Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Thank you, Madam President. I appreciate Senator Schumer's remarks about the Iran sanctions. They are very important. It is an action by the United States that I think has helped in a number of ways with the radicalism in Iran, and we need to keep it up. Yesterday, I heard Mr. Clapper--or maybe it was the day before-- testify before the Judiciary Committee, and he said he had a number of people not working. Senator Grassley said: If they are not critical people, then why do you need so many? If you have a critical job, you need enough people to do the critical duties. How many do you need? You must not need all these people. You said they are not important to us. I don't think Mr. Clapper had a very good answer to that. When someone raised the question of defense cuts under the Budget Control Act, and he expressed concern about that, which I would share. I think Mr. Clapper is right to be concerned about it. So I asked Director Clapper: Do you know the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Have you ever heard of the Commander in Chief of the United States? The House--the Republican House, I must say--has a half dozen times or more, over several years, passed legislation that eases those cuts and finds other reductions in spending from other departments and agencies that have received no cuts and as a result reduces the burden on the Defense Department. Indeed, the Defense Department represents one-sixth of the U.S. budget and they are being asked to take one-half the cuts and don't think that counts in bringing down the war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan; that is entirely different. I am talking about the base defense budget that has taken half the cuts under the Budget Control Act. It is too much for the Defense Department. It ought to be spread around. The House has voted more than one-half dozen times to do that. It died in the Senate because I guess they want to utilize the military to threaten Republicans: If you don't do what we want, we are not going to fund your military. My goodness, the President is the Commander in Chief of the U.S. military. Doesn't he have a responsibility to make sure we are adequately funded? I have to say, I am just getting a little frustrated with that argument. First of all, I don't think he is required to lay off that many people. He indicated he was reviewing it. He was going to bring back more people, as he could have been doing all along, but I think it did allow another example of disastrous complaints beyond reality. One more thing. Senator Schumer, and many of our Democratic colleagues, have been conducting a sustained and direct attack on the millions of people who supported and identified with the tea party movement. Make no mistake about it, they don't respect the people in the tea party movement. They demean them in every way virtually every day in this body. The tea partiers believe in America and thought this U.S. Congress has turned into lunatics and are putting this country into bankruptcy by its spending too much and passing ObamaCare. Democrats passed ObamaCare in spite of the overwhelming objections by the American people. They did it without listening. The tea party spontaneously rose up, and it clobbered a bunch of Democratic House Members and Senators. It switched the whole majority in the House by a big number. So they don't like it. Everybody who opposes them and says: You are not listening to us, they are now demeaning and attacking. I think the American people and the people who identify with and support the tea party, either directly or indirectly, need to know that. I know the people in the tea party. They care about America. They love America. They can't understand what is going on here and they think they are moving us into bankruptcy and we forgot the entire concept of constitutional limited government. We have heard a lot of talk about the challenges facing the government during the funding lapse we are in. All of us want to see the government return to normal operations, and I certainly do, but what we seem to be losing sight of is the permanent consequences--the debt consequences--of the Affordable Care Act. It needs to be a part of this discussion. The Democrats have refused to listen. They basically blocked any effort in the Senate to reform in any significant way the Affordable Care Act. It has been going on ever since it passed. Their goal is to put up a wall around it so if anything comes up, they will not listen to it. They will not consider it. They will not discuss it. It is a fact. It is a done deal. We can't even discuss it. The House has a right to fund what they want to fund under the Constitution and not fund what they choose not to fund. They are trying to initiate and force a discussion on one of the most important issues facing America. One of the things that is so dangerous about this law has not been properly discussed, and I wish to talk about it. A lot of us are going to donate our pay during this furlough to charity. I certainly will. I wish our friends would begin to be more concerned for the private sector workers. There are millions of American workers who will be permanently affected by the Affordable Care Act. They will be hammered by it. Eventually full funding will resume to our government. We know that. This furlough will end. If this ObamaCare remains in full effect, the consequences for American workers are going to be lasting and damaging, as will the consequences to the United States Treasury and our financial condition. In particular, as ranking member of the Budget Committee, I would like to focus on the huge and fundamental accounting manipulation that lies at the center of this health care law. I am going to make some statements, and if anybody has detailed objections or rejections to it, I want to see them, and I will respond to them. But I am correct in what I am saying, and I look forward to any discussion that anybody would like to have. So far people don't want to talk; they want to ignore the problem. We have to deal with these accounting manipulations because it is a colossal blow to our Treasury. The Affordable Care Act was packaged and sold based on a promise that I am going to disprove. The American people knew it wasn't true anyway. Before a joint session of the Congress, the President of the United States said and promised this: ``I will not sign a [health care] plan that adds one dime to our deficits, now or any time in the future, period.'' That is a bold statement. It is as good as ``read my lips.'' As I addressed earlier this week, hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings to the hospital insurance, HI, trust fund were double- counted under the legislation that was passed--at least $400 billion over the 2010 to the 2019 10-year period. I asked for an analysis before the bill passed on December 23. We ended up voting on December 24, Christmas Eve. They rammed it through before Scott Brown, who would have denied them the 60th vote, was elected in Massachusetts--liberal Massachusetts--on the commitment he would be the vote to kill ObamaCare, but they were able to get it through before he was able to take office. The night before we voted, I asked CBO about it. I insisted they give an answer, and they did. They said: The key point is that savings to the HI trust fund-- That is Medicare-- under PPACA-- That is ObamaCare-- would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on the other parts of the legislation-- ObamaCare-- or on other programs. . . . To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings----

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have an additional 2 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. The CBO went on to conclude to say: To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government's ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government's fiscal position. What a statement that was. In fact, CBO estimated that if Medicare savings were truly set aside to pay future Medicare benefits, the new health care law would not decrease but increase the deficit over the first 10 years and subsequent decade. They said it would increase the deficit. But there is a lesser known, equally shocking, account gimmick that I wanted to mention today; that is, how it was done with Social Security. They have obtained another $100 billion over the next 10 years by double-counting Social Security money. My time is up, and I could explain it in more detail, but we have to understand this. According to the Congressional Government Accountability Office--and I asked them not too long ago when they issued a report--that over the next long-term implementation of ObamaCare, it would add $6.2 trillion to the debt of the United States. That is almost as much as the liabilities that Social Security has and fully accounted for--my budget staff tells me that the ObamaCare legislation will be harder to fund and add more to the deficit----

Mr. SESSIONS. Than Social Security will under the current problems. We need to stop digging the hole and we need to start fixing Medicare and Social Security and not adding other programs we can't pay for. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for 2 minutes and to be followed by Senator Enzi for the normal time he was allocated.

