Orrin Hatch

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in adjournment until the hour of 11 a.m. on Friday, February 7. I ask consent that on Friday, immediately following the prayer, the routine requests through the morning hour be granted. I further ask unanimous consent that the Senate then immediately resume consideration of Senate Joint Resolution 1, the constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. Finally, I ask unanimous consent that the time between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. be equally divided between the chairman and ranking member, or their designees.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that there now be a period for the transaction of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 5 minutes each.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate immediately proceed to executive session to consider the following nominations on the executive calendar: Calendar Nos. 6 through 16, and all nominations placed on the Secretary's desk in the foreign service. I further ask unanimous consent that the nominations be confirmed, motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the nominations appear at this point in the Record, and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate return to legislative session.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I now ask that the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. I yield.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I honor my colleague. He is a very fine Senator and does a very good job, but give me a break: All it takes is for us to do the job and the President's signature. We have had 28 years of that philosophy. Here it is. Twenty-eight years on balanced budgets and really, in the last 60 years, there have been really very few balanced budgets. This would be three times this size if we put it up for the last 60 years. This ought to give anybody enough pause to say, ``Hey, it's time to get this over with. It's time to let people move on from here.'' Our efforts to pass the balanced budget amendment predate even my own election to the Senate some 20 years ago. But these new freshmen Senators are absolutely critical and an indispensable factor, it seems to me, in this debate. They came to the Senate last month with new insights and unbounded enthusiasm and energy and determined that some integrity and sanity be restored to the Federal budget process. Their commitment to this process, to our children and our grandchildren is an inspiration to those of us who have dedicated most of our political life to this message. I hope their message is heard around the country. All freshmen Senators are original cosponsors and they can work in a bipartisan manner with their Democratic counterparts to ensure passage of the amendment this month.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from Colorado for making such an impassioned statement on how important this balanced budget amendment is. We are so glad to have you in the Senate. You are making a difference and we appreciate and thank you so much for your good comments. You are speaking for the vast majority of people in this country, 68 percent of whom, according to the latest polls, want this amendment passed. I personally thank you and congratulate you for your speech.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I compliment our distinguished colleague from Oregon. He became the president of the Oregon Senate shortly after he was elected to the Oregon Senate. I think we are very privileged to have him in our body today. He has made his maiden speech, and I can't imagine any subject that would be more meaningful than this one. I am pleased he took the time to make that speech on the balanced budget amendment. It also shows there is a new wave coming through this body. People are now getting serious, after 28 years of unbalanced budgets. This stack represents the 28 unbalanced budgets over the last 28 years. These folks are coming in here saying it is time to change it. You can hardly see me behind this stack. But this has to be changed, and the only way we are going to change it is with a balanced budget amendment. When people come on the floor and just say, ``Let's have the will to do it,'' the only will they need to show is to pass the balanced budget amendment so we will do it. For 28 years--really, for most of the last 60 years, we haven't had the will to do it. I compliment my colleague and thank him for his cogent, good remarks here today. I yield the floor. Mr. GRAMM addressed the Chair.

