Phil Gramm

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in adjournment until 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, May 5. I further ask that on Wednesday, immediately following the prayer, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed to have expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and that the Senate then proceed to vote on the adoption of S. Res. 94, which is at the desk.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I now ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, along with Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison, Connie Mack, and Paul Coverdell, I am introducing legislation today which will expand the opportunities for military retirees to use their Medicare coverage to pay for treatment at military medical facilities. By giving our military retirees this option, we fulfill a health care promise that America has made to every man and woman who has retired from our armed forces after a career of exemplary service. Upon retirement after twenty or more years of military service, our nation promises to provide military health care to our retirees for the rest of their lives. This promise is one of the most important commitments our country makes to its military retirees. Unfortunately, for many military retirees age 65 and over, this promise is being broken. More and more of the 65 and over retirees have found themselves unable to receive care on a space-available basis at their local military medical facility. For these retirees, America's promise of health care for life is not being honored. Ironically, many of these military retirees are entitled to Medicare in addition to their military health care eligibility. An estimated 1.2 million Americans fit into this ``dual-eligible'' category, with over 300,000 of them regularly using military medical treatment facilities for their health care. The result is that the Department of Defense effectively subsidizes Medicare at the rate of approximately $1.4 billion per year to treat these dual-eligible beneficiaries. As a first step toward fulfilling America's promise to military retirees 65 and over, Congress passed my proposal for a three-year demonstration project as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Under this demonstration project, known as Medicare Subvention, over 28,000 dual-eligible military retirees are being treated in military facilities at selected test locations across the country. For these retirees, Medicare is reimbursing the Department of Defense up to 95% of the amount Medicare would pay Health Maintenance Organizations for similar care. Unfortunately, the limited scope of the demonstration project means that the majority of dual-eligible retirees are still unable to receive the treatment they have earned at the military facilities in their hometowns. The bill we introduce today will keep the health care promise America made to her military retirees 65 and over by expanding the demonstration project and by ultimately making Medicare Subvention permanent across the country. Specifically, this bill will expand the test locations for the demonstration project to 16 sites effective January 1, 2000. At these 16 sites, the demonstration project will become permanent. In addition, on October 1, 2002, the bill expands Medicare Subvention to any military medical treatment facility approved by the secretaries of Defense and Health and Human Services. This bill not only fulfills commitments America made in the past, it gives meaning and credibility to promises America is making to our military service members today. If America does not keep her word to those served during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the cold war, how can we expect America's best and brightest to dedicate their careers to serve this country in the future? We must act now to ensure that America's defense in the future will be as strong as it has been in the past. I ask my colleagues to support this important legislation. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of a letter of support for the bill, signed by the Military Coalition, which is a consortium of military and veterans associations, be printed in the Record.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, along with Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison, Connie Mack, and Paul Coverdell, I am introducing legislation today which will expand the opportunities for military retirees to use their Medicare coverage to pay for treatment at military medical facilities. By giving our military retirees this option, we fulfill a health care promise that America has made to every man and woman who has retired from our armed forces after a career of exemplary service. Upon retirement after twenty or more years of military service, our nation promises to provide military health care to our retirees for the rest of their lives. This promise is one of the most important commitments our country makes to its military retirees. Unfortunately, for many military retirees age 65 and over, this promise is being broken. More and more of the 65 and over retirees have found themselves unable to receive care on a space-available basis at their local military medical facility. For these retirees, America's promise of health care for life is not being honored. Ironically, many of these military retirees are entitled to Medicare in addition to their military health care eligibility. An estimated 1.2 million Americans fit into this ``dual-eligible'' category, with over 300,000 of them regularly using military medical treatment facilities for their health care. The result is that the Department of Defense effectively subsidizes Medicare at the rate of approximately $1.4 billion per year to treat these dual-eligible beneficiaries. As a first step toward fulfilling America's promise to military retirees 65 and over, Congress passed my proposal for a three-year demonstration project as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Under this demonstration project, known as Medicare Subvention, over 28,000 dual-eligible military retirees are being treated in military facilities at selected test locations across the country. For these retirees, Medicare is reimbursing the Department of Defense up to 95% of the amount Medicare would pay Health Maintenance Organizations for similar care. Unfortunately, the limited scope of the demonstration project means that the majority of dual-eligible retirees are still unable to receive the treatment they have earned at the military facilities in their hometowns. The bill we introduce today will keep the health care promise America made to her military retirees 65 and over by expanding the demonstration project and by ultimately making Medicare Subvention permanent across the country. Specifically, this bill will expand the test locations for the demonstration project to 16 sites effective January 1, 2000. At these 16 sites, the demonstration project will become permanent. In addition, on October 1, 2002, the bill expands Medicare Subvention to any military medical treatment facility approved by the secretaries of Defense and Health and Human Services. This bill not only fulfills commitments America made in the past, it gives meaning and credibility to promises America is making to our military service members today. If America does not keep her word to those served during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the cold war, how can we expect America's best and brightest to dedicate their careers to serve this country in the future? We must act now to ensure that America's defense in the future will be as strong as it has been in the past. I ask my colleagues to support this important legislation. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of a letter of support for the bill, signed by the Military Coalition, which is a consortium of military and veterans associations, be printed in the Record.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I thank our colleague for clarifying that. When our colleague says he doesn't get a chance to present his proposal--obviously, being in the majority, we have the opportunity to present bills and the majority leader has the right to offer amendments first. We have offered our proposal and we are trying to move toward the passage of a bill. But the amendment of the Senator would be in order if it was relevant to the underlying bill--actually, even if it were not relevant it would be in order--after we had completed action on the amendment by the majority leader. So that part of the argument simply will not hold water. But that makes it parallel to every other part of the argument, since none of it will hold water. What our colleague has said and what we are hearing here is basically this: That a lockbox is a bad, terrible, destructive, dangerous idea that could cause a recession or a depression and be catastrophic for America. That is argument No. 1. But argument No. 2 is: If you want to do it, we have a better way of doing it and ours will do all these things better. If logic could speak for itself on the floor of the Senate, it would scream at the torture that it is being put to here. What we are seeing here is very simply the President being called on a commitment he has made, and the President was not telling the truth when he made the commitment, and he desperately does not want to have to live up to it. Those are strong words and I would not say them if I could not back them up. Here is the reality of where we are. In 1993 Social Security took in $45 billion more than it spent in benefits, and under the Clinton administration and the Congress every penny of that $45 billion was spent on something other than Social Security. In 1994, Social Security took in $56 billion more than it paid out in benefits, and under the Clinton administration and the Congress every penny of that $56 billion was plundered and spent on something else. In 1995, $62 billion was taken in in Social Security taxes above the amount we needed to pay benefits, and every penny of that $62 billion was plundered and spent funding other Government programs. In 1996, it was $67 billion that was plundered. In 1997, it was $81 billion that was plundered. In 1998, the President said, ``Save Social Security first; don't spend a penny of this surplus on Government programs; don't give a penny of it back in tax relief.'' Everybody remembers the President saying that. But in 1998, we spent $30 billion of the $99 billion that Social Security took in above the amount it needed to pay benefits. The plain truth, despite all this talk about saving the Social Security trust fund, is we have consistently spent the money that came into the trust fund on other Government programs. Let's get one thing clear from the language. Nobody is talking about saving Social Security here. To save Social Security, you have to have a program to replace all these IOUs with wealth. You have to have a program to replace all this debt with investment. As you will remember, when the President said, ``Save Social Security first,'' he was going to study the problem for a year. He studied it for a year. Then he had a big meeting down at the White House, which I and many others here attended. We were waiting for some proposal from the President. What we got was a political copout which, for all practical purposes, did nothing and it continued plundering the Social Security trust fund. Senator Domenici has come up with a very simple program. It has not saved Social Security. It does not deal with the huge financial liability in Social Security in the future. What it does is it tries to prevent us from taking the Social Security surplus and spending it on something else, something that many of our colleagues desperately want to do, but they do not want people to know they want to do it. How does the Domenici proposal work and the proposal that has been refined by Senator Abraham? What the Abraham-Domenici proposal does is this: It sets the amount of money that the Government can borrow each year so that the Social Security surplus has to be used to buy down the Government debt, so that the Social Security surplus cannot be spent, and so that it cannot be used for tax cuts. The proposal before us is not very complicated, despite all the cloud of rhetoric and doublespeak. The proposal before us is very, very simple. It says that next year, we are going to be taking in $138 billion of surplus in Social Security, so that we want to set the amount of money the Government can borrow without having to vote on borrowing again, such that none of that $138 billion can be spent. That is pretty simple. If it is spent, what we will