our housing prices were skyrocketing for the last decade. When that bubble burst, we were one of the four States that was affected most severely. There were a lot of causes, we all know, to the reason that the prices went up so rapidly. A big part of that, I argue strongly, is Government intervention. We, as the Government, said let's increase the percentage of home ownership in the United States. Through the Community Reinvestment Act, we said: Banks, a certain percent of your money will have to go to subprime loans. And, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we want you to get into this subprime market. Then what happened, to exacerbate the situation, was Wall Street got involved in all of this and made it all worse. We took out the person who was loaning the money and severed the direct relationship between the lender and the borrower. These mortgages were sold overseas and around the world. There was no accountability, and we saw a huge runup. While the runup was going on, everybody was happy. Jobs were being created in the housing market. It was helping the economy throughout the early part of the decade. Everybody was happy, and a lot of wealth was being created in their homes. We didn't put in a strong regulator back in 2004, when people recognized that Fannie and Freddie would cause a major problem in our housing market. We didn't put a strong regulator in then. It was blocked on party lines in the Banking Committee in the Senate. Republicans tried to pass a bill and it was blocked by Senate Democrats. Having that strong regulator in over Fannie and Freddie could have stopped this whole thing from happening. We all know--and all economists agree, and there is no doubt about this. Unfortunately, that cancer that was the housing crisis has now spread to the rest of the economy and our financial markets. The question now is not only what caused it, but what do we do about it. How do we actually bring ourselves out of this particular problem? I am going to spend a couple of minutes talking about history. I think it is important we learn from history. Not all of the things we can learn from history are a perfect model, but they give us a lot of guidance. We have a couple of examples. Obviously, the Great Depression in our own country is a great place to go back and look at what happened. We can look at what led us into the Great Depression and what things worked to get us out of the Great Depression and what didn't. First of all, during the 1920s--they called it the Roaring Twenties. Why did they call it the Roaring Twenties? It is because the economy grew. Unemployment was almost nonexistent in the United States because President Coolidge at the time recognized that low tax rates encouraged the private sector to invest, and this would be a good thing. People got very excited. Jobs were created. Everybody was doing great. But the stock market became overvalued. It was a kind of frenzy, similar to today's housing crisis or the dot-com bubble during the 1990s. Just like the dot-com bubble that burst during the 1990s, the stock market burst in 1929. That was a correction. That was a correction in the stock market. That was not the start of the Great Depression. What led to the Great Depression then were the policies implemented by a Republican President by the name of Hoover. What did he do? He increased taxes, tremendously increased Government spending, especially on infrastructure projects, and, worst of all, instituted what are known as the Smoot-Hawley laws, which were protectionist laws. It stopped trade around the world. Unemployment rates over the next couple of years kept going up and up, eventually up to as high as 25 percent in this country, way higher than they are today. Then we had the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He saw that the answer to this was to have massive Government spending. So he put into place what we all know now as the New Deal. People argue today that the reason the Great Depression continued on was because Roosevelt would spend money and back off, spend money and back off, spend money and back off. They didn't feel as though they did enough spending at the time, nor did they keep the spending going. Going into 1937, there were some other mistakes. Once again, taxes were raised. There was a depression within a depression in 1937. We have to ask ourselves this fundamental question: Even if you believe the New Deal was helpful, do we really want to take 5, 7, 10 years to get out of the economic problems we have today? The New Deal never brought us out of the Depression. Never did. The only thing that brought us out of the Depression was World War II. By the way, World War II was not the answer to our economic problems. There were severe sacrifices made by Americans all across the country. Everybody was working on the war effort. But there were tremendous sacrifices that were made--rationing of food, rationing of gasoline, rationing of any kind of consumer product that we take for granted today. And the economy was very tough after World War II. As a matter of fact, the stock market in the United States never recovered. After that crash in 1929, it never recovered until the mid-1950s. Do any of us here want to wait 25 years for our stock market to recover and to start back