David Perdue

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, it is not often I get to come to the U.S. Senate with an uplifted heart, but today I do. Yesterday, two-thirds of this body got together on an issue that is so important to Main Street America and agreed. After weeks of negotiation and going back and forth, we passed a bipartisan banking bill, and I believe historians will look back on this week and this bill as being a watershed event. It was a measured bill. It didn't blow up Dodd-Frank; it didn't do away with it. It didn't go as far as some people wanted; it did more than others wanted, but two-thirds of us put the national interests above our own self- interests and passed a bill that will change the face of lending for small community banks and regional banks across our country. Last year, when President Trump became President, he said: Job one is growing the economy. After 8 years of the lowest economic performance in our history, he knew that if you are ever going to deal with the long-term debt crisis we have, you have to first grow the economy. He was right. His instincts were exactly right on. So what did we focus on? The President had us focus on regulations, energy, and taxes. I am happy to tell you, this body collectively agreed, and we got those things done. We reversed 860-some rules and regulations last year. We unleashed our energy potential, as the Presiding Officer knows very well. Late last year, we passed an earth- shattering, historic tax cut and tax modification bill that will unleash our potential and make us competitive with the rest of the world. Why was all that necessary? Well, we had gone through an experiment where Big Government--more regulation and more control--was the call of the day, and we saw the result of that. So what we have been doing is, in a measured way, reversing many of those onerous fiscal policies that kept the monetary policy from igniting the economy again. That is all this is. At the beginning of last year, some $7 trillion almost was not at work in our $20 trillion economy. That is historic. That is unbelievable. You can't even describe that to people outside this country. There was some $2 trillion on the balance sheets of the Russell 1000. That is now being employed. We see announcements every week where companies are announcing capital plans, capital expenditure plans, for the next few years largely as a result of the pullback on regulations last year. Second, we see that by eliminating our archaic repatriation tax that was part of the tax bill, there is some $3 trillion of unrepatriated U.S. profits overseas, and most of that will be coming back. The banking bill we just did that reverses some of the more onerous provisions of Dodd-Frank on small banks and community banks will free up some $2 trillion potential in lending capacity. I think this is historic. After Dodd-Frank, we created a two-street economy: We had Wall Street and we had Main Street. I have a chart here that explains. This happens so often in Washington, where well-intended people who have very little experience in the free enterprise system make decisions that have unintended consequences--and this is one. Dodd-Frank was intended to rein in and control the big banks. Yet what it did inadvertently was penalize the small banks and make big banks better business. This chart calls out--the way I would measure this is the lending activity. The dark blue line here shows, since the 2008 crisis, large business loans coming out of the major money-centered banks have increased dramatically. Even that hasn't driven the recovery we talk about because a lot of the job creation comes in smalltown America and small companies. This light-blue line is small business loans, less than $1 million. We are not even back to where we were in 2008. We will be, now that this bill just passed, because it releases or changes the reserve requirements for small and community banks and regional banks. It also changes the definition of what is a regional bank and increases it to $250 billion from $50 billion. That lowers the regulatory burden and the cost of compliance for these small banks. That gets translated into money flow--cashflow--into businesses that create jobs. This is an innovation economy. We know how to create jobs. We just need to get the Federal Government out of the way. One-size-fits-all regulations do not work. Yesterday, we pulled back on a blunt instrument law--Dodd-Frank--done with a supermajority, by the way. Dodd-Frank was totally ineffective and got the opposite result of what they really wanted. Those small banks and community banks did nothing to cause the 2008 and 2009 crisis, but since Dodd-Frank was enacted, over 1,700 small banks, primarily, have gone out of business--1,700--many because they were unable to cope or afford to comply with the 2,319 pages and 390 new regulations imposed by Dodd-Frank. Let me say that again: 390 new regulations were imposed by Dodd-Frank. My goodness. These small banks had nothing to do with the crisis of 2008. Many of these banks were community and regional banks that actually support small businesses on Main Street, give small businesses the needed capital, and sponsor Little League baseball parks. I grew up in a Little League baseball park sponsored by the three banks in my hometown. My father was a board member of one of those small banks. I remember those days. They were involved in the community. When you borrowed money from them, they knew you personally. What we have done is created an environment that just shut down lending activity in these small banks. Small business lending--which we all know is a driver in every recovery since World War II--took nearly 8 years to barely get back to where we were in 2008, and I am not sure we are totally there, if you go across the board, entirely. I am so glad to stand here and say that finally the U.S. Senate took action. I am also proud to say, even though it didn't go as far as I would like, that we got to a measured approach here that both sides could agree. I remind everybody in this body that two-thirds of us agreed to this. I can't think of another issue that has come before this body. I think we had one vote, 98 to 2, to allow the head of the VA to run his human resources practices the way people in the real world do, and we have seen over 1,500 people now replaced at the VA to clean that place up. I can't think of another thing that has brought us together like this because we all know small banks have been inappropriately affected by Dodd-Frank. Republicans and Democrats proved this week, and over the past several weeks, that we can put our self-interests aside and get to the better good. I am proud to be a part of this. That is why I ran for the Senate. That is why the Presiding Officer ran. We didn't come up here to not get anything and to just get reelected. The American people are fed up. That is how Donald Trump got elected President. That is how I got elected. I would dare say, the American people have the right idea about the future of America, if we would just listen to them. Nobody has all the right answers, but freeing up capital right now to put to work in our economy is the only way we are going to grow this economy north of 3 percent, and I believe we can breathe life back into our rural communities. I had lunch yesterday with the Secretary of Agriculture. They are focused on redeveloping our rural communities that have been ignored for the last decade. These communities share the values that built America. Yet they have been ignored by past administrations that led to big city, big urban focus. I think this bill, more than anything else we have done since I have been in the Senate, will actually breathe life back into those rural communities. I applaud our Democratic partners across the aisle. Seventeen of them took the heat from their own party and from K Street and from the vested lobbyists who did not want this to happen. I applaud them for their courage and for standing up for the people back home. That is what we are here to do. It doesn't always work out this way, but sometimes 15 or 16 of our Republican Party will work with them and get a bill they want to do. That is what this Senate body is supposed to do. I know there are some on the other side of the aisle who really want a one-size-fits-all bigger government and more intrusion. We heard the speeches this week: It is going to be so draconian. They just don't understand how this bill will breathe life back into capital formation, which is the cornerstone of a capitalistic society, but I believe most people in America have seen the dark side. They have seen the punitive nature of large regulatory bodies by a Federal Government that wants to dominate every aspect of our life, and Dodd-Frank was one of the ramifications of that--accomplished, as I said, only during a supermajority. The irony of Dodd-Frank is that it is just another example of Washington overreach that hurts the very people it claims to champion and fails to help the working middle class. We see from this chart, large businesses had no problem getting loans, but the small startup entrepreneur is having trouble today, and that is what this bill goes a long way toward helping to alleviate. Small businesses should look at this and say: We are back in business. We are open for business. I believe this will breathe life back into many communities around our country. Community and regional banks and, by extension, communities and small businesses across the country have been unduly punished for something they had nothing to do with. It is time to correct that, and this bill does that. I am proud to be a Member of the U.S. Senate today. I haven't said that many times here. I am proud because we took action, we put our self-interests aside, and this is exactly the kind of result the American people want us to deliver. This rollback--which I believe is very measured--combined with last year's regulatory rollback, President Trump's steps to unleash our energy potential and, yes, our historic tax bill, go a long way to be a big win for our economy. It sends a message to the rest of the world. I am hopeful the House is going to pass this bill as soon as possible and that President Trump is going to be able to sign it into law very soon. President Trump has a vision for America. It is born out of Main Street America. I believe this puts us back on the track to greatness and leadership in the world economically, socially, politically. It is the right thing to do for our country. It is the right thing to do for every person in America. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I, for one, really appreciate the Senator's attempt to solve this issue. Our hearts are very similar. But a temporary solution, such as the one the Senator from Arizona has proposed, is not a solution, as he just said. It is, rather, another failure of Congress to provide real border security for the American people. It provides only 25 percent of what we need to secure that border for the next 3 years. Does anybody really think that is acceptable? Something the President and the American people have in common is that they want border security. In addition, Members of this body and the administration have spent a great deal of time over the last year, as a matter of fact, talking about a potential DACA solution. I am happy to report that people on both sides want this DACA situation solved permanently. I think the Senator from Arizona and I have the same desire there. Further, as a result of recent decisions by Federal district courts, current DACA recipients are free to continue renewing their status unless and until the Supreme Court overturns those lower court decisions. It will likely be over a year before the Supreme Court would even hear such a case. It is my opinion that we should take that time right now and continue working on a permanent DACA solution, as well as the other legal immigration issues that we know are within reach, rather than settling for a temporary solution that does not address the problem. That permanent solution should also be one that ensures we are not back here in the future dealing with the same issue again. The bill the Senator from Arizona is now proposing would only take us further away from fulfilling our congressional responsibility, with a 3-year delay. I will be happy to work with the Senator from Arizona and any of our colleagues in this body to try to address any of the concerns he and they have with the Secure and Succeed Act, which we just voted on a couple of weeks ago. That bill is exactly what the President said he would sign into law. Therefore, Mr. President, I respectfully object.

Mr. PERDUE. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator and am honored to follow my good friend from North Dakota. It took courage for the Senator from North Dakota to be a leader on this issue in committee. The Banking Committee fought hard and long on this issue. I think there were 30 amendments that we discussed and voted on in coming to this bill that we are bringing forward today. The Senator from North Dakota was a shining star in that debate, one that reminded both sides of what was most important--the people back home. The Senator has reminded me today of something that I have come prepared to talk about but that, I think, warrants merit. The Citizens State Bank was my hometown bank, and it has been bought and sold a few times. My father, who was a schoolteacher and a school superintendent, was actually on that board. It was my first exposure as to how banking worked. I remember going with my dad then, who was a schoolteacher and didn't make a lot of money but who wanted a loan to buy a car. At that time, I was a little older, but this was a 1954 Ford that my dad had been driving. I am not really that old, but it was an old car, and he wanted to buy a new car. I remember sitting off to the side and listening to the conversation. When you talk about relationship lending, relationship lending could not go very long if that relationship lending didn't lead to a loan that got paid back. I knew the lending officer because he taught me in Sunday school. We saw him every week in church. His children went to the school where my dad was the principal. This is a different time today--I understand that--but the fact still remains that relationship lending, as the Senator from North Dakota just reminded us, should be at the core of what we consider here when we talk about this being a lending institution, making a transaction with an individual for him to then pay that loan back. That is what we tend to forget sometimes because of the debacle in 2008. Since Dodd-Frank has become law, over 1,700 banks have been closed. Let me say that again. Since Dodd-Frank has become law, 1,700 banks have been shut down. Most of these are community banks and regional banks--entities that had nothing whatsoever to do with the financial situation in 2008. While some in this body may see that as encouraging signs that Big Government is now getting more control of the lending principal in the banking industry, I think they are misguided. I think they are overlooking the reality that these 1,700 banks aren't the massive big banks or the very few banks that had responsibility in the 2008 financial crisis. These are local banks, credit unions, regional banks--the banks supporting our Main Street, as the Senator from North Dakota just reminded us. They are providing small businesses with capital and sponsoring Little League Baseball games. I grew up in Little League, as many Senators here did--and in softball leagues and so forth. Right there in center field was The Citizens State Bank sign, for, every year, they were involved in that effort in that community. Yet, for nearly 8 years, those same small town entities have been hammered by Big Government regulations that had been enacted by the Dodd-Frank Act. Credit unions, community banks, regional banks were simply not responsible for the financial crisis of 2008, period. None of the draconian rules put on them make them safer today than they were in 2007. These onerous rules have subjected these small lenders to the same regulation and compliance costs to which the major four or five banks are now being subjected. Overall, it is estimated that compliance costs for community banks have risen by at least 20 percent, but I think it is much higher than that. I met with a regional bank just this morning from Georgia, and their compliance costs have gone up $400 million because of Dodd-Frank. That is money that could be in the community in the form of loans; yet it is now coming in the form of higher compliance costs. Some of those are fines, by the way, coming from the Federal Government up here. That is another topic for another day that we don't address in this bill. This is eating up those small banks' bottom lines and is discouraging some banks from offering some services to their communities--services that small businesses and Main Street rely on for capital every day as they try to grow. What happens when a bank grows? Lending grows. That means small businesses grow. What happens when small businesses grow? Jobs are created. Compliance costs run diametrically opposite to that dynamic and do not increase or lower the risk. The CFPB's qualified mortgage rule is a perfect example. This rule has driven many community banks actually out of the mortgage lending business altogether. So, while it was intended to protect the consumer, yes, it protected the consumer all right. It protected him from being able to get a mortgage. Government restrictions on reciprocal deposits are what is at topic here in this bill. Reciprocal deposits have created uncertainty around this critical lifeline for community banks and especially minority- owned banks that have specialized in serving customers with limited discretionary income and limited access to capital. Dodd-Frank is crippling the ability of community banks and regional banks to serve these communities. We recently heard from one community bank in Georgia that has not even established a residential mortgage department to serve the community because of these draconian compliance regulations. Why isn't it doing this? It is simply because the Federal Government--the people in this room--decided a few years ago in the Dodd-Frank Act that they knew more about the free enterprise system, the capital formation dynamic, the relationship between a lending entity and a borrowing entity, and how all of that translates into jobs and economic growth. Because of that, we have ended up with this arcane Dodd-Frank rule that overregulates these small regional and community banks. Look, we are not trying to blow up Dodd-Frank. Many of us have taken a big step back in terms of what we think we need to do in terms of growing the economy in order to accommodate this bill. I think there are some 14 cosponsors on the other side of the aisle, and I applaud them for the courage that it has taken to work with us to get to a bill on which we both give and take. In the Senate, the No. 1 criticism we get back home is: Why can't you guys work together to get anything done? Here is a shining example. If we can get it across the finish line here and get a vote on this, we may have a tremendous example that will have a dramatic impact on Main Street back home. Small banks tend to spend too much time and resources dealing with the regulation and compliance costs that this Dodd-Frank law has created. Put simply, Dodd-Frank is just another one-size-fits-all, Washington bureaucratic policy that hurts the very people it claims to champion--the middle class and the working poor and those communities that have the least access to capital to borrow. Fortunately, we have an opportunity to do something today to fix these problems. The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act takes major steps to roll back Dodd-Frank's overreach. It will bring relief to the more than 5,000 community banks across the country. It will help free up capital for small businesses to invest in our economy and put people to work. It will help minority-owned banks, again, to provide a wider range of services. In my State, the Citizens Trust Bank is a minority-owned bank in Atlanta. Why is that important? You may have heard of that bank. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a customer of the Citizens Trust Bank. Martin Luther King, Sr., served on its board. Many distinguished Atlantans and Georgians have been customers and members of the board of this auspicious bank in Georgia. Citizens Trust, though, has been forced to draw back its entire mortgage business because of the regulatory costs that have been imposed by Dodd-Frank. This is counterintuitive. Thanks to the action we are taking this week in the U.S. Senate, Citizens Trust will be able to grow its mortgage business again because of safe harbor provisions in this plan. Citizens Trust is not alone. Carver Bank is a minority-owned bank that has been serving Savannah, GA, for 90 years. The restrictions and regulatory uncertainty on reciprocal deposits have limited its resources. This bill we are voting on this week will more than remove government restrictions on reciprocal deposits, meaning Carver Bank and Citizens Trust and many others will have additional lending capacity and lower compliance costs, which is another way to provide more capital to the community. This bill was written by both Democrats and Republicans. It is a shining example of what people back home expect us to do up here--our job. No, it is not perfect from my perspective. It is not perfect from the Senator from North Dakota's perspective, but do you know what? Between us, there is common ground, and we have found it. This bill will bring relief to rural communities and help small businesses, which will, in turn, grow our economy--something that both sides want dearly. This bill also preserves and improves consumer credit protections. A vote on this plan is a vote for Main Street growth, obviously. It is a vote for rural communities and small businesses. It is a vote for people who work with their local banks to secure capital so that they can keep building the American dream. I commend my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for coming together in support of this bipartisan effort, and I encourage every Member of this body to think seriously about this and to support this bill in its final passage. I thank the chairman of the Banking Committee, the Senator from Idaho. I cannot tell him how much I appreciate his leadership. This has been a yeoman's effort, and I am committed to seeing this through, across the finish line, and getting a vote on it this week. I thank him for his leadership.