have to do is have a vote in the Senate where someone will have to get 60 votes in order to plunder that money from Social Security. This is not unlike what families do when they sit around the kitchen table and get out their pencil and on the back of an envelope and set out a budget and say: I want to save this much money, and we are setting this limit on the amount of money that we can spend because we want to use this money to pay off some of the debt we have, or we want to use this money to send our children to college or buy a new refrigerator, go on vacation, or whatever they want to do. In response to our proposal to prevent the Social Security surplus from being spent or used for tax cuts, for that matter, since our colleague launched off on that program, what do our Democrat colleagues say, and what does the administration say? They say, if you do not leave the law as it is so we can plunder the Social Security surplus, we could have a recession. They say: If you don't allow us to plunder the Social Security surplus, the creditworthiness of the Government could be lowered because we could have trouble borrowing money. In essence, they are saying that the financial world, the prosperity of America, the creditworthiness of the Federal Government will all come to an end if we do not let the Federal Government steal money from the Social Security surplus. It seems to me if we are talking about the creditworthiness of the Government, in terms of its credibility with working Americans, that the way we get real credibility in the Government is to stop stealing the Social Security surplus. In terms of the Secretary of the Treasury saying we are doing it the wrong way, the reality is, they do not want to do it any way. If they have a better proposal, let's see it. If it is enforceable, let's consider it. If they are willing to set out a procedure which strengthens our ability to stop stealing money from the Social Security trust fund, I would like to get a chance to look at it. Let me tell you, the reality is that the opposition to the proposal by Senator Abraham and Senator Domenici is, they do not want to stop stealing from the Social Security trust fund, so they create this giant ruse that somehow the Treasury will not be able to operate if it cannot take money out of the Social Security trust fund; that we are going to have a recession if we cannot take money out of the Social Security trust fund. Any legitimate concern about the flexibility of the Treasury in borrowing, we have said from the beginning we are willing to work on. Any flexibility they need in dealing with short-term cash problems, we are willing to work on. But what we are not willing to negotiate away is a commitment to stop this plundering of the Social Security trust fund. That is what this issue is about. The President's budget this year, and I have the budget right here, if we do everything the President proposes to do, most of which we are not going to do, it says he will take $42 billion out of the Social Security trust fund this year and spend it on other things. We believe that is wrong. We do not believe the Social Security trust fund should be spent on other Government programs. What we are trying to do with this lockbox is to guarantee that none of this Social Security money is spent and none of this Social Security money is used for tax cuts; that the money is used, until we decide how we are going to fix Social Security, to simply buy down the Government debt. The amazing thing to me is that this is exactly what the President says he wants to do. It is exactly what our Democrat colleagues say they want to do. But when we try to put teeth in it and make it enforceable with a supermajority vote, suddenly they do not want to do it. Suddenly, when we try to make it enforceable, they say, ``Well, we could have a recession; the Federal Government could lose its creditworthiness and its ability to borrow.'' What does it tell you when the President says, ``Save Social Security first, don't spend the surplus, don't give it back in taxes''; when our Democrat colleagues say, ``Save Social Security, don't spend the surplus, don't give it back in taxes''; and then we have two of our Members, Senator Abraham and Senator Domenici, come forward with a proposal that actually does what they say they want to do, and not only does it, but would require 60 votes in the Senate, rather than 51, in order to actually violate the commitment. In other words, the difference here is, we are not talking about words, we are not talking about rhetoric, we are talking about a real lockbox program. A real lockbox program is put forward that would require a supermajority vote in order to plunder the Social Security trust fund. Then, all of a sudden, the President does not want to do what he told us he wanted to do. All of a sudden, our Democrat colleagues have all kinds of concerns: We are going to have a recession; we are going to destroy the creditworthiness of the Federal Government; prosperity as we know it is going to come to an end--if we stop the Federal Government from plundering the Social Security trust fund. It would lead one to believe that they did not mean it when they said it. We are all in agreement if we say do not plunder the Social Security trust fund. If we held up our hands here, 100 Members would say do not plunder the Social Security trust fund. But when two Members come forward with a program to really prevent it from being plundered, then all of a sudden we do not agree anymore. I know these issues get confusing, but I think people are going to have to make a judgment here as to who is serious about protecting the Social Security surplus and who is not. We have a proposal to stop the plundering of Social Security by simply requiring that the debt be bought down by the amount of the surplus and that if you do not do that, you have to get 60 votes in the Senate; in other words, you have to prove that something extraordinary happened to convince 60 Members of the Senate to go back on their word. That is all this bill does. It is not complicated. If you do not want to do that, it suggests to me that you were not serious to begin with, that you did not mean it when you said, ``Save Social Security first,'' that you did not mean it when you said, ``Don't plunder the Social Security trust fund.'' We know the President did not mean it because in his budget he plunders $42 billion right here in black and white. The question is not, Was the President being straight with the American people? We know he was not. The question is, Is Congress being straight with the American people when we say we are not going to do it? If our Democrat colleagues have a better way to do this, I would like to see it. I do not believe we have any monopoly on wisdom. But the plain truth is, I do not believe everybody wants to stop plundering the Social Security trust fund. I believe there are people who want to continue to plunder it. And I think that is what this debate is about. Let me run over some of these issues. ``It is risky to stop stealing from the Social Security trust fund.'' That is what our colleagues say. I think it is risky to continue to steal from the Social Security trust fund because when the baby boomers start to retire, unless we begin to invest this money, there is no way we can pay benefits, and we are going to have to raise the payroll tax or cut benefits. So our colleagues say it is risky not to steal the trust fund. I say it is risky to continue to steal it. They say using the debt limit as a policy tool is dangerous. Well, what other tool do we have? They act as if we are just simply robots-- that every time the President goes out and spends money, that when the bill collector is knocking on the door, all we do is just pay out the money and go on about our business. That is not the way America works. When the bill collector comes and knocks on the door of the modest dwellings of working men and women in America, they do have to pay the bill collector. But they do not just keep merrily going along their way. They sit down, get out their credit cards, get out the butcher knives, cut up the credit cards, they write out a budget, they have a ``come to Jesus'' meeting at the kitchen table, and then they start again. What we are trying to do in Government with this amendment is nothing less than what Joe and Sarah Brown do on the first day of the month every month that comes along; and that is, set out priorities and set some kind of limit on our spending. If we cannot use the debt collector being at the door to do something about spending and plundering the Social Security trust fund, what can we use? If you do not get alarmed when the bill collector is knocking on your door, you are going to end up going bankrupt. Now is the time, when the bill collector is at the door, to try to change the way we are doing business. That is all this bill does. As far as the suggestion that if we try to prevent stealing from the Social Security trust fund, we are going to have a recession, I mean, please, it is one thing to try to confuse people, it is another thing to insult their intelligence. How can reducing Government debt cause a recession? How can stopping stealing from the trust fund send the economy into a tailspin? Exactly the opposite is true. Now then, the final bromide, unimaginable suggestion is, ``Well, what about Medicare? They are solving the Social Security problem, but they're not solving the Medicare problem.'' There are a lot of problems we are not solving here. This bill does not bring peace in Kosovo either. This bill does not stop violence in our schools either. This bill does not make people love their families and pay their bills either. This bill does not make people feel good about themselves in all cases either. But the bill does not claim to do all those things. Why don't we solve the Social Security problem today, and then start working on Medicare? But to suggest that there is something wrong with this bill because it only stops plundering from Social Security and that we have not fixed the Medicare problem--we can always find something we have not done, but what we ought to be concerned about is what we are doing. There is no surplus in the Medicare trust fund. Medicare is a very different program from Social Security. But I would like to say that on a bipartisan basis, led by Senator Breaux, we had a bipartisan majority on a commission that wanted to fix Medicare; and this President, Bill Clinton, killed that effort--killed that effort. So to stand up here and suggest that when Senator Abraham is trying to stop the stealing from Social Security, that there is something wrong because he had not solved the problems of Medicare is absolutely outrageous--outrageous. Let's solve the problem with Social Security today, and start working on Medicare tomorrow. And, by the way, it seems to me that Senator Breaux and Senator Bob Kerrey and most Members who sit on this side of the aisle are ready to deal with Medicare and the President and most Members who sit on the other side of the aisle do not seem to care. The next thing is, somehow this has to do with tax breaks for the rich. Our colleagues can never debate an issue without engaging in class warfare. They can never debate an issue without saying somehow this is helping the rich: ``If you stop stealing from the Social Security trust fund, you are helping the rich. If you let people keep more of what they earn, you are helping the rich.'' Of course, whenever they are raising taxes, they are taxing only the rich, even if the rich make $25,000 a year. The point is, this bill has absolutely nothing to do with tax cuts for the rich, the poor, or the people in between. In fact, this bill says that the Social Security surplus cannot be used for tax cuts. And to suggest that somehow, by locking away the Social Security trust fund, and not letting it be plundered either to spend, which is the real danger, or to be used for tax cuts, that somehow to suggest that helps rich people, what it does is it helps the creditworthiness of the Government and it puts us in a position to fix Social Security. But the idea that this somehow helps the wealthiest among us--anytime the Democrats do not want to do something, always their excuse is, the wealthiest among us are going to benefit. ``If we do not keep plundering the Social Security trust fund, the wealthiest among us are going to benefit. If we can't steal that money and spend it on all these programs, the wealthiest among us are going to benefit. Let us keep stealing the Social Security trust fund because, if you don't keep stealing it, the wealthiest among us will benefit.'' I do not know who these