Rick Santorum

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be withdrawn: No. 3514, 3515, 3516, 3517, 3523, and 3531.

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

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I rise to discuss an issue that I spoke about at great length last week. I want to speak very briefly about the amendments that I have put forward that are pending concerning the disaster relief portion of this bill and the emergency spending declaration that was attached to those spending provisions. I really want to focus on just sort of the broad outline of what I am trying to accomplish in these amendments. There are really three subjects that the amendments deal with. The first subject really is the immediate subject, which is, are we going to offset the money that we spent here in the Senate bill with other spending reductions in the bill so we do not add to the deficit this year? That is the first issue. The second issue is, do we get a bill out of conference that does not add to the deficit? Third, what do we do long term to deal with the issue of disaster relief? Let me address all three of those, if I can, and discuss the amendments that I have to take those subjects on. First, the Senate bill. We had an amendment by the Senator from Texas and me. Senator Gramm and I put forward an amendment to offset the spending with an across-the-board cut in all the nondefense discretionary appropriations accounts. We had 45 votes on that, which I consider is a pretty good showing, but not good enough. We are continuing to look. I have three amendments filed, and, in fact, am working on a fourth with the Appropriations Committee and the leadership, to try to come up with a way where we can pass a bill here in the U.S. Senate that does not add to the deficit this year. So I am hopeful that in the end, whether we do it with the amendments that I have pending or whether we can come up with a modification to one of those amendments to accomplish a deficit-neutral bill in this bill that we are working on, I am confident that we can make that happen. That is No. 1. No. 2 is the issue in conference. In the Senate, as I said before, I am hopeful we can get a bill that comes out of here that does not add to the deficit. The House has already put forward a bill that does not--that does not--increase the deficit. So I have a sense-of-the- Senate resolution which would instruct the conferees to hold firm and come out with a bill that is within the budget caps that we set in the budget resolution last year, so we do not add additional red ink in this round of trying to finish the appropriations process for the rest of this year. So we have something that clearly states the Senate is on record that we should pay for the disaster relief funds in this bill. Third--and this gets to, I think, a very important issue, and I am hopeful we can get very broad support for this--is another sense-of- the-Senate that the Congress and the relevant committees examine how we deal with disaster relief. How we deal with disaster relief now is-- actually, we do not. We appropriate a few hundred million dollars, very little money relative to the amount of disasters that we have in this country, that are eligible for Federal relief. We appropriate a few hundred million dollars a year to FEMA and then, as the disasters come along, as they certainly do--whether they are earthquakes in California or whether they are fires in Texas or whether they are floods in Pennsylvania or hurricanes in South Carolina, we have them--we have a Federal role to play in helping the people who have been hurt, whether it is physically or whether it is their property or with the public roads or bridges, infrastructure. There is a Federal role to play in assisting an area, a community, that has been hit. So the question is, how do we pay for it? How do we budget for it? And what we do right now is we do not budget for it, and we pay for it by putting it on the next generation's credit card, so to speak. The difference with the next generation's credit card is that unlike most credit cards we have to pay after 30 days--we get charged interest, but eventually we pay it back--this credit card, we never pay it back, we just keep paying interest on it forever, and the future generations pay forever and ever and ever. So what we ask is, look at a long-term solution. How can we, within the budget, allocate resources as disasters come up, to make sure we can be fiscally responsible, and at the same time provide the needed assistance for disasters as they occur across this country? That is the last leg or last subject area that I am trying to address with these amendments that I have on the floor. I am hopeful we can get support for all three subjects, fixing the Senate bill, getting a bill out of conference and to the President's desk that does not add to the deficit, and No. 3, coming up with a suggestion to the Congress that the relevant committees do some good work and determine how we can begin to pay for disasters within the budget. Senator Gramm and I mentioned last week when we were debating his amendment that over the past 7 years, we have added $100 billion to the deficit--$100 billion to the deficit--in disaster declarations. They have been things from very serious, as I said before--floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, et cetera--to things such as declaring an emergency because we had a 6-percent rate of unemployment and we wanted to pay extended unemployment compensation benefits. There really is a very loose standard of what is an emergency. In fact, there is no standard of what an emergency is. It is whatever the President declares, whatever the Congress declares. I think we need to do a little better than that. I think we have to have some guidelines and we have to have some procedures by which we are going to declare emergencies and which would cause us to increase the deficit. That is an appropriate standard. That is something, frankly, we should have done when we put together the emergency provisions in the 1990 Budget Act in the first place, but we did not. Those who argued for some sort of parameters to define an emergency hearkened back then that we were going to see everything that was politically popular for the moment declared an emergency and thrown on the deficit. I think their fears have been brought to fruition. We have, as I said before, $100 billion of such spending. I want to make it very clear that we have an obligation here to provide emergency disaster relief for communities in States that are hit. I