Mr. PERDUE

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

Mr. PERDUE. Madam President, I rise to talk about the topic of the week. Although some of us have been working on this for some time, many of us in this body have actually been addressing this for over the last 20 years or so. I am new to this body, as I have only been here a few years, but, last year I got involved in this. We are dealing with the immigration issue today, not just the DACA issue. Our current immigration system is outdated, threatens our national security, and does not meet the needs of our economy. The issue before the Senate this week is not just about DACA, which is but one manifestation of our broken immigration policies. Rather, President Trump, while offering a generous solution for DACA recipients, has proposed a broader solution to our legal immigration system that will ensure that we are not back here in just a few short years to deal with this same problem again. Over the past 11 years, Congress has failed to fix our broken immigration system three times, primarily because it has attempted to solve the entire situation, the comprehensive problem, which would be the legal situation, the temporary work visa problems, and then the illegal situation. The Secure and Succeed Act only deals with our legal immigration policy. From the onset of these negotiations, President Trump has been consistent with what he has wanted as part of any immigration deal that deals with the legal immigration system. Months ago, he gave us a clean framework. He said that any plan that didn't fit that framework would never become law. The Secure and Succeed Act, which we are dealing with this week, is the only plan that actually fits that framework. It is the only plan the President has said he will sign into law. The framework that has been laid out by President Trump has four parts. First, it provides a solution for the DACA situation and ends the program. It does so in a compassionate, responsible way that every Senator on the other side of the aisle should support and has supported at various times. President Trump went out of his way to reach across the aisle to the Democrats when he expanded the population that was being discussed in the DACA situation, and he actually talked about providing long-term certainty for this population group. Second, this bill secures our borders with additional border security and a wall where required. It puts $25 billion in a trust fund toward border security and a wall system. This money would be spent over the next few years to provide better national security for our country's borders. It ends policies like catch and release, which encourage more illegal immigration. It makes critical changes to the immigration court system to clear out backlogs, expedite court hearings, and give law enforcement the resources it needs to do its job properly. Third, this bill fixes the flaws in the current immigration system that spurred this DACA problem in the first place and incentivized illegal immigration. It protects the immediate family of the primary worker. Seventy-two percent of Americans believe immigration should include the primary workers, their spouses, and their immediate children, which is exactly what this bill does. In addition, two-thirds of Americans actually believe that the solution here for illegal immigration includes the DACA fix, an end to chain migration, border security, and an end to the diversity lottery--two-thirds. That is from a Harvard poll that was put out several weeks ago, and there are others that actually corroborate that. This bill also expedites the backlog, which is something that was not even discussed before we brought this bill forward. This bill ensures that the primary family of immediate citizens-- some of them are recent green card recipients and new citizens who are trying to get their families in--will be reunited. But there is a backlog. We have that in this bill and have ensured that the backlog will be taken care of and that these families will be reunited, which is what most Americans want. Fourth, the Secure and Succeed Act ends the archaic visa lottery program. This failed program is dangerous, filled with fraud, and has proven to be an avenue for terrorists to enter our country. We simply must fix these national security flaws and close the loopholes in our current immigration system that incentivize illegal immigration. If we don't deal with these problems that got us here in the first place, we will be right back here in just a few short years. This is the President's objective. If we are going to deal with it, let's deal with it once and for all on the immigration side and then move on to the temporary work visas and solve that as well. I don't think anybody in this body wants to be back here in a few short years. Many on the other side and on our side have been trying to find a common solution to this for decades. I believe we have an historic opportunity right now to do something that people in this body have wanted to do for a long time, and that is to solve our legal immigration system in a very compassionate, fair way that will benefit every American. That is why we have to deal with these issues in a responsible and fair way. Politicians have talked about this for far too long. I have discovered, now having been in this body, that it is easy for some to just kick this down the road. It is a great pandering opportunity for one side or the other to blame this on them. Unfortunately, the American people deserve better than that. We have a clean opportunity here to do what most people in America want us to do. Other than politics, there is no reason for the Secure and Succeed Act not to have widespread, bipartisan support this week in this body. Each part of the Secure and Succeed Act has been supported by many Democrats at various times over the last 30 years. As a matter of fact, in 1994, Barbara Jordan presented the result of her bipartisan immigration commission report to then-President Bill Clinton. The recommendations at that time were to change our immigration system from our current country caps and chain migration system to more of a skills-based system like those seen in Canada and Australia. They knew then the flaws that were included in our immigration law that was written in 1965 that actually incentivized illegal immigration. Unfortunately, it seems that because these ideas are now being put forward by President Donald Trump, the Democrats, all of a sudden, disagree with these principles. President Trump has crafted a deal that is tough but more than generous. Nobody asked him to expand the number or to even talk about certainty in the long term. He has brought that forward because he wants this done. He wants this solved. He wants this ended right now. The Secure and Succeed Act follows the framework that President Trump has crafted. Compromises have been made on both sides of this issue. It deals with the DACA issue, secures the border, and fixes critical flaws in our immigration system that incentivize illegal immigration today. This is to ensure that we are not back here in a few short years to deal with the problem again of a new wave of young people who may be brought here illegally. Again, the President has said repeatedly that the Secure and Succeed Act is the only bill that he will sign into law. Leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives has also been clear that the only plan it will bring up for a vote in its body is one that will be signed into law. The Secure and Succeed Act is that plan. We don't have many opportunities in this body for common thought and common positions, but we have one here. I have seen what most people in this body have said about these issues, and it impresses me that there is commonality of thought. At the root, this body wants to solve the DACA issue, but it also wants to solve the problems that caused this issue in the first place. This President called for a compassionate compromise when he met with Democrats and Republicans several weeks ago at the White House, and we all agreed it was time to do that for the American people. Yet the American people want to be assured that the borders will be secure. They want to be assured that the policies that are embedded in our immigration system will not create another wave of illegal immigrants. They also want this archaic diversity lottery to end, which has never worked as was originally intended and is nothing but a loophole for terrorists today. I think there is too much talk about this bill cutting immigration. That is not the intent here. The intent is long term. We have a bill in here called the RAISE Act that would actually move us to a merit-based system like those in Canada and Australia. That is not included in the Secure and Succeed Act. What is included here is a first step toward a long-term solution not only on our legal immigration side, but it sets us up to then deal with the temporary work visas and, ultimately, with the illegal population. I believe, as I know the Presiding Officer does, that it is time for those in this body to put our self-interests and our partisan interests aside, as we say so many times, and to do what the American people want us to do, for which we now have hard evidence. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, as an outsider to this process, one of the first realizations was that, as I got here, things don't always move in a linear fashion from point A to point B. Many times, the people who are trying to move an issue from point A to point B aren't interested in getting to point B. I would like to talk tonight about one of those issues. I think we have a situation here where both sides in this body--and I dare say in the House--pretty much want the same thing, but I am afraid politics have gotten involved to where we are focusing more on the differences of what we might hope for than on what we agree upon. That is a shame because not only do we put a great confusion on these issues that I will talk about tonight, but we lose the confidence of the American people that we can even govern up here. Last year, this President wanted to focus on getting the economy going. He wanted to focus on energy. He wanted to focus on regulations. He wanted to focus on taxes. Check the boxes. We did that. I believe we are seeing some of the early manifestations of that in the economy now, where 123 businesses just announced at the end of the year, year-end bonuses related to this tax bill that we passed last year. That is an example of where we can get together and make things happen. I was in the Chair last night presiding over an hour and listening to conversations about a topic that I believe is very critical to where we are today. I heard several descriptions of a DACA bill but a bill no one has seen yet. It hasn't been presented. This is merely 1 day before we have to fund the government--before midnight tomorrow night. In my opinion, I think most people in America believe it is irresponsible that Members of this body are threatening to shut down the Federal Government over this DACA issue. Members of the other side of the aisle used to agree with that position. In 2013, the current minority leader said--and other people talked about this today: ``We could say, `we're shutting down the government . . . until you pass immigration reform.' It would be governmental chaos.'' Well, that is what we are facing tonight. I just don't think there is any need for it because, honestly, if you want to solve the DACA situation, there is a deal to be done, but serious negotiations aren't being made right now because one side wants to create this issue and threaten to shut down the government, thinking they can get both, a financing deal that they favor, along with this DACA proposition. That is unfortunate. Our men and women in uniform deserve better than that. You are an ex- officer. You know what I am saying. It is absolutely ridiculous that we are in the fourth month of this fiscal year in the middle of January-- our fiscal year started October 1. It is absolutely ridiculous that we are sitting here today having not funded the government permanently for the balance of this year. No other entity that I know of anywhere--any business or any facet of operation--can do that except the U.S. Federal Government. These two issues we are talking about have nothing to do with it and should not be tied together; that is, the DACA solution and funding the Federal Government. Given our global security crisis--and I do mean the word ``crisis'' today--I think the world is more dangerous than any time in my lifetime. I can't think of anything worse than to tie up the funding for our men and women in uniform with an issue like this; that we all want to solve anyway. I am shocked the Democrats would advocate that we shut down the government over a bill no one has even seen yet and an issue that has nothing to do with getting the government funded. Creating a false deadline for a DACA solution, I believe--and using it to hold military certainty hostage--is no way to govern. I think most people back home agree with that. That is what is wrong with this institution today. Both sides need to stop it right now. We need to get to a vote and fund this government.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I would like to make a few comments about the current immigration system. That seems to be the topic of the day recently. I want to tell you some of us have been working on this for years. Some in this body have been working on it at least the last decade. Three times in the last 11 years, this body has tried to solve this problem unsuccessfully. I believe one of the problems with each of those solutions or attempts at a solution was they tried to be comprehensive. People are misusing that word today when they talk about what we are trying to do on this side. These three attempts, over the last 11 years, attempted to solve not just the illegal situation and the temporary work visa situation, but they also tried to solve the legal situation. They tried to solve all of this. Today, what we are trying to do on our side is to solve just the illegal immigration system before we even talk about DACA. The legal situation is this: 1.1 million green cards are given out every year today. That is up from 300,000 in 1965, when this bill--the law we operate under today--was first passed. What we believe is, if we get this done, then the next step would be to move to the temporary work visas, where we give out 2.2 million temporary work visas every year. Those need desperate work. Both sides agree to that. Some categories probably need to be increased; others need to be streamlined. There might need to be a new category created, but that needs speciality work. Then, of course, we have to deal with the people who are here illegally. Remember, 40 percent of the people here illegally, or thereabouts, came into this country under a legal temporary work visa or a student visa, or some other form of temporary visa and overstayed their visa. We are one of the few countries in the developed world that can't track overstays, but that is not what we are trying to do. We are trying to bring focus to an issue that will stop this continuing evolution of immigration problems. I believe there is a better way, and there is a proposition to do just that. There was a meeting in the White House last week on Tuesday, and the President started out the conversation--it was bipartisan, bicameral. You heard my colleague from Iowa Senator Grassley talk about this. As part of that meeting, I was moved by how the President introduced this topic. He said, with regard to the DACA situation, we need to develop a compassionate approach that demonstrates love in dealing with these young people who are here illegally but through no fault of their own. The President, in that meeting, defined the scope, and he brought a sense of urgency to this topic. He expects a result. He undid what we believe was an illegal act by the past President in giving work status to these individuals, and said--now this is President Trump--he said: This is the responsibility of Congress to put a law in place to deal with this. I agree with that, but let's be very clear about what is going on right now. We are not debating what to do with the DACA individuals, mostly aged 15 to 36. My colleagues spoke last night as though they are the only ones committed to solving the DACA problem. That is not true. People on both sides of the aisle--in this body and in the House--believe we need to solve this problem. These individuals did not break the law, their parents did. We all agree there is a solution to be had. Again, the question is whether we are going to solve DACA without dealing with the things that created it in the first place. The President was very clear last week--and he has been consistent on this issue, as have those of us who have been working on this over the last year, this new, focused approach on legal immigration. The President made it very clear that any solution on DACA has to include border security--including a wall--an end to chain migration, and an end to this perverse diversity visa lottery. If we don't actually solve what created this, we are going to be right back here in just a few years. That is the problem I have with the bill that is being discussed here, this so-called Graham-Durbin exercise. I just don't know why we would do that and knowingly put ourselves in the same position in just a few years. Haven't we learned our lesson from what we did in 1986, 1991? We know kicking the can down the road on this is not going to give us any solution, but we have an opportunity because we have commonality in this body about what we need to do going forward with not only the DACA situation but this legal immigration system. There is a great deal of commonality in thought. I have done deals in the business world, and when you get this level of commonality, a deal should get done. There is a lot of symmetry here to be had if we would just talk with each other and get at the real issues and put political issues aside. If we give DACA recipients a path for legal status without a real investment in border security and a wall, we are going to further incentivize a new wave of illegal immigration. By the way, the President has said this publicly. It is not necessarily a 2,000-mile wall, but it is a system of constraints where we know that we can protect our southern borders. It is not just an immigration issue; it is a national security issue, as has been demonstrated by two acts of terror just in recent months. The plans I heard last night don't even address that seriously. A $1.8 billion allocation is not a serious attempt at that. The Dream Act--the estimated cost back in 2013 for doing that was $26 billion. Today, who knows what that estimate would be. It has to be greater than that. The second criteria in this was that if we are going to solve the DACA problem and eliminate the things that created this issue going forward, we have to deal with how to protect the family of the immigrant, the primary worker. We must protect the immediate family of the person who is sponsored and comes in as a citizen. But I believe there is a great deal of confusion about that. This is the so-called chain migration. There is nothing derogatory about that term. That was a term used by the Gang of 8 in 2013. The Democratic leader and the whip of the Democrats right now all used that term repeatedly. There was nothing derogatory and there is certainly nothing prejudicial about that term; it was a mere description of what happens in the current law. The current law says this: The person sponsored for citizenship comes in as a legal permanent resident, moves through a period of time, and becomes a citizen. If they apply, they become a citizen. After that process, as a citizen, they can then sponsor their spouse, their immediate minor children, their family, their adult married children, their