Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I fully agree, I say to Senator Ensign, with Senator Byrd's view. Senator Byrd wrote this legislation. He also wrote the book, literally, on Senate rules. He is our conscience of the Senate in terms of the great historic role of the American Senate. Senator Byrd has also said this: Using the reconciliation process to enact major legislation prevents an open debate about critical issues in the full view of the public. Health reform and climate change are issues that, in one way or another, touch every American family. Their resolution carries serious economic and emotional consequences. The misuse of the arcane process of reconciliation . . . to enact substantive policy changes is an undemocratic disservice to our people and to the Senate's institutional role. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that it not be in order in the Senate to consider any conference report or House amendment on the fiscal year 2010 budget resolution which contains reconciliation instructions for the Senate.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask for 5 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. I will be delighted to.

Mr. SESSIONS. In fact, the President's budget, this year, proposes to increase domestic discretionary nondefense spending by 11.5 percent. We passed, a few weeks ago, a stimulus plan to spend $800 billion--the largest single appropriations in the history of America; $800 billion-- every penny of it going to the debt. Now we are going to have an 11- percent increase this year in discretionary spending on top of that? You know the rule of 7. It states that at 7-percent growth, your money doubles in 10 years. At 11.5-percent growth, our spending would double in 7 years. The entire spending of the discretionary account would double in 7 years if we maintained this incredible, colossal spending path we are on. I think Senator Gregg is exactly right. Let's at least slow down and let's at least have the 60 votes we would normally have to pass an important piece of legislation if and when--and we certainly are heading to a point where this debt doubles--so at least to go to tripling, we ought to have another vote and slow down and ask ourselves: What in the world are we doing to our children? They are going to be carrying--at this year, as shown on the chart--$800 billion in interest that year. That assumes the interest rate is mainstream. But the truth is, with this much borrowing in these many countries around the world, we could have interest rates higher than that. If the interest rates go up, the $800 billion could become $1 trillion a year easily, and above, if the debt continues to surge. I support the amendment. I am very worried. The numbers we are talking about on the floor are not a political dustup. This is about the future of America. The financial integrity of our country is at stake. We have never spent like this before, except in World War II when we were in a life-and-death struggle. It is not the right thing to do, and I support the amendment. I thank the Chair and yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I see the chairman.

Mr. SESSIONS. I will be glad to yield for a question. I have another request to offer.

Mr. SESSIONS. Yes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I support the Gregg amendment because it at least requires us to focus on the enormity of the wrong we are now committing. This chart I have in the Chamber--you have seen a lot of charts and a lot of obfuscation and numbers thrown around--this chart is not disputable. These numbers come directly from the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the Obama 10-year budget. That budget says that today our debt is $5.8 trillion--$5,800 billion since the founding of the Republic. It will double, in 5 years, to $11.8 trillion--$11,800 billion in 5 years. It will, in 5 more years, triple to $17 trillion of debt. We all know that nothing comes from nothing. We have to pay interest on that debt. CBO has calculated that. We are currently paying $170 billion a year in interest--$170 billion. My home State of Alabama's entire budget is under $10 billion. The federal government spends $40 billion a year on highways. We spend $100 billion on education. We are currently spending $170 billion just on interest on our debt. When this budget gets through, in calculating the interest rate, with some increases--because these debt levels are going to require higher interest to get people to loan us money--it will be $800 billion in interest at the 10th year, which is bigger than the defense budget, bigger than education, bigger than anything else in our account. I know the chairman has the budget on the floor and has said it is a 5-year budget, but the House has a 10-year budget. Director Orszag, the President's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, has said the Senate's budget is 98 percent of the President's budget. So it is not a fundamental change. It is, essentially, the President's budget. This is what the President's budget does. I would contend it is, essentially, indisputable that this is what he calls for. He made choices. He could have cut spending in some other places, but he increased spending. I will add this: He does not project these deficits arising from slow economic growth. Under the President's budget, he projects robust growth, good growth. The only negative year is this year. Next year, he projects solid growth. The next year, I think, 4 percent; 3 years in a row of over 4 percent growth, which is very robust. No recession is projected in this 10-year period. So we have good years, fat times, and all the while we are increasing our debt, tripling it. Senator Gregg is saying, let's at least have a vote that requires 60 votes of the Senate, such as we do on any other important piece of legislation, as to whether we will exceed doubling the debt. Let me tell you the consequences of this. Last week we had difficulty selling our debt. The Brits' debt auction failed. The British are following our model of huge spending increases and surging debt. That idea is being rejected by Central Europe, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, and others. They reject that. They have refused the mortifying request of our own Secretary of Treasury that they go further into debt, spend more money as part of this wild plan to stimulate the economy with unprecedented debt. They have said no. It is irresponsible. In fact, the EU President said it is the road to hell. The idea is, we have to pay this. This has a cost to the future. Yes, it gets money into our economy today, and in the short run there has to be some benefit, although Nobel Prize laureate Gary Becker says it is so poorly drafted--this money we are spending--that we are not going to get nearly as much financial stimulus as we should be getting from it. And you would say: Well, we will soon begin to pay this debt down. The President says he is worried about it. We are going to pay the debt down. But the debt is not going down. The annual deficit, in the last 4 years, surges until CBO scores the 10th-year deficit, in 1 year, at $1.2 trillion. The highest deficit we have ever had prior to this year was $455 billion, and in good economic times, they are projecting a $1.2 trillion deficit. That is the annual deficit, adding to these numbers, as shown on the chart. That is why it triples. They keep going up, up, up. There is no constraint in spending whatsoever. There is no plan to control the entitlement surge, no plan to control spending. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

Mr. SESSIONS. That is correct. Under the President's plan, the average American family will see their energy bills increase up to $3,128 each year. Not over 10 years, but each year. That is how much it will go up. In a candid moment when he was still a candidate, President Obama admitted: Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electric rates would necessarily skyrocket.

Mr. SESSIONS. I will yield to the Senator, our chairman.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I say to Senator Boxer, we will have more in-depth discussion of the cost of this program, but it is not without cost. The President and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget have admitted clearly there will be costs of very large amounts passed forward to our constituents. No. 2, and since it is such an incredibly monumental, colossal intervention and tax on the American economy, it certainly needs more debate than the limited hours that would be given under the budget process. That is what we were asking, that it be treated in the normal order of business and not expedited with a simple majority vote and a limited number of hours of debate. That is what the objection is to.

Mr. SESSIONS. I would agree.