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, we share being attorney generals of our States, and I just wish to take a moment to express my sincere and deep thanks--and from all of us--to the men and women who protect us every day, the Capitol Police. We had a very serious incident yesterday. Our people rallied and responded in an appropriate way. I believe they conducted themselves in a professional way. For example, I saw one young man. He said he had heard and responded immediately, was running toward the scene. We think: Well, that is OK. That is what they do. That is what they are supposed to do. We need to understand, when one of our young men and women are responding to a scene of a firing, of weapons discharged, they do not know what is there. In this environment, it could be a very serious thing. Their very life is at stake every time. Everyplace they stand on our streets, everyplace they stand in our building, the Capitol, and our office buildings, they are standing there subject to a threat by somebody who could appear out of nowhere with deadly force, and they do it with professionalism and courage every day. We have been very fortunate in seeing this Capitol be well protected, and I wish to express my appreciation for them and all who place their lives at risk every day to protect the operational functions of this government. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, we have a number of serious difficulties in our country. The most serious is a lack of jobs and a lack of economic growth. The Affordable Care Act is devastating to that situation, making it much worse. Our colleagues need to understand, as we talk about the difficulties that would happen if there would be a shutdown--and there will be difficulties, for sure. But the idea that this is not an important matter that needs to be addressed when we confront the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, is wrong. We have to address this question. One thing I would say to all of us, the numbers are in and it is quite clear: 77 percent of the jobs that have been created since January of this year are part time. Every economist has said that is in large part driven by the Affordable Care Act. They have no doubt that this is a major factor and is an exceedingly unusual and dangerous trend that businesses are hiring people part time, not full time--77 percent of those hired this year are for part time work. When we look at the job numbers that will come in tomorrow and at how many people found jobs, maybe it will be 180,000, maybe it will be 210,000. They will brag about that I'm sure. But has anybody thought about the fact that to an unprecedented degree those jobs will be part time, without health care, without retirement benefits, and less job security? Somebody needs to be thinking about this. The health care law is absolutely a driving factor. Businesses told me that as I traveled my State in August. They say they are trying to keep small businesses below 50 employees too. They are not hiring people only to stay below 50 employees so they don't have to comply with some of these rules. What have we heard all year? We are not going to talk about fixing the Affordable Care Act. We are not going to bring it up. We are not going to get a single amendment in the Senate. The House has repeatedly legislated on the Affordable Care Act. The Senate refuses to take up their bills, refuses to allow votes, refuses to have a full debate. We are at the end of the year, and nothing has been done about it. We could expect some tension to build up here. What I hear the House saying is: Delay this bill for 1 year. It is not working. Delay the individual mandate and give ordinary Americans some relief from this law. The President has already delayed parts of ObamaCare--probably without lawful authority--and delayed it for a year for Big business. But the President and Senator Reid have, in effect, said: We will shut down the government before we delay the law for ordinary Americans. The House has passed a bill to fund the government, but the bill that was just voted down would simply have delayed the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act for 1 year. Maybe this time we could actually fix some of the problems or change some of the provisions in ObamaCare that are so damaging to America. One thing I wish everyone to know--and I am the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee and we deal with the numbers--I wrote to the Government Accountability Office. They are an independent group, and I asked them what the long-term costs of the Affordable Care Act would be. The President said, unequivocally, this bill will not add one dime to the debt of the United States. Do you remember him saying that? He said it many times. His aides and Senators said the same thing many times. The President went on to say, however, you may have forgotten: Not now, not ever, period. Well, is that true? Will the Obama administration health care law not add one dime to the United States debt now or ever? What did the Government Accountability Office say? This is a chart that reflects what they told the Budget Committee in response to my question. They said over the 75-year period, it adds $6.2 trillion to the debt of the United States. That number is huge, as $1 trillion is a lot of money. How huge is it? How do we compare it? All of us know that Social Security is in great difficulty and under serious threat. We have to reform it and put it on a sound basis. It is not going to be easy to do that. Why? Well, it has unfunded liabilities. We don't have enough money coming in to pay for the commitments we made to pay out in the future. Remember, Social Security has a dedicated source of revenue as well. It is on your paycheck every month. It is the FICA we pay. It goes to Social Security and there is a Medicare withholding too. Those funds are dedicated for Social Security or Medicare. But people are living longer, and the benefits are such that we are going to have a shortfall in the future. How much is that Social Security shortfall we have been wrestling over how to fix? It is $7.7 trillion. In the ObamaCare bill that passed on Christmas Eve, that they rammed through the Senate on Christmas Eve on a party-line vote before Scott Brown could take office and provide the vote for Massachusetts that would have killed the bill. They rammed it through the Senate without any amendments, and it added at least another $6.2 trillion to the long-term debt of the United States of America. It is worse than that, and I can explain why it is even worse. That number does not consider interest on the $6.2 trillion over 75 years. I suspect the interest is going to be many trillions of dollars more and it adds to the debt. As we borrow the money, we pay interest on the money we borrow. It is not free. We borrow the money on the market or from trust funds. This is a big deal. The American people need to know that the promise this law will not add to the debt is absolutely false. This is based on, the GAO said, accepted accounting principles and a realistic scenario of what is likely to happen over time should the plan be implemented. One of the things they say is the cuts they made to Medicare providers, hospitals and doctors, that provide health care to seniors are so large they will not be sustainable. If they continue to cut in that fashion over a period of years, hospitals would close and doctors would quit practicing. You cannot do it. We are already dealing with a doc fix now on a bill that cut doctors more than they could reasonably be cut. Every year we have to find up to $20 billion to get the money to fund the doctors because we can't cut below a certain amount. So I would say this GAO number is low. As we wrestle with the great responsibilities we have been given as Senators, yes, we need to think about what would happen in the next few days if the government does not function. I hope we avoid that. We absolutely should avoid that because it is not good. We need to be asking ourselves what are we doing to our children, grandchildren, and the financial stability of the United States of America with a new entitlment program that is going to commence now, by January 1, that will add more than $6.2 trillion to the debt of the United States. This is a huge amount. I ask our colleagues to consider it. One more matter that shows how we get in trouble financially is when the numbers get so large nobody can quite follow. The larger the numbers get, the harder it is to follow. Under the legislation of the Affordable Care Act, the plan was to cut up to $500 billion over the next 10 years from Medicare by cutting providers while promising patients would receive just as good health care as they always did. We are not cutting your benefits, we are only going to cut providers. We have done this before. At some point you can't sustain that. On December 23, the night before this bill passed, I spoke with the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, our own accountant, and told him in a conference call words to this effect: It is absolutely unbelievable to me, Mr. CBO Director, Mr. Elmendorf, that we are about to vote tomorrow morning, we are told, on the largest health care bill since Medicare and we don't know how to count the money. I think they are double-counting the money. This is unbelievable, how many hundred billion dollars we are talking about, it seems to me. I could hear somebody on his end of the conference call say: It is double-counting. I heard someone say it in the background.