people are talking about. The wealthiest among us do not depend on Social Security as much as middle-income Americans depend on Social Security. What does this wealthiest among us business have to do with stealing from Social Security? Finally, they say they have another way. It reminds me when we were debating a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and we were one vote short of sending it to the States. We know the States would have ratified it. Our colleagues who were against it and who voted against it and who killed it, they weren't really against it. They just didn't like the way we were doing it. They had other ways of doing it. They had a better program, which by the way contained a limit on debt held by the public, the very mechanism contained in this amendment. They would have done it better than we would have done it. They killed the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It failed by one vote. It could have changed American history. They didn't say they were against it. They are not against the lockbox. They are not against what Senator Abraham is trying to do. They just want to do it differently. They think it is a bad idea and it could cause a recession and it could help the wealthiest among us and it could do all those things, but they want to do it. If you decide you want to do it after they tell you what a terrible idea it is to quit stealing from Social Security, after you have crossed that threshold, then they say, well, actually we are not against it, but we want to do it a different way. If we took their way, they would be for doing it another way. The problem is, they are not for it. The problem is, they want to keep stealing this money out of the Social Security trust fund. That is what this debate is about. The sadness of this whole deal is that instead of debating a legitimate issue, we are engaged in this gigantic ruse to confuse and befuddle the American people. We have a proposal before us that is very simple. It says we are going to collect $138 billion more than we are spending in Social Security, and we do not want any of that money spent. So we are going to adjust the amount of money Government can borrow and force that $138 billion to be used to reduce the indebtedness of the Federal Government. That is what this amendment does. But rather than our colleagues standing up and saying, no, we do not want to do that because we want to spend part of that money on other things, instead of standing up and saying, here is what we want to spend it on, we want to spend it on A, B, C, D, and E, and these are all vitally important and it is worth stealing the money from the Social Security trust fund to fund it, rather than standing up and saying that, they say you are going to cause a recession. You are going to destroy the creditworthiness of the Federal Government. You are going to help the richest among us. The richest among us are going to benefit if you don't steal from the Social Security trust fund. Maybe the American people are confused or maybe with all the terrible things that are happening in the world today, maybe they do not care. But it seems to me that we can't have a meaningful political dialogue when we do not debate the issues that are before us. If you are not for preventing the Social Security trust fund from being spent for other things, stand up and say it. But this tortured logic that if you really force the money to be used to buy down the debt of the Federal Government, you are risking a recession or you are helping the richest among us or that if you decide to get through all that, well, but there is a better way to do it, they could do it in a better way if we just let them do it, I wish for once we could have a straightforward debate. Do you want to stop taking this money out of the Social Security trust fund and spend it on other things or not? Yea or nay. Yes or no. Black or white. But you know why we are not having that debate--because our colleagues have already said they want to do this. The President has already said he wants to do this. He has urged us to do it. What is the difference between what they are saying and what Senator Abraham is doing? The difference is simple. They are saying it, and he is doing it. The difference is, they are getting the rhetoric right; he is getting the program right. The difference is, they are saying don't spend it, don't use it for tax cuts, use it to pay off debt. The problem they have is that the Abraham amendment actually pays the debt off, and it would force the Federal Government to get a supermajority vote in order to violate that principle. If you say you are for something and then somebody has a way of doing it and you vote no, what does it mean? Well, to finish and yield the floor, what it means is, you weren't serious when you said it to begin with. The debate here is between people who do want to pillage the trust fund and those who do not. It is that simple. Using this to buy down debt does not solve the Social Security problem, but we have in this amendment the vehicle that would let us use this money we are saving to solve the Social Security problem, if we could reach a bipartisan agreement. But we can't solve it if we don't have the money, and if we don't do something very much like the Abraham amendment has proposed, we are going to end up spending this money. Do you want to spend the money or do you want to see it buy down debt? If you want to buy down debt, support the Abraham amendment. If you don't, vote no but say so. I think that is really what the debate is about. I yield the floor. Mr. HOLLINGS addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the budget that is before the Senate. I am sorry that our dear chairman, Senator Domenici, is not here, but I want to say some very strong, positive things about this budget, and I wish he were here to hear it. I want to say it mostly because it is true. It would just be a plus if he were here to hear it. It has been my great privilege since I first came to Congress to be actively involved in budget debates. In fact, I remember the first debate I ever was involved in as a Member of the House was a debate about raising the debt ceiling, and I remember as if it were yesterday the House majority leader, Congressman Wright from Texas, stood up and said that we had no choice except to raise the debt ceiling of the Government, that we were in a position that a man would be in if his wife went out and ran up all these debts on the credit card and the debt collector was at the door. Today, in this era of political correctness, no one would ever suggest such a thing. They would say their spouses ran up these bills, and probably the reality would be the man did run up the bills in any case. But the point is that the then-majority leader of the House, in 1979, made the point that these bills had been run up and the bill collector was at the door, and so we didn't have any choice except to pay the bills as any good, honest family would. And so I stand up and say that the first thing I ever said in debate in the Chamber of the House was, well, it is not really the way it works. It is true that honest families would pay their bills, but what they would do is they would sit down at the kitchen table, they would talk about how they got in this financial mess, they would get out the credit card, they would get out the butcher knife, they would cut up the credit card, they would get an envelope and pencil and they would work out a new budget on the back of an old used envelope, and they would start over again. The problem in Congress was we kept simply spending money, incurring debt, raising the debt ceiling, and nobody ever sat down around the kitchen table, nobody ever got out the butcher knife and cut up the credit cards, and so, as a result, we never changed anything. So anyway, I opposed raising the debt ceiling. It failed. And then we tried to offer an amendment trying to tie the debt ceiling to the budget and saying you can only raise the debt ceiling if you balance the budget. Well, to make a long story short, from that time in 1979 until today, I have been involved in debate about every budget that has passed in this Congress or been enforced in this Government since 1979. And let me say that of all those budgets, this is the best budget that has ever been written by American Government in that period. Now it is probably not, certainly not the most profound budget. The most profound budget was the Reagan budget that was written in 1981. But in terms of what you want a budget to be, it would be very hard to improve on what this budget does. And it is one of my frustrations that everything is now so focused on the war in Kosovo and on many other issues, and we are not having any kind of adequate debate or focus of attention on the profound nature of the budget that is in front of us and what great promise this budget holds for America if we actually enforce this budget. So let me begin by just ticking off some things this budget does, and then I want to get into a discussion of a comparison of this budget with what the President proposed. I want to get into some of these areas like Social Security and Medicare that have been talked about a lot and will be talked about again. But let me outline what this budget does. First of all, this is a 10-year budget that, if enforced, will balance the budget every single year for 10 years. To sort of turn on its head the language of the 1980s, this is a budget that has surpluses as far as the eye can see. And it has those surpluses because it maintains a restriction on spending in a period where revenues are gushing into the Federal Treasury, a period where if we are not very careful we are going to see the launching of a massive new spending spree which could squander the surpluses of today that give us the opportunity to pay down debt, to rebuild Social Security, and do it right this time by basing it on wealth instead of debt, that give us the ability to let working men and women in America keep more of what they earn through a reduction in taxes. If we can keep these spending control measures in place, we can provide adequate Government--in fact, the highest levels of Government spending in American history. And yet by controlling the growth of spending, with the power of the American economy and our competitiveness on the world market and the attractiveness of our capital market with huge amounts of wealth flowing into our equity markets, inflating values, making American families richer, and inducing them to take income and capital gains and pay record levels of taxes on it, we can keep the budget balanced, we can rebuild Social Security based on wealth, and we can cut taxes for working Americans. This budget does all those things. Now, a budget is like a marriage license. It gets you into the deal, but it doesn't make it successful. The easy part is saying ``I do.'' The hard part of a successful marriage is what comes after the wedding. But you cannot have the successful marriage if you don't have the wedding. We are being brought to the altar here with a document that promises all the right things. It is now going to be up to us to enforce those promises. But the key promise, the linchpin of this budget, the element of this budget on which everything else hinges is it enforces the spending caps. If we do not control spending, we are not going to have the surplus. We are not going to be able to rebuild Social Security based on wealth instead of debt. We are not going to be able to preserve a balanced budget, and we are not going to be able to cut taxes. Now, the second thing this budget does, which I rejoice in, is it strengthens our ability to do these things. Every Member of Congress, and I wish every American, understood what happened last year. The President stood up really on the opening day of Congress last year in the State of the Union Address and said save Social Security first. Don't spend a penny of the surplus on either Government programs or tax cuts. Save every penny of it for Social Security. Well, we all know that the President was not telling the truth. We all know that in the end we ended up spending very much of that surplus. We ended up on the last day of Congress taking a third of the surplus that was meant for Social Security and spending it on other programs, and we did it in the name of emergency spending. One of the most important features in this budget is that we have in this budget an enforcement mechanism that says that if someone wants to designate an emergency in nondefense spending, they are going to have to get 60 votes, if somebody raises a point of order. My basic view is, if something is not