Phil Gramm

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I am going to get back to the subject that we are here to talk about, the President's budget. Rather than getting into all of this argument about what is phony and what is not phony, it seems to me we what we ought to do is look at what this budget claims to do. The budget is the one issue of the year through which we define what we want America to be. In this case, we are talking about what we want America to be over the next 7 years. Let me begin by doing something that we do not do much of around here. Let us assume that every word in the President's budget is true, let us assume that we are going to do everything he asks us to do, and let us assume that everything he says will work will indeed work. We will grant him every assumption you would grant somebody to try to give them the benefit of the doubt. Let us take this budget, this great big thick document that we now have debated for 2 hours, and view it as Bill Clinton's vision for the future of America. What I want to do is ask not whether you can find on page 54 something that does not make sense, but rather to ask ``What kind of vision is this?'' Is this an America we want? This is the question that we are here today to talk about. First of all, let me just look at the Clinton budget and assume that everything works out exactly the way the President wants it to work out. I want to talk about what kind of America we will have if this happens and compare it to the America of the 1940's, the 1950's, the 1960's, the 1970's, and the 1980's. This, again, assumes that everything works out exactly as the President hopes it will. This is the best case Bill Clinton scenario. First of all, let us look at the tax burden. In the 1940's, the average American family sent to Washington about 16.5 percent of everything they made; the Government took about 16.5 percent of all goods and services produced in America. In the 1950's, it rose to 17.6 percent. In the 1960's and 1970's, it was up to 18 percent. If we adopt Bill Clinton's budget and enforce it exactly as it is written, where everything works out exactly as he wants it to and with the most rosy scenarios he can assume, we are committing ourselves to the highest tax burden in the history of the United States of America: 19.3 percent out of every dollar earned in America is going to come to Washington and be spent by Bill Clinton. These are the President's numbers and this is the President's vision. Under the best of circumstances, where everything works out exactly as the President would like it to, the American taxpayer will face the highest tax burden in the history of the United States of America. Further, under the President's plan, the cumulative tax burden will never have been higher. When you add up State, local, and Federal taxes, over 30 percent of all money earned by all sources in America will be spent not by the people who earn the money but by their Government. So this is the first part of the Clinton vision--the highest taxes in American history. The second part of his vision is social spending, by which I mean nondefense spending. In the 1950's, the Federal Government spent 7.4 cents out of every dollar earned by every American on nondefense programs. This rose in the 1960's, in the so-called Great Society period, to 10.2 cents out of every dollar earned. It rose to 14.6 cents out of every dollar in the 1970's, and then 17.1 cents in the 1980's. If we adopt Bill Clinton's budget, and if it does everything he says it will do, we are still talking about social spending taking 17.3 cents out of every dollar earned by every American. That is the highest level of social spending in the history of the United States of America--thus giving us both the highest taxes in American history and the highest level of social spending. What about defense? In the 1940's, 7.9 percent of all income earned by all Americans went to national defense. As the cold war heated up in the 1950's, it grew to 10.6 percent. In the 1960's, it was 8.9 percent, and then it leveled out at 6 percent in the 1970's and 1980's. If we adopt Bill Clinton's budget and all the dramatic cuts in national defense expenditures that it entails, expenditures on national security as a percentage of the income earned by all Americans will be at the lowest level since the 1930's, with only 3.4 cents out of every dollar going to our national defense. This is the President's vision: the highest tax burden in American history, the highest social spending in American history, and the lowest defense spending in the post-war era. If we adopt the President's budget, we will have social spending twice as high as the Great Society's social spending, we will have taxes substantially above the tax burden of the Great Society, and we will have defense spending substantially below the Jimmy Carter era. That is the Clinton vision. In addition, what kind of growth rate does the Clinton administration say his budget is capable of generating? Let me begin with a brief reminder of the country we live in. If you have ever wondered why Americans, until this generation, have always been confident that their children will have a brighter future than they had, it is because up until now this has been true. We live in one of the few countries in the history of the world where it has been the routine for people's parents to do better than their grandparents, who did better than their great-grandparents, and where people knew that if they worked hard, if they were dedicated, they were going to do