Mr. SESSIONS. Yes.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I wish to be notified when I have 6 minutes remaining.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, as so often has been said, we are on an unsustainable path of taxing and spending and borrowing. The numbers are larger than anything we have ever seen before in the history of our country. We have dueling charts and different views and obfuscation and spin and talk and all that kind of thing, but the bottom line is that our debt is surging under this budget--President Obama's budget and the Senate budget and the House budget--to a degree we have never seen before. I think that much is not disputable. President Bush had a $412 billion deficit at the time of the recession he inherited and the war in which we found ourselves. Then it dropped until 2007 to $161 billion. This Congress, responding to the President's requests--without my vote--added another $150 billion and sent out the checks last spring, which did nothing good for the economy, although everybody was glad to get the free money from Washington. That caused us to reach $455 billion in deficits for that year--the largest in the history of the Republic outside of World War II. This year, the deficit will be $1,800 billion--four times that. Next year, we will be over a trillion. The Congressional Budget Office scores President Obama's 10-year budget as averaging over $900 billion in deficit each year--almost $1 trillion in deficit each year--with no plan to bring that down. In fact, it surges in the 10th year to $1.2 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO is our group, a bipartisan office, though the Democratic majority hires them. But basically we have a good group, and they are honest numbers. So that is what we are looking at. To say President Bush's $455 billion deficit he had in his last year--which every dime of that was appropriated by the Democratically controlled Congress--somehow excuses the path we are on today is unbelievable. The year before last, he had $161 billion. They are going to average $900 billion. What does it mean in terms of interest? Most people can understand this. When you borrow money--and we have to borrow the money. That is where we get the money. It doesn't drop out of the sky. If we print it, it debases the value of the currency. So we are borrowing. That is what we plan to do, to borrow the money and pay interest. This year, interest on our over $5 trillion debt is $170 billion. This chart shows the trend of the interest this Government will pay each year on the debt we are now adding to each year in unprecedented record numbers. It goes from $170 billion in 10 years to $806 billion. This is a thunderous alteration of our financial situation. This is not politics; this is the President's budget as scored by the Congressional Budget Office. These are not my numbers but CBO's numbers. I know the budget we have today on the floor is a 5-year budget. They didn't like the looks of the President's 10-year budget, so my colleagues cut it to a 5-year budget. There is nothing in this 5-year budget that suggests there is any effort to contain the surging deficit in the outyears, which continues to surge. There is nothing in the budget that suggests we are going to control entitlements or any other spending. In fact, Mr. Orszag, who used to be CBO Director but who is now the President's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, says the Senate budget is essentially ``98 percent of what the President wanted.'' So it is essentially the same budget. It puts us on the same path. You can spin it any way you want to, but that is true. Those of us here in the body know that. Anyone who is sophisticated about it understands what is happening, and it is very troubling. The President proposed an 11\1/2\-percent increase in domestic nondefense discretionary spending this year. That is a thunderous number, particularly in light of the fact that we just passed, a few weeks ago, a stimulus package that added $800 billion in spending on top of all of the fundamental baseline spending we have. Scored over 10 years, that is $1.2 trillion based on the interest to it. So our colleagues in the Senate Budget Committee thought that didn't look good and it was easier, I think, to just propose a 5-year budget so they wouldn't have to deal with these numbers out here. No changes were made that would have actually created any real reduction in those numbers. They propose, instead of an 11-percent increase in domestic discretionary spending, a 7-percent increase. That is on top of the stimulus package. Surely we all know that every penny of that stimulus package was paid for by increased debt. We are already in deficits, so when you add another $800 billion, where do you get it? You borrow it. You know the House is not outside of this game. They are in the game too. What does their budget do on nondefense discretionary spending? Their budget projects an 11\1/2\- to 12-percent increase in discretionary spending. They passed their budget. So if we go to conference with this bill, the Senate will be at 7, the House will be at 11 or 12, the President is at 11 or 12, and I suspect we will come out with a budget that increases by about 10. Let me just note that an 11\1/2\-percent increase over 7 years doubles your money. You know the rule of 7: If you have 7 percent on your money, in 10 years it doubles. Here we are talking about a rate of increase that will double nondefense discretionary spending in 10 years--probably considerably less than that. That is why the baseline funding is important. I have to note, in all frankness, that our Senate budget is less honest--I will use that word for lack of a better one--than the President's. The President scored the cost of fixing the alternative minimum tax for 10 years, which he says will be about $600 billion. The President also scored the cost of fixing our doctors' medical payments that, if we do not put money in, will drop down 20 percent. Our Senate budget doesn't fix that. So that is maybe how they make the numbers look a little better. But I want to say these numbers are huge. Madam President, what is the status of our time?

Mr. SESSIONS. I believe the issues we are talking about today are not insignificant. They represent the direction the President of the United States wants this country to go--which is huge spending without compensating cuts, with tax increases but not enough to cover it--and that this is an unsustainable path. This amendment would be a significant step in the right direction. With the stimulus package that has already been passed this year, we will still have sizable increases in discretionary spending across the board, and we will be able to carry on all requirements of our Government without having to spend this much of our children's money. Maybe we won't have to pay $806 billion a year in interest, when our education and highway budgets will each be about $100 billion. The education budget and the State general fund budget in Alabama, for the teachers and schools and highways and police and the Governor and the legislature--all of that is less than $10 billion a year and we are talking about $806 billion in interest? It is not responsible. I thank my colleagues for giving this amendment their serious consideration. I believe it is the right step and the right direction. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I have filed and call up amendment No. 772 and ask that it be the pending business.