up the path beyond what it was just a year ago? I want to discuss not only parts of the stimulus bill but also what we have done in the last several years. First, this chart shows the percentage of Federal debt that is held by the public as a percentage of GDP--this is the most accurate way to measure the debt, as a percentage of our economy. The early 2000s started growing, started growing, but then in the last several years debt went up dramatically. The deficits and the addition to the debt were going up much faster than this chart looks, but not as a percentage of our economy because our economy was growing very fast. People have argued that the money was spent on tax cuts. The evidence is very clear on this point. The tax rate cuts, just like under Ronald Reagan and just like under John F. Kennedy and just like under Calvin Coolidge, actually led to more tax revenues because they stimulated economic investment, they stimulated people to work harder, to invest and create jobs, and therefore we ended up with more tax revenue. The problem with this last decade under President Bush is that we spent too much money. By the way, who is responsible for this spending? Has anybody read the Constitution? Congress holds the purse strings. The President cannot spend the money that we do not authorize him to spend. In this body and the other body across the Capitol, we spent too much money. There were only about 20 of us who kept voting no on these massive spending bills. There were about 20 Republicans. The rest of the Republicans and Democrats sent the last President bill after bill that added to Government spending that added to the size of our Government. This chart shows total Government spending as a percentage of GDP. We can see when President Bush took over it kept rising, kept rising, kept rising. Now we can see what is going to happen with spending as a percentage of GDP. This is not sustainable. The spending bill that is before us today is part of the reason for that line. We understand that Secretary Geithner is going to bring us at least another $500 billion, the third round of TARP. We still have to pass an omnibus spending bill. The next chart shows some of these items. We have to pass an omnibus bill. There is going to be a war supplemental bill that is going to be passed this year. Some people are saying this is just the first stimulus bill we are going to pass because the arguments I have heard coming from the economists who believe that Government spending is the answer just believe that during the Depression, there was not enough Government spending, so we have to do a massive amount of it. We are talking $350 billion for the first part of the TARP, and $39 billion was just added with the Children's Health Insurance Program. By the way, this number, $39 billion, is way low because they are saying this program is going to stop in a couple years. We know that is not going to happen. The truer cost is well over $100 billion. The second round of TARP is another $350 billion. This stimulus package, when we count interest that has to be paid over the next 10 years, is $1.2 trillion. The omnibus bill is estimated around $400 billion; $70 billion for a war supplemental; TARP III is estimated at $550 billion. When do we stop? When are we going to be responsible to future generations? Do you know what this all adds up to? Higher taxes. It is impossible not to have higher taxes in the future, and in the very near future. The President came out and said that in the next several years, we are going to have over $1 trillion deficits for the next 4 or 5 years. That is not sustainable. Right now, the only reason we have not had a complete economic collapse is because other countries around the world--they are called sovereign wealth funds--have been buying our Treasury bills. It is smart for them to do that because if they don't, their economy collapses too. What happens if political pressure mounts? What happens if all these countries say: We are not sure U.S. Treasurys are good to buy anymore. They are a little too risky now. If that happens, our economy goes off a cliff and there is no way to save it. So we have to be concerned about the amount of spending that is in this bill. It has to be responsible. I believe in infrastructure spending if it is done and it is done right. But what we shouldn't do is just spend money for the sake of spending money. The President said the other night that spending equals stimulus. That was basically what he was saying. Not all spending is stimulus. Certain spending is good stimulus, but not all spending is stimulus. We also have to be careful about the size of the spending because we cannot just keep printing money like this. Not only will we have to have higher taxes in the future, but it causes inflation. It is a basic economic principle. It is just like a family who lives beyond their means or a business that lives beyond its means or a State government. At a certain point, living beyond your means catches up with you. So we are going to hurt--and according to the CBO, they said there will be some short-term stimulus in this bill, we all know, there will be stimulus, but the long-term problems we are creating with this stimulus package can be very severe. Let me point out a couple of things. First, before