Mr. HATCH. I thank the Chair. We are returning to the balanced budget constitutional amendment debate. This is a singularly important debate in our Nation's history. And while I am talking, I am going to constantly refer to just 28 of the unbalanced budgets since 1969--28 of them. We had to find a table strong enough to hold them, and we could not put them on top of each other. As you can see, they are almost as high as I am, stacked in twos and threes. If we put them on top of each other, they would reach almost to the ceiling. These are our unbalanced budgets over the last 28 years, every last one. And yet every time we get into this debate, our friends on the other side of this issue come in and say, ``Oh, let's just have the will to do this. We can do it if we want to, if we just have the will.'' And we heard the President the other evening talking about all you have to do is pass it and I will sign it. Give me a break. That is what was said in every one of these instances. And a number of them were listed as balanced budgets during this time. It turned out to be horrendous budgetary deficits rather than balanced budgets. You can just look at this stack--and this is just 28 years. This does not count the other unbalanced budgets for most of the last 60 years. This is just 28 years, these stacks right here. A lot of good intentions, a lot of people working hard to try to do what is right but never accomplishing it because they did not have the fiscal discipline necessary to get it accomplished. You cannot look at this and listen to these arguments of ``Why don't we just do what we should do.'' After 28 years--and we are just using the last 28 years like I am saying--after 28 years we have to wake up and say we do need a fiscal mechanism to help Congress to do its job because it has not done its job in the last 37 years and most of the last 60 years. If we put them all up here, we would not have room. Frankly, we are worried with this stack that we might be violating OSHA rules. If these happen to fall over, somebody's leg could get broken. We are returning to this debate, and it is an important debate. It is about whether we have reached the turning point in our Nation's history in our fiscal affairs which will change the way we have been doing business. We are hoping that if we pass this amendment, we will profoundly effect a legacy we leave to all future Americans. We have, as I have said, had piled on this table the failed budgetary history of the last 28 years. These are the unbroken string of unbalanced budgets that we have had since 1969. As Senator Abraham observed last night, this is about as close to balancing the budget as we have come, balancing these budget documents on this table so they will not fall over. That is about as close as we get to balancing budgets. We are not sure we have it balanced well even that way, so you can imagine how difficult it must be to try to balance them the real way. We received today yet another budget submission. In this one, President Clinton has promised to point us to balancing our budget by the year 2002. In the coming days and weeks, the Congress will be reviewing this budget submission to determine whether it will be just another failed attempt that we toss on top of this huge pile. Of course, since this budget for fiscal year 1998 will not itself balance, it can be placed on this stack of unbalanced budgets. But we have yet to see if Congress will be able to work with this budget submission to get us on the path to balance by 2002. We should all understand that the backdrop to all this is that the Congressional Budget Office has recently painted a less rosy picture of the deficit in the next few years under current policies. Let me just take this chart. As this chart shows, CBO predicts that the deficit will begin to rise this year and continue rising throughout the foreseeable future. The CBO predicts that the deficit will rise to $124 billion in fiscal year 1997 and continue to rise to $188 billion by fiscal year 2002, the year we hope we will have balanced the budget. The deficits just keep rising until 2007, as you can see. Our annual deficit is projected to be, at that time, $278 billion a year. Added up, these deficits will add a total of more than 2 trillion additional dollars to the debt from now until the year 2007. That is if we do what the President is going to offer today. The point is that we cannot yet congratulate ourselves for a job well done. There is work ahead for all of us to do, and there is no assurance of success. Based on the sad history illustrated by these 28 years of budgetary submissions, success has to be considered, by any reasonable person, to be in serious doubt. That is why we need a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It has been called an insurance policy that we will get the budget actually balanced in the year 2002 and, more important, that we keep it balanced afterward, instead of doing what it appears will be done up through the year 2007, a continual rising deficit each year, well over hundreds of billions of dollars. I think the combination of these illustrations of the past and the projections for the future based on our current policy suggest that the past is prologue and should show us that we need a balanced budget amendment. We have been through debates on this measure before. I would like to outline briefly for those watching these debates what they are likely to hear from the opponents of this amendment based on past debates and the positions outlined to this point in this debate. First, let me point out this is not a partisan disagreement or debate, and it should not be. That is only fitting and proper for a constitutional debate. You have to have people on both sides supporting a constitutional amendment or there is no way it even has a chance of passing. This is a bipartisan amendment. Some opponents of a balanced budget amendment will attempt to paint this debate as a battle of parties, of a choice between a Republican amendment or a Democrat amendment or Democrat opposition to the amendment. While I hasten to point out that all 55 Republican Senators, every one of us, are supportive of this balanced budget amendment, there are numerous Democrats who support it as well and I commend them. Among the original cosponsors are seven Democrats. An additional four Democrat Senators voted for this version of the balanced budget amendment the last time it was considered in Congress, two of whom voted for it in the House and have now joined us in the Senate, and two other new Democrat Senators expressed support for the balanced budget amendment in their Senate campaigns. That number alone will give us sufficient support to send this