adult unmarried children, their parents, and their siblings. The only thing we are talking about is limiting that to the primary worker and their immediate family, and that would break the so-called chain as described by our Members across the aisle. Let's be very clear. Seventy-two percent of Americans believe that immigration should be limited to the individual worker, their spouse, and their immediate family. Again, the only difference between that ethos and what we have today are the parents and the siblings. Somebody says: Well, I want to protect the family. Well, so do we. But whose family? The family of the sponsored worker or their parents' family or their parents' parents' family or their parents' parents' siblings' family? Which family? I believe the American people have spoken loud and clear about which family. There is a significant portion who believe it should just be the worker, but that is not our position. We believe we need to protect the family of that immediate worker. There are some of us who are trying to get to a merit-based immigration system like Canada and Australia have been using for decades and they have proven works. It helps their society, builds their economy, and opens their doors with a welcoming hand for those who want to come. Canada is no bastion of conservatism in its immigration policy. Yet it has a merit-based immigration system. Now, we are not proposing that. We are happy to wait for phase two, which the President talked about last week. Many people on the other side have absolutely discredited his words and confused them knowingly. What the President is talking about right now is, focus on this legal immigration system, solve DACA, solve the border crisis, eliminate the chain migration issue, and eliminate the diversity visa lottery. It is just that simple. The diversity visa lottery is the last thing in his scope, and it is so easy. We all know that needs to be eliminated. The issue comes up in their bill that they want to reallocate the 50,000 people who are coming in today. We know that the diversity visa lottery is fraught with fraud. We know that it has been related to at least one act of terrorism, and it needs to be eliminated. How to do it is the question. Well, let's talk about that. There is no reason why that can't be negotiated. But the Graham- Durbin bill, if it is ever offered, ensures that we will be right back here in a few short years. What we want is to have a solution on the DACA side and protect America from repeating this mistake again and again and again. Let me be very clear. If we do what is on the table today in the Graham-Durbin bill, it would allow the parents of DACA recipients legal status. This would ignite future waves of parents entering the United States, putting their children at risk as they come across the border illegally. Thank God most of us have never had to deal with that. Imagine putting your children at risk coming across the border illegally. But then their children will eventually be given legal status, according to this bill and precedent, and then they will be able to sponsor their parents, who broke the law in the first place. Then here we go, reigniting another wave. So we have not done anything to prevent being right back here just a few short years from now. I believe it is time for action. My colleagues last night talked about, well, nobody is offering up any other solution. Well, that is just not true. There are three Republican Senate bills right now that relate to this issue, active bills that have been filed, and they are out there. The language is out there. You can read them. There is one bill in the House. Chairman Goodlatte was there in committee and brought out a bill. So it is just not true that we don't have things to talk about on the Republican side on this issue. What is missing in this process is a good-faith effort to negotiate the details of a deal and make it happen. To try to make an end run on that process is not going to work. I don't believe it, and I don't think the American people want it. What they want is to solve DACA and ensure that we are not doing it again in just a few short years. This means that we need a real investment in border security. We need to put a focus on the immediate family of the sponsored new U.S. citizen, the family of the incoming immigrant, and we need to end this archaic, outdated diversity visa lottery. The solutions are here. I might not be 100 percent happy, they might not be 100 percent happy, but I promise you that in my experience, this situation is closer to a deal, a negotiated deal right now because both sides really want to see an end to the situation where there is a question about the DACA recipients. But we want to make sure we are not back here in 5 years or even sooner dealing with the same problem again. That is the lesson we should have learned from 1986 and 1991. It is an honor to be in this body, but it is time for action. It is time to get to point B. We know we have been trying for over a decade with many Members of this body who are well-intended. I, for one, am ready to negotiate. The President is ready to negotiate. Let's get together and make this happen. It is time for action. The American people demand it. But let's please don't tie this solution to the funding of the Federal Government. That is totally irresponsible. Our men and women in uniform deserve better. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, today I was honored to be invited to the White House and included in a small meeting with President Trump, and it was very clear that I was invited to the White House to stand firm with President Trump today. We talked about immigration, and today I was proud to stand with our President. We have been crystal clear. Chain migration must end, period. Any solution to our current immigration crisis that the U.S. Senate will consider must include ending chain migration. Before I talk about the details of what chain migration is, I want to put it in perspective. Our immigration crisis today has been longstanding. We had a law written in 1965 and other changes in 1986, but it has really not been since 1991 that there has been any meaningful immigration change. Three times in the last 11 years, well-intended people in this body and in the House have done a yeoman's job of trying to solve the comprehensive problem of immigration in the United States--without success. Here we are, again, right now, facing a deadline that the President has put on, and rightfully so. We have a sense of urgency. The President has done a couple of things. He has defined the scope of the problem, and he has defined a sense of urgency for the people in Congress. The legal immigration system right now is broken, but to deal with that, we have to deal with our entire immigration system in pieces. The reason I believe most past efforts have failed is that they tried to do a comprehensive solution. Today, we are breaking it into three areas. One is our legal immigration system, and the next step might be our temporary work visas. Today, we bring in about 1.1 million legal immigrants a year, and I will talk about how that relates historically. But we issue about 2.2 million temporary work visas a year. Then the third issue is, of course, the people who are in the United States illegally. President Trump had a meeting 2 days ago at the White House. In that meeting, he had Democrats, Republicans, Members of the House, and Members of this body, the Senate, and he drove consensus in that meeting. It was very interesting that he had the media in there for almost 60 minutes for an open dialogue, and we heard from all people in that room about their position on these topics. I thought it was very interesting that the President had the courage to put this issue in front of the American people and create an air of transparency that we have not had on this issue in decades. In that meeting, he drove two conclusions: one, a scope of the problem and, two, a sense of urgency. The scope is very simply defined as this: We have to address the DACA situation. The President has given Congress the date of March 5 to come up with a solution for these individuals who are in the country illegally--but not of their doing. The second issue is border security. We know that border security is a national security issue as much as it is an immigration issue. The good news is that we know that illegal crossings of our southern border are down dramatically this year just because of a couple of reasons. One is the enforcement of current law, and the second is an understanding around the world that we are going to deal with this issue. The third piece of the scope is chain migration. Any solution to the DACA situation or the legal immigration situation must include addressing the chain migration issue. Then the last is this archaic diversity visa lottery we have in the United States that was related to at least one of the terrorist attacks, and chain migration was involved in both of the terrorist attacks we have recently experienced here in the United States. With regard to DACA, the first item on the scope is that we know we have a March 5 deadline. There is a growing consensus in this body of how to deal with that, and there is great latitude on the part of Republicans in this body to deal with that in a way, with our Democratic partners here, to get a consensus bill that solves this once and for all. The second is border security. Here, with the President's leadership and in these recent meetings with Democrats and Members of the House, there is a growing consensus that we can deal with the national security issues related to our southern border. We don't need a 2,000- mile wall, as even the President of the United States has said just this week. But there are things we need to do, and we need to do them quickly. The President today said that his goal is to get this done this year. Coming from the real world, I know that is possible. This President, who comes from the real world and is an outsider to this community here in Washington, knows that is possible, and I think he is going to hold us accountable to that. The third area I mentioned before is chain migration. I will say more about that in a minute. The fourth is the diversity lottery. This diversity lottery has not served us well. It is not the number; it is the way it is being handled. We know there is fraud, and we know this is a loophole terrorists are now using to put people in their chain inside the United States. There is a growing consensus on these four items of this scope that the President has defined, and we had a consensus in that room 2 days ago in the White House. There is consensus that we can get to a solution within the timeframe here, but let me be very clear. Any deal--whether it is in business, sports, or certainly in politics--has to have some symmetry. Therefore, any solution for the DACA situation must include a solution for our chain migration crisis. We must continue working with the President. He is holding us accountable. He is moving at a business pace, but to do that, we really have to talk about chain migration. I understand there are other areas that we have to talk about, as well, but there is a lot of disinformation about what it really is. Chain migration is nothing more than a law put in place in 1965 to allow legal permanent residents and U.S. citizens to sponsor people for U.S. citizenship. It was put in place in 1965. It has been updated a little bit. But today, a legal permanent resident--for the most part, this is someone who has come in qualified in our legal immigration system, who goes through a 5-year waiting period, who eventually can apply for U.S. citizenship. While they are a legal permanent resident, almost immediately they can sponsor spouses, minor children, and unmarried adult children. That is current law. Once they become a citizen--and this is true of any U.S. citizen, whether they were a recent immigrant or were born here; a U.S. citizen can sponsor their parents, their spouses, minor children, unmarried adult children, married adult children, and siblings The issue around this is pretty simple. We have a chart here which shows that in 1965, when this law was put in place, approximately 300,000 U.S. citizens were brought into the United States in that year under this system. Last year, we had, roughly, about 1.1 million. We had a high of somewhere close to 1.3 million. But we can see, this is a geometric progression that increases unbounded. It is not really the number here, but it is the balance that we have lost. What happens, and the criticism I have as a business guy looking at this, is that the individuals who determine who future immigrants are going to be are current and recent immigrants. We don't have many guidelines. We have a country cap system which says that most countries have a percentage of the total they have to have, and they can't exceed that. But there is no real cap here, such that if all these numbers were maximized, then over time you would see this number go up geometrically. We have a second chart that shows this and demonstrates that over a very short period of time, the numbers can increase dramatically, as we have seen in the last 40 or so years. There have been studies on this. Princeton has a study which says that right now, based on recent history, any immigrant who comes in sponsors somewhere around 3.5 future immigrants within a short period of time. We don't know what the 3.5 immigrants do when they get sponsored and become citizens or legal permanent residents, but if you extrapolate this out--let's say we start with 2 million as a starting point. They become citizens and they sponsor--let's just say the number is 3. In the first iteration, now we have 6 million people sponsored by the original 2 million; then the second iteration goes from 6 to 18; and in the fourth iteration we are at 54 million people. So all of a sudden, as you can see, there is no limit here, other than the country caps, and the country caps do not limit the total number. They limit the mix. What is wrong with this system? The problem, as I said just now, is that future immigrants are determined by current immigrants without any regard to their ability to participate in the system. The second one is that because you can bring parents in, immigrants who come in under this system and become U.S. citizens can bring their parents in, and all of a sudden, now we have an aged population coming in--not a younger population--and they then draw social services on an already bankrupt system. Chain migration is not based on skill or the ability to participate in the current economic situation in the United States. Last year, we brought in 1.1 million immigrants. Of that, 140,000 were immigrants who were related to the worker; 70,000 were the workers, and the other 70,000 were their immediate family. So we can see that over 950,000 people were derivative iterations of what I am talking about. The third thing is that if chain migration is not stopped, it continues to incentivize future illegal immigration because of what you can do once you get here. Chain migration is another problem with the DACA situation because if you permit a pathway to some sort of legalized situation in the United States for the DACA population, you end up with a situation where those people who are then legalized can sponsor their parents. The problem with that is, the DACA population is not violating fair law, but their parents have. The last issue I will bring up is, the national security issues are profound. We have seen two national security incidents just this past year related to chain migration and the diversity visa lottery. There is more than enough evidence to show this has to be addressed. Again, any symmetric deal on immigration has to include, I believe, the four points the President talked about the other day. We have to deal with the DACA situation. We have to deal with our border security, and that means building a wall. We have to deal with the chain migration issues, and we have to deal with this diversity visa lottery. The President demands it. The American people demand it. Today, as a matter of fact, over 80 percent of America believes we need to deal with the DACA situation. Likewise, 72 percent of people in America believe the immigration law should be the worker, the spouse, and their immediate minor children only--72 percent. I can't think of another issue that has come before this body where we had those sorts of agreements in the American population. The President wants results. He has charged leadership in this body and the House and those of us who have been involved in this for some time to get to it. There is a March 5 deadline looming. Some people say there is a January 19 date that has to do with funding the government. I personally believe the two have nothing to do with each other, but we want a sense of urgency. The President has demanded it. We need it. We know there are going to be other steps. This is not the last step to this problem. We know we have to deal with how we bring people to the United States. We need a balance. Of course, we want to continue to be the open arms of the world today in terms of welcoming people to our shores. Just look at what is written on the Statue of Liberty. Who can argue with that? At the same time, we have to have a balance. Right now, we don't bring in people who are contributing to the economy, for the most part, and we are eliminating--we are not bringing in people who can contribute. All we are asking for is a dialogue to bring balance back to that system. I am excited to be a part of this dialogue because I believe we have a unique, historic opportunity with people on the other side and people on this side who generally have hearts that are not that dissimilar with regard to how to deal with the DACA population, how to deal with the Dreamers population, how to deal with future immigrant populations that are coming to the United States. We can have those debates, and we are having them now. I welcome input from all points. I am anxious to get to the bottom line of this. I will close with this. It is exciting to have leadership from the executive branch on this issue that has put the responsibility back on this body to come up with something that will not allow us to be back here in the next 3, 5, or 20 years dealing with this same problem. We have a historic opportunity. It is time to get to it. I yield the floor.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. I thank the chairman for the clarification and appreciate his outstanding leadership and work on this important and historic legislation.

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I rise today to engage in a colloquy with my friend and colleague, the distinguished chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Hatch. I would like to confirm my understanding of the modification of the section 958(b) stock attribution rules contained in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The Senate Finance Committee explanation of this bill, as released by the Senate Budget Committee, definitively states, ``This provision is not intended to cause a foreign corporation to be treated as a controlled foreign corporation with respect to a U.S. shareholder as a result of attribution of ownership under section 318(a)(3) to a U.S. person that is not a related person (within the meaning of Section 954(d)(3)) to such U.S. shareholder as a result of the repeal of section 958(b)(4).'' I would like to confirm that the conference report language did not change or modify the intended scope this statement. As you know, I filed an amendment to the Senate bill, Senate amendment No. 1666 would have codified this explanatory text of the Finance Committee report. I also want to confirm that the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service should interpret the stock attribution rules consistent with this explanation of the bill.