I point out a couple things in this spending bill, I want to talk about Japan for just a little bit. Japan, during the 1990s, had severe economic problems. They said: We are going to pass stimulus bills. As a matter of fact, during the nineties, I think they passed six stimulus bills, if I am correct. This is Japan on this chart. These blue bars are government spending as, once again, a percentage of their economy. In the late eighties, nineties, it kept going up, up, and up. This red line is unemployment in Japan. As they kept spending, if government spending was the answer, we would see a reduction in unemployment, wouldn't we? That isn't what happened in Japan. As a matter of fact, the 1990s in Japan is called the lost decade. They had bad monetary policy, and there was bad monetary policy during the Depression as well. Hopefully, we are not doing that today. But it isn't just Government spending that is going to get us out of this mess we are in today. This compromise plan before us--first of all, nobody has seen it. It is not available yet. I think the only copy is at the desk because it was not in a form you could copy it. None of us have seen this bill. None of our staff have on either side of this aisle. Nobody has seen this complete substitute before us today. It is a $1.2 trillion bill when we add in the interest. If you assume the optimistic projections of 4 million jobs, this is about $300,000 per job that is either created or saved. It used to be just created, now it is created or saved--$300,000 per job. If the low end of the projections are correct--you always have a high end and low end; I was being optimistic--at the low end, about 1.3 million jobs, the price tag per job is over $600,000. Don't you think we can do better than between $300,000 and $600,000 per job? Common sense, don't we think we can spend the money and create more jobs for that much money? We have heard about the pork in this bill, and Senator Coburn had an amendment yesterday--I am glad it was adopted--that would take out some of the pork in this bill. The unfortunate thing is, what they did was they asked for a wish list of Governors and mayors across the country. These kinds of items could still be allowed: $6.1 million for corporate jet hangars in Fayetteville, AR; $8 million for citywide bicycle facilities in Miami, FL; $15 million for pedestrian ways in St. Louis, MO; $47 million for new bike paths throughout the country. I cycle. I like bike paths. I love to see them out there. I ride my bike almost every weekend--not this weekend because we are stuck in DC. But I love to cycle. This is not a time to build these kinds of things. If we are going to invest in infrastructure, invest in infrastructure that actually makes the economy more efficient, such as roads that are needed. By the way, in Japan, when I put up that chart before, a lot of that spending they did ended up being bridges and roads to nowhere. If you do not target this money correctly--and the only way to do that is to take our time. When we rush through bills, we are going to see bridges to nowhere, we are going to see bicycle paths that people feel good about riding, but it is not going to help the economy. We need to take our time. If we rush through this bill, I believe we are going to have some very serious regrets in the years to come. We are going to have inflation. We are going to have to have higher taxes, and in the long run, we are going to do a huge amount of damage to our economy. Let's get together. Let's sit down, not as Republicans and Democrats but as Americans. That is the way the process should have been done in the first place. I have told the folks on the other side that if they want a bipartisan bill, they need to start in a bipartisan fashion. The President said he wanted a bipartisan process. You don't bring a Democratic bill from the House of Representatives, jam it through here, send it over to the House with no Republican input in either the House or the Senate, and then just allow amendments to happen but not at the crafting of the bill. I believe this stimulus package could have been put together with Republicans and Democrats and probably had 80 votes in the Senate because neither side has all the right ideas. Neither side does. Our side doesn't have all the right ideas; their side doesn't have all the right ideas. So to put the best ideas together, we should have sat down together, taken our time, and gotten this thing right. Mr. President, $1 trillion is not something where you can afford to blow it all. If you don't get $1 trillion right, you have made a massive mistake that you may not be able to recover from. That is why we need to slow down and do what is right for this country. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, without a doubt, the collapse of the housing market is at the root of the economic crisis we are facing in our country. Every single American is being affected by this. A few short years ago in Nevada, housing prices were through the roof. If you were in the market for a home, you had to act quickly and you had to plan on being in a bidding war. For a while, it seemed there were more realtors and mortgage brokers than blackjack dealers in Las Vegas. The housing storm blew through many communities in our country at high force, and the aftermath has been brutal. If you do not live in an area with a lot of foreclosures, let me describe the situation. You drive home from work to find one home--or maybe several homes--in your neighborhood with a dead lawn. That is the first sign. Then the ``For Sale, Bank Owned'' sign pops up on the lawn. But the most painful part is when you find out how much the foreclosed home down the street from yours is going for. It is part of the reason consumer confidence is at such an all-time low. When you find out that the biggest investment you personally have, the property that gives you leverage in this economy, is worth less than what you bought it for, it creates a sense of panic. Much worse off are the people who have lost jobs, have been unable to pay their mortgages, and soon found themselves losing their homes. Nevada leads the Nation in foreclosure rates, so these stories are reality for too many of my constituents and too many other families across the United States. If we don't figure out a way to get this housing market back on track, nothing we do in the name of economic stimulus will matter. It has to be our number one priority. If we can fix the problem--and the problem is housing--then we have a chance to fix our economy. To do that, we absolutely must increase home sales and decrease foreclosures. It sounds like an impossible task in light of the current economic climate, but if we do not succeed, our economy will continue to crumble under the weight of the failed housing market. We really do not have a choice. I have a plan that will jump-start the housing market and breathe life back into our economy. It is very simple. A lower mortgage rate will provide more than 40 million households in the United States who are creditworthy or who have a Fannie Mae- or Freddie Mac-backed loan with what amounts to a $400-a-month tax cut for the next 30 years. Here is how it works. American homeowners would be able to refinance their current mortgages or finance the purchase of a home for somewhere between 4 and 4.5 percent. Homeowners who hear about this proposal immediately begin to do the math. You can literally see their eyes light up as they realize how this will benefit them. Imagine saving $400 per month on a fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage. This will save $150,000 over the total term of their mortgage. That $400 a month will make a huge difference in the budgets of most families. By the way, think of the stimulus effect. If you send a one-time check of $500 to somebody, they will be unsure whether that is going to be there in the future. Remember, we did this last year and found out what happened: people spent only 12 cents out of every dollar. It did not help the economy that much. It just added to the deficit. Instead, people saved the money because they saw tougher economic times ahead. They paid down some of their credit card debt, but they didn't go out there and spend it in the economy to generate economic activity. So just think of what a family could do with the kind of savings my amendment would provide. That is almost $5,000 per year that you could count on for the next 30 years. You could build that into your budget and you could increase your economic activity with that. Now, banks would issue these Government-backed lower fixed-rate mortgages on primary residences, and they would be available between now and the end of 2010. This new lower rate would be based on the historic spread between the rates of the 10-year Treasury bill and the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. We have limited the cost of the program to $300 billion. But the economists who have looked at this think the cost will be dramatically less. If you multiply this out across the country, it is over $6 trillion in savings for the American people over the next 30 years. So the Government invests $300 billion, and Americans save, over the next 30 years, $6 trillion. That is a pretty good return on our investment, I would say. It is also time to expand the current tax credit for first-time home buyers. We need to encourage every potential creditworthy homebuyer to jump into the market. We should expand the existing credit to cover all homebuyers and cover all properties, not just vacant or foreclosed properties. That is why I strongly supported Senator Isakson's proposal to increase the credit to $15,000. Well, since our proposal is a substitute, we have actually incorporated the Isakson proposal for up to $15,000 for those who will buy a home. They will be able to claim that against their taxes either in one year or take 50 percent each year for the next 2 years. We need to have people staying in their homes. The onslaught of foreclosed properties in Nevada and across the country is a significant hurdle to economic recovery. They bring down property values and drag down consumer confidence. Privately securitized mortgages are at the core of the problem. These are mortgages that were originated without a guarantee from one of the government-sponsored enterprises. They account for more than 50 percent of the foreclosure starts despite accounting for only about 15 percent of all the outstanding mortgages. So my bill, the Fix Housing First Act, includes temporary incentives for privately