Judd Gregg

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Which means that, Mr. President, more money is being spent than is allowed to be spent under our budget rules; is that not correct?

Mr. GREGG. I thank the Chair.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I rise today on behalf of myself and my wife Kathy to pay tribute to Officer Greg Kendall of Rye, NH, who retired on January 1, 2010, after 50 years of service as an educator and law enforcement officer. It is important for us to take a moment to recognize and honor Officer Kendall's long career as a dedicated public servant. Citizens like Greg Kendall ensure that our communities remain great places to live, work, and raise a family. The outstanding community service demonstrated by him is what inspires people to leave behind a better society than they found, and contribute to the betterment of their local community. Greg, whom Rye Police Chief Kevin Walsh describes as ``irreplaceable,'' is both well known and highly respected throughout New Hampshire's Seacoast community, where he has served on the Rye police force and as an educator in the Rye and Seabrook school districts. Starting out on summer beach patrol in 1960 as a full-time officer, Greg continued to serve as a police officer on weekends while also beginning his career in education as a full-time sixth grade teacher at Rye Junior High School. Upon finishing graduate studies at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Maine, he became the principal at Rye Junior High School, where he continued to guide and shape the education and character of a generation of young students over the next 16 years. Following that, Greg taught in Seabrook for an additional 13 years, all while serving nights and weekends as a special officer in Rye. Since 2001, Greg has also been animal control officer, performing his duties with the same compassion, calm demeanor, and professionalism that he always brought to his shifts on patrol or lessons in the classroom. On a personal note, I had the pleasure of serving with Greg when, in the summer of 1968, I worked as a special officer on the Rye Police Force. The town of Rye, the people of the region and the State of New Hampshire are all better off for Greg's wisdom, skills, and experience. He is a friend and someone whose sense of humor, expertise and dedication I have always admired. Kathy and I join Greg's friends and neighbors in Rye in honoring him as an officer of the law, an educator of youth, and a motivator for us all. Thank you, Greg Kendall. We wish you the best in all your future endeavors; may they be as rewarding as those of the last 50 years.

Mr. GREGG

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

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 10 minutes.

Mr. GREGG. Without my losing the floor, does the Senator wish to speak after I speak?