important enough or enough of an emergency that 60 out of the 100 Members of the Senate will vote for it, then it is not an emergency. I say right now that I personally intend, if others don't, to raise a point of order against each and every emergency spending bill that would raid the Social Security trust fund. I give notice right now that anybody who has an idea that we are going to make all these wonderful promises, that we are going to promise to love, cherish, and obey in this little wedding we are having here on the budget, but that we are going to turn around and start cheating in the fall by breaking this budget by claiming all kinds of expenditures are an emergency, that they better be ready to get 60 votes in the Senate if they are going to be successful. They better be ready for a real battle, because I, for one, believe in this budget, and I intend to fight for it very, very hard. This budget puts a focus on some priorities. It basically says that even in a tight budget not all spending is equal. It puts a focus on veterans' health care, and it does it by, quite simply, taking the position that in a time when you are trying to control spending, you have benefits and you have earned benefits. The basic position of our budget is that those who have served the country, who have preserved its life by wearing with pride its uniform and fighting its wars and by keeping its peace, that even at a time when we have tight budgets, they ought to come first. So this budget provides more money for veterans' health care, and I support it. This budget provides more money for education. It doesn't create the money magically. It takes it away from other programs, with the basic idea that we ought to let the States decide how to spend money on education rather than the Senate being a huge 100-member school. This budget calls for an increase in defense. One of the great unknowns now, not knowing what the war in Kosovo is going to cost, is what is this going to do with our budget and where do we go from here. I want everybody to understand that this budget is written in such a way that we contemplate an increase in defense spending. We want to give a pay increase to everybody in the military. We want to try to provide the pay and benefits and recognition that will help us retain in uniform and recruit the finest young men and women who have ever worn the uniform of the country. Today they wear that uniform with pride, but we have grown increasingly concerned that we are falling behind in recruitment, in retention. We are having trouble, especially, keeping pilots. Now that the President has us deployed in some 30 different engagements around the world, where defense spending has been cut by over a third since its peak in real terms, and yet we have massive military deployments, what is happening is, people are beginning to leave the military. This pay increase that we call for in this budget is vitally important in terms of helping us recruit and retain the best people. Having all these miracle weapons does us no good if we don't have quality people to man those systems. We have the best people in uniform today that we have ever had. We want to keep it that way. That is what this budget does. That is the choice we have. The choice that is presented to us in this budget is, even though we are in a period of record prosperity, even though the level of revenue flows is a record level, what we call for is to limit the growth of Government spending, put a focus on areas like veterans' health care and education and defense, use the surplus to deal with the looming crisis that faces us in Social Security, and to the extent that we have surpluses flowing from the general budget instead of from Social Security, take the bulk of that money and give it back to working families in tax cuts. That is what this budget does. I believe that it is an excellent budget. I think looking at the whole package, it is the finest budget presented in America in the 20 years that I have served in Congress. Talking specifically about several different areas, I want everybody to understand that there is a shell game going on with Social Security. I want to explain, because people have trouble understanding what it is the President is doing on Social Security and what this budget does on Social Security. Let me first explain what this budget does on Social Security, and then explain the fraud that is perpetrated in the President's budget. What this budget does on Social Security is very, very simple. It says every penny that we collect in Social Security taxes that we don't have to have to pay Social Security benefits should be dedicated to Social Security. It ought to be locked away, and it ought to be available to any effort to rebuild the financial base of Social Security. But we should not spend it on any other Government program, nor should we use it for tax cuts. In fact, Senator Domenici, in a proposal that is enshrined in this budget, but we will have to vote on separately, sets up a lockbox where we literally change the lending limits that the Government faces, the debt ceiling, so that we will not be able to spend one penny of the Social Security surplus. This is vitally important because, as anybody in the Senate knows, and I wish every American knew, our Government has been stealing every penny of money coming in to the Social Security trust fund. We currently have IOUs for this money that are sent to West Virginia and put in a metal filing cabinet, but the Government then takes the money and spends it on everything but Social Security. None of that money is being used for Social Security purposes. Senator Domenici's lockbox would change that permanently and say that this money would be set aside to reduce debt, and it would be available when we can agree with the White House on a way to rebuild the financial base of Social Security. That is a critically important proposal. If the American people knew the extent that we have been stealing money out of the Social Security trust fund, there would be outrage in the country. That is exactly what is happening. The Domenici lockbox ends that forever, and it is vitally important. I hope every Member will support it. Now, let me talk about this shell game the administration is playing on Social Security. Let me say, to begin with, that if you have been involved in every budget since 1979, you have seen phony assumptions, smoke and mirrors, shell games, or whatever the words are that we use. But let me say, so that no one is confused, that in Republican and Democrat administrations I have seen people make assumptions that were wildly unrealistic about the future, about what inflation was going to be, about what interest rates were going to be, about what economic growth was going to be, about what spending was going to be; but those were always assumptions about what was going to happen in the future where at least people could say, well, it may be based more on hope than reality, but it could happen. What the Clinton administration has done is they have brought phoniness, distortion and untruth into the budget at a level which has never existed in the American budget in the history of this country. And no better example exists than under Social Security. I think I can explain it to you very simply. Here are the facts. In the year 2000, the first year of this budget, we projected a $131 billion surplus in the unified Federal budget. If you take every penny we get from every source, and you take every penny we spend on every program or giveaway, or lose, or forget about, and you bring those two together, we are taking in $131 billion more than we are spending. Now, Social Security is taking in $138 billion more than it is spending. So while we show that we have a $131 billion surplus, the reality is that if you don't count the Social Security trust fund, we are actually spending $7 billion more than we take in. So let me show it to you this way. We are taking in $138 billion more than we are spending on Social Security alone. We are then spending $7 billion of that money from Social Security on general government. Now, that would leave you with $131 billion of money for Social Security. What the administration does is it sends to West Virginia this piece of paper that actually prints out on a computer, and it says, ``IOU Social Security $138 billion.'' So they get this piece of paper, they tear it off--and it has actually been on television, and they won't let you photograph the bonds, interestingly--they tear off the perforated edges and they take that $138 billion IOU and put it in the filing cabinet. Now, what happens is, we then spend $7 billion of it immediately, and that brings us down to $131 billion. Now, the President says, well, let's take 62 percent of that and give it back to Social Security and we will spend 38 percent of it. So we started with $138 billion, we spent $7 billion, and then the President says let's spend 38 percent of what is left and then we will send another IOU to Social Security for $81 billion. So out of the $138 billion that they initially had, they send IOUs to Social Security for $219 billion. Now, they started with $138 billion and then they spent $7 billion, and then of that $131 billion that was left, they spent another $50 billion, and then they give Social Security an IOU for $219 billion. Now, any freshman accounting student in any accounting class in America would be given an ``F'' if they proposed on an examination paper such an accounting system. Yet, some of the most highly educated people in America--men and women of great stature--stand up in front of God, a television camera, and everybody else in the world and defend this totally phony, fraudulent, embarrassing proposal. I guess we all have our own standards, but I would not do it. I don't admire people who do it. I think it does a terrible injustice and disservice to the American public that this is happening. I wanted to show this graph to sort of bring the whole thing together. What I have here is plotted between the years 2000 and 2009, the years where this budget is in effect, the Social Security surplus. It starts out at $138 billion and it grows over the period to over $200 billion a year. That is the amount of money that Senator Domenici locks away in his lockbox. Now, in addition to the Social Security surplus, because the economy is growing so quickly and because we are controlling spending, if we actually do it, we will get an additional surplus in the rest of the Government in this area that I call ``B'' on this chart. Interestingly enough, what the President does is, he says let's take 38 percent of this unified budget, Social Security plus non-Social Security budget, and let's spend it and then give the rest to Social Security on top of the Social Security surplus that we have already measured. So that is how they start out with the Social Security surplus and then end up with these huge IOUs that they claim they are giving to Social Security. It is interesting because if you look at the President's plan--and this chart is from the Social Security Administration--if you look at their plan, they claim that under their plan they are building up the assets of Social Security from $864.4 billion to $6,697.8 trillion. Yet, when you look at the Office of Management and Budget figures--and all this is put out by the same administration--when you look at their actual level of paying down the debt, that level turns out to be only $2,183.6 trillion. So the question is, What happened to the $3.6 billion? What happened to it? The President says that under his system, with all this double counting of money, he was putting $5.8 trillion into Social Security; yet, his budget shows only $2.163 trillion actually saved for Social Security. What happened? Well, what happened is that none of this money ever went to Social Security to begin with. It was all a paper, double- counting bookkeeping. Their own numbers show it. Yet, nobody is embarrassed enough about it to simply say, well, this is phony and we apologize and we should have never tried to perpetrate this fraud on the American people. Now, I think we can be proud of the fact that in this budget every penny of the Social Security surplus is locked away to be used for Social Security. And when we decide how to save Social Security--and I wish we could decide today; maybe we will tomorrow--those funds will be there for that purpose. I think that is very important and I want to congratulate Senator Domenici for his leadership on this issue. I want to address two other issues and I will speed it up if anybody else comes over and wants to speak. If not, I will give a fairly detailed description