John Thune

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, we have among the many people who serve in the Senate some people who have balanced budgets and done it----

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I thank my colleague from Missouri. He has a great deal of experience. As he said, we worked together on these issues for a long time. We both recognize the importance of economic growth. We see a budget put before us by the Senate Democrats that grows the government and not the economy. We believe the focus should be on growing the economy, not the government. The amendments we offered have that thought in mind. There are other colleagues who are here to speak to the basic budget proposal the Democrats have put forward and talk about some of the amendments they intend to offer. Thank you.

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, the House Republican budget does something the Democratic budget does not do--it balances. It actually balances in 10 years, and it does it not by taxing more but by spending less, spending at a slower rate--3.4 percent over that 10-year period. If we look at what the House Republican budget does, it is focused on growing the economy, not growing the government. What the Democratic budget, before the Senate this evening, does is it grows the government, not the economy. In fact, if we look at the analysis that has been done, it is suspected the Democratic budget would cost us 850,000 jobs and reduce take-home pay for middle-class families by $1,500. The House Republican budget takes seriously the challenges that are facing this country, takes the steps necessary to save and protect Medicare for future generations of Americans, something this budget--the Senate Democratic budget--does not do. I urge my colleagues to support this budget, and it is a serious one, that balances the budget in 10 years and puts our economy back in growing mode and our fiscal house back in order.

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota. I think he put it absolutely right in terms of what the priorities should be and what the stakes are in the budget debate. I thank him for his leadership on this issue. I want to close with one final point he made. He spoke a lot about the impact on the economy and what happens when we get economic growth. His State is a good example of this, because the State of North Dakota has a growing economy. And when we have a growing economy, we have people who are making money, people who are working, people who are investing, and that means people are paying more taxes, and that is how we get more revenue. What we need is a growing economy. In the last 4 years, the average growth rate is less than 1 percent, eight-tenths of 1 percent. The 60-year average of economic growth, post-World War II, is 3.3 percent. So we are growing at less than 1 percent. In the last 4 years we have added $6 trillion to the debt, and we still have 12 million people unemployed and an unemployment rate that continues to hover around 8 percent. Having said that, wouldn't we think we would want to try something different and go in a different direction? Yet this budget doubles down. It flat doubles down on these failed policies of the past 4 years that are antigrowth, antijobs, and continue to tax and spend and borrow as if there is no tomorrow. We need a different path. We need a different approach. So I hope, as we have this debate over the course of the next couple of days, it will become clear not only to the Senators here in this Chamber but to the American people who really is interested in getting revenue the right way, which is through growing our economy, creating jobs, getting Americans back to work, and doing something about the debt and the spending crisis we have in this country. I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for up to 15 minutes.

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

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about the important budget debate we will have this week here in the Senate. We hope to get on that soon. We are disposing of some of last-year's budget work before that. But I think this is an important moment for the Senate because it has been 4 years since we did this; 2009 was the last time the Senate acted on a budget. During the time which has lapsed, we have added $6 trillion to our national debt. I would like to think as we get into this budget debate, we could do something about that. Unfortunately, the budget that is going to be put before us by the Senate Democrats doesn't do anything to address the debt. I think perhaps the reason we are finally doing a budget here is because there was a No Budget No Pay Act passed earlier this year which required that a budget be passed. It was moved by the House of Representatives and drew attention to the fact that the Senate hadn't for 4 years done a budget, and suggested that before the Senate get paid, it actually ought to do its work and pass a budget. So we are here now for the first time in 4 years. Unfortunately, the budget that has been proposed by the chair of the Senate Budget Committee fails to balance the budget and instead means more taxes, more spending, and more debt. That is a formula we have heard before. If you look at the last several years, we have added $6 trillion of debt since President Obama took office. We have seen tax increases already of about $1.7 trillion if you combine the tax increases associated January 1 with the fiscal cliff, and then couple that with the tax increases that were included in the President's health care bill--$1.7 trillion in new taxes, $6 trillion in new debt, a runup in spending unlike anything we have seen in recent history. So you would think, given the fact that we have seen debt, spending, and taxes go up over the past several years, we would actually get a budget that is finally focused not on growing the government but on growing the economy. But the Senate Democratic budget does exactly that--it grows the government, not the economy. Their proposal contains more of the same big spending and big government policies that have led to a dismal average economic growth rate of just eight-tenths of 1 percent over the past 4 years. That has been the economic growth on average for the first 4 years of President Obama's first term, eight-tenths of 1 percent. Less than 1 percent is what the economy has grown over that time period. A better approach when it comes to putting forward a budget would be to advance a budget that actually is focused on growing the economy, not the government. Over the next few days we are going to have an opportunity to debate and improve this budget proposal on the Senate floor. I look forward to that debate. As it stands today, the Senate Democrats' budget increases spending by 62 percent over the next decade; it raises taxes by $1.5 trillion-- and that is in addition to the $1.7 trillion in tax increases we have already seen enacted under President Obama. Even with the enormous tax increase, the Senate Democrats' budget would result in $7.3 trillion in new debt over the next decade. So you have a 62-percent increase in spending, you have $1.5 trillion in new taxes, and a $7.3 trillion debt, in addition to the debt we hand down to our children and grandchildren. The amazing thing about that, even with this enormous tax increase, is the budget would never balance, which begs the question: What is balanced about a budget that never balances? You hear the Democrats come here on the floor of the Senate and talk about, We need a balanced approach. The President of the United States gets up all the time and talks about, We need a balanced approach. What is balanced about a budget that never balances? That is a fundamental question I would expect the American people to ask. In contrast, the House Republicans will be enacting a budget this week through the House of Representatives. Hopefully, eventually something like it will get enacted. But it balances in 10 years. I think 10 years is a responsible, reasonable timeline to achieve a balanced budget, and I think most Americans who balance their budgets month in and month out would agree with that proposition. The budget put forward by Senate Democrats also fails to target waste, fraud, and inefficiencies across the Federal Government. For each of the past 2 years, the Government Accountability Office has outlined hundreds of billions of dollars of wasteful and duplicative spending throughout the Federal Government. The Federal Government is a $3.6 trillion enterprise, and there is plenty of waste to target and reform--low-hanging fruit most would agree is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars--but Senate Democrats have failed even to make an attempt at reining in this waste with their budget plan. Budgets are a reflection of values. As Vice President Biden once said: Show me your budget, and I will tell you