Judd Gregg

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. I will speak to Senator Grassley's amendment. What Senator Grassley is suggesting is we give the Secretary of Health and Human Services the authority to extend the signup time for senior citizens, and if we extend such signup times, there will be no penalty against the senior citizens. It is an excellent amendment. I hope it will be supported.

Mr. GREGG. I move to reconsider the vote and to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 3009

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

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote and I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, at this point I ask unanimous consent that after we have completed the final vote in this group, which has been ordered, which is the Santorum vote, we will then turn to an amendment by Senator Conrad about avian flu and an amendment by Senator Burr on avian flu. Prior to those two amendments, there will be 5 minutes for Senator Conrad and 5 minutes for Senator Burr to speak before we go to those votes.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask, as we proceed forward, that we deem the yeas and nays to have been ordered on all the amendments that have been pending.

Mr. GREGG. And all votes be 10 minutes in length.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. That is fine.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask after we complete the Santorum debate we move to your amendment on avian flu and then that be followed by-- you have another amendment?

Mr. GREGG. They are all 15 minutes.

Mr. GREGG. The Wyden-Snowe amendment would be up sometime around 11:25.

Mr. GREGG. I yield for a question.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 1 o'clock today the Senate proceed to vote in relation to the Murray amendment No. 3363, to be followed by 2 minutes of debate and a vote in relation to the Santorum amendment No. 3050; provided further that following the vote on the Santorum amendment, the Senate recess until 3 p.m. in order for the Senate to proceed to the House for the joint meeting.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, actually there will be another amendment dealing with the avian flu by Senator Burr, and then we would to go to the Wyden-Snowe amendment.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. GREGG. Do we know how long we are going with this little aside?

Mr. GREGG. What is the regular order?

Mr. GREGG. I am not yielding the floor. I am asking the Senator from North Dakota if he would like to get on with the amendment process. I have not yielded the floor.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I yield myself--the Senator from North Dakota and the Senator from Maryland took about a half an hour. I took about 5 minutes. So I am going to yield myself 25 minutes to discuss this issue in some depth because it is an important issue. I do believe the characterizations here are interesting but inconsistent with the facts. The Senator from North Dakota says we are running up the debt. I suppose you can argue that is true, yes, because we are operating the Government. But the second question would be, Who is running up the size of the Government? That would be probably a more appropriate question. If you look at the Democratic proposals, as they have hit the floor of the Senate, they are running up the size of the Government. That is their goal. They proposed amendments in committee that increase the size of the Federal Government by $127 billion. That is a huge expansion of the Federal Government. I give them credit, they pay for it with taxes on the American people, raising them $133 billion. And they are not tax- loophole closers. The Senator from North Dakota has claimed: Well, if you just collected taxes that are owed, you might get up to $100 billion. That may or may not be true, and we are going to try to do something to accomplish that. But as he well knows, CBO will not score that. They score that as zero. So in order to get that $133 billion, they are going to have to raise taxes on working Americans because loophole closers simply do not generate anything like that. The maximum amount you can score for loophole closers is about $11 billion. So they are going to have to raise taxes at least $121 billion on working Americans. And then the Senator from Maryland says there is $41 billion out there that you can just take from high-income Americans. If you grab that, well, that is clearly a rate increase and a tax increase. But it is an inaccurate statement. Actually, the high-income Americans today are paying more--paying more--than they have paid at any time in history as a relative burden of taxes. Their number has gone up significantly. In fact, the time when they got the best deal, ironically, was during the Clinton administration. During the Clinton administration, high-income Americans actually paid less as a percentage of the gross tax burden, total tax burden in America, than at any other time. It is only in the last few years that their percentage of the burden has gone up. Why is that? Well, it is something called economic activity. When people go out and they work hard and they are being productive, they end up paying more taxes. When tax rates are high, people seek tax shelters, and they hide income, and they invest it in things that give them avoidance of taxes. Some of the things the Senator from North Dakota would like to eliminate I would like to eliminate, too, that are inappropriate. But they also do things that are appropriate to avoid taxes so they do not have to pay that high tax rate. When you have a capital gains rate of 30 percent, people do not sell their assets. They hold on to them because they do not want to pay all that money to the Federal Government, especially high-income people. So what we have seen is when we cut rates, high-income people started doing things that generated revenue for the Federal Government, and it also generated a tax burden on them that was higher. They were willing to take that because they were making more money. And it is shown definitively by the revenues we have received as a Federal Government as a result of the cut in the capital gains rate. Now, the other side of the aisle considers the cut in the capital gains rate to be poison. They think it just benefits the rich and it should not have occurred. They want to repeal it. They tried to put in place pay-go to force the repeal of it, and they have all sorts of ideas for how you eliminate it because this is the rate they see as the problem in America, the capital gains rate being 15 percent instead of what it was. It used to be 30 percent. What was the effect of cutting capital gains rates? It actually generated huge revenue to the Federal Government. Why? Because people went out and started to undertake economic activity. They went out and sold stock. They went out and sold small businesses. They went out and sold real estate. That generated economic activity, which generated taxes to the Federal Government, taxes which we did not expect to get of $81 billion. Then they took the money they generated as a result of selling those assets and reinvested it in more productive activity and created more jobs, took more risks. As a result, the economy is growing. We have had month after month after month of growth in this economy. We created 5 million jobs. We have had, I think, 30 months of growth in this economy. And the 5 million new jobs we have created actually exceeds the combined jobs created in Japan and Europe during that same period of time. That is good economic policy. Just last month, we created 234,000 jobs. Why? Because we created an atmosphere where people are willing to go out and take a risk, where they are willing to go out, invest their money, take a risk, and create a job as part of taking that risk, and create revenue for the Federal Government because they create income. As a result, the revenues have gone up in this country. So another chart is pretty dramatic. These are the revenue growths-- the yellow lines--in the last few years and what we project out into the future--a 14-percent jump in revenue last year. Now, the other side will say: But that is from a historic low. Yes, it is a historic low, which was driven in large part by the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, the largest bubble in the history of this country or in the world. It was a bigger bubble than the tulip bubble or the South Seas bubble. When the Internet bubble collapsed, we went into recession, and that dropped revenues dramatically. Then we were attacked on 9/11, and that dropped revenues even more. So the President, with considerable foresight, I would say, decided to cut taxes before we got deep into the recession. As a result, there was economic activity generated, and that has produced a significant upturn in revenues--one of the most significant upturns in revenue in history. Now, here is the bottom line of this whole argument: We are reaching a point where we are back to a historic level of what taxes have been in this country. Historically, taxes in this country have represented about 18.4 percent of gross national product. And yes, they dipped well below that because of the Internet bubble and because of the attack on 9/11 and the economic slowdown that occurred. But now they are headed back up because of the economic policies this President has put in place, including creating more incentive for people to go out and be more productive. So within a year, or maybe a year and a half, we are going to be back to a tax burden in this country which is generating essentially what has been the historic norm, which is about 18.4 percent--18.4 percent-- of gross national product, with a Tax Code that does it by saying to people: Go out and take a risk. Create a job. As a result of doing that, give us some more revenue--because there will be more people paying taxes. But if you look at the Democratic proposals which have come forward under this budget, what they are suggesting is that this tax burden, this historic tax burden of 18.4 percent, is not high enough. The American people are fundamentally undertaxed, they are saying. They have to be taxed more. And Government has to grow more. Government has to grow a lot more. We have to grow Government by $127 billion more, and then we have to hit people with another $133 billion in taxes. We will get that tax burden up around 19 or 20 percent of gross national product, maybe get it up to 21 percent, 22 percent. Who knows how high it is going to go. It is going to go as high as they want to spend money. That is the difference between our parties. They believe in expanding the Government and expanding taxes to pay for it. When our members have come to this floor and suggested there is a priority for CDBGs or there is a priority for veterans, what they have said is they want that money to be spent there, but they are willing to do it under a cap. They are going to control spending on the discretionary side of the ledger. When the members from the other side have come to the floor and said there is a priority for veterans or there is a priority for CDBG, they have said: We don't want to have to be limited to any spending regime around here. We want to blow that cap. We want to add another $127 billion to the cost of Government, grow the Federal Government, and we will raise taxes to pay for it. At least they have integrity on that point. I agree with that. They are saying: Grow Government, grow taxes, take that tax burden over the norm of 18.4 percent. Take it up to 20 percent. Take it up to 19 percent of gross national product. And then take the size of Government and drive it up, too, over 20 percent, 21 percent, 22 percent. What our people are saying--