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, this is a dangerous exercise we are in. I want to say a couple of things. The surging of debt and interest payments is not due to an expectation by the Senate or the President that we will be in a recession or in an economic slowdown. This is the only year they are scoring us as having negative growth. The President expects 3 percent next year and 4 percent the next and 3 years which is robust growth. Those are the kinds of numbers that President Reagan and President Clinton had in their best years. So that is not why we are going deeper and deeper in debt with a $1 trillion 1-year debt in the 10th year. It is because of spending. States are facing financial crisis. This year States are expected to reduce their spending by 4.1 percent. Are they going to disappear from the face of the Earth? No, they are making some tough decisions. They are wrestling with costs, fraud, accountability, efficiency, productivity. We need to be doing that instead of throwing money at this problem. I suggest that, with the huge surge of stimulus funding, we ought to keep the baseline level for 2 years. We will be spending huge amounts of money--65 percent more nondefense discretionary budget authority in the first 2 years with the stimulus money pouring into the system. So I suggest we could achieve a significant improvement in our long-term fiscal situation by saying during this time of stimulus spending we will have a 2-year freeze and then we will go up to a 1-percent increase. Flat spending does not require us to savage anybody's budget. The power is given to our appropriators to work out exactly how some programs might take more than others. Others could still get an increase. But fundamentally we need to set here, as a principle, we are going to have a budget that actually contains baseline spending and it will save $226 billion over 5 years. I project it would save at least that much in the second 5, maybe more because the baseline of our budget would not have gone up so much. What about this interest on the increasing debt? It amounts, today, in 2009, that every household is paying to the Federal Government $1,435, just to pay the $170 billion in interest. That number in 5 years, 2014, will increase to $3,433 per household, to pay the interest on the debt. With interest rates increasing as we expect--unfortunately as they are going to be doing with this inflationary budget--the number may well be twice that in 10 years. That is an unsustainable path. I propose we take this step. It is a rational step in light of the huge stimulus package we passed--without any cutting of total expenditures but an unprecedented increase in our expenditures would still occur with flat funding, level funding for 2 years and 1 percent for 3 years. I think this is a rational approach we could be proud of. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal noted that nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom will be tempted to use inflation to pay their massive debts. Households in the United States are among the most indebted in the world. People on fixed incomes would be most hurt by inflationary rates. Other nations might also continue to borrow, creating more nations seeking to borrow more and more money, therefore having to raise interest rates to get people to buy their debt, which could mean that the estimate that in 2019 we would be paying 5.5 percent on our Treasury bills would probably be low. In fact, it could be much higher. Indeed, Mr. Rogov was quoted in the Wall Street Journal. He is at Harvard. He was the chief economist for the International Monetary Fund. He predicted--hold your hat. This is something new. He predicted that inflation in the United States could hit up to 10 percent in the next 3 to 5 years, all because of this incredible spending spree we are on. Let me say this to my colleagues. This country is going to come out of this economic problem. We don't have to spend irresponsibly now. We have already spent an incredible amount of money in the stimulus package. Our baseline budget needs to start getting frugal, to challenge us to get more for less in the Federal Government. The best way the U.S. Government can help the American people and the American economy is to use every dollar our Government gets wisely, to get the best possible return for it. You will not get that kind of return throwing money around as rapidly as we are throwing it today. In fact, I think it is a general acknowledgment that the surge in spending under the stimulus package, plus 7, 8, 12 percent increase in general spending, will throw so much money so fast that our Presiding Officer, who doesn't like waste, fraud, and abuse, is going to have a lot to do to watch out for it because, like her, we have been prosecutors and we know that you have dangers out there in spending money unwisely.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. So according to his budget, in year 3, we will have 4 percent growth for 3 consecutive years and never have a recession and have good growth all 10 years, except for this year, where we will have 1.2 percent negative growth. Well, I think that is probably too optimistic. If it is too optimistic, then this figure is going to be worse. It could be far worse. So what does that mean? Does the debt make a difference? This is today's Wall Street Journal, an article by Mr. Mark Whitehouse in which he states that countries with mounting debt burdens will: Ultimately face a growing temptation to allow inflation to accelerate more than they typically would--a move that would slash the value of their debts as the prices of everything else rose. He points out that poor demand at a U.S. Government bond auction and the failure of a separate auction in the UK added to unease about the market's willingness to support the country's heavy borrowing. So we have now not only our country going in debt, we have the UK going into debt, causing the European Union folks to get very nervous. So who is going to buy this debt? When we go into debt, it doesn't just happen; somebody has to loan us the money. Right now, we sell Treasury bills. China has bought a whole lot of them, as well as Saudi Arabia and other countries. We are talking about selling twice as many in 5 years, three times as many in 10, and at the same time other countries are going into debt. Who is going to buy this, and what does it mean to the economy? Mr. Whitehouse quotes Mr. Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard and a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. This is what he said in today's paper. Mr. Rogoff says annual inflation could go as high as 8 to 10 percent within 3 to 5 years in the United States and sooner in the UK. He projects eight to ten percent inflation in 3 to 5 years, based on what we are doing today. He notes that the average inflation rate in 1 month in this country has gone up 25 percent, the projected rate of inflation. Debt matters. There are no free lunches. Nothing comes from nothing. Debts have to be repaid--not only repaid; we have to pay interest on it, and the interest on this debt will go, according to the Congressional Budget Office, from $170 billion this year--that is what we pay out of our whole $3 trillion budget--$170 billion is the interest on the public debt--this $5 trillion. CBO is projecting that 10 years from now, we will pay in interest $800 billion--$806 billion, to be exact. We spend $100 billion on education, so we will have interest payments in just 10 years 8 times as large as the amount of money we spend on education. Our highway spending, $40 billion a year today--it will go up some, but we will be spending 20 times as much in interest. So future generations in America will be paying an incredible burden of interest, denying them money to spend on education and highways and other good things because we irresponsibly spent it now. It is not right. It is wrong. It should not occur. We really need to have a national discussion about this and try to fix this problem. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I would ask to be notified at 7 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the Budget Committee. I say to the Senator, it is a pleasure to work with you. You do a great job in an exceedingly difficult situation. But the net result so far is a budget that is thunderously irresponsible, and we cannot and should not pass it. We must not pass this budget. I think it would send a signal that we are not serious about our financial future, that the world may think, as the President of the European Union said in Europe recently, from the Czech Republic, that the United States fiscal policy is on the road to hell. That was his direct quote in the newspaper. So this is a serious matter. A President's budget states what the President believes in, and what he wants to see accomplished over a period of time. A 10-year budget-- which he submitted--is good. Sometimes we do 5 years. It could be 5 years. Senator Conrad and the Democratic members of the Budget Committee, unhappy with the numbers of the 10-year budget, submitted a 5-year budget, and just did not talk about the second 5 years. But there is a grim second 5 years also. So this budget is a plan, a direction, a list of priorities of the President. What we can see with absolute certainty is that financial responsibility is not a priority for the President. It is not. In fact, the title of his budget is ``A New Era of Responsibility''--and the numbers I am going to be talking about are either numbers that come right out of his budget called ``A New Era of Responsibility,'' from the Office of Management and Budget, and it has explicit numbers about what