amendment to the States. Other Democrat Members have supported this text in the past, and I hope they will return. I would certainly be happy to welcome them back. Senate Joint Resolution 1 is a bipartisan undertaking and a bipartisan, bicameral consensus amendment. The first division of opponents of the balanced budget amendment is between those who say that they are for a balanced budget amendment, just not this one, and those who are against all balanced budget amendments. In effect, the position is the same. Senate Joint Resolution 1 is the product of years of refinement and debate. It is the only balanced budget amendment which has any chance of being adopted by the Congress as a whole. In past debates, substitute amendments have been offered, not one of which has garnered the support of even a mere majority of the Members of this body, let alone approached the 67 Senate votes required for Senate approval. Any of us might change a word or two if we were writing our own Constitution. We might want the courts to do this or the President to do that, or we might want tax limitation or any number of other changes. But Senate Joint Resolution 1 is the only version that has a chance of passing. So, when someone in this debate says they have a better idea, you will know, in effect, that they are working against passing a balanced budget constitutional amendment. Second, there will be those who propose changes to the amendment to exempt certain items from the budget-balancing rule. While they will profess that, of course, they are for balancing the budget--we are all for balancing the budget now; I don't know of anybody on this floor who does not say that. They believe that certain items are just too important to be left to congressional prioritizing. Because they are so important, they propose pretending that, for purposes of the Constitution, these items do not exist in the budget of the Federal Government. Of course, these items are items that the Federal Government pays for, but never mind, they are not part of the budget for purposes of balancing the budget. When it comes to this, I have to say the No. 1 scheme on the part of these people is to exempt Social Security from the balanced budget amendment. We are here to save Social Security. That is what the balanced budget amendment is all about. The best way to do that is to pass this constitutional amendment. If you take Social Security out from the purview of the balanced budget amendment, the highest item in the Federal budget, that is a risky gimmick that would endanger Social Security's future. So we are very concerned about what is happening here. Third, we will also hear those who believe that willpower, or another statute, will be the discipline we need. Let me say, again, it has been 28 years, since 1969, since we have balanced the budget. That was the only time we did it since 1960--37 years ago. So, in 37 years we have only balanced the budget once and we have only 28 of those years up here. We could not afford to take the risk of violating OSHA rules by piling this any higher. So, willpower has not worked. We have had no fewer than five major statutory attempts to rein in our borrowing habits since 1978 alone. No statute has worked. Finally, there are those who would say that a constitutional amendment is unnecessary because Congress and the President both want to balance the budget by 2002, we are moving toward that goal. While it is true that everyone has adopted the goal of balancing the budget by 2002, we have not finished that job yet. June O'Neill, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, testified last week before the Budget Committee that the good news is pretty much over and the hard work is ahead. As I pointed out, CBO projects that the annual deficit will begin rising again this year from $107 billion this year, which they act like is nothing, to $124 billion next year, to $188 billion in the year 2002, the year we all agree we will have a balanced budget, or we will have to balance the budget. The lesson, then, is we cannot declare victory and go home because things have recently improved to some extent. The hard work is ahead, and the political pressures that have given us our decades-long debt habit will continue to push us off balance, toward mortgaging the future. Only the permanent counterweight of the Constitution can get us to balance in the short term and keep us in balance for the long term. Let me conclude simply by saying that I am pushing for this change in our basic charter because I care about the quality of life for all Americans, for those now living, and for those future generations that cannot make their wishes known at this time. I believe that if our colleagues will think about how Washington has worked over the last few decades--just look at it, three decades almost--and the price real Americans pay now, and especially will pay in the future, that they will agree that a vote for the balanced budget amendment is a vote for a better future for all Americans. We have debated this amendment in Congress for many years. I believe it is time to let the American people debate it in their State legislatures, but that cannot happen unless we pass it through both Houses of Congress. I believe it is time they will adopt a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution if we give the people a chance. Let the people speak, and let them speak without further delay. Let me just say one last thing about Social Security, because I think it is one of the phoniest issues I have seen in years. Without a credible sustained balanced budget, we will never have the money to pay our future benefits. It is just that simple. A balanced budget means economic prosperity, producing the revenues necessary to fund the program. With a balanced budget, the big spenders in Washington won't be able to target Social Security to pay for other programs, just as the administration did in 1993. By the way, in the President's own words, he said this: ``Neither the Republicans nor I could produce a balanced budget tomorrow that could pass if Social Security funds cannot be counted.'' That was said on January 28, 1997, just a week ago. Neither of us can do it without that. I think it is important to make it clear that opponents of the balanced budget will throw out any diversion to confuse the issue. They will even use scare tactics. The truth is, excluding Social Security does nothing to secure benefits into the future, and the President's own budget that is submitted today counts those surpluses to set it in balance. We have set aside most of our time this afternoon for our newest Members of the Senate, our freshman class, to come down and express their views on this.

