Phil Gramm

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I want to make an opening statement now about the budget before I turn to the amendment on taxes. Let me begin by congratulating those who have put the budget agreement together. I have had an opportunity in both the House and the Senate to work on many budgets. I understand the difficulty of putting a budget agreement together. And I think when so many people have done so much work, it is incumbent on someone who opposes that final product to say why. So what I would like to do is to go ahead and explain why I am not for this budget, what I believe is wrong with the budget, and then consider an amendment which corrects to a significant degree not everything that I find objectionable in the budget, but certainly as a movement toward the vision that I have for the future of the country and what we would like that future to be. Let me begin by going through a couple of charts which I think will save time for the Senate.

Mr. GRAMM. Yes.

Mr. GRAMM. If I may, I have several other people who have asked me to do the same thing so maybe I should begin by asking unanimous consent that I might recognize Senator Hollings to offer an amendment, Senator Inhofe to offer an amendment, Senator Kerry from Massachusetts to offer an amendment, and then I had Bob Kerrey who was going to do an amendment very briefly that has been accepted, and then let me go ahead and recognize my colleagues from South Dakota and from Virginia to offer amendments, and I would ask unanimous consent that I might do that without losing the floor and that then I might be able to offer an amendment that has been agreed to, and then bring up the amendment that will be debated.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, let me start by going through the budget that is before us and outlining the concerns I have about it. I would like to discuss it in some detail. Let me say in advance the two points I hope to make. No. 1, that this does not balance the Federal budget, and neither the country nor the Congress should be deceived about that, nor should this change our behavior in being vigilant about spending. Second, I want to make the point that this does not save Medicare, that, quite the contrary, it simply engages in a bookkeeping entry on Medicare that makes it look better in the short run, but we are adding five new or expanded Medicare benefits which clearly will add to the financial insolvency of the system. Having gone through that, then I will turn to the amendment. First of all, let me talk about deficits. When this budget debate started, based on a re-estimation of the economy due to stronger economic output and stronger performance, what was required to balance the Federal budget when this budget debate started was $339 billion of deficit reduction. When the President and congressional negotiators met for the first time, that was the level of deficit reduction that was required, as compared to current law, to balance the Federal budget. In other words, if we had simply not had a budget and left every law in place, not repeal any law, not pass a new law, and kept discretionary spending at its current level, it would have taken $339 billion of deficit reduction to balance the Federal budget. I would like to first go through how this budget balances the budget in 2002. On Thursday night 3 weeks ago, when we reached an impasse in the budget negotiations, the Congressional Budget Office came forward with the glorious news that, due to a change in the estimation they had made, the Federal Government could expect to collect $225 billion of additional revenues over the next 5 years. That $225 billion of additional revenues that the Congressional Budget Office decided to project for the future represents 66 percent of all deficit reduction required to balance the budget that is before us; 66 percent of the deficit reduction simply comes from the fact that the Congressional Budget Office, 3 weeks ago, decided to change the estimate about the future performance of the economy and tax collections, based on the very strong quarter of economic growth we are in. Mr. President, $28 billion of the deficit reduction in the budget before us comes from an assumption that the measure of inflation will be lower in the future, and that $28 billion of savings that comes from an assumption about the Bureau of Labor Statistics changing the measure of inflation represents 8 percent of the deficit reduction needed in the budget before us. Mr. President, $77 billion of the deficit reduction in the budget before us comes from the assumption that, with a balanced budget, the economy will be even stronger, and that represents 23 percent of the deficit reduction in this budget. So, when we total all this up, 97 cents out of every dollar of deficit reduction in the budget before us comes not from changing policy, not from constraining entitlements, not from cutting discretionary spending, but from assuming--from assuming--that revenue collections will rise in the future, from assuming that inflation will be lower in the future, from assuming that the economy will be stronger in the future. So, before this budget ever does anything, it assumes 97 cents out of every dollar of the projected deficit for the next 5 years away. Only 3 cents out of every dollar of deficit reduction in this budget represents a change in policy. In fact, that is a whopping total of $9 billion of deficit reduction in this budget that comes from changing Government policy. In fact, every penny of that deficit reduction comes from assuming that we are going to sell to radio and television stations, and to nonbroadcast users, spectrum, and that spectrum is going to bring $26 billion into the Treasury. In fact, the last year where all this $9 billion of savings is needed, it is assumed to bring in $14.8 billion. Last year, we sold spectrum to fund increased spending of $2.9 billion. We estimated it would bring that. When it was sold, it brought $13.6 million. In other words, for every $200 we thought we were going to get by selling spectrum, we got $1. But we still spent every dollar of the $2.9 billion we assumed. So the first point I want everybody to understand--and it is important that they understand it because someone might believe that we have put the deficit behind us by making hard choices here--the truth is, 97 cents out of every dollar of deficit reduction in this budget, as compared to current policy and current law, comes from simply assuming the economy is going to be stronger in the future and that prices are going to be lower in the future. And, of course, no