better than their own parents. Here is the reason why: In the 1950's, we had real economic growth in America which resulted in job creation, growth in the value of the things that we produced, and, as a result, real GNP grew on average by 4 percent. It grew by 4.4 percent in the decade of the 1960's. But then something happened in the decade of the 1960's. What happened in the decade of the 1960's is that we traded an economy which was growing at 4 percent a year for a government that would grow at 9 percent a year, and, as a result, economic growth started falling. We had 3.2 percent growth in the 1970's, and 2.8 percent growth in the 1980's. The most optimistic assumption that the Clinton administration could come up with, given their budget, given what they are doing in taxing and spending, is that the economy will grow by a mere 2.3 percent. This is their rosy scenario. So, when you go back and look at it, what is the Clinton vision? It is the highest tax level in American history. It is the highest level of spending on social programs in American history. It is the lowest defense expenditure level since World War II and it is the lowest economic growth rate that we have had in the 20th century. That is the vision of this budget and that is exactly why it ought to be rejected. Let me address another issue: Medicare. It is an issue that frustrates me, because almost nobody is facing up to this problem, least of all the Clinton administration. The trustees of Medicare did a study last year which, given the rate that money is being spent out of the Medicare trust fund, and given the rate that it is coming into the trust fund from the high premium you pay in your payroll tax and the part B premium that our senior citizens pay for physician services, concluded that only people who were age 60 and above had any kind of guarantee of receiving benefits. This means that the remaining 93 percent of the people in America, many of whom had paid in excess of $30,000 into Medicare, had no guarantee whatsoever that they were going to ever get a penny of benefits from Medicare. Now, I remind you that three of these trustees are Cabinet officials of the Clinton administration. So this is not Senator Domenici talking; this is the Clinton administration. What happened since that time? Well, two things have happened. The commission has gone back and looked at the data and, because costs are up sharply, they have concluded that Medicare is not 7 years from bankruptcy, it is now 6, and we are moving toward 5--so the numbers are actually worse than what is on this chart. The Clinton administration claims that it has submitted a plan that will protect 13 percent of the beneficiaries of Medicare and will roughly guarantee benefits to everybody who is 55 or older. That means that, according to President Clinton's own figures, 87 percent of the people who have paid into Medicare have no guarantee whatsoever. But when CBO looked at the Clinton proposal, they concluded that, at best, it would keep Social Security solvent only for one extra year. So the best the Clinton administration could do, while telling senior citizens that the people who want to deal with the Medicare crisis are trying to take their benefits away, is give us a Medicare policy that says to 92 percent of the people who have already paid into Medicare, ``We are not going to guarantee your benefits. The problem is getting worse, but we are not going to fool with it.'' Why? Well, 7 years is two Presidential elections away so it's not this President's problem. Now, we can be sure that after the election, they are going to start talking about raising the payroll tax because if you raise that payroll tax by about a third, you can begin to come to grips with this problem. Let me remind you of what the Republicans tried to do in the balanced budget act that the President vetoed. The President went on and on about how we were going to decimate Medicare. But let me just show you how modest our attempt was relative to the crisis we are facing. We tried to guarantee Medicare for a generation. Had our reforms been signed into law, it would have guaranteed Medicare, under the current estimates, to everybody who, based on an average life expectancy, is 46 years old or older. But you will notice that for 72 percent of the people who have paid Medicare taxes, we could not have guaranteed their benefits. We have, in our budget today, a modest proposal on Medicare, with the goal of making it solvent for another decade. Some day, we are going to have to come to grips with this. The great tragedy is, rather than the President doing what, very much to his credit, Ronald Reagan did--that is, getting a bipartisan group together in the mid 1980's and solving, at least for 20 years, the Social Security problem--the President is now playing politics. He calls dealing with a third of the problem an assault on Medicare while letting 92 percent of the people stand with no guarantee of medical benefit is called responsible. The truth is that the President has not come to grips with this problem, and the real crime is that our senior citizens are being told that the Republicans, who are attempting to deal responsibly with this situation, are trying to take something away from them. The truth, however, is that leaving the current situation in place, where in 6 years Medicare is going to be bankrupt, creates an environment in which a great tragedy is just waiting to happen. In the private sector, anybody in a position of fiduciary responsibility in who let this happen would go to prison.