Mr. HATCH. Yes.

Mr. HATCH. Of course not. We will go back and forth as we did yesterday; either way, as far as I am concerned.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. It is an old expression that the time to save money is when you have it. If this economy is so good, as some of our colleagues are saying, Madam President, why do we not have a balanced budget. Why? Because it is easy to spend other people's money in good times and bad. That is why we need to correct Congress' spending bias with a constitutional amendment. This country has enjoyed some remarkable economic progress in the latter half of this century, and yet the United States has borrowed ever more money, despite the fact that most of those years were both peaceful and prosperous. So when people hear the opponents of the balanced budget amendment talk about needing to spend more in recessions, they should consider whether we have spent less in prosperous times. Of course, we have not. The debt has simply gone up higher and higher. It now stands at over $5.3 trillion. Let me just take a moment to illustrate just how big that is. This chart shows, if you were to lay the debt of $5.3 trillion in $1 bills end to end on a road, they would stretch 514,283,460 miles. Were you to drive to the end of that road traveling an average of 500 miles per day at 65 miles per hour, it would take you 2,818 years. You would have to drive along the road paved with dollar bills for 500 miles a day at 65 miles an hour for 2,818 years. That gives us a little understanding of how big the debt is. Two thousand eight hundred and eighteen years is somewhat difficult to comprehend, so let me put it in more descriptive terms. Had the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus, gotten on his horse in 753 B.C. and started down that road of dollar bills at a rate of 500 miles per day, he would still be some six decades away from reaching the end of that road. In the course of his travels, he would have circled the globe more than 20,000 times. That is our debt. It is no longer cyclical. It has become a permanent structure in Washington. It even has its own Government office, the Bureau of Public Debt. I am not kidding; that office really does exist. Our deficits have not been countercyclical, they have been counterproductive. What we need is to change the way Congress thinks. Only a requirement with the strength and staying power of a constitutional amendment can make that change. Only the balanced budget amendment can get our fiscal house in order and keep it there. Before we are done with this debate, we will likely see amendments to exempt certain programs, exempt certain groups, and waive the balanced budget amendment whenever the times get tough. But this is precisely the type of thinking that has brought us 30 straight years of deficits and a $5.3 trillion national debt. The way to avoid the hardships of recession is to pass a strong balanced budget amendment and get our runaway deficit spending under control. That will take some guts. Because it is tough, you will see all of these amendments to try and protect one constituency after another. The fact is, we have to keep all the budget together and approach it in an intelligent and thoughtful way. And those programs, like Social Security, that are so justifiable are better than capable of competing, and they will compete well. Some of the programs that are not quite as good--all of them have some merit--but some that are not quite as good may have to have some changes. All of our budget has to have some changes if we are ever going to get the budget and economy of this country under control and save the future for our children and grandchildren. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an excellent editorial by the Investors Business Daily of today's date entitled ``Perspective: Balanced-Budget Blather,'' as well as an excellent editorial by Bruce Bartlett entitled ``Dangers that Don't Hang in the Balance.''