what you value. It seems from the Senate Democrats' budget that they value the same big spending and big government policies of the past 4 years that have prolonged this period of slow economic growth and high unemployment. In contrast, the budget proposed by the Republicans in the House would balance the budget in 10 years--again, something I believe we ought to be able to do--and it grows the economy. It starts by cutting wasteful spending, which is not an extreme proposition and something we ought to be able to do. The House Republican budget also reforms our broken Tax Code to promote economic growth, which will mean more jobs, better pay, and more opportunities for hard-working Americans and middle-class families. The House budget also recognizes that if Washington fails to take action, Medicare and Social Security are headed toward bankruptcy in the not too distant future. I commend my colleagues in the House for the vote that they will have this week, and for recognizing that reality, that our seniors across this country and those who are nearing retirement age and those of younger generations of Americans are not going to be protected when it comes to the programs that someday they will rely upon if we don't make the changes and the reforms that are necessary to align those programs with the present and future demographics of this country. So the House budget strengthens those priorities. The budget debate for fiscal year 2014 that we are going to have on the Senate floor this week presents an opportunity, an opportunity to solve our fiscal challenges, to move past the job-destroying policies of the past few years, and to grow the economy. As I said earlier, average economic growth under this President has been 0.8 percent--eight-tenths of 1 percent--of the overall share of the economy. This is a reflection of the negative impacts high levels of spending and high annual deficits have had during President Obama's tenure. Unfortunately, the proposal that will be before the Senate this week only continues and doubles down on those policies. In fact, there is evidence this is the opposite of what we should be doing. Harvard Professors Alberto Alesina and Sylvia Ardagna have studied economies around the world and various fiscal adjustments that have taken place in some of these countries. They found targeted spending cuts have led to economic expansions, while tax increases have been recessionary. According to these Harvard economists: Spending cuts have a positive effect on private investment while increases to taxes . . . hurt investment through the labor market and firms' profitability. The evidence is there. Growing the government will not solve our economic challenges. If that were true, we would have a much stronger economy today, because with the massive health care plan that passed a few years ago, with the trillion-dollar stimulus program that was put into place early on during the President's first term, and all the additional runup in discretionary spending that we have seen, we still have slow growth, high unemployment, massive amounts of debt, and many Americans who are struggling with their own personal economies and lower take-home pay. The focus should be on growing our economy. That starts with passing a budget that cuts spending and reforms the Tax Code in a way that promotes economic growth. Again, I believe there is a better approach out there. The House of Representatives has put forth one. It is unfortunate that the Senate Democratic budget fails to address the long-term spending and economic problems facing this country and, instead, focuses once again on growing government. In fact, the Washington Post editorial board had this to say of the Democrats' budget proposal: In short, this document gives voters no reason to believe that Democrats have a viable plan--or even a responsible public assessment of--the country's long-term fiscal predicament. Failure to act and solve our fiscal challenges could result in another damaging credit downgrade, thanks to the out-of-control spending, and such a downgrade would have a very negative effect on the American people. A credit downgrade would drive up interest rates across the board on everything from student loans to home mortgages. That means it would be more expensive to buy a home or a car, to send a child to college, or to pay down personal debt. So as we get ready to debate the majority's proposed budget for fiscal year 2014 on the floor this week, I hope the Senate will take an honest look at the relationship between spending and economic growth. We need to put the Federal Government on a stable fiscal path in order to create the kind of economic certainty and the economic conditions we need to grow our economy and to create jobs. The majority's budget goes in the opposite direction. It grows government instead of growing the economy. We need to be talking about a budget here in the Senate whose primary focus is to grow the economy, not to grow the government. So this will give us a chance over the course of the next few days to present two very different visions for the future of this country: one that is based upon higher spending, higher taxes, more debt, and one that is focused on putting in place a responsible spending plan that protects and saves important programs such as Social Security and Medicare, that reforms our Tax Code in a way that encourages and promotes economic growth, and that puts policies in place that will actually get this economy growing and expanding again, get more Americans back to work, and increase the standard of living and the quality of life for future generations of Americans. We can't do that if we can continue to borrow and spend like there is no tomorrow, and that is precisely what the Democrats' budget would do. Mr. President, I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, today I wish to honor the South Dakota State University men's and women's basketball teams on winning their respective 2013 Summit League Championships. This marks the Jackrabbits fifth consecutive women's Summit League Title and the men's basketball team's second consecutive Summit League Title. The Jackrabbits are also the only team in Division I to have both their men's and women's teams repeat as conference tournament champions this year. The SDSU women's basketball team has a long history of success, including winning all five Summit League Tournaments since moving up to NCAA Division I. South Dakota State University, which concluded the regular season with a 22-7 overall record, won the Summit League Conference with a 14-2 record. With the tournament victory the Jackrabbits will go to their fifth NCAA Tournament in as many years. Certainly, this successful season would not have been possible without the hard work of the players. The members of the 2012-2013 South Dakota State University women's basketball team are: Anne Aamlid, Gabrielle Boever, Mariah Clarin, Chloe Cornemann, Leah Dietel, Ashley Eide, Jessica Hart, Tara Heiser, Katie Lingle, Steph Paluch, Hannah Strop, Megan Stuart, Rachel Walters, and Megan Waytashek. Although this accomplishment was truly a team effort, I would like to pay special recognition to their coach Aaron Johnston, who in his 13th season recorded his 300th win and became SDSU's all-time winning head coach. Coach Johnston's current record is 315-106. I also would like to congratulate assistant coaches Katie Falco, Mike Jewett, and Carissa Nord. The SDSU men's basketball team has seen much recent success of its own. The Jacks posted a regular season record of 22-9 en route to its first regular season Summit League Conference championship, with a conference record of 13-3. Also, following a 73-67 win over rival North Dakota State University in the tournament championship, the Jacks have reached the NCAA tournament for the second year in a row. SDSU's successful season could not have been possible without the dedication and determination of the players. The members of the 2012- 2013 South Dakota men's basketball team are: Jake Bittle, Brayden Carlson, Connor Devine, Matt Donlan, Jordan Dykstra, Joey Feilmeier, Tony Fiegen, Marcus Heemstra, Zach Horstman, Cory Jacobsen, Taevaunn Prince, Ruben Silva, Chad White, Joshua White, and Nate Wolters. Finally, I would like to congratulate Coach Scott Nagy on winning his first Summit League Conference regular season title as well as his second consecutive tournament championship as head coach of the Jackrabbits. I also would like to congratulate assistant coaches Brian Cooley, Austin Hansen, Rob Klinkefus and graduate assistant Nick Goff. The coaches and student athletes of SDSU's men's and women's basketball team should be very proud of all of their remarkable achievements this season. On behalf of the State of South Dakota, I am honored to congratulate the Jackrabbits on their impressive seasons and wish them the best of luck in the NCAA Tournaments. Go Jacks!