Mr. SESSIONS. I ask unanimous consent of the Chair for 1 additional minute.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Presiding Officer. Mr. Elmendorf, by the next morning, gave us a letter. It laid out and contained this language. He said: The key point is that savings to the HI trust fund-- That is the Medicare trust fund. --of $500 billion over 10 years, the savings from the HI trust fund by cutting providers and increase Medicare taxes under PPACA-- That is the Affordable Care Act. --would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs. You can't simultaneously say you are using this money to support Medicare by making Medicare more sustainable and then spend the money on a new program because then it is not going to be available to strengthen Medicare. That double-counting is not even taken into account in the $6.2 trillion figure derived from the GAO study. I would conclude by saying the unfunded liabilities in this law are huge. They are a direct threat to the future of the United States financially. At this point in history, we need to be saving Medicare, we need to be saving Social Security, and we need to be saving Medicaid. We don't need to be starting another program without sufficient funds to pay for it. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I would like to use 15 minutes of the appointed time and be notified after 10 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair. Look, what we are here today about is the Democratic majority in the Senate has built a fortress around ObamaCare--the Affordable Care Act. They have refused steadfastly any serious reevaluation of the law. They have blocked every attempt to do that. The House, Senator Cruz, Republicans, and others are trying to force this Congress to confront the obvious flaws in that law, and they have refused to do so. That is why it has all come down to a debate at the end of the year over what we are going to do. Do we just give up? Do we allow the majority in the Senate to not even allow votes in the weeks to come? They are not. They will not do it unless they are forced to do so. They made a strategic decision to reject and fight off any attempt to bring up a vote on the floor of the Senate. People in America, I am sure, cannot believe if a Member of the Senate desires to try and fix and improve the Affordable Care Act that they cannot go to the floor and get a vote on it. That is exactly what has been happening ever since it passed. Polling data show the American people want substantial changes to it. Members, even Democrats, have said they want some change. But nothing gets voted on that will actually make a real change in the law. It is the plan of President Obama and Senator Reid to accept no change. Indeed, Senator Reid has made clear his plan is to move to a single-payer system. He said openly and publicly just a few weeks ago he wants a single payer system for all health care in America--the United States Government. And that can only be described as socialized medicine. That is what the goal is, and we have got to confront this. So I wanted to say that first of all. But as ranking member of the Budget Committee, I want to share a few thoughts about where we are financially and what is going to happen with this legislation. First and foremost we have to know that the Affordable Care Act is deeply unsound financially. The President's promise--repeatedly made--was that it would not add one dime to the debt. He said it would not add one dime to the deficit ``now or ever, period.'' Is that true? No, sir, it is not true. This is a hugely unsound new entitlement program that will endanger the financial future of America at a time when we need to quit digging ourselves deeper in debt and begin to work ourselves out of debt. The Acting President pro tempore is on the Budget Committee. We both know these numbers. We are dealing with Social Security, desperately trying to figure out a way to make Social Security sound so our seniors can go to bed at night and not have any worries about the future of Social Security. Medicare is even more stressed. Now we are adding this law--ObamaCare. What does it do? The Government Accountability Office, headed by an independent person, actually appointed by President Obama, has issued a report stating that under the likely financial scenario over the next 75 years--that is how they figure Social Security and Medicare's liabilities--this bill will add $6.2 trillion to the Federal deficit. Social Security's unfunded liabilities are only $7.7. We are talking about adding almost as much debt to the future of the United States and to our children and grandchildren as Social Security has in liabilities. We need to be fixing Social Security, not creating a new entitlement. We need to be fixing Medicare, not adding another one. We need to be fixing some of our pension plans that are unsound, not adding more debt. We were promised it wouldn't happen. We are going to have a budget point of order later, and we will hear arguments that ObamaCare is good for the budget. But this is how a country goes broke. This is how a country goes broke. We are going to have a score from the Congressional Budget Office that says over 10 years this law will bring in more money than goes out. In one sense that is correct. But where did they get the money? The money--$500 billion or so--is coming out of Medicare. But it is Medicare's money. They are cutting doctors and hospitals--providers-- $500 billion, and they are saying, therefore, the U.S. Treasury--the conventions of unified budget accounting, as CBO says--will show it as increased money. Therefore, it can be spent by an entirely new program. But it is not money for a new program or the U.S. Treasury. It is not Congress' money. This is Medicare's money, and it will be loaned by the Medicare trustees to the U.S. Treasury so it can be spent on this program. The ObamaCare money that comes out of the Medicare savings is borrowed money. It is not free money. It is not new money. It is borrowed--borrowed from the trustees of Medicare--and it is headed in a downward spiral, and they will call those loans in very soon. There is just no money there, and that is how it all comes out. The Government Accountability Office says under a realistic set of assumptions this law will add $6 trillion--$6.2 trillion--to this country's deficit. Mr. Holtz-Eakin said in the first 10 years there will be $500 billion added to the debt of America. Supporters of the new law will contend otherwise, but it is indisputable that this is so. We are adding to the debt and it is going to threaten the future of America. I would also point out, as we work our way through the entire effort to focus on our debt and what we will do for America, we need to understand how this accounting works. The Congressional Budget Office, on December 23, the night before the bill passed in 2009, in response to my request, sent a letter saying you cannot simultaneously use the money for Medicare and to fund a new program, though the conventions of accounting might indicate that. You cannot use it for both purposes. They used the phrase it was ``double counting.'' That is our own Congressional Budget Office. The night before this bill was rammed through the Senate, they told us that. Yet we still have the President--we still have Members of this body insisting this law is fully paid for and will not add to the deficit ever, period. Nothing could be more false. Nothing could be more false. I know there are good people who feel like we have to keep this process moving, we have to send something to the House, and they will want to move this bill to the House. I understand that. But I just want everybody to know that we all need to fully understand that this health care law is unsound financially. This health care law will never work. Second, I am disappointed that our colleagues in the House have sent a bill over that spends at a rate that would add $20 billion more to our debt than the Budget Control Act would allow. Colleagues, we have got to be so careful about this. I know they have an excuse for it. I know they say that by the end of the year the sequester will cut those spending levels down and it will not add to the debt at the end of the year. Don't worry about it, they say. But right now we couldn't agree, so we just spent more money on the discretionary side than we should have otherwise. We are going to spend $988 billion instead of $968 billion, $20 billion more at that rate. But they say after 3 months or 2 months, when this CR ends, it will all be fixed. I am worried about that. It is going to be harder, I think. I think the pressure is going to be more intense 2 months from now to keep spending at that level. I don't think they should have sent a bill to this floor, even though they can correctly argue that if sequester laws stay in effect, it will be reduced. I recognize that they can continue to argue that.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair. But fundamentally it is going to be harder for us to confront this problem as we go forward in the future because we will have more cuts over 9 or 10 months than would otherwise have been the case if we don't make any of them in the first 2 months in this Congress. I would say to our colleagues who are thinking, ``We may need to waive the budget points of order. Let's just go forward, and somehow we will work all this out in the future. We are going to be watching''--I can't support it. But those who feel they have to do so to keep the ball moving when the House sends another bill back over here, it ought to be on the budget level, not above it. I hope they will do that. That will relieve one more problem. But the truly big issue is how to understand the cost of this health care law. My colleagues, using a score from the Congressional Budget Office, are going to contend that if you eliminate ObamaCare, it will cost the Treasury money. That is what they are going to tell you, and that is the score CBO would issue. But the CBO Director told us it is double-counting the money. You can't score this money twice. But according to the conventions of accounting and the 10-year window over which this occurs, by reducing the cost of Medicare, you can therefore spend more money to fund a new program. You can do that, and it will appear not to add to the debt. But you can't count the amount of money coming in because it is Medicare's money. It is simply borrowing money from Medicare. It is going to add to the debt. Our own independent Government Accountability Office has said, according to the likely analysis of events over the next 75 years, as they do for Social Security and Medicare, this plan is going to add $6.2 trillion to the Federal deficit. In other words, what they are saying is that you would have to deposit $6 trillion into an account today to have enough money to honor the commitments that are being made with the Affordable Care Act. So that much money, in addition to the other revenues and taxes that are in the legislation and the payments that are made by Americans, is not going to be enough, and we need that much more money. But we are committing this benefit to American citizens. It becomes an entitlement. We are committing these benefits to them, and we don't have the money to honor the commitment. That cannot continue. We cannot as a nation continue down this path. Wall Street and others are telling us we have to get our house in order. We cannot continue to add to our debt in this fashion. I understand the difficulties Members will be facing when they cast a vote as they come up here today. I am not going to criticize any Member on their vote--although I am not going to vote to waive the budget. I think we ought to stay within our budget, and I think we cannot get by with this idea that the Affordable Care Act is going to improve the financial condition of America when it absolutely is not.