am for that. I want to make sure that we can do that and we do it properly, but I think we have to make sure we do it within the confines of trying to get to a much more responsible fiscal policy here in Washington, to a balanced budget, to a better America and, again, avoiding this knee-jerk reaction we have had in this town for a long, long time, that if we have a problem, and we do not want to take money from some area of the budget that may have your name attached to a program, or whatever the case may be, and put it to where the emergency is, that instead we just add it to the deficit. I think that is irresponsible behavior, and it is certainly not in keeping with the changes that have occurred since the 1994 election. We focused so much of our time and energy on trying to balance this budget, but when an emergency comes along that we frankly should have budgeted for but did not budget for, we are the first to run, even now, and talk about, well, we have just got to put it on the deficit. I think it is talking out of both sides of your mouth and is not what we should be doing here, or what the public expects us to be doing. We are talking $1.2 billion out of $1.6 trillion that we will spend this year. Somewhere around we can find some money in a lot of areas of Government to put where it should go, which is to pay for this emergency. The three things I am hoping to accomplish tomorrow, whether we can do it, and I hope we can, by agreement or consent on both sides of the aisle, is something frankly that both Democrats and Republicans should be for: Fiscal responsibility, a long-term solution, and more of a structure to funding emergencies and standing up for the Senate not to be fiscally irresponsible and adding to the deficit in this appropriations process. I yield the floor. Amendment No. 3551

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. The Senate is not in order.

Mr. SANTORUM. I ask unanimous consent that the amendments be set aside. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SANTORUM. I send en bloc amendments to the desk and ask for their immediate consideration.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be set aside.

Mr. SANTORUM. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendments be dispensed with.

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

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I just want to respond to what the distinguished whip said about Members working on their amendments. I have been, over the past 18 hours or so, working with members of the Appropriations Committee, and Senator Hatfield and the staff have been very cooperative in trying to work on something that we can do to address the concerns I have about disaster relief funds in this bill being declared an emergency and off budget and therefore adding to the deficit. We are working and have been and will continue to work to try to come to some agreement where we can put this spending within the context of the budget laid out last year so we do not cause an increase in the deficit. I know everyone wants to work on that in good faith, so this negotiation will continue. I wish to tell the Members and the whip this is ongoing, and I am optimistic we will come to some favorable conclusion on that issue. I yield the floor. Mr. McCONNELL addressed the Chair.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I rise in very strong support of Senator Gramm's amendment. As a cosponsor of that amendment, I think we have a fundamental issue to decide on the floor of the Senate tonight, and that is whether we are going to go back to the old system, prior to last year paying for emergencies, adding it to the interest costs of future generations, or whether we are going to face up to the fact that we have emergencies in this country, that we do not appropriate for them every year as they occur, as we should, and that we need to pay for them out of existing appropriated accounts, not to just declare an emergency every time we have one and pass the bill on to the next generation of Americans. If we do not and this bill becomes law, the children of America, the people of America are going to be paying interest on this $1.1 billion for the rest of their lives. Now, is that fair to have that happen? I am speaking as someone from the State of Pennsylvania who probably is going to get the lion's share of this benefit. In Pennsylvania, in January, we had a very serious snowstorm. We had a couple feet of snow in most places, followed by extremely warm weather and a rainstorm which, depending on the area, dumped anywhere from 4 to 7 inches of rain. So we had the combination of 2 feet of snow melting plus 4 to 7 inches of rain in a matter of a 2-day period. It caused floods that were above the 100-year-flood level in many places. The damage in Pennsylvania is calculated now over $1 billion. There is half a billion dollars in eroded infrastructure, and, even more important, we lost 100 lives. We lost 2,000 businesses and 50,000 homes. We had a very serious disaster. It is one that we should, on the Federal level, help. It is a disaster that qualifies, in fact, all 67 counties eligible for individual assistance. Madam President, 52 of the counties have been declared eligible for public infrastructure assistance. So there is no doubt we need to spend this money. The question is, are we going to spend it within the existing pot of money that we have to spend this year, or are we going to just add it to the deficit? Last year, in the rescissions package, we made a decision that we were going to fund emergencies. We provided FEMA with money, $5.5 billion. That is paid for in a rainy day fund. Unfortunately, that money is over at FEMA and some of the extraordinary expenses are in the Small Business Administration, which is not FEMA. So they cannot take that FEMA money, even though it is sitting over there. They cannot use it. Or it is in the Department of Agriculture. Again, it is for disasters, but the money is sitting over in FEMA. I will have an amendment, if this amendment fails, to take the money from FEMA and put it into those accounts. It is not something I want to do, because I think we should have this fund available to FEMA. I think we should pay for it now. I have had a history as a House Member of standing up for this. I voted, I think, on four or five occasions against unemployment extensions which were not paid for, which emergencies were declared and we just added on to the deficit. Luckily, in four of the five instances where we extended unemployment benefits, the President at that