one knows what is going to happen in the future. Next, I would like to go through and show you a startling fact, which is, not only does this budget not reduce the deficit, but in reality it raises the deficit by $71 billion over the next 4 years as compared to what would happen if there were no budget. Let me try to explain this. I know it is a little complicated, but, if you look at this, I think you can see it. Under current law, with current spending, if we simply continue to do exactly what we are doing now, with no budget, the deficit next year would be $76 billion. But, under this budget, with policy changes, we are adding $14 billion, much of it in new spending on discretionary accounts and 13 new mandatory and entitlement spending programs. So actually, by passing this budget today as compared to current policy, we are raising the deficit for the coming year by $14 billion, from $76 to $90 billion. In 1999, if we simply continue current policy, the deficit would be $77 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But we are going to add $13 billion to the deficit, so it will actually be $90 billion. In the year 2000, we are raising the deficit from $70 to $83 billion, by $13 billion. In the year 2001, continuing current policy would produce a deficit of $22 billion, but we are going to raise it by another $31 billion. We are going to more than double it, so the deficit would be $53 billion. And the first and only deficit reduction due to policy change in this budget is $10 billion in the year 2002, in a new century, under a new President. Until we reach that point, nothing in this budget lowers the deficit by a penny, and, in fact, this budget raises the deficit by a total of $71 billion in those 4 years. Let me turn to some other points. Probably the most startling thing that people will come to understand about this budget is that it spends so much money that the first thing we have to do in this budget is waive the spending limit set in the 1993 budget. Let me remind my colleagues and anybody at home who might be watching this debate, in 1993 we had a Democrat Congress and we had a Democrat President. They passed a budget where they increased spending and increased taxes. But they set a spending cap in that budget, and that cap said, by 1998, we would spend no more than $546.4 billion on discretionary accounts. That was in the President's budget. The Congress actually lowered that a little to $545.9 billion the next year. Under this budget deal, we are going to spend $553.3 billion. So the first act of this new budget is to bust the budget law that is currently in effect, and we are going to have to waive a point of order at some point that I am going to raise so that we can spend $7.4 billion more than we set out, in the 1993 budget, to spend in 1998. This is a partisan point, but it is very relevant. This is going to be the first time in history that a Republican Congress is going to vote to bust the budget set by a Democrat Congress so we can spend more money. We have had a lot of discussions about what this budget does and does not do with regard to spending. I am sure, as people who follow the debate know, we have all kinds of ways of confusing this debate. We have what we call a current service baseline, where you cut relative to what you would have spent. So, for example, if you are going to buy a new shotgun and you come home and your spouse looks at you funny because you already own 20 shotguns, you say, ``Look, honey, I was going to spend $1,200, but I only spent $1,000, so I saved $200.'' It is that kind of baseline under which people talk about this budget saving money. But let me talk about things you know something about. Do you remember the Contract With America? Well, I remember it. I think the American people remember it. The Senate and the House have forgotten it. But we wrote a budget called the Contract With America, and we all ran for office on it, at least people on this side of the aisle did. We passed that budget in 1995, and, as compared to that budget for the years 1998 through the year 2002, this budget we are voting on here today will raise spending by $212 billion on discretionary nondefense programs, basically social programs, above the level contained in the Contract With America budget that was adopted in 1996. So however you want to define spending, the one thing we know is, compared to the budget that we adopted 2 years ago for the same years, we are increasing spending by $212 billion, basically on nondefense discretionary social programs. We voted on a budget right here on the floor of the Senate a year ago that set spending totals for 1997 and 1998, through the year 2002. As compared to the budget we voted on just last year, the budget before us today spends a whopping $189 billion more in the same years on discretionary social programs than we spent in the budget we adopted on this very floor only a year ago at this time. As compared to the President's budget that he offered last year, this budget spends an additional $76 billion on social programs, and, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, this budget actually spends slightly more than the President asked for in this year's budget. In reality, the 1 year that really matters is the year that this budget will set out in detail, that is, the 1998 budget as compared to our 1996 budget. This will spend, in 1 year, $38 billion more than the Contract With America; as compared to the budget we adopted last year, it will spend $23 billion more; as compared to the budget the President submitted last year, it will spend $3 billion more, simply on discretionary programs. But that is just discretionary programs. This budget will create or fund 13 mandatory and entitlement programs that will either be created new or will be expanded or will represent new benefits. I remind my colleagues that every one of these mandatory programs in these entitlement programs is a little baby elephant that is set to grow in the future. We just adopted, by unanimous consent, an amendment of our dear colleague from Nebraska that said to us, listen, we need to be alert about the growth of entitlements and maybe we ought not to let these programs consume more than 70 percent of the budget. We all supported the resolution. But you need to realize that the budget before us has 13 new spending programs or additions or additional funding to mandatory and entitlement programs that do not exist under current law. Let me go over what those are: environmental reserve fund. We have five new or expanded Medicare benefits. I am going to come back to Medicare. We increase Medicaid