Mr. GRAMM

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

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I want to talk today about repealing the gasoline tax, and I want to talk about it from two angles: No. 1, the gasoline tax we adopted in 1993, where the money went to general revenue, was an unfair and discriminatory tax that should be repealed. No. 2, I want to talk briefly about gasoline prices, something that all of Washington talks about but no one actually does anything about. By passing the pending amendment, by repealing the 4.3-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline, we can bring the price of gasoline down by about $1 a tank whenever you fill up your car, your truck, or your van. Historically, Government has understood that gasoline taxes are inherently discriminatory since the level of gasoline usage varies greatly depending on where you live. The average resident of a State like Texas spends almost twice as much money on gasoline as the average resident of a State like New York. People who live in rural areas, by the very nature of their living in rural areas, travel great distances and use a lot of gasoline and diesel in their cars and trucks. As a result, government has concluded that taxing gasoline as a source of general revenue is inherently discriminatory. It discriminates against people who live in rural areas as compared to urban areas, it discriminates against people who have to travel great distances to work, and it discriminates against people who live in the Western part of the country where you have more open spaces and people generally drive more. To try to deal with the inherently unfair nature of a gasoline tax as a source of general revenue, what we have normally done is to dedicate the gasoline tax to pay for roads and bridges. Since the 1950's, it has in essence become a user fee: the people who use the roads the most pay the most gasoline taxes, and they are the largest beneficiaries. Before we adopted the Clinton gas tax, we had never, since we started the highway trust fund, imposed a permanent gasoline tax that was not dedicated to highway building. The Clinton gas tax is unique in that it is a permanent tax on gasoline where the money goes not to road building, so that the people who are paying the taxes are the principal beneficiaries, but instead goes to the general revenue. In fact, if you look at the Clinton budget since 1993, you will see that the money basically goes to social programs and social welfare. In 1993, through the Clinton gasoline tax, we imposed a new general tax on gasoline-- paid for by people who have to drive their cars and their trucks great distances to earn a living--in order to pay for benefits going to people who by and large do not work. We, therefore, created through this gasoline tax an incredible redistribution of income and wealth--the Clinton gasoline tax imposed a new burden on people who drive to work for a living in order to subsidize people who by and large do not go to work. We have an opportunity in the pending amendment to solve this problem by repealing this gasoline tax thereby eliminating this burden on people that have to drive their cars and trucks great distances to earn a living. In my State, it is not uncommon for someone to live 40 miles from where they work and, as a result, a gasoline tax imposes a very heavy burden on them. We have an opportunity to eliminate that inequity by repealing the 4.3-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline, a permanent gas tax that, for the first time ever, went into general revenues to fund social programs instead of paying for highway construction. Now, everybody is talking about rising gasoline prices--the President has asked for an investigation by the Justice Department and we are holding hearings all over Capitol Hill. Yet, we all know one thing for certain: if we really want to lower the price of gasoline this week, there is only one thing that we can do--repeal the Clinton gasoline tax. If we repeal the gasoline tax today in the Senate, if the House passed it tomorrow, and if the President signed it on Thursday, on Friday morning every filling station in America would lower their posted price by 4.3 cents a gallon and everybody in America who fills up their car, their truck, or their van with gasoline would save about $1 a tank. This is something that we can do, it is something that we have the power to do, but the question is: Do we have the will to do it? I would like to remind my colleagues, and I would like to remind anybody who is listening, that I offered the amendment to repeal the Clinton gasoline tax 19 days ago. My effort to offer that amendment was stopped by the Democratic leadership in the Senate who decided not to allow this amendment to come up for a vote. The President now says he would sign the bill repealing his gasoline tax and our Democratic colleagues in the Senate say that they too are for it. My guess is, if we had a vote today, 80 Members of the Senate would vote to repeal this gasoline tax. Yet, for 19 days we have denied lower gas prices to the American people. We have denied the equity that would come from repealing this gasoline tax which, for the first time since the creation of the highway trust fund, taxes people who drive their cars and trucks to work in order to subsidize welfare for people who do not work. For 19 days, despite the fact that almost everybody agrees this is something we should do, we have not done it. Unless some kind of an agreement is worked out, at 2:15 p.m. today we are going to vote on breaking the Democratic filibuster of the gasoline tax repeal amendment. If you want to repeal the gasoline tax, then you should vote to end debate and let us have a vote on actually repealing the gasoline tax. I hope the American people will make note of how individual Senators vote, and will remember that people who want to repeal the gasoline tax are going to vote to end the debate. After 19 days of stalling, after 19 days of perpetuating an inequitable tax, after 19 days of artificially holding up gasoline prices, I hope our Democratic colleagues in the Senate are ready to let this Senate do its will. I believe the Senate is ready to repeal the gasoline tax and I am confident that we will vote to repeal it if the Democrats will just let us. After 19 days of the Democrats stalling, I am ready to vote, and I am sure the American people are also ready for us to vote. I yield the floor. Mrs. BOXER addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. I object.