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I rise to discuss the issue of fiscal policies, which we talk a little bit about around here but on which we are not focusing, in my opinion, with the intensity we should, and the fact we are now seeing in Europe the meltdown of a major nation-state's financial situation, Greece. Greece has become a precursor for many other industrialized nations in this world which are finding themselves grossly overextended in the amount of debt they put on their books. As a result, in the situation of Greece, they are incapable of repaying their national debt, or what is known as their sovereign debt. Fortunately, the European Community has rallied around and has tried to stabilize the situation. But the fact that the situation may be being stabilized should not allow us to take much solace because this is not a unique problem to Greece. As we look at the debt levels of a large number of nations in the industrialized West, especially, many of them are in serious trouble. Many are grossly overextended. We have seen, obviously, pressures on Ireland, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Italy, and, of course, Greece is so overextended that it was about to default potentially. What does this mean for us as a nation? Unfortunately, we are on the same track. People talk in terms of default and overextension and too much debt and their eyes sort of glaze over. What does that mean? Essentially, it means we as a nation see a fundamental drop in our standard of living. If our debt gets to a certain point, we basically as a nation, in order to pay for that debt, have to reduce the standard of living of our people. What is that point? There is general consensus that a public debt; that is, debt owned by other countries and by the people of the nation who is running it up, a public debt that amounts to about 35 percent or 40 percent of your gross domestic product--what you are producing as a nation--is a very good status. But as that moves up by running deficits--and, remember, we are running a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, and under the President's budget we will be running over $1 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years--as that debt goes up-- which means you are basically borrowing money and borrowing it from Americans, but mostly now from other countries, especially the Chinese and Saudi Arabia--it starts to cross certain thresholds. The next most significant threshold is to have a debt-to-public-production ratio of about 60 percent. That gets serious. In fact, that is such a high debt-to-public-production ratio that in Europe you can't even join the European Union if you have a debt situation that big. Well, unfortunately, later this year, because of all the debt we have put on the books in the last 3 years, we are going to pass the 60-percent threshold as a nation. Then you start moving into waters which are more than uncharted and choppy, they are dangerous. You start to move into the waters that Greece finds itself in. Because when your public debt gets up around 70, 80, 90 percent of your gross domestic product, you have trouble paying it back without doing some very horrible things to your people--things such as massive inflation or massive tax increases, both of which cost Americans jobs and reduces their savings and their ability to live a better lifestyle. Under the President's budget, as proposed, and under the scenario which is clearly in front of us--it is like a railroad track that is almost impossible to get off unless we do something very significant-- we hit 80 percent within 6 years, or approximately 80 percent. So we are basically where Greece is 6, 7, 8 years from now, and the implications for us as a society are catastrophic. What are we doing about this? Not a lot. In fact, we are aggravating it every day. Just yesterday, we passed another bill, or the day before, that spent $100 billion--$100 billion that wasn't paid for. It went to the debt. Last week, we passed another bill that alleged to spend $10 billion, but buried in it were some parliamentary games which actually meant it spent another $100 billion that wasn't paid for in highway funds. So $200 billion in 2 weeks. And the week before that, we did another bill that spent $15 billion unpaid for. Not only are we not addressing this problem, but we are fundamentally aggravating the problem. Now the House has this Senate health care bill over there. What are the fiscal implications of that? It grows the Federal Government by $2.5 trillion--$2.5 trillion. It is claimed the bill is paid for. But how is it paid for? It alleges it is going to reduce Medicare spending by $500 billion. But rather than using that money to make Medicare more solvent, it takes that money and creates two new entitlements--or expands one and creates another one. We know from our history that entitlements are never fully paid for. Then it takes money from a fund, which is supposed to be an insurance fund, and