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I come from a different world. I come from the real world. I have been here just a couple of years, but this sort of rhetoric that we have heard on the floor of the Senate over the last few weeks is amazing to me. The disinformation, the known misleading statements that are made--that doesn't exist for very long in the real world because there are rules and regulations out there where that is taken care of. But it seems that if you are good at it in this body and can get away with it long enough, that what Vladimir Lenin once said is true, and that is this: It doesn't matter what you say is true; it only matters that you say it and say it and say it, and pretty soon, to the common folks in your country, it becomes true. Well, I think we have lived through a century where we have done nothing but disproved that as a free society here and as a leader of the free world. I think what is at stake tonight in this vote is bigger than just a few changes in our Tax Code. Good grief. We can work for the next 10 years and not clean up every detail in this Tax Code, but this is a first step to bringing sanity back to our country. Let me put a little perspective on this. Let's talk about what President Trump inherited when he took office in January of this year. We had 8 years of the lowest economic growth in the history of the United States--1.9 percent. We had the lowest workforce participation rate in over 40 years. In the last 8 years, we borrowed 35 percent of every dollar that was spent by the Federal Government--this body borrowed before you and I got in the Senate. Under the last administration, for 6 years of those 8 years, the opposing party in this body had a supermajority for 2 years and they had a majority for 4. So for 6 years, that party had the White House and they had a majority in the Senate at least. In those 8 years, they doubled our national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion this year, even though last year--or the last year of the last administration, 2016--our Federal Government collected more Federal tax than any other year in our history, and the last few years have been the same. With all that borrowing, even when the last administration said: OK, we need to fix infrastructure, we need to get the economy going--they put $1 trillion into fake infrastructure investments, and none of these parameters moved. We still had no economic growth. This is the same party that liberalized Social Security and Medicare to the point where they are not sustainable. And in just 14 years--14 years--both those trust funds go to zero. This is not about going to Medicare and Social Security and finding money to give to the rich; this is trying to figure out how to get the economy going so we can save Social Security and Medicare. It is no more complicated than that. But what we are hearing here are words like ``shameful'' and ``ridiculous.'' I think what President Trump walked into was shameful and ridiculous. For the United States--the wealthiest country in the history of the world--to have those sorts of performance parameters is ridiculous. It is shameful. There will be a day of reckoning, and it is today. Our President took that seriously, and he said that job No. 1 is growing the economy. Let's put that in perspective. He said, in the first year of his administration, he wanted to focus on three things that would grow the economy. One is he wanted to pull back on regulations. I am here to tell my colleagues that over 860 of the most onerous regulations and rules have been reversed so far this year. The second thing President Trump said was he wanted to work on energy. Well, we got the Keystone Pipeline working. He actually moved on stopping the Clean Power Plan that was thwarting the energy production in this country, and, in this bill tonight, we will open up ANWR production to give us capability on the energy side of our economy. The third thing the President said he wanted to do was to change our archaic tax plan; not to give money to the rich but to open our companies and our workers to be more competitive with the rest of the world. For the last decade--maybe even the last 30 years--I have lived this in my career. For 40 years, I have watched U.S. competitiveness decline and decline and decline. Why? Because of two reasons. Our Federal Government grew out of any proportion. In 2000, the size of our government was $2.4 trillion. Last year, it was $4 trillion. That is under one Republican administration and one Democratic administration. We have put regulation on top of regulation. We liberalized all of our social programs to the point we cannot afford it. The other thing we did is we loaded onto this tax situation where we lost our competitiveness with the rest of the world. The rest of the world lowered their tax rates while we actually increased ours, they reduced their regulations while we increased ours, and we just simply lost our competitive edge, such that today, two out of every three acquisitions regarding a U.S. company are U.S. companies being bought by a foreign company. Now, that is a C corporation. In many cases, it is an S corporation. Why is that? It is because of the difference between our 35 percent corporate tax rate and the average of 18 percent in Asian countries and 21 percent in Europe. All we are doing is trying to reach some point of being reasonably competitive with the rest of the world. This President walked into a disaster, and what we have seen in the first year are dramatic results: Two million new jobs have been created this year, 860 regulations reversed, and illegal crossings on the southern border are down 60 percent. We passed a bill in this body 97 to 2 that allows a department head in the Veterans' Administration to remove people for cause, for lack of performance. Guess what. So far this year, over 500 people have been asked to leave because of performance reasons in our Veterans' Administration. That is something both Democrats and Republicans should be proud of. We also see a Department of Education that has removed 300 people for the same reason. CEO competence is at a 20-year high. Consumer confidence, despite what the other side wants to tell us, is at a 16- year high, and many studies are proving that today. Tonight I want to clear up some of the absolute, unbelievable mistruths and myths about this bill that are being perpetrated. We heard several just in the last hour on this floor. The first, the great one--I love this: This tax plan is only going to help the wealthy. We are going to tax the low-income people in America, and we are going to give it to the billionaires. Let me just give some examples here. A median-income family today--a family of four who works, with two kids, who makes a median income of $73,000 a year is going to get a $2,200 tax reduction. That is a 60- percent reduction in their Federal tax rate. A single working mother, as an example, with one child at home--now, this is a parent who has to find childcare, has to find a way to work, gets very little help from family or friends, doesn't own a home--I know many people like this--that person is going to get a 75-percent tax cut in this bill. Beyond that, today, 52 percent of households in America--this is before this bill--pay zero Federal income tax, but this bill goes further. Up to 6 million people will potentially be removed from the tax rolls because of this bill. I am just a simple business guy, but I just look at the facts. These are mathematical facts here. There is no projection, no opinion. This is part of this bill that belies half of the mistruths we just heard in the last hour on this floor. The second one is a process question. Of course, this is what we always hear the minority party say. I dare say, as an outsider, I heard Republicans say this in the last 6 years. There is no transparency, no regular process, no regular order. Well, in the last few years, there have been over 70 public hearings--Senate hearings in committee--about tax reform. This particular bill has been in full regular order. Yes, it was done in reconciliation, but that is regular order. I personally would have preferred not to have done that, but it is within regular order. It went through committee. Amendments were put up and debated and passed in committee. Then the bill was brought to the floor. We voted on amendments on this floor, and then it went to a full vote and was passed--or will be passed tonight. The third myth: This tax plan will not generate economic growth. This is a really rich one because most of the people saying that have never written their signature on the front of a check. They just simply haven't been in business. Yet these are now the newfound experts in this body who say: Well, this is not going to grow the economy. Of course, it is not; we need bigger government to grow the economy. Haven't we proven that? No, we have disproved that. If anything, over the last 8 years, we have proven that bigger government does not correlate with a better, growing, competitive economy. What this bill simply does is it gets government back out of the way, to some degree, helps us become competitive with the rest of the world, and ignites this economy. Let's just look at what is being said about this. First of all, it has been estimated that nearly 1 million new jobs will be derived because of this bill. It is estimated that annual incomes of working Americans will go up somewhere between $4,000 and $9,000. That is in addition to the tax cuts. That is because the demand for labor in a growing economy will create rising wages. The other side says: Well, to get rising wages, you need to increase minimum wage. That is the wrong way to look at this. This bill, I can tell from personal experience, will create demand for labor, and that labor will increase in price. GDP will grow somewhere between 3 and 5 percent over the next decade. I actually believe it will be much more than that. The big one, in my mind, is by eliminating the repatriation tax, and, by the way, we are the last country in the world to still have this archaic tax, which we collect no tax on today, but eliminating that brings over $2.6 trillion back into this economy. The other side says: Well, that is not going to go to the economy, it is going to dividends or to pay down debt. Guess what. In a capitalistic society, it is all contributory. It all adds to the benefit of growing the economy. Capital formation is part of what created this miracle in the first place. The last 70 years in America has been, I would argue--as a 40- year experienced veteran of the business community here, as the only Fortune 500 CEO in the Senate and in all of Congress, I would argue that this economic windfall we have experienced over the last 7 years in America is based on three things: On the top of the best workforce in the history of the world, it is innovation, capital formation, and the rule of law. Quite frankly, because of regulations in this body over the last 15 years and because of our Tax Code, we have taken those for granted. Tonight we begin to reverse that. The next claim I want to debunk is that this tax plan adds $1 trillion--I love this one--will add $1 trillion to the debt. This is from the other side that administered more than doubling our debt in the last decade. No other President in the history of our country, prior to the last administration, added $10 trillion to the debt of this Nation. There is no bigger debt hawk in this body than I, and I can tell you this is what brought me into the political arena. This $20 trillion in debt is the beginning, it is not the end of the story. Unless we do something today about our Federal debt, it is going to grow $11 trillion, is the latest estimate, over the next decade. Most of that is on the mandatory side. To solve this debt crisis, clearly we have to grow the economy, but we will not solve the debt crisis only by growing the economy. We will not solve it unless we start by growing the economy. We are told by the Joint Committee on Taxation and by the Congressional Budget Office--and both of these modeling groups I have personal problems with--but even if you take their worst-case scenarios, you only have to grow the economy two-tenths of 1 percent per year. That is going from 1.9 percent, which is the average baseline of the last 8 years, growing it by two-tenths of 1 percent to 2.1 percent over the next decade. There has only been one time in one decade in the last 70 years where this economy didn't grow more than 2.5 percent, and in that decade it grew 2.3 percent. So in no decade since World War II have we grown less than 2.3 percent. In addition, CBO says we have to grow 2.2 or 2.3 percent. The last two quarters are already over 3 percent. The fourth quarter looks like it will be as well if we pass this tax bill tonight. It just seems to me that people who have experience in the real-world economy know that investing in our workers is the best investment we can make, and that is what this tax bill does. Don't be confused by the rhetoric. Members of the other body in the last hour say there is going to be a day of reckoning. There is, because I believe that the other side has failed the working poor in this country. The best example is ObamaCare, perpetrated by the supermajority, 60 votes on the other side, and we know it is now collapsing under its own weight, but this is what they have done to the working poor in America. In 2014--and it has been that way over the last 3 years as well--but 2014 is the last year we can get from the IRS. Under ObamaCare, the IRS fined 8 million people in America $2 billion, and the irony is, half of those people make less than $25,000. Now, that is outrageous, and for those same people to beat their chests now about this being for the rich, it is even more outrageous. I will close with this. The biggest argument they make is that this is for the rich, and the rich are not paying their fair share. The top 1 percent today pay about 40 percent of all tax revenues that we have, and the top 10 percent pay over 70 percent. That was true before this bill, and that is going to be true after this bill. What is going to also be true is the fact that the working men and women of America will find that their place of employment, whether it is a one-man self-proprietorship, a one-woman self- proprietorship, or a major corporation, those companies, in a global economy, are going to find themselves more competitive because of what President Donald J. Trump is doing in this tax bill and what we are backing up tonight. I argue that this is a historic day, not just because of tax relief for the working men and women of America, or building competitiveness for those same people around the world, but for our kids and grandkids so we can begin to deal with this huge growing debt. People say: Well, you are adding debt. No, this is an investment, and, by the way, it is not $1.5 trillion. They know that $500 billion of that--one-third of it--is this policy versus law. They know that, but it still makes a better story. They also know that $200 billion of that are fake costs because it says if you eliminate the way it is scored right now, if you eliminate the repatriation tax, the Joint Committee on Tax and the Congressional Budget Office, in their infinite wisdom, say that is going to cost you $200 billion. We don't collect $200 billion in repatriation tax. As an outsider, I cannot believe we sit here and talk about these fake numbers that way. The President of the United States has a vision for our country. We need to rise up and be competitive again in order to deal with this long-term tax situation but, more importantly--or as importantly--to be able to afford to do the right things for our people. When we have hurricanes, when we have fires, we don't have the resources to do that. Every dime we are spending behind these hurricanes and behind the fires and behind all of the things we are doing is borrowed. Every time we spend on our military, it is borrowed money. The only way to eventually change that is to begin to grow our economy. This is only one of many steps that are required, but this tonight becomes historic because you can't do the others unless you make this economy competitive. I want to praise our President tonight for having the guts to stick through this process. We are going to pass this bill tonight and make America great again because we are going to make America competitive again. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, last week the Senate finally broke through the gridlock and voted to change our archaic Tax Code once and for all. It only took 31 years to get here. As to regulatory relief, so far this year this body and this administration have removed 860 regulations and rules, from the rule book here in Washington, that had been sucking the very life out of our free enterprise system over the last 8 years or so. But along with regulatory relief and unleashing our energy potential, this is the single most important thing we can do to unleash our economic growth and bring relief to American workers. These changes to the Tax Code are a win for American families, American workers, and American businesses. Let me give just a couple of examples. A family of four that makes a median income today of $73,000 a year will see their tax bill go down by $2,200 a month. That is a 60-percent reduction in their Federal income taxes. A single payer, a single mom with one child, making the median income, will get a 75-percent tax cut. The standard deduction is doubled. The child care credit is doubled to $2,000. The individual mandate that was unleashed on the American people by ObamaCare is eliminated. By the way, just in 2014 alone--that is the latest year we have any official record from the IRS--this insidious mandate fined 8 million Americans $2 billion. The irony of that is that almost half of those people make less than $25,000 a year. In addition to those changes, the one I love and the one my mother and father will love--they were public school teachers--is that the teacher expense deduction has been doubled under this bill. In addition, 6 million taxpayers have been removed from the Federal income tax roll. That is just the half of it. Businesses see their corporate tax rate go from 35 percent to 20 percent, allowing them to create jobs here in America and expand production and compete with the rest of the world. Due to our archaic repatriation tax, we are the last country in the world to have a double tax on profits made by U.S. companies around the world. That is $2.6 trillion, by some estimates, that we hope will be reinvested here in the United States. According to outside analysts, this bill creates 1 million new jobs, and the average compensation of the average family in America should go up by $4,000--some estimate as high as $9,000 per year. The GDP only has to go from 1.9 percent to 2.1 percent to more than pay for all of this. That is not my estimate. That is the estimate of the Joint Committee on Tax. If you don't believe them, then, the Congressional Budget Office, with which we have all kinds of problems, say that we only have to grow the economy 0.4 percent. So anywhere from 1.9 to 2.3 percent growth would more than pay for this investment in the American worker. I would argue, because of the last two quarters, that we are already seeing 3 percent growth, primarily, because of the expectation that we are going to act on tax and because of the reality of the fact that we have been moving on the regulatory regime that has been perpetrated on the American worker these last 8 years. There are a lot of benefits, but in my opinion the person who benefits from this tax bill the most is that person in America who gets a job. When it comes to the corporate rate, I personally have seen firsthand how important it is to have a rate that allows American workers to compete with their counterparts around the world. The most stimulative part of this tax bill, in my opinion, is this corporate tax cut, because of the impact it will have on our businesses and workers and because it creates a level playing field with the rest of the world. Let's be very clear. My original goal was 15 percent because I know this is a dynamic situation, where the rest of the world today is going to move because of what we are doing. Both the House and the Senate agreed on 20 percent. Now there is some talk about changing it in conference. My question is this. The House approved 20 percent and the Senate approved 20 percent. The purpose of this conference is to work between those two decisions to find the differences and mull those into a finer bill that both the House and Senate can vote on. My question for this body and for this conference is this: What is between 20 and 20? I don't understand. This should be a no-brainer. The best thing we can do for people in the United States who work with their hands--these are people who punch a timeclock, just like I did when I was working my way through college--is to create a level playing field for the rest of the world and lower the corporate tax rate. The current rate sends jobs overseas and keeps our workers from competing on a level playing field. We have the best workforce in the history of the world, and yet we have hamstrung them such that other companies can come to the United States and buy our companies and take those jobs overseas. We need to get this tax rate competitive and as low as possible. Otherwise, other countries will immediately lower their rates, and we will still be at a significant disadvantage. If we don't take bold action right now, we may not get the chance to do so again for another 30 years. We need to make sure we don't get outpaced by other countries, even after we make these tax changes. Let me just describe why this is so important. Today, the U.S. tax rate is 35 percent. Asia right now averages about 18 percent. Europe is about 20 percent. So if we go to 20 percent, the rest of the world is going to move. We already know that the United Kingdom is moving to 15 percent. Others are talking about moving as well. We have a 50-percent differential. That difference allows other countries to come into this country, buy our companies and use that tax differential to pay for part of the acquisition costs. What that does is it takes jobs overseas and actually thwarts our ability to compete. Because of this reality, because of this 50-percent differential, there are twice as many foreign companies buying U.S. companies, both C corporations and passthroughs, as there are U.S. companies buying foreign companies. We simply have to change that. Let me give you some examples of how competitive and how dynamic this issue about the corporate tax rate is. Germany today has a 16 percent tax rate; that compares to our 35 percent top tax rate. The UK today is 19 percent, but as I said earlier, they have already announced that they are going to 17 percent next year. France and the Netherlands have also announced that they are going to take rates lower next year. When the UK goes to 17 percent, France lowers theirs, the Netherlands lowers theirs--Germany is already sitting right there at 16 percent--if we increase this corporate tax rate from what we have already agreed to in our negotiations in this body, then we will replicate the 50-percent differential with the rest of the world almost immediately, so we will have accomplished nothing. The greatest burden on the American worker, again, is this corporate tax rate of 35 percent. It is estimated that every 1 percent drop in the corporate tax rate could mean roughly 30,000 new jobs in an economy that is $30 billion larger. We can't afford to play around with this corporate tax rate that we have already agreed on. It is time to stop that debate. All of these changes in the Tax Code, though, were meant to lift up Americans, simply put. It is the family who will benefit from this. It is the individual who is trying to get an education, get that first job. It is those people who are going to retire and depend on a robust Federal Government to take care of them in their retirement. But right now, with this debt crisis, we are losing the ability to do the right thing. Members of both sides of the aisle have previously supported many of these changes to the Tax Code. There was no reason to vote no on this bill, and there is no reason not to support them now. The United States made history the other night at about 2 a.m. on Saturday morning by approving this plan. We now have certain individuals from this body and the House who will go into a conference, and they will work out the differences between the House bill and the Senate bill. That is called democracy, and I am looking forward to seeing that bill come back to this body. We must not lose sight about what this is all about--to bring relief to Americans and help us become more competitive. We cannot take this standard of living for granted. This body is great at spending money, but right now every dollar we spend of discretionary money, by definition, is borrowed money. This can no longer be the case. This tax bill is clearly an investment in our future. I am not embarrassed to say that I believe in capitalism. Capitalism is what has made this country different from any other country in the world so far. Right now, the economic miracle of this past century is based on three simple things: innovation, capital formation, and the rule of law. That, combined with the best workforce in the history of the world, has created this economic miracle. Yet we sit here today where my children, the next generation, will be the first generation in the history of our country to face lower economic prospects than the generation before them. That does not have to be the case. It is up to this body to stand up and do what is right for the next generation. This is a critical part--don't miss this--this is a critical part of solving our debt crisis. This is the least we owe to our children and our children's children. We must continue doing all we can to make sure that we put this tax bill on President Trump's desk before Christmas. Our children and our children's children's futures depend on it. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time on the King motion be extended until 4:30 p.m. today, with all other provisions of the previous consent remaining in effect.