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak about spending and its impact on economic growth. I think it is important Washington closely considers the true impact Federal spending and our soaring national debt are having on economic growth. Over the past few weeks, the White House and the President have been out campaigning across the country and making statements aimed at causing fear and anxiety about the sequester. The White House has painted the sequester--which, keep in mind, amounts to just 2.4 percent of all Federal spending--as something which would lead to an economic disaster in this country. The White House attempts to cause fear and anxiety have fallen flat. What is more, many of the claims which were made were simply false. In fact, the critics agree. Bill Keller wrote in the New York Times: ``The White House spent last week in full campaign hysteria.'' The Washington Post issued four Pinocchios with regard to false claims made by Education Secretary Arne Duncan about the sequester's impact on teachers' jobs. The National Journal states: ``The White House's strategy to exaggerate the immediate impact of the cuts has backfired.'' In Politico: ``For all the hype, spin and blame exchanged over the across-the-board cuts, the reality is they don't mean the sudden economic collapse of America.'' It is important to see the sequester in its overall context. All the hype associated with this could be analogous, I suppose, to all the hype we had yesterday about the weather. Everybody expected we were going to have the blizzard of 2013, and it never materialized. All of the predictions with regard to doom and gloom relating to sequester have also not amounted to very much. The American people have picked up on that. I think most of them agree, if you look at public opinion polls, that Washington does need to tighten its belt. Washington does need to reduce its spending. Washington needs to lessen the appetite it has to take more of the American taxpayers' money and spend it on what most taxpayers view to be not really necessary. When you talk about a 2.4-percent reduction in overall Federal spending, most Americans, when they evaluate their own financial situations, come to the conclusion most of them probably could absorb, if they had to, a 2.4-percent reduction in their own spending. They would look at their budgets in very realistic ways. They would scrutinize and examine where they could find spending which is low priority, things they could live without. What we have seen here in Washington from the administration is various heads of agencies and departments going out and trying to identify the biggest, most high- profile thing for dramatic effect in an attempt to scare and frighten the American people. The American people recognize, and hopefully the administration has come to the conclusion as well, a 2.4-percent reduction in overall Federal spending is something we need to absorb here in Washington, DC, and demonstrate to the American people we are serious about getting Washington's fiscal house in order. I have long maintained the sequester is not the best way to rein in Federal spending. There is a better way to do so. The reductions called for in the sequester disproportionately impact certain areas of the budget. We all know about the impact on the national security budget, which represents only 20 percent of Federal spending but gets 50 percent of the cuts in the sequester. I would have preferred a different approach. Given the refusal of President Obama and Senate Democrats to come to the table and find alternative savings, the sequester has gone into effect. The President and most Senate Democrats wanted to see an increase in taxes, something many of us believe would be very harmful to the economy. If you look at what the President has already received in terms of tax increases since he has been in office, it amounts to about $1.7 trillion. If you look at the last 4 years and all the promises which were made about additional spending, stimulus spending, $1 trillion in additional stimulus spending back when the President first took office, how that would impact the economy, we were told it would take unemployment down below 6 percent. We all know what has happened. We continue to experience sluggish, slow, anemic growth with chronic high unemployment, and we continue to pile massive amounts of debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren. While the President has been seeking to cause alarm and cast blame with regard to the sequester, one must question the economic arguments he is making. The President and his allies in Congress claim he inherited a bad economy and increased spending is necessary to stimulate economic growth. President Obama's agenda, since he has been in office, has been to spend more, tax more, and regulate more. As I mentioned earlier, over $1.7 trillion in new taxes has been imposed to be signed into law since he took office. The most recent of that, the fiscal cliff, was $620 billion on January 1. If you add up the tax increases in ObamaCare, there is over $1 trillion there. If you look at the $518 billion in new regulations which have been approved since the President took office, you may see we put an enormous amount of cost, burden, new requirements, mandates, and harm to the economy and the small businesses which create jobs: $1.7 trillion in new taxes, the $518 billion in new regulations. What has been the impact of those policies? It is pretty clear average economic growth under this President has averaged eight-tenths of 1 percent, .8 percent of the overall share of the economy, GDP. This is less than 1 percent economic growth, on average, in the 4 years this President has been in office. To put it in perspective, if you look at past Presidents when we have had economic downturns and recessions, President Reagan inherited a bad economy too. When he came to office, we were faced with a series of real economic circumstances: high inflation, high interest rates, and weak growth. President Reagan put in place policies which were progrowth. He enacted progrowth tax reform, fewer regulations. The economy grew nearly three times as fast as it has under President Obama's watch. The point, very simply, is if you put the right policies in place, if you make it less difficult and less expensive for our small businesses and our job creators to create more jobs, there are more jobs and economic growth. If you make it more difficult, more expensive, and harder for our small businesses and our job creators to create jobs, there are fewer jobs, less economic growth, and lower take-home pay for American families and workers. If the Obama recovery was as strong as Reagan's, our economy would be $1.5 trillion larger today, meaning more jobs and more opportunity for Americans. This is assuming if you were getting a comparable level of growth in the economy. The fact is President Obama's spending, tax, and regulatory policies are hamstringing economic recovery, jobs, and opportunity. Yesterday the Federal Reserve released the latest edition of its so- called beige book or more formally known as the Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions. The beige book stated the 2010 health care law is being cited as a reason for layoffs and a slowdown in hiring. This report, which examines economic conditions across various Federal Reserve districts throughout the country, stated: ``Employers in several districts cited the unknown effects of the Affordable Care Act as reasons for planned layoffs and reluctance to hire more staff.'' It is clear President Obama's policies are the real threat to our economy, not the sequester. A 2.4-percent across-the-board reduction in Federal spending here in Washington, DC, clearly--if you look at the rate of growth we have seen in spending since the President took office of over 20 percent in 2009, in the overall scheme of things, is something which is very reasonable. The American people see this as reasonable overall. On the contrary, if you look at policies the President has put in place, whether this is more stimulus spending, growing government, higher taxes, more regulations, we are getting a very different picture of what those policies look like in terms of the impact on our economy. We have seen negative impacts, high-level spending, and high annual deficits during the President's first term. As a consequence of these statistics, there is slower economic growth. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an opinion piece by Michael Boskin, which he wrote earlier in the week. In this article Mr. Boskin makes the case that spending cuts will actually help the economy: ``Standard Keynsian models that claim a quick boost from higher government spending showed the effect quickly turns negative. So the spending needs to be repeated over and over, like a drug, to keep the hypothetical positive effect going.'' Mr. Boskin points to an academic study which found returning spending to pre-crisis, pre-Obama levels--about a 3-percent reduction in spending as a percentage of our entire GDP--would increase short-term economic growth because expectations of lower future taxes and debt lead to higher incomes, more private spending, and investment. [From the Wall Street Journal, Mar. 4, 2013] Larger Spending Cuts Would Help the Economy (By Michael J. Boskin) President Obama's most recent prescription for economic growth--more government stimulus spending, new social programs, higher taxes on upper-income earners, subsidies for some industries and increased regulation for all of them--is likely to have the same anemic results as in his first administration. Recall: The $825 billion stimulus program did little economic good at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per job, even based on the administration's own inflated job estimates. Cash for Clunkers cost $3 billion merely to shift car sales forward a few months. The PPIP (Public-Private Investment Program for Legacy Assets) to buy toxic assets from the banks to speed lending generated just 3% of the $1 trillion that the program planners anticipated. And now? Mr. Obama proposes universal preschool ($25 billion per year), ``Fix it First'' repairs to roads and bridges, plus an infrastructure bank ($50 billion), ``Project Rebuild,'' refurbishing private properties in cities ($15 billion), endless green-energy subsidies, and a big hike in the minimum wage. The president and Senate Democrats also demand that half the spending cuts under sequestration be replaced with higher taxes. These proposals are ill-considered. The evidence sadly suggests the initial improvement in children's cognitive skills from ``Head Start'' quickly evaporates. Higher minimum wages increase unemployment among low-skilled workers. A dozen recent studies in peer-reviewed journals, including one by the president's former chief economic adviser Christina Romer, document the negative effects of higher taxes on the economy. As for adventures in industrial policy, former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers wrote a memo in 2009 about the impending $527 million loan guarantee to Solyndra and other recipients of government largess. ``The government is a crappy v.c. [venture capitalist],'' he wrote, in what is also the best postmortem. In 2010, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser concluded in the New York Times that infrastructure is poor stimulus because ``It is impossible to spend quickly and wisely.'' Federal infrastructure spending should be dealt with in regular appropriations. Will more spending today stimulate the economy? Standard Keynesian models that claim a quick boost from higher government spending show the effect quickly turns negative. So the spending needs to be repeated over and over, like a drug, to keep this hypothetical positive effect going. Japan tried that to little effect, starting in the 1990s. It now has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio among the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development--and that debt is a prime cause, as well as effect, of Japan's enduring stagnation. The United States is heading in this wrong direction. Even if the $110 billion in annual sequestration cuts are allowed to take place, the Congressional Budget Office projects that annual federal spending will increase by $2.4 trillion to $5.9 trillion in a decade. The higher debt implied by this spending will eventually crowd out investment, as holdings of government debt replace capital in private portfolios. Lower tangible capital formation means lower real wages in the future. Since World War II, OECD countries that stabilized their budgets without recession averaged $5-$6 of actual spending cuts per dollar of tax hikes. Examples include the Netherlands in the mid-1990s and Sweden in the mid-2000s. In a paper last year for the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford's John Cogan and John Taylor, with Volker Wieland and Maik Wolters of Frankfurt, Germany's Goethe University, show that a reduction in federal spending over several years amounting to 3% of GDP--bringing noninterest spending down to pre-financial-crisis levels-- will increase short-term GDP. Why? Because expectations of lower future taxes and debt, and therefore higher incomes, increase private spending. The U.S. reduced spending as a share of GDP by 5% from the mid- 1980s to mid-1990s. Canada reduced its spending as share of GDP by 8% in the mid-'90s and 2000s. In both cases, the reductions reinforced a period of strong growth. An economically ``balanced'' deficit-reduction program today would mean $5 of actual, not hypothetical, spending cuts per dollar of tax hikes. The fiscal-cliff deal reached on Jan. 1 instead was scored at $1 of spending cuts for every $40 of tax hikes. Keynesian economists urge a delay on spending cuts on the grounds that they will hurt the struggling economy. Yet at just one-quarter of 1% of GDP this year, $43 billion of this year's sequester cuts in an economy with a GDP of more than $16 trillion is unlikely to be a major macroeconomic event. Continued delay now leaves a long boom as the only time to control spending. There was some success in doing this in the mid-1990s under President Clinton and a Republican Congress. More commonly the opposite occurs: A boom brings a surge in tax revenues and politicians are anxious to spread the spending far and wide. In any case, the demand by Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats that any dollar of spending cuts in budget agreements this spring (to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year and when the debt limit again approaches) be matched by an additional dollar of tax hikes is economically unbalanced in the extreme. Those who are attempting to gradually slow the growth of federal spending while minimizing tax hikes have sound economics on their side.