funding for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. We increase Medicare funding in terms of reducing copayments at the very time we cannot pay for Medicare as it now exists. We restore welfare benefits for immigrants and refugees and asylees. We expand the Food Stamp Program. We expand a welfare-to-work grant. We expand child health care and barely avoided raising it by another $20 billion. So, basically, there are two reasons that I am not for this budget, and I didn't come here today to argue against it thinking I was going to convince anybody. This is a wonderful political deal. It is a wonderful political deal because it allows everybody to get what they want. It allows President Clinton, in his own words, to have the largest expansion in social programs since the 1960's. It allows Republicans to talk about having a tax cut. And it allows both parties to claim they are balancing the Federal budget. But in reality, if it sounds too good to believe that we are having the largest increase in social spending since the sixties and we are cutting taxes and balancing the budget at the same time, the reason is that it is too good to be believed. In reality, it is not true. The two points I want to make are these: First, we are not balancing the budget here; we are simply assuming the budget is balanced. It may be that, based on a strong economic performance in the last quarter, the future picture of the economy is changed for 5 years. It may be that this is going to be, by far, the longest and strongest recovery in American history. But the probability is that that is not true, and it is not sound policy to set out the financial plan for the whole country based on those kinds of assumptions. I do not think it would be quite as far-fetched as assuming you could pay your bills because you are going to win the lottery, but, basically, for anybody to believe that we are balancing the budget based on policy decisions that I already demonstrated are not true, it is important that the Congress, it is important that the country not let its guard down and understand that all we have done in this budget is assume the deficit away, and it may or may not be gone. I raise this concern because in the supplemental appropriations that we dealt with last week, we added another $6.6 billion to these spending totals, so that we have, in reality, already busted this budget which has not yet been adopted. These spending totals that I talked about of being $189 billion above last year's budget in this budget, we have already added to that by passing a supplemental last week, which adds another $6.6 billion to the deficit. The second and final point I want to make about the budget is it is very important that nobody believe that this budget solves the Medicare problem. What does this budget do about Medicare? First, it says we are going to lower reimbursement for doctors and hospitals. We have done that a dozen times. It has never worked, and it has never worked because, like all wage and price controls, people find ways to get around it. Yet, while we know it has never worked in the past, we have it in this bill because we have agreed to take, in essence, the President's policy in Medicare. But that is not the worst part of it. The claim that this budget saves Medicare for 10 years is not just based on that unachieved and unachievable savings by simply reducing payments to hospitals and doctors; it is based on taking the fastest growing part of Medicare and taking it out of the Medicare trust fund and funding it in general revenue. Home health care, which is the fastest growing part of Medicare, is taken out of the trust fund under this budget agreement and is funded out of general revenue. Virtually every person on my side of the aisle, when this was discussed 6 months ago, said, ``Well, that's fraudulent.'' That is equivalent to having a bunch of debt on your credit card and you go to the bank and borrow money and pay part of it off and then you say, ``Well, look, I'm out of debt.'' As I said when this was suggested by the President, ``Look, I can do you better, I can make Medicare solvent for 100 years. Take hospital care out of the trust fund.'' But does that change anything? Does that solve anything? So here we are engaging in a shell game which is totally fraudulent, taking the fastest growing part of the trust fund out, not counting it, paying for it out of general revenues and claiming we save Medicare for 10 years when Medicare is going to cause a $1.6 trillion drain on the Federal Treasury in the next 10 years. The terrible tragedy of this is we were on the verge of getting a bipartisan consensus to really reform Medicare. I am afraid that by accepting this budget deal we are going to take the pressure off Congress, because if Medicare is solvent for 10 years because we have taken the fastest growing part of it out and hidden it in general revenues, is there a problem? Why should we all cast tough votes that could cost us our jobs if we can tell people there is no problem? Do not believe this balances the budget. It simply assumes the budget is balanced. We have assumed it was balanced on many other occasions, and it has not been balanced, I am afraid. Just like a family budget, assuming you win the lottery normally does not work. The way you balance your budget sitting around your kitchen table is by saying no. There is no ``no'' in this budget. There is no ``no'' here. There is no ``no'' to anybody. There is nothing in this budget that really represents any kind of fundamental change in policy. What this budget is is a wonderful political document, but I am afraid that this political document is going to induce us to spend more, it is going to induce us not to deal with Medicare, and America is going to be the loser. Let me turn to my amendment, and let me say this is a controversial amendment. Some are going to say this is a deal-breaker amendment and, in a sense, if you want to argue that, you can. But let me talk about the amendment. First of all, I have a chart up here, and I want people to understand what has happened to the Federal budget in the last 10 years. If you look at 1987 and then you look at 1996 and you adjust for inflation, real spending on defense has gone down by 27 percent, real spending on entitlements has gone up by 38 percent, and despite all of the protest from the President and from Members of Congress, nondefense discretionary spending, the fundamental general Government, social programs, general Government operating expenses, are up over 10 years by 24 percent. So all of Government has grown dramatically in the last 10 years