it spends that money--long-term care insurance. So that when those insurance IOUs come up to be paid, there isn't going to be any money to pay them. It is called the CLASS Act. It is a classic game of pyramid accounting. In fact, if you did it in the private sector you would go to jail. So that is the course we are on--a massive expansion in our debt, leading us to a situation where our capacity to pay that debt will be virtually impossible to accomplish without huge negative implications for the standard of living of our children and our grandchildren, and even our generation, quite honestly. It is going to arrive pretty soon. In fact, today, there was a CNBC question put out: Should you continue to invest in American debt in light of what we are headed toward? How do you avoid the impending meltdown? As people start to sense this coming at us, the cost of selling our debt is going to become extraordinarily expensive, because people will have to price in either massive inflation or an economic cost through reduction in productivity due to massive taxes, which will reduce our capacity to repay this debt in any sort of reasonable way. This is a serious problem, and yet we do not seem to be willing to face up to it. There is something else we need to focus on. Not only is it the sovereign nations of the world that have this debt problem, it is our States. Think about this for a moment. California's debt problem is so severe they are represented as being close to potential default. What is the implication of that for us as a country if one of our States were to default on their debt? The domino effect would be extraordinary. Do we have enough gas in our tanks, so to say, to come in and resolve this from the Federal level? I doubt it. We have used up most of our running room. If we go into a fiscal cardiac arrest, which is approximately what we are going to do--it is exactly what we are going to do, a fiscal cardiac arrest--4 or 5 years from now, and we reach for the defibrillators, there isn't going to be any power. There won't be any power to activate them because we have used up all our resources already. We have spent it. We can't borrow any more, and we certainly don't want to inflate our way out of it. It will be severe, and the arrest may become terminal for certain parts of our economy and certain people's lifestyles--basically, regular Americans living on Main Street. So the issue is out there and it is pretty clear. Greece is a precursor, California is an example, and our own profligate attitude here in the Congress about it is not helping the problem at all. You don't have to listen to me on this. Mohamed El- Erian, who is a senior member of a group known as PIMCO, the largest bond dealer in the world and one of the leading authorities on debt and the purchase and selling of debt in the world, wrote a very thoughtful article, and this article hits the nail on the head about the threat we confront as a nation for our failure to face up to this debt situation now and allowing it to erode and continue to grow. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article I just referred to.

Mr. GREGG. It is time for us to act. It is time to, first, stop spending. That is the bottom line. It is like a diet. The only way you can lose some weight is to actually stop eating the wrong way. We have to stop spending, and then we have to come up with some pretty aggressive ideas addressing the very systemic problems we have as a country relative to the growth of our debt, so that if we do them now it will have less negative impact on people than if we have to do them in a crisis situation. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep passing debt on to our children? Why do we keep running program after program out here that is shrouded in sweetness and light but not paid for? We just passed a pay-go point of order 4 weeks ago to great fanfare, great breast-beating about how fiscally responsible we were going to be. Yet time after time since we passed that pay-go point of order, amendments have been brought to the floor which violate it. This is another one. This amendment costs $2 billion which is not paid for. Summer jobs may be good. I am sure they are. But why do we want to put the debt for those summer jobs onto the children of the people who are having the summer jobs? If this is a priority--and it is--let's pay for it. Let's take the money out of some other account. But let's not add to the debt, and let's not once again violate the pay-go rules which this Senate has so loudly proclaimed is the manner in which we will discipline ourselves fiscally. It is a $2 billion item. If we can't stand by pay-go for $2 billion, we are making a farce out of it. As a result of this violation of pay-go, I raise a point of order against the amendment pursuant to section 201(a) of S. Res. 21, the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2008.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, is this a pay-go point of order violation?