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, as an outsider to this process in this body, when we get to a major issue like this, I really become very troubled. What we are trying to do today is historic. What we have been trying to do all year--this process has been under debate all year--is historic. I agree with my colleagues across the aisle, but I am going to use another word, a six-letter word, that I believe characterizes it the best. We absolutely have a debt crisis. There is no doubt about it. In the year 2000, the last year under President Clinton, this country had a $6 trillion Federal U.S. debt. At the end of George Bush's Presidency, we had a $10 trillion debt. Now, at the end of President Obama's administration--we added $10 trillion to the debt, such that today we end up with $20 trillion of debt on about a $19 to $20 trillion economy. Now, Mr. President, there are countries under World Bank fiscal watch that have stronger balance sheets than we do today. My concern is this. It is that both sides fight each other over this issue depending on who is in the White House and who has the majority in this body. The American people are fed up with it. But I have to say that this bill, what we are talking about doing today, is a con on the American people. Let's talk about what a con is. Over the last 100 years, we have had three political supermajorities. That is where one party or the other has a 60-vote majority in this body, where they can do basically what they want. Sixty times they have had that--I am sorry. We have had three of those in the last 100 years, all Democratic. The first gave us the New Deal; the second, the Great Society; and the third, Dodd-Frank and ObamaCare. Now, I am just a simple business guy, Mr. President. I have run small businesses. I started working on an hourly wage. I worked my way through college. I ended up running a pretty big company. So my point here is that I can lay at the feet of those three supermajorities most of the responsibility for this financial catastrophe we have in the United States. It is a full-blown crisis. It didn't just start this year. The annual deficit--they talk about deficits. I talk about debt. That is what we owe the rest of the world. This year, this President, President Trump, inherited a budget that this year will produce a $666 billion shortfall between revenues and expenses. Yet we will collect a record sum of tax this year, the highest in our history. Last year we collected the most we have ever collected. The year before that, the most. So this has not been a problem of raising taxes, Mr. President. Our problem is very simple: The size of our Federal Government has exploded. In the year 2000, the last year under Bill Clinton, the size of this Federal Government was $2.4 trillion. The size of our government last year--under two administrations, one Republican, one Democratic--it was almost $4 trillion. That cannot continue. Yet, since 2009, because of sequestration and the Budget Control Act, the size of our discretionary spending has declined from $1.5 trillion a year to $1.1 trillion a year, and $250 billion of that cutback has been on the back of our U.S. military at the very time when we face more threats and the world is more dangerous than at any time during my lifetime. So I am here today to talk about the con of all cons, and it is the fact that the Great Society and all those sweeping programs--tens of trillions of dollars behind the world poverty--have failed. Today, the poverty rate in the United States is exactly the same as it was in the late sixties when that was signed into law. Mr. President, doing nothing--the proposal to do nothing is the con of all cons. The con that bigger government has the solution for the American people has been proven over and over again to fail. Look at ObamaCare. Both sides are now agreeing that it has failed. Now what we do about it is the issue. The Veterans' Administration was a cesspool of performance. Obama's $1 trillion stimulus package back in 2010 and 2011 gave us nothing in terms of economic development. As a matter of fact, the con of all cons is that we are coming out of the slowest, lowest economic growth in the United States history--230 years. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are bankrupt. The U.S. Postal Service is another bastion of success. Amtrak is bankrupt. I think the greatest thing that we have to do today is get past all that. There are no innocent parties up here. Both sides are guilty when it comes to the $20 trillion problem. The $20 trillion is a manifestation of Washington's unwillingness to get its fiscal house in order and do what every other American has to do; that is, to live within their means. Doing nothing is simply not an option. In the last 8 years under President Obama, we borrowed as a Federal Government 35 percent of everything we spent. What that means is that every dime we spent on our military, on our Veterans' Administration, and on all domestic discretionary programs is borrowed because every dime of the $3.5 trillion that we got in last year was spent on mandatory expenses. Doing nothing is not an option. When President Trump took office, though, he said that job one was to grow the economy. Why? Why is growing the economy important? Well, growing the economy is important because it is one of the several steps you have to employ to get at this debt crisis. Yes, there are going to be some tax cuts for individuals--we will get to that in a second--but primarily this is to be a stimulative package to get the economy growing. There are three pieces to it. One, lower the corporate tax rate. I am sorry, anybody can debate this and win. We have to become competitive with the rest of the world. In Asia, the corporate tax rate is 18 percent. In Europe, it is in the low twenties. Getting to 20 percent in a dynamic situation where everybody is going down, like the UK--which next year will go to 17 percent, Mr. President--this is the least we can do. Getting our passthroughs to have parity is also critical. But we have to first roll back Federal regulations. That is the first piece. The second piece is, we have to then push out our energy potential. We just talked about a few of those. The Keystone Pipeline this year, the Clean Power Plan, and ANWR are all moving along. But the three pieces of this--lowering the corporate tax rate, eliminating the repatriation tax, and then a tax cut for working Americans--will actually get this economy going. The other side says: Well, wait a minute. You are going to add $1.5 trillion to the debt. OK. I look at it as an investment. As we just heard from my good friend from Pennsylvania, four-tenths of 1 percent will more than pay for that. Well, let's look at history. History says that over the last 100 years, 3.5 percent is our average on GDP. But more important than that, in the last seven decades that we have enjoyed this economic growth in America, only one decade have we had lower growth than 2.5 percent and that was one decade where we had 2.3 percent. At 2.3 percent, we more than pay for what we are talking about now. My projection is that we will do a lot better than this, and there are many other people out there, including noted economists, who say the same thing. Remember, we have $7 trillion not at work in this economy today because of fiscal policy, not monetary policy. At the very time that the Fed added $4.5 trillion to the balance sheet--the largest in history--we got 1.9 percent GDP growth over the last 8 years. Mr. President, you can only look at one place--and that is fiscal policy-- that would generate that kind of anemic growth in our history. So what I am looking at right now is freeing up that $7 trillion, and this tax package is one of several steps we need to employ that will begin to unleash that capital power. We have several trillion dollars on the bank balance sheets of smaller and regional banks. We have a couple trillion dollars on the balance sheets of the Russell 1000 because of uncertainty coming out of Washington. And we have almost $3 trillion overseas in unrepatriated U.S. profits because of our archaic repatriation tax. Changing this Tax Code is not only necessary, the rest of the world needs us to do this. I will say this: Under President Trump's leadership and driving force, I believe things are already beginning to happen, and that is why we see reflections in the bond market and the stock market that reflect a moving economy. This economy wants to move. I have watched consumer confidence my entire career. Right now, this is what is happening: So far this year, 2 million jobs have been created. Some 860 rules and regulations have been reversed, and most of these are onerous things that are sucking the very life out of this free enterprise system. Illegal border crossings are down 60 percent. Five hundred people--we voted 97 to 2 in this body, in the U.S. Senate, where people say nothing is happening--in a bipartisan vote, we voted 97 to 2 to allow the head of the Veterans' Administration to deal with it like any other entity in the country; that is, to be able to fire people for performance. Since that time, over 500 people have been removed from the Veterans' Administration because of lack of performance. Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Consumer confidence is at a 16-year high. Things are moving, but this body is still gridlocked, and that is what we have to break through. What we have here is a historic opportunity to change the direction of our country. This is why I ran for the Senate--to be a part of trying to add some influence into a future direction for our children and grandchildren. Mr. President, do you realize that our children--this next generation is the first generation in the history of our country that faces a lower economic prospect than their predecessors? That is unacceptable. We are the richest country in the history of the world. We have the most dynamic worker base in the history of the world. We have a growing economy again. This is not necessary. So these changes that we are talking about--and I have heard all the rhetoric today, even just in the last hour: Oh, this is all going to the rich. This is all going to those mean old greedy corporations, and by the way, nothing is going to the little guy. Well, let's talk about the reality. A family of four--this is a real-world example--earning a median income of $73,000, in this bill, will get a 60-percent tax cut. A single mom with one child, making $41,000 a year--which is a median individual income--will get a 75-percent tax cut. I don't consider those rich. I don't consider those big corporations. Those are individual examples of what this tax bill is intended to do. But more than that, for 6 million people who pay taxes today, under this bill, next year, their tax rate will go to zero. Six million Americans will find that they will not be paying Federal income tax next year. But the person who gets the biggest benefit from this entire plan is that person who gets a job. That is not the half of it. Our 35 percent nominal tax rate, the top rate for corporations, is the most onerous penalty on the American worker that has been perpetrated by politicians in Washington over the last 50 years by both Republicans and Democrats. This is insanity. The other side talks about insanity. When the rest of the world is almost at half of what our corporate rate is, how in the world are we going to defend foreign companies from coming and buying U.S. companies, and using the tax arbitrage to pay for it? That is what is happening now. We can end that. This repatriation tax will free up almost $3 trillion. This is extremely stimulative in the market. It will improve capital again. I believe that on the back of an aggressive trade policy, we will get exports growing again. There is no good reason not to be for this bill today. All the false accusations from the other side are simply just not true. Yes, there is an investment here, but every time I bought a piece of equipment in business, I had to pay for it. I paid for it upfront, and I got a benefit from it. It is called a return on investment. That is exactly what this is. For the American worker and the American people, this is an investment, and I expect a return on investment from which they will benefit. This Tax Code is so archaic that it is embarrassing to talk about. I will not even get into it because it is 2.4 million words. It is so ridiculous. One of the intents here is to simplify that for the average taxpayer. I believe we have accomplished that. There are clear problems with this current plan--with this Tax Code and its problems today--and this plan takes clear steps to address those. It is an investment in our future. It is a rejection of the idea that 1.9 percent is the new norm. The other side, a few years ago, tried to convince us that was the case. If we do nothing from today forward with the current budget under which we are operating--which is the last budget President Obama left with us--we are both guilty. This is not a partisan comment. But if nothing is done, $11 trillion will be added to a $20 trillion debt. That is unacceptable. That is not an option. It is not possible. This issue is bigger than partisan politics. It is bigger than self- interest. It is bigger than anyone in this body. This is about our children and our grandchildren. This new tax direction will allow workers to compete again on a level playing field with the rest of the world and win. Not only is our economic security at risk, but I believe our national security is definitely in danger because of this debt. Both sides are commenting on that today. Don't take my word for it. Almost 200 outside groups have come out in support of this bill. That is historic in its own right, when you do something that is this big, to have that many people support it. I believe that what both sides of the aisle need to do is to back up and look at what is best for the American people long term. There are two ideologies at war here. One side believes we need to give more money to the Federal Government, have more big programs like the Veterans' Administration, the Postal Service, and all those things, instead of putting it back in people's pockets and investing in our economy. This is a historic moment of opportunity for us this week to change the Tax Code and finally to help American families and businesses compete with the competitors around the world. This standard of living that we have taken for granted for 70 years is the greatest expansion of economic exercise in the history of humankind. We can turn this around, but only by getting back to the fundamentals of economic opportunity for everybody--fiscal responsibility, limited government, and individual liberty. I believe we will do it. I believe the American people want us to do it. This President's agenda will work. He comes from the business world. I come from the business world. That is what this is about. We have an understanding of what it takes to compete globally, and that is what this bill does, finally, for the American workers. I yield the floor.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Madison Lynn, a fellow in my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the day.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Thank you, Mr. President. When President Trump took office, he said that job No. 1 this year was getting the economy growing again. As a business guy--I am going to speak very quickly because I think the majority leader is on the way down to the floor--he said the first thing we had to do to get the economy going were three things: No. 1, pull back on the onerous regulations. Well, so far this year 860 rules and regulations have been reversed. No. 2, he said we have to unleash our God-given energy potential. So far, Keystone Pipeline, the Clean Power Plan, and ANWR are underway. Finally, we have to change the Tax Code, and that is what we are here debating this week. I am very optimistic that this plan will absolutely put people back to work, put money back in their pockets, and make our American economy and the people who participate in it competitive with the rest of the world. With that, I notice that the majority leader is on the floor, and I yield back.