Fritz Hollings

Mr. HOLLINGS

Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, in recent weeks there have been numerous battles on the Senate floor over efforts to take a budgetary meat ax to the Federal Government, eliminating agencies and slashing funding. Today, I am pleased to join with my Commerce Committee colleagues in supporting legislation to authorize the activities of one Federal agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, which has been spared by the budget hackers. The reason for this success is simple--there is bipartisan recognition that the Coast Guard has an important job and does it well. Indeed, the widespread support for the Coast Guard budget reflects the breadth and complexity of its missions--from protecting our maritime boundaries and the safety of life at sea to preserving the ocean environment and enforcing maritime laws and treaties. On an average day in 1994, the Coast Guard saved 14 lives, assisted 328 people, responded to 34 oil or hazardous chemical spills, inspected 64 commercial vessels, seized 379 pounds of illegal drugs, serviced 150 aids to navigation, and interdicted 174 illegal aliens. Over the years, we have continued to ask the Coast Guard to do more with less. In typical fashion, the Coast Guard has responded with a streamlining plan that will trim $400 million from the budget by 1998 and allow personnel reductions of 4,000 people. As an example of the pragmatic approach the Coast Guard has taken in this plan, next summer we will welcome the Coast Guard high endurance cutters, Dallas and Gallatin, to their new homeport at the Charleston Navy Base. By relocating Coast Guard assets from expensive locales like Governors Island to areas where the quality of life is high and the cost of living is reasonable, everyone benefits. Coast Guard is better able to meet both its budgetary bottom line and its personnel needs. Today, the Senate is considering S. 1004, the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 1995. The bill authorizes a Coast Guard budget of $3.7 billion in fiscal year 1996, covering six appropriations accounts: First, operating expenses; second, acquisition, construction, and improvement of equipment and facilities; third, research and development; fourth, retired pay; fifth, alteration and removal of bridges; and sixth, environmental compliance and restoration. The authorization levels are consistent with the administration's budget request for fiscal year 1996. S. 1004 also provides for end-of-year military strength and training loads and addresses a backlog of Coast Guard-related administrative and policy issues. Among such issues, the bill provides for: Personnel administrative reforms requested by the administration, marine safety and waterways management improvements, updated authority for the Coast Guard Auxiliary, funding for State recreational boating safety grants, regulatory reforms for the U.S. maritime industry, tougher controls to reduce marine plastic pollution, and law enforcement enhancements to reduce drug smuggling and money laundering. At this point, I would like to highlight some key provisions of the legislation. alteration of bridges Under the Truman-Hobbs Bridge Act, the Federal Government shares with the States the cost of altering publicly owned bridges that obstruct the free movement of marine traffic. The administration requested no funding for this account in fiscal year 1995, initiating a new policy under which the Coast Guard no longer will seek direct funding for alteration of highway bridges. Instead, the administration proposes that the Federal share of such projects be financed from the discretionary bridge program funds of the Federal Highway Administration, under the continuing program direction of the Coast Guard. This new policy would not apply to railroad bridges. S. 1004 provides the Secretary of Transportation--Secretary--with the discretionary authority to implement the administration policy. Boat Safety Account Similar to legislation approved by the committee last Congress, S. 1004 would ensure that States receive financial assistance for the development and implementation of a coordinated national recreational boating safety program. The State grants are not funded from general revenues, but rather from motorboat fuel tax revenues that are deposited in the Boat Safety Account of the Aquatic Resources Trust Fund--Wallop-Breaux Fund. The Wallop-Breaux Fund also supports State grant programs administered by the Department of the Interior [DOI]. Unlike the DOI programs, however, the Coast Guard grant program is scored against agency operating expenses and competes directly with other Coast Guard missions for funding priority. S. 1004 would continue State boating safety grants and allow the budget scoring to be patterned after DOI programs under the Wallop-Breaux fund by increasing the funding available under the Clean Vessel Act of 1992. Under the bill, authorized funding for State boating programs would increase from $45 million in fiscal year 1995 to $59 million by fiscal year 1999. S. 1004 also would improve recreational boating safety by requiring children age 6 and younger to wear lifejackets and calling for plans to be developed to improve reporting of vessel accidents. coast guard regulatory reform. Last year, Coast Guard worked with the maritime industry in developing a package of amendments to existing marine safety laws that would allow their implementation in a more cost- [[Page S 17389]] effective and efficient manner, reduce the regulatory burden on the industry, and provide greater flexibility in making safety decisions. The amendments contained in the bill before us today specifically would: Implement the International Safety Management Code for U.S. vessels engaged in foreign commerce; allow qualified third parties such as the American Bureau of Shipping to conduct vessel safety inspections; allow greater use of foreign manufactured safety equipment; and extend the validity of Coast Guard certificates of inspection from 2 to 5 years, allowing earlier scheduling of annual inspections. The changes will help U.S.-flag vessels to become more competitive in international trade and reflect the Cost Guard's commitment to harmonize U.S. regulations with international requirements. population from ships S. 1004 also includes a provision developed in cooperation with Senator Lautenberg that would amend the act to prevent pollution from ships [APPS] to strengthen requirements that ports maintain reception facilities to off load plastic wastes generated by vessels at sea. The bill calls for the Secretary to inspect and maintain a list of such facilities and for port operators to post placards encouraging reporting of any inadequacies. S. 1004 also amends the Marine Plastic Pollution Research and Control Act to: Continue the Secretary's biannual reporting to Congress on compliance with APPS; add a requirement to publish an annual list of APPS violators; establish a Marine Debris Coordinating Committee; and continue and expand the Federal Public Outreach Program to include the use of grants. law enforcement enhancement In 1970, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton ordered the construction of revenue cutters to stop smuggling and enforce tariffs. Today, the Coast Guard continues that mission, facing and increasingly sophisticated threat from illegal drug smugglers. Proving new authority to deal with an old problem, S. 1004 contains administration-requested measures to enhance law enforcement. These measures establish sanctions--including seizure and forefeiture--for failure to land an aircraft at the order of a Federal officer enforcing drug or money- laundering laws, and for obstructing boarding of a vessel by a Federal law enforcement officer. These measurers provide for Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] revocation of aircraft or airman certificates for such a violation, establish Coast Guard and Customs Service air interdiction authority, and set civil penalties of $15,000 for violations of that authority. In addition, the managers' amendment would revise these provisions to require that FAA establish conditions, based on observed conduct or prior information, for ordering a plan to land. These provisions are not intended to restrict or affect in any way the Federal Government's current broad authority to conduct boarder searches. I am optimistic that the bill strikes an appropriate balance with the need to assure innocent citizens that they will not be forced to land. cruise ship tort reform Before closing, Mr. President, there is one matter I would like to address regarding the House-passed Coast Guard authorization bill. The House bill, H.R. 1361, contains tort reform proposals regarding foreign cruiseline companies. The provisions, which I strongly oppose, would alter U.S. tort law in three significant areas: First, medical malpractice claims by passengers on U.S. cruiselines; second, emotional distress claims by U.S. passengers; and third, physical injury suits by foreign cruise ship employees. First, in medical malpractice suits against foreign cruise shiplines brought by American passengers, the legislation would permit the cruiselines arbitrarily to select the State law that governs the action. This right of selection would apply regardless of the State where the plaintiff resides, or where the suit is brought. The legislation would, for the first time under American tort law, permit the law of one State to govern actions in another State, merely at the self-interested discretion of foreign companies. Second, with respect to limitations on pain and suffering damages, the legislation would allow foreign companies to use the fine print of ticket sales to absolve themselves of liability for pain and suffering damages. Foreign cruiselines would be permitted to limit their liability for such damages to cases involving substantial physical injury. The legislation would allow the companies to use the fine print on tickets to determine what constitutes a substantial physical injury. This is unfair, particularly considering that most passengers often are unaware of such limitations when purchasing tickets. Third, the House-passed bill would ban suits in U.S. courts by foreign cruise ship workers for injuries or death, if the employee purportedly is part of a collective-bargaining agreement providing for a dispute forum, or redress is available in their home countries. The provision would be applicable even if there is evidence that such cruiselines substantially use U.S. ports and resources or transport U.S. passengers. I am concerned that this provision will permit foreign cruiselines to exploit foreign employees, who often have no adequate redress available in their country of origin. The provision also will encourage the hiring of foreign workers as cheap and exploitable labor, at the expense of U.S. workers. Mr. President, I am pleased that the bill we are considering today does not include these questionable provisions. They have not had the benefit of hearings or other close scrutiny by the Senate Commerce Committee and are inappropriate for inclusion within a bill to authorize appropriations for the U.S. Coast Guard. Over the past two centuries, the U.S. Coast Guard has built an enduring reputation throughout the world for its maritime safety, environmental protection, humanitarian, and lifesaving efforts. We have all watched the valiant and often heroic work of Coast Guard seamen and officers as they rescue desperate refugees who have taken to the seas in crowded and makeshift boats. Even in the remote regions of the world, the Coast Guard is present, actively engaged in the enforcement of United Nations' embargoes against countries like the former Republic of Yugoslavia and Iraq. The men and women of the Coast Guard respond with equal dedication during times of war and peace. I ask my colleagues to recognize this service by joining me in supporting S. 1004. Mr. KERRY: Mr. President, I am pleased to join my distinguished colleagues, Senators Stevens, Hollings, Pressler, and Breaux in cosponsoring the bill before us today to authorize the programs and activities of the U.S. Coast Guard for fiscal year 1996. In this time of draconian budget cuts and dramatic changes in our society and our Government, it is unusual to find an agency which everyone agrees is a good investment. But that is true of the U.S. Coast Guard. Mr. President, Massachusetts with its hundreds of miles of coastline, unforgiving storms, active maritime and fishing industries, and thriving recreational boating population, needs the Coast Guard at full strength. So does the rest of the nation. The Coast Guard is essential to the safety and well-being of citizens in every coastal State and in every State with navigable waters. Today, over 50 percent of the U.S. population lives within coastal areas and directly benefits from the services the Coast Guard provides. But, indirectly, the Coast Guard, in the performance of its mission, protects every American. In fact, more than two-thirds of the total budget for the Coast Guard goes to operating expenses to protect public safety and the marine environment, to enforce fishery and other laws and treaties, maintain aids to navigation, prevent illegal drug trafficking and illegal immigration, and preserve defense readiness. The Coast Guard is the oldest continuous seagoing service. As a military service it has fought in almost every war since the Constitution became the law of the land in 1789, and it has performed its myriad of peacetime missions during the intervening years. It has proven that it is a multi-mission service flexible enough to adjust to the needs of the nation in peacetime as well as wartime. Since its origins as the Revenue Cutter Service, enforcing tariff laws of the young nation for Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton the Coast Guard has expanded its missions to include saving lives, enforcing U.S. laws and treaties, ensuring maritime safety and [[Page S 17390]] defense, maintaining safe navigation and protecting the environment. Given this legacy of service and the degree to which Americans depend on it for their vital services, I believe it is our responsibility to ensure that the Coast Guard has adequate resources for its missions as it prepares for the next century. Our actions should ensure that the Coast Guard is capable of meeting its existing mandates and recognize the Coast Guard's ever-expanding role and missions in our coastal waters and beyond. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a long and storied involvement with the sea and the Coast Guard. One of Alexander Hamilton's ten original revenue cutters was built in the City of Newburyport and was named the Massachusetts. The successors of the Massachusetts--today's Coast Guard cutters--are stationed in the ports of Boston, Gloucester, Woods Hole and New Bedford. The first lighthouse built in the United States was Boston Light in 1716. Today, Boston Light stands as the only manned lighthouse still in operation in the United States. The people of Massachusetts love the ocean. Over 145,000 recreational boats are registered in Massachusetts. Many rely on the sea for their livelihood. The men and women of the Coast Guard keep watch over the fishing fleets, the maritime industry, and recreational boaters. While Massachusetts has a long and close relationship with the Coast Guard, many other States can demonstrate similar ties. We all know that the Coast Guard's mission does not end at our shore. It protects our interests throughout the world in times of war and peace. From supporting U.S. peacekeepers in Haiti, to responding to oil spills in the Persian Gulf, to supporting drug interdiction efforts in South and Central America the Coast Guard has been there. Its work has been exemplary, but it seems that we continually ask the Coast Guard to do more with less and have been doing this for a long time. The Coast Guard is now in the process of a 4-year downsizing and streamlining which ultimately will reduce the service by 4,000 people and $400 million--a 12 percent reduction. We must eventually acknowledge the finite limitations on Coast Guard capabilities and resources and I am concerned about some of the choices it will be forced to make. The bill before us today assists the Coast Guard in facing these dilemmas, allowing it to do its job more effectively and efficiently. I'll describe some of the ways it will do this. The bill includes provisions that would ensure continued funding for state boating safety grants by changing the funding mechanisms-- expanding the existing boating safety grant program that was established by the Clean Vessel Act of 1992 and ensuring access to funds from the Boat Safety Account of the Aquatic Resources Trust Fund, or the Wallop Breaux fund as it is known. Long awaited by the maritime industry, the Coast Guard regulatory reform provisions of the bill will eliminate unnecessary and burdensome regulations on American shipping companies in order to make them more competitive in the world market. These reforms will save precious resources while also removing an unnecessary burden from a struggling industry. The bill enhances protection of the ocean and coastal environment by amending the act to prevent pollution from ships, strengthening Coast Guard capability to enforce regulations to minimize pollution from plastics. It includes provisions to ensure that adequate waste reception facilities for plastics are available at ports and terminals and to encourage development and implementation of public education programs about the harm of plastics in the environment. To increase the weapons in our arsenal for the war on drugs, the bill adds new authority for federal law enforcement officials by providing sanctions for aircraft and vessel operators suspected of smuggling drugs or laundering money, who intentionally disobey the orders of a Federal law enforcement officer to land or halt their aircraft or vessel. These operators will face criminal and civil penalties of imprisonment of up to a year, fines up to $15,000, seizure of the aircraft or vessel and forfeiture of the aircraft's registration. The bill instructs the Coast Guard to develop a plan for making the transition from the current ground-based radionavigation system [LORAN- C] to a satellite-based technology--global positioning system or GPS-- after it is determined that GPS is ready to serve as the sole means of safe and efficient navigation. The plan must take into consideration the need to ensure that LORAN-C technology purchased by the public before the year 2000 has a useful economic life. As part of the response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (or OPA 90), required that offshore facilities demonstrate the ability to pay certain costs of oil cleanup and damages up to $150 million that could result from an oil spill. The Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior recently determined that the present language of the law extends the financial responsibility requirement over an unnecessarily large group of facilities that includes traditional inshore facilities such as marinas and oil terminals, some of which may be located far inland. There appears to be consensus that the intent of the law was to require demonstration of financial responsibility for offshore drilling rigs and production platforms, not inshore facilities. Applying these same financial requirements to the thousands of inshore facilities in Massachusetts and throughout the country which pose a much smaller oil spill risk, would impose potentially severe financial burdens. Therefore, amendment to the bill will be offered to clarify the statutory requirements for financial responsibility as they apply to facilities traditionally located in inshore areas and facilities traditionally located in offshore areas. The bill also amends the financial responsibility requirements so that responsibility is proportional to the oil spill risk posed by the facility. Although I generally do not support letting potential oil polluters off the hook financially, these provisions allow us to maintain protection of the marine environment and prevent requiring unreasonable levels of financial responsibility requirements for facilities that do not pose a substantial risk of a oil spill risk. I would also like to mention another and highly controversial provision relating to OPA that is contained in the House-passed Coast Guard authorization bill but which has been omitted--properly--from the Senate bill. The House provision would eliminate ``direct action'' authority which has been in U.S. law since 1970 relating to clean-ups and damage claims from oil spills. ``Direct action'' entitles a claimant to proceed directly against the responsible party's financial responsibility provider, usually an insurer, in order to obtain compensation for loss associated with a pollution incident. Direct action enhances prompt payment by a spiller by assuring that governments and other claimants do not get caught in the middle of arguments concerning reasons why insurers do not have to pay those they insure. Direct action in connection with oil spill liability is not an OPA creation. Direct action is a key component of the ``polluter pays'' mandate of Congress which makes potential spillers act more responsibly and has been an underpinning of oil pollution financial responsibility laws, both national and international, for 25 years. The oil industry has voiced a concern that no insurer will provide insurance guarantees under the OPA regime, with its direct action component. Apparently some insurers fear they will be exposed to unlimited liability because the courts will circumvent OPA's explicit provisions limiting a guarantor's liability. I believe this fear is without practical basis, however, because insurers currently provide direct action guarantees for facilities located on the outer continental shelf under a regime that is almost identical to that established under OPA. Furthermore, I am deeply concerned about the precedent that rolling back the direct action provisions applying to offshore facilities will have. I believe that these provisions would undermine an important tenet in marine environmental protection, and I therefore strongly oppose their inclusion in the final legislation. Given the fiscal constraints being imposed on the Coast Guard as the Congress moves to balance the federal [[Page S 17391]] budget, the service's efforts to downsize and streamline have been demonstrated admirable seriousness. In general, I support the Coast Guard's goals of streamlining and consolidating operations where possible. I applaud its recently announced plans to streamline without closing or consolidating any frontline operating units while reducing personnel slots by 1,000 and overhead expenses by $100 million. However, I am very concerned by the administration's budget proposal to close 23 Coast Guard small boat stations as a cost-cutting effort to save $6 million. I have looked closely at the criteria used by the Coast Guard to develop the closure and station modification lists and was surprised to find absent from the criteria any consideration of local and regional factors, including water temperature and unusual tidal or current conditions. The Coast Guard uses a one size fits all approach to determining response time for their small boat stations. I do not believe this is appropriate because severe weather and ocean patterns in some regions can slow down the average response time and colder water temperatures necessitate a quicker response to prevent death and serious physical injury. Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury and Coast Guard founding father, was the first to acknowledge such differences when he allowed additional funding in 1789 for the construction of two larger revenue cutters in order to handle the harsh winters off the New England coast. These conditions have not changed and still require that special local and regional needs be addressed in any Coast Guard decision process. This is not a parochial Massachusetts issue. Similar conditions exist in throughout the country--in the Great Lakes and the Northwest Pacific. The Coast Guard criteria also appear to exclude consideration of vital Coast Guard missions besides search and rescue--including marine environmental protection, boating safety, and enforcement of drug, illegal alien, and fisheries laws. In the consideration of whether or not to close a station, I believe all the services provided by the station should be taken into account. When, after consideration, the Coast Guard concludes a station should be closed, it must take steps to ensure that necessary services will continue to be available in the station's area. The provisions in the bill establish a more detailed and public process that addresses these issues and those voiced by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure and set forth in the conference report on the Transportation appropriations bill. The conference committee in resolving the differences between the House and Senate versions of the Transportation appropriations bill voted to preclude the Coast Guard from closing any small boat stations during Fiscal year 1996. The authorization bill incorporates the appropriators' prohibition against closure of any small boat stations in fiscal year 1996 and sets forth more detailed criteria for making such decisions in subsequent years. Such criteria would include unique weather conditions as I have noted, a station's deterrent effect on crime, and its role in protecting life, property, the environment, public safety or national security. Coastal communities most impacted by the closure of a station will be able to submit comments on their concerns before that final decision is made. While we take these steps to increase the probability that significant damage will not result from station closures, I realize that the process may make station closures more cumbersome, consequently, the bill allows the Secretary of Transportation to implement management efficiencies within the small boat system, such as modifying the operational posture of units or reallocating resources as necessary to ensure the safety of the maritime public nationwide. I believe that this provision gives the Coast Guard the flexibility to make the operational changes needed to make for streamlining services but ensures that coastal communities and the environment are not put at undue risk by closing of a station. In closing, I also want to express my concerns about three highly controversial provisions relating to foreign cruise ship liability that are contained in the House version of the Coast Guard authorization bill. No hearings have been held in either house on this matter, and the issue of the liability of foreign-flag cruise vessels is not germane to the legislation before us. I am pleased none of these provisions has been included in the Senate bill. The House provisions in question appear solely to benefit the foreign-flag cruise line industry. If enacted, they would jeopardize the health and safety of American passengers traveling on foreign cruise ships, and would deal a tremendous blow to the economic well- being of American workers and American businesses which are in competition for American tourist dollars with the foreign-flag cruise line industry. The first provision would allow foreign cruise ship owners to use the fine print on the back of tickets to deny liability for emotional distress claims brought by passengers, unless the passengers also suffered substantial physical injuries. A number of women's groups and organizations across the country, including the Women's Legal Defense Fund, the Women's Law Center, and the NOW Legal Defense Fund, have expressed strong opposition to this provision. They are rightfully concerned that it could make it more difficult for victims of rape on foreign-flag cruise vessels, who suffer tremendous emotional scars but sometimes only minor physical injuries, to bring civil lawsuits against the cruise lines that bear responsibility for their trauma. I am in agreement with their concern and would strongly oppose inclusion of this provision as drafted by the House in the final bill. The second provision would allow foreign cruise vessel owners to take advantage of any statutory limitation on liability for medical malpractice available to any doctor or medical facility wherever a foreign cruise ship passenger is taken ashore for treatment. This language should send chills through anyone who is thinking about taking a cruise. A very broad measure, it all but sets the stage for U.S. citizens to lose their right to sue for medical malpractice if they are taken for medical treatment to a remote foreign island where doctors or hospitals are not held accountable for malpractice. I would not want to place U.S. citizens in such jeopardy. Finally, the most egregious provision relates to foreign seamen's rights. This provision would undermine the competitiveness of U.S. maritime labor and further disadvantage U.S. businesses that compete with the foreign-flag cruise line industry. It would overturn centuries of maritime law by taking away the basic right of seamen--without regard to nationality--to maintain cases against their cruise line employers in U.S. courts for wages and necessary medical care, so long as current ``long-arm'' jurisdiction exists. The U.S. Supreme Court, as well as our treaties with foreign nations, have long provided that such suits are proper if there exists a sufficient ``nexus'' with this country, and that such suits are necessary to maintain a competitive balance between foreign and U.S. labor, because U.S. seamen have such rights. Foreign interests should not be granted a special ``exception'' from the established long-arm jurisdiction of the U.S. justice system, nor should we be granting foreign-flag vessels additional economic advantage over the interests of American workers and businesses. American maritime labor is certainly justified in its strong opposition to this provision. Mr. President, these provisions would directly benefit the narrow interests of foreign cruise line owners while threatening the health and safety of American passengers. They have no place in the Coast Guard authorization legislation, and I will strongly oppose their inclusion in the final legislation. This bill is the culmination of almost two years of effort, and I would like to thank the Chairman of the Subcommittee, Senator Stevens, the Chairman of the Commerce Committee, Senator Pressler, and the Committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Hollings for their hard work in preparing this bipartisan bill and bringing it to the floor. I also would like to acknowledge the hard work and long hours invested by staff on both sides, including Penny Dalton and Lila Helms on the Commerce Committee minority staff and on the majority side, Tom Melius, Trevor McCabe, and Jim Sartucci. I [[Page S 17392]] would like to acknowledge the work of Kate English and Carole Grunberg of my staff and Steve Metruck, a congressional fellow in my office. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. HOLLINGS