Mr. HATCH. With the right of the minority leader to come and speak whenever he desires.

Mr. HATCH. Yes.

Mr. HATCH. I thank the distinguished Senator. We will do that, except if the floor is vacant we will let whoever is here speak.

Mr. HATCH. Whether in opposition or a proponent of the amendment. So we will just work this out and work together. I yield the floor. Mr. GRAMS addressed the Chair.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator for his remarks in this area.

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, there will never be a time when we have a true economic need and a true economic emergency that we will not get a three-fifths vote. As a general matter, whenever we needed it for unemployment compensation, whenever we needed it for emergencies, there has always been more than three-fifths. That requirement of consensus to borrow, which allows for flexibility but not complete laxity, is the value of this amendment and the strength of this amendment. So we can't just do what our friend from Illinois would like to do, and that is to just have a nebulous set of terms that would allow this Congress to do whatever it wants to about spending in the future. What we are trying to do is establish some restraints and get this place under control. This constitutional amendment's approach is a bipartisan approach. It is not a Republican approach; it is not a Democrat approach. It has taken a lot of us working together year after year--in my case, over 20 years now--to get this bipartisan amendment, the only one having a chance of going through, and everybody knows that. So hoping for a version more to one's liking is no excuse not to vote for this. Everybody knows this is the amendment. We are hopeful this amendment will pass intact and be sent to the House, and if it receives the required votes in the House, it will be a great day for America. I yield the floor. Ms. MOSELEY-BRAUN addressed the Chair.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I believe I will be the last to comment today, and I deliberately waited to the end to allow some other speakers to have a turn, but we do have an amendment which has been filed by the distinguished Senator from Illinois [Mr. Durbin], and I do believe I need to make a few remarks about that. But I do not intend to take too much time here. Senator Durbin has offered an amendment to the balanced budget amendment that would allow for suspension of the balanced budget rule in times of ``economic recession or serious economic emergency.'' I wonder what those words mean. Some words, when placed into the Constitution, can have almost any meaning. The very purpose of this provision of the distinguished Senator from Illinois is to make the balanced budget amendment easier to waive. Instead of trying to find ways to avoid fiscal responsibility, we ought to be working toward passing a strong balanced budget amendment that will help us to keep out of recessions in the first place. As an initial matter, any definition of ``downturn'' is malleable and could be abused by any future Congress bent on deficit spending. This amendment is no different. Trying to deal with a concept as loose as an economic downturn without even an attempt at defining terms can make this a loophole you could drive a truck through. It will not be long until a convoy starts rolling through. Furthermore, there is a loophole within the loophole, because the amendment does not limit the waiver in any way, such as to amounts related to the emergency. Under this provision, even during times of significant national growth, certain regions may experience an economic downturn which might give Congress a reason to trigger this waiver, whether we actually need to borrow to respond or not. Or there could be a general feeling of ``economic anxiety,'' or a perceived sense of anxiety felt in Washington about the economy. We can create anxieties about anything around here. For instance, I am very anxious about these 28 years of unbalanced budgets that are represented by this stack of budget submissions right here. We have had people worrying all day that these volumes might fall off and crush somebody. I just hope it is not us. But the debt burden they represent are crushing the American people. Year after year of unbalanced budgets and all we get from the other side is, ``All we need is the will to do it, to balance the budget.'' This President says we are going to do it by the year 2002, but he's going to do 75 percent of the balancing in the last 2 years according to the budget filed today. Give me a break. It is just more of the same. That is why we are here. I don't think it takes any brains to figure this one out. It is a no- brainer to know that these people who file these amendments do not want any balanced budget amendment, they do not want any constraints; they want to keep spending just like they always have. We have plenty of unbalanced budgets around here. We have done it for 28 years straight, and actually for the most of the last 60 years. We just put 28 budget submission volumes up here because we thought to stack up our budgetary failures any higher would be truly dangerous. In fact, I am not sure this little table will hold this throughout the whole debate. Let me say this. Even during times of significant national growth, under this proposal of the distinguished Senator from Illinois, we could have a waiver of the balanced budget amendment during times of economic boom, just when we should be balancing the budget or running a surplus. I believe the general three-fifths waiver already provided for in the balanced budget