Mr. GRAMM. I ask unanimous consent that the gasoline tax bill be made in order and be brought before the Senate at this point.

Mr. GRAMM. Senator Dole--reclaiming my time----

Mr. GRAMM. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. GRAMM. Well, when he comes back maybe he could moderate this dispute we are having.

Mr. GRAMM. Under the proposal that I am making--I believe in free speech. So I think if people want to get together and talk about any legal act between two consenting adults, they ought to be able to do it. It is an amazing thing to me that two consenting adults can engage in any kind of activity other than industry, commerce, work, investment, job creation, but when they try to do those things they stand either naked before the world in terms of protection from our Government or they are impeded. If they want to do any other thing as consenting adults, they have a right to do it. I have never understood that. But there are many things that I do not understand. Finally, I see two of our other colleagues are here. I want to yield the floor, but here is my point. For 2 weeks we have been trying to repeal the tax on gas. It is a simple issue. It is not a complicated issue. You either want to repeal the 4.3-cent-per-gallon tax or you do not. I do. A few people say they do not. Most people say they do. But yet we do not get a vote on it. I am simply frustrated about it. But I have been frustrated before. But I just hope people will make note of the fact that even though for 2 weeks we have been talking about it, even though for 2 weeks people say they are for it, for 2 weeks we have not been able to do it. I hope that something can be worked out. I certainly, for my part--this is a decision that will be made by the majority leader and the minority leader--but I am perfectly willing to see votes on other issues. I want a vote on repealing the gasoline tax. I hope something can be worked out. I yield the floor. Mr. INHOFE addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. I will go back to the Budget Committee. My colleague says all they want is an amendment to assure that if we repeal this tax it is passed along to the consumer. I ask unanimous consent that the gasoline tax bill be the pending business of the Senate, that there be one amendment in order, to be offered by a minority Member to guarantee a passthrough to the consumer, and that debate on that amendment occur within an hour, and that there then be a final vote on the passage of the gasoline tax.

Mr. GRAMM. Reserving the right to object, I would ask to amend that unanimous-consent request to say that the bill be brought up and that the gasoline tax be in order and that there be 1 hour equally divided on the gasoline tax.