except defense. What has happened to family income in the last 10 years? If you take the average family income of America and you adjust it for inflation and take out taxes and payroll taxes and look at what the average working family in America had to spend in 1987 and what they had to spend in 1996--we do not have the figure for this year yet--basically what happened to the American family, as compared to the American Government during this same 10 years, was Government grew and grew rapidly, but here is what happened to the average family: After taxes, after inflation, the income of the average working family in America fell, after-tax income from $28,302, 10 years later, 10 years of working and struggling and often both the husband and the wife where families are blessed with two parents in the household, 10 years later, that average family is making $27,737 after taxes. So in 10 years where Government has grown, in 10 years where we have not said no to Government, working families have actually seen their spendable income after taxes decline from $28,302 to $27,737. My amendment is very simple. My amendment says, let's go back to the budget that President Clinton submitted last year. I remind my colleagues that in the budget he submitted last year, it provided funding for not only last year but this year and every year to 2002. When we voted on our budget, the President said his budget for 1997 provided the education funding, housing funding, the medical care funding that America would need through the year 2002. Various Members of the Senate stood up and spoke on behalf of this budget. Senator Lautenberg said: It makes critical investments in education and training. It provides increased funding for programs like Head Start, title I, safe and drug-free schools. The President said: This budget funds my priorities. One year later, for the same years, the President says, ``Well, you know I said last year I had enough money for all those things, but actually now, I need $76 billion more for the same 5 years than I said I needed last year.'' So here is what my amendment does. My amendment goes back and takes the President's last year's budget for 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002 and says, ``OK, Mr. President, we are going to give you everything you said last year you needed to spend in these years, and then we are going to take the $76 billion of savings and we are going to give them back to families by cutting taxes and by guaranteeing that families will get the $500 tax credit per child that we promised in our budget and guaranteeing that we will get full capital gains tax cut.'' If you vote for this amendment, what do you say? You are going to hear many ways of saying what you are saying is, ``You are cutting Government spending below the President's requested level, below the budget; you are breaking the deal.'' In reality, what you are saying is, ``We are giving the President everything he said he needed last year,'' but we are saying more than that. We are saying, rather than spending another $76 billion in Washington on behalf of all these families, we are going to give that money back to them and let them spend it themselves. That is what this is about. The question you have to answer on this amendment is this: Can we spend this money on behalf of American families better than they can spend it? By letting families keep $500 more per child, for every working family in America, can they take that money and invest it in education, housing, nutrition, and health care better than we can spend it on their behalf? Do we know their interests better than they do? Let me say, I do not think so. I know the Government, and I know the family, and I know the difference. I believe that the biggest problem in America, in terms of finances, is that Government is spending too much and families are spending too little. We are literally starving the only institution in America that really works, and that is the family. How can it make sense for Government to grow year after year after year when the family budget has declined in real terms on an after-tax basis for the last 10 years? Shouldn't we take this $76 billion more than the President asked for last year and let families spend it instead of letting the Government spend it? Now, if we adopt this amendment, we are going to change the budget, we are going to have $76 billion less of Government spending, basically on social programs. I am not saying there are not some good programs in there, but I am saying this, that if you take all $76 billion of new discretionary spending and you let American families look at it and say, ``Would you rather have us spend this for you or would you rather spend it yourself?'' the vast majority of working families would say, ``I would rather spend it.'' In fact, if you just ask taxpayers, who paid for it, I would not doubt that 95 percent of them would say, ``Yeah, I think probably I can spend it for my family a little better than you can spend it for me.'' So that is what this is about. This does not raise the deficit. It just simply says, instead of giving the President $76 billion more to spend than he asked for last year, since he said last year he could fund the Government and do everything he wanted to do for $76 billion less, and now this year he wants more. They discovered this magic money out there where the Congressional Budget Office decided that we were going to collect all this revenue. So the President said, ``Look, I need more spending.'' Now, that is one argument. It is a legitimate argument. I just do not happen to agree with him. I am saying, let us give it back to families. After all, that is where the money is coming from. Let families spend it. This is our vision. This is the Republican vision. It is America's vision. A budget is about choosing between two competing visions. The budget before us is a clear vision: more Government. The budget before us is a budget that says, more Government is in the interest of the American people. The President may say the era of big Government is over, we may parrot those words, but this budget does not say the era of big Government is over. This budget says the era of big Government is permanent and it is expanding. What my amendment says is, let us let families spend this new money instead of giving it to the Government to spend. I know this is a controversial amendment. I hope my colleagues will support it. I do not suffer under any delusions, but I wanted to show my colors on this amendment. I want people to know there are at least a few people in the Senate who have not forgotten what we promised.