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. I object.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I understand the Senator from Illinois is planning to speak. I wish to speak after he completes his remarks. I ask unanimous consent he be recognized and then I be recognized.

Mr. GREGG. The Senator is speaking after me?

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I rise to go over, for the sake of the record and also for those people who may be listening and may be reading this dialog, where we stand relative to the health care debate. I think it is important for people to understand what has happened. There has been a lot of talk about a lot of different things, with reconciliation, the term ``reconciliation'' taking a front row seat. What is happening here essentially is this. The House of Representatives is going to have to make a decision whether they want to pass the bill that passed here in the Senate. Remember, the bill that passed here in the Senate was a bill that was produced and delivered to the Senate on a Saturday afternoon, for all intents and purposes--the core of the bill, the managers' amendment. No amendments were allowed after that Saturday afternoon and a final vote was taken 3 days later on Christmas Eve. It was a bill that expanded the size of the government by $2.5 trillion, when fully implemented. It was a bill that reduced Medicare by $1 trillion when fully implemented and was scored at $500 billion in the first 10-year tranche, by $1 trillion when fully implemented, and took those savings from Medicare, from Medicare recipients, and used them to fund a brandnew entitlement which had nothing to do with Medicare, it didn't involve the people who receive Medicare, and to extend dramatically an already existing entitlement called Medicaid. It was a bill that basically said to small employers we are going to make it so darned expensive for you to keep the insurance you presently give to your employees that a lot of you are going to decide to throw up your hands, stop insuring your employees and send your employees down the street to something called an exchange. It was a bill that basically set up a structure which would manage, in a very micromanaged way, the delivery of health care in this country from a top-down situation so essentially it put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor and you and your hospital. It was a bill which was going to create so much new spending and grow the Government so much that we would now have, after this bill is fully implemented, the largest government, as a percentage of our gross national product, we have ever had at any time when we have not been engaged in a world war. Think about that. That bill takes the size of our government and grows it from its historic level, which is about 20 percent of GDP, up to around 25, 26, 27 percent of GDP when it is fully implemented. Most of that, although allegedly paid for--those paid-fors will never come to fruition because we know this Congress doesn't have the courage to stand up and raise taxes at those levels or cut spending at those levels. So most of that, in my opinion--and granted, this wasn't CBO's score because they had to take the statements as though Congress would do something such as cut Medicare by $1 trillion--most of those pay-fors would not come to fruition and therefore this would fall on the deficit and become debt our children would have to pay off. In addition, it did nothing, absolutely nothing, about reducing the cost of health care in this country. In fact--again according to CBO-- the cost of health care went straight up under this bill. A lot of Americans, also under this bill, would still not be insured because the estimate was 24 million, I believe, would still have no insurance, even after we had spent $2.5 trillion. So this bill, in my opinion, was and is and remains a disaster from a fiscal standpoint, because it will so massively expand the size of the Federal Government and throw those costs onto our children's backs in the form of debt; and from a health care standpoint, because it will undermine, in my opinion, the delivery of health care. But more important, it doesn't do anything substantively to bend the outyear health care costs. So now this bill, this giant bill on health care, this asteroid headed toward Earth, is sitting in the House of Representatives. They do not have the votes to pass it. Why? Because the American people have spoken. They spoke when they elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts, they have spoken in polls across the country, and they have spoken in town meetings. They have spoken in letters to Senators and e-mails to Senators and House Members. They are upset. They know this is bad policy. They know we cannot afford it, and they know we should not do it. So there are a lot of House Members who are a little queasy about voting for this bill. So what does the administration come up with and the House leadership, Speaker Pelosi? They have come up with this sidecar to this huge bill, and this sidecar is called reconciliation. It is a littler bill. What is the purpose of this bill? The purpose of this bill is to go around to the different constituencies in the House, the different liberal constituencies in the House, ask them what they need to get their vote for the big bill, and then put it in this little bill. It is a purchasing process. It is a going-out-and-buying-votes process done behind closed doors, as this bill was. This bill was designed in a back room. The big bill was designed in a back room. This is a back room, behind the back room, behind a hidden door, where they are negotiating with all of these folks: What do I need to do to get you to vote for this big bill, which nobody wants? Someone says: Well, you have to spend more money, so they put in something that spends more money, or you have to raise taxes on somebody, so they put in a tax increase, or you have to change the benefit structure, so they change the benefit structure. They put all of these little changes, which are fairly significant but are nothing compared to the bigger bill, in this smaller bill called reconciliation. Why did they choose that bill called reconciliation to do this--or why will they? Because under the Senate rules anything that comes across the floor of the Senate requires 60 votes to pass. It is called the filibuster. That is the way the Senate was structured. The Senate was structured to be the place where bills which rushed through the House because they do not have rules that limit--they do have a lot of rules that limit debate and allow people to pass bills quickly, but they do not have any rule called the filibuster which allows people to slow things down. Bills can rush through the House, and they come over here. Sometimes they are pretty bad ideas, and the Founding Fathers realized when they structured this government they wanted checks and balances. They do not want things being rushed through. They had seen the parliamentary system. They knew it did not work. So they set up the Senate as the place, as George Washington described it, where you take the hot coffee out of the cup and you pour it into the saucer and you let it cool a little bit and make people look at it and make sure it is done correctly. So that is why we have the 60-vote situation over here to require that things that pass the Senate get thoughtful consideration. Unfortunately, it was totally ignored--the 60 votes were not because 60 votes were used to override thoughtful consideration. But when the big bill was passed, it was done in a way that basically limited the ability of the Senate to debate it and to amend it. But now they know they cannot go through that route again because they know there is no longer 60 votes on the other side of the aisle with the election of Senator Brown, who was elected, in large part, because of people's outrage over what happened