time, President Bush, insisted that we find offsets, and we did find offsets, and we were able to pass a deficit-neutral unemployment extension. The only time we did not do that was under President Clinton in his stimulus package. It is the only part of the stimulus package that became law, and we deficit spent to provide unemployment benefits. I voted against it. I tell you, I was a Congressman at that time, and I represented a district which has probably been as hard hit, if not harder hit, than any district in the country with respect to unemployment. I represented the steel valley of Pittsburgh where we lost over 100,000 jobs in a matter of 10 years--100,000 steel worker jobs in a matter of 10 years. We still have long-term unemployment there. But I said that it is important to stand up for principle, that we do not spend money today for emergencies, as important as those emergencies are and as needed as the funding is, by penalizing future generations and not making the tough decisions, not setting priorities. That is what this is about. Everybody in this Chamber and everybody in the House Chamber is for this disaster assistance. The President has asked for it, and the appropriators have wisely appropriated the money he has asked for. The question is, are we going to pay for it now or are we going to make our children pay for it later, forever and ever and ever? I think the answer is pretty clear. One of the reasons we are here debating this bill--we are into March debating appropriations bills--is because we are trying to balance the budget. We are trying to cut spending. We are trying not to add on to the deficit, and here we are in the middle of this great struggle to put America back on sound financial footing, back on the path to fiscal responsibility and we are saying, ``Oops, we have an emergency; we must add to the deficit.'' I can tell you, the House of Representatives is not adding to the deficit in their bill. They have an appropriations bill similar to ours. They do not add to the deficit. They are within their caps, and I think that is important to know. I think it is incumbent upon us to act as judiciously as the House in this instance. Right now there is a special session going on in Pennsylvania, and they are coming up with the funds to pay for the tens of millions-- hundreds of millions--of dollars that the State of Pennsylvania is going to have to come up with to fund this, and they cannot declare an emergency. They cannot put it off budget. They cannot add it to their deficit. They have to balance their budget every year, and they are making tough decisions up there right now. My colleague in the State house and the State senate and the Governor, my former colleague in the House, Tom Ridge, are offering up some pretty tough medicine right now to the people of Pennsylvania. All I am asking is that we take a little bit of the medicine in Washington, that we do the responsible thing. I do not understand how this body, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, can go back home and go before the people of this country and say you really are serious about balancing this budget, that you really are serious about cutting spending and setting priorities. We have to set priorities. As Senator Gramm says, when the refrigerator breaks, you cancel the vacation. Every family does that. Most States do that. This Government and this Congress should do that. If there is anyone who should be for this bill, whether it spends for emergency and adds on to the deficit, it should be me. But I believe it is so important--so important--that we continue the precedent that we set last year of paying for our disasters, of not bailing out and declaring emergencies that I am prepared to vote against this bill. I am prepared to vote against disaster assistance for my State if we do not offset it over the next few hours. If the Gramm amendment fails, I have other amendments. I have other amendments to offset other accounts within the purview of this bill and outside the purview of this bill. I have amendments to transfer money from FEMA. I know that is subject to a point of order, but I am prepared to be here tonight, and I am prepared to offer amendments. I think this is something that we absolutely must do to be able to face the American public with a straight face. We bail out too often around here. We are always looking for a way to sort of be cute and get around the law, to get around the substance of what we really are talking about here. Oh, sure, we can legally, under the law, circumvent the Budget Act and declare an emergency and add it on. By and large, you know, it is only $1 billion. No one is going to notice. Well, I notice. I think we have an obligation not just to the process that we are engaged in to balance the budget but for the future generations of Americans who, as I have said before, will pay for this $1 billion of deficit the rest of their lives. Is that fair to do? The answer, I think, is very clear. It is not fair to do. So I am very hopeful that we can get bipartisan support for a very rational act. I will tell you that an across-the-board cut is probably not the best way to go about paying for this, but I suggest that the principle of saying that we are going to pass a deficit-neutral appropriations bill is important. When we do that and we send it to the conference and we have a deficit-neutral appropriations bill coming out of the House and a deficit-neutral bill coming out of the Senate, then we can sure as heck guess that we are going to get a deficit-neutral bill coming out of the conference. Is it going to have an across-the-board cut? No, probably not. They will probably set priorities. They will sit down and they will make those decisions within the context of a larger picture, as it should be. But I think we have to set the tone here with this amendment. So, I am very hopeful that my colleagues who stand up and repeatedly talk about how we have to set priorities and balance the budget and that we did not need a constitutional amendment to balance the budget because we can do it ourselves, we can make these decisions, we can set priorities--it is priority setting time. I cast my priority to spend this money on disaster relief. I am for disaster relief. I want to fund these programs. But I also want to do it within the context of this budget. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support that effort. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would like to respond to the distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee by suggesting that the timing of the disaster is really less important than the timing of when the money is going to be spent. That is very important. We have a billion dollars' worth of damage in Pennsylvania, but we are not going to spend a billion dollars over the next 6 months in repairing or fixing that problem. We have, for example, $5.5 billion sitting in FEMA right now. That money was originally appropriated for the California earthquake and for the Mississippi floods that happened 3 years ago. It still has not been spent out. Historically, what we have done when we have declared emergencies is we have put it off budget and appropriated money for the entire emergency, for what we think is going to be the cumulative cost of that emergency, knowing full well they are not going to be able to spend all that money in this fiscal year, whether it was September 28 or October 1. It takes a long time to let contracts and rebuild, as the Senator from Oregon said. It is going to be a couple of years before a lot of these people get it all back together and can use all the money that is available. So to suggest we should be worried about the timing of disasters really does not reflect how the disasters are paid for. So what we are saying is, look, maybe we should look at, as the Senator suggested, how we appropriate money for disaster assistance because maybe there is money in this request that is not going to be spent this year, that we do not need to put in the budget this year, that we can put in next year when we anticipate it to be spent. That is a real concern. I think the more fundamental issue here is, how are we going to pay for emergencies? It is interesting for me that if you look at all of these accounts, whether it is the Department of Agriculture, watershed and flood control, or whether it is the Small Business Administration, or the Corps of Engineers, or the National Park Service--all of these agencies that are funded--none of these agencies, to my knowledge, receive any additional funds for emergency purposes. They get funded for their programs, but they are not given sort of a slush fund or a rainy day fund to be able to be used to meet emergencies that they have to deal with when they come. We do not appropriate money--with the exception of a small amount for FEMA every year, usually $200 million or $300 million, which is always exceeded. We appropriate very little money annually for emergencies. Then when they come, as surely they come every year, we step back and say: We do not have any money. We have an emergency we did not anticipate. And whether it is a big one like the California earthquake, or a small one, we say, well, let us just add it to the deficit. What we are saying is that is just not responsible. The responsible thing is to let us appropriate the money every year and, my goodness, if we do not spend it, and if the Lord shines upon us and we do not have a natural disaster, well, then we keep it for the next year when, probably, the disasters will be worse than what we had planned on. But it is silly for us to not appropriate for emergencies, and when they come along, say: We have all this destruction and costs and we have to come to these people's aid. We are coming to these people's aid. We are out there. I have been out there, as have Senator Hatfield in Oregon, and Senator Wyden, and Senator Specter, and Senator Gorton. We have been out there, and we have seen the damage. It is severe, and we need to remedy it, but we need to do it within the confines of rational budgeting. That is what Senator Gramm said. Every family does it. I hear the credit card analogy all the time, and Senator Gramm is right that the analogy is not applicable to the Congress, because you have to pay back a credit card. If not, they take you to court and garnish your wages. We are never going to pay this money back. We are going to add this billion dollars to the deficit, and we are going to pay interest on that. Children who are not yet born are going to pay interest on that. I do not think we have any intention in the near future of doing anything to reduce the national debt. We are hoping to reduce the annual deficit. But there is no plan that I am aware of to start whittling down the mountain of debt that we have already accumulated. So to suggest that it is equivalent is just not accurate. It is apples and oranges. I applaud Senator Hatfield and the Appropriations Committee for, as he said, having cut $22 billion this year. He is absolutely correct. Unfortunately, because we have not been able to get agreement on entitlements and on the budget--the President vetoed the budget that actually does something with entitlements--we have had to rely solely on appropriations. But we have relied on appropriations within the budget caps that we set in the budget resolution. We are not asking them to do anything more than we would have had we done all of the entitlement savings anyway. I appreciate that they have done it. But it is not like we have not worked very hard to get those entitlement savings. Everyone over here, at least, put up the votes to get that bill to the President for him to balance the budget. Unfortunately, the President has vetoed it. But we have done our part. We will continue to do our part to make sure that we reduce all levels of government so we can balance this budget, not just appropriated accounts. The final point I want to make is just to reemphasize. This is not about helping people in need. We are helping people in need. FEMA teams have been in Pennsylvania for a couple of months. We are doing the job. This is how we pay for it, if we pay for it. I think that is a pretty easy call for most Americans. You would think it is fairly common sense. It is one of the commonsense things that I hear when I go home. ``Well, of course, if something comes up that you need more money, you find the money somewhere else. You just do not put it on the deficit forever and over and over for us to pay interest on for generations.'' I want to see this bill passed. I want to see the people who are in need feel good about the fact that the Federal Government came in and helped them but also feel good that we did it within the context of a budget, that we did it the right way. I am hopeful that we can get bipartisan support on this and send a resounding vote that we are going to balance this budget and that we are willing to step up to the plate in tough situations and make the tough decisions to move this country to a more responsible fiscal future. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. HATFIELD addressed the Chair.