Mr. SESSIONS. I would be delighted. The Senator is such a fine leader of the Appropriations Committee and one of the most knowledgeable people here, a person I respect greatly.

Mr. SESSIONS. I certainly do. And I think I may have had a little role in the fact that a budget was passed since I had been complaining that the Democratic majority went 4 years without passing a budget and several years without even bringing it to the floor. While the House was passing a budget every year, the Senate failed and refused a fundamental legal requirement to even produce one. But this year our new chairman, Senator Murray, did bring a budget forward and did move it through the body. There was a concern--I didn't raise it, but a number of colleagues on this side of the aisle said: We are glad to have the budget move forward, but we want you to commit not to raise the debt ceiling on a budget reconciliation because you could raise the debt ceiling with 51 votes instead of 60 votes. I know the Senator may not like that, but that is exactly what was said. And Senator Durbin on this floor said he did not think it could be done under the rules of the Senate and that we could raise the debt ceiling on the budget. But then why wouldn't the Senator agree to that? So the request from the people who objected to sending a budget forward to conference was based solely--and they expressed it repeatedly--on the concerns that budget reconciliation would be used to raise the debt and therefore not be subject to a 60-vote majority.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I yield the floor. If I have not used all my time, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, as I explained the unfunded liabilities of the Affordable Care Act, I now want to make something clear. It is a lot more than that. It is unlike Social Security and Medicare, where there is a dedicated tax that supports those programs that are on our payroll withholding every week, that FICA withholding, dedicated to Social Security and Medicare. There is no dedicated tax support for ObamaCare. If you assume all the new taxes they raise are actually used to fund ObamaCare, then there would be a $6.2 trillion shortfall, a liability. But if you do it like it should be accounted and assume that none of this money raised in taxes is actually dedicated to the Affordable Care Act, then it runs about $17 trillion according to estimates by my Budget Committee staff. Congress is well-known for this. Unless your tax money is absolutely legally dedicated to something, it gets spent on other things. So we have no confidence we will come in with just $6.2 trillion. It is likely to be far higher than that, the way we know this body operates. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I want to share some remarks about the comments. I want to say Senator Boxer is a great advocate and does a good job as chair of our Committee on the Environment and Public Works. Pretty much we have had unanimous votes on bills that came out, Republicans and Democrats voting unanimously on the bills that came out. Sometimes we have differences and we fight over them, but a lot of times things are getting done around here. But I will just say it is not actually fully correct to say the Republicans opposed the President's health care bill, the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. The American people opposed it by huge numbers. They, through an election, a remarkable election, and in some very close wins, found themselves with 60 votes in the Senate of the United States. They had a majority in the House, and they decided to move this bill. They shut out Republicans, moved a partisan bill, and they got it through--even when Scott Brown, if you remember, was running for the Senate in Massachusetts to fill the late Senator Kennedy's seat. He promised he would be the vote that would deny the 60 votes and stop this bill, and he won in Massachusetts. But he couldn't get here quickly enough. They were able to get the bill passed before he got here to kill it. This has never been a popular bill and the polling number shows it is even less popular today than it was when they rammed it through. So this is not a little bitty matter. It threatens our Republic, I think, in a lot of different ways. I have talked about that earlier. But I would say--to understand the dynamics on the floor of the Senate--you have to understand that the majority leader, having gotten his bill passed on Christmas Eve 2009, after all kinds of maneuvers to get that accomplished, has protected it from any further debate and discussion. He has blocked any ability to bring up the legislation and to be able to amend it and fix some of the obvious flaws in it. One of the top drafters, the Senate Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee, has called it a train wreck, and it at least at needs reform. It really cannot succeed in its present form. Senator Reid has blocked any effort to bring up a bill and fix it. The American people might find that hard to believe, but I will repeat it: Since that time there have been numerous efforts on behalf of Members from this side to call up amendments and call up legislation to alter, amend, and replace the ObamaCare legislation. He has utilized parliamentarian maneuvers, filling the tree, to block that. It cannot continue. This is about to become a law. It is going to hammer the American economy. It is already hammering the economy. The American people don't want it, and we are not going to go silent. So this is the beginning of the fight. Senator Cruz--maybe people can disagree with his tactics--but he drove and raised the issue. We need to keep talking about it; we just do. It is time for this Congress to listen to the voice of the American people. Senator Boxer is a good person, and she said President Bush had $1 trillion deficits and President Obama has reduced them in half. The highest deficit President Bush ever had in the 8 years he served as President was $487 billion, which is a lot of money--too much. The year before, it was $168 billion. When President Obama took office, what was the first thing that was passed within weeks? A $1 trillion stimulus bill to supposedly stimulate the economy, but the money went out to government agencies and departments, and it had no stimulus impact at all. It was $1 trillion--every penny of which was borrowed. That year the deficit went up well over $1 trillion. The next year it was well over $1 trillion, the next year well over $1 trillion, and the next year well over $1 trillion. In the first 4 years of President Obama's leadership, we had the highest deficits ever recorded in America. It is a stunning event, and he fought every day--and there were fights on the floor--to spend more and borrow more. Some of his advisers would say: The reason this economy isn't growing so well is because we didn't borrow and spend enough. We didn't have enough. We should have created more debt and should have spent more. It has resulted to this date in the lowest rebound economically from a recession since World War II, and we are not doing well in that regard. It is absolutely not so that President Obama bears no responsibility for the unprecedented debt that he has run up during this time. He is still advocating for $1 trillion more in spending above the Budget Control Act levels that he agreed to in the summer of 2011. He wants to spend $1 trillion more than what he signed as an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. I know he didn't want to, but Congress said: We are going to cut back on your credit card. Now we are going to raise the debt ceiling $2 trillion, as you said you need, but we demand that you reduce the growth of spending over 10 years by $2 trillion. We were projected to have spending growth to $10 trillion over the current rate of spending, which is about $3.6 trillion a year. We were going to increase it by a total of $10 trillion. Under BCA, if we adhere to it, we would increase it by $8 trillion, not $10 trillion. That is not going to bankrupt America. There is no reason we can't run this government by growing the spending by $8 trillion instead of $10 trillion. So it is unbelievable that we make that point. I know the budget balanced in the last years of the 1990s, and President Clinton proudly claims credit for that, and he was a part of it. But I haven't forgotten that the Republican House was in a constant battle over Democratic President Clinton's spending levels, and there was actually a fairly long shutdown of the government to contain the growth of spending, and it resulted in a balanced budget. That is how it happened. There was credit enough to go to both sides of that. We need health care reform. It needs to be smartly and effectively done. We can improve health care in our country, but it does not have to tank the American economy, and that is what has been happening in recent days. I was going to talk about that, without much reference to ObamaCare and the health care bill--which is a negative factor of economic growth of very large proportions--but I just followed my friend and able colleague, Senator Boxer, and I wanted to share those points. Last Thursday I delivered the first in a