it intends to spend, how much debt will be created and how much taxes will be imposed and how it all will play out over a 10-year period. So the Senate Budget Committee's budget suggests it is better or at least it does not spend as much money. But I do not think that is sustainable. I think the real analysis came from the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mr. Peter Orszag, the President's budget manager, who said it is 98 percent of what President Obama asked for. Because there are some gimmicks in the Senate budget. And there are flaws in it that make it look better, such as not fully accounting for the cost of fixing the alternative minimum tax or the doctor fix or TARP II or some of the other things we know we are going to be spending money on. Let me just sum up the situation with regard to the CBO analysis, the Congressional Budget Office analysis. Our Congressional Budget Office analyzes the President's budget and attempts to explain what it is. They calculate numbers just like the President did. But very truly their analysis is more realistic and more likely to be true than the President's because he took some gimmicks too--not as many, I have to admit, as some have taken, but he has quite a number of gimmicks in it. Without the gimmicks, our Congressional Budget Office gives us a reliable analysis. They work both Houses of Congress, their leadership is selected by the Democrats, and it is certainly not a Republican institution. They are proud of their nonpartisanship and their accuracy and their figures. So this is what would happen to the debt held by the public if this budget passes and becomes reality. In 2008, debt held by the public was $5.8 trillion. That represents the entire debt of the United States of America since its founding. Under the proposed budget of President Obama, by 2013 that debt will double to $11.8 trillion. In 5 years, it will do that. In 2019, 5 more years later, it triples to $17.3 trillion. I do not believe those numbers are challengeable in any significant way. If you take the President's budget, you make sure that the figures, calculated with legitimate expectations of the future as CBO has done-- this is what they come up with. The President's proposal assumes more favorable numbers--instead of $17.3 trillion, $15-plus trillion, which is almost virtually three times the $5.8 trillion we have today. He admits that is what his budget does, with his own numbers. So that is a big question. Here is an example of where we are with the debt. My colleagues savaged President Bush for excessive spending, and the debt held by the public did go up during his time in office, to over $5 trillion, but this is not an exaggeration, colleagues. This is what the numbers show. It is going to go up to $17 trillion. So my first point to my colleagues and to those who might be listening is these numbers are not political numbers ginned up out of thin air; these are numbers that have been calculated from the President's own budget, entitled ``A New Era of Responsibility,'' according to the Congressional Budget Office, and that is when they score the situation to be 10 years from now. So you say: Well, we are in an economic disaster area. We have very bad problems in the economy. Well, maybe we do, but the President, in his expectation of income to the Government, other than this year being a year of negative growth, assumes we will have positive growth in the future. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 3 additional minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, there are good examples, as Senator Enzi declared, of bipartisan work in this Senate. We have a lot of those examples. I would point out, however, that a budget is a document that tends to favor an individual party's belief. It tends to point out where they want to take the country. It is a roadmap for the country, and that budget is a vehicle to achieve the goals that party has. I want to say this about the budget: A budget is not just something an individual has to submit. The President submits one, but the numbers contained in it, the directions contained in it, are the choices made. You can choose to spend less, you can choose to spend more, you can choose to reduce debt, you can choose to increase debt. It might be more popular to spend more and run up more debt today, but it may not be good for the long-term interest of America. We just left the budget markup, and the Democratic majority passed out of the committee on a straight party-line vote--with no Republicans supporting it--what I believe is the most irresponsible budget in the history of our Nation. It takes our spending, as a percentage of the gross domestic product, to the highest level we have had since World War II, when we were fighting for our very existence. We had been attacked at Pearl Harbor. We were facing the Nazis and Hitler. The problems we face now are not like that, but that is the level of spending we have now, and it is a very dangerous thing. Does anybody doubt the conventional wisdom that nothing comes from nothing; that there is no free lunch; that somebody had to produce it; that debts must be paid when incurred; and that if you borrow money, you have to pay interest on it? Does anybody doubt that? From the beginning of the founding of our Republic until this year, we, the public, have accumulated $5 trillion in debt. That is the whole founding of our country. That is what we have accumulated. Under the budget that the President has submitted to Congress--in a bound volume, carefully put together--in 5 years alone that $5 trillion debt will double, and in the following 5 years it will triple. So in 5 years, we would add twice as much debt--according to the President's own numbers he submitted to us--as we have today and three times as much in 10 years. I am not making this up. These numbers are in the book. And it is pretty disturbing to me. The chairman offered an alternative budget. He got clever. He said: We will do a 5-year budget. We won't do a 10-year budget. We will move some things around and make things look better, and then we can all vote for it. That is basically what happened today. But when you look at it carefully, it is no big change. And the chairman's mark that was passed out of committee today, that mark is disturbing because it was less honest and it was more gimmicked up than the President's budget. President Obama's budget was pretty honest about two or three big issues. One of them is the alternative minimum tax fix. It costs quite a bit to fix that. We only fix it 1 year at a time, but we fix it every year. President Obama assumed we would fix it. I think he underestimated the cost of a 10-year fix, but he had it in there. It cost hundreds of billions of dollars to do that--$500 billion. I think it is probably closer to $700 billion or $800 billion, but that was in there. That was omitted from the chairman's mark that was voted out. But that is going to be fixed, and when you fix it, you reduce the alternative minimum tax's impact in the country, you lose revenue, and that makes your debt look worse. Also, every year we have been fixing the doctors' reimbursement rate under the Balanced Budget Act. A decade ago, we required those payments to be cut, and we required them to be cut too much. They can't be cut that much, but that is the current law. They are dropped about 20 percent today. So every year, we come back and we put the money in. We spend the money necessary to keep the doctors with a modest increase in their reimbursement rate. We don't let them take a 20-percent cut. The chairman's mark assumes we don't fix the doctors' bills. That is not going to happen. That makes his numbers look somewhat better. But when charted out carefully, the Budget Committee, on the Republican side, put the numbers together and found discretionary spending over 5 years under the chairman's mark was 98.8 percent--the same as President Obama's budget. Total outlays over 5 years was 96.6 percent--the same as the President's budget. And revenue was 99.8 percent--the same. So it is basically the President's budget. But since it was getting so much flak and that budget was so irresponsible, people wanted to pretend that the budget they voted out of the committee was more responsible and deserved more support. But it is just not so, really. There is nothing in it that suggests a confronting of the serious financial situation we are in. It has an incredible increase in spending, and that is why the debts are so large. It creates these deficits. As I indicated, we go from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in debt held by the public in 5 years. Where does that $5 trillion come from? Where does it come from? It comes from borrowing. And you borrow by going out and offering Treasury bills on the U.S. Treasury. You offer people an opportunity to buy them, and you pay them interest to loan you the money. So they loan you the money, and you pay them interest. We have been in a time in which the interest rates have been unusually low because people were so scared around the world and other countries were shakier than we were, and so they wanted to buy Treasury bills--because we always pay them, basically. We have historically been a very safe investment. So that is how we get there. We borrow the money. Now, I want to suggest that costs money. I am not making these numbers up. These are the numbers that the Congressional Budget Office calculated. The Congressional Budget Office is hired by the Congress-- both Houses of Congress--though it is controlled by the Democratic majority. They essentially have the final choice on who becomes the head of that office and who can control that office. But