Mr. HOLLINGS. Not a political war.

Mr. HOLLINGS. I yield.

Mr. HOLLINGS. You are. The law itself says that it cannot be used in that fashion, if I could put my finger on it. That is exactly the law you voted for and I voted for in 1990, that it not be employed in that fashion, to obscure the size of the twist. We are spending more than we are taking in. That is what we are doing. It is not a technicality about being in the Treasury. Certainly it is in the Treasury, and it should, under our intent of increasing the taxes back in 1983, be embellishing a surplus. Nothing wrong with that. The fact is with the surplus there, your children and my children can count on their retirement. As it is now, Senator Thurmond and I are holding free on that score but the kids are not. They are caught up because we are using all the money. We owe $481 billion. If we spend another $636 billion under this budget, thereupon, at 2002 we will all be owing Social Security over $1 trillion, and then they will be coming around on the floor of the Congress saying, ``Social Security is busted and we have to save it.'' How will you find $1 trillion to save it?

Mr. HOLLINGS. My position is it not be used. The budget--so far we had in the Budget Committee, the document by Chairman Kasich of the conference itself on the budget reflects a usage of Social Security trust fund--$636 billion over the 7 years.

Mr. HOLLINGS. The amendment that is now under the consideration of the body. Namely, it says that the 7-year balanced budget passed by the Congress to the President shall not include Social Security trust fund to reflect a balance. Very simple. I have copies of it. I will be glad to try to change it around and make it clearer, but I do not know--I wanted to make you an offer you could not refuse. You just voted for it on Monday. Here it is Thursday. That was my intent. If I do it now, then we will correct this situation and we will all be pulling forward together and finally getting out of Senator Gramm's wagon of spending $200 billion a year and raiding trust funds, and talking about how intent we are in doing heavy lifting and how Mark Twain, and whether we are patriots and whether we are popular--that is children's talk. We should do the job. In order to do the job, quit moving deficits. Do not move the deficit from the general fund over to the Social Security. Our idea is to lessen or eliminate deficits, not move them around.

Mr. HOLLINGS. I yield.

Mr. HOLLINGS. That is the case. Our only chance at getting out of this particular fix is the free press, the media. I have dutifully called all around the clock. I think at that time President Jefferson said, ``As between a free Government and a free press, I would choose the latter.'' Yes, you can have a free Government, but it will not remain free long unless you have a free media. Right to the point, I have gotten the Washington Post economic writer, I have gotten all the particular people--for example, on ``Meet the Press.'' I have talked to editors and written articles. I keep talking about it, and they keep reporting just like Greenspan, like he is some authority. He represents Wall Street. Wall Street loves a unified budget. When you say a unified budget, the Government in Washington borrows from itself and not from Wall Street. There is less of a burden on the financial market. So they have a selfish interest involved here, and they do not want to see us, as public servants, start putting this Government on a pay-as-you-go basis. Greenspan has been a lawyer here for 15 years. I can tell you, in football, I would have had another coach long ago. I got some remarks of his somewhere here. He was talking, just the other day, to some group and he said, ``We don't want to be lulled asleep.'' If there is one person who has lulled us asleep, it has been Alan Greenspan. He talks of unified budgets. He never says, categorically, what the truth is, and that is that you have to get tax revenues in here to do this job. When you are at $1 billion a day, and $348 billion a year, and use $271 billion in defense, you can [[Page S 17136]] eliminate defense and you would still have a deficit. Domestic discretionary spending is the President, Congress, courts, Department of the Interior, Justice, go right around, Commerce, general government. That is $273 billion. You could eliminate it, not just cut it, and you still have a deficit. We are in a position like the character in ``Alice in Wonderland.'' In order to stay where you are, you have to run as fast as you can; in order to get ahead, you have to run even faster. No one wants to talk about it. We have fiscal cancer. Once again, we are prepared to lie to the American people. Therein, the Hollings amendment. It is very clear-cut. Do not give us any of this Social Security embezzlement budget. It is not the balanced budget. Read the language. Section 301 of the continuing resolution says the President, the Congress, must enact legislation to achieve a unified balanced budget. That is the trick. We voted on Monday just exactly not to do that by a vote of 97 to 2. At that particular time, the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee said the first portion of this instruction ``we have never violated, so we can be instructed on it.'' False. We continually--as he argues, every President, every Congress has given budgets that way and it has been in violation. He knows it. The second section ``we have never violated, so we can be instructed not to.'' False. We continue to violate it. You come around and you raise a point when he is on the floor, he will say, ``Senator, that is what President Clinton does.'' Do not give me that. I am serious. I expect to be here after President Clinton. Come on. I have been here after all of these Presidents that are running up these deficits. We are conscientious about it. We do not want to see this charade continue. The only way to make sure that everybody knows when they vote--I will vote for your resolution, Senator, on 7 years; I will vote for CBO figures. Nothing wrong with that. But do not give me the trick, the smoke, the mirror, of unified. That is raiding the trust funds-- $636 billion, specifically, of Social Security, $200 billion from the airport and airways trust fund, the highway trust fund, the Medicare trust fund, the Civil Service retirement, your military retirees. The distinguished Senator from Alaska has that responsibility. You can see the trickery as they do. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin announced plans yesterday to pull $61.3 billion from two retirement accounts. He authorized withdrawal of the entire $21.5 billion--in the G-fund, and as much as $39.8 billion of the $350 billion held in the Civil Services retirement fund. In effect, both funds would be given--IOU that would obligate Treasury to make complete repayment with interest after a permanent increase in the debt limit is finally approved. (Mr. BURNS assumed the chair.)