series of speeches looking at the state of our economy. I directed my staff on the Budget Committee--I am the ranking Republican there--to specifically analyze conditions facing working Americans so I could share those findings directly with the Members of the Senate. Both parties need to focus their efforts on defending working Americans from policies--Washington policies too often--that damage their financial well-being. It is happening. Last week I discussed the falling incomes and social challenges eroding the security of the middle class. Today I will focus on the jobless recovery and the general problem of unemployment. Few things matter more to a working family than the pace of the economy, especially after a hard recession. If on the one hand, it is a rapid, strong recovery, jobs will return quickly, people will return to the workforce, and a great deal of social suffering will be averted. If, on the other hand, it is a slow recovery, then businesses don't create many new jobs, wages stagnate or fall, as they have been doing, and families continue to borrow from their savings to pay their bills. Life is spent wondering and worrying about the future. We live today in the slowest economic recovery--they called it an economic recovery--since the end of World War II. No recovery from a recession since the end of World War II has been as slow as this one. Not counting the Great Recession, we have had 11 recessions since 1945. All had faster, stronger recoveries than this one--with all of them we bounced back quicker. How slow is this economic recovery? Well, it has been nearly 6 years since the recession began in December of 2007. We still have not returned to the number of jobs we had 6 years ago. We haven't come back to the number of people working that we had 6 years ago. We are 1,988,000 jobs--almost 2 million--short of the 146,273,000 jobs we had when the recession began. This is not good. Let's compare that with the other two bad postwar recessions: the contractions of 1973 through 1975 and 1981 and 1982--serious recessions. The recession of 1973 lasted 16 months. The recession of the 1981 collapse lasted 16 months, and the recession of 2007 lasted until June of 2009, or 18 months. Working people were hit hard by these two earlier recessions. The unemployment rate rose to 9 percent in 1975 and 10.8 percent in 1982. The highest monthly unemployment rate for the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 was 10 percent. Our unemployment rate didn't hit as high as 1982. There is not much difference in the severity and length of these recessions. They were pretty similar. Even so, total jobs had recovered by 25 months after the start of the 1973 recession and by 28 months after the recovery from the 1981 recession. It has been 70 months, however, since the start of the 2007 recession, and employment has not yet recovered. Lost hours of work is another and even better way to gauge the failure of the current recovery. It is not simply the number of jobs in the economy but the number of hours worked that strongly influences the pace of economic activity. In the fourth quarter of 2007, just as the recession was starting, Americans worked about 236 billion hours--that is a lot of hours. We still have not returned to that level. In the third quarter of 2013, this last quarter, the Labor Department estimated Americans still only worked 232 billion hours. That is a shortfall of 3.5 billion hours. This decline is greater per worker since the population of available workers has increased by 9 million. So we have got 9 million more workers and a decline in the number of hours worked, and it is still well below what the number was in 2007. This is not the kind of recovery we need to be looking for. Still another way to show the slowness of this recovery is to measure how much higher GDP--the economy today--is compared to the start of the recession. It turns out that economic output is 4.4 percent higher. Compare this with the 1973 and 1981 recessions. By this time after the 1973 recession, GDP was 17.9 percent higher, and GDP after the 1981 recession by this time was 20 percent higher. That is, the economy was 20 percent bigger by this time after the 1981 recovery. Our current economy is only 4.4 percent larger. The 1981 economic gains were five times as great as this. These are the top line numbers. What do they mean to real people? Below this surface we find extensive economic suffering throughout our Nation. There are 25 percent more discouraged workers today--988,000 versus 793,000--than there were in June of 2009 when the recession ended. We had 366,000 discouraged workers when the recession started in 2007, which means we have had an increase of 172 percent in this sad number in 6 years. One of the most stunning developments of this recovery has been the decline in the labor force participation rate. This is a fundamental indicator of the breadth and depth of a recovery and of economic growth. Today 58.7 percent of the noninstitutionalized population 16 years of age and older is working--58.7 percent today. In 2007 that number stood at 62.7 percent. The current rate of labor force participation is the lowest this Nation has seen since 1978. The percentage of the population working today in the age group of workers is the lowest it has been since 1978, and it is not getting better. This decline is due to two factors: increased unemployment, and labor force dropouts--discouraged people who are no longer even looking for work. How many people are we talking about? If the same percentage of the population was working today as was working in 2007, we would have 154,089,000 workers. Since we currently only have 144,285,000 million people working, it appears that 9,804,000 people are out of the labor force--9 million normally expected to be working are out of the labor force. When they are out of the labor force, it does not show up in the unemployment rate. It is only people who are actually applying for jobs who show up in the unemployment rate. So the unemployment rate we see today hides the real depth of the unemployment problem we have in America. Of the 5.7 million who totally dropped out, more retirements and more disability than in 2007 explain about two-thirds of those dropouts. People went on disability, went on retirement. Many of them went on retirement at 62 when it would have been better if they could have had a decent job opportunity to work to 65, 66, 70, but they have dropped out because they are older workers, perhaps, and were unable to find decent work. But it cannot be good for America for millions of people to take their Social Security at 62 rather than later, too often because no work is available. More than 4 million unemployed Americans have been out of work for more than 27 weeks--4 million--more than half the year they have been unemployed. All told, 11.5 million Americans want to work but cannot find jobs. The unemployment rate for those between the ages of 16 and 19 who are not in school or in the military or in prison stands at 24 percent. So teenagers have a very large number, and the number is much higher for minority teenagers and young men particularly. This is the highest teenage unemployment has ever been this far into a recovery. It is very dangerous for our society to have so many young people--especially young men whose unemployment rates are even higher than females--out of work. This is not good for America. We need to have a growing economy that creates jobs, and we don't need to be bringing in--under the immigration bill that passed the Senate, we don't need to be bringing in twice the number of low-skilled workers as we have been doing, as we have a generous immigration policy. This bill would double the number of guest workers coming into America to take jobs that children need to be doing. They need to be working. We don't need teenagers and young people--19, 20, 22, 23--with nothing to do month after month, year after year. At 13 percent, unemployment among African Americans is about twice the national average of 7.4 percent. Unemployment among Hispanics stands at 9.4 percent. Unemployment among those with less than a high school education is 11 percent. But we want to bring in millions of people without high school educations to compete for the few jobs that are out there. Again, these statistics, as bad as they are, mask the real-life implications of the slow economy. These are young careers that have failed to launch when they should, marriages perhaps put off until the economy improves, families not started until couples can afford children--a generation of children that arrive out of wedlock. We have retirements taken too early, loss of homes, perhaps; older children at home who should be out on their own, and we would normally expect them to be working; and lots of part-time, extra jobs at lower pay just to make ends meet. Indeed, one of the most devastating statistics is the growth in part- time work instead of full-time work. It is a stunning number. We have 5,188,000 fewer full-time jobs today than in December of 2007--5 million fewer. That equals a decrease in full-time employment of 4.3 percent, even though our population is growing. At the same