Mr. SANTORUM. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, what Senator Gramm did in his modification is really identical to what the House has done in their bill. The House does actually declare an emergency, but they actually do not exceed their caps. What Senator Gramm is going to do, the effect of his amendment is to keep the emergency declared and pay for it, so we do not exceed the overall budget cap as opposed to the caps on specific subcommittees. I think that makes perfectly good sense, to make sure that we pay for this within the whole appropriations account as opposed to just targeting specific subcommittees because of these occasionally arcane budget rules that we have to deal with in this body. I want to reiterate that I hope on this matter we can get a strong vote of support, frankly, from both sides of the aisle, that we are no longer going to continue the practice of previous Congresses--not this Congress, but of previous Congresses--every time that we have a disaster. On an annual basis, we do not appropriate for those. We do not appropriate money. With the exception of a couple of hundred million dollars annually for FEMA, we do not appropriate money for disasters. We wait until they happen, as they surely will, and then we ask for emergency authority to borrow the money and not put it on the budget. We know there are going to be disasters. We should be able to budget for those disasters, either beforehand or be able to rearrange priorities once they occur. That is what we do here. We arrange priorities. This is not about whether we are going to provide relief to the victims of fire, relief to the victims of floods or storms. What we are talking about is providing a reasonable, commonsense way to pay for it. That is something that all of us in this body have said we want to do. We want to balance this budget. We want to set priorities. Many people in this body opposed the balanced budget amendment. When they opposed that balanced budget amendment, they said, ``We do not need a balanced budget amendment; we can do it ourselves. We have the ability to set priorities in this body without the hammer of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.'' It is put-up time. If, in fact, you believe that we should have a balanced budget, then this is the first step to making that happen--to stop this practice of adding tens of billions of dollars. Senator Gramm articulated that earlier in the debate, that we have added close to $100 billion to the deficit with these emergency declarations. This is not just a billion dollars. To many people who might be watching this debate who are not Senators, a billion dollars actually is a lot of money, it sounds like a lot of money. Here it does not sound like a lot of money. But when you add up a billion here and there, we have gotten to $100 billion over the last 6 years. That is a lot of money even for here. So let us not continue this practice. If anyone has an interest in seeing that this disaster relief is passed, it is the Senator from Pennsylvania. We have had $1 billion in flood damage in our commonwealth. We have had over 100 people killed, 50,000 homes damaged or destroyed, 2,000 businesses washed away. We need that help, but we need to do it responsibly. This Senator is not going to be a hypocrite and say, ``Well, I'm for reducing the deficit except, of course, when the money comes home and then, well, let's just spend it all.'' I will vote against this measure if we do not adopt this, or something like it. I have several other amendments. I am prepared to stay here all night long offering amendment after amendment, which I will require votes on, to find some way to pay for this disaster that is acceptable to this body. So I hope that we are in for a good day of votes, whether it is tonight or tomorrow, because if we do not succeed, we are going to have votes and you are going to have to stand up to the American public and say, ``This is not the way to do business. The way to do business is to add it on to the deficit. Fine, but we are going to be here.'' I am going to be here tonight, tomorrow, the next day, whatever it takes, so we do this responsibly. I hope we do it on a bipartisan basis. Balancing the budget is a bipartisan affair, and it is something I know we all want to do. Let us put into practice tonight what we preach. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. COCHRAN addressed the Chair.