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

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak as in morning business for up to 12 minutes.

Mr. THUNE. To wrap up and put this into perspective, Federal spending has increased nearly 20 percent since 2009. Sequestration, the across- the-board spending reductions which will occur under the sequester, amount to a reduction of 2.4 percent out of a $3.5 trillion budget. Even with the sequester, the government will spend more this year than it did last year. I would hope the President would begin to be honest with the American people about the impact of his tax hikes, his spending, and new regulations are having on our Nation's economic growth and recovery; more important, coming to the conclusion and being honest with the American people about that, change his policies; actually come to a conclusion based on what we have seen, 4 years of his policies, which is slow growth, and a .8 percent economic growth on average for the past 4 years. There is also, as I said before, high unemployment, chronic unemployment--which is still around that 8-percent level--and massive amounts of new debt we are piling on the backs of future generations. Not only do we need the President, in terms of his rhetoric, to be honest with the American people, we need him to change his policies and take an honest look at the relationship between spending and economic growth. This shows the sequester will not have long-term negative impacts on the economy. We need to put the Federal Government on a stable fiscal path in order to create the kind of economic certainty needed in this country to grow the economy and create jobs. Less spending by Washington, DC, actually will lead to greater economic growth, a private economy, more jobs for the American people, and higher take-home pay. I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Kentucky for yielding for a question. I appreciate his diligence in continuing at this late hour to get an answer to some very important questions. I think many of us when we got up and came in this morning were preparing and getting ready for the big blizzard of 2013 which, of course, never materialized here in Washington, DC. Evidently, there were a lot of agencies of government that were not here today. Perhaps when they get back, maybe the Senator from Kentucky will get an answer to his question. I think it is a straightforward question. I am someone this evening who has supported the use of drones in fighting the war on terror. I think they have been very effective in killing terrorists, people who want to do harm to the people of this country. But I think the question that has been raised by the Senator from Kentucky--and the reason we are here this evening--has to do with a straightforward issue. He has a sense of the Senate on which he is prepared to have the Senate go on record, and it is very simple and very straightforward. It says: Resolved that it is the sense of the Senate that, No. 1, the use of drones to execute or target American citizens on American soil who pose no imminent threat clearly violates the constitutional due process rights of citizens. No. 2, the American people deserve a clear, concise, and unequivocal public statement from the President of the United States that contains detailed legal reasoning including, but not limited to, the balance between national security and due process, limits of Executive power, and distinction between treatment of citizens and noncitizens within and outside the borders of the United States, the use of lethal force against American citizens, and the use of drones and the application of lethal force within the United States territory. It is a very straightforward resolution, a sense of the Senate, and all that the Senator from Kentucky is simply doing is trying to get a response and get a vote on that and make that the statement of the Senate. He obviously wants to get the President of the United States, the White House, and Mr. Brennan--whose nomination is pending before us--to make a clarification on that point. It is not like this issue popped up overnight. The Senator from Kentucky has been trying for some time to get an answer to this question. He has submitted numerous letters addressed to Mr. Brennan. This is a letter from February 12 where he poses numerous questions, one of which is: Do you believe that the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil? What about the use of lethal force against a non-U.S. person on U.S. soil? These are straightforward questions to which the Senator from Kentucky deserves an answer, and this is a perfectly fitting and appropriate time in which to try and get that answer. The nomination of the CIA Director is an incredibly important and strategic position in this country, and under the Constitution of the United States, article II, section 2, the President has the power by and with the advice and consent of the Senate to make treaties provided two-thirds of the Senators concur. ``He shall nominate, and with the advice of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers, counsels, judges of the Supreme Court, and other officers of the United States.'' It is the advise and consent power that the Senate has under the Constitution that the Senator from Kentucky is exercising on this nomination. Again, it has been pointed out many times on the floor of the Senate today this is not something that is a partisan issue. It is not a Democratic or Republican issue. This is something that has ramifications. It is a constitutional question. It has to do with due process under the law. It has to do with the advise and consent power of the Senate under the Constitution. So when the Senator from Kentucky continues to press the administration for a straightforward answer, he continues to get sort of these vague, ambiguous answers, if you will. Again, these are questions that did not just pop up overnight. Back on January 25 of this year, 2013, the Senator from Kentucky posed to Mr. Brennan a series of questions at that time. The follow-on letter, which I quoted from earlier, was from February 12. He put forward questions, such as: Do you agree with the argument put forth on numerous occasions by the executive branch that it is legal to order the killing of American citizens and it is not compelled to explain its reasoning in reaching this conclusion? Do you believe this is a good precedent for the government to set? He goes on to ask another question: Would it not be appropriate to require a judge or court to review every case before the individual in question is added to a targeting list? Please describe the due process requirements in place for those individuals being considered for addition to a targeting list. Would you agree it is paradoxical that the Federal Government would need to go before a judge to authorize a wiretap on U.S. citizens overseas but possibly not to order a lethal drone strike against the same individual? If not, please explain why you believe something similar to the FISA standard should not be applied in regard to lethal actions against citizens of the United States. These are straightforward questions. These are questions to which I believe the Senator from Kentucky deserves an answer. Many of us this evening, at this late hour, are here to support him in that endeavor and his attempt at least to try--as this nomination moves through the process--to get the answers to the questions that would allow him to perform the advise and consent function that is in the U.S. Constitution as it applies to nominations and as it has been implemented here by the Senators in history. I want to say to the Senator from Kentucky--and I have a question for him in a moment--that it is remarkable to see this process unfold. In my time here--and I came in the 2004 election; started my service in the U.S. Senate in January of 2005--I have not seen a time where we had a Senator who as a matter of principle stood down here for the number of hours he has today and insisted on getting some answers. I give him great credit for the job he has done in pressing this issue. He has not been given that answer yet. It sounds as though it has kind of come up to the line a couple of times. It is very simple. They could put this thing to rest. All they have to do is come forward and answer that very simple question about the legal authority to target American citizens on American soil with drone attacks. It doesn't seem to me, at least, that it would be that hard of a question to answer. They say as a matter of policy they have not done that and they don't have any intention of doing it in the future. Why don't we put this issue to rest once and for all, and the Senator from Kentucky will allow the process to go forward and Mr. Brennan can get his vote. In the time I have been here, at least, it certainly is remarkable to me to see the amount of effort the Senator from Kentucky has put forward in trying to get an answer to a very straightforward question. I give him great credit for that, because a principled stand is something we don't see enough of around here. So to stand here and use his powers as a Senator in a way that is very fitting with the tradition and history of this great institution--we look at the U.S. Senate and those who have come before, the place of great characters of our history, including Calhoun and others who have graced the U.S. Senate and some of the great debates that have occurred in the past. It is nice to see a discussion and debate about a major constitutional issue, a major constitutional question. I, as do many of my colleagues who are here this evening, support the Senator from Kentucky in his quest to get answers. I think it is certainly appropriate. I think it certainly should be expected that the administration respond to what are very straightforward questions with regard to the issue that has been raised by the Senator and I hope that answer will be forthcoming. If it is not, it is entirely possible, I suppose, that this could continue for some time into the future. But in any event, I ask the Senator from Kentucky what it will take in terms of some sort of affirmation, some sort of answer, some sort of response from the White House, from the nominee, the Director of the CIA, to satisfy the question he has raised. It seems to me, at least as a Senator from South Dakota, that the question he poses is a straightforward and simple one and merely requires a very simple answer.