Mr. GRAMM. I will be happy to.

Mr. GRAMM. Well, I hope that is what it is. But all we know is that the Congressional Budget Office came up with this estimate, that because of the strong economy that we have had in the last quarter, that looking into the future, we were going to collect $45 billion a year off as far as the eye could see. Now, to the extent they are right, it is coming because families are paying more taxes.

Mr. GRAMM. They are working harder. They are working longer.

Mr. GRAMM. Why not give me 5 minutes.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, in all of this passion, in all of our efforts to vilify cigarettes and talk about taxing them, I think we have really forgotten a fundamental fact, and that is that we already have more money in this budget than we need to buy an insurance policy for every child in America for whom we are seeking to provide health coverage. Let me go back and try to remind people of what this whole debate is about. What this whole debate is about is that the President, after looking at various statistical estimates, concluded that if you look at every family in America with income up to 300 percent of the poverty level, and I remind you, for a family of four that is $48,000 a year of income--I say to our distinguished majority leader from Mississippi, that is higher than the per capita income and family income of his State--that if you look at families up to 300 percent of poverty, there are as many as 10 million children in America who are not covered by either Medicaid or private health insurance. Now, what the President has done is set the goal, recognizing that 3.3 million of these children already are or will be qualified for Medicaid--they just had not signed up--the President set out a goal of coming up with a program that helps 5 million more children to get private health insurance. I would like to remind my colleagues that the cost of a private health policy for a child, looking at various data that is available, averages about $500 per child for a fairly standard policy--lower with a higher deductible, higher with a much lower deductible, but basically $500 per child. We could go out and buy an insurance policy for all 5 million children in America that we want to cover, and we could do it for less than the $16 billion that is in this bill. So why should we pass an amendment--unless we just get some pleasure from spending money, why should we pass an amendment to raise it up to $36 billion, which would allow us to buy three policies for every child in America that we are trying to help. What could possibly be the purpose of such an amendment? What is the purpose of the Kennedy amendment when he started out saying we need $20 billion? The President started out with a program that was less than $10 billion. We ended up with a budget that was $16 billion. But the amendment does not say we will take it to $20 billion. The amendment says take it to $36 billion. Now, is there no limit on the amount of money that we want to spend? If we already have in the budget enough money to buy an insurance policy for every child in America that we are trying to target here, even up to families that make $48,000 a year, where 82 percent of those families already have private health insurance policies that cover their children, is that not enough? Isn't one insurance policy enough? Why should we have in this bill enough money to buy three insurance policies? That is what the debate here is about. If we simply want to say how much we want to deal with this problem, maybe this amendment has some relevance. But the plain, honest-to-God truth is, it is going to be hard in any rational manner to spend the $16 billion we have already provided. If we just simply went out and bought every child in America that qualifies in this 5 million children problem that the President has defined, we have more than enough money already to do it. Why do we want to add $20 billion more? Could we not use that money for some better purpose? Could we not let families keep the money and invest it in their own children and their own future? So I just want to remind people, in all of this passion about how we want to pound our chest and say how much we care about children, we have already have enough money in this resolution to buy an insurance policy for all 5 million of the children that the President has targeted and that we have agreed to. We clearly could do the job for much less than we have already committed to spend. But the point is, why spend three times as much as is required to simply buy the insurance policies? There is no logical reason for doing it. All we are doing is bidding with each other for spending money. I would like to note, finally, two additional things. No. 1, I am not for this budget agreement, and I am going to be in the Chamber when this amendment is disposed of telling people why I am not for it. But I am not going to vote for the Kennedy amendment to try to kill this budget agreement. And I hope there is nobody on our side of the aisle, if this vote turns out to be very close, who is going to cast a vote for the Kennedy amendment thinking, by doing that, they are going to kill all the bad things in this budget agreement that we are not for. I have never found that I was smart