held, securitized mortgages to be modified. That would allow homeowners facing foreclosure to pay lower monthly payments and to stay in their homes. It also provides temporary legal protection for those who do loan workouts in good faith. These two steps eliminate the economic and legal barriers that are currently preventing many homeowners from modifying their loans. This will have a huge impact on families who may be slightly underwater on their loans but who are anxious to stay in their homes. Unfortunately, more than 860,000 properties were repossessed last year alone. That means that nearly 1 million families lost their homes. It was easy for a while to blame irresponsible homeowners for taking out risky loans and gaming the system, but the cancer caused by the housing crisis has spread to every aspect of our economy--the financial markets, employment, the auto industry, retailers, State budgets, and local budgets. The list goes on and on. If we want to heal our economy, we have to start first with housing. My proposal--by the way, I call it ``my'' proposal just because I happen to be the lead author. Many people have worked to put this proposal together. Our proposal will fix housing. It is the most comprehensive of any of the pieces of legislation out here. It is the most comprehensive piece of legislation to fix the housing crisis in the United States. But along with addressing the housing market, we also need to do properly targeted tax relief for families and small businesses. The underlying bill has some good proposals in it. They are, unfortunately, a small part of the package. But we have incorporated some of those good ideas into our amendment. If there is a good idea out there, let's do it in a bipartisan fashion. That is the way we should have done this bill in the first place. That is what the President called on us to do. Unfortunately, the Democrats in the House of Representatives decided to cut Republicans out of the process, and the Democrats in the Senate decided to cut Republicans out when we were crafting this bill. It is unfortunate, but that is what happened. It is not too late, though. We can sit down and take good Republican ideas and take good Democratic ideas and help the American people out of this terrible economic morass we are in. I believe American taxpayers deserve a break. American families, especially working-class families, need a tax break. So what we have done in our bill is taken the two lowest marginal rates and we have cut them. The 10-percent bracket would be cut to 5 percent, and the 15- percent bracket would be cut to 10 percent. The average combined benefit of these cuts for middle-class families would be about $3,200 per year for each of the next 2 years. As I mentioned before, we also need to give small business a major boost. Small business creates 80 percent of the jobs. We need to encourage small businesses. It is not Government that grows us out of every recession, it is small business. That is why this engine of our economy needs some fuel. Extending bonus depreciation, eliminating capital gains taxes for startups and certain small businesses, and investing in broadband access are all measures that will spur job creation and help get this country back on its feet. Finally, the Fix Housing First Act eliminates the laundry list of wasteful spending items in the current stimulus bill. There is also a large list of spending items that some of us may support. Many are new spending programs. But at a time when our country is facing a fiscal as well as a financial crisis, if we are going to have new programs, we ought to eliminate old, wasteful programs. The underlying bill does none of that. Mr. President, Americans are hurting right now. So many have lost their jobs, lost their homes, and they need help. They need us. We have a role to play here. We need to put confidence back into consumers across America so they can start getting back involved in the economy. They understand that a $1.2 trillion spending bill is not the answer. That is why we are seeing support of this bill go down in the polls each day. By the way, the bill is not getting smaller. Each day we vote on amendments, it gets larger and larger and the interest on the bill gets larger too. So I challenge my colleagues, if you do not like the approach we have taken, let us sit down and do it right. Consider the TARP funds that were spent. We were told if we didn't do it that week, the whole economy was going to collapse. When we rush things through, we make mistakes. And we have seen the mistakes with the TARP fund. You see the headlines all the time: $20 billion in bonuses for executives who took money from TARP. And there are all kinds of newspaper stories here and there about the abuses committed with TARP funds. Let's not make the same mistake by rushing through this bill. There is an artificial deadline that has been set on this bill--and that is exactly what it is. Should we act quickly? Yes. But doing something wrong quickly does not make it right. Yet that is what some people seem to be saying. I urge us to do what is right for the American people, and let us join together as Americans and figure out what we need to do. Let us take good ideas from both sides and let us help fix the American economy. I yield the floor.