Mr. HOLLINGS. Yes.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President--reading from that document, which use CBO figures--during the 7-year period, the debt actually goes up $1.8 trillion. I have listed down in that document what is owed to the trust fund, what is owed to the Government accounts, and what is owed to additional borrowing. And, of course, interest costs go up from $348 billion to at least $448 billion, but over the 7 years, every expert on Wall Street says interest cost is going up and will exceed $500 billion. So how do you do it? You do not. Mr. Kasich, the chairman, says you cannot. He records a deficit; the CBO records a deficit. How do you do it? You fabricate a paper balance with smoke and mirrors. One of the big smokes that has recently surfaced and in 20 years I have not heard this tricky one, is that the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, has been overstated. So we will have less of a CPI and spend the money. You cannot. When you give less to Social Security, you do two things: You cut the benefits, of course, because you are giving less, but more than anything else --and I welcome that--you increase the Social Security surplus. You do not have ready moneys to spend in violation of 13301. You do not have ready moneys for Medicare when you use a different CPI to spend for the deficit. It goes to Medicare, and we are trying to save Medicare. So let us talk sense. That CPI is a gimmick. Use it if you will, but the result is not to lower the deficit. It is to increase the surplus. On that basis, we need to do that and the Senator from South Carolina would support it. But come down to the reality of Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare. I could go through each one of them. Let us just take welfare. We say some $83 billion saved in the welfare reform. The House side says $100 billion or so. I can tell you it will cause spending more money. I have been a Governor. You give me welfare and say, ``Governor, now you have to set up a job-of-last-resort system in the government,'' because they have to work, and I can tell you it is going to be difficult now to get people to work because they have closed down 17 textile plants in South Carolina since NAFTA. There have been at least--and this is last week's figure--92,000 jobs lost. So we are moving our manufacturing overseas like gangbusters and here come welfare recipients. If you cannot get them a regular job, you have to give them a government job. But to give them a government job, of course, they have to be skilled. So you not only set up a jobs program. You have to set up a skill program. That costs money. And, oh my gracious, two-thirds of children--the other third are minority mothers, single mothers--are part of the program and you look around and say, ``They can't leave the children,'' so you set up a child care program. All of this costs money. The intent is splendid. Let us put everybody to work, but let us not kid the taxpayers that we are saving money. What we are doing, and I welcome it, is saving lives. Yes, let us train them, skill them, try to find jobs for them, and that is a worthwhile, necessary Government program. The market is not going to do it. That is the kind of thing we need Government for that they are trying to abolish. But they abolish their own responsibility, the Gang of 73, by giving it back to the Governors under the chant that ``government closest to the people is the best government.'' So we will get rid of that responsibility and start cutting the moneys. That is not going to happen. The worst thing of course, Mr. President, you see in this document is backloading. When I talk about backloading, if we were to adopt ipso facto the reconciliation bill that they bring out tomorrow, we will have cut or saved, however you look at it, $45 billion, and that is assuming the truth of everything that happened under that particular budget. We will have cut $45 billion. That has not been easy. We are already at Thanksgiving, and we have not gotten the bill. It is so difficult. Do you know what they say to do in the year 2002? Cut $347 billion. This thing is just to get their attention and get out of town to get the President's election over with next November. They say, ``Do not pay attention to it; oh, we'll come back, we'll change it later; it doesn't have any impact on the Presidential election.'' They do not have anything there much cut as compared to the enormous task of saving billions of dollars. They put it all in the last 2 years after two Presidential elections. Gamesmanship, smoke and mirrors and, yes, Social Security embezzlement. Now they embezzled $636 billion. That word embezzlement is from none other than the former Senator of Pennsylvania, Senator John Heinz, when we debated and passed the law. Now they have another little thing that has come along. They give themselves credit and say we are going to cut taxes. That, if anything, ought to expose the charade, the fraud that we are being asked to adopt. When you come around and you are looking for money and you cut well-conceived programs--education, Head Start, technology, health care, research--they then have the audacity to say we have to buy the vote for next year with this middle-class tax cut. Under the tax cut, we are going to get--like Reaganomics--increased revenues, they say. That is what they say. Mr. President, we were faced with this 8 years ago in the Budget Committee. We had tried with the freeze during the early eighties. We tried with Gramm-Rudman-Hollings the cuts across the board. We had tried with the tax reform, with Senator Bentsen. In the Tax Reform Act of 1986, we closed the loopholes and then, yes, 8 years ago in 1987, eight of us Senators cold-sober voted what? To increase taxes. We voted for that in the Budget Committee. I abhor taxes just like everybody else in this land. But we looked and saw what was occurring, and I conferred at that particular time with Dick Darman, the head of OMB for President Bush. I said, ``Look, what we need to do is get''--actually, President Reagan was still in, but we were talking to Darman who was coming in--``we need not only freezes, we need not only spending cuts, we need not only loophole closings, but we need all of those and a tax increase.'' We voted that, allocating it to the deficit and the debt. I want you to know we did not give up with President Clinton. In February 1993, shortly after his inauguration, I asked for a personal interview with the President of the United States. [[Page S 17135]] And I said, Mr. President, I have been in this thing almost 20 years, and there is no way out. What we really need to do is get what cuts you can get, what savings you can get. But to get on top of this hemorrhage of interest cost spending on the national debt, you are going to need a revenue measure. And on careful consideration, we would suggest a value-added tax. In fact, I said, ``Mr. President, if you take it, I will take the lead.'' I had just been beat up upon, being reelected in 1992 as ``high-tax Hollings.'' But I said I would take the lead, and we could get the votes, as long as the President is leading. Nobody, for example, on the House side running for reelection is going to throw himself on the tax sword if it is going to be vetoed. One-third of those in the U.S. Senate, running for reelection, are not going to throw themselves on a tax sword if it is going to be vetoed. So, Mr. President, you are going to have to get it. And he said, ``You know, that is interesting, Senator.'' He said, ``Last night I got a call from Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO. He was down in Bar Harbor at the annual conference. He said he would favor a 5-percent VAT to get rid of the deficit and the debt.'' I said, ``Mr. President, happy day. When I testified before the Finance Committee, that was the opposition, and organized labor was talking about the regressivity.'' They do not talk about the regressivity of spending for nothing. Nothing is more regressive than the present course Government is on and insisting upon raiding trust funds, just to look politically smart. ``Come on,'' I said, ``If we have the AFL-CIO, we can really get it done.'' The next morning, Mr. President, the President of the United States was out doing his jog, and one of the reporters asked him about some of his thoughts. He said, ``I am thinking about a VAT.'' Well, before he got back to the White House, they were stepping all over us and all the rest of that crowd said, ``You're lying, the President overspoke; he did not say it,'' and everything else. I will show it to you in the newspaper. That ended any effort. At least the President came back with $500 billion in cuts, increased taxes on gasoline, Social Security, and the least cuts in Medicare and acted very responsibly, which has gotten us into a pretty good economic situation--for the moment. But we have fiscal cancer. The automatic spending and interest costs on the national debt are eating us alive--are growing each day and cannot be stopped, unless we get rid of this debt and this deficit. Ironically, the only way to get rid of the increased taxes--because that is what the interests costs are. They cannot be avoided, like death and taxes; you have to pay the interest costs. The only way to get rid of the automatic increase in taxes is to increase taxes. Now, if you understand that, you will understand the predicament the land is in. All of this other thing of force-feeding, whether it is education, whether it is the environment, whether it is Medicare and all, is beyond repair. Why argue here in November 1995 about something that is solvent and paid for like Medicare? Why argue about something that is solvent and paid for like Social Security? Let us look at the real problem that we are trying to finesse. Let us understand that we are in the same act, same scene. And, as President Reagan said, ``Here we go again.'' We proposed and supported a balanced budget in 1987 we proposed and supported a balanced budget in 1991, and we were supposed to, under Bush in 1990, report a surplus in 1995.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, it shows there, and I read, ``CBO would project an on-budget deficit of $105 billion in 2002.'' ``Peace, peace, everywhere a man cried peace,'' said Patrick Henry, ``But there was no peace.'' Balance, balance, balance, balance, everywhere men cry balance. There is no balance. There is a deficit. Let us level with the American people. To quote Mark Twain, ``The truth is such a precious thing, it should be used very sparingly.'' And that is the credo of this Congress that is up in the wagon trying to get by again and is using the pressures of the Government closedown on itself to get what they cannot get by a majority vote. They could not get a majority vote because--I joined with one on legal services. They do not want, like the gang of 73 over on the House side, to abolish legal services. So we joined in reinstating legal services in the appropriations bill. Mr. President, they do not want to abolish the Department of Commerce. That is why we had a voice vote to strike the provision that would have abolished the Department of Commerce. What is happening is they are trying to force feed the White House on measures that they cannot even get a majority vote for. And they're nagging and crying like children about where they sat on the plane going to a funeral. I do not believe anybody felt much like talking. But our distinguished minority leader, Senator Daschle, was there and I believe him, and he recounted the several times that the President came back. That is one thing you cannot accuse President Clinton of is not talking, for God's sake. Heavens above. Where have we come to in this town of ours putting on this show? I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the document ``Here we go again,'' which has the budget tables.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. Kasich there for the 104th Congress, the first session, concurrent resolution for the fiscal budget for the fiscal year 1996. It says fiscal year 2002. Mr. President, everybody ought to listen. They do not want to hear it: It shows a $108,400,000,000 deficit. Aha. They keep on these weekend shows, morning interviews, the TV, 20-second scripts. Truth in budgeting. But they themselves say in the year 2002, it is a $108,400,000,000 deficit. And then, of course, June O'Neill, on October 20, 1995. This, incidentally, Mr. President, was subsequent to the October 18 good Government award that the chairman of the Budget Committee came to the floor and gave his budget. He said, now we have got it certified. Now we have got it certified. And I do not want to just repeat the record of those particular amounts, but he had them all detailed out there on October 18. And he said, the Congressional Budget Office has reviewed our budget that I have just quoted from, and they have found that we have a $10 billion surplus in the year 2002. I said, wait a minute, I can read. Kasich himself said a $108.4 billion deficit. Where in the world did this $10 billion surplus come from? Two days later, when we admonished the Madam Director to obey the law--to cut out the embezzlement of the Social Security trust--she wrote back meekly. I ask unanimous consent that that letter be printed in the Record, the letter of October 20.