Mr. THUNE

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

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, we are hearing a lot of discussion here in Washington and around the country this week about the so-called sequester, which I think bears some explanation. Oftentimes we talk in terms and in such a way that I think ordinary Americans have a hard time understanding the arcane world and arcane lexicon we have here in Washington, DC. Basically we are talking about these spending cuts-- across-the-board cuts--that will take effect at the end of this week. It was a process that was put in place many months ago. In fact, if we go back to the Budget Control Act, which passed in August of 2011, we won't find very many people now who will claim paternity of that idea. In fact, there is a big debate and a lot of finger pointing about whose idea this was and whose fault it was that we are where we are. I would simply point out that I think there are a lot of Republicans and Democrats who voted for the Budget Control Act, so clearly many of us voted in support of that as a last resort. Many of us didn't want that to happen. We wanted to see a deal worked out where we would actually address the major problems facing this country with regard to our spending and debt. But since that couldn't be negotiated between the President and the leadership of Congress, we ended up with this process where we had some immediate spending cuts taking effect--about $900 billion, with another $1.2 trillion to follow--hopefully achieved through reforms, including tax reform, entitlement reform, by a so- called supercommittee that met and convened for a while. However, when that committee failed to reach a conclusion, it set in process, set in motion, what we know today as sequester. It was actually built to go until the 1st of January, in which case all of these things would take effect if nothing had happened. Clearly, nothing had happened. So when January rolled around, we ended up with this process we now know as sequester. I wish to point out that the President has been running away from this; somehow this just imaginarily appeared, this idea of sequester. But if we go back and look at the origin of this, we see it was clearly something the President and his people put forward. Fine points have been laid out by Bob Woodward in his book and subsequent op-ed this last weekend in which he stated very clearly this was an idea that originated with the White House. In fact, Jack Lew, in his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, actually mentioned the fact that when they were looking at something they could use--a trigger, if you will--they drew upon the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings agreement that was agreed to back in 1985 by the Congress, and that incorporated this idea of a sequester, which included an across-the- board spending cut. So, basically, it came from the White House. It came from the President and his people. That is where the idea of sequester originated. So to suggest now that somehow they didn't know about this or they didn't have anything to do with it, that it isn't their responsibility, is completely contradictory to the facts, as has been delineated by Bob Woodward in his book and many others who are familiar with those discussions. The point, very simply, is we have a process that was put in place a long time ago. We can go back to August 2011 when the Budget Control Act was passed to find out why we are where we are today. The other thing that is interesting to me, which I think has now added to the narrative of trying to reconstruct the history of all this, is the idea that somehow there should have been taxes incorporated in this, that we needed to have a ``balanced approach'' in the sequester. That was never contemplated. This was all on the spending side. If we look at the history of this and we actually listen to, again, the people who are familiar with those discussions--and Bob Woodward, this weekend in his op-ed said: The President is moving the goalpost. The revenues and taxes were not a part of this. But now, all of a sudden, the White House is insisting upon: We want taxes to be a part of this. What is ironic about that is they got taxes. They got a big fat tax increase on January 1 of this year. That wasn't balanced. There were no spending cuts. That was all taxes: $620 billion. So from our perspective, the tax issue has been dealt with. The President got revenues--revenues that weren't contemplated by the sequester in the first place. Yet, today, he gets up and argues that this needs to be a ``balanced'' plan, which is a euphemism around here for: We want more of your tax dollars. We want more taxpayers' money to come to Washington, DC. We want higher taxes. That is what that message is essentially saying. When the President and many of his allies on Capitol Hill say: We want a balanced plan, that means they want tax increases--on top of the $620 billion in new taxes the President got on January 1 of this year. Now, what is interesting to me about this whole process is it was reported this morning that the President has called a meeting on Friday. He now wants to convene a meeting on Friday to talk about these Draconian cuts that are going to go into effect, and he has been traveling all over the country picking the most high-profile, highly visible items he can that would suggest this is going to have this profoundly dramatic impact on people around this country. So now he is coming back to Washington. When? March 1. When is that? It is the day the cuts are designed to go into effect. Where has the President been for the last year and a half? Where is the leadership in waiting until the very day these cuts are supposed to go into effect to say: Oh, let's have a meeting to talk about what we might be able to do to avoid the impact of these across-the-board spending reductions. So March 1. OK, here we are, eleventh hour, once again, at the last minute, the President sweeps in and says he wants to do something to try to avert this sequester. But, again, remember: We have known about this for a year and a half. This is not a new revelation. We have known this was coming for a very long time. The supercommittee failed to produce a result in November 2011. So it is almost a year and a half now we have known the sequester is coming. In fact, last summer we passed legislation in Congress that asked the administration to give us some detail and some specificity about where these cuts were going to take place, and we got some vague outline about that. We didn't get any report from the President that enumerated these because, frankly, I don't think they had gone through the process of trying to figure out what they were going to do with it. So here we are now 18 months later, at the eleventh hour, and the President all of a sudden says: Let's have a meeting and talk about what we might be able to do to avoid the impact of these across-the- board spending reductions. Where is the leadership in that? Why weren't we doing that 12 months ago, 11 months ago, 10 months ago, 1 month ago, last week? Why weren't we talking about this earlier? Why do we have to wait until the very last day to have a discussion about this? Well, evidently, the President is better at campaigning than he is at governing because he has been driving all over the country--I shouldn't say driving, flying all over the country, over 5,000 miles--over 5,000 miles--campaigning on this issue to try to scare people into believing that an $85 billion across-the-board spending reduction, which represents 2.4 percent of Federal spending this next year, is somehow going to be disastrous for our economy and for our country. Frankly, I am not in any way diminishing the impact of spending reductions. Spending reductions will have some impact--there is no question about that--for sure. But to go out and say we are going to have 90-minute lines at airports, and we are not going to have meat inspectors, and all these things they are trying to put out there to scare the American people, to dramatize and, frankly, to traumatize the American people about a 2.4-percent reduction in overall Federal spending? Now, if a person is a member of an average American family or an American business or anybody in this country, and they know they are going to have 2.4 percent less to work with next year, what do they do? They sit down around their kitchen table and figure out what those things are they spend money on that they can live without. It is a fairly simple exercise. In most cases, people are going to pick the low-priority items. They are going to pick the things they can probably live without. They are not going to pick the things they really need and rely upon and depend upon. But I think most Americans would agree they could find a 2.4-percent reduction in their annual spending if they had to. I think that is something ordinary, average Americans have to deal with all the time: Let's just tighten our belts a little bit; let's figure out how we can get along with 2.4 percent less spending. Well, we