Mr. ENSIGN. Will the chairman of the Finance Committee mind if I go second so I can answer any of the charges that may come out?

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, that is absolutely incorrect. The mortgage interest we target is between 4 and 4.5 percent. Right now in the market, it would be between 4 and 4.5 percent. We capped the program at $300 billion. It is impossible to do what the Senator from New York said because we put a cap on it. It could cost no more than that. The Treasury cannot authorize any more than that. Regarding the second untruth he just spoke--this amendment is not just for millionaires. These are for homes that are not above the conforming loan limit, so it is no home over $729,000. Only homes under that would qualify for it. We have over 600 organizations that build homes in this country-- plumbers, cabinetmakers, homebuilders, and everything else--that support this amendment. This amendment will get the housing industry going in the country. And it is not just about lowering interest rates--another untruth said by the Senator from New York. We also do foreclosure mitigation because we help modify loans for those homes that are underwater right now. There are tax credits for businesses to get the economy going. We fix housing first, and then we get the economy going. I urge a ``yea'' vote on this amendment.

Mr. ENSIGN. I would rather the chairman of the Finance Committee go first.

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, through the Chair, I ask the chairman of the Finance Committee if I would be allowed to ask unanimous consent, not for a time agreement, but for an agreement on the order of speakers on our side, going back and forth with the majority, so that they would have an idea of the order.

Mr. ENSIGN. I move to waive the applicable provisions with respect to my amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. That is correct, this is a 30-year fixed. This is not an adjustable rate mortgage where there are catches and in a couple of years it is going to go up again and I am going to have to worry about that. This is a 30-year fixed mortgage that can be very significant to the average family's budget. We believe this is going to be one of the big fixes. You combine this with the other proposals, such as Senator Isakson's proposal, and the other things Senator McCain and Senator Martinez have come in with, with mitigation for those who are underwater--ours does some for houses that are underwater if they are backed by Fannie and Freddie right now. But all of the proposals together--I believe we can do exactly what we say needs to be done, and that is fix housing first. But our proposal also takes out all of the spending in the bill that does not create jobs. We still have tax incentives in there for families and small businesses to create jobs, but we take out all of the $200 billion in new entitlement spending, all of the other 34 new programs that are created. There are some worthy programs in there that most of us would support. At this time, we should not be spending money on new programs, especially without eliminating other programs. We believe this is fiscally responsible. It is going to help the economy. It is going to help the housing problem. I appreciate your leadership, Senator Alexander, for bringing this colloquy together so we can talk about the underlying problem.