time, part-time employment has grown by 3 million over this same time period. That is an increase in part-time jobs of 13 percent. So make no mistake, the total number of jobs since 2007 is down, and for the people who are finding work, the work they find too often can only be part time. Now 77 percent of the people who got a job since January of this year got a part-time job, not a full time job. When we see, colleagues, the reports of 190,000 jobs, 200,000 jobs, remember, 77 percent of those are part-time jobs. Those numbers hide the reality of the danger in our workforce. Nearly 90 percent of the increase in part-time work represents people who, according to the Labor Department, ``could only find part-time work.'' In other words, they would like full-time but could only find part-time work. At the end of 2007, this number stood at 1.2 million. However, the most recent data shows that this population has grown by 127 percent to 2,714,000--a 127-percent increase in this number. Job growth in the economy since 2007 has been principally in part- time work. We are becoming a part-time economy. The President's health care law, without any doubt--I don't believe any economist, even if they try to sugar-coat it the best they could, would deny that the President's health care law is playing a major factor from the shift from full-time work to part-time work. As we all know, part-time workers don't enjoy the same health, retirement, vacation, and other benefits as full-time workers do. It is exceedingly hard indeed to succeed in this economy and in a career with only a part-time job. We must recognize one of the biggest contributors to the decline in full-time jobs is the health care bill we have been debating. As others have observed, it is destroying the 40-hour workweek. That is what a union leader said: It is destroying the 40-hour workweek. It is even an assault on workers. Let me tell my colleagues about one constituent who wrote my office. Linda Askew, from Sheffield, AL, wrote in July, asking Congress to do something to help. Ms. Askew has a small neighborhood business. She employs less than 10 people. According to Ms. Askew: We have been here for almost 50 years. We have tried to help our employees have health care for over 10 years now . . . The new premiums are $590 per month for single coverage and $1,520 for family coverage. . . . These costs are almost becoming unbearable for our company. More troubling than that, in the letter-- she got a letter from her insurance company-- was that part of the reason for this increase was blamed on a new health care reform fees and taxes that health insurers must pay on behalf of all their groups . . . So to reduce the cost of health care in America, the health care bill raised taxes on the insurance companies that provide it. It gets passed along. She continues: Small businesses cannot keep up with these increases. In the coming days, as I document the conditions facing American workers, I will also address the many causes of this economic deterioration--and there are many. There are many causes for the deterioration in the economy. Republicans and Democrats need to heed these problems I have stated, including a decline in wages, beginning in 1999 through a different administration. The question is, What are we going to do about it, Republicans and Democrats? We need to consider these issues and deal with them. What we are seeing is immensely troubling. As Washington grows larger, Washington grows wealthier and more powerful, American workers are being impoverished, sidelined, and marginalized. We see the numbers showing that the only area of America that has been showing raised growth is Washington. Washington! The government class is being enriched at the expense of the middle class. From deficit spending to Federal regulation to the immigration bill, Washington is pursuing policies that benefit lobbyists, the well-connected, government employees, regulators, and bureaucrats, but that are reducing the wages and job opportunities for everyday American workers. The numbers are clear. Both parties need to shut out the special interests, work to develop policies that will restore our history of dynamic economic growth--and we can do so--growth that benefits all the people of our Nation. What is the response we get from the governing class? What do they tell us the problem is? On the deficit, what do they say the problem is? We haven't spent enough money. It is your problem, American people. Just send us more money and we won't have deficits anymore. Trust us. Send us more money. The President proposed a $1 trillion tax increase in his budget. It was rejected, but that is what he proposed and that is what he advocates for. So they want to spend more. They believe they can invest. We give the government more money, and it is going to invest in the economy and everybody is going to be better off. But we have seen that movie. It has been going on for 5 years, to a degree unprecedented in the history of America. They say, Don't worry, borrow and spend. Don't worry about the debt. We can just borrow more and spend more and that will stimulate the economy. They say we need to regulate more. We need to block more American energy and import more, I suppose, from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and that is going to improve our economy. Really? We are going to drive up the cost of energy and coal and that is going to improve jobs in America? That is going to help a working person who now has to pay $200, $250 a month for his gas bill to commute? That is supposed to be good for us? All we have heard is more taxes, more regulation, more government, more debt. That is the policy we are seeing here. I haven't seen anything that has the power to produce the growth and prosperity that we need. So I say we have to get over this. We have tried this. It is not working. These policies have made it worse. We have to get back to classical American policies that validate individual responsibility, that allow people to progress and make more, that don't drive us to import more oil, that don't put regulation by massive numbers all over the economy, driving down productivity and driving up costs. That is the kind of thing we need to be doing. If we will do that, and if we will allow the vitality of the American spirit to flourish and flower and get this burden off the backs of our people, I think we will be surprised how much better things can be. It is a serious crisis. This trend has been going on far too long. We can't ignore it. We can't say it is just the recession. We have been going along like this since 2007. We have not seen the growth we need. The tax and spend and borrow policies haven't worked. It is time for us to confront that. I hope my colleagues will. I will continue to examine the data we are seeing out there and share it with my colleagues and maybe we can surprise ourselves how much good we can do in the long run. Thank you, Madam President. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I thank Senator Durbin and appreciate his leadership and courtesy. I want to speak for a few moments about the impact of the President's health care law, the Affordable Care Act. Although the law hasn't been fully implemented yet, this massive overhaul--Federal takeover, really--of the health care system is already proving to be anything but affordable. My team on the Budget Committee, where I am the ranking member, did some research on this issue, and we want to know what the real costs would be and how it will play out in the end. So what I will share with everyone now are some very important facts that all of us need to know. The President has repeatedly said we have a health-spending problem, but what he hasn't said is that this law will make that problem worse. Last week actuaries from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services--those are our top Federal health care people, CMS--issued a report, and its findings were unequivocal. This law will lead to higher health care costs. By 2022 the law is projected to increase cumulative health spending by $621 billion. That is the report from CMS. They basically work for the President of the United States. Next year growth in the private health insurance premiums--the increases in our own private insurance premiums--is expected to accelerate to 6 percent from 3.2 percent this year, 2013. So the increase in premiums, CMS projects, will go up from 3.2 percent to 6 percent. The Congressional Budget Office, CBO--they work for us here in the Congress--also released its annual long-term budget outlook last week. It concluded, 1, that Federal health care spending will ``grow considerably in 2014 because of changes made by the Affordable Care Act . . .'' They says the health care law is by far the single biggest factor driving the growth in Federal health care spending over the next decade--accounting for 53 percent of projected growth. So our own government agencies are finding--which most Americans knew, despite promises to the contrary that were repeatedly made when it passed on Christmas Eve after it was rammed through this Senate-- that this bill can't be done without increased costs, and government agencies