of both. The next issue is tax cuts. The budget before us simply says that every penny of the Social Security surplus will be there for Social Security; that of the surplus that is left, we keep a reserve of money that is available for a contingency use which could be used for one of many purposes, and then after we set aside that contingency, we provide the rest of the money for tax cuts for working Americans. After all, the surplus we have is due to the fact that Americans are working harder, working smarter, working in a more productive way, earning more and paying more taxes. There have been several proposals to cut taxes. None of them are endorsed in this budget. This budget simply gives to the Finance Committee the ability to cut taxes. And there have been a lot of proposals discussed. But the one that especially our Democrat colleagues have talked the most about is a proposal to cut taxes across the board. This has given rise to a debate in which I love to engage. Obviously, my Democrat colleagues love to engage in it as well. This is the debate that basically takes the view, as our Democrat colleagues often do, that investment is a good thing but investors are somehow bad people; that wealth is a wonderful thing but people who create it, that somehow there is something wrong with them, or that there is something wrong with letting them keep part of it. I don't understand how you can love investment and not love investors. I view people who are successful as being public benefactors. I never got a job being hired by somebody who made less money than I did. Everybody who ever hired me was richer than I was, which is why they were hiring me rather than me hiring them. And I never resented the fact that people had gotten rich by working in America. But here is what you are going to hear all day today, and here is what you are going to hear as we debate the tax cut. We have a very, very progressive tax system in America. ``Progressive'' is really a phony word. It is a made-up word that is meant to really cloud the issue so you don't really understand. Under our system, if you make more money, you not only pay more taxes proportionately, but the rate of taxes goes up. So that as you make more money, your taxes don't go up proportionately but they go up exponentially. Our system of taxes is so progressive that roughly 50 percent of Americans pay virtually no income taxes. And they pay no income taxes because there are many provisions which were adopted when Ronald Reagan was President in terms of changing the Tax Code. We were able to make some changes with the child tax credit and in our tax cut of 2 years ago that further exempted income from taxes. But the bottom line is that about 95 percent of income taxes are paid for by people who are in the upper half of the income distribution in the country. What our Democrat colleagues have discovered is that we do have a progressive income tax. So that if I pay $5,000 of income taxes, and someone else pays $50,000 of income taxes, and we give a 10-percent tax cut, I get $500 as a tax cut and they get $5,000 as a tax cut. And our Democrat colleagues think that is somehow outrageous. But the point is, the only way you are getting more of a tax cut is if you are paying more taxes. So that what they are really talking about is that the system is progressive. Should it be progressive? You know there are many people who believe we ought to have a flat tax and that everybody ought to pay the same rate. But the point is, if we are going to cut taxes and Senator Rockefeller pays 10 times as much in taxes as I do, or 100 times as much in taxes as I do--I don't know, and I hope he pays 100 times as much because then he is better off and so is America. But, whatever it is, the fact that he would get a bigger tax cut than I do from an across-the-board tax cut is the most reasonable thing on Earth to me if he is, in fact, paying more taxes than I am paying. I believe our No. 1 priority in cutting taxes is we ought to cut everybody's taxes by 10 percent. So, if you do not pay any taxes, you should have learned in the third grade--since I repeated the third grade I remember it--that anything times zero is zero. So with a 10- percent tax cut, if you are not paying any taxes, you don't get a tax cut. You are going to hear our colleagues say, well, 50 percent, or 40 percent, or whatever the number is they choose or make up today, people will get no tax cut under a 10-percent tax cut. The only person in America who will get no cut in income taxes from a 10-percent tax cut by definition is a person who pays no income taxes. Here is my point. Most Americans don't get Medicaid. Most Americans don't get food stamps. Most Americans don't get welfare. Why don't they get those things? They don't get those things because they are not poor. Tax cuts are for working people. Welfare is for poor people. Medicaid is for poor people who are sick. Medicare is for elderly people for their health care. We have many different programs that do not go to everybody. We have very few programs in America that everybody benefits from directly. The point is, if not everybody gets welfare, why should we be shocked that if you do not pay income taxes, that when we cut income tax rates you don't get a tax cut? I don't find that to be shocking. I don't have any trouble saying to somebody in my State who says, ``You cut income tax rates by 10 percent and I didn't get a tax cut.'' I know, because I understand arithmetic, that they are not paying any income taxes anyway. So I don't have any problem saying, ``Yes. That is right,'' because tax cuts are for one unique group of Americans, ``wagon pullers,'' I call them--the people who are pulling the wagon in which so many other Americans are riding; the people who are paying for the Medicaid they don't get, for the welfare benefits they don't get, for the food stamps they don't get. Tax cuts are for the people who are pulling the wagon in which all other beneficiaries of Government are riding. So I don't feel the least bit squeamish about saying that tax cuts are for taxpayers. If you do not pay income taxes, you don't deserve a cut in income taxes, because you are not paying any. We have a surplus because Americans are working harder and paying more taxes. In fact, they are doing it today, tax day. I want everybody who is going to the post office today to send their taxes to the government--if you happen to be on mountain time, or if you are on Pacific time and you have nothing better to do than to turn on C-SPAN-- I want you to remember this when you pay your taxes: I want you to remember, you didn't get food stamps, you didn't get welfare, you didn't get Medicaid, but I believe--and the party I am a member of, the Republican Party believes--that you ought to get a tax cut. Our Democrat colleagues are going to say--you are going to hear it, so pay close attention. They are going to say, yes, you get a tax cut. You-- this person working in Los Angeles, CA, on your way to mail your check in right now--you get a tax cut. Think of these people that don't get a tax cut. How is it fair that Joe Brown and Susie Brown, who make $21,000 a year, pay no income taxes, and get an earned-income tax credit--which is really a welfare benefit--why is it they don't get a tax cut when you do? The answer is, they don't pay any income taxes and you do. We have this basic viewpoint which our Democrat colleagues find to be radical. That point is, if you don't pay income taxes, you don't get a tax cut; if you do pay income taxes, you do get a tax cut. The more taxes you pay--and God bless you for doing it, because if people are paying record taxes it means they are earning record incomes--I believe, and the great majority of the Republicans in Congress believe, if you pay more taxes, you ought to get a bigger tax cut. That is what an across-the-board, 10-percent tax cut would do. A final point: This used to be a bipartisan idea. John Kennedy proposed an across-the-board tax cut in 1961 which was adopted and became law. His famous words are, ``A rising tide lifts all boats.'' That is still believed by one-half of the political spectrum in America. It is no longer believed by the other half--and that is the half that he was once a part of. To conclude, let me talk a little bit about Medicare. There is no more fraudulent portion of the President's budget than the proposal about Medicare. Let me give Members a tiny bit of history. We, through an act of Congress, signed by the President, set up a Medicare Commission. In a gesture toward bipartisanship, Republicans--who control both Houses of Congress--agreed to appoint a Democrat, Senator Breaux, as chairman of that Commission. Senator Breaux did a great job as chairman of the Medicare Commission. It was my privilege to serve on that Commission. I remember as if it were yesterday President Clinton called the whole Commission down to the White House and talked to us about the terrible problems we had in Medicare and challenged each of us not to let the work of the Commission fail because of us. He challenged each of us to find a way to be for the final proposal. As it turned out, as most people now know, the final work of the Commission did fail. It failed by one vote. Not one single person appointed by President Clinton found a way to be for the final proposal, and they all voted against the Commission proposal. The President, in 3 months, had an opportunity to change American history on Social Security and Medicare, and in both cases he failed. What did the President do in his budget? What the President did in his budget is literally this: He said we are going to pay off debt-- though not as much as the Domenici budget--but we are going to name the debt reduction in honor of various programs. That is in essence what it was. In essence, what the President's budget does is send a little note to Medicare that says: You will be happy to know that Federal debt was reduced by such and such an amount and it was done in your name. It would be sort of like our Presiding Officer having someone send a check to his university saying, ``We made a contribution in your name,'' and then you say, ``When do I get the money?'' You don't ever get the money. What the President did in Medicare--which was one of the cruelest hoaxes I can imagine in public policy--the President didn't give Medicare a penny over 10 years, provided no additional money to Medicare. In fact, he cut Medicare, cuts that are not in the budget before the Senate. So he cuts Medicare funding over 10 years, and yet by sending this IOU to HCFA, the agency that runs Medicare, he somehow creates the impression that he has given Medicare more money, when none of this IOU can be spent. In fact, the only way we could ever provide money under this is to raise taxes, to cut Medicare or cut other Government programs. Yet the President creates this impression that he has provided this money that could be used for pharmaceutical benefits or all these other wonderful benefits. It is a cruel hoax. What we do in our budget is set out a procedure where this reserve fund, this reserve money that we didn't use for tax cuts that we kept as a buffer could, in part, be used for Medicare. Our problem in Medicare is we need to adopt the Breaux Commission report. We had a vote on instructing conferees for us to preserve our commitment to that. It is in this budget. We are going to bring that proposal to the Finance Committee. I hope we are going to adopt it. What that proposal will do, in addition to planting the seeds to save Medicare, for moderate- and low-income retirees it will, for the first time, give them assistance on pharmaceuticals. For middle-income retirees and upper-income retirees, by expanding the options that are available, by literally letting them have the same health insurance that I have as a Member of the Senate, it will allow them for the first time to have an opportunity to buy into a plan that will give them some assistance with their pharmaceuticals. I have talked a long time and covered a lot of subjects. Let me conclude by simply congratulating Senator Domenici. This is a great budget. If we can enforce this budget, America will be richer, freer, and happier. If we can enforce this budget, we will have an opportunity to begin the long process of rebuilding the financial base of Social Security based on wealth and not debt. If we can enforce this budget, we will pay off Government debt. If we can enforce this budget, we will be able to give working Americans tax cuts. It is one thing to enter the marriage; it is another thing to make it a successful one. This is a very important day, a very important budget. I am very proud to be for it. I yield the floor. Mr. HOLLINGS addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM

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

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I want to be careful in what I say. But our colleague suggested that we be honest. I want to be very honest. What we have before us is a totally phony amendment. Let me go through and explain why. Let me touch a couple points. First of all, this save Social Security business and lock the money away for Social Security, that didn't come from Bill Clinton. That came from Pete Domenici. That is in the budget before us. I want to thank Senator Domenici for that. Let me just run down the list of things here. First of all, our dear colleague brought out a quote from me about using money from Medicare. To paraphrase Paul Harvey, let me tell you the rest of the story. Last year, our Democrat colleagues were trying to raise taxes on the poorest among us, on a tax where 60 percent of the tax was paid for by Americans who made $25,000 a year or less. It was a cigarette tax. The claim that the Government had the right to part of the money was that people smoke. They get smoking-related diseases and it costs us money in Medicare. So Senator Domenici and I said, If you are going to collect money in cigarette taxes and you suddenly have this giant windfall--as one of the lawyers, I guess, of these people that our dear colleagues talk about, these rich people, said, ``This is like winning a lottery,'' talking about the millions of dollars that had gone from the settlements--Senator Domenici and I said last year, Well, if you are going to tax tobacco and you are going to impose the tax on people making $25,000 a year or less that pay the bulk of tobacco taxes--they are concerned about poor people today, but last year they were raising their taxes--Senator Domenici and I said, Well, if you are going to do that, at least spend the money on Medicare for health care. Now, when it was clear they weren't going to be able to spend it on all their social programs, their amendment died. But that is where that quote came from, if we are going to be honest. Let me make it clear that all this business about ``the Domenici budget does not provide a penny for Medicare,'' not so. The Domenici budget provides more money for Medicare than any budget ever written in American history. It provides $199 billion of new money. It funds every penny for Medicare. The President proposed cutting Medicare funding by $20 billion over the same period. So this is not about Medicare. This is about tax cuts, and it is about politics. Now, this ``richest among us''--I do not understand people who love capitalism and hate capitalists. I do not understand people who love investment but hate the people who make investments. I don't make $1 million a year. If I were really productive, maybe I would. But let me just tell you the trick behind all these charts. The trick behind all these charts is that tax cuts are for taxpayers. So if you don't pay any income taxes and we cut income taxes, you don't get a tax cut. Some people say, Well, that's not fair; I don't pay income taxes, but if they are going to give a tax cut, I ought to get some of the money. Well, ask working people. Do they get Medicaid? No. Do they get food stamps? No. Do they get housing subsidies? No, because they are not poor. Those programs are not for working people. Tax cuts are for working people. So if you don't pay any taxes, you don't get any tax cuts. Now to this business about what if somebody makes $800,000 a year and they get a $20,000 tax cut. Outrage. Well, if they get a $20,000 tax cut, it meant they paid $200,000 of taxes. So if I paid $20,000 of taxes and I get a $2,000 tax cut, why shouldn't somebody who paid $200,000 get a $20,000 tax cut? Do we have to debate every issue by trying to pit Americans against each other? What is wrong with people making money? What is wrong with people being rich? They didn't make the money by stealing it from somebody. They made it by producing something of value and selling it. I would just like to say that we get tired of having the people who are making $1 million a year tell us about tax cuts for rich people. I don't get it. Senator Domenici is from an immigrant family. I told the story earlier about him almost being born in a lettuce patch where his mama was picking lettuce. Neither of my parents went to high school. Suddenly we care about rich people and our colleagues, many of whom are rich, are going to protect people against rich people. Here is the point. Why not give everybody a tax cut? This bill does not give an across-the-board tax cut. It just provides money for tax cuts. Obviously, one of the ones that will be debated, everybody will get a chance to give their speech about these outrageous rich people who paid $1 million a year in taxes and we want $2 million. We want every penny they have. We want to put them in prison. The point is, with an across-the-board tax cut, you get 10 percent, whatever you pay, you get 10 percent of it back. If that hurts your feelings, you live in the wrong country. It doesn't hurt my feelings. Final points and I will get out of Senator Domenici's way. Senator Kennedy asked, What does this do to the lifespan of Medicare? Well, let me tell him. Nothing is the answer, zero, zip. The lifespan of Medicare is supposedly to 2008, but it is only to 2008 because President Clinton took part of the cost out of the trust fund and put it into general revenue. So Medicare already went broke. But it is 2008 today and, if this amendment were adopted, it would still be 2008, because this amendment provides not one nickel, one penny, one million, one billion, nothing to Medicare. It gives Medicare a meaningless IOU, and we still have to cut spending or raise taxes or borrow money in order to pay it.

Mr. GRAMM. Well, let me say that this is a phony amendment in every respect except one. It has nothing to do with Medicare. It doesn't have any impact on Medicare. Normally in these amendments, you have all this folderol and meaningless stuff at first, but when you get to the last page and the last paragraph, you get to the bottom line. What this amendment does is, it reduces the levels of funds in section 104(1) by which the Senate Committee on Finance is instructed to reduce revenues. So what this amendment is about is denying people a tax cut. Our colleagues are for tax cuts in general, even though both our colleagues voted for the last amendment which would have denied any tax cut. They are for them in general. They are for eliminating the marriage penalty in theory. They are for changing inheritance taxes in theory. But when it gets right down to giving somebody a tax cut, they are against it. Why are they against it? As long as we have been asked to be honest, they are against it because they want to spend this money. They are against it because they want to spend this money on programs, just as they did last year when we busted the budget by $21 billion and stole every penny of it right out of the Social Security trust funds and they voted for it. So let's not be deceived. I was asked to be honest and I wasn't going to be, because I didn't want to be unkind. But since I have been asked to be honest, let me be honest. This is a phony amendment. It has nothing to do with Medicare and everything to do with denying tax cuts. Our colleagues on the left side of this Chamber want to spend this money, and we don't want them to spend it. We want people to have it back. I yield the floor. Mr. DOMENICI addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. That is right, and claims that they get credit for it.

Mr. GRAMM. Yield on my time. We have been very good in going back and forth. We have almost an hour. We have a few minutes. Would it not make sense to let us speak--let me say a few words, let Senator Domenici speak, and then continue this, rather than shutting us out? If you want to do it, you obviously have the right under the rules.

Mr. GRAMM. Will the Senator from North Dakota yield?

Mr. GRAMM. How much time have we run off of the Conrad amendment?

Mr. GRAMM. I certainly will not take 60 minutes. Mr. President, in the Budget Committee we had a series of amendments and they all had a common theme: Do anything with the surplus except give it back to working Americans. We had an amendment that said you could not give a tax cut until you had fixed Social Security for 75 years--that would be the year 2074, so you could not do a tax cut before the year 2074; you could not give a tax cut to working people until Medicare was fixed for a similar period. You could not give a tax cut until Jesus came back. You could not give a tax cut until Bosnia and Serbs and Bosnia and Croats routinely met, fell in love, got married and, like the lion and the lamb, lay down together. When you listen to all this rhetoric and all these amendments, what they have in common is not all the things that have to happen before a tax cut, but what they have in common is our Democrat colleagues do not want working Americans to get any of the non-Social Security surplus back. We find ourselves with the highest tax burden in American history. When you take Federal, State, and local taxes, 31 cents out of every dollar earned by every American goes to government and taxes. With the history of our country, such as at the peek of the war effort in World War II in 1944 when we had the largest defense spending in American history and the highest tax burden in American history prior to today, even with the highest tax rate in American history, our Democrat colleagues would say: ``Defer tax cuts until the year 2074, defer tax cuts until all the problems of the world are solved, defer tax cuts.'' The point is, they are not for letting working Americans keep some of the money that we are now taking from them above the level needed to pay the taxpayers' bills. Remember that every penny of the Social Security surplus by the pending budget will be set aside and locked away for Social Security. Now, this is the newest variant of this ``anything but tax cuts'' amendment. This variant says, ``Don't give the money to tax cuts; reduce the debt and then give an IOU to Medicare.'' I want to remind my colleagues that this doesn't provide a dime for Medicare. Not one penny of this money can be spent under the budget. If we adopted this amendment, Medicare would not have one nickel that it doesn't have now. It would have an IOU from the Federal Government. But how would we pay the IOU? We would pay it by raising taxes, by cutting spending, by cutting Medicare, maybe, or by borrowing money from the general public. But nothing we do today in giving an IOU to Medicare provides any money for Medicare either today or in the future. So this is not a real transfer of resources. When our dear colleague from Rhode Island on the Budget Committee says we need to give the resources to Medicare, no resources are given to Medicare in the budget of the United States. If you look at that budget, which has a $199 billion increase, the amendment offered by the distinguished Senator from North Dakota doesn't change one penny of spending for Medicare over this period. In fact, what the Senator from North Dakota is doing is not changing Medicare spending, not providing any new benefit, not paying any old bill; he is simply giving Medicare an IOU. Now, what is the net product of this IOU? That is the point I want to get to. The net product of this IOU is not more money for Medicare; the net product of this IOU is that in the year 2009, Medicare insolvency will occur unless we pass a reform bill, like the Breaux reform, which I strongly support and supported as a member of the bipartisan Medicare Commission. Unless we do something that is a real reform, in the year 2009 we are going to have to raise payroll taxes, or raise general taxes, or we are going to have to cut spending, or we are going to have to borrow money, whether or not we give an IOU to Medicare. Nothing in the Senator's amendment changes the amount of money that is available in the 10-year budget for Medicare. But what is changed by the amendment? Medicare is no better off, no worse off; it has an IOU. We already have many IOUs to Medicare because of our commitment to the program. It is probably the second most popular program in American history and one to which we are all committed. Nothing changes for Medicare. No new resources are available to Medicare. No hard choices are avoided in Medicare. But what is changed? Well, what is changed is that this amendment will reduce the amount of money that is available for tax cuts by $320 billion. That is what this amendment is