amendment strikes the right balance. It will allow Congress to waive the balanced budget rule during times of real need, but it will prevent those who are simply trying to find an easy way out of a budget crunch from strapping even more debt onto the backs of our children and future generations. The general three-fifths waiver provision will give Congress an incentive to plan ahead, rather than to borrow and spend in good times and bad, just like we have up to now, and then when things get tough, just go borrow some more. That is what we do. This is a recipe for instability. You will find the people who bring these amendments by and large are people who were never, never going to vote for a balanced budget amendment. But they will do anything to stop it, anything to stop us from having to live within budgetary constraints. Mr. President, this amendment is based in part on the largely rejected notion that increased borrowing will help us out of a recession. Fred Bergsten, a noted economist who had testified in support of the balanced budget amendment in past years, suggested the better way to go is to shoot for a yearly surplus, and let that take care of any truly automatic fluctuations and any truly pressing needs at that time, if there are any. Further, financial market experts have stated that increased borrowing and spending is not a cure for recessions. The better way is to get Federal spending and borrowing under control, which will make for a stronger, more stable economy, which will help us avoid economic problems in the first place. We should learn from other countries in the world that are trying to ``spend their way out of recession.'' Several European countries and Japan have been trying to do this lately. The result has been continued recession and even larger debt. On the other hand, a number of the world's up and coming countries are enjoying booming economies while keeping their national budgets in balance or even surplus. Perhaps we should be more concerned that we do not spend ourselves out of prosperity. I think we ought to think about that. Are we spending ourselves out of prosperity? One commentator has wryly stated that the theory of borrowing and spending out of a recession ``is the game plan that propelled Argentina and Bolivia into economic superpower status in the 1970s.'' That is pretty sarcastic, but I think a pretty good comment. The balanced budget amendment in no way prevents us from running a reasonable surplus which could be used to offset the effects of an economic downtown. This surplus would allow us to use fiscal policy within the balanced budget rule better than we can now without it. Even if we were to drop below balance using the intended rainy day surplus, the balanced budget amendment has anticipated this sort of need. A three-fifths vote in Congress will allow the balanced budget amendment rule to be suspended for a year. That way we have the flexibility to run reasonable deficits if we need to. The three-fifths requirement makes sure we do not waive the amendment unless it is a true need and not just an attempt for us to avoid making tough choices, which is something that goes on here all the time. So, we do not need any exceptions or loopholes. What we need is a strong balanced budget amendment as a mechanism in the Constitution to help us to get to a balanced budget. We should be less concerned about when we can spend more and more concerned about when we must spend less. Some say we are spending less. We have been hearing a lot in just the last 2 days about what a wonderful job we have done in reducing the deficit. Of course, we do not hear much about the fact that so long as we still have a deficit, our debt is increasing. In fact, we are not spending less. You would think a $107 billion deficit was a wonderful nirvana-like state. Only in Washington do we celebrate a reduction in the increase in the debt as an achievement, only here in this surrealistic place where we have these surrealistic budgets, all of which were unbalanced for 28 straight years, some of which were proposed to be balanced budgets but were not. None of these since 1969 have been balanced. Another fact we do not hear much about is even though the economy is doing fairly well, we are still in a deficit. Opponents of the balanced budget amendment keep talking about how the deficits are related to the economy. It seems to me, that given the current health of the economy, the budget should be balanced right now. But of course it is not. And of course the blame must be Mr. Reagan's or Mr. Bush's. Give me a break. The Reagan tax cuts actually produced 40 percent greater increase in revenues. What really cost us were two things, part of which was President Reagan's fault. One was the increase of strength to our military. But, on the other hand, I think most commentators now will give President Reagan credit for having brought down the iron curtain and having ended the cold war. But the other side of that equation was, during all of Reagan's 8 years, and all of Bush's 4 years, the House of Representatives where all money bills originate was controlled by liberals. In particular, during the Reagan years it was Tip O'Neill who led the liberal onslaught against the budget. Even though Reagan cut taxes and reduced marginal tax rates, and revenues actually went up--not as high as we would have liked, but they went up some 40 percent--even though that happened, the liberals in Congress were spending us into bankruptcy. That, coupled with the increase in the military, of course, did get us to the point where we are. (Ms. COLLINS assumed the chair.)