Mr. GREGG. No, I am not going to yield. Your side did not yield to me when you were talking. What our people are saying is we have priorities, too. We recognize that some things need more money than other things. We are willing to do it within a controlled atmosphere of a spending cap that is $873 billion. Within that cap, we are going to offer amendments to spend money on this item or that item, and in exchange for that we are going to cut across the board under 920. That is what it does. That is the difference. We are willing to set priorities and limit spending. They are willing to set priorities, increase spending, and raise taxes to pay for it. This argument that these taxes are going to come out of some nonpenal event to the American people, that it is not going to affect the American people's income, that it is going to come from some corporate loophole or that it is going the come from some Cayman Islands place, is just--well, it is like the Customs fees. Forty-five times we used Customs fees around here to claim we could raise spending. Finally, we actually did use the Customs fees, so we don't here about them anymore around here. Hopefully, someday we will wipe out the Cayman Islands building so we won't hear about that anymore, either. But in the process, you cannot generate enough revenue from doing that to address the $133 billion of taxes that are being raised here. The maximum you can generate out of those items is $11 billion. So this has been an interesting aside, well discussed, well presented. But I would like to suggest to the Senator from North Dakota that we get on to the amendment process.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, this is a classic liberal amendment that increases the size of Government, increases taxes on the American people. A much more appropriate way to do this, if we believe CDBG is important, is vote for the Santorum amendment which makes that a priority but does so within the caps. So it has to compete with other programs that we as a Congress can declare as a priority by using the Santorum amendment. To follow the Murray proposal is to increase spending by $1.3 billion and increase taxes by $1.3 billion; grow the Government, grow the taxpayer. For the American people, that is not the right way to do this. I yield back my remaining time.

Mr. GREGG. I ask unanimous consent the yeas and nays be deemed in order for all the amendments that will be called up in this group.

Mr. GREGG. I move to reconsider the vote and move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the President of the Senate be authorized to appoint a committee on the part of the Senate to join with a like committee on the part of the House of Representatives to escort Her Excellency Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the President of Liberia, into the House Chamber for a joint meeting today.