about. The actual change in the budget as a result of this amendment is to reduce the amount of money that is available for tax cuts. So what are we doing here? This is an amendment that has only one substantive effect; that is, it reduces our ability to eliminate the marriage penalty. Americans meet and fall in love and get married, only to discover that they pay the Federal Government, on average, $1,400 a year for the right to be married. Knowing the Presiding Officer's wife, I know she is worth $1,400 a year, but I believe--and so does the Presiding Officer--that she ought to get the $1,400, not the Federal Government. In fact, I know the wife of the distinguished Senator from North Dakota, and I know she is worth $1,400 a year, and we want her to have the money. We don't understand why the Senator from North Dakota doesn't think she ought to have it instead of the Government. In any case, that is a matter of personal choice. The point is, what we are doing here does nothing for Medicare, but it affects our ability to repeal the marriage penalty. There are many people who believe it is not right to force farmers and ranchers to sell the farm and sell the ranch when papa dies. He spent his whole life building up the farm or the ranch and put every penny of after-tax money he ever had into the farm or ranch. When he dies, the children have to sell the farm or ranch to give the Federal Government 55 cents out of every dollar. We want to end that. The amendment of the Senator from North Dakota doesn't help Medicare a bit, but it takes away from our ability to exempt farms and ranches from this confiscatory death duty and exempts small businesses from this confiscatory death duty. We believe we ought to have an across- the-board tax cut. Now, we know many of our Democrat colleagues don't believe we should have an across-the-board tax cut, and they very quickly point out, well, with an across-the-board tax cut, some people don't get a tax cut. That is true. But across-the-board tax cuts are for people who pay taxes. So everybody who pays taxes would get an across-the-board tax cut, and people who pay a lot of taxes would get 10 percent of that back. People who pay a little would get 10 percent of that back, and they would both be happy to have it back. Now, what the Senator from North Dakota is saying is that he would rather not repeal the marriage penalty, or repeal or reduce the inheritance tax, or have a tax cut across the board, or any of the many other ways we could give this money back, because he would rather it not go back to the taxpayers. So the net effect of this amendment is that it doesn't change Medicare, doesn't change a single spending figure over the 10-year budget; it gives Medicare a meaningless IOU, basically. But what is changed, what is substantive, is that it lessens our ability to reduce the tax burden for working Americans by $320 billion. Let me make one final point on this. Let me give you the advantage of giving some of this non-Social Security surplus back to taxpayers rather than having the Government keep it and ultimately spend it. We all remember last year when President Clinton stood at the rostrum of the House and said: Social Security first. Every penny of this surplus will go to Social Security. I won't allow it to go on tax cuts, I won't allow it to be spent. Yet, the President, as a tribute for adjourning, required that $21 billion of it be spent. Every penny of it came right out of Social Security. So if we don't give this non-Social Security surplus back--or at least part of it--to workers, we are going to end up squandering it; we are going to end up spending it. Now, the advantage of giving it back is, first, it is their money to begin with. This money came from the working people. The economy is doing better because they are working and saving and investing more. Why should they not get some of the benefit--in fact, a very small percentage under our budget? Another thing is important. If we need the money back, we can take it back. But if you spend it on a bunch of new programs creating a bunch of new constituencies, it is gone; you will never get it back. How many Government programs have we ever eliminated in American history? Virtually none. So I just want to urge my colleagues, when they listen to the debate on this amendment, to remember that these amendments aren't about denying a tax cut until 2074 to save Social Security, or put off a tax cut until Medicare's problems are forever solved, or to wait until the second coming and let Jesus worry about it, or to wait until world peace is enshrined. That is not what these amendments are about. These amendments are about some of us not wanting to give people a tax cut. That is what it is about. So if you think that out of the massive surpluses we are projected to have over the next 10 years, giving a modest tax cut to working Americans in things like repealing the marriage penalty, reducing or repealing the death tax, and giving a little across-the-board tax cut to everybody--if you think workers deserve some of the benefits of the good economy and the impact it has had on taxes, rather than giving every penny of it to the Government, then you want to vote no on this amendment, and you want to vote no on a whole series of amendments, each of which is going to be tied to some other issue, like research to prevent meteorites from causing tidal waves or destroying New York City--or it will go on and on and on. But the bottom line is, this is about tax cuts. And our colleagues are desperate. They want to spend the money. They want to do everything with the money except give a little of it back. That is where we have a disagreement. Do not be confused. This doesn't have anything to do with Medicare. Nothing in this amendment in any way provides another nickel to pay Medicare benefits. Nothing in this amendment changes the Medicare numbers in this budget at all. This simply reduces debt; God's work, if it really happened. But what it does is give a meaningless IOU to Medicare. We already have written Medicare so many IOUs that we will never pay back the ones we have written. If you want to, give them a cigar box full. And, if it makes you feel better, great. But still, it is a promise to pay money. It is not money. So I hope our colleagues will reject this amendment and realize it is not about Medicare. It is not about Social Security. It is not about meteorites. It is not about the second coming. It is about taxes. Some people are against them. Other people are for them. That is what the vote will be about. I reserve the remainder of our time. Mr. CONRAD addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, we want to do everything we can to satisfy every Member. No one is trying to deny the distinguished Senator the right to debate his amendment. But it is my understanding that there was a unanimous consent request, and that it was granted, so that we could set the amendment aside and offer these other amendments so that they would all be pending simultaneously and that we would have the vote at approximately 6:45. No one agreed to the specific time, but the general principle was largely agreed to. On that basis, it is my understanding that Senator Bond has been recognized. If that is not the case, if the Chair could give us a ruling. We want to follow the regular order. And no one is trying to be unfair in any way.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, normally we would go back and forth, but Senator Moynihan is here and doesn't have a lengthy statement. As a courtesy to him I want to allow him to speak now and then have the rotation come back to me.

Mr. GRAMM. Some of us need time to respond to the Conrad amendment.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. That is right.

Mr. GRAMM. Let me make a concluding point, and then I will be happy to yield. The President had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save Social Security this year, and he did not do it. The President had a once-in- a-lifetime opportunity with a bipartisan commission to plant the seeds to save Medicare, and he did not do it. To use a parody on a very famous commercial, the Presidency is a terrible thing to waste, and President Clinton has wasted Presidential leadership on Medicare and Social Security with phony programs that serve no purpose except to mislead the American public and to prevent real debate on these issues. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. GRAMM. I thank the Senator for the clarification, but the point is every penny of this $199 billion is out of the surplus because, if it were not provided, that money would be in the surplus. The point is, and I want to be sure nobody is confused, the Domenici budget provides full funding for Medicare over the next 10 years. It has not one cut in one benefit anywhere for Medicare. In fact, no budget in the history of America has provided the funding increase for Medicare that is provided in this budget, and no program, except the buildup for a war effort, in the history of mankind has ever provided the increase we provide for Medicare. So no one should get the impression that in any way this budget does not fully fund Medicare. It does. Second, and I do not want to get off on this same old debate, dragging the same old dead cat across the table, but it is always an amazing thing to me that when Democrats talk about tax cuts, they think it is always for rich people. When I heard the story, that Senator Domenici's mama was out picking lettuce and she started having Senator Domenici, and they took her in the house and Senator Domenici was born in this house. I don't know why anyone would think Senator Domenici does not love working people. I don't know why our Democrat colleagues, most of whom are very wealthy people, why they have this monopoly on loving poor people and Senator Domenici, the child of an immigrant family, somehow he does not love working people. Let me tell you what the whole paradox is about. Our colleagues on the Democrat side of this body have discovered that we have a progressive income tax. Senator Domenici, what that means is that American workers in the bottom half of the income scale pay virtually no income taxes. And people who are in the higher income brackets pay very high levels of income taxes. So, for example, if we had an across-the-board tax cut where we reduced everybody's taxes by 10 percent, a proposal that was made by John F. Kennedy who, last time I looked, was a Democrat--of course he believed that rising tides lift all boats. I don't know if Democrats still believe that. It was President Kennedy, in 1961, who proposed an across-the-board tax cut. ``Let's get America moving again'' was the Kennedy slogan. When you cut taxes across the board, there are two things that everybody ought to understand, because our Democrat colleagues are going to go on and on and on about it. No. 1 is, some people do not get a tax cut if you cut income taxes across the board. Why? Because they don't pay income taxes. Some people don't get Medicare because they are not senior citizens. Some people don't get welfare because they are not poor. Some people don't get Senate salaries because they don't work for the Senate. But tax cuts are for taxpayers. You don't pay taxes, you don't get a tax cut. Secondly, some people will get a bigger tax cut with an across-the- board tax cut than others. That shouldn't come as any shock, because some people pay more income tax than others. This budget does not make this judgment; this budget simply provides money for a tax cut. We will decide in the Finance Committee what it is. I personally support an across-the-board tax cut. If you want to figure out how much you get--it is very simple and couldn't be fairer, in my opinion--take the amount you pay, take 10 percent of it, that is how much you would save if we had a 10 percent across-the-board tax cut. If you don't pay any income taxes, you don't get any tax cut. If you pay a little income taxes, you get a little tax cut. If you pay a lot of income taxes, you get a lot of tax cuts, but you don't get back what you don't pay. Simple formula. Let me talk about my two issues. The President, 2 years ago, said in the State of the Union Address a brilliant line--``Save Social Security first.'' It was a brilliant line. Everybody stood up and applauded. We waited a whole year and the President never told us how to save Social Security first, last, or ever--never had a program. It was simply a bumper sticker, a slogan. Then this year the President said, ``Oh, the year has come for us to save Social Security.'' He said, ``Don't just save it first; save it now.'' We all stood up, standing ovation. We