are making that statement today. It is not my opinion, it is what our own agencies say. Democrats have repeatedly complained that the law would bend the cost curve. The President said it would slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government. That is what he promised. He said it would ``slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.'' Democrats--pushing the law, against the wishes of the American people, in 2009--claimed the law would not add to our deficit and would improve our Federal balance sheet, our budget situation. The President promised he would not sign a plan that ``adds one dime to our deficits now or any time in the future.'' That is an unequivocal promise. It sort of reminds me of the promise ``read my lips, no new taxes.'' Surely a colossal misrepresentation of the debt impact of a gargantuan government takeover of health care is a serious matter. The nonpartisan actuaries at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMS, project that this law will increase health care spending as a share of our total economy. In other words, the law bends the cost curve in the wrong direction. It bends it alright, but in the wrong direction. We need to understand how the Democrats were able to assert that their plan was financially sound, which they insisted on repeatedly, as we went through weeks of debate on this matter. This is how. This is very important, I say to my colleagues. Senators do not understand this fully and Congressmen do not understand this, and I don't think the American people fully understand it. The Democrats' claims about the fiscal impact of the health care law were based on monumental accounting maneuvers and multiple other gimmicks. Before the law passed, the Congressional Budget Office warned that the law would ``maintain and put into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time.'' That is careful language from our accountants at the Congressional Budget Office. I am sure they were pressured not to say that. At that time, both Houses of Congress were controlled by our Democratic colleagues, with 60 votes in the Senate. They warned us that the law would ``maintain and put into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time.'' Isn't that true. CBO and the CMS Actuary also highlighted that hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings were double counted. We need to understand this. This is a key point we need to understand. I made an inquiry to them. I made an inquiry to them late in December 2009. I got the letter from them the night before the Christmas Eve vote in the Senate to pass ObamaCare--on December 23--and I wanted and insisted that we get a clear answer on the question involving approximately $500 billion in Medicare savings, which I contended was double counted. They were claiming they were going to use this money to strengthen Medicare and they were also claiming the money was available to fund ObamaCare. Can we do both with the same money? If we are confused about that issue, if we can't understand that issue, now we can begin to understand why this country is in such disastrous financial shape. This is what the CBO responded by saying on the night of December 23: The key point is that savings to the HI trust fund-- that is Medicare-- under PPACA-- that is the Affordable Care Act-- would be received by the government only once, so that they cannot be set aside for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs.'' How simple is that? They go on: To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government's ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government's fiscal position. Right before the vote, they said, in effect, you are double-counting this money and you can't use the money simultaneously to benefit Medicare, which is where the money is, as well as use the money to fund ObamaCare, or a new health care plan, or any other policy. This is so basic. The next spring, in March of 2010, CBO estimated that without this double counting, the health care law increases the deficit over the first 10 years and the subsequent decade. Under the conventions of accounting, it would appear we could have this health care plan, at least for 10 years, and it would appear that it reduces the Federal deficit, but that is because of the conventions of a unified budget accounting. The money that comes into Medicare--the money that is saved by cutting Medicare providers--is Medicare money. It is not the Treasury's money to spend on a new health care program. It is Medicare's money. So because it looks as though in the short run we have an advantage, they were able to count it and say, Well, money coming in is equal to the money going out, but they forget that all of the people paying into Medicare off their FICA and off their checks each week are going to draw that out in the long run from this trust fund. Everybody who is paying in is going to draw out all of that money, and more, because it is unsound actuarially. If my colleagues want to see other gimmicks, look at the CLASS Act Program which they counted on to produce $70 billion in premium revenue over its first ten 10 years as enrollees began paying premiums into the system. The program was so actuarially unsound that the Secretary of HHS had to notify Congress, as she was required to do, that there was ``no viable path forward'' to implement the CLASS program. With that decision, and a lot of pressure from some of us in Congress, nearly 60 percent of the Democrats claimed deficit reduction in the first 10 years disappeared. We had to eliminate that. So that amounted to 60 percent of the so-called surplus that would be produced by the legislation. Those savings from the CLASS program were not real and should never have been counted in the first place. The Wall Street Journal called the CLASS Program ``a special act of fiscal corruption.'' One of our Democratic Members--actually, the chairman of the Budget Committee at the time, Kent Conrad--said it was a Ponzi scheme. In the first 10 years, the numbers looked good, but over a period of time the money drawn out was going to be far greater than ever was put in. They claimed to produce $70 billion in assets for America when over the lifetime of the program it was a devastating, unsound program that if a private insurance company had tried to offer it and promote it in that fashion, I am sure someone would have gone to jail. Absolutely unsound financially. Eventually, Congress had no choice but to repeal the CLASS Act, this bankrupt entitlement program, as part of the fiscal cliff bill at the end of last year. But the case of the CLASS program is but a sign of what is to come under the rest of the health care law. While the American people always knew this health care bill would never pay for itself, they did not fully understand how the President and his supporters could insist otherwise. I wish I had been able to better explain at the time. I tried, but at the time I was not successful in penetrating the media and the administration's view that the bill would create a surplus for America. Maybe we could have stopped the legislation from being rammed through Congress if we had been more effective on that point. But the facts are crystal clear now. A report issued by the Government Accountability Office--that is our independent GAO--in February of this year, at my request, revealed that under a realistic set of assumptions, the health care law is projected to increase the Federal deficit by 0.7 of the entire GDP over the next 75 years, an amount that is equivalent to $6.2 trillion in today's dollars. So it would add $6.2 trillion in unfunded liabilities to the United States of America over the lifetime of the program, over the next 75 years. This estimate excludes debt service or interest on the debt caused by the shortfall. This is an enormous sum, $6.2 trillion. Let's put it into context. We all know Social Security is financially unsound. We are in a desperate effort now to figure out ways to find the money to make Social Security sound so retirees can know they are going to get their benefits in the future. We all know it must be fixed. At the time this health care law was enacted, the 75-year unfunded liability for Social Security was $7.7 trillion. In passing this bill, we add almost as much unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years to the U.S. Government as Social Security. Instead of putting Social Security on a sound path, this bill added another $6.2 trillion in unfunded liabilities to our debt that is almost as large as Social Security's liabilities. It is a monumental problem we have created for ourselves. We have dug the hole deeper financially, which is the worst thing we could be doing. The first thing we should do is stop digging. This finding seems to strike a nerve with some supporters of the law, so much so that they tried to attack me and argue with the GAO, but attacking the messenger doesn't change the facts. The GAO report is crucial. It clearly answers the question. It sank any validity to the President's claim that his plan would not ``add one dime to our deficits now or at any time in the future, period.'' Health care economist Christopher Conover at Duke