CBO takes pride in being nonpartisan and doing the right numbers. We use them a lot. They are the best numbers we can get. This is what they have calculated that interest payments on the debt will be. People can understand interest. How much are you paying on your credit card in interest? How much are you paying on your house note in interest? When you borrow money, you pay interest. When the United States borrows another $5 trillion, we pay interest on that 5, plus the 5 we have already borrowed. And when it goes to $17 trillion, as CBO expects this budget deficit to do based on the budget the President sent us, you would see these kinds of numbers. And these are the President's numbers, but on these numbers, I think he is low. I trust CBO. But we will look at both of them. According to CBO's estimates, we will spend $170 billion for interest this year. It goes up slowly. In 2011, $216 billion; then $282 billion, $460 billion, $601 billion, $734 billion; and in the 10th year, $806 billion in interest. One year's interest. How much of that is for foreign countries--China and Saudi Arabia and other countries who bought our Treasury bills? That is $806 billion. How much is $806 billion? My State of Alabama is an average-size State--maybe a little smaller, not much--and we are about one-fiftieth the population of the country. Our entire general fund budget, including our State school spending and teachers, is less than $10 billion a year. The Government will be paying $806 billion in interest in 1 year. The Federal highway program today is $40 billion. We send that out to the States, where they get an 80-20 or a 90-10 split, and they use it to repair interstates and highways, and they do a lot with that. It is $40 billion. We're talking about 20 times as much as the highway money. I am very concerned about that interest number. Can we not understand why this is important? And we are not sure what this number will be because we are not perfectly sure what the interest rates will be. There are some developments today in the world that cause us quite a bit of concern. In the Washington Post today, there is a report that the President of the European Union blasted U.S. spending. Subheadline: ``Czech Premier Calls Obama Administration's Economic Policies `a Road to Hell.' '' The article is talking about the United States urging other countries to borrow more money and spend more money, as we have done. Let me quote from the article: Some countries, led by Germany, have strongly resisted, predicting that such a path could lead to unsustainable debts and runaway inflation. Luxembourg's prime minister . . . who heads a coordinating body . . . said European countries had already spent enough to jumpstart their economies. They haven't spent as much as we have, yet we are urging them to spend more. To further quote from the article: The European stimulus plans are muscular. They are demanding, they are important in volume and in quality. . . . There was ``no question'' that the European Union would reject requests from Obama to spend more. Well, what happens when you do that? What happens when you borrow too much money? There was an article in today's Washington Times talking about Mr. Geithner's difficulties in misspeaking and causing the dollar to plunge and the market to plunge, and then rebalance after he corrected himself. The article said: By afternoon, a poor showing of buyers at a Treasury bond auction sent interest rates sharply higher, raising fears about the U.S. ability to sell a massive load of $2.5 trillion of debt this year. It goes on to say: Buyers may have been spooked by . . . the unveiling of budget plans on Capitol Hill that would double the amount of debt the Treasury has to sell in the next 5 years to nearly $12 trillion. The markets are worried about this. So if you are going to buy a Treasury bill and you think the United States is selling too many of them, or there are too many on the market and not enough money out there to buy them, or the interest rates are low and you want higher interest rates, you just don't buy. And then what is going to happen? To sell our bonds, to get people to loan us money, we are going to have to promise to pay them higher interest rates. That is the deal. The New York Times had an article about this a month ago. Chairman Conrad, our very able chairman of the Budget Committee, passed it out to our committee members. This is a warning. When you get too much debt and you are demanding that too many people loan you money, countries such as China--which have a fraction of the surplus in their trade account today than they had a number of years ago--are not going to buy as much of our debt, even if they wanted to, because they do not have the money to buy it with. Who is going to buy this? To get enough people to send us their money to finance our spending spree, we are going to end up having to pay higher interest rates. That is a fact. The article goes on to say: The mounting worries about the debt also snuffed out a rally in the stock market . . . He talked about China. You have heard a lot of people talk about China and buying our Treasury bills and our concern about being obligated to them. This is what the article said today: China and other investors recently have taken to worrying about whether the United States may debase its currency in its drive to address economic problems. I think the world is worrying about that. Are we going to debase our currency? Are we going to inflate our currency to bail ourselves out and pay back those who loaned us money with dollars worth less than the dollars they loaned to us? If they think that, what they will demand is even higher interest rates. Because then they have to have interest rates that will assure them that even if the money is inflated, they will be paid back in an amount similar to that which they loaned us. It goes on to say: But the investors worry about the lingering effects of the legacy of debt and the inflationary impact of the Federal Reserve's program to help finance that debt with $300 billion of Treasury bond purchases. So the Federal Reserve is basically printing money and buying these Treasury bills themselves to try to help us out, and that is worrying people because nothing comes from nothing. Debts must be repaid. It goes on to say: Apprehension about these matters is apparently what led to the Treasury's difficulty in selling $24 billion of the five- year notes Wednesday afternoon. That is yesterday afternoon. To attract buyers, the Treasury had to pay interest rates that were significantly higher than its previous auction, touching off fears about the nation's ability to finance ever bigger loads of debt in the future. It didn't help that Britain on Tuesday experienced its first failed bond auction in nearly seven years--a bad portent since Britain, like the United States, has gone deeply into debt to finance large economic stimulus and bank bailout programs. The Brits have followed us. The Central Europeans are saying no. The Brits are spending like we are and the other countries are rejecting that. They pushed back and we have urged them to spend like we do and they said: No, we are not going to do it. I think it is embarrassing. It is mortifying to me, as an American who believes in limited Government, lower taxes, and free enterprise, to be in a position where we are being lectured by the Europeans and told no, when we want to spend more, tax more, and create more debt and they are saying it is irresponsible. We have always believed we were more responsible and we had more honesty in our system and we were more frugal in what we spent and our economy has been more robust than the European economies over the last 15 or 20 years. But now it looks like the situation has shifted. CreditSights--an organization that deals with these kinds of interest issues--CreditSights' Ms. Purtle was quoted in the article. She said that: . . . the most serious problem the Treasury faces is a lack of buyers worldwide for its growing mountain of debt. In particular, countries like China and Japan that invested their trillions of dollars in export earnings in the Treasury market have been hit by plummeting exports-- They are not selling as much as they used to. --which means they have less money to invest in Treasury Bonds, she said. She concludes by saying: ``. . . funds simply aren't available to continue the purchases.'' That is something I have been talking about for some time. It is pretty obvious, unless you believe something can come from nothing. Julie Andrews had it right: Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could. In the course of this debate, a lot of efforts were carried out to try to do something about the stark numbers that are revealed in the President's bound book he sent to us. This chart reflects what is in his book. I didn't make up the numbers. They came right out of the book he wrote, or his staff did, and it reflects the total of the debt held by the public which is the best hard number we have, I think, of what the debt of the country is. We start out in 2008 with $5.03 trillion. You can see the deficits, how they increase. By the first 5 years, debt held by the public is $11.55 trillion, virtually a doubling in 5 years of that debt. Then, in the 10th year, it is $15.370 trillion, more than three times the amount, about three times the point of the 2008 figure. The numbers don't lie. Nobody is disputing this. They are saying, you know what, as my colleague said on the floor in a very partisan speech: Well, we are investing. We admit we are in a changed environment. We are trying to do things in a different way, and get over it, you guys, you mossbacks, worrying about debt. Don't