are talking about 2.4 percent less spending on a $3.6 trillion annual Federal budget. What does that represent? So $85 billion is a lot of money. It is a lot of money anywhere. It is a lot of money in my State of South Dakota. In the small town I grew up in, those are dimensions we didn't even contemplate in most cases. But we think about it this way: $85 billion, the amount of money we are asked to reduce in terms of the overall Federal spending this next year, is the equivalent of how much our country borrows every single month. Every 28 days, we borrow $85 billion. So every single month, we borrow--we put on the backs of our children and grandchildren--as much money as the Federal Government is being asked to live without for an entire year: 2.4 percent of annual Federal spending. To be fair, people will say: Wait a minute. It is not 2.4 percent because it is just affecting a certain area of the budget, and they are right. It will represent a bigger percentage simply because so much of the budget has been walled off from this, the area where the real Federal spending is; where three-fifths to two-thirds of all Federal spending has essentially, for all intents and purposes, been protected or insulated from this. There is a small 2-percent cut that would occur in some of the mandatory areas of the budget, but for all intents and purposes, what really drives Federal spending year in and year out and what is going to represent, according to the Congressional Budget Office, about 91 percent of all Federal spending 10 years from now-- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps; mandatory Federal spending entitlement programs--that is pretty much walled off. So we are increasingly shrinking the discretionary part of the budget which represents a smaller and smaller portion of Federal spending each and every year. But the reality is it still is 2.4 percent out of a $3.6 trillion annual budget that we are talking about. So it seems to me, at least, that all the hand-wringing that is going on in Washington right now and all the drama the President is trying to create by flying over 5,000 miles across the country, campaigning about the effects of this sequester, really gets lost in what I think every American has to deal with every single day and every single week and every single month and every single year; that is, sometimes they have to make do with a little bit less, and maybe Washington, DC, can figure out how to do that. But we have to ask the question again: Where is the leadership? The President, on Friday, March 1--the day this happens--decides to have a meeting when we have known about this for 18 months. The Senate, under the leadership of the majority--the Democrats in the Senate--hasn't passed a budget now for 1,400 days. We have gone 1,400 days without a budget. We are going on 4 years without a budget. We spend $3.5 trillion, $3.6 trillion of the American taxpayers' money every single year, and we haven't had a budget that suggests how we are going to spend it now for going on 4 years. Where is the leadership? The President of the United States submits a budget--which he will do sometime soon. He has missed the deadline already, but we assume it is coming in the next few weeks. But over the last couple of years when he submitted a budget to Congress, when it was voted on in the House and in the Senate, it didn't receive a single vote. Now, it perhaps is not surprising it didn't receive a Republican vote because it had a lot of tax increases in it, but it didn't get a Democrat vote--zero, zilch--in the House or Senate. There wasn't a Republican or a Democrat who voted for the President's budget. Why? Because it wasn't serious. The President is not doing anything to meaningfully address out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt. So here we are. The Budget Control Act finally did put in place some spending reductions, and now everybody is hyperventilating about what we can do to avoid them. How can we turn this off? How can we shut off the sequester? I, frankly, believe we could do this in a much better way, a more responsible way when it comes to the spending reductions. We ought to do it in a way that doesn't put a disproportionate burden on the defense budget. National security represents 20 percent of total Federal spending, but it gets 50 percent of the cuts under the sequester. That is not the way it ought to happen. I am all for--and plans have been offered and twice passed by the House Republicans--to replace this sequester with other--what we believe are more responsible spending reductions. But that passed the House of Representatives; it can't pass in the Senate. The President has had no interest in looking at some alternative. The only alternative he is interested in is the one that would do the most harm and the most damage to the American economy; that is, more taxes. If he gets taxes on this, if he gets taxes to turn off the sequester like the taxes he got on January 1, it will not be enough because it is never enough. People who believe in big government and believe the way to solve deficits is to raise taxes are never going to raise enough revenue. If you do not address what is really afflicting our country--and that is out-of-control spending--you have not done anything to solve the problem, which the $620 billion tax increase on January 1 demonstrated. The amount of money, the amount of revenue generated from that tax increase January 1 will fund the government this year for less than a week--less than a single week. This is not a revenue problem. This is not a tax problem. This is a spending problem. It is time for some leadership. It is time for the President to quit campaigning, to come back here, and to start governing. But here we are--Friday, the day it is all set to take effect--we have a $16 trillion debt. The Congressional Budget Office says at the end of the next 10 years it is going to be $26 trillion. We are adding $1 trillion a year. We are borrowing 40 cents out of every $1 we spend. Revenues coming into the Treasury, according to the Congressional Budget Office, are going up, actually; and by 2015 they are going to be 19.1 percent of our entire economy, which is more than a percentage point higher than the 40-year historical average. Revenues are going up, and for the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, revenues will exceed, by about a percentage point, the 40-year historical average. So revenues are coming up to above historical averages, and yet we continue to run trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. Well, we have to get our spending under control. We have to get the economy going again. The Republican staff on the Joint Economic Committee put out a study that suggested if we had revenue growth like we have had--average revenue growth--for the past 60 years, if we had that in the past 4 years, the deficits today would be half of what they are. That is the impact of economic growth. That is why growing at 1\1/ 2\ to 2 percent is not enough. We have to grow at 3 to 4 percent. But to grow at 3 to 4 percent, we have to have policies that promote growth, that allow the economy to expand. We cannot keep piling on new taxes and new regulations and making it more difficult and more expensive for people who create jobs in this country to create those jobs. So the economy will continue to grow at a sluggish, anemic rate. We will continue to have these high deficits, particularly if we do not get our spending under control. It is about exercising fiscal discipline and responsibility when it comes to our spending. It is about putting policies in place that promote job creation and growth in this country. That is what it is going to take to get this country back on track. Yet the President is out campaigning around the country. He comes back now at the eleventh hour, and on March 1 he decides to have a meeting at the White House to talk about something we have known was going to happen now for 18 months--18 months. We have the most predictable crisis, according to the Simpson-Bowles Commission, we have ever seen--the spending and debt crisis that is in front of us. We have known about it for a long time. You can see it. It is like a slow-moving train wreck out there. You are just watching it. You just know it is going to happen, and yet nobody is doing anything to turn off the engines. It is high time we did that. I hope the President will engage. I hope we will get for the first time now in almost 4 years, 1,400 days, a budget in the Senate that puts a plan in place--a real plan, not a fake plan, not a phony plan, not a plan that has a bunch of tax increases, but a plan that actually addresses what drives Federal spending and debt in a way that will put us on a more sustainable fiscal path and ensure that future generations of Americans have a higher standard of living, a higher quality of life than what previous generations have had, not a lower and a less one. That is the path we are headed on today if we do not change course. Madam President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. THUNE