University explained that the Government Accountability Office's report did not ``cook the books'' or use ``wacky assumptions.'' According to Professor Conover, GAO's assumptions in this more plausible scenario are a ``carbon copy of those used by the Congressional Budget Office, the Medicare trustees, the Treasury Department, and the Medicare Actuary in their own independently derived long-term budget projections.'' Independently derived long-term budget projections are the techniques that were used in the GAO report, and they found $6 trillion added to our debt. So despite what we were told by the proponents of this law, the truth is that the President's health care law will further increase the cost of health care, it will add to our already unsustainable deficits and debt, and, if fully implemented, would forever alter the relationships not only between patients and their doctors but between the American people and their government. Period. It has been 3\1/2\ years since its passage, and every day we learn more about how the law is harming Americans. Here are some of the important facts: Jobs. Part-time is the new normal. Seventy-seven percent of the jobs that have been created over the last year have been part-time. The Investor's Business Daily has kept a running list of employers who are cutting hours and staff levels because of ObamaCare. Currently, the IBD tally of businesses, including large firms, affected by ObamaCare is 313. This list includes the University of Alabama, which announced it was capping the number of hours students could work for the university because of ObamaCare. Remember, I just indicated 77 percent of the jobs created this year, since January--and it hasn't been that large a number--are part-time jobs, and every economist tells us without any doubt that the President's health care law is driving those decisions by businesses. It is unprecedented. We have never seen this kind of trend. The president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Joseph Hansen, an original supporter of the law, recently said that ObamaCare would have a ``tremendous impact as workers have their hours reduced and their incomes reduced.'' ObamaCare penalizes hard work. According to a new paper by Casey Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago--a premier economics department--the marginal tax hikes included in ObamaCare add up to a 17-percent reduction in the reward for working for median income families. This penalty American workers will take will essentially, he says, erase all gains in labor productivity made over the last decade. This health care law has also led to the loss of health insurance coverage. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the largest security guard provider in the United States--Securitas--will stop offering health insurance because of ObamaCare. We hear that over and over again. This report is in addition to other major companies that employ millions of Americans. These companies include Darden Restaurants--owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster--Home Depot, and Trader Joe's. Small businesses and their workers will be penalized. Democratic colleagues have claimed that most firms are not subject to ObamaCare tax penalties because they have less than 50 workers and are therefore not subject to the employer mandate penalty. But it is not an accurate statement. ObamaCare includes a nondeductible fee on insurance providers that the CBO has warned will get passed back to small business owners who pay for the health insurance of their employees. It is another tax on companies that provide health care to their employees. I recently received a letter from a small business owner in Wetumpka, AL, Leesa Williams of Lee's Auto Repair, to let me know she is already being subjected to this tax even though her business has only 11 employees. She wrote to warn me that if the fee continues, she will be forced to reevaluate the offer of insurance to the small number of people at her repair company. Costs are increasing, premiums are rising, and millions of Americans will lose the coverage they have today. Workers are having their hours--and their paychecks--reduced. Its countless regulations are stifling job creation and adding uncertainty to the already fragile economy. The State director of NFIB/Alabama--a small business group in Alabama--says that Washington is doing a ``lousy job'' of keeping small businesses informed about the law and it will do real damage to them. So where will it end? When will we save ordinary Americans and the American economy from this oncoming train wreck? The administration has taken five steps already to delay the implementation of important parts of this law pertaining particularly to powerful interest groups that are pushing for delays and changes and relief. Many of them are getting it--but not John Q. Citizen. Big businesses unilaterally have been given a break from the law for at least 1 year. The Administration is considering a carve-out for Big Labor. We need to be considering the overall impact of the law on our economy, on jobs, on the length of hours that Americans are working. We need to consider that. The President's health care law will worsen, not improve, our fiscal outlook. That is clear. It is hurting our economy right now. It is clear. It is harming millions of Americans right now, and it is growing the size and scope of government in a huge leap forward. Congress must permanently repeal this unworkable law and start over with health care reform that will actually reduce costs and not hurt everyday Americans in a way that is in the classical American tradition of responsibility and limited government. I wish through this budget and continuing resolution process we could have forced a real debate on this health care law. It is absolutely clear that the leadership in this Senate is stonewalling and refusing to even acknowledge these problems, will not allow amendments or legislation to be brought up and voted on that would fix this law and make it better and help the American economy. So this has been an effort by Senator Cruz and others, and I think everybody on our side is committed to engage in this and to force changes because it will not be, it looks like, accepted voluntarily. There is no consensus that we should even talk about it. Indeed, it is the position of the majority that we will not allow a full and open debate about the way to fix the problems with this law. So the American people, I hope, will continue to relay their views to the Members of this body, and as time goes by we are going to confront this legislation. We are going to be able to force the ability of the American people to have their voices heard in this body. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. SESSIONS. By chance, or maybe because of the significance of it, my first question is very similar to what Senator Roberts had asked, because I have given a lot of thought to this. I haven't signed letters. I haven't said how I was going to vote on this issue. But it was called to my attention that Senator Reid, the majority leader, flatly stated a month ago he believed in a single-payer system. They asked him: Is it the Senator's goal to move toward a single- payer system? And his answer is: yes, yes, absolutely yes. I just left the Budget Committee hearing. We have a great team there, on the Republican and Democrat side, and my friend Sheldon Whitehouse and I had a little exchange about the new health care law, and I thought he was suggesting it wasn't much of a change. So I asked him this, I said: The majority leader said he favors a single-payer system. He said: I do too. It wasn't long ago in the Budget Committee that Senator Bernie Sanders also said he favored a single-payer system. And Senator Roberts mentioned others. And of course the President did. I checked the President's quote from 2003. He has denied it since, when he was trying to get the votes to pass the new law, but in 2003 he said he was a proponent of a ``single-payer universal health system.'' I think this is a huge national issue. This new health care law is clearly driven by an agenda: to have a single payer. So I ask Senator Cruz: If there is a single payer, who will the payer be?

Mr. SESSIONS. In other words, the Federal Government?

Mr. SESSIONS. Let me ask this. In other words, the government is going to be the one that pays for everything. In health care in America there will be only one payer, the government, and it would then, since it is a predominant power, be able to dictate health policy, such as in the socialized medical systems that have failed around the world; would it not?

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, if the Senator will yield again for a question.

Mr. SESSIONS. And is it not true--since Senator Reid has made his position crystal clear ideologically, and based on the actions the Senator from Texas and I have observed--that he has steadfastly resisted any change whatsoever in the legislation as passed, certainly any change that would constrict its power and reach?

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, without yielding the floor, will the Senator yield for a further question?