when they basically tried to jam the Senate, or did jam the Senate procedure, and did not allow amendments, did not allow a debate on the biggest piece of social policy and fiscal legislation in history--in my experience, in the history of my experience in the Congress, the big bill. When they jammed us, jammed that thing through here on Christmas Eve, the American people got outraged. Senator Brown made that point. As a result, people agreed with him in Massachusetts, and they elected him. So there are no longer 60 votes on that side of the aisle. They cannot use that railroad approach. So they decided to go back to an arcane Senate procedure called reconciliation and use that approach. Under reconciliation, which is a Senate process, that is the only bill around here, the budget and reconciliation, that has the right to pass with 51 votes and a time limit on debate, and basically a time limit on debatable amendments, although not on amendments generally. So this reconciliation is a hybrid vehicle in the Senate. And what is it? Well, reconciliation was structured so that when a budget passed the Senate, there would be a way for the Budget Committee to say to the committees that were supposed to adjust spending or adjust taxes in a way to meet the budget that they had to do it. So if your budget was coming out $10, $20, or $30 billion over where it was supposed to be, the reconciliation structure would say: Change the law to bring it back to where it is supposed to be. It has been used around here on numerous occasions. I think 19 times reconciliation has been used since the Budget Act instituted reconciliation in 1976. But it has always been used for the purposes of adjusting issues which either, A, were bipartisan, or, B, were pretty much purely issues of adjusting numbers, numbers on the tax side, numbers on the spending side. So of the 19 times that reconciliation has been used, every time except two times, reconciliation has been a bipartisan bill. Twice it was not bipartisan. Twice it was run through here on a partisan vote: once on the tax increases that President Clinton passed, and once on a reconciliation bill dealing with adjusting spending. I believe it was in 1985; otherwise, there has always been a bipartisan vote for the bill. So 89 percent of the time it has been bipartisan. It has always been, when it has been partisan, used for the purpose of making these numbers adjustments, not for the purpose of creating massive new policy that affects every American in very personal ways in the way they deal with their doctors and their hospitals and their health care treatment. It was never conceived as a concept where the real legislation involving substantive issues of policies would be done. Tax rate adjustments have occurred under it. Absolutely. But when you move tax rates from 39 to 35 percent, as the Bush tax cuts did, or tax capital gains from 20--I think they went from 25 percent to 15 percent--that is not a complex issue. That is just, you know, taxes are either going to go up or go down. It takes about 100 pages of actual legislative language. Everybody knows the issue. It is an up-or-down vote. Pretty clear. In fact, in these instances, there were opposing positions presented, and in those issues, there was actually more than one--people of both parties voted for them. That is not like passing an entire rewrite of the health care system of America. The health care system is 17 percent of our economy, one of the most complex issues we have to deal with. You pull a string over here, and a string 10,000 miles away is affected. It is just a matrix of exceptionally complicated interrelated issues with all sorts of policy language that is necessary. So reconciliation was never conceived of, and its purpose was never to take on big policy like that. Big policy is supposed to be taken on the floor of the Senate in an open procedure where there is debate and there is amendments, and the amendments are debatable. So reconciliation is certainly not the appropriate vehicle to use. But I think the point I am trying to make is that reconciliation is not the real game. I mean, after the House of Representatives--after they have gone around with this reconciliation bill and they bought up the votes they need and said to these people: Well, we will just fix that in reconciliation if you will just vote for the big bill--after that has happened and the big bill has passed, this $2.5 trillion monstrosity in spending and government dominance of the health care sector, after that is passed, the game is over. That is the law. I do not think there will be much incentive at all for the White House or my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to take up reconciliation. There certainly will not be any energy needed to pass it. Because this big bill, which America basically rejects--every poll in America says it has a maximum of about 25 percent approval of that bill and somewhere around 60 to 70 percent disapproval, at different levels, ``strongly'' or ``fairly strongly''--that bill will have become law, and basically what we will have done, or what will have occurred, then, is we will have created a government program that is so large and so burdensome that it is very unlikely that this country will be able to pay for it. As we move into the outyears, our children are going to get these bills. In order to pay those bills, they are either going to have to have a massive event of inflation to pay for them or a massive tax increase. Either one of those events, of course, undermine the quality of life and the standard of living of the next generation. In addition, of course, we are going to get a health care system which has become basically a ward of the government, for all intents and purposes, for the bureaucracy that is very dominant and that makes it very difficult for citizens to have the choices they need to develop a health care delivery system that is tailored to their needs. A lot of small businesses will just simply give up on the idea of supplying health care. We also know, of course, that the health care prices will not come down but will continue to go up. So this is a really dangerous time. It is a time when the House of Representatives has to take a hard look at what actions it is going to take, obviously, and I am sure they will. But they have to recognize that voting for that big bill and hoping that the Senate will bail them out with a little bill--well, I would take a second look at that. First, it will be hard to run a reconciliation bill across this floor and have it end up with the way it started out because of all of the points of order that will be available against it. But, secondly, I am not sure there will be all that much energy to do it to begin with because once you pass the big bill, those who want to essentially dramatically expand our government, and in the end nationalize the health care system with a single-payer approach, will be well on their road to accomplishing those things. There is not going to be a whole lot of energy to do much else. So I think it is important to understand that as much as reconciliation is an interesting and entertaining point of topic for discussion around here as to whether it is appropriate and whether--which I do not think it is under this type of scenario--and whether the reconciliation bill will actually survive the challenging on this floor from points of order, that is an interesting issue too. That is not the question. The question is, is reconciliation even relevant once the big bill passes? I think it is probably not. So if I were a House Member depending on reconciliation, looking to that bill as the way that I am going to justify voting for this bigger bill, which is such a disaster, I would think twice. I yield the floor.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I was going to inquire of the chairman if he had locked in a speaker after the vote.