Mr. SANTORUM. I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Texas.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I thank my colleague and my friend from Wyoming for his leadership on this freshman focus, a time where freshman Members of the Senate have an opportunity to get up and talk about issues of importance to the country from a perspective of those of us who are relatively new in this body. I think he is right on target to talk about the issue of the economy and where this country is going. We have a President who is running around the country talking about how this is the healthiest economy that we have seen and we are doing great and everything is fine. It actually reminds me of another President in an election year 4 years ago, who was going around the country trying to convince the American public that the economy was fine and everything is great and this is a healthy economy and we are moving forward. The American public, frankly, did not buy it. The reaction was very simple: What country is he living in? What country is he leading? Does he not have any understanding of what is actually going on in the economy, what we are dealing with here, that in fact the statistics show that, out of recessionary years, this economy is the slowest growing economy since the 1950's? This is not a robust economy. The Senator from Wyoming was right on target as to why this is not a growing economy. It is the same reason that the previous President had problems saying it was a growing economy, and that is because this President and the previous President raised taxes on the American public. They took more money out of their pocket and sent it here to Washington. It had a real effect on their take-home pay and had a real effect on their ability to be able to provide for themselves and their families. That has a ripple effect through the economy, from consumer confidence and their willingness to consume to the real issue of just paying bills. I think we may be seeing a repeat here. I know many of us who are in this Chamber now were here as Senators or Representatives during the 1993 Budget Act, when President Clinton went out and said we have to raise taxes and we said this is going to have an effect. It is the same type of tax increase that was put forward in 1990. Many Republicans--I was in the House at the time--many Republicans fought it and said President Bush at that time was making a mistake; it would hurt the economy and drag the whole economy down and this country down. A lot of us believed it would bring the President down. It did. Then 1993 comes around and President Clinton did not learn from the mistakes of President Bush and pushed forward through another tax increase--and, I might add, more entitlement programs, more regulation, more on people's backs. Many of us said, ``Learn your lesson from 1990. That is not going to help the economy. That is not, in the long run, going to balance this budget.'' He said, ``No, we have to do it.'' They did it. As a result, coming out of this recession in the early 1990's, we have had one of the slowest recoveries in history. Job growth, yes. We have had jobs. But I think if you talk to most of the people, the kind of jobs being created are not the kind of jobs that will support a family. You hear Members on both sides of the aisle talking about that. The reason is oppressive regulation, oppressive taxation. Almost 25 percent of the income of the average family in America goes just to pay taxes to Washington, DC. That is a peace-time high. By the way, I like to compare that to what it was back in 1950 when the average American family--same family, average-income family--did not pay almost 25 percent of their taxes to the Federal Government; they paid 2 percent of their income to the Federal Government in taxes. Now it is almost 25 percent. Do we wonder why people feel squeezed, why they do not feel they have the opportunities to provide for a family anymore, why both husband and wife have to work? If you are a single parent, what do you do? You work two jobs and you struggle to provide for your children. What we do here is what they did 3 years ago: Put even more taxes on the American public. We believe that is not the answer. We have stood up this year and said the answer is not to take the American public for more, not to regulate the American public more, but to put Government on a diet so we can allow the folks back home to take a little bit more out of their paycheck for their own use, not Government use. So we proposed this irresponsible thing. People got on the floor and said this was such an irresponsible thing to let people keep more of their own money to help provide for their families. As the song goes, ``That's my story and I'm sticking to it.'' My story is that American families should keep more of their money. We are going to continue to push for a tax cut for American families. We will continue to push for a tax cut to create growth and opportunity in capital gains and helping small business people, because creating jobs is the real answer here. Creating good quality jobs is the real answer here. Growth is the answer--not further taxation, but liberating people. Money should go out and be invested in capital resources so we can create more high-quality jobs in this country. We will continue to push for that. We will continue to push for regulatory reform so Government does not stifle the creativity of Americans by regimenting them into some model that we believe in Washington, DC, is the best for everyone. We are going to go out and do the things that are necessary to make this country prosperous and moving forward. I just hope that the President will come to the realization that tightening the belt here in Washington ever so slightly--and frankly, that is all we are talking about in this balanced budget--tightening the belt here in Washington so we can give just a little bit more to working families is not cruel. It may be cruel to some bureaucrats in town, but it is not cruel to American families. It is not cruel to Americans who want good-paying jobs, outside in the private sector, not just here in Washington. I am hopeful we can somehow come to an agreement that this is not the healthiest economy, that the spin doctors of the campaign of 1996 for the President are not going to win the day to try to convince the American public what they know is not true, that this economy is booming and healthy and the best it has ever been. We should get down to trying to address the real economic insecurity that American workers have, the real problems of raising families in this country, and do something about it on a bipartisan basis in this Congress. I am hopeful we can do that. We should be able to do that. I am looking forward to the opportunity to make that happen. I yield the floor.