enough to game the system and end up where I wanted to be on that basis. So we are going to have an opportunity on final passage to vote ``no'' if we are going to be against it. I am going to offer amendments that present another vision. But what I want to urge my colleagues to do is to look at this amendment and see we already have more than enough money to buy the children's insurance policies that we need. So let us stay with the amount we have in the bill. As chairman of the subcommittee that is going to be instrumental in trying to put the bill together, I would attest that we can cover all 5 million children with the $16 billion we have. Finally, let me say that it is discouraging to see a budget deal that commits to $16 billion of brand new programs, little baby elephants that are just going to grow, and we cannot pay the bills we already have in Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. But, even for many of our Members, the $16 billion is not enough. The ink is not even dry on the budget deal and here we are, talking about busting it big time. It has to be very discouraging. Defeating this amendment, it seems to me, is the reasonable thing to do, unless you really believe that it is just important that you be able to say to people: Not only did I want to insure people, but I wanted enough money to do it several times over so we can do it just as inefficiently as we wanted to and still reach everybody. Unless that gets you something at home, don't waste this $20 billion. Don't vote to raise taxes and spend this money. We already provide the funds necessary to serve the children we seek to serve. I yield the floor.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Go ahead, I might be enlightened.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I want to first say how proud I am of two of our colleagues here, Senator Santorum and Senator DeWine. I have delayed coming over to speak until the end because, quite frankly, I think they have done a better job of defending the position that I hold than I could possibly do. I think their arguments over the last few days have been a great testament to the seriousness with which we take our business. I was thinking, since I was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee when they were both elected, that if I found myself at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter added up my good deeds and found me coming up short, I would say as my final argument, Santorum and DeWine, I had a little something to do with their being elected. I am convinced that would be instrumental in getting me through the gates. We have had a lot of things said here, and I want to get back to the basic point, which I think often gets lost. This is not a debate about a woman's right to choose. This is not a debate about the rights of the unborn. We are debating, today, a gruesome procedure that no civilized society would condone. We are back here again today because every day since we had the first debate more facts have come out, often contradicting the very arguments that were used against this bill when we debated it last year on the floor of the Senate. As people learn more about this procedure, they become stronger in their conviction that it should be stopped. We are here today because many members who voted against this bill last year have constituents back home who, as they have gotten to know more about this procedure, feel that a mistake was made. We are here today because even the people who opposed the bill before are deeply troubled by this procedure that we are trying to ban. Now, I am not a physician. I first got involved in this debate when back in 1995, I came over to give one of my dull lectures on economics. While waiting to speak, Senator Smith was standing here talking about this procedure. I knew little about its gruesomeness prior to that time. A Senator rose to object. That Senator was offended by what Senator Smith was trying to demonstrate. It suddenly struck me, if we are offended by somebody simply talking about this procedure, for God's sake, we ought to be offended that it is happening to thousands of children in America. I cosponsored Senator Smith's bill. That marked the beginning of my involvement. The bottom line here is that we are trying to ban a gruesome procedure which is inhumane, uncivilized, and clearly unnecessary. I am not sure about all that the Daschle amendment purports to do. Many people see it doing many different things. But I am sure that the one thing it does not do is ban partial-birth abortion. Should we as members of the greatest of all civilized societies continue to condone a procedure? An unborn living child is completely delivered, except for the child's head, and that child is literally 3 inches from the full constitutional protections afforded every person in this country. Only at that point is that child's life terminated. I think the American people who have come to understand this procedure want it stopped. If you want it stopped, you can't stop it with the Daschle amendment. You have to stop it by banning partial- birth abortion. So I urge my colleagues to vote no on the Daschle amendment and to vote for this bill.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from Arizona, Senator Kyl, 5 minutes.