Mr. GRAMM. My point is, the gas tax is collected by filling stations. They collect the tax. And they remit it to the Government. The average filling station in my State collects about $300,000 of gasoline taxes a year. If we want to lower prices, the quickest way to do it is to repeal that tax. Let me touch on a couple of other things here. Our colleague says, 96 percent of companies are engaged in some form of joint work between management and labor. That is not the point. The point is, the National Labor Relations Board is now denying companies that ability. What we want to do is to guarantee that workers and management on a voluntary basis can meet together and talk about things like safety and health and productivity.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago today, I attempted to offer an amendment repealing the 1993 4.3-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax. Two weeks ago today, the Democrats objected to that amendment coming up, and we find ourselves in a situation where, all over America, people are talking about the rising cost of gasoline and diesel fuel. The President now says he is in favor of the repeal. Our Democratic colleagues say they are in favor of it. But yet 2 weeks after I tried to offer this amendment, we have yet to get an opportunity to vote on it. When I tried to offer the amendment, our Democratic colleagues said, ``Well, we want to vote on the minimum wage.'' So Senator Dole said: ``OK, let us vote on the gasoline tax, and let us vote on minimum wage with a relevant amendment if the Democrats want to offer an amendment to try to guarantee a pass-through on the gas tax.'' The majority leader said that he would allow that amendment to be offered. If they come up with a reasonable amendment, we will support that amendment. But the majority leader said that, with the minimum wage bill, he would like to try to do something about an absurd situation which has had the effect of preventing workers and managers from using the teamwork approach which has increased productivity all over the world. The National Labor Relations Board has come in and denied employers and employees the ability to meet and talk together about such issues as company softball teams, appropriate work clothing for pregnant women, and other issues involving quality, efficiency and productivity because the union bosses believe that somehow their power is diminished if people who work for companies and people who run companies learn how to work together. So, as a result, we are in a situation where the American people continue to await a repeal of the gas tax. I do not have any doubt in my mind that if we had a vote on repealing the gas tax this afternoon, 75 Members of the Senate, minimum, would vote for it. The Democrats say they want to raise the minimum wage. The majority leader says: ``Great, we will give you that vote.'' Yet, here we are where people are affected by rising gas prices, where we have the ability through legislative action to reduce the cost of a tank of gasoline when working families fill up their car or their truck or their van--about $1 for every fillup. Yet, for 2 weeks nothing has happened. I wanted to come over today to express my frustration. I think we ought to bring up the gasoline tax repeal and have a vote on it. The majority leader has said he is willing to bring up the minimum wage and have a vote on it. The majority leader would like to have a vote on the so-called TEAM Act. My guess is that 98 percent of the American people would support the concept of letting people who work in the same company, whose retirements are tied to the progress of the company, who have the shared goal of creating jobs and growth and opportunity, talk to one another. Only in America do we have an absurd system where the Government tries to stop people who work for the same company from talking to each other to improve safety and efficiency and to improve the quality of life. Yet, while we have three proposals and we have an agreement from the majority leader to vote on all three of them, we are denied that ability. While I am in the process of listing legislative agenda items, recall that we recently passed a health care bill. It was touted by both sides of the aisle. It was going to help 25 million people in making health insurance more affordable and by making it more available. And the majority leader, in his capacity as majority leader, sought to appoint conferees so we could go to conference with the House, adopt this bill, send it back to both Houses, and attempt to make it the law of the land. Now we have an objection to even going to conference with the House because the Senator from Massachusetts does not like the makeup of the conference decided upon by the majority leader. So it seems to me that what we are seeing here is an effort to prevent the will of the American people from being exercised in the Senate. I think it is outrageous when we have had a consensus in the country for over 2 weeks, when we have probably 75 Members of the Senate who want to repeal the gasoline tax and bring down the cost of gasoline for working families, when we have a President who has said he would sign the bill, we cannot bring it up for a simple yes-or-no vote in the U.S. Senate. I think it is very clear to anybody who wants to watch the process that it is our Democratic colleagues who are denying us the ability to repeal the gasoline tax. Let me say just a little bit about the gasoline tax. Many people do not understand, really, what this issue is about. Let me try to explain it in two ways. First of all, prior to 1993, we had never had a permanent gasoline tax that was not tied to building highways. In fact, the gasoline tax has historically built up a transportation trust fund which has been used to build the transportation system of the country. It has in essence been a user fee. So you pay taxes on gasoline, and that builds roads. We have now taken part of that money, unwisely, in my opinion, and put it into mass transit, instead of a mass transit user fee paid for by mass transit. So we have mass transit systems all over the country, and nobody rides mass transit in many cases. Quite aside from that point, before 1993 and the Clinton gasoline tax increase, the gasoline tax went to build highways. In 1993, the President tried to impose a general energy tax called a Btu tax. We defeated that tax. As an alternative, without a single Republican vote, the President and the Democratic majority raised taxes on gasoline, but none of the money that went into the Treasury from the gasoline tax went to building roads. For the first time, it went into general Government, which under the budget that we adopted----

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, the distinguished majority leader said yesterday and the day before and the day before that he would look at any language the minority had concerning a passthrough of the tax cut from the filling station to the consumer. In terms of oil companies, I do not think--first of all, I am proud of the fact that my State is an oil producer, as I am sure my colleague is proud of the fact that his State is the producer of tobacco and cigarettes.

Mr. GRAMM. Reclaiming my time, the point I want to make is, despite our dear colleague from Kentucky saying all he wanted to do was to offer an amendment to guarantee that the tax cut was passed through to the consumer, that in fact---- Mr. FORD addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. I am not going to modify the request.

Mr. GRAMM. That is not all that the distinguished Senator from Kentucky wants to do.