Mr. SANTORUM

Mr. SANTORUM. Just 1 minute.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask Senator Chafee and Senator Reid be added as cosponsors of this amendment.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, the Senator from Alabama said we would not be growing peanuts in this country anymore. We would be driving all of these peanut farmers out of business with our amendment. What our amendment does is, over 5 years, we reduce the quota price by roughly 30 percent, and we then eliminate the quota. How much of the cost of growing peanuts is the quota? The answer is roughly 30 percent. We reduce the support price equal to the cost the quota adds to the price of peanuts. So it is a wash. What we have done is open up the market so all these additional growers--we are talking about these little rural communities and all these poor growers. What about these growers who grow peanuts and do not have a quota? They grow peanuts, their price is $132 a ton as opposed to, if you are one of these privileged few quota holders, you get $678 a ton. So let us think about these folks who just did not happen to have a granddaddy who was at the trough 50, 60 years ago when they were handing out these quotas. Let us look at all the farmers out there working who have to buy quota seeds. To even grow additional peanuts, peanuts that do not get you this nice big price, you have to go to the quota holders and buy their peanuts at their high price so you can plant your poor peanuts, that are just as good in quality but you do not happen to have a quota. The Senator from Alabama said a lot of things. First off, CBO says our savings in our amendment are the same as under the bill. There will be no increased costs to the Government under the bill. Second, the Senator from Alabama said under our bill, 49 percent of the farmers would not be able to get loans in the first year. That is different from the underlying bill. I remind the Senator from Alabama we cut the support price in the first year of this bill the same as the underlying bill. We do not change the first year. We go to $610. The underlying bill is $610. To suggest we do the same thing and somehow 49 percent more people are not going to be eligible for loans does not make any sense. The Senator talked about how we sell peanut butter to the School Lunch Program at a greatly reduced price, much less than market price. First off, I do not know anybody who does not sell bulk, to a mass consumer, in bulk quantities, cheaper than they do when they have to put it in little 6- or 8- or 10-ounce jars and market it. Of course, they are going to charge them less, as any bulk purchaser gets less when you are buying in that size than something you were going to market at a local convenience store. That is No. 1. No. 2, in 1991 the USDA suspended peanut butter purchases, peanut butter sales for school lunch. School lunch programs suspended it. Why? Because peanut butter prices were too high. They could not afford it anymore, so they had to suspend it. Why? Because we were making a lot of farmers who, again, their granddaddy had a quota, they were making a lot of money and our schoolchildren are not getting peanut butter because it is too expensive. He looked at foreign price. I remind the Senator, as I am sure he knows, America is somewhat unique in the world in the consumption of peanuts. Most of the people around the world do not eat peanuts like we do. Most grown in the rest of the world is used for feed for animals. Very little is used for food for consumers. It is considered, I would not say a delicacy, but in a sense a very rare item for people to consume. We consume in this country over 70 percent of the world's peanuts for human consumption. To suggest because a couple of countries that do not sell a lot of peanuts have very high prices, it would be like maybe in this country our prices for caviar are higher than they are in Russia, or something like that, where you have an indigenous food that people consume versus something that is a luxury in other countries. That is not a fair comparison. Another amazing point that was made, the Senator compared the peanut program with the cotton program and the wheat program and said these other programs rent out their land for production of this crop. The difference is, if you rent your land out for the production of cotton or wheat, you can still sell that cotton or wheat in this country. There is no quota. The difference with peanuts is, when you rent that land out, you rent the quota. If you do not have a quota, you cannot sell your peanuts in this country. So it is not the same. I mean, the difference is anyone can rent land to grow cotton. You can sell the cotton here. But unless you have a quota, you cannot sell your peanuts here in this country. You talk about the small rural farmer, the guy who goes out and sweats every day to grow those peanuts, and he cannot sell them because you had somebody's granddaddy at the trough 50 or 60 years ago because he was able to get a quota because he knew somebody. If people do not understand quotas--a liquor license is the same thing. What is a liquor license? It is a piece of paper. It is not worth anything. If you sell a liquor license, you get a lot of money because it gives one an opportunity to do something that nobody else can do. You cannot sell liquor in this country without a liquor license. And you cannot sell peanuts in this country unless you have a little piece of paper saying you can sell peanuts. Is that American? Is that what we want to do to allow the privileged few--by the way, 70 percent of the people who grow quota peanuts who have this license rent that license. It is owned by somebody else, some fat cat sitting in New York City, or Paris, or someplace. They trade them like securities. So what do they do? They make a lot of money so a bunch of folks can sit and work their tails off. For what? For what? Basically, the world price for peanuts is what they ultimately get. Who makes this different? A bunch of fat cats who buy liquor--quota--licenses.