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

Mr. ENSIGN. The case has been made that we need to fix housing first because it is the underlying cancer that is affecting our economy, and that cancer is spreading to other parts of the economy. If we don't fix the underlying problem, it will not matter what we do with the rest of the spending bill. The spending bill will not help the economy. It is going to continue to get worse and worse. If home values continue to go down, no amount of money will help. We will have to have three or four TARP funds, trillions of dollars, and it is not going to help because we have not fixed the underlying problem. Several of us got together. I happen to be the lead author on the bill, but this is really a compilation of many minds trying to fix housing. We have incorporated one of the ideas from Senator Isakson. I will let him describe that. One of the hallmarks of the bill is we try to fix housing in the bill. We eliminate the wasteful spending, and we have some targeted tax credits for families and small businesses to create jobs. We try to take care of the whole package, and we do it in a fiscally responsible way, so the total cost will be under $500 billion. It is not the $1.1 trillion the other side of the aisle has put forward. Such spending would put a tremendous burden on future generations. What we have said is that we are going to allow anybody who has at least a 5-percent equity in their home, or if they already have a Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac-backed loan, would be able to refinance at about 4 to 4.2 percent interest. The average American family who refinances will save over $400 a month. That is not a one-time saving, that is a saving through a 30-year fixed loan. That is like a permanent tax cut. All of the economists have told us that one-time tax rebates give a little bit of stimulus, but they cost more in the long run. Permanent tax relief is really what stimulates the economy. If a family only receives a one-time check, all they are going to do is pay down debt or save the money. But if they know they have over $400 per month, that is something they can count on. They can budget that. They can start spending that money. That will actually help stimulate the economy. The economists who have done the studies are Glenn Hubbard and Christopher Mayer. They said this proposal will stabilize housing prices next year because they expect housing prices to go down by about 12 percent. If you lower interest rates on the average of about 1 percent, that historically has meant housing prices will rise about 7 to 8 percent. If we can get them down about a point and a half, they figure, instead of going down by 12 percent, housing prices next year will stabilize. We all know that if you do not stabilize housing prices in the United States, the economy is going to continue to go down. I see the Presiding Officer from Colorado. Colorado is one of those States that is having pretty severe housing problems now. These housing problems started in my State, Nevada, and in Arizona, Florida, and California. They have spread to the rest of the country, so we need to fix this problem. We have also put a limit on it. This is not for the rich. This is for loans of $750,000 or less. That is going to take care of about 40 million Americans. That is what this takes care of, 40 million people refinancing their homes--40 million households, not Americans--40 million households getting on average of over $400 a month. Put the numbers to that. That is a huge amount of money.

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, while we are waiting, may I lay down my amendment?

Mr. ENSIGN. I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendments be set aside. I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, first of all, there is not fungibility this time. Senator Boxer and I worked very closely to make sure there were very tight uses of the money, and there is going to be IRS audits afterward to make sure they use the money exactly how the bill specifies. The other thing is the distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee was trying to point out the companies repatriated money and then laid off workers, and he was trying to point out that was somehow a causative effect. It had nothing to do with it. Ford repatriated $1 billion almost and laid off 30,000 to 40,000 employees. OK. Ford had a lot of other problems. These companies had a lot of other problems. Hewlett-Packard had huge problems going on, and the repatriation made it a lot better, so they ended up in a short period of time laying off some people, but in the long run they ended up increasing American employment over the next several years because they were in a better financial position. That is the way our companies are today. You could take a lot of other companies during that same period of time that did not repatriate a dollar and laid off people. So what did repatriation have to do with anything? Now, the chairman of the Finance Committee brought up that it is a question of fairness, that U.S. companies doing business overseas would only have to pay at a 5.25-percent tax rate on the money they made overseas, while companies in the United States pay a 35-percent corporate tax rate. Well, I will join you right now in lowering the corporate tax rate in the United States. I will join you hand in hand to lower it. By the way, if you lower it, you do not have to do the repatriation amendment. As a matter of fact, they tell us that at somewhere between a 20-percent and 25-percent corporate tax rate, you do not have to do repatriation because then money can flow where money would be used most efficiently, and a lot of this money would come back on its own to the United States. The problem is, the way the tax structure is set up today, it encourages companies in the United States that have invested overseas to keep the money there because it is too prohibitive to bring the money back to the United States. So I ask the rhetorical question, once again: Is 5.25 percent of $560 billion better than 35 percent of zero or 35 percent of a small number? That is really what we are dealing with here. So whether it is CRS, whether it is Joint Tax, they just do not seem to get it. The outside economists get it. They understand it. That is why their studies show 2 million jobs will be created this time, maybe more than that. Actually, Shapiro actually says it will be about 2.6 million jobs created or saved with this amendment. So I think the facts are clearly on our side on this issue. Whether it is a fairness issue or whatever, the bottom line is we want to help the United States of America. The last point I will make is, if you did nothing with this money-- absolutely zero--if we required nothing except for the money to come back to the United States and come in to our banks, wouldn't that be a good thing right now? Common sense: Our banks need capital. We need liquidity in the United States. Let's try to follow this simple formula: In order to have employees, you must first have employers. OK. Are you with me so far? In order to have employers, you have to have capital. Mr. President, $560 billion in capital leads to a lot of employees. That is capitalism, folks. You need capital to have employees. It is a simple formula. Let's get this right. I yield the floor.