Mr. GRAMM. If I may just make my statement, then I will yield the floor and let our colleague have it back.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, reclaiming my time, obviously, before we established the highway trust fund, there was no trust fund to which the taxes could be directed. The Senator makes it very clear that we have had temporary taxes in the past that were not dedicated to the trust fund, but were planned to expire. The point I am making is this is the first permanent gas tax that we have had since we have had the highway trust fund that has not gone to the highway trust fund. Let me tell you why that is important. We are taxing people who work for a living, people who have to get in their car or their pickup truck and, in my State, drive 30 and 40 miles to work to subsidize social programs for people who do not work, and I object to that tax. We are taxing people who live in the West and who live in rural areas who have to drive great distances to work for a living to subsidize people who live in the big Eastern cities, and I object to that tax. I do not think this is a fair tax. I think it ought to be repealed on its merits. The American people want to repeal it because gasoline prices are up. The only thing we can do that will bring down prices at the pump is to repeal this tax. Now, we have had the administration suggest that we have investigations. We have various committees that are holding hearings. But the point is, if we want to bring down the price of gasoline, we know how to do it. We could do it this afternoon. If the Senator had not objected and we had brought up the gasoline tax repeal as I just asked consent to do, we could have passed it this afternoon; it could have gone to the House; they could have passed it tonight; the President could have signed it tomorrow; and Saturday morning when every filling station in America opened, they could have lowered their posted price by 4.3 cents a gallon. Let me also note that the price of highway diesel would come down 4.3 cents a gallon; the price of diesel used on the railroad would come down 4.3 cents a gallon; the price of commercial and noncommercial jet fuel and aviation gasoline would come down 4.3 cents a gallon. So we are not just talking about what you save filling up your gasoline tank. We are talking about consumers who pay this tax every time they go to the grocery store, because the cost of everything from red meat to beans has the cost of the diesel fuel tax in it because all of those groceries had to be brought in by truck or by rail to that grocery store. Every time you get on an airplane, you are paying this tax because it is built into the price of your ticket. So the plain truth is, the Joint Economic Committee has estimated that the annual cost of this 4.3-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline to Texans is $445 million a year. So my point is this. We have an issue here where the American people are overwhelmingly for repeal of this gasoline tax and in favor of bringing down the price of gasoline by about a dollar a tank. We should stop taxing working people who have to use their car or truck to go to work to subsidize social programs for people who do not work. I do not understand, when we have such a clear consensus, when the President says he is for it, why we cannot vote on it. Now, maybe they are not for it. I would never suggest that someone does not stand where they say they stand, but I think it is up to people who claim they are for repealing this tax but yet will not let us vote on it to explain to us why it is that they are for it. They think it is a good idea. The President, who is from their party, says he will sign it. But yet this now represents 14 days we have attempted to bring up the gasoline tax repeal, and we have been denied that ability. So I just wanted to come over this afternoon to express my frustration at where we are. I do not understand. If people want to vote on the minimum wage, the majority leader has offered them an opportunity to have an up-or-down vote on it. People want to vote on guaranteeing the right of people who are in management and who are working on assembly lines to get together and talk and work together as a team, as the whole world is doing now and doing very effectively, and as American companies are doing but now they are being stopped by the National Labor Relations Board from doing it. I do not see why we cannot have a vote on it. Now, I know that the people who run the AFL-CIO are against it, but I am against a lot of things that we vote on every day in the Senate. I do not know what gives them the power to dictate our agenda. I certainly wish we could submit this to popular referendum because most Americans would laugh in your face if you told them that you want to protect the ability of Government to tell employers and employees, blue-collar, white-collar workers working for the same company with the same interests that they cannot sit down and talk about safety clothing for pregnant women, about softball teams, and about jointly seeking quality. It seems to me that is an eminently reasonable proposal. My point is why not vote on all three of these things? The one I am most concerned about, the one that I have tried now for 14 days in a row to get a vote on is repealing this unfair gasoline tax, unfair because it does not go to build roads; it goes to general revenues. It is being spent, every penny of it, on social programs, and we are taxing people who have to drive their cars and their trucks to work to subsidize in many cases people who do not work, and I do not think it is right. I would like to have a vote on it. I would like to be able to cut gasoline prices and do it today. I would like, when people tomorrow go to the filling station, that they look and see that the posted price is down 4.3 cents a gallon. If we acted today, we could make it happen. I just express frustration that we are not allowed to bring it up and vote on it. If you are against it, fine, vote against it. We heard the Senator from Louisiana say yesterday that he was going to filibuster. Great, I admire that honesty. At least he admits that he is against the repeal. He is not pretending that he is for it and it is just that we are not going to bring it up and vote on it. He says, no, he thinks it is a lousy idea, he is against it and that he is going to filibuster. Great, let him filibuster. He has a right to do that, but let us bring it up. Let us let him talk, and let those of us in favor of repeal talk. And when everybody gets tired, then let us vote. We could have cut gasoline prices 2 weeks ago if we had chosen to do it. So I hope when people go to the filling station to gas up the car for the weekend, when they are going to get the kids in the car and the dog in the back and go see mama, and they look at that posted price of $1.279, I want them to remember that Republican Members of the Senate wanted to cut that price 4.3 cents a gallon; when they filled up their Suburban with 42 gallons, we wanted to save them about $2. But we could not do it because people who say they are for repealing this tax, who are every day in the paper saying, ``Yes, we do not object to it; we could vote for it; the President says he could sign it,'' but, yet, these are the very people that are preventing us from repealing this tax and cutting the price of gasoline at the pump. So let me say to Mr. and Mrs. America, when you fill up your tank on Friday to go see mama and you look at that posted price, remember those who wanted to cut the tax and remember those who said they were for it but they would not let us vote on it. If you will just enshrine that in your elephantine memories, it will serve the public interest and perhaps bring some good to the U.S. Senate. I yield the floor. Mr. Ford addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. I said this is the first permanent gas tax we have ever had that did not go to the highway trust fund. We have adopted gasoline taxes in the past on a temporary basis, but we have never adopted a permanent one that did not ultimately go into the trust fund. This is the first.