Mr. SANTORUM. Thank you, Mr. President. Let me talk a little bit about this program. Freedom to farm is about simplifying agriculture programs, providing certainty and simplicity. We do that in a lot of areas of this farm bill, and I commend the chairman, Senator Lugar, and Senator Leahy for their work in moving farm programs, albeit slowly, but gradually toward simplicity and certainty. We do not touch this program. We do not reform this program, and this is how it works. I wish I had time to explain this monstrosity of a program. It has taken me, as a new member of the Agriculture Committee, a year to just begin to understand how this program works. It is discriminatory is probably the nicest thing you can say about it. If you are a quota farmer--that means, if you own a license to raise so many tons of peanuts--you can sell your peanuts at $678 a ton. If you do not have a license, which has been passed on usually from generation to generation--and, by the way, about 20 percent of the quota holders, 20 percent of the people who own quotas control 80 percent of the quota peanuts in this country. So it is very few farmers, in some cases not even farmers, people who own these things live all over the world and lease out the quotas so people can grow their peanuts. If you do not own one of these quotas, you do not get $678 a ton, you get $132 a ton when the world market price is $350. There are literally hundreds of thousands of growers out there who cannot even make ends meet because of this program for the privileged few--for the privileged few--who just happened to have a granddaddy who knew somebody on the board when they handed out these quotas back in the 1930's. That is not the way we should run farm policy in this country, and it is discriminatory. If you look at the percentage of minorities who have quotas, that is another story altogether. Minorities were not given a lot of quotas in the South back in the 1930's to grow peanuts, and that is another inequity built into this program. It is a great reason to get rid of it. Let me talk about equity. As I said before, in the process of the last couple of farm bills, we have gradually begun to reform the farm programs. We have reduced support prices for a variety of commodities. In fact, we have reduced support prices for every single commodity but one: Peanuts. Peanuts have gone up. Price supports have gone up since the 1985 farm bill by 21 percent. Peanut support prices have gone up 21 percent. Every other program has gone down. Every other commodity support price has gone down, as we seek to get Government more and more out of supporting agriculture and allowing agriculture to work on its own. Only peanuts, with this horrible quota system that prejudices folks who were not lucky enough, as I said, to have their granddaddy give them a quota license--those are the folks who make money at the expense of other growers, of shellers, of processors and consumers, because we pay a heck of a lot more for peanuts in this country than they do anywhere else in the world. Why? For a privileged few, a privileged few who just happened to know someone back in the 1930's or their granddaddy happened to know someone in the 1930's. It is a system that needs to be done away with. Frankly, the right thing to do is to eliminate the program outright. But we understand there are a lot of people who own these quotas who have loans and relationships, that they borrowed money based on the fact they had these quotas and were able to get these increased prices, so we phased it out. We are not going to drop anybody off the quota right away. We phase it out over a period of 5 years and then go to a nonrecourse loan program. We still keep a safety net in place for all peanut growers, not just the privileged few who happen to own quotas, but for all peanut growers. I reserve the remainder of my time. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I have a very short period of time under the agreement to go through this. So if I can, I would like to first say I would like to describe our amendment so I can get that in; and then I would like to talk generally about the dramatic need for reform. What we have seen in the bill that is before us right now is an attempt to move farm programs, at least a lot of farm programs, into the 21st century--actually the 20th century; the late 20th century, not really the 21st century--in an effort for reform, the freedom to farm. There are a couple of programs that have been left aside, that have been allowed to continue as they are and have not been reformed. In fact, in the past several farm bills, while other commodity programs have been reformed, a couple of programs have been set aside for nontouched status. One such program is the Peanut Program. What we are trying to do with this amendment, Senator Bradley and I, is to do just a modest amount of reform over the next few years and really make this program look like programs like the Soybean Program looks today. So we are just trying to bring the Peanut Program into what is the 1960's and 1970's farm policy as opposed to the 1930's farm policy. What we do is gradually reduce the support price for peanuts from the current level, which is $678--and, by the way, the world market price for peanuts is not $678 a ton, which is what it is in this country for people who grow quota peanuts; it is $350 a ton. So we pay, as this chart shows, a tremendous amount more for peanuts in this country than the world does. What happens as a result of that? Well, a lot of our folks who process peanuts end up producing Snickers bars and the like up in Canada or Mexico where they can buy peanuts at the world price, not have to subsidize an arcane quota system at $678 a ton. So we are losing jobs. Not only are we losing jobs, but consumption of peanuts is going down. We are losing farms and losing processors and losing shellers. This is a doomed program. Keeping prices at this level is dooming this program, not just for the processors and consumers, but for farmers also. What we do is gradually reduce the support price for peanuts from $678 to $610 next year, and by the year 2000 it goes down to $475 for the years 1999 and 2000. After the year 2000, we go to a nonrecourse loan program which is similar to other agriculture programs in place right now as a safety net program. So we still have a program for peanuts when we are done. It looks more like the traditional farm programs. It is not a system, as I will explain in a minute, that is absolutely indecipherable, as well as unfair, to growers who do not happen to have passed on from generation to generation a quota that allows us to charge this outrageous price for peanuts that we do charge. Let me now talk very briefly about the peanut program. Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. SANTORUM. Thank you, Mr. President. I have, I believe, at the desk amendment No. 3225. I ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. SANTORUM. Will the Senator yield?