Mr. GREGG. What is the regular order?

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, this amendment would add billions of dollars to the deficit which would have to be paid for by our children. Of course, the reason the COLA is not being given this year is because the law says it should not be. Therefore, I raise a point of order that the Sanders amendment violates section 403(a) of the budget resolution.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I make a point of order that the amendment violates section 201 of S. Con. Res. 21 of the 110th Congress.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. I ask unanimous consent that upon the completion of the remarks from the Senator from New York, I be recognized.

Mr. GREGG. Yes.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I believe the first obligation of a government--or one of the obligations, especially of Congress--is to live by its own words and live by its own rules. With great fanfare a couple weeks ago, the Democratic leadership and its membership passed a pay-go piece of legislation which says that when you bring spending legislation to the floor, it should be paid for. There was great breast-beating on the other side of the aisle about how this would discipline the government and make us fiscally responsible. Now we see, as the first piece of legislation to come forward since the pay-go resolution passed, a bill which violates that pay-go resolution. This bill spends $12 billion that is not paid for under the pay-go rules over the next 5 years. It is in violation of the concepts and the rules which were put forward by the other side as the way we would discipline spending. I understand--and I think most of us understand--the issue of the economy is critical, getting people back to work is critical, but I don't think we get people back to work by loading more and more debt onto the next generation. Probably we create an atmosphere where folks who are willing to go out and invest and create jobs are a little reticent to do so because they don't know how all that debt the Federal Government is putting on the books will be paid for. I presume that is one of the reasons the pay-go legislation was brought forward a couple of weeks ago, to try to give some certainty to the markets and to the American people who were upset with all the deficit and debt, that we would discipline ourselves. Now the first bill that comes forward violates the rules of the Senate by adding $12 billion of spending which is not paid for, which will be deficit spending, and which will be added to the debt. I am not sure how you vote for this bill when it violates that rule which you just voted for 2 weeks ago. It seems a bit of inconsistency that is hard even for a political institution to justify. On top of that, this bill has massive gamesmanship in the outyears. It is a bill of $15 to $18 billion in spending, but actually, because of the games played in the highway accounts, it adds $140 billion of spending that is not paid for which will be added to the debt if this bill is passed. That is a hard number. That is a big number. That is a real number. The simple fact is, this bill, in the classic gamesmanship we see from the highway committee, spends money we don't have and then claims we have the money. In the end, all that money has to be borrowed because there are no revenues to cover it. If this bill is passed, there will be $140 billion in new debt put on our kids' backs as a result of this alleged small number. I forgot what the number is they claim is actually in the bill. How does that happen? This bit of gamesmanship ought to be explained because it keeps being undertaken by the highway committee in the most egregious way relative to proper fiscal management. In fact, if this were done in an accounting cycle that was subject to accounting rules, the people who claim this sort of sleight of hand would go to jail. It is that simple. They would go to jail because this is such a fraud on the American taxpayer. What they are claiming is that the highway fund, on which they have committed to spend much more money than is coming in, and they knew they would spend more money than was coming in because they wanted to spend more money than was coming in, what they are claiming is that highway fund lent the general fund money 10 years ago and that money should have had interest paid on it. Of course, at the time, they actually waived the interest, assuming interest should have been paid on that. That interest has been recouped a couple of times now, allegedly, even if it were owed. But what they claim is that because the money is coming out of the general fund to fund the highway fund, they are calling that an offset so it won't score. Unfortunately, under the present rules with which we budget around here, it doesn't score because it is built into the baseline. It adds up to $140 billion over the next 10 years, approximately, that is going to come out of the general fund to fund the highway fund because the people who run the highway fund don't have the courage to fund what they want to spend. So they are going to take it out of the general fund. Where does the general fund get its money? It borrows it from our children and grandchildren. It runs up debt. That is why, under any scenario, no matter what gamesmanship you play around here on naming this event, it turns out to be the same thing: debt added to our children's burden. Our children already have a fair amount of debt coming at them as a result of this Congress's profligacy. Under the President's budget, the deficit will double in the next 5 years and triple in the next 10 years. We will add $11 trillion of new debt to the backs of our children over the next 10 years under the President's initiatives, every year for the next 10 years. We will average deficits of $1 trillion. The American people intuitively understand that cannot continue; it can't keep up. We are on an unsustainable course. We are running this Nation into a ditch on the fiscal side of the ledger. We are putting this Nation into financial bankruptcy because of the fact that we are running up deficits and debt far beyond our capacity to repay. In fact, if you look at these deficits and debt just in the context of what other industrialized nations do--for example, the European Union--they don't allow their states to exceed deficits of 3 percent or a public debt to GDP ratio of 60 percent. The way this works out, we are going to run deficits of about 5 percent every year for the next 10 years, we will have a public debt situation of well over 60 percent next year, and we will get to 80 percent before the next 10 years are up. Those are numbers which lead to one conclusion--that we are in deep trouble. We are in deep, deep trouble. Yet we come here today with a bill which aggravates that situation relative to the pay-go rules by $12 billion and relative to the highway fund by $140 billion.

Mr. GREGG. I will yield for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

Mr. GREGG. What we have before us today is a bill which, first, violates the pay-go rules which we just passed a couple of weeks ago to the tune of $12 billion and, second, puts in place a glidepath, which should be called a nosedive, toward $140 billion of new debt being put on the backs of our children, with the alleged justification that it is offset when, in fact, the offset is superficial, Pyrrhic, and nonexistent.

Mr. GREGG. We can not keep doing this. We cannot keep doing this to our children. We cannot keep coming out here and claiming we are being fiscally disciplined when we are doing just the opposite: spending money we don't have and passing the bill on to our kids.