Mr. GRAMM. Well, let me put it this way, the point is, for a period of time, I was one who helped deny a vote on the Clinton health care bill. But the difference between me and my colleagues is I made it clear I was not for the Clinton health care bill. I never intended to see it passed. And it will not ever be passed. What I do not understand is all these people who say that they are for repealing the gasoline tax, but they will not let us vote on it.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I enjoyed listening to our colleague from Kentucky. I am always enlightened by his views. No one is saying that the Senator from Kentucky, or the distinguished minority leader, or every Democratic Member of the Senate does not have the right to deny us the ability to vote on repealing the gasoline tax. I have certainly exercised my right as a minority Member of the Senate, when we were in the minority, as much as any other Member. In fact, we debated in one form or another the President's health care bill for 86 days. As much as any other Member of the Senate, I fought it and denied, until we had the votes to defeat it, the ability of the majority to vote on it. But the point is I never denied doing exactly that. In fact, I said in front of God and everybody the Clinton health care bill is going to pass over my cold, dead political body. I said in front of God and everybody, the Clinton health care bill is deader than Elvis.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. I object.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, the tragedy of this thing is that 23 percent of this gasoline tax we are trying to repeal today is paid by families that make less than $20,000 a year. So whatever we are going to do in the future about allowing management and employees to get together and talk about safety measures, something that I think makes perfectly good sense--I understand the National Labor Relations Board intervened and stopped companies from talking about safety clothing for pregnant women, and that is what the TEAM Act is trying to provide, to allow supervisors and workers to get together as teams--I am for that. I know the distinguished minority leader is for raising the minimum wage. The point is we can today cut the gasoline tax by 4.3 cents a gallon, we can lower the cost of filling up your tank by the end of the week by a dollar a tank and 23 percent of those savings will go to families that make less than $20,000 a year. Can we not do this one thing to help the very people whom we say we are helping with these other provisions? Can we not move ahead with this one provision today and debate these other provisions tomorrow? I do not see why we want to hold this up. The American people are strongly for it. I have heard the distinguished minority leader say that he does not object. We could pass this today. The House could pass it tomorrow. The President could sign it on Thursday. And Friday morning when filling stations all over America open, the posted price could come down by 4.3 cents a gallon, saving a dollar a tank for working people.

Mr. GRAMM. Will the distinguished majority leader yield?