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I wish to thank my colleague from Colorado. I will not tell him what I was doing in 1986, the last time we adjusted the tax rate, but I just want to remind our colleagues today that we are in a moment of crisis in the United States. Today we have a national debt crisis. I have been to this floor many times, and many of my colleagues have as well, to talk about this debt crisis. It affects our ability to do the things that we know are right to do--to deal with the victims of hurricanes, with national security, and with our healthcare situation. Folks, we are losing the right to do the right thing. To solve this national debt crisis, we have to do many things. But one of the ways we can deal with this debt crisis--and one of the first things we have to do--is to grow our economy. The way to grow the economy is to roll back regulations, unleash our energy potential, and, yes, finally, once and for all, fix this archaic tax system, which keeps us from being competitive with the rest of the world. In 1986, we had the third lowest corporate tax rate in history, in the world, and over the next 15 years we benefited from that. But at the same time, the more our economy grew, the lower the tax rates were taken in the rest of the world. Today, American businesses are taxed at one of the highest rates in the developed world: 35 percent. Meanwhile, for example, Japan's statutory corporate rate is just 23 percent; Germany is at 16 percent; Mexico is at 30 percent; the U.K. reduced theirs in 2009 from 30 percent to 19 percent, and they are about to go to 17 percent as we speak. As a matter of fact, the average rate in Europe is just 18 percent, while in Asia the average corporate tax rate is 20 percent. Why is the corporate tax rate so important to an American worker? The corporate tax rate we have in America is the greatest burden the American worker has today. Why? Because it makes that American corporation less competitive with the rest of the world. It also makes that American corporation vulnerable to foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies and then the moving of those headquarters and factories and jobs offshore. The No. 1 thing we can do for the American worker is to become competitive from a tax standpoint with the rest of the world. I have lived this. I have lived in Asia; I have lived in Europe. I have worked here most of my career, and I know when this gets out of balance, and it is out of balance today. We are penalizing the American worker because of it. It is no secret, a lower corporate tax rate would make us more competitive globally. Our tax plan fixes this. We are one of the last countries that still has a tax on unrepatriated earnings. In other words, if we have a U.S. company that makes money overseas, it pays taxes over there; when they bring it over here, they have to pay tax here. We are the last country in the world that really has double taxation. We need to end that repatriation tax so that we can free up almost $3 trillion of U.S. profits overseas and bring them back and invest in training, in plants, in facilities, and in research and development. Our plan makes that happen. We have an individual tax code that is 2.4 million words in length. Let me say that again: 2.4 million words in length. Wasn't that the tax simplification law of 1986? I think it was. It is 2.4 million words in length. That is ridiculous, and it is entirely too complex. We all know that. Our plan will fix this. It is also estimated that, if we can get it enacted, this tax plan will create over 1 million new jobs because of the changes that we are enveloping into this Tax Code right now. In addition, it is estimated that the GDP growth will be more like 3.7 percent, instead of the 1.9 percent we have become used to over the last 8 years. Frankly, I believe there is no reason it can't be significantly more. We are getting closer to getting this done, but I realize there is a lot more to do. It is more important now than ever that we don't get bogged down in this Washington dysfunction and gridlock. Last week, I mentioned that many Democrats supported the changes we are talking about in the Tax Code, right up until President Trump took office. In fact, over the last several years--in fact, over the last several decades--many Democrats on the other side of the aisle and people in their place before agreed. This is not a partisan issue. This is about national security, if you want to get right down to it. It is about making America competitive again. Who would be against that? There are decades of quotes from Democrats and Republicans about this issue. This should be a bipartisan issue. In 1963, a very famous American made this quote: A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget. Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left over after taxes. . . . Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his [or her] profits in his [or her] cash register or to put it to work expanding or improving his business, and as the national income grows, the Federal Government will ultimately end up with more revenues. That noted American was President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. If he were here today, I think he would admonish all of us to put our partisan bickering aside and get something like this done for the American people. Another quote: I think [the corporate rate] should be lowered. We should try to get it as close to the international average as we can, so we'll [once and for all] be competitive. That was Bill Clinton last year, 2016. Another quote: Get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field. And use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years. That was President Barack Obama in 2011, believe it or not. This is not a partisan issue. There are more minority party leaders in the House and the Senate who have also come out and spoken on this point: Today, 28 OECD countries and every other G-7 country has adopted some form of territorial tax system--and all these countries have lower corporate tax rates than the United States. This means that no matter what jurisdiction a U.S. multinational company is competing in, they are competing at a disadvantage. That was the current Senate minority leader in 2015. This is not a partisan issue. Another quote: ``It is long past time for tax reform that would lower the corporate tax rate.'' That was House Minority Leader Pelosi last year. This is not a partisan issue. This tax bill is being done under regular order, including a committee markup this week, with plenty of amendments, and it will go to the floor as soon as we can get it there for debate and more amendments. I urge all my colleagues: Let's put partisan politics aside once and for all and collaborate through the amendment process to do something historic, something that American workers deserve, and that is to become competitive with the rest of the world again. Renew your support for the same tax changes your party has supported for years. I want to close with another quote from an individual I have long admired, President John F. Kennedy, in 1962. I repeat: our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budget surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy, or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve, I believe--and I believe this can be done--a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future. Again, these are words from President John F. Kennedy, while he was President, in 1962. This is not a partisan issue. Our tax plan is an investment in our future, just as John F. Kennedy said. It is an investment that will help all Americans. I know there is a lot of disinformation going on: This is only a tax break for the wealthy, and so forth. When the facts come out--and they have already come out; four Pinocchios have been given to those comments. Our tax plan will prove that when we get into the details. Equally important, getting this tax plan done to help all Americans is a critical part of developing a long-term plan to solve the national debt crisis. I am proud to serve here with my colleague from North Carolina, Senator Tillis. I think, in North Carolina, they actually did this, and they had the results we are talking about here.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I say to the Presiding Officer, like you, I am a relative newcomer to this body. It is an enormous privilege and responsibility to be a Member. Like you, I come from the real world, spending a career where your word is your bond, and telling untruth is not rewarded. Unfortunately, in this body, sometimes that is not the case, and both sides are guilty. What Americans are demanding right now is a change in the status quo, not only in this body but in Washington and in its entirety. Tonight I want to talk about some of the things that have happened in this body. I know both sides are guilty, but these are a couple of examples that I think rise above the norm and are so egregious that I could not let them stand. Right now, Members of the minority party and their friends in the media are doing everything they can to stop us from changing the Tax Code this year. Their complaint about healthcare was that we weren't doing it in regular order. Now we are doing tax reform in regular order. The bill that we are working on in the Senate will go to committee as soon as next week. It will be marked up with amendments from both sides. At the right time, it will then go to this floor, and we will have amendments--again, from both sides--and we will vote that bill, up or down, into law or not. But Members on the other side are actively spreading numbers in studies that are based on false assumptions and have been proven to be untrue. I want to highlight a couple tonight, but there are many others. On Monday, the Tax Policy Center released a study saying that the House plan, which was released last week, to change the Tax Code would raise taxes on 25 percent of American families. The minority leader said this on that day: This analysis makes clear that over one quarter of taxpayers will see a tax increase under the Republican plan, all in the name of giveaways for the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations. Republicans want to take away middle class deductions for people with student loan interest and medical expenses so that the rich can exploit bigger loopholes and corporations can pay lower taxes. That study by the Tax Policy Center didn't even survive a full day. It was retracted later that afternoon. It is not even publicly available online today to review any longer. Do you know what is, though? The statements that came out of that report that day--false statements, just like the one I just gave, and many others highlighting that this study was reality. Maybe even worse is that these are false stories that are still running through the media, as if they were true, as if they were facts. The website Vox posted a story about this study titled, ``The numbers are in, and House Republican tax bill raises taxes on nearly a third of Americans.'' Surely, they posted an update saying that the study has been retracted. They say that they will update the story once new numbers are released. In the meantime, this headline and this story are still in existence as if they were still true. Why wouldn't they take down the story? Why wouldn't they change the headline until new numbers are available? I wish this were a single, discredited study we are talking about and that this were the only time something like this has happened since we started to have this debate about changing the Tax Code and making America competitive again. Unfortunately, it is not. Multiple Members of the minority party said that the tax framework supported by President Trump would raise taxes on families earning less than $86,000 per year. One of my colleagues said: ``On average, middle class families earning less than $86,000 will see a tax increase under the Republican `tax reform' plan.'' Another colleague said: ``The average tax increase on families nationwide earning up to $86,100 would be $794.00 per year.'' Here is another one: ``The average tax increase on families nationwide earning up to $86,100 would be $794.'' You begin to think that there is a common thread among many Members in this body about this same story. This talking point is so wrong that even the Washington Post later that day came out and said so. It gave this claim four Pinocchios, which we all know is their highest number against a falsity. That is the worst rating you can get on their fact checking. The Washington Post's full ruling said: Democrats have spread far and wide the false claim that families making less than $86,100 on average will face a hefty tax hike. Actually, it's the opposite. Most families in that income range would get a tax cut. Any Democrat who spread this claim should delete their tweets and make clear they were in error. That is from the Washington Post. At least one statement making this claim is still up, and I haven't seen a single statement admitting error. These are but a couple of examples. There are many more. As one last example, House Minority Leader Pelosi has called changing the Tax Code ``a Ponzi scheme.'' Virtually every Democrat has called it a ``betrayal of the middle class.'' Clearly, the facts do not back up these claims. The minority party is doing all it can to stop us from getting this done this year because it makes good politics somehow. That is the only explanation I can think of. Answer this for me; it doesn't make any sense: Why would someone oppose giving the middle class a tax break? Why would someone oppose making America competitive again? Why would someone oppose bringing billions of dollars of U.S. profits back to the United States so that they can be reinvested in the economy and create jobs? I don't understand it. It is time for people in Washington, and even in this body, to stop doing what is best for their own political self-interest on both sides, frankly, and start doing what is right for the national interest. That right now--in the next few days--is clearly one thing, and that is fixing this archaic Tax Code. Every person in this body is responsible to some degree for the archaic nature of this Tax Code. Both parties are responsible. If they were acting in our national interest, we would be hearing about the study showing that, on average, Americans are projected to get a pay increase of somewhere between $4,000 and $9,000 under this plan. We would be hearing about how families making less than $86,000 a year are actually getting a tax cut. Again, that is a point even the Washington Post has acknowledged. We would be hearing about how lowering the corporate tax rate, ending the tax on repatriated earnings will make us more competitive with the rest of the world. We would be hearing about the economic growth that could result from these potential changes. We have a historic opportunity before us to deliver results and make a difference in the lives of all Americans. There are Members of the minority party, however, who have supported these changes in the Tax Code right up until the point when President Trump took office. But that is no excuse for this nonsense that is going on right now. I think it is our role, on both sides, to call out these untruths. It is also our responsibility to stop this nonsense. What the American people want are facts. They don't want fake news. They want to know that we are here doing their work for them, to make sure that we make America competitive again. I say to the Presiding Officer, like you, I live in the real world. I have dealt with the nonsense that came out of these bodies that affected our Tax Code in a way that kept us from being competitive. It is time we change that. We have to get it done this year so that we can ignite economic growth next year and give relief to the middle class, who have suffered so much over the last 8 years. I yield the floor.