Mr. GRAMM. I yield the Senator 2 additional minutes.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I yield the Senator from Pennsylvania, Senator Santorum, 5 minutes.

Mr. GRAMM. The Senator from Alaska has 7 minutes?

Mr. GRAMM. I do.

Mr. GRAMM. For 5 minutes.

Mr. GRAMM. Certainly.

Mr. GRAMM. Let me say that I have been asked by several people to reserve them time. I assume they are on their way over.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I am not going to spend a lot of time debating whether or not this adds to the deficit. Our official accountant says it does. I think people know in fact that it does. I think we really ought to debate the merits of this amendment. The merits of this amendment boil down to simple facts. Because we have natural disasters--we have had them every year. In fact, since President Clinton has been in office we have averaged $7 billion of expenditures on natural disasters, and we have not put money in the budget to pay for it. We have just simply added it to the deficit every single year. My view is that in the midst of a new budget that has historic levels of increases in discretionary spending, even before that budget goes into effect, we ought not to be adding another $6.6 billion to the deficit. So I hope my colleagues will vote for this amendment. I realize this is a difficult amendment. This is the kind of real-world decision that people face outside Washington, DC, where bad things happen to them and they have to deal with it but they have to pay for it. My amendment does not deny one penny of aid to anybody. Nothing in this program would change as a result of having to pay for it other than we would have to go back in light of these natural disasters and come up with other programs that we now say we will have to do without because we are going to pay for this money, that we are going to provide for areas of the country that have been ravaged by natural disasters. Let's not turn this natural disaster for a handful of States in our country into a fiscal disaster for every State in the country and for every family and every person. Let's pay our bills. We can do it through this amendment. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I am afraid that my amendment is a lot more controversial than the amendment that we have just had. My amendment has to do with paying for disaster relief. I think every Member of the Senate wants to help people who have been affected by floods and earthquakes. It has always been our way to have national programs to help parts of the country which have been ravaged by natural disasters. But ultimately, in this kind of bill, you come down to the question, are you going to pay for it or are you simply going to add the cost to the deficit? Interestingly enough, in the supplemental appropriations bill before us, we have a section for defense--basically money for Bosnia--and we have a section for the disaster, and then we have a lot of other spending programs in addition to the disaster. But every penny of new spending on defense is paid for by cutting defense programs. But, unfortunately, the nondefense spending in the bill that is before us providing this disaster relief, which none of us opposes, is going to raise the budget deficit by $699 million in fiscal year 1997--that is, between now and October 1 of this year--and it is going to raise the budget deficit, over the next 5 years, by a whopping $6.6 billion. In fact, it raises the deficit this year by $699 million. Then it raises the deficit next year by $1.67 billion, and the next year it raises the deficit by $1.56 billion. In the year 2000, we are still spending money out for this emergency appropriation--over $1 billion in that year. Now, what my amendment does is very, very simple. It is a complicated process that we employ in the budget, and I apologize for that as people try to understand it. What we are doing is very simple. For the $699 million we are spending this year to help people deal with a natural disaster, we are going to require an across-the-board cut in all other programs of 1.9 percent, roughly, to pay for this program. So we are going to provide disaster assistance. The Gramm amendment does not stop $1 from going anywhere to provide assistance to anybody. But what the Gramm amendment says is, in the remaining 5 months of this fiscal year, we are going to ask each other program in the Government to throw in a little bit less than 2 cents of their annual appropriation, and only $699 million of their actual spending, so that we can pay for this emergency appropriation without raising the budget deficit. Second, for all this money that is going to spend out over the next 5 years, all we are saying is that, with the new budget coming into effect, these outlay figures, this money we are going to spend next year and for the next 5 years, that spending will count as part of the spending caps that we set for each of these years. So, for example, the $1.67 billion that we will spend next year as a result of this appropriations bill will simply count toward the spending for next year, and since the new budget