worry about debt. Don't worry about spending. We are investing. We are going to spend more in education--like we haven't done that year after year--and we are going to have such an improvement in the quality of our graduates it is going to make America better and we are going to pay all this back. I guess that is what the argument is. But at some point, you just don't have the money. We do not have the money. It would be nice if we could double every program in the world. Maybe we'll send more as foreign aid. Somebody offered that amendment in the Budget Committee today to spend more on foreign aid. Spend everything more and more and it will all work out. I do not think that is acceptable, and these numbers represent, I contend, the most irresponsible budget since World War II, and since we were in a life-or-death struggle in World War II, those deficits were necessary. Well, somebody might say: Sessions, we are in a recession. That is why the President's numbers look bad. But hold your hat: the President's budget says we will have, this year, a negative GDP of 1.2 percent. He projects in this budget, to make the numbers look better, actually--I think, that is the only thing I can say; I hope it would be right--he projects that unemployment would cap out, the highest we would ever have in this recession is 8.1 percent. It is already at 8.1 percent. Wouldn't it be great if it doesn't get any higher? Maybe it won't. I surely hope not, but I suspect it will. Look at this. This is the projections through 5 years. He doesn't project--the reason we are having these deficits is not because of lack of economic growth. The reason we have these deficits is spending, unprecedented spending. Look, in 2009, this fiscal year ending September 30, they predict a GDP decline of 1.2 percent. The independent, Blue Chip consensus, which is the most respected group, they project it will be worse, at 2.6 percent. In 2010, that is next year--we are in 2009. In 2010, the President is projecting 3.2 percent growth. That is robust growth. That is not a little growth, that is robust growth. In 2011, it is 4.0; 2012, 4.6; 2013, 4.2. The point I am trying to make is, the reason the deficits are here in the outyears is not because the President is saying we are going to be in a sustained economic slowdown. President Clinton in his best years in the 1990s, President Reagan in his best years, I think it very rarely broke 4 percent or 5 percent growth. Four percent growth is robust growth. Great Scott, it would be great to have that every year. We are not having these deficits because we are assuming we are going to be in an economic slowdown or a war. That is not assumed either because the defense budget is one thing that is getting reduced. Amendments were offered. Senator Gregg offered an amendment, the ranking Republican on the committee--and such a smart and experienced member of the committee. To get into the European Union, you have to commit that your annual deficit will not exceed 3 percent of your GDP and that your total debt will not exceed 60 percent of your gross domestic product, the GDP. This budget, I think, is taking us--this is where we are. In 2009, this year, we are at 55 percent of GDP is our debt. It goes up next year to 61, in 2010, because of the budget, with such huge deficits. That already takes us outside of being admitted in the European Union. The European Union says if you are going to be a member of our economic union, you have to show you have financial discipline in your country. Every new member has to go through this. But under the President's budget in 2011, it is 64 percent; in 2012, it is 65 percent; 2013, it is 66 percent; and 2014, it is 66 percent. I think it hits about 80 percent. It goes on up in the second 5 years. This is a troubling trend. So Senator Gregg said: Why don't we at least make it a situation in which at least to pass a budget such as this you have to have 60 votes if we violate the standards of the European Union? It was voted down. Every Democrat voted against that reform, that containment mechanism. Senator Gregg also offered an amendment dealing with the budget presented by the chairman. I think he had a little humor in him when he offered this. The budget presented by the chairman projected a 7- percent increase in spending this year; 7 percent over the baseline. But over 5 years, he claimed it only would increase spending by about 2.5 percent. That is pretty good, a 2.5-percent increase. It is not great. I offered an amendment lower than that but 2.5 percent. OK? Then, Senator Crapo, a Republican member of the committee and a very experienced and knowledgeable person, he said one thing I have learned around here, the budget that counts is the one for this year. You can project anything in your next year's budget and the next year's budget and the fourth and fifth year's budget. You can project any spending level you want because we will be back here next year, sitting in this room, and we will be voting on what this year's increase will be. In other words, it appeared we were dealing with a gimmick. It appeared we were talking about spending a lot this year in the budget that counts--this fiscal year--and having reductions next year when we will have every opportunity to increase it. OK. So Senator Crapo says: OK, you said you are going to keep it at 2 percent. That is what your budget says. I am going to offer an amendment that sets up a budget point of order that takes 60 votes if you go above that. Fair enough, right? So if next year--actually, I think next year they are proposing a 1-percent increase, which is not going to happen, I assure you. And he proposed we hold them to that 2.5, and we would have a 60-vote point of order if they went over 2.5. Every Democrat voted it down because they knew they were not going to stay at 2.5. Everybody knows it. I will just say this: No matter what is in the budget that comes out of this Senate, if it is any kind of real reduction from President Obama's budget, and I do not think it will be, but if it is, when it goes to conference and they meet with Speaker Pelosi, they are going to put the money back in. When the bill comes over here, it is going to essentially be the Obama budget. We have seen that is the tone of this discussion. So that is why he offered that amendment. That is why they voted it down, because they flatly intend not to stick to a 2.5-percent-per-year spending increase in nondefense discretionary spending. Senator Lindsey Graham offered an amendment--get this--that would limit each household's share of the debt in America to $80,000 per household. Our debt today is $60,000 per household. The Federal debt, if divided out per household, is $60,000. So Senator Graham said: Well, let's just put a mechanism in here, if you go over $60,000 and get up to $80,000, we have a budget point of order; at least it would take two-thirds to pass it. No. They voted that down because the budget clearly puts us on a track to go well above $80,000 per household. It would have the potential to bite and be a potential way to contain this growth of spending. Senator Alexander offered an amendment that said there would be a budget point of order if the amount of our total debt reached 90 percent of the gross domestic product of our country. I just told you that you cannot get in the European Union if your debt exceeds 60 percent of your GDP. But this budget puts us on track to going beyond 90 percent of GDP, and Senator Alexander offered an amendment. How reasonable is that? And it was voted down, on a straight party-line vote. Senator Cornyn offered an amendment that would create a 60-vote point of order if we doubled the debt. If we double our debt, we ought to at least have 60 votes to do that. It was voted down, straight party-line vote. These are troubling instances. We are not making this up. The issue is critical for the future of our Nation. It also says something more than just debt; it says this President meant something when he said: We are going to remake the American economy. At a point in last year's campaign, many will remember this, when our President met Joe the Plumber, and he said: Well, we are going to take this money and spread it around a little bit, Joe. People said: Wait a minute. Was that revealing who he really was? Is not that the socialist impulse to take money from people who have it and spend it on people you want to have it? Is not that the socialist impulse? People talked about President Obama--Senator Obama then--is that the way he really thinks? Is that what he is going to do if he gets elected? Oh no, they said, we are not socialists. We do not believe in those things. But budgets are not campaign rhetoric. The campaign is over. We are dealing with real books, a proposal to triple the debt in 10 years out of his budget office, with his name on it. I think the name of the budget document is ``A New Era of Responsibility.'' That is what is on it. That is what is right here. Here it is. ``A New Era of Responsibility.'' You tell me how tripling the debt is an era of responsibility. You tell me how raising the interest payment per year from $170 billion to $800 billion is responsible, in 10 years. It is not responsible. We will have this debate next week. The Members will have a chance to speak about it and talk about it. For some people listening out there in the great American countryside, you may think this is just another Republican-Democratic dust-up, just another flim-flam fight, a burning of political hot air about nothing. And why does everybody not get together and just agree and work in a bipartisan way and pass something? Well, what if they passed something that you think is bad for America, the