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, since 2001, the Federal Government has exploded in constant dollars from $2.4 trillion in 2000 to last year almost $3.9 trillion in costs. Those are constant dollars. In September of this year, just a few weeks ago, our national debt surpassed $20 trillion for the first time, and no one in Washington blinked an eye. If that is not enough of a wakeup call, this debt is projected to increase over the next 10 years, according to the budget we are operating under now, by another $11 trillion. If that is not enough, over the next 30 years alone, it is projected that over $100 trillion of future unfunded liabilities--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pension benefits for Federal employees, and the interest-only debt--are coming at us like a freight train. These are unfunded liabilities. Today, with $20 trillion in debt, we are only paying about $270 billion every year in interest only. I say that because just in the last year, we have seen four increases in the Federal funds rate, which fundamentally increases our interest by 100 basis points. That 100 basis points over the next few years will grow our interest on the debt by more than $200 billion on top of the $270 billion. By the way, today that is almost 25 percent of our discretionary budget, already, just at the $270 billion. If it doubles, it will be almost half of our discretionary budget. If interest rates just go back to their 30-year norm--between 4 percent and 5 percent--we could be paying as much as $1 trillion on our Federal debt. That is almost equal to today's discretionary budget. It is going to take a long-term fix. We can't tax our way out of this problem. We can't cut our way out of this problem, and we can't just simply grow our way out. It is going to take a multifaceted approach. There are five interwoven imperatives that are at work in solving this problem. It is one thing to call the crisis, but it is another to call out the ways to fix it, and they are all within our grasp today. No. 1, we need to fix Washington's broken budget process. No. 2, we need to root out all the wasteful spending in the Federal Government today. No. 3, we have to grow the economy by repealing and pulling back on a lot of regulations that are unnecessary, by revamping our tax structure and by unleashing our energy potential. No. 4, we have to save Social Security and Medicare, of which both trust funds go to zero in 14 short years. Lastly, we finally have to get after the real drivers of spiraling healthcare costs. As we are working to change our archaic tax system to become competitive with the rest of the world and to get our economy rolling again, I want to talk about two things today. One is this wasteful spending, and two is economic growth. These are two of the five imperatives that I just outlined. According to the General Accountability Office, today and also every single year, this Federal Government wastes hundreds of billions of dollars. It is estimated today--and this bipartisan organization has identified this--that we are overspending about $700 billion a year. Let's put that in perspective. As I just said, we spent $3.9 trillion running the entire Federal Government. That is about $1 trillion for discretionary spending and about $3 trillion for mandatory spending--so almost $4 trillion. Of that, over $700 billion has been identified as wasteful spending. I will describe those in a second, but to put it in perspective, that is almost 20 percent of everything we spend as a Federal Government. It is a larger number than what we spend on the national security of our country. Let me say that again. The number identified by the General Accountability Office of wasteful spending is larger than what we spend on our military. There are three facets to this as they outlined. No. 1 is redundant agencies. These are agencies targeted to do exactly the same thing that one administration or another has come in and added and that basically do the same things. That costs about $135 billion every year. Just since 2003, we spent $1.2 trillion in improper payments. That is about $144 billion every year. These are overpayments--improper payments. This is not fraud. This is not anything like that. It is basically an administrative error, where the Federal Government has made a mistake and made improper payments--Social Security Disability, SNAP overpayments, unemployment insurance, and others. This is outrageous. The third item is that it is estimated that we have a net tax gap of $406 billion. This is a 17-percent error rate in the IRS Tax Code. That means that people are underpaying or not paying what is calculated, according to the General Accountability Office. The Federal Government last year took in almost $3.5 trillion of taxes. Yet we had this $400 billion. That is a 17-percent error rate. I don't know what else to say. Those three things add up to about $700 billion of wasted spending. We have to get to the bottom of this. Let me also put it in perspective another way. That $700 billion every year is $7 trillion over the next 10 years. This tax package we are talking about has an initial cost of about $1.5 trillion, as identified by both sides, before you get to the economic growth that more than pays for it. A 0.4 percent of growth pays for this tax package that we are working on. But this $7 trillion of wasted spending is overspending by the Federal Government, unnecessarily. Nobody in this body--no Democrat, Republican, or Independent--has voted on this spending. This is spending in error. These are just common mistakes made by an oversized bureaucracy. It is not a partisan talking point. Both sides bear responsibility in this debacle. Again, these are numbers from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. I am apoplectic that I even have to be here bringing this to the attention of my colleagues. Washington knows about these problems and has known for years--decades. Yet nothing is done. A former Member, Senator Tom Coburn, actually worked hard on this. There are others who are beginning to pick up this mantle here, as I am. But as we talk about the tax package changes--the tax changes that will get this economy growing again--I wanted us to reflect on the opportunity we have right here that can more than pay for what we need to do to give the middle class a tax break and get our economy growing again. There are things identified in this report by the Government Accountability Office. There are recommendations that can get at most of this $700 billion of wasted spending. Let me give you a couple of examples. If the Department of Defense just manages commissaries more effectively, there is a $2 billion opportunity there over the next 5 years. If the Department of Defense weapon acquisition programs were more effective, it is estimated that tens of billions of dollars over the next 10 years could be saved in terms of purchasing the same level of equipment and machinery. If the Department of Defense simply completed an audit, we believe it would identify further opportunities for wise spending of our taxpayers' money. But since coming to the United States Senate, I was shocked to understand that the largest line item on our budget has never been audited. It is high time that we complete that audit. By the way, there is a law that was passed in this body in 1991 requiring the Department of Defense to submit an audit. Here we are in 2017, and we still don't have that audit. In my opinion, as hard as it is for the American people to earn their salaries and to pay their taxes, it is unconscionable that I am standing before the U.S. Senate tonight reminding us all that there is $700 billion a year that we spend in error--just bureaucratic error. Because of that and because of this financial intransigence, we have built up a debt that has created a crisis in our country. Because of these years of fiscal intransigence, we are losing the ability to fund our government the way it should be funded. We are losing the right to do the right thing when it comes to funding things like emergencies and disaster relief efforts. Just a couple of weeks ago, we passed a $15 billion relief package for two hurricanes. Last week, we passed a $36 billion supplemental, as if nothing had happened. Every time we do that, it is borrowed money. We can wait no longer to solve this debt crisis. It is going to take tough decisions to solve the debt crisis, and we are going to have to be making these very quickly, but eliminating redundant spending, improper payments, and eliminating this tax gap are at the top of the list. Along with reducing our spending by almost 20 percent each year, we need to grow the economy to solve this debt crisis. The single most important thing that we can do to grow the economy this next year is to change this Tax Code. Let me remind this body that so far this year, under this President's guidance, we eliminated over 860 rules. These were rules made by the Federal Government that were choking the very life out of our free enterprise system. The result of that this year alone is that in the third quarter we have now achieved a 3-percent growth again. This is not the Holy Grail. Who knows what this economy should be growing at right now if we just get Washington out of the way? Part of the way to do that is to correct this archaic tax policy. Changing the Tax Code will mean more jobs and higher wages for the American worker. For example, if we eliminate the repatriation tax on our corporations--again, we are the last country in the world to have a double tax on U.S. profits made overseas--it is estimated by independent, nonpartisan groups, that this would mean $4,000 to $9,000 of annual income for the average worker in the United States. I don't know what else to tell you, except that we are not competitive today. We have to become more competitive. What we are talking about here should not be partisan issues. America needs to be competitive. We all know that. The idea that bigger government will create more jobs has been proven not to work. Look at the last 8 years. We have had the lowest economic growth in the history of the United States. As we debate how to fix this archaic tax system and become competitive with the rest of the world, I am reminding us tonight that we also need to get serious about cutting this wasteful spending. This spending is not benefiting anybody. It is not providing for national security. It is not taking care of people who need help. These are just simply overpayments, mispayments, and they are creating problems that should not have been created. Changing the Tax Code, as I said, is a historic opportunity to generate growth and make us more competitive. Eliminating this spending, which amounts to 20 percent of what we spend as a Federal Government, is absolutely mandatory. People back home should be demanding that. There is a lot of heavy lifting to dig out of this debt crisis, but these two things I am reminding us of tonight should be at the top of the list. We simply cannot fail the American people to get this done. I am committed to that. I urge my colleagues to take seriously this opportunity we have of changing our Tax Code. It is historic. At the same time, we have to get serious about eliminating our redundant, outrageous, and unnecessary spending. I yield the floor.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I think I am the only one standing between this body and a vote on something that 2 years ago I didn't know existed, and that is a ``vote-arama'' in local Senate terms. Being an outsider to the political process, I find a lot of this very strange. I came to Washington, and now I have a new vocabulary. It includes things like ``scoring,'' which doesn't have anything to do with sports, ``vote-arama,'' which doesn't have anything to do with the carnival down the road, or ``deficit-neutral reserve fund.'' I am still trying to figure out what that is; I see the Presiding Officer is smiling up there. Then there are ``points of order.'' There is a vocabulary centered around what we are going to be doing this afternoon, but I want to speak to the budget process itself. First of all, I want to be very clear with my colleagues on both sides. I support this budget that we are going to vote on today for one very strong reason. It is a vehicle to get to tax reform in the United States. I will not speak on taxes today in the few minutes that I have, but I do want to speak about the process. What we are doing in America right now in the Senate and the Congress--and what we have been doing over the last 43 years--is losing the right to do the right thing. Let me say that again. We are losing the right to do the right thing. Just a few weeks ago, we voted without batting an eye for $15 billion of allocated funds for the victims of two hurricanes in Florida, Texas, and other southern States, with every dime of that money in borrowed money. We have to go to China and other places and borrow that money so we can spend and do the right thing. That is not an embellishment or an exaggeration. What about research for the rising, spiraling cost of our healthcare, driven by Alzheimer's, cancer, and diabetes? We spend about the same amount of money on that as we spend on all foreign aid. Yet, if we were to do more, we could cure those heinous diseases and lower our medical costs. We can invest in our infrastructure. We can absolutely take care of victims of wildfires, and now we have Puerto Rico. Tonight we are going to be asked to vote up or down on a supplemental bill for some $30 billion-plus for the needs of these catastrophes. We have lost the right to do the right thing, which is, of course, to meet those needs. Here is the biggest one. You just heard my great colleague, Senator McCain from Arizona. He is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, of which I am a member. He talked about how decimated our military is from a funding standpoint. He talked about readiness. He talked about capitalization. But today, we are borrowing every dime we spend on our military, on our veterans, and on every domestic discretionary program in the United States. That is a fact. Where do we get the money when we run out of our own money? We spend every dime of our own. By the way, we collected over $3.5 trillion of Federal tax revenue last year. It is the largest amount America has ever collected in income taxes and total taxes for the Federal Government--the most we have ever collected--but all of that money goes to mandatory expenses. As a matter of fact, since 2000, under one Republican President and one Democratic President, our government has grown from $2.4 trillion to $4 trillion. That is not the worst of it. The worst is yet to come. We have added in two Presidencies $14 trillion to our Federal debt. Of our $20 trillion, $14 trillion of it was added under these two Presidents. In the next 10 years, the current budget under which we are working will add another $11 trillion to our debt. Here is the problem. The blue line here is what you heard Senator McCain talk about earlier. That is our discretionary spending. It is flat. As a matter of fact, between 2009 and today, we have lowered discretionary spending by over one-third, by $400 billion. But what has happened is that our mandatory expenses have exploded. On this chart, this line here, are our mandatory expenses; that is, Social Security, Medicare, pension and benefits for Federal employees, and the interest on our debt. This is a formula for financial disaster. At this point, we already have $20 trillion of debt. Over the next 30 years, some estimates say that we will have over $130 trillion of future commitments, liabilities coming at us like a freight train. We are hamstrung because we have a budget process that doesn't work. One thing that contributes to this is a process that over the last 43 years, since the 1974 Budget Act was put in place, which created this budget process, the budget has worked only four times in 43 years. It has funded the Federal Government only four times. That is not a partisan comment; that is an indictment on this body and on the body across the hall. In any other environment--sports, medicine, business, military-- imagine if you had a process that worked only four times. Imagine if you had a tank in World War II, and you are over there, and every 43 times you fired it, it worked only four times. Imagine what result would be. What we have here is a system that doesn't work. I am going to try to explain that very quickly. First, we have committees in the U.S. Senate that involve themselves in appropriations and the funding of the Federal Government. Some are called authorizing committees. These are committees like the Foreign Relations Committee; we have Appropriations. We have all of these authorizing committees over here on the left. On the right here are Appropriations Committees. Today, these committees have to pass 12 bills in order to fund the Federal Government. Over the last 43 years, out of the 12 bills we have to appropriate to fund the government, we have averaged only 2\1/2\ bills. In any other world, that can't work. It doesn't work here. So we end up with 179 continuing resolutions to get us past the end of our fiscal year to continue spending at last year's rate, and then we go to an ``omnibus''--another new term that I had never heard of--at the end of the calendar year. Basically, most times, six or eight people will get in a room and decide how to spend $1 trillion. This current budget deals with, primarily, issues that are not on the mandatory side. There is a way forward. There are Members on the other side--and I am going to call out one--my good friend from the State of Rhode Island. Senator Whitehouse and I and others have been working on this for quite some time. He has a great idea: Let's pick a point in the future, make the debt a percentage of our GDP, and work backward from there with guardrails on what we can do every year. There is a budget process we have been working on that creates a politically neutral platform that allows both sides, in a bipartisan way, to argue and fight over what we think the budget should include, because we believe the budget should be a law. Today, the budget is only a resolution, which means it is nothing but a political statement by the majority party. We then go to an authorizing process where the minority party, because they weren't asked to play in the budget process--we have an authorizing process in which, today, we have over $300 billion of Federal expenditures a year that are not authorized, over $300 billion. Then we are supposed to go to an appropriations process. As I have just said, we have appropriated, on average, over those 43 years, only 2\1/2\ bills a year instead of 12. We can fix this. It is not a partisan issue. We will absolutely fix this budget process in a bipartisan way. I am going to vote for this. I hope my colleagues will vote for this budget bill so we can go on and debate taxes. The debt crisis is the No. 1 crisis we face in our country. It keeps us from doing the right thing--funding our national defense and taking care of our needs. I will support this budget today, and I urge my colleagues to do the same. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I have great news. This is the last amendment and the only bipartisan amendment tonight, and after this we will vote on the entire bill. The purpose of this amendment is to declare this process--the vote- arama--utter nonsense. It is part of a budget process that both parties have perpetrated and persisted with for 43 years. It has only worked four times; to fund the Federal Government, according to the Budget Act of 1974, four times in our history. We are supposed to appropriate 12 bills a year to fund the Government. We have averaged 2\1/2\. I urge all of my colleagues to make clear to the American people that we recognize this budgeting process is broken and we are committed to fix it. Thank you.