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, first of all, to set the record straight, Senators Bingaman and Kerry both voted no the last time. Several other things. The Senator from North Dakota said he would like all Americans to pay a 5-percent income tax, such as in this bill. Well, that means that he would raise taxes on 40 million Americans who pay no income tax today. Let's get the facts clear. Last time, $360 billion came back into the country and created about 2 million jobs. This time, more money is going to come back. Almost double, about $565 billion the estimates are, is going to come back this time. We have to ask ourselves this commonsense question. The opponents would argue the money came back last time and no jobs were created. From a commonsense perspective, if the companies did not do anything that they said they were going to do last time, if money is in the United States--you need capital to create jobs. Right now we have a banking system that does not have capital. Capital markets are shut down. Guess what? Jobs are not being created because there is no capital to invest to create jobs. If $360 billion came back last time and $565 billion is going to come back this time, doesn't anybody with any kind of common sense know jobs are going to be created with that? We have to get real. Put your thinking caps on. I don't care what Joint Tax says. I don't care what the CRS says. Put your commonsense thinking cap on, and we are going to have a good piece of legislation if we adopt this amendment. I encourage all of us to vote in a bipartisan fashion for this bipartisan amendment. I yield the floor and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ENSIGN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ENSIGN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ENSIGN. I raise a point of order on this amendment.

Mr. ENSIGN. Is it subject to a point of order? I believe it is, and I make a budget point of order.

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, what is the regular order? Amendment No. 178

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, how much time is on the opposition side?

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, I wish to make a couple points. Once again, I wish to get back to some common sense. Is it better for the money to be overseas, or is it better for the money to be in the United States? If it is overseas, it creates jobs. If it is in the United States, it can create jobs in the United States. That is the bottom line. On the chart my friend from California showed earlier, the money was not coming back to the United States in any significant amounts until we passed the 2004 ``Invest in the USA Act.'' And then the next year, $360 billion came back to the United States. After that, it went back down as far as the money coming back into the United States. By common sense, we have to know that the money is not going to come back to the United States. By doing this, we are not encouraging companies to go overseas. Quite frankly--and I said to my friend, the chairman of the Finance Committee--if he wants to lower the corporate tax rate, I would join him right now. As a matter of fact, I may be offering an amendment to do that because I believe that our corporate tax rate, being the second highest in the industrialized world, is too high, and it encourages other companies to go overseas. But we cannot do that. We do not have enough bipartisan support to do that. Here we have a bipartisan measure. Very few things happen on this bill in a bipartisan way. This is truly bipartisan. The four sponsors of this amendment--two Democrats, two Republicans--are working together. The last time this bill passed the Senate was a 75-to-25 bipartisan vote. That should show us right now a lot of people looked at this and said it was a good idea, and a lot of people are looking at this again. It is a good idea because it makes common sense to bring money back into the United States to create jobs in the United States. I will just say, if Joint Tax was wrong a few years ago, they are probably wrong again. As a matter of fact, I cannot even believe the last year they scored a repatriation bill with a larger scope at around $15.9 billion. This year they are scoring a more narrowly tailored version at almost $29 billion. In one year, they are that far off, and they were totally wrong back in 2004. The outside economists are saying this is going to save or create over 2 million jobs. Isn't that what we are about, trying to create and save jobs in this bill? This particular amendment, even if it did cost the money Joint Tax is saying, creates more jobs for the dollar than anything else in this entire stimulus package. We ought to adopt this amendment. It is common sense, and we ought to put common sense to work when we are trying to save the U.S economy. I reserve the remainder of our time.