Mr. HOLLINGS. ``The appropriate levels of total budget outlays are as follows * * *'' And going right down the list, the amount of surplus is as follows: ``Fiscal year 1995, $20.5 billion.'' So to their crowd saying: ``We are carrying the load; we are lifting things,'' I say you all are doing nothing. They have not voted for anything since Clinton has been in town. They have not passed the appropriations bills. They have not passed the reconciliation. I want to see that lifting. Be that as it may, this 1990 document is another paper document--a surplus we are supposed to have, this minute, of $20 billion. What is the actual deficit? I put the tables in. The actual real deficit at this particular minute is $283.3 billion instead of a $20 billion surplus. So every 5 years, in 1981 reflecting one, in 1984 and 1985 reflecting one, in 1990 reflecting a surplus, and here we go again, in with another paper document for another 7 years. Another day older and deeper in debt. But who will be around 7 years from now? We will have two Presidential elections under this scheme. We will have unrealistic cuts. We have had already cuts in Social Security. You are not going to get $270 billion in Medicare. I do not care what you say or how you vote, we have been cutting. I have been on this Budget Committee 20-some years, and every year President Reagan, President Bush, and other Presidents, they would come and they would want to cut $5 billion to show they were headed in the right direction. We would have to restore $2 billion or $3 billion. So momentarily, or annually, I should say, we have been cutting billions out of Medicare. So it is under President Clinton who came to town, he cut $57 billion in the year 1993 out of Medicare. Last year--last year--Mr. President, he proposed a $120 billion cut. Now, let me just as an aside and say a word about Social Security. ``For by their fruits shall ye know them.'' In 1994, last year, I read the so-called report of the board of trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance Fund. And from page 2: The trust fund ratio defined as the ratio of assets at the beginning of the year to disbursements during the year was 131 percent in 1993, and then under the immediate assumptions is projected to decline steadily until the fund is completely exhausted in the year 2001. Now, mind you me, Mr. President, that this is the same report they are talking about 2002. Last year when they said it was going broke in 2001, they did not even care about it. They went around whining, ``What's the matter with health care? We have got the best in the world.'' There was no proposal to confront that so-called dreadful disaster 7 years from now. But with President Clinton, not with their votes, President Clinton and the Democratic votes--and the Vice President had to vote--we at least picked up a year with the $57 billion cut. And it was completely rejected, repudiated. The First Lady was ridiculed all last year about health care. An interesting thing because the distinguished Senator from Texas was saying that with Social Security taxes, they were going to be hunting us down like dogs in the street and shooting us. Like dogs in the street. Oh, they said the whole country was going into inflation. Unemployment was going to soar. Plants were going to close. The economy was going to be in a depression. And they were going to grab us politicians who voted for this and hunt us down like dogs in the street and shoot us. Well, it was not easy to vote to tax Social Security. But, mind you me, Mr. President, when we taxed it, we said, wait a minute, the revenues from this tax, $25 billion, shall go to--what? Shall go to help making Medicare solvent. We allocated $25 billion to Medicare. Here we had already cut $57 billion. Here then we had allocated some $25 billion. And you know what the contract crowd did in November? They came in there and said, ``Do away with this $25 billion, Medicare,'' that they now are worried about 7 years from now. Pure theater. An absolute sham. They, in their contract, increase the deficit of Medicare some $25 billion. They did not help strengthen the Medicare fund. Why is it that we pick out these straw men out here 7 years from now in Medicare, 30 years from now in Social Security, and are not worried about going broke this minute? We have fiscal cancer. The interest costs--the automatic spending to pay the interest costs on a $5 trillion debt--is going $1 billion a day up, up and away. There is no plan, Democratic or Republican, that says let us cut spending $1 billion a day. So let us get down to the real facts. The real facts are, in the GOP budget, that for every year they increase spending, the fact is, the present budget--the reconciliation we will vote on tomorrow--will increase spending $53 billion. $53 billion over the present year. A $53 billion increase in spending. You look over at the increase in revenues, and you say, well, maybe we had to spend more. But we took in more. We did have some of that growth. Not so. Not so. You add up the 7 years, Mr. President. The expenditures, the outlays by CBO. Incidentally, I do not mind CBO figures. I do not mind the 7- year budget. I am prepared to vote for a 7-year budget and CBO figures--so long as it is a true balanced budget and not an embezzlement of Social Security. None of this unified. Do not give old Hollings that. I heard it before. I hear it again. I hear the whine that other Presidents have done it. We came to town in November, my dear Republican colleagues, for change, not for business as usual, not how Presidents have done it, not how Congress has done it before, but the truth in budgeting. But, Mr. President, the outlays exceed the revenues some $1,052,000,000,000 during that first 7 years. How do you start with a $283.3 billion deficit, increase spending over [[Page S 17133]] revenues each year for 7 years, and get a balanced budget? You cannot. There is no mystery to it. You use smoke and mirrors. In fact, the very authorities they use, they misquote. You look at page 3 of the conference report of Chairman Kasich over in the House side. I ask unanimous consent that a portion of that report be printed in the Record at this particular point.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Then, Mr. President, we came to one of the wonderful chapters in history, Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. I had worked earlier--and we got to wish him a happy birthday--Senator Howard Baker. Senator Howard Baker was the majority leader, and he tried to help me on the freeze. We could not get the freeze. And so I then got with Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and said, ``Look, I understand you have an idea of cutting spending across the board.'' [[Page S 17132]] I remember well as Governor I got a triple A credit rating doing just that. We had truth in budgeting back in South Carolina in 1959. We said that whatever your budget said was going to happen and would have to occur within the expenditures and revenues. If the expenditures ever exceeded the revenues, automatically by law--no discretion--the spending amounts across the board would be cut. And from Standard & Poor's and Moody's, I got a triple A rating ahead of Texas and up to Maryland and before any of the Southern States. I used it as my calling card as a young Governor to carpetbag the North, trying to get industry down. So I feel it keenly. It is lost now. Why is it lost now? We have Republican administrations that are giving that same nonsense. That is why I would not join them. It is all rhetoric. It is all applesauce. We have lost the triple A credit rating in South Carolina on account of growth. But be that as it may, Senator Gramm, Senator Rudman and I put in Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. I have the tape from President Reagan giving me The Good Government Award and litany and congratulations and everything else, and, yes, the budgets were going to be balanced because we had truth in budgeting. And then what happened? We found out that it was too severe, these $37 billion cuts annually, and they went out in the year 1990 to Andrews Air Force Base and repealed Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. I raised a point of order on October the 19th, 1990, at 12:41 a.m., and they voted me down. I said when you get away from the automatic cuts across the board, the sequesters, what you have is so-called spending caps that are pure rhetoric, and you can see what has happened. The spending has gone up, up and away. So they repealed it at that time. And let us go to the 1990 budget at the time of the repeal. Mr. President, that is the most interesting document for our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to ever look upon for the simple reason that it has an astounding figure to it. It says here for the 101st Congress, Second Session, report 101-820--I ask unanimous consent that this be printed in the Record.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, as you go down, you will see we have been borrowing sumptuously from trust funds. At the present time--not just owing Social Security the $481 billion--at this very minute, we owe the trust funds of the United States, we owe to the veterans, we owe to the civil service retirees, we owe to the military retirees, we owe, yes, to Medicare. We have been using everybody else's moneys: $1,255,000,000,000. So, the thrust of using the word ``unified'' is to obscure just that; that we are already in hock, before we begin the year, $1,255,000,000,000. We are already in hock on a national debt of just about $5 trillion. And, since this is all Presidential campaign politics, whoever the next President is, when he comes to town January a year from now, he will find at least $500 billion spent for absolutely nothing, just for the past profligacy and waste, Congresses for 15 years now are spending over $200 billion more than we have taken in. Congress has continued to campaign on balanced budgets, and they all tell you on the political stump how they are going to balance the budget. When they come to town, they get into the smoke and the mirrors. There is no question that the smoke and the mirror are just in that one word ``unified.'' Just say ``the balanced budget.'' I have heard Senators say it is not complicated. You take the revenues that the Government receives, you take the expenditures, or outlays the Government spends, and there is the balance. That is not the way. Then they want to move deficits. They say, ``Wait a minute, when you take the revenues in, the outlays out, and you look at that figure, that is too high for me to run on in the next election. So we will take an amount of money out of the right pocket and put it into the left pocket. We will take $636 billion from Social Security in this budget that we have under consideration and put it in the general fund to make it appear we are balancing the budget.'' That is what my particular amendment is. As soon as I caught this word ``unified,'' the attempt has been made to abolish this section 13301. They do not like it. But the Senator from South Carolina watches. So the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution which I was prepared for, ready for, and have voted for numerous times--and am ready, willing, and able to vote for at this minute--included in section 7 the repeal of section 13301. I caught that earlier in this session this year. I told the distinguished majority leader and our distinguished colleague from Illinois, Senator Simon, who was sponsoring this, I said, ``You got my vote. I understand you got five other Democratic votes in a minute. Just take out the repeal of what John Heinz called embezzlement provisions that protects the Social Security Trust Fund from embezzlement.'' They will not do it. They were adamant. Then they figured, ``Wait a minute. It is good politics if we try to blame it on one vote--if we fail to pass a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget by one vote--and then take it down and offer it next year during the election year. I have the same amendment right in my pocket. Everybody has been walking around with the contract in their pocket. My distinguished former majority leader from West Virginia carries the Constitution in his pocket. I carry around in my pocket the Social Security provision-- namely, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution that does not repeal section 13301 of the United States Code. Mr. President, there are those who love this unified budget that has brought a modicum of dignity and financial expertise to the politician Senator. Because you go up on the financial market, and I am astounded. But still the best of economists, the best of financial officers, the biggest and the best of the banks, are reporting what? A unified budget. They are the ones [[Page S 17131]] who want it because they are in the business of making money. And the less pressures of the Federal Government's borrowing in the financial market, the more the interest rates, momentarily, will drop and the ease with which to finance momentarily will grow. And, if they can have the Government itself back in Washington borrowing from each other even though, of course, the debt is up, up, and away to $5 trillion, who cares? This crowd operates on quarterly reports, computers, tenths of a second, moving money around, all around the world. They have no responsibility. The Government, Mr. President, you and I, do. So, it is fine, momentarily, for the financial markets in reducing the pressure. But we, who have the responsibility of serving here in public office as a public trust, have to cut out the nonsense and playing around with the smoke and mirrors. We have to cut out trying to fool the American people that under, for example, this resolution, you would have a balanced budget when it is unified. Not at all. When it is unified alone from Social Security and $636 billion and over the 7-year period from civil service retirement and military retirees and others, we will borrow another $200 billion. So it will be over $836 billion needed to get to a so-called ``paper balance.'' Let me tell you about the paper balance because I have to listen to the talk on the other side of the aisle about this historic effort and that we finally are doing the heavy lifting. They have not lifted anything. When we lifted year before last, when we cut $500 billion in spending, when we taxed cigarettes, when we taxed liquor, when we taxed gasoline and Social Security, when we cut Medicare $57 billion, they wanted lifting? They were out at recess. There was not a single vote on the other side of the aisle in this body, or in the other body. And they have the unmitigated gall to come and say, ``President Clinton does not want a balanced budget.'' Well, he is the only one that cannot be blamed for it. The distinguished Presiding Officer, this distinguished Senator from South Carolina, may have voted for expenditures that unbalanced the budget, but not President William Jefferson Clinton. He was down in Little Rock doing what? Balancing the budgets. He balanced them for 10 years. That was part of the good record that helped in his election in 1992. But we instead were engaged in this shabby exercise of growth, growth--that we will just cut out all the revenue and buy the vote with Reaganomics and with President Bush. It was President Clinton who came to town, yes, to give us a change in direction. I was here under President Lyndon Johnson. He was conscientious about this political charge of guns and butter and runaway government. So with George Mahon and others working in a committee, we called at the very end, in December 1968, the fiscal year running from the 1st of July back to the next year, June 30, and we told the President, ``We can cut another $5 billion.'' He said, ``Don't do it.'' And the budget for the war in Vietnam, for Social Security, for Medicare and all these particular programs was $178 billion. To show how far we have gotten out of hand, the interest costs for absolutely nothing--no government is obtained there--the interest cost on the national debt this fiscal year is $348 billion, $1 billion a day. But President Johnson not only balanced, but he gave us a $3.2 billion surplus. President Nixon came to town. We were working with him again on the idea of block grants, incidentally. But in 1973, the OPEC cartel hit. We began to run some $21 billion deficits. President Ford took over, and our friend, President Ford, knew well what the problem was. And he called us all together in a summit. He said, ``Let's get our hands on this thing. It is runaway.'' We held it down to $66 billion. Thereafter, President Carter came to town. He said, ``I have to at least reduce this.'' Now, you are looking at the author of the first reconciliation bill. I was chairman of the Budget Committee, and I went over on the Friday after President Jimmy Carter was defeated on a Tuesday in November 1980, and I said, ``Mr. President, a Democrat is never going to get elected again with this deficit going up, up, and away.'' He said, ``How much?'' I said, ``Mr. President, the Congressional Budget Office has just estimated the deficit is going up to $75 billion.'' He said, ``Heavens. What are we going to do?'' I said, ``There is a fancy word called reconciliation. It means cut-- just cut across the board already-approved spending.'' He said, ``We can do that?'' I said, ``If you can just take Harris and McIntyre''--who were working at OMB and the assistant at OMB trying to give away the money to reelect their President--``if you tell them to stay out of the Capitol, I will go to my good liberal friends''--I say that with reverence--``and I will get the votes, and we will cut it back.'' And President Carter said, ``Go to it.'' I came to Warren Magnuson of Washington and Frank Church of Idaho and John Culver of Iowa and George McGovern of South Dakota and Birch Bayh of Indiana and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. I said, ``Before you all leave, you have to give me one vote because we have got to prove that we are fiscally responsible.'' They did, and we reduced the deficit down to $57 billion, just about $58 billion. Then came to town the leader of them all against waste, fraud and abuse, President Ronald Wilson Reagan, and he was beginning to put up budgets that we were going to work with. But he got behind the poll, behind the curve. Do not ever fool with polls. That is why I have this particular article on the desk. But getting behind it, he adopted what he had earlier rejected, namely Kemp-Roth. Reaganomics. They termed the name, and we were going to cut out all the revenues. I stood at this desk--and I saw the distinguished Republican Senator last night--and the Senator from Maryland, Senator Mathias agreed with me, and some 10 other Democrats. We tried to hold the line. We said: Wait a minute; this thing is going to get way out of hand. What is going to grow is these deficits and debts with the very intent that you have in mind and by talking this political nonsense that we will have more sales, we will have more purchases, we will have more sales taxes, more income, more income tax revenues. ``Give the money to the people. They know how to spend it best.'' That was the political cry. ``Get out of the wagon and help us pull'' and that kind of nonsense. We are the ones up in the wagon. Who is in the wagon? The Congress has been in this wagon for 15 years. The people outside have been pulling. I am trying to get the Congress out of the wagon--$200 billion a year more than we have taken in for 15 years. President Reagan said he was going to balance the budget in 1 year. If necessary, I will go get the speech for you. He came to Washington after his inauguration and he said: Whoops, this is way worse than I ever thought. So I will put in a budget that we will balance in 3 years. And just like this paper document that we are going to consider tomorrow--the so-called reconciliation that nothing but a paper document--it reported formally that it would be balanced by the year 1984. I will include that page that we have for the fiscal year 1984. It says, ``Fiscal year, zero,'' Calendar No. 63, the 97th Congress, first session. I ask unanimous consent that the report be printed in the Record.

Mr. HOLLINGS. We said in the reconciliation instructions that they adhere to the law 13301. At that particular time, the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee looked at it. It was Senator Graham of Florida and the Senator from South Carolina who introduced the particular language. We said about the Balanced Budget Reconciliation Act of 1995, and I read, ``. . . that the conferees be instructed to honor section 13301 of the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990, and, 2, not to include in the conference report any language that violates this section.'' And, to that, the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee, the Senator from New Mexico, said, and I quote: ``Mr. President, the first portion of this instruction, we have never violated, so we can be instructed on it. The second section, we have never violated it, so we can be instructed not to.'' Absolutely false. That is categorical. We have regularly violated it. And that is the plea, later on, of the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee, that all the Presidents have done it. All the Congresses have done it. So, the heck with the law. He gets up and says solemnly: We have never violated it. We continue to do so. The fact that President Reagan reported a budget that way, and President Bush reported a budget that way, President Clinton reported a budget that way, makes no impression on this particular Senator. It is our responsibility to have truth in budgeting. It is our responsibility to adhere to the statutory laws of the United States of America. It is not a technicality of law; it is a fundamental here involved. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a budget table showing the U.S. budget outlays beginning in 1945, the use of trust funds under President Truman at that particular time, the real deficit, and then, of course, the gross Federal deficit. When you put together the borrowing from the trust funds that must be replenished, you get the real deficit, the gross Federal debt, and the gross interest costs. These are all on one page so all the Members cannot dance around and talk about CBO and OMB. These are the figures of the U.S. Government. I ask unanimous consent they be printed in the Record.

Mr. HOLLINGS. I thank the distinguished Chair. At the end of the 7-year period, we will all have to pay back, supposedly, over $1 trillion into the Social Security trust fund, and no one has any idea--not any Senator or House Member --who is going to introduce the increase in taxes to refund the Social Security trust fund. The remedy for this particular evil is to obey the law. We saw this in the Budget Committee. We tortured over it. We realized this back in 1983 when we passed the Greenspan Commission report making the Social Security trust funds solvent into the middle of the next century, we said, so the children and the grandchildren could count on it. We raised the taxes and assured everyone--in fact, we could not have done it for defense or for foreign aid or for welfare or for any of the other endeavors of Government. We said we were raising these Social Security taxes to make certain that there was trust in the trust fund through the year 2050. Having done that, 5 years ago we met in the Budget Committee and realized, look, on an emergency basis, yes, we borrowed from Social Security, maybe $100 billion here, $200 billion there. As Senator Dirksen says, it could easily run into money. So we voted, on a vote of 20 to 1 in the Budget Committee, that we would stop this nonsense by writing into the law section 13301 of the statutory laws of the United States of America that ``thou shalt not use Social Security trust funds to in any way be computed in outlays or revenues of the United States Government or in any way to obscure the size of the deficit.'' That particular measure passed this body by a vote of 98 to 2. It was signed into law by President George Herbert Walker Bush on November 5, 1990, and no less than reaffirmed in a solemn vote here on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Monday, 3 days ago. We said in the reconciliation----

Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, it was Mark Twain who said the truth is such a precious thing that it should be used very sparingly. As a result, Mr. President, what we have been doing is calling budgets ``balanced'' when in reality there have been raids, or, as the former Senator from Pennsylvania, John Heinz, called it, ``embezzlement'' of the Social Security trust fund. At the present moment we owe Social Security, due to this lack of truth in budgeting. We owe Social Security $481 billion, and if you duck the proposed reconciliation tomorrow or the GOP budget, you will expend another $636 billion of Social Security trust fund. Now, what may have been in the original instance an instrument of good, turned into a usurpation and a bankruptcy of Social Security if you have to borrow a few billion dollars. In the morning paper, you see the Secretary of the Treasury, in order to keep from defaulting, the Secretary of the Treasury has borrowed $61.3 billion from the civil service retirement. And they say later on, of course, he has to pay it back with interest--and that is the point. You have to pay Social Security back with interest and at the end of the 7-year budget you will owe.

Mr. HOLLINGS. In order to vote for the resolution you have to vote to violate the law. They know it. That is the smoke and that is the mirror. On Monday, they agreed--in fact, the Senator from New Mexico, the chairman of the Budget Committee talking now about ``unified'' stated at the time we passed the Heinz-Hollings-Moynihan amendment, ``I support taking Social Security out of the budget deficit calculation . . .'' Again, on Monday, he voted that way. It reminds me, Mr. President, of a contest that we had for an insurance company and they wanted a slogan for the new insurance company. The winning slogan we finally got was, ``The Capital Life will surely pay if the small print on the back don't take it away.'' Now, Mr. President, that is the gamesmanship you see here. That is $636 billion. This is a problem not of technicalities. It is real. For we, at the present moment, owe Social Security $481 billion. Pass this GOP budget and you will use again another $636 billion. So, come the year 2002 we will say, ``Oops, what a smart boy am I. I have made solvent Medicare but, oh, heavens above, I have forced Social Security into bankruptcy. I owe $1 trillion and there is nobody around ready to raise $1 trillion worth of taxes to make the IOU sound.'' Let me look at the morning paper here and see exactly what it says. It says: Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin announced plans yesterday to pull $61.3 billion from two Federal retirement accounts, an unprecedented fiscal move he said was necessary to save the U.S. Government from the first default in its history. He authorized withdrawal of the entire $21.5 billion held in a Federal savings plan known as the G-fund, and as much as $39.8 billion of the $350 billion in the Civil Service retirement fund. In effect, both funds would be given a temporary IOU that would obligate Treasury to make complete repayment with interest after a permanent increase in the debt limit is finally approved. Now, Mr. President, that is my point. We should reduce deficits. We should eliminate deficits. We should not move deficits. You move them from the general fund over to the Social Security trust fund. Or as the Secretary of the Treasury did yesterday, you move it from the general fund over into the Civil Service retirement fund. That moving around is absolute trickery and is putting us in such a position that we are no longer allowed the luxury of children and grandchildren arguments. We will get it through the neck here in about 2 years. We owe, this minute, trust funds $1.255 trillion--right this minute. If we continue to spend now under this so-called continuing resolution, a unified budget, then we really are going to be up a creek. Let me tell you who loves this--Wall Street. The financial market. I talked to one of them just earlier this week. They love a unified budget. Why? Theirs is to make money. And so if you can borrow around from the other Government funds there is less of a burden of borrowing on the New York stock exchange. When we come in for borrowing funds, with the sharp elbows of Government, we shove away other capital investment. They love that. But we have the responsibility of running the Government, not of making money. This thing was, perhaps, a good idea at one time. But now we have come with the contract and the revolution that says we are not going to have business as usual. We are going to have change. Do not tell me what Presidents have done, what this President will do. Tell us what we will do to not have business as usual. Namely, adhere to the law--adhere to the principle and policy of not using the trust funds. That is why there is a lack of trust in Government, if the youngsters coming along see that you are frittering away their retirement funds. I lose trust myself. So there is no mystery to this thing. Let us have an honest budget, without smoke and without mirrors. Let us get right down to the idea, here, that we are not using the Social Security trust fund. It is against the law to do it. On October 18, if you refer to the Congressional Record, the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee stood on the Senate floor and he said here: I have the certificate, certified of this GOP budget, and we have a $10 billion surplus. When we reminded her of the law--would you think you would have to remind a Congressional Budget Office Director of the law? Once reminded of the law, June O'Neill, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, came and said, ``Oops, I am sorry. You have a $105 billion deficit.'' So they went from a $10 billion surplus, in 48 hours, to a $105 billion deficit. And they talk about CBO figures. That is what destroys the trust in CBO. Because they have gamesmanship there. But let us not have gamesmanship here. We all voted on Monday to stop the gamesmanship with the Social Security trust funds. Let us again vote for this amendment when it comes up that says: Notwithstanding any other provision of this joint resolution, the 7-year balanced budget passed by the Congress to the President shall not include Social Security trust funds to reduce or apply to the deficit--to effect or obtain a balance. Mr. President, I retain the remainder of my time and yield the floor. Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, I had talked to the distinguished ranking member on the other side of the aisle and asked for 10 minutes but he is not here so I yield myself 10 minutes. Mr. President, my colleague from Pennsylvania talks about the resolution without smoke and without mirrors. Let me point to the smoke and let me point to the mirrors. It says here on the last page about commitment to a 7-year balanced budget: ``The President and the Congress shall enact legislation to achieve a unified balanced budget.'' Now you have the smoke. Now you have the mirrors. This is exactly what the U.S. Senate on Monday--today is only Thursday--exactly what the U.S. Senate on Monday voted 97-2 against, this smoke, this mirror. Let me quote, since the distinguished Senator from Pennsylvania is here, our late colleague, the distinguished Senator from Pennsylvania, Senator John Heinz. Since 1983, when we may have saved the Social Security goose, we have systematically proceeded to melt down and pawn the golden egg. It doesn't take a financial wizard to tell us that spending these reserves on today's bills does not bode well for tomorrow's retirees. I quote another statement from Senator John Heinz: The truth is that Congress, by counting the old-age, survivors and disability income trust funds as part of general revenues, radically distorts the actual financial health of this Nation by pretending that the money paid in by workers to Social Security will never be paid out. Stating further: Mr. President, in all the great jambalaya of frauds surrounding the budget, surely the most reprehensible is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund in order to mask the true size of the deficit. Now, that is exactly, Mr. President, why I have an amendment at the desk [[Page S 17123]] which I will call later in its due time. We have the amendment on the date of December 22, which I favor, but I thank the distinguished leadership for yielding me this time because here on Monday, here on Monday, the distinguished leader stated, when we read in here that ``on the Budget Reconciliation Act of 1995, the U.S. Congress agrees to honor section 13301 of the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 so as not to include in the conference any language that violates that section.'' Now, what does that section that Senator Heinz had enacted back and signed into law on November 5, 1990, say? I ask unanimous consent that section 13301 be printed in the Record.

Mr. HOLLINGS. That is exactly correct. If anybody heard anything during this week's debate, listen to the Senator from North Dakota. He was there and made the motion. I remember it well. At that particular time, we were raising taxes on the absolute promise that it would only go for Social Security. If we said at the time we are going to raise taxes for defense and raise taxes for foreign aid and raise taxes for education--in fact at that particular time they were trying to abolish the Department of Education--and raise taxes for any of these other endeavors of Government, you could not have gotten a tax increase. You got it on a solid promise that we were keeping faith under the Social Security fund.

Mr. HOLLINGS

Mr. HOLLINGS. I protested.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. HOLLINGS. It makes no difference to me. I would hate to see a President want to veto that and say I want to raid the Social Security trust fund. He does know politics. I do not think he would hesitate signing that part of it, I can tell you that.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Yes, sir.