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

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about the fiscal challenges facing this country, and particularly the spending problem we have and how it impacts not only the economy but also the lives of the American people. Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released the latest Budget and Economic Outlook, which confirmed the threat that long-term fiscal imbalances pose to the Nation's economy. The Congressional Budget Office found that the national debt will climb by $10 trillion, to $26 trillion, over the next 10 years if Federal spending continues on its current trajectory. Spending on mandatory programs will remain on auto pilot, resulting in high annual deficits. To kind of put things in perspective, if you go back to 2007 and you look at what the Federal Government spent, it was about $2.7 trillion annually. If you look at what the Federal Government spent in fiscal year 2012, which ended September 30 of last year, it was $3.5 trillion, an increase of nearly 30 percent. Inflation during that same time period was 10.8 percent, meaning that government grew at almost three times the rate of inflation. Again, I want to emphasize what I think is an important point here, because in the discussion we are having about spending and debt, there is somehow this assertion that has been made that this is not a spending problem, that actually this is more a revenue issue. Well, again, if you look at what has happened just in the past 5 years, spending has increased nearly 30 percent, Federal spending, or at a rate of almost three times the rate of inflation. So clearly spending has increased dramatically just in the last 5 years. The trend is projected to continue over the next 10 years and beyond, with spending exceeding its historical average over that time period, and then ballooning in the years beyond that. Such levels of spending will cause the Federal debt to grow, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, ``Such a large debt would increase the risk of a fiscal crisis during which investors would lose so much confidence in the government's ability to manage its budget that the government would be unable to borrow at affordable rates.'' Again, why is this important? Well, obviously, if the deficits continue to continue year after year, adding more and more to the Federal debt, eventually investors are going to lose confidence in our government. They are going to demand a higher return, higher interest rate when we borrow money. That obviously has an impact all across the economy. Because when interest rates go up, everything else that is pegged to it goes up. If you look at middle-class Americans who are trying to borrow money, for example, to buy a home or to get a college education or for a small business to make investments in order to create and expand jobs, the interest rates go up for everyone. Inflation also goes up if the Nation's fiscal challenges are not addressed, meaning that the hard-earned dollars are not going to go as far. That is going to put further pressure on hard-working middle-class families. The threat of the budget challenges facing this country and our economy is very real, because of this report that came out last week from the Congressional Budget Office. It confirmed we are headed toward Greece if we do not take the steps that are necessary to change the direction we are on. A lot of that reality, however, unfortunately, is lost on lots of people here in Washington, DC. As I said earlier, there has been this debate about whether we do, in fact, have a spending problem. Over the weekend, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, repeated what has become doctrine to many in the Democratic Party; that is, the idea that the U.S. Government does not have a spending problem. She said, ``It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem.'' This comes from the top Democrat in the House of Representatives. ``It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem.'' Well, obviously the White House scrambled quickly the next day to come out: Yes, yes, we know we have a spending problem. But there is reporting out there that suggests the President of the United States has also made this assertion, that this is not a spending problem. I do not know how you can examine the Federal budget projections and not come to the conclusion that we have a spending problem. It is driving our national debt, a debt that is very harmful to our economy. You have to look no farther than the Congressional Budget Office report last week to see that this is a spending problem, not a revenue problem, because that same CBO report said that the revenue--money that is raised by the Federal Government--is returning to its historical average of 17.9 percent of GDP. That is the way we have measured the amount of revenue coming into the Treasury as a percentage of our entire economy. You measure that over time, and getting back to the historical average, the 40-year average would be 17.9 percent. If you look at the year 2015 as a case in point, the revenues get back to 19.1 percent of GDP, which is a 25-percent increase in 2 years, significantly exceeding the historical average. If you look at the 10- year outlook the CBO came up with, they said revenues would average 18.9 percent over the next decade, which is almost a full percentage point more than the 40-year historical average. The point is this: Revenues are not only at historic levels, will be there by 2015 and stay there for the next decade, but they will exceed the historic average for revenues over the next 10 years. So clearly, what we are talking about here is not a problem of Washington taxing too little, it is a problem of Washington spending too much. I know that truth is hard and that math is hard to accept for the people who want to grow government, but we absolutely have to govern in reality. What the math shows is that mandatory spending, which as I said is on auto pilot, continues to squeeze the Federal Government and the Federal budget to a point where we are going to face a Greece-style fiscal crisis if Washington continues to punt on the hard decisions that have to be made. Mandatory spending comprised roughly 60 percent of Federal spending in fiscal year 2012. If you look at the big drivers of mandatory spending, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represented 40 percent of that total, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Congress and the administration have an opportunity in the coming months to reform these entitlement programs not only to get this country back on a more sustainable fiscal track but also to save and protect these programs not only for current retirees but for future generations of Americans as well. That is why I was disappointed last night that the President, in his State of the Union Address, failed to lay out a plan to address the fiscal challenges our country faces. I hope the President and my colleagues here in the Congress will come to the table and work with us to solve these problems, particularly as we consider ways to address the sequester, the continuing resolution which follows after that, and the fiscal year 2014 budget resolution. We cannot simply wait and watch these programs crumble under the weight of looming insolvency. We know Social Security operated at a cash deficit in 2010. The Medicare trustees have told us that Medicare will be insolvent by the year 2024 and the HI trust fund actually as early as the year 2016. If we are going to keep the promises we have made to current retirees and to future generations of Americans, we have to make these programs solvent. That means we have to reform them in a way that saves and protects them and makes sure they are fiscally sustainable not only for today but for the future as well. I have to say, as I listened to the debate about the issues of spending and debt, there is an argument that is made by those on the other side that this is just because of the two wars, and the two wars drove up spending; you know, they were not paid for and that is the reason we have this $16.4 trillion debt. Well, obviously the wars have contributed to that. But if you look at through 2012, that is about $1.4 trillion. Obviously, I would say, to be fair, Republicans have contributed to this as well as Democrats. When Republicans were in charge of the Congress, we did not do a good enough job of keeping spending under control. But the fact is even if you count in spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, that is about $1.4 trillion. The total debt now, as I said, is over $16 trillion, scheduled to go to $26 trillion 10 years from now. Over the course of the first 4 years of this President's term, his first term in office, the debt has increased almost $6 trillion. So it is hard to feature any objective analysis of these facts and this data and say it was the wars that somehow caused all of this. Washington has been overspending for a long time. It is high time for those habits to change. If you look at the war that is winding down, the cost of that, the resources we are putting into these conflicts, those dollars are not going to be showing up again as expenditures in the next few years. We still have the Congressional Budget Office telling us at the end of the next decade we will have added an additional $10 trillion to the debt. So clearly that has certainly been a factor, but it has not been the main factor. There is again no objective analysis that would suggest spending on the wars has been the driving reason for why we are facing the debt crisis we have today. I would simply say too that when you are in a hole, it is advisable to quit digging. Obviously, we continue to look at ways to add more and more spending and, therefore, more and more debt. The health care bill is not something anybody on my side here in the Senate supported when it passed in 2009 and early 2010. But that too is going to drive up spending and is going to drive up debt as we head into the future. You heard from the President last night a whole new series of new spending initiatives, ``investments,'' he called them, in a whole range of areas. As he was sort of laying that out, those of us who were listening to that message were thinking to ourselves: Okay, if you put a calculator on this thing, it keeps going and going and going. Yet the President said we did not need to add a single dime to the deficit. Well, I do not know how anybody could accept that with a straight face. It flat does not pass the smell test. We have a spending problem here in Washington, DC. The facts bear that out. The revenues are going up. They are going to go up 25 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in the next 2 years. In 2015 they will be at 19.1 percent of GDP, an average we have not seen--or a number we have not seen in a long time. Then they will stay roughly at that for the next decade. This is not a revenue problem. This is not a problem where Washington taxes too little. This is a problem where Washington spends too much. If you look at the other side of the equation, spending continues to go up as a percentage of GDP. We see a little bit of relief here in the next few years, but then when the cost of the Affordable Care Act starts hitting, when you start seeing the demographics of the country, as they continue to change, if we do not do something to save and protect Social Security and Medicare for future generations, it is going to bankrupt us. We are headed for a train wreck. We have to do something about that and recognize what that problem is. That problem purely and simply is that Washington spends too much. It is a spending problem. That is why, again, when I heard the top Democrat, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, say over the weekend that it is a false argument to say this is a spending problem, I was shocked, because I think most Americans would argue, as they look at this, and they can do the math, Washington has a very serious spending problem which needs to be addressed. It needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. I thought the report that came out from the Congressional Budget Office last week was instructive for a number of reasons. It pointed out the impact that debt is going to have as we face this debt crisis in terms of interest rates, in terms of inflation, in terms of loss of jobs, and a more sluggish economy. We know from history that when you get a certain amount of debt, it becomes such a drag on your economy that it reduces economic growth. So we have seen this anemic, sluggish economic growth which is going to be continued now for the foreseeable future. We have slower growth, fewer jobs, massive amounts of debt. Eventually what that is going to mean for the middle-class American is higher interest rates when it comes to buying a home, when it comes to buying a car, when it comes to financing a college education. It is going to mean lower take-home pay when the economy slows down and there is not the demand for workers out there. There are so many adverse impacts on our economy from carrying the kind of debt load we are carrying today. I think we have a responsibility to lead. I hope the President of the United States will lead on this issue; that he in his budget will put forward the types of remedies that are necessary not only to deal with our short-term crisis in the sequestration but also to put us long term on a sustainable fiscal path by proposing reforms, reforms to these programs that are driving Federal spending, that are going to add massive amounts to our debt over the course of the next decade and beyond, and at the same time look at things we can be doing that would generate economic growth, that would create jobs in this country. Because when the economy is growing and expanding, then all of these other problems look much smaller by comparison. Republicans here in the Senate are ready to work with the President, work with Democrats. We are anxious to go to work on entitlement reform to save Social Security and Medicare. We are anxious to go to work on reforming our Tax Code in a way that would unleash economic growth to obtain the robust growth we need in the economy to create jobs and make the debt crisis we face look much smaller by comparison. I hope in the days ahead the President of the United States, the leadership on Capitol Hill, and the Congress will do what we should have done a long time ago. It is long overdue for action. It is high time that we become busy and do the work of the American people, which is about providing a more secure, prosperous, and a safer, debt-free future for future generations. Anything less is negating or undermining the responsibility we have to the American people. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, today I recognize Elaine Balsley, an intern in my Rapid City, SD, office for all of the hard work she has done for me, my staff, and the State of South Dakota over the past few months. Elaine is a graduate of Stevens High School in Rapid City, SD. Currently, she is attending Black Hills State University where she is majoring in mass communications. She is a hard worker who has been dedicated to getting the most out of her internship experience. I would like to extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to Elaine for all of the fine work she has done and wish her continued success in the years to come.