will set a limit on the amount of spending, we will have to offset that next year against some other program. What is the argument for doing this? It is kind of strange that in 1997 in America you have to give a strong argument for paying your bills. But this is Washington, DC. That argument is required. The argument is that spending is a problem. The argument is that, if we simply add another $6.6 billion to the deficit today, that $6.6 billion the Government is going to have to go out and borrow. And that $6.6 billion is not going to go to build new homes, new farms, new factories, nor to generate new economic growth, because the Government is going to borrow that money and it is not going to be available to the private sector to undertake those activities which the people would have put the money towards had the Government not seized it. This amendment simply, for the remainder of this year, asks every program to throw in 2 cents on the annual appropriations to help pay for this emergency funding this year, and then for the next 5 years it simply says, in looking at the amount of money we are spending in each of those next 5 years, count the money we are spending as a result of this bill. Let me explain why that is so important. We are on the verge of adopting a budget compromise that will increase discretionary spending by the Federal Government over the next 5 years by $193 billion, compared to the budget we adopted last year. But yet, at the very moment that we are moving toward adopting that budget which has such massive increases in spending, we are today considering an appropriations bill that will spend $6.6 billion more outside that budget. So, in a very real sense, if we do not adopt the amendment that I am presenting today before we even adopt the new budget, which the President says has the most rapid increase in social spending since the 1960's, before we even adopt that budget today, we will be busting the budget with $6.6 billion in additional spending that won't even count under the new budget even though that money will spend out over the next 5 years. So, this is a good-government amendment. Let me also say, look, I am not saying that it is going to be easy to go back and have every program, project, or activity kick in 2 cents to pay for this program. I don't underestimate for the moment the argument that I am sure will be made by the chairman of the Appropriations Committee that we have only 4 or 5 months left in the fiscal year and that coming up with that 2 percent savings will be very difficult for the Government. But I want to remind my colleagues that the Government is not the only institution in America that has emergencies. American families have emergencies all the time. They have to make decisions about how to deal with their emergencies. When Johnny falls down and breaks his arm, no matter at what point it is during the year, the family has to come up with money to have the arm set and provide the medical care. If they were the Federal Government, they could argue, Look, we have already written our budget. We are already well into the year. We have planned to go on vacation. We planned to buy a new refrigerator, and we can't do those things and have Johnny's arm set. So they would like to have this emergency appropriations that would simply allow them to spend money they don't have. But families don't have the ability to do that. Families have to make hard choices. So, what they do, as we all know since we are members of families, is go back, and they don't go on vacation that year, or they don't buy a new refrigerator. They have to set priorities. The Federal Government almost never sets priorities. Quite frankly, I offer this amendment, Mr. President, because I am worried that by creating this image that somehow we are dealing with the deficit in this new budget that we are opening the floodgates to new spending. What better example could there be than the supplemental appropriations before us which raises the deficit by $6.6 billion over the next 5 years? I am not going to go through the list of all the programs. But as we all know, as we are all painfully aware, many of these programs have nothing to do with hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, or other natural disasters. Many of the programs in here represent ongoing spending. But by putting them in this emergency appropriations, unless we pay for it, we are going to be adding $6.6 billion to the deficit. I know there will be debate: Are we really adding money to the deficit? I have a memo from the Congressional Budget Office which does the official scoring for Congress. Let me read: CBO estimates that the nondefense programs in this bill would increase Federal outlays and the deficit by $699 million in fiscal year 1997. Total nondefense outlays for fiscal years 1997 through 2005 are estimated at $6.667 billion dollars. I ask unanimous consent that this be printed in the Record.

Mr. GRAMM. Yes.

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

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I send the amendment to the desk.

Mr. GRAMM. Sure.