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I thank my distinguished colleague from Illinois. She may call herself a liberal, and that is fine with me. But she has stood up on this amendment as one of our principal cosponsors on the Democratic side of the floor, and that is one of the reasons this amendment is as good as it is and why it is a bipartisan amendment. I'm personally grateful to her for her courage in standing up for this. I think the generations will, as we pass this amendment, thank the distinguished Senator from Illinois for standing up and being willing to articulate why this is so important. So, again, I want to personally express my fondness for her and my feelings of what a great job she does on this issue and how I personally appreciate it. I have enjoyed her remarks. They have been right on point. I think she covered the issues very well and, frankly, I hope everybody in this country is listening to it. As we close, I wanted to offer just a few final remarks on today's debate. First, I would once again like to thank all those who have participated so far in the debate. I especially wish to congratulate those new Members who have made their first addresses on this important issue. I appreciate their participation. Second, I would like to add just a few additional thoughts on the notion of the so-called automatic stabilizers and the moderation of the business cycle. Madam President, I believe the importance of automatic stabilizers has been overstated. In her testimony before the Senate Budget Committee just last month, CBO Director June O'Neill responded to a question about the effectiveness of automatic stabilizers by citing better monetary policy and the Nation's move away from an agricultural based economy, with the inherent ups and downs that go along with agriculture, as factors at least as important as automatic stabilizers in minimizing recessions. Additionally, the move to a service economy and better inventory management practices has reduced the fluctuations associated with inventory overstocks and the factory economy. The global economy and greater business information and efficiency have also contributed to a more stable economy. Finally, there has been much discussion of who can take credit for the recent reductions in the deficit. I believe that, like the increases in the deficit, the credit is to be shared. A recent article by Jim Miller, a former OMB Director shows various ways credit might be shared, and I ask unanimous consent that that article be printed in the Record following my remarks.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, February 10, the Senate resume consideration of Senator Durbin's amendment regarding economic hardship. I further ask that there be 2 hours for debate, equally divided in the usual form, and at the hour of 5:30 p.m. on Monday the Senate proceed to vote on or in relation to the Durbin amendment, and no amendments be in order to the Durbin amendment prior to the 5:30 p.m. vote.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, for the information of all Senators, on Friday, the Senate will resume consideration of Senate Joint Resolution 1, the balanced budget amendment. Under a previous order, the pending amendment offered by Senator Durbin will be voted on at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, February 10 and, therefore, there will be no rollcall votes during tomorrow's session. On Monday, Senator Wellstone will offer two additional amendments, and it is my hope that the Senate will be able to vote on these amendments on Tuesday, possibly in the morning. I will remind my colleagues that next week is the final week of session prior to the President's Day recess. I anticipate a busy week as we continue to make progress on the balanced budget amendment, as well as consider additional nominations as they become available. I thank all Members in advance for their continued cooperation.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. I do not think it would be fine with that side, but it would be fine with me.

Mr. HATCH. I yield to the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I would like to take a few seconds to point out this little stack. This is only 28. This stack is only 28 of the unbalanced budgets since 1969. We were afraid to put up the ones before 1969, which was the last year when we had a balanced budget in this country. So those who get up and say, ``Well, we just simply ought to have the will to do it,'' look at this stack. We are going to have to take it down because we are afraid somebody will get hurt. We wanted the American people to see just what they have lived with for 28 solid years, and that doesn't even count the years before. It is pitiful for people to stand up and say, ``Well, we don't need a balanced budget amendment.'' That is pitiful, too,