Mr. THUNE

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

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. I ask unanimous consent that the period for morning business be extended until 3 p.m. today and that all provisions of the previous order remain in effect.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about the debt crisis facing this country and the opportunity we have to address this issue in a way that balances the budget and ensures the long-term fiscal solvency for future generations. The recent fiscal cliff agreement which enacted tax relief for 99 percent of Americans addressed the revenue side of the equation. But as everyone knows, revenue increases alone are not going to solve the debt crisis. In fact, the tax increases that went into effect as a part of the fiscal cliff deal generate enough revenue over the next 10 years-- and I should say if we annualize that over the next year--to fund the government for less than 1 week next year. So all the talk about the higher revenues and what that will do to address our long-term fiscal solvency and what it will do to address the deficit, if we think about it in those terms, it puts into perspective what the real problem is. We have a debate in this city and in the Congress all the time about whether we can address the huge debt we have in front of us--the trillion-dollar annual deficits--by raising taxes on the so-called rich and people in the higher income categories. That was done. That was done as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations that occurred. Remember, those taxes were all scheduled to go up. They were scheduled to go up on everybody--anybody who had income tax liability on January 1. Because of the agreement that was reached, we were able to protect 99-- in my case in South Dakota more than 99--percent of taxpayers from those tax increases. That being said, there are those in the higher income categories and some businesses that will see higher taxes as a result of that. But those higher taxes represent enough revenue next year to fund the Federal Government for less than 1 week. The question before us is, What do we do for the other 358 days of the year? That is what we have to start talking about, the real problem: What truly affects and afflicts Washington and our fiscal situation for the foreseeable future and for the long-term future; that is, government spending. The reality is the Federal Government doesn't tax too little; it spends too much. Over the past 4 years, the deficit has exceeded $1 trillion each year. The long-term outlook is even worse. This country faces unsustainable fiscal imbalances largely because of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare that have not been reformed in a way that aligns our current demographics with the needs of these programs, which must be done if we are going to save and protect these programs for future generations. Entitlement spending is the largest driver of our national debt over the long term. While it is true Federal revenues as a percentage of GDP have declined over the past few years, this was true because of the great recession, not because tax rates were too low. The average ratio of Federal revenue to GDP over the past 40 years has been roughly in the 18-percent range. Based on Congressional Budget Office data, it is expected that Federal revenues will exceed their historical averages within the next 10 years and remain there for the foreseeable future, even without additional tax increases. I wish to illustrate with this chart which I think tells the story. We always talk about a picture telling a story in exchange for a thousand words. I can talk a lot about this, but I think this visually illustrates it perhaps as well as anything. If we look at the green part, that represents Federal revenue historically, and this goes back to 1980. If we took this chart back to literally the 1970s, late 1960s, we would find, I think over that time period, the revenues stayed pretty static. They go up and down a little bit based on what is happening in the economy, and of course we have a downturn in the 2007 and 2008 timeframe, but revenues are starting to climb back up to that historical average. So it is about, give or take, 18 percent of GDP. That is what historical revenues are. The black strip, which may be perhaps hard to see, is what was enacted in the fiscal cliff negotiation. Those are enacted tax increases that will add a little bit to the total as we project out. This chart takes us out literally to 2040. The purple represents the additional taxes the President would like to get. If the President got everything he wanted in the form of taxes, the revenue picture would be about right here. Again, this takes us from where we are today out to about 2040. As we can see, even if the President got all the tax increases he wanted, represented by this line right here, it still doesn't come anywhere close to dealing with the spending that is going to explode in the outyears if we don't do something to rein that in by reforming many of these programs I just mentioned. If we are going to save and protect Social Security and Medicare for future generations, we have to reform those programs in a way that doesn't create this huge red line that spikes into the future and literally bankrupts the country. In fact, Social Security ran a cash deficit in 2010. Medicare, we are told by the actuaries, will be insolvent by the year 2024. In fact, in the hospital portion of the Medicare trust fund, we are told it may be insolvent by the year 2016. These are important dates to remember because those are the dates at which the revenue coming in from the payroll taxes that support Social Security and Medicare no longer pay for the benefits paid out to beneficiaries. We have this sort of train wreck coming. We know what drives Federal spending are these entitlement programs. What we call mandatory spending in the Federal budget is about 60 percent now of all Federal spending, largely imposed by Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We have this crisis looming. We see the way this thing just starts exploding in the outyears because of the demographics of the country. We have more baby boomers who are reaching retirement age, people living longer--all good things--but we have to align those programs with the demographics of this country and today they are not. Today we are headed on a path that will take us toward a fiscal train wreck unless we do something about that. I think it is important to point out the reason we are where we are, the reason we are running nearly $1 trillion deficits or north of $1 trillion deficits every single year for the past 4 years is because spending has increased dramatically over that timeframe. Again, just to put that into perspective, before the great recession in 2007, the Federal Government was generating about $2.5 trillion annually in tax revenue. At that time, the government was spending about $2.7 trillion each year. So we had somewhere on the order of a couple hundred billion dollars in annual deficits. As I said, revenues dropped off a little bit from that period in 2008 in the financial meltdown, but those have started to pop back up to a more historic and traditional level. So now revenues are back up to roughly that $2.5 trillion annual range. What has changed over that same period of time, between 2007 and 2012, is the amount the Federal Government spends annually. I just mentioned that in 2007 the Federal Government spent $2.7 trillion. We are now at the end of fiscal year 2012, which ended on September 30 of this year, and the Federal Government spent $3.5 trillion. We saw almost a $1 trillion increase in spending over that 5- year period at a time when revenues have stayed somewhat static, although they dipped into recession, but now they have come back, as I said, to that more historic level. Essentially, what is driving these deficits is the massive runup in spending. What caused them? We had a stimulus program that was going to be one-time spending, much of which I think has gotten factored into the baseline. Eventually, we are going to have with the new health care mandates enormous amounts of new spending associated with that, which I think is going to make this picture much worse than it looks already. But my point is we have a fiscal crisis in this country which needs to be addressed. We have been kicking that can down the road for way too long and we have run out of road. The Congressional Budget Office has made it abundantly clear that in each of their assessments of our fiscal situation as a country, most recently in November of 2012, a couple months ago, they said the following: With the population aging and health care costs per person likely to keep growing faster than the economy, the United States cannot sustain the Federal spending programs that are now in place. That is from the CBO. They track this stuff on a daily basis for us. We have a real challenge ahead of us. We have a major problem. I would argue, again, this is predominantly a spending problem, and I think it is illustrated, again, by this chart. When we look at government revenues, it is a fairly flat line. Even with the ups and downs in the economy, it averages about 18 percent of revenue. Actually, without any changes in the baseline, I think it ends up at about 18.6 percent of revenue a decade from now. But what we see is spending, which historically has been in the 20- to 25-percent range if we go back over the past 40 years, is going to explode. The spike we see right here is why we have a fiscal crisis on our hands and why it is so important we act to rein in out-of-control Federal spending. I suggest to my colleagues in the Senate, as I have for a long time, that where this starts is with passing a budget. We have to go back a long time now. I mentioned this the other day, but the last time the Senate passed a budget the iPad didn't even exist. Most of us now take iPads for granted. Many Americans--not all but some Americans--have iPads. They came on the scene around April of 2010. There hasn't been a budget passed in the Senate since April of 2009. We are going on 4 years and now 1,360-some days since the last time the Senate acted on a budget. That is irresponsible. It is especially irresponsible in light of this problem. We have a responsibility to the taxpayers of this country, as stewards of their tax dollars, to do what we can to ensure that we are putting the fiscal house of this country in order in a way that will ensure that future generations of Americans have at least as good, if not better, standard of living and quality of life than what the generation that came before us had. That is not going to happen because we are piling on the backs of future generations enormous amounts of debt. In fact, the $16.4 trillion in debt the Nation has today, if you break that down an on an individual basis, that is about $53,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. That is what every individual owes, every individual in this country owes of that $16.4 trillion in debt. That is not fair to future generations. It is up to us as leaders to look at these things and make decisions today that are in the best interests of future generations. I think it has been sort of a tradition in this country, a heritage, if you will, for one generation of Americans to sacrifice so that the future generation, the next generation of Americans may have a better life, a better standard of living, a better quality of life. That is certainly something that is true where I come from in South Dakota and where the Chair comes from in North Dakota. We represent people who understand that you sacrifice so that the next generation and those who come after you have a better life than you had. If we don't change the way we are doing things, this next generation will be the first generation of Americans where that is not true. Literally, they will have a lower standard of living and a lower quality of life than what we experienced because we weren't willing to live within our means. This is because we continued to spend money we didn't have, we continued to borrow money from China, and we will hand the bill to future generations. It is unconscionable, given this picture--and, again, a picture speaks a thousand words--that we haven't done a budget in the Senate in the last 4 years. There is always a blame game played in Washington, DC, and I understand that both sides have contributed over the years. When my party was in charge of the Congress we spent too much. Obviously, since that time, since we have been out of the majority in Congress the numbers have increased dramatically. If you look at the amount of debt we piled up just in the last 4 years under the current administration, it is about $6 trillion that we have added to the debt in that amount of time. The spending is exploding. The tax revenues are staying fairly steady over time, as I have pointed out with this particular graphic. One thing we know for certain is that raising taxes doesn't solve the problem. If the President got everything he wanted in terms of additional tax increases, and that would be this purple line right here, it doesn't come anywhere close to addressing the amount of spending we have already put on the books. We are going to have to borrow to pay and hand that bill to future generations. You can only do that for so long. It is high time that the Senate got on board and started doing the budget. I served on the Budget Committee for the last 2 years. I had hoped that being on the Budget Committee would be a place where a lot of big debates would occur about how to deal with these big fiscal issues that are facing our country. I turned out to be wrong. We didn't do a budget, we didn't mark up one, we didn't put one on the floor of the Senate. We didn't vote, we didn't have amendments, and we didn't do anything to address this fiscal crisis. To be fair, the House of Representatives, every single year, on time, has passed a budget. The President of the United States, who needs to be a party to this, is the only 1 of 307 million Americans who can sign a bill into law, can engage the American public and the Congress in a way that would address this. The budgets he submitted to the Congress, when they have been voted on in the Senate and the House, haven't received a single vote, not a single vote. Neither Republicans or Democrats in the House or the Senate have voted for the budgets the President has submitted. Why? Because they are not serious. The President hasn't taken this issue seriously. Neither has the majority in the Senate, where we haven't had a budget now for 4 consecutive years. It is high time that changed. I hope it will. I am encouraged, actually, by what I have been hearing from my colleagues. This year, perhaps now, finally, after 4 years, we will actually do a budget. We may put a plan in place for how we are going to address this fiscal crisis, this amount of spending that is going to bankrupt the country unless we take steps to avert it. There are lots of ideas out there. It is not like we don't know what the issues are, like we don't know what the problems are. We do. There have been many bipartisan commissions that have studied this and have examined it thoroughly, that have all come to the same conclusion with regard to what the various problems are--and, frankly, for that matter, what the solutions are. My colleague, Senator Hatch, was down here earlier this morning talking about some of those suggestions. Many of those suggestions, as I have said, