Jon Kyl

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I want to respond today to some statements President Obama has been making on the campaign trail regarding debt, spending, and taxes during his administration. Last week, the President said he should not be blamed for the massive debt and spending in recent years because, in his words, it was all ``baked into the cake'' when he took office. He also contended that his administration has done the responsible thing in taking steps to fix our Nation's fiscal problems. Here is the totality of what the President said: I love it when these guys talk about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit. We signed $2 trillion of spending cuts into law. Spending under my administration has grown more slowly than under any President in the last 60 years. They baked all this stuff into the cake with the tax cuts and the war. I would like to respond to each of the President's comments. First, on deficits and debt, President Obama is not the reformer he makes himself out to be. Since he took office, the national debt has climbed by $5 trillion. It is now larger than the entire economy. If we take his entire 4 years and all of the Presidents before him, he has incurred as much debt as all of the Presidents, from George Washington through George W. Bush, just in his time as President. Yearly deficits, which is the gap between revenues and spending, have grown substantially as well. Despite a promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, the President has run annual deficits in excess of $1 trillion for 4 years in a row. None of this has anything to do with what happened before he became President. So how about after he became President? According to the President's own budget numbers, in 2009, the first year of his Presidency, the deficit was $1.4 trillion. In 2010 the deficit was $1.3 trillion. In 2011 it, again, was $1.3 trillion. If the President's policies are followed, the deficit this year is expected to top $1.3 trillion. Those are all in the years when he was President. The highest deficit under President Bush, his predecessor, was $458 billion, and that was in 2008. Every deficit under President Obama has been more than double that figure. But President Obama says he is blameless when it comes to the debt problem? Not hardly. He never even submitted a plan to come close to balancing the budget, even with the massive tax hike he supports. As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote last week: Despite [the President's] claim that ``both parties have laid out their policies on the table,'' President Obama has made no serious proposal to fix the runaway entitlement programs that threaten to swamp the government's finances. Dana Milbank is not a conservative Republican. Second, let's take a look at the President's claim that spending during his Presidency has grown more slowly than during any Presidency in the last 60 years. That claim does not pass the smell test. Keith Hennessey, former Director of the National Economic Council, is one of many observers who has debunked this claim. First, as Hennessey notes, the President's claim is based on a discredited article that suggests he isn't actually accountable for anything that happened before October 1, 2009. That is the start of the fiscal year. But, of course, he took office almost 9 months before that time. In other words, that timetable excludes the auto bailouts, the first year of the stimulus bill--which, of course, was President Obama's legislation--the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a lot of other things. As Hennessey writes, this date was ``cherry-picked . . . to make President Obama's record look good.'' I would ask: Does President Obama also disclaim anything to do with the auto bailouts that occurred during that same period of time? No, last time I heard, he was bragging about that. That is the height of cherry picking. The things that make you look good, you take; the things that make you look bad, you reject. You can't have it both ways. Second, the President actually proposed spending far higher than was enacted into law. For example, his latest budget request proposed spending of $3.72 trillion in fiscal year 2013. But the President is taking credit for spending in the CBO baseline which is $3.58 trillion, which is somewhat less than the $3.72 trillion he proposed. So the President wanted to spend more but was restrained by the Republicans in the House of Representatives in Congress. Mr. Hennessey also explains how the President's spending claim collapses once you take three basic errors into account. He writes: If you instead do this calculation the right way and measure the average annual growth rate from fiscal year 2008 to CBO scoring of the President's budget proposal for fiscal year 2013, you get an average annual growth rate of Federal spending of 4.5 percent. That is a nominal growth rate, so the real growth rate will be in the 2s. Finally, on spending, it is inaccurate to measure a President's record without looking at the overall size and scope of government. President Obama's preference for big government is obvious to everyone. He usually argues for it. He doesn't argue he is for a smaller or less active government. Well, the historical average of spending to gross domestic product before President Obama took office was roughly 20.6 percent. So how does President Obama's record stack up? Here is the breakdown of spending to gross domestic product. These are the ratios during the Obama years. Remember now, this is compared to the historical average of 20.6 percent. In 2009, his first year, 25.2 percent; next, 2010, 24.1 percent; in 2011, 24.1 percent again; and an estimate for this year, 2012, is 24.3 percent. All of these figures are substantially higher than the historical average of spending at 20 percent. So his spending every year he has been in office, including the projected spending this year, will be far greater than the historical average. And lastly, in the President's budget request for fiscal year 2013, which would be next year, the spending averages 22.5 percent--still above the 20-percent historical figure. So it is no wonder President Obama doesn't want to run on his real spending record, because it is not one of fiscal constraint. Third, I want to address the President's claim that the tax relief Congress enacted in 2001 and 2003 somehow played an outsized role in driving up the debt. We have heard him talk about this--if it weren't for the Bush tax cuts, he said we would be closer to having a balanced budget. Not true. The records for this come from the nonpartisan referees at the Congressional Budget Office. These are not partisan people--not on one side or the other--and they have shown what we have is a spending problem, not a revenue problem. In May of 2011, CBO released an analysis showing that nearly 50 percent of the cumulative budget deficit since 2001 is due to increased government spending, 28 percent of it is due to economic and technical corrections, and 11 percent is due to temporary stimulus-like tax provisions. The 2001 and 2003 tax relief to which President Obama refers--which, by the way, is the same tax relief he extended for 2 years about a year and a half ago--accounts for how much? Just 14 percent of the deficit since 2001 and 2003. So, far from being the cause of the deficit, it only accounts for 14 percent of the deficit. It is inaccurate for the President to place the blame for his spending records on broad-based progrowth tax relief that has helped to create jobs and economic growth in this country prior to the last downturn--and that he himself supported extending. Additionally, the recently released ``Long-Term Budget Outlook'' estimates that tax revenues will exceed the historical average in the next 10 years if this same tax policy--the 2001 and 2003 tax relief--is extended, and if Congress prevents the alternative minimum tax from hitting millions of additional middle-class families. And that is what Republicans have been supporting all along. So we will get back to the historical average of revenues raised. We all know robust economic growth is the most effective way to reduce our debt and that raising taxes will not achieve that goal. Failure to stop this tax-driven fiscal cliff could push us into another recession next year, again according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It would result in a $4.59 trillion tax hike on individuals, families, businesses, and investors over the next decade. We have said that is the largest tax increase in the history of our country--over $4.5 trillion. If we are serious about increasing tax revenues through economic growth, avoiding a recession is a good place to start. Republicans are happy to debate President Obama on the best way to create jobs and to get our country back on sound fiscal footing. But in order to do so, we need to get the facts straight first. President Obama has not lived up to his promise to cut the deficit. He has not reduced spending in any meaningful way. And tax relief is not the main reason why we are in the red today. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Johnson), the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey), and the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter).

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I wish to comment on something the President recently said that is very much in the news. Last Friday, the President of the United States said, ``The private sector is doing just fine.'' This is not taken out of context. He was talking about economically. His office leader explained what he was really talking about is the comparison between the public sector and the private sector, and I take him at his word there. The President said: Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government--oftentimes cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don't have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in. I think that is generally true. But here are the two key points I would make in response: First, everyone--not just government employees--is suffering. They are struggling in the Obama economy. Yes, the number of government jobs has decreased during the last 40 months since President Obama took office, but overall employment in government has increased on the whole in recent years, even with the reductions that have occurred in the last couple of years. For example, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total government employees added up to 21,847,000--rounded off--in January 2006. That is just a little over 6 years ago--21,847,000. By comparison, last month the total amount of government employees added up to 21,969,000. So there are a few more government employees today-- State, Federal, and local--than there were just 6 years ago. I would just ask, how on Earth did we get by in this country with only 21,847,000 government workers in 2006? I think we were doing just fine. The reality is, when a private firm faces financial difficulty, usually the first area the firm looks to in terms of saving money is its workforce. It is too bad, but frequently firms have to lay off workers because they simply can't afford to continue to pay that many workers. I will just give the experience of a friend of mine in Arizona who said: This recession was probably the best thing that happened to us because it forced us to look at our workforce, how we did business, and whether we could make savings. He said: Today, we are making more money than we ever have, even with a lower workforce, because we found that we could make do and make the improvements that made us more efficient. We are asking that to be done in government. Government doesn't have a right to continue to grow and grow. Government should be as efficient as the private sector, including with respect to the number of people it hires to do the work that has to be done. After all, the private sector has to take care of paying both the employees in the private sector and the employees in the government sector. Who pays government employees? All of our constituents, the people in the private sector. So we in the government have an obligation to run the governments-- Federal, State, and local--as efficiently and leanly as we possibly can. If we find we can run the government with just a few more employees today than we had, for example, 6 years ago, then all the better for our economy and all the better for the taxpayers who have to pay their salaries. So there isn't some right of the Federal Government to continue to grow its workforce at a rate higher than the private sector. Rather, we should be trying to run the government on as few a number of employees as necessary to do the work the American people want us to do. But here is the larger point: As the Wall Street Journal points out, the reason the government workforce has shrunk since January 2009 is not due to smaller budgets or dwindling aid, as the President suggested. As the Wall Street Journal notes, revenues to State and local governments have increased during the last 2 years, according to census data. The main problem is rising health care and pension costs for government workers, and we have seen the experience in a State such as Wisconsin in having to deal with that to make some reductions, which caused a lot of political turmoil in the State. But at the end, the voters of the State said: We agree. We need to cut government cost as it relates to the health care and pension commitments we have made to our government employees. While government has experienced some job losses, it is important to remember that benefits enjoyed by government workers are far superior to those enjoyed by those employed in the private sector. For example, according to an article in the National Review magazine, on an hourly basis private sector employees' benefits cost their companies $2.15 an hour. State and local government workers cost taxpayers $4.72 an hour-- 219 percent more. For retirement benefit costs, the private sector figure works out to $1.02 per hour. The State and local workers sum, $3.37 an hour--a 330- percent premium. This is where the extra costs are for government workers. You can't blame State and local governments for trying to provide more efficiency for their operations by conforming their practices for health care and pension benefits more to those in the private sector. Why do government employees deserve more? I guess that is the question. As is a matter of fairness--and especially when compared to people who are paying their salaries--I don't think anyone can argue that government employees should have twice as much or three times as much of a benefit as somebody in the private sector. The second point I would make is this: At 4.2 percent, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among government workers is also far below that of the private sector. We know the average in the country is 8.2 percent, and that is only the people who are still looking for work. If we took all the people who are out of work, it would be about 11.1 or 11.2 percent. But among government workers, the unemployment rate is 4.2 percent. Compare that with unemployment in some other sectors. In agriculture, it is 9.5 percent; 8.1 percent in the wholesale and retail trade; 9.7 percent in leisure and hospitality, to name just a few industries. In each of these I named--I think each of them would be thrilled to have unemployment at 4.2 percent. When the President says the real problem is with government employment, the private sector is doing just fine, the facts simply belie that. The President was wrong; he was incorrect. Finally, let me address his theory of how an economy grows. Unemployment, as I said, is 8.2 percent nationwide. Labor force participation is at historic lows--the number of people actually working or looking for work. GDP growth in the first quarter of 2012 was a very anemic 1.9 percent. This is not enough for this country to grow and prosper and the President wants to borrow or raise taxes from that segment of our society so taxpayers can finance more government workers? That does not make sense. I think not only is the President wrong on the facts about the private sector doing just fine, he has it wrong as to what the solution would be. The solution to help government workers is to have the private sector do better so it can afford to help--to hire more government workers and to pay them better benefits. Government stimulus spending and aid to States has not grown the economy so far and it is obviously not going to do so in the future. Rather than divide the country into public versus private sector workers, Federal versus State and local workers, rich versus poor, men versus women, as the President is wont to do, I hope we work hard to represent all Americans. No one benefits in the long run from an enormous government with an appetite to grow more and more, crushing economic growth and crowding out the private sector, a government that drives up costs for job creators and forces companies to lay off private sector workers. None of us benefits from that. Yet that is what we are seeing playing out right now. The total number of unemployed and underemployed is over 23 million people in the United States. Think of that. That is the number of people who are looking for work who have stopped looking for work or who do not have the kind of work they could be doing. Economic growth last quarter, as I said, was only 1.9 percent; only 69,000 new jobs added. We need more than twice that many jobs added each month in order to keep pace with the new workers coming into the economy, so we are losing ground in terms of jobs created. I don't think the President's solution of more spending on government employees is the answer. I think that is a recipe of another 40 months of 8 percent-plus unemployment. At that rate we are not going to get out of the economic difficulties we are in right now. Let's do things that support the private sector, things that help the private sector. The healthier the economy is, the more growth we have, the more we are able to do for the public sector as well. That is the ultimate answer. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I wish to speak on a different subject primarily, but in view of my colleague's comments and my disagreement with them, let me just make a note of my position.