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I would like to echo what my esteemed colleague from Missouri has outlined in the last few minutes. His leadership on this issue is pronounced, and his experience on this floor is not to be underestimated. I appreciate his leadership on this, and I appreciate the opportunity to weigh in on this. Before my remarks today on this historic opportunity before us right now to finally, after 30 years, become competitive again with the rest of the world, I would like to preface my remarks with a personal comment. My mom and dad were schoolteachers. We were middle class. I grew up working on our family farm. My mom and dad were really the first two in their extended families who had ever been to college. All of my relatives were farmers in the South. I think the Tax Code that we have had for the last 100 years, since it was instituted in our country, has created an imbalance. We can see right now that we are losing competitiveness with the rest of the world. We have a growing disparity among income levels in this country, borne out somewhat by the derivative results of an archaic, out-of- control, out-of-date, and inappropriate tax policy. Today, we have two crises in America. I have spoken on this floor a lot about this. We have a global security crisis that cannot be argued against. It is deadly. It is serious. We also have a debt crisis, and they are interwoven because of our inability to discipline ourselves on this floor over the last 30 years, particularly the last 16 years. We now have $20 trillion of debt, and that is the result of an explosion in the size of our Federal Government. In 2000, the size of our government--these are constant 2016 dollars. The size of our government in 2000 was $2.4 trillion. ``Trillion'' is a big number, and it gets a lot of zeros out there. I have a hard time even digesting what that is. But 2.4--I can relate to the size that it is today, and it was $4 trillion last year. So our Federal Government has grown over 60 percent in 16 short years. There was one Republican President and one Democratic President. My experience here in the last 2 years has been that there are no innocent parties in terms of this out-of-control spending on the part of the Federal Government. One of the solutions to this debt crisis is a growing economy. President Trump, from day one, has said that growing the economy is job one, but it was part of a bigger strategy in his first year. There were four components to the strategy in the first year. One was that we had to get Neil Gorsuch confirmed to the Supreme Court, and that was done. Second, we had to roll back on some of the more onerous regulations that were stifling the very life out of the free enterprise system. To date, over 800 regulations have been removed from our government. Third was healthcare. We are still trying to fix a collapsing ObamaCare system that is hurting people back home. Lastly, we had to reform our tax package so that we could become competitive with the rest of the world and get our economy going again. Job one this year was to get the economy going again. To some degree, it is beginning to move. Consumer confidence is at a 16-year high. CEO confidence is at a 20-year high. Why? Because they finally see rhetoric in Washington talking about the things they have been asking for for over 10 years, and that is relief from some of the pressure the Federal Government has put on the free enterprise system that keeps us from being competitive with the rest of the world. I have lived around the world, and I have run businesses. I started my career working for an hourly wage in construction. I understand that America--and I can say this with some authority--has some of the best workers anywhere in the world and in the history of the world. On the back of that, we have innovation, capital formation, and the rule of law. That is what has created this economic miracle over the last 7 years, but we have taken it for granted. What we have done is allow other countries because of our immigration policy, because of our tax policy, and because of our regulatory policy, particularly of late--we have lost our competitive edge. We believe that to get this economy going, President Trump is right. I am absolutely committed to the strategy President Trump has laid out. It really is only three things, and we have already started on two with his leadership. No. 1 is regulatory reform, which I talked about. No. 2 is that we have to get this energy policy going. What the President has already done with the Keystone Pipeline and the Clean Power Plan has set the stage to allow us to become the energy czar, if you will, of the next century right here in North America. Lastly--and maybe most importantly--is to get this Tax Code so we can be competitive with the rest of the world. Let's talk about what competitive means. In 1986, the last time we actually made any real, substantive change to the Tax Code, the United States, after those changes, had the third lowest corporate tax rate in the world. What that did is allow us to compete with the rest of the world and set the stage for the next 10 to 15 years of economic boom that is now part of history. What has happened now, though, is that the rest of the world has caught up. They have lowered their corporate tax rates. They have simplified their regulatory environment and taken the burden off some of their people. Today we have absolutely the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and we are the last country of the major OECD countries--the 39 countries--to actually still have a repatriation tax. This is unbelievable. We have been so arrogant as a country that we have let the rest of the world outrun us to the next stop, and they are now outcompeting us. How does this affect the average man and woman on the street? Well, this I believe--the repatriation tax and indeed the lack of competitiveness in our Tax Code--is an absolute tax on American workers. Why? Because right now, twice as many companies in the United States are being purchased by companies outside our country, as compared to companies that our U.S. companies are buying outside the United States. That is nothing but a reflection on the imbalance of our high tax environment here at home, and the people who suffer from that are the people who buy products in the United States and the people who work for companies that sell products in the United States. By companies, I am talking about friends of mine who have small businesses in South Georgia and have four employees. I am also talking about friends who run large corporations, multinational corporations. All of the above contribute to our economy. We have unwanted acquisitions. Just look at recent history. Burger King was bought by a Canadian firm, Timmy's. Look at the beer industry in St. Louis. Today, most of those companies are owned by Brazilians and Belgians. These are not mean CEOs who decided to move their corporate headquarters, no. This is a reflection of a competitive disadvantage in which someone outside the country has used our Tax Code and our tax dollars to actually buy U.S. companies to the detriment of U.S. workers. How can anyone be against lowering our corporate tax rate and doing away with this repatriation tax? The Business Roundtable in 2004 documents--and this is interesting-- that if our corporate rate today were just 20 percent, over 4,700 companies that have been purchased over the last couple of years would still be in the United States. I think that is tantamount to a marching order for us here in the Senate to make this change. The way forward is very simple. This is what is talked about in this tax package that we are beginning to talk about publicly, and this is only after 9 months of regular order in committee with multiple hearings. We heard in the healthcare debate: Oh, this is not regular order. We didn't have the chance to talk about it and put amendments in and all this. Well, this time, in tax, it will be by regular order. There will be amendments. There will be debates. There have already been multiple hearings. We are looking for input from all corners. This strategy has three parts: One, we have to lower this tax on our American workers--lower the corporate tax rate to be competitive with the rest of the world. Two, eliminate this repatriation tax as every other country in the world has done. And, last, we have to simplify our individual Tax Code. My mom and dad were schoolteachers. They were proud of their ability to pay their taxes, but they were burdened by that. Right now, we don't need to do that. We have to find a way to make this Tax Code more equitable for everyone. Nearly 90 percent of Americans want the code changed. Over two-thirds think taxes are too high. Almost two-thirds say that lowering the corporate tax rate--again, they get the fact that this tax rate is lower in the rest of the world and that it is a penalty on the workers here in the United States. Nearly every CEO surveyed by the BRT, Business Roundtable, said that delays on tax would damage our economy. Here is why. We just heard the Senator from Missouri talk about timing. We have to have a sense of urgency on this for one reason; that is, if you want to affect the economy next year, you have to get this done this year. Budgets are being finalized for next year right now. Capital investments have already been made in terms of determining how much and where and how soon they will be making it. More importantly, during the back half of next year, we will have the holiday season, which offers up a significant portion of our retail sales for the year, and those decisions are being made right now--before the purchases that are made next spring. We have major CEOs weighing in on this. Randall Stephenson, CEO at AT&T, said that if we get the corporate tax rate lowered, ``We will step it up''--meaning their capital investments. ``Every additional billion dollars . . . is 7,000 hard-hat jobs putting fiber in the ground, cell sites up, and antennas on cell sites.'' David Abney, CEO of UPS, said: ``We'd like to bring some of those foreign earnings back, invest them into our network here.'' Finally, Mark Weinberger is the CEO of one of the major accounting firms we have here in the United States. They are multinational, so they have experience around the world in this with Ernst & Young. Actually, through these tax changes, they will stand to lose revenue because we are simplifying how people calculate what they owe in taxes. His quote is this: ``I think it's truly a bipartisan issue''--I agree--``something everybody can rally around . . . it's urgent for our country.'' To get this done, we have to move past partisan politics and Washington games. We saw how we disappointed the American people--both sides. The Democrats in 2009 crammed ObamaCare down the throats of America through a supermajority. We now know it has failed. Republicans were not able to fix it this year, so far. So we all need to look at this tax issue as a bipartisan issue to fix this once and for all for the people back home. We can't get bogged down in this scoring--this financial modeling that is only done this way in Washington. People back home don't run their small businesses this way. They don't run big businesses this way. They sure don't run their personal finances this way. We can't get bogged down in bad numbers and bad timing coming from the Congressional Budget Office--not this time. It is too important. The only score that matters to me is GDP growth and the jobs that it creates--the change of lives that it can affect for the people back home. I hear people talking all the time: I work part time; can you help me get more hours? Wages at the low-income level have not grown at all in the last 30 years. That is terrible in the United States. We can fix that. It is a function of the thing I am talking about right now-- American companies that lost their competitiveness because of the rules here in Washington. This is a 1-percent increase in our GDP. Say we grow from 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent. That alone is $3 trillion of revenue over the next 10 years. That is doable. Everybody in this room knows that. But we have to change this Tax Code to put people back to work, to get our economy going again, and to become competitive with the rest of the world. The end result will be to address, finally, this debt crisis. The reason we want this Tax Code changed is to put people back to work and to change lives here in America. But the long-term benefit of this is that it gives us more flexibility and more capital with which to solve this long-term debt crisis. Growing the economy alone will not fix this debt crisis, but we will not fix the debt crisis unless and until we fix this Tax Code. We need to have a sense of urgency like never before in order to get this done this year. I echo the comments of my colleagues, and I thank you for this opportunity. I yield the floor.

Mr. PERDUE

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

Mr. PERDUE

Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, we have had a lot of action today in the Senate, which is unusual here, and I wish to address it. I would like to address this to the people in Texas, Louisiana, and to all of those who just experienced the devastating results and the impact of Hurricane Harvey. Obviously, our hearts go out to those people, and, of course, we are going to do the right thing and help the people of Texas, which is just what we voted on today. But there is a bigger issue I want to speak to today. I relate to this personally because, just last year--almost exactly to the day--our family was evacuated from our home in South Georgia. As I speak today, we were just notified today that my wife and mother-in-law, who are there today, will be evacuating this weekend from the south coast of Georgia, trying to get out of the way of the next hurricane--Hurricane Irma-- which looks to be a very dangerous storm as well, coming into Florida over the next day or so. But this crisis that we just saw in Texas and that we might see in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina with the next hurricane--Hurricane Irma--reminds us of a bigger issue. It reminds us that because of our inability to get our financial house in order and as a result of the debt crisis we have today, we are losing the right to do the right thing. Whether it is medical research, whether it is infrastructure, or whether it is education, whether it is funding our military, which we will deal with next week, we are losing the right to do the right thing. By that I mean our own financial intransigence over the last 16 years, primarily, but, I would say, ever since 1965, when we had the Great Society and the great War on Poverty, which has failed miserably. That was another great, sweeping, progressive, liberal program that failed to make any dent in our poverty rate in the United States. The poverty rate today is fundamentally the same as it was in the days when that bill was signed into law. Because of our intransigence, our ability to appropriate money to deal with disasters like Hurricane Harvey and potentially Hurricane Irma and others is in danger. Moving forward, we just simply will not be able to continue to deal with these emergencies and crises if we don't have a functioning Federal Government that actually pays its bills and has its financial house in order. The national debt is actually what pulled me into the political process. It is the reason I am in the Senate today. The people of Georgia understand that this is an underlying crisis that we have been digging here for the last two decades and it simply has to be dealt with. Today we have $20 trillion in debt. I call that a crisis because we do not have a plan to reduce that back to some reasonable percentage of our GDP. This is greater in size than the size of our entire economy. What is worse than that and what is more concerning is that over the next 30 years, we have over $130 trillion, by most estimates, of future unfunded liabilities coming at us like a freight train. That is Social Security, Medicare, pension benefits for Federal employees, and the interest on the debt, primarily. Here we are dealing with this debt ceiling just today, and I would argue that the debt ceiling has been the most ineffective thing that I have seen in the Senate. Over 100 times it has been extended or increased, and it has not slowed down deficit spending in the Congress. It has not kept us from having a $20 trillion debt today. Washington knew this was coming, by the way. We have raised or suspended this debt over 100 times to no avail. It hasn't slowed down the debt spending that we have been doing, particularly over the last two decades. Two months ago in June, a group of Senators and I listed the debt ceiling as one of the key reasons why we thought we ought to stay here during the month of August, instead of going home and having our work period there, because we felt that this needed to be debated and that we needed to get to a long-term solution. Exactly 3 months ago today, I stood right here in the Senate and laid out what I thought the real consequences of the debt would be. At that time I said: Congress is the only enterprise I can find anywhere in the world that funds its operations the way we fund this government. The problem is we have a system that is absolutely, totally broken. It is a fraud that is being perpetrated on the American people. I stand by that today. The American people know that this is a fraud perpetrated on them, and that is why I think we have seen change in leadership in the White House. Just three months later, we see our debt limit today being dealt with in a way that puts in jeopardy our ability to deal with these national disasters, such as hurricanes and fires. We heard just a few minutes ago about the devastating fires in the Northwest. Let's be clear. The United States cannot and will not default on our debts. It will not default on our obligations, but this debt ceiling issue should have already been resolved months before now. We actually hit this debt ceiling--just so everybody remembers--in March of this year. The Secretary of the Treasury has been using unusual measures-- extraordinary measures, they call them--to keep the government funded during this period of uncertainty. In fact, we hit this debt ceiling at a time when we should have been dealing with the budget. But still today--as I stand here today--we do not have a budget for fiscal year 2018, and we have 15 days until the end of this fiscal year, or the end of September of this year--September 30. Raising the debt ceiling now just until December 15 isn't what puts our country at risk. The debt ceiling is not the issue here. It is not the problem. It is the unbridled spending that both parties have succumbed to over the last two decades under two Presidents--one Republican and one Democrat. Our government has grown from $2.4 trillion to $3.9 trillion. That is constant dollars. Neither party can point fingers at the other in terms of the explosion and the size of the Federal Government. What is worse, as I just said, is that over the next 30 years, our mandatory expenses--it is not our discretionary spending. Discretionary spending in the last 9 years has come down, largely because of the Budget Control Act and because of sequestration. Our discretionary spending has come down from about $1.5 trillion to just over $1 trillion last year. That $400 billion reduction, though, came on the back, primarily and largely, of our military. The debt ceiling has to be dealt with, but it is not the driver of our problems. The budget process is the underlying release valve that causes this problem, and it allows both parties, particularly in the last 20 years, to spend money we don't have. The budget process, as I have said before on this floor, has only worked four times in 43 years. We have to appropriate 12 bills a year to fund the Federal Government. The average over that 43-year period is only 2\1/2\. That is the fraud that is being perpetrated on the American people. No other body--no other entity that I can find anywhere in the world--can get away with that. Yet here we are, kicking the can down the road again for another 3 months. Fixing the budget process alone will not solve the debt crisis, but we will not solve the debt crisis unless and until we fix this broken budget process. We cannot ignore this any longer. We must stop piling up this debt on the backs of our kids and our grandkids. The fix is readily available. This debt crisis is not something we can't solve. People say: Well, you can't touch Social Security and you can't touch Medicare. Wait a minute. If we don't touch them, they are going to be broke in 14 short years. In 14 years, the trust funds of both Social Security and Medicare go to zero--zero. People will not be up here changing Members of this body at the rate they are now. It will be much accelerated. The fix can be done. There are five areas that need attention, and any of these areas can have bipartisan solutions. I will not go into detail today. I will just highlight the five areas, but we have to deal with each one of these on their own merits. The budget process is broken and can be fixed. I believe we have right now, behind the scenes, Democrats and Republicans working together to find a bipartisan, politically neutral platform to present our arguments on both sides of the budget process and to create a budget that actually funds the Federal Government appropriately, without all of this drama and without a release valve of extra spending. The second thing is redundant spending. We know that the GAO, or the General Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office both agree that we have several hundred billion dollars in redundant agencies and redundant programs. The third is to grow the economy. This is job one by this President. This President has said that job one of this administration this year is to do the things necessary with the regulatory environment and the tax environment to grow the economy. The fourth area is to save Social Security--not to cut it but to save Social Security and save Medicare. That can be done, and I believe there are bipartisan alternatives that we should be debating right now. In 2\1/2\ years, that has not come before this body, and I don't see it happening in the balance of this year. The fifth area is that, while we debated healthcare most of this year, we debated the insurance side of healthcare for the individual market and Medicaid but what we never talked about--and we haven't under President Obama, President Bush, and, now, even under President Trump--in this Congress is that we have not dealt with the spiraling drivers of healthcare costs themselves--healthcare delivery, pharmaceuticals, and the fact that the neediest among us are getting the most expensive care in emergency rooms today unnecessarily. Don't be misled. We are well into this debt crisis. This is not something that can be solved with a 10-year planning horizon. This is a situation where we need to tell the bond market and the world that we are committed to a 20-year or 30-year period in order to fix this debt crisis. Ideas are coming from both sides of the aisle. One idea comes from the Democratic side that says: Let's pick a time in the future, put a stake in the ground about what target percentage of GDP our debt should be, and then develop a roadmap between today and that point in time in the future to commit ourselves to get there. I applaud that idea. I think that is a genuinely brilliant idea. It is something that other countries have done before and it is something that works. I hope my colleagues will please remember that, today, every dollar we spend in our country's defense, which is about $600 billion directionally correct in our military and between $150 billion and $200 billion for our veterans, and all domestic discretionary spending, or about $1.1 trillion--every dime of that--is borrowed money. Let me say that again. Every dollar we are spending on our defense, every dollar we spend on our veterans, and every dollar we spend on our discretionary domestic programs, like what we are doing here today, is borrowed money. This simply cannot continue. I can't think of any taller order. Between now and the end of the year, as we debate the tax changes that we want to make to our Tax Code so that we can become competitive with the rest of the world, let's remember why we are debating that tax issue. We are debating the tax issue to become competitive with the rest of the world, to grow the economy. That is one of five areas which need to be dealt with. Our regulatory work is the other area in that attempt to grow the economy. But we will not dig out of this debt crisis unless and until we fix our budget process, stop this redundant spending, save Social Security and Medicare, and fix the spiraling nature of our healthcare costs. I can think of nothing--nothing--in our future the rest of this year that is more important than addressing this budget process as we look at tax and dealing with this long-term debt crisis that we have. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.