legislation that has been offered. Every amendment that will make a difference gets voted down on a straight party-line vote, and it is going to be voted out of this Senate with an overwhelming partisan vote. I doubt a single Republican will vote for it. But because a budget is passed--unlike most legislation--with a simple majority, there are plenty of votes to pass this. So there have been a lot of votes in this Senate, and a lot of times Republicans, I have often thought, have saved our Democratic colleagues from themselves by taking the hard votes by asking: How much is it going to cost? Do we really have the money? And not vote for things that in the long run have not been wise for America. OK. It is not going to happen this time because the votes are here. Senator Reid, the majority leader, has the votes. This budget is going to pass. I suppose it is possible that the American people will have their voices heard and something could change and it could come out better. That would be my hope. But unless something changes in the dynamic, and the only thing that can change this dynamic is if the American people make their voices heard through their representatives and tell them that is not what we intended when we voted for President Obama. Or almost half the people voted for John McCain; that is not what we intended you guys to do. You did not tell us you were going to triple the debt. You did not tell us you were going to do these things. What about our Member who ran for reelection recently in the last several years? They have been attacking President Bush. They have been attacking President Bush as a profligate spender and saying they were going to do better. This is better? Give me a break. Let's talk about that. I think a relevant year is 2003, after 9/11, after that recession, the commencement of the war on terrorism, President Bush had a deficit of around $400 billion. He was savagely criticized for that, and some of that was justified. At the time that was the biggest deficit since World War II. It dropped for 3 consecutive years. In 2007, the year before last, the budget had dropped to $161 billion. We were on a good path, and then this recession hit. The President sent out $150 billion last year, unwisely. That did very little good. All of a sudden the deficit last year, September 30, was $459 billion. Well, that was the biggest since World War II. And I think he was rightly criticized for that. I did not vote to send out the checks. Sorry, constituents. I did not think it was going to work. I do not think it has. Most economists say it did not benefit us. But this year, hold your hats, with the $800 billion stimulus bill we passed this year, the deficit for this 1 year will not be $455 billion, $600 billion, $700 billion, $800 billion, $1,000 billion. No, it is $1.8 trillion. It is $1.8 trillion this fiscal year, and they are scoring the Wall Street bailout all this year. They are scoring Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae this year. There are some one-time things in that score. But next year it is going to be $1.1 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If you look at Congressional Budget Office numbers--here are the President's numbers. He projects, with a robust growing economy, the debt will be $1.75 trillion in 2009; $1.1, almost $1.2 trillion in 2010; almost $900 billion in 2011; and he goes down. And it starts coming back up in the outyears when he has solid growth and no projections of an economic slowdown. He projects continued growing deficits to $712 billion. And that is that 1 year. OK. There is not a single year, not a single year in these 10 years of the President's budget that the deficit is as low as the highest deficit President Bush ever had. Not one. But my staff tells me, let's not forget, that is the President's score. It has been doctored too. It is really worse than that based on the money they plan to spend. Our own Congressional Budget Office, controlled by the majority Members of our body, this is what they have for the deficit. They have this year being $1.845 trillion, $1,845 billion; 1.4 the next year; not at $712 billion but at $1.2 trillion in the tenth year. So that is why Senator Conrad, our Democratic chairman, has said it is unsustainable. You cannot sustain these kind of deficits, even with a healthy economy. USA Today, when this crisis began to hit us, they wrote an article that said simply this: An economy founded on excessive personal debt, excessive Government debt, and excessive trade deficits is not healthy. So what we have to do is get off debt and get back to an honest growth economy that we have always been able to have. We have had a clear housing bubble that has burst. It has impacted the financial community significantly. We have done a lot of things. Some of them are of dubious value. But we have done a lot of things to work our way through, and certainly President Obama projects the economy to bounce back strongly. But we cannot keep spending. We have to control that. So as we go forward next week, I hope the American people will be alert to the most important issues; that they will make their voices heard; that all of our colleagues will go home, and as they sit down in quiet time, ask themselves: Can I vote for this? Can I go on record as voting for a plan that will increase the annual interest payment of Americans from $170 billion to $800 billion? And I am going to triple the debt in our country in 10 years, put us on a plan that will do that? I think not. I hope not. I encourage my colleagues to study it carefully and vote no and let us see if we cannot come back with a much better budget. The only way to fix some of these issues is a bipartisan effort because some of those spending programs are tough. They have been growing out of control. It is going to take mature, tough decisionmaking to bring it under control. Some special interests are going to holler as soon as you try to do it, and you have to listen to them. But you cannot let them set the national policy. You can't let the person who is getting a benefit from a single program set a policy that adversely impacts everybody else in the country. That is what we are paid to do, to make the tough choices. We are not doing it now. The President's budget is not responsible. I hope we can confront it honestly and make some positive changes. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I thank Senator Thune for his excellent remarks. I will just say that sums it up pretty well. I would like to go into a little more detail about the budget--just some of the matters in it--so we confront honestly the situation with which we are dealing. This is the budget, which I hold up in my hand. This is the budget the President sent up. It is from the Executive Office of the White House, Office of Management and Budget. The big print on it says, ``A New Era of Responsibility.'' The small print says, ``Renewing America's Promise.'' Well, I am not sure what ``Renewing America's Promise'' means, I guess, but I am pretty sure that ``A New Era of Responsibility'' is not what this budget is. I would like to talk about it because it is breathtaking, really. Now, some would think: Oh, here we go. This is just another political dustup, just another fight between the Republicans and Democrats, just another partisan spasm. That is what it is all about. They talk about these numbers, and I don't know what these numbers mean: a billion, a trillion, a million. What does all that mean? Well, sometimes numbers do mean something. Sometimes numbers are quite different from one another. Sometimes situations have changed, and sometimes they have not changed much. Sometimes the changes are dramatic, significant, directional in nature, historic in nature. That is what I think we are dealing with today. I believe the discussion over this budget--I am a member of the Budget Committee--is historic. I believe the decisions we make around this budget will affect the very nature of the economy, the nature of the Government that we have, whether we will continue to have a government of limited powers, and where we are heading. Are we moving toward a ``Francification'' of America, a socialization of America? That was a big issue in the campaign. It turned out to be where, in the last few weeks, you remember Joe the Plumber and the quote ``We are going to spread the wealth around.'' People said: Oh, no, President Obama does not really mean that. Yes, he is going to do some new things and make some changes, but he is not heading toward a European-type of economy for America. So let's talk about the budget. What does his budget say? What does it mean? A budget is a President's plan for the future. It tells where he will get the money he wants to spend. It tells where he will spend it. It tells how much money he will spend and how much spending will occur, and will there be a surplus or will there be a deficit? Now, some people think: Well, he can't help it. That is just the way things are. These are things that a President does not have power over. Not so. These represent Presidential priorities. Most States in this country have a balanced budget constitutional amendment. They have had shortages bigger than we are having, and those States are getting by. They are having to make some reductions in their expenditures. I have had a bunch of cities and counties in to visit with me the last 2 weeks, and all of them are making some kind of reduction in their spending. They are not disappearing from the face of the Earth. So here we go. This is not a secret document, fundamentally. The numbers I am talking about that he proposes as his budget for the country are here. Normally, since I have been in the Senate--12 