all applauded. And we had a big conference down at the White House. One of my Democrat colleagues was smart enough not to go. He had already figured out that this was a political sham. But I went. I sat through all these meetings. I sat in a meeting with the President. We had about 60 Members of Congress there. He went around the room and asked people their opinion, agreed with everybody. Then, when we left, we waited for a program. Finally, the program came. Let me say, not to mince words but to be precise with the English language, it was a total and complete political cop-out. It was a political punt. It was a program that basically said: We are not going to make any decision other than we are going to claim that we are locking all this money away for Social Security. I am going to explain how the hoax works. The second issue that is a major disappointment in the President's budget and the President's proposal is Medicare. I was appointed to the Medicare Commission led by Senator Breaux, a Democrat. We put together a bipartisan coalition to save Medicare. The President killed the Commission. Then he makes a proposal that does not give Medicare a dime, not a dime of new resources. It simply reduces debt and gives Medicare credit for it in a sort of nebulous IOU that can't be spent for 15 years, and can only be spent then if we raise taxes or cut other spending to redeem the IOUs. I want to talk about Social Security and Medicare the way Bill Clinton does it. A lot of my colleagues have racked their brains to try to figure out how the President saves Social Security. Let me explain it to you. I have a chart here, and I hope people can follow it. What I show on the first chart is plotting out over time the Social Security surplus, which starts out here at the current level of $137.6 billion and then it grows over time. That is the amount of money we are taking in, in Social Security taxes, that we are not spending on benefits, plus the interest we are earning on the IOUs that Social Security has from the Federal Government. In addition to the Social Security surplus, we have a general budget surplus from the rest of government that is shown here as B. The total budget surplus, counting the Social Security surplus and the non-Social Security surplus, is the combination of the two I have shown in blue here. Here is what the President does. The President takes the Social Security surplus, which this year is $137.6 billion. They have a guy over in the Treasury who puts into a computer the number $137.6 billion, and out in West Virginia there is this little Federal office with a steel filing cabinet. They have a printout machine, and this prints out this IOU for $137.6 billion. I have seen them on television--at least a man and a woman working there. They may have 10,000 people, but I have seen only 2. The guy normally does it. He goes up and he takes it off the machine, tears it off, takes the perforated edges off, and takes the carbon copy off. Then he puts it in that metal filing cabinet. This is an IOU from the Government to the Social Security Administration. This literally happens. That is the $137 billion. The problem is, we do not have $137 billion, because the unified surplus, when you add the two together, Social Security and non-Social Security, is only $134.6 billion, because we are running an actual deficit in the non-Social Security part of the budget of $2.9 billion. What the President does is, he takes the $134.6 billion we have in cash and he says: Let's take 62 percent of that. That 62 percent is shown in light green here. That is 62 percent of the total budget surplus. He says: Let's spend 38 percent of that. Now, that is $52.3 billion. Remember, every penny of this surplus is Social Security, but in his budget he spends $53 billion of this surplus. Then he says: We are going to give Social Security $83.5 billion. So they already have this IOU in West Virginia for the blue, the Social Security surplus, and now we are going to give them an IOU for the green, 62% of the unified surplus, which of course came from the Social Security surplus. So what we do, we start with $137.6 billion in Social Security surplus. We don't really have it. We are $2.9 billion short, because we already spent that. The President prints out an IOU in West Virginia, and then he takes $134 billion, every penny from Social Security, and he spends $52 billion of it. Then he takes $83 billion that is left and gives it to Social Security again. You might ask, how, with $134 billion, do you give Social Security $221 billion? Well, how you do it is, you give them $137.6 billion and you already have spent $2.9 billion so you have $134 billion. You spend another 38 percent of it, and that leaves you with $83 billion, and you gave that to Social Security. So what the President has done is double-counted $83.5 billion of the Social Security surplus. The amazing thing to me is that Senator Domenici, Senator Lautenberg, and I have seen many budgets come and go, and we know we have seen administrations, Democrat and Republican, who made rosy assumptions about the future--of course, nobody knew what was going to happen in the future--that did all kinds of things, but nothing of the scale of double-counting the Social Security trust fund. In the 20 years in the House and the Senate that I have watched budgets come and I have watched them go--more go than come, in many cases--I have never before seen the level of dishonesty that exists in the budget President Clinton has submitted this year. It is not rosy assumptions about the future, it is plain fraudulent bookkeeping. The amazing thing to me--having appeared on television with senior officials of the Clinton administration to talk about this issue, having listened to them in testimony--is how educated people who have credibility independent of serving in the Clinton administration can come before the public and come before the Congress and defend this; it is totally beyond my comprehension. It is totally beyond my ability to understand the willingness of people to say something that they know, because every one of them took freshman accounting in college--if a freshman economic student at Harvard had proposed this double-counting scheme, our dear colleague, Larry Summers, the smartest guy in the Clinton administration, would have given him an F. And yet poor Larry Summers is dragged on CBS television to defend double-counting bookkeeping. Having gone through it, let me just show you some of the manifestations of it. If you take the President's budget, he claims that he is locking away $5.8 trillion for Social Security in the future. Remember, these are all IOUs, and it does not make any difference whether you have one or you have a cigar box full. They all are commitments for which we are going to raise taxes, cut spending, or borrow money in the future. But I am simply talking about gimmicks. The President claims $5.8 trillion that he has put in the Social Security trust fund. But yet when you look at what he has actually locked away, it is only $2.2 trillion. Let me just show you the numbers from his own budget. This is the first document that comes from the Social Security Administration, and it shows the President's proposal: Under the President's plan, the Social Security trust fund will rise from $864 billion to $6.6 trillion, an increase of $5.8 trillion during the year 2000 to 2014. That is what the President says he is doing, locking away $5.8 trillion for Social Security. But when you actually look, I say to Senator Domenici, at the President's budget from the Office of Management and Budget, there is a ``Social Security lockbox transfer used to redeem debt.'' They are not redeeming $5.8 trillion, the amount set aside for Social Security, they are redeeming $2.183 trillion. What happened to the other $3.6 trillion? It is missing. You cannot find it in their books. What happened to it? It is a funny thing about double-counting bookkeeping, you can double count all you want, but when you finally open up the box, you only have in there what you put in there. That is basically what the President does. When our colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle say the President does these great things for Social Security, what he does for Social Security is double count the entries he is making in the Social Security trust fund, but nothing the President does in any way will pay any benefit past 2012 because at that point we open this box, and all it has is IOUs. Then we have to raise taxes or cut spending or cut Social Security benefits, or we have to borrow money to pay for it. Finally, let me read you a quote. Probably the best summary of the Clinton Social Security proposal was in a major article by David E. Rosenbaum in the New York Times on March 24. Here is his summary of what he calls ``the shell game'' in the Clinton Social Security proposal. Listen to this quote. He is talking about the Clinton plan on Social Security: The plan does nothing more than throw new IOUs at the problem and avoids tough choices needed to keep subsequent generations from having to pay the bills for the retirement of the baby boomers. What is being called a plan to save Social Security is, in fact, a phony bookkeeping scheme to double count the number of IOUs put into Social Security. Not only is it fraudulent, but it is a hoax, because the IOUs in Social Security do nothing to pay benefits. You cannot pay benefits with IOUs. You have to have money, and the only way you can get money is to tax or to cut spending or to borrow the money from the general public. The second hoax in the Clinton budget is the hoax of Medicare. This year, the President killed the Medicare Commission report, and his alternative to it was to send an IOU to Medicare. He said, going back to this surplus, ``Look, we started out with $134 billion and we gave $221 billion of it to Social Security. That worked great. Having taken 134 and given 221 of the 134 to Social Security, why don't we give 15 percent to Medicare? It worked great for Social Security, let's do it for Medicare.'' So what he does is he sends this meaningless IOU to Medicare only, as Senator Domenici was the first to discover, there is a big caveat on this IOU, and that is, you cannot spend it. He does not provide any new benefits. He talks about drug benefits and how wonderful it would be to have them, but he provides not one penny for drug benefits. None of this money can be spent under the President's budget. It is simply a meaningless IOU. I guess we will open another office in West Virginia and we will hire people and they will print out the IOU for Medicare and put it in a metal filing cabinet, but does it fund one prescription drug? No. Does it pay for one day in the hospital? No. Does it pay for one home health care visit? No. If it does not do any of those things, what good is it? It is good because it is a political weapon. The President can say, ``I gave 15 percent of the surplus to Medicare.'' You cannot spend it. It will not buy any of these things, but I did it. The point is, Senator Domenici could have done all these things, and more, if he were willing to use phony bookkeeping. But thank goodness he is not willing to use phony bookkeeping. He did fund--fully fund-- for 10 years Medicare.

Mr. GRAMM. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I am going to talk mostly about Social Security and Medicare, but I want to answer two of the points that our dear colleague from California raised. First, she says, Is it fair to give a tax cut and to give nothing to Medicare? The Domenici budget gives this big tax cut and gives nothing to Medicare. Let me just change the question a little. It is not, Is it fair? The question is, Is it true? And the answer is no. Let me just ask our colleagues to look at page 54 of the report on the concurrent budget resolution for the fiscal year 2000. This is the budget reported from the Budget Committee. It provides, beginning this year, for Medicare, $194.6 billion, and by 2009 that has risen to $394.2 billion. So the Domenici budget provides $199 billion of additional money for Medicare by the end of the 10-year period. Let me just make two points. No. 1, Medicare has never grown by more than it grows under the Domenici budget. No. 2, no program has ever grown as much as Medicare grows over this 10-year period. There is not one cut in one Medicare benefit in the Domenici budget. In fact, the President's budget cuts the Medicare Program. The Domenici budget fully funds it. So we all have a right to our opinions, but we do not have a right to our facts.

Mr. GRAMM. No. In fact, it provides no new money in the year 2008 to cover that deficit.