years--and on the Budget Committee most of that time, budgets pass on a party-line vote. There have been some tough, close votes. I remember the budget that had the tax cuts in it was a close vote. Several Democrats voted with the Republicans, and it passed. But this budget is different because we have a very large Democratic majority in the Senate. I think it is a three-vote Democratic majority on the Budget Committee. Under our rules, a budget does not have to be subject to a 60-vote point of order, and it is not subject to filibuster or any kind of 60-vote threshold; it passes on a simple majority. So the Democratic majority-- a very large majority now--has the power to pass this budget. That is just the way it is. They have the power. I hope, therefore, they will feel the awesome responsibility they have in discussing this budget because it is so unusual, it is so large, and it is so game-changing, to a degree which I have never seen before, and I don't think any of us have. One of the things that disturbed me in this whole process is the spectacle of our Secretary of Treasury going to Europe to meet with European leaders and chastising them--and they have had some pretty big stimulus packages--for not having bigger stimulus packages, not spending more money, and not going into more debt. This is so odd because we as Americans have normally been the ones who have criticized the Europeans for their tax and spend and entitlement, socialistic welfare system. So here we are doing that. Prime Minister Merkel in Germany said it is extraordinarily dangerous that transatlantic conflict is being fanned, and, ``I am grateful to the American President that he has told me this is an artificial debate,'' she told lawmakers on April 2 at the Group of 20 nations. She said: The Group of 20 nations need to send ``a positive psychological signal, not a competition over stimulus packages that can't be implemented.'' The European Central Bank president, Mr. Trichet, said this: If the additional deficits are costing you both a strong increase of the cost of your own refinancing and a loss of confidence of your people, you are not better off! He goes on to say: If your people have the sentiment that they will not be better off in an endless spiraling of deficits, they will not spend any money that you give them today! So the Europeans are pushing back. They are warning us that we are going too far. So let's look at some of the numbers to which Senator Thune made reference. The first is the title of the budget, the President's budget, which came right out of this book--these numbers the President has submitted to us--what he plans to occur in America over the next 10 years under his budget. In 2008, last September 30, we had a $455 billion deficit. Since World War II, that is the largest deficit the country has ever had-- $455 billion. Do you know what it was the year before? It was $161 billion. Why did it jump that much? Well, 150 billion of the dollars that jumped was the checks that got sent out. President Bush sent out the checks. He was going to stop the recession. He sent everybody a check last spring. It didn't work. I voted against it. It wasn't easy to vote against constituents getting a check, but I didn't think it worked then, and everybody agrees now that it didn't, but that helped jump the deficit to this record amount--$455 billion. What about this year? Including the stimulus package--or a part of it that we just passed--and the $700 billion Wall Street bailout and the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, scored at about $200 billion according to CBO, it comes out this year, September 30, the deficit will be $1,752 billion, more than three times the highest deficit we have had since the Republic--well, at least since World War II, when we were in a life-and-death struggle with millions of people in arms all over the world, turning out airplanes and ships by the thousands. Is this just one time? Is it just a one-time expenditure? No, it is not. In 2010, the President's own numbers show the deficit will be $1,171 billion, or about $1.2 trillion. According to the numbers in the President's budget, which were gimmicked, in my view, we will already be under a recovery in 2010. We will not be in negative growth; we will have I think 1.6 percent economic growth, GDP growth. We are still going to have $1.2 trillion in deficits. It drops down to $912 billion, $581 billion, $533 billion, and then starts growing again, and in the 10th year of his budget, he is projecting a deficit of $712 billion. Now, within those projections are some rosy scenarios, such as if the economy is growing and unemployment is not too high, then you have more money to spend than if the economy is still slow-sinking and unemployment is high. So the budget assumes an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent, the highest--that is as high as it would ever get during this entire 10-year period. It assumes that next year or later this year, we will have 8.1 percent unemployment. Well, we are at 8.1 percent unemployment now. That is the current figure. The blue chip group, the top economists and the ones most people look at, project unemployment to be over 9 percent. CBO projects 9 percent will be the maximum unemployment rate. If it goes that high, then we are going to have bigger deficits. So there are some other rosy scenarios in there that the objective economists do not believe will occur. When you score this budget without using those gimmicks or rosy scenarios, as the Congressional Budget Office is required to do--they are required to make an independent analysis of the President's budget, and they have done so. Let me just say that we are proud of the independence of the Congressional Budget Office. They are a talented group. They work for us here. The new Director was chosen in a bipartisan way but clearly with the final power in the hands of the substantial Democratic majority in the Senate. They control the ultimate choice of the Congressional Budget Office. They come out not with a $712 billion deficit for that year--not $912 billion but $1.2 trillion, $500 billion higher when they use numbers they believe are fair and honest and accurate, coming out with $1.2 trillion in deficit, not $700 billion in deficit. There will not be, in this entire 10-year period, taking President Obama's own numbers, and certainly not the Congressional Budget Office's numbers, a single year that is close to as low as the $455 billion deficit of President Bush's last year. Most of them are twice that or will average twice that. So what I wish to say to my colleagues is that this is not sustainable. The President had a great meeting with the Republicans one day at lunch in the room right over here. He was very personable, open, and responded to any questions asked. I thought he was very sincere when he said: Look, we are going to have to spend a lot of money now, but when this economy comes back we are all going to have to work together to reduce the systemic threat of out-of-control deficits. He said that more than once. I thought he meant that. But when you propose a budget that has deficits increasing every year over the next 5 years and reaching, in his own numbers, $712 billion in deficit--and according to CBO, $1.2 trillion--then I can't take that very seriously. There is not one act in this budget plan of any significant evaluation of the out- of-control entitlement programs we have or how to bring those under control. So that is not politics; that is reality. It is not acceptable. We have to say no to this budget. I know my Democratic colleagues are uneasy about those numbers. They tell me they are uneasy about them. They want to support their President. They want to pass this budget. But at some point, I think my colleagues are going to have to say no. I hope they will. Certainly, the Republicans can't say no; we don't have enough votes. Now, Senator Thune made reference to this number. Madam President, what is our timeframe?

Mr. SESSIONS. It shows the interest rate or payments on this tripling debt reaching $694 billion, according to the White House's own estimate, in 2019, to the people who buy our debt--the largest foreign recipient of which is China. CBO says that is underestimated. They calculate it to be $806 billion. The entire general fund of the State of Alabama, an average- size State, is about $7 billion for the counties, schools, teachers, and roads. The highway budget for the entire United States of America is $40 billion a year, including interstate, all the money we send to the States, and all of the pork money we put on top of it. This is $806 billion in interest alone on a debt that we have run up in previous years. That is why people are worried about it. I will conclude with that and say, again, I know we all get caught up in politics, that is true. But this year, this budget is not a normal budget. It is not a bigger budget or a lot bigger. It is a gargantuan budget, the likes of which we have not seen before. It results in debt increases that are not sustainable. It has no projection of any containment of spending. It does nothing to deal with the entitlement difficulties that are driving much of the debt, and it cannot be passed in this fashion. I urge my Democratic colleagues to say: No, Mr. President, you have to go back and look at this some more. We cannot pass this budget and not just take a few hundred billion dollars off, or something like that. We need to have a serious discussion of the financial condition of our country. I think the Republicans will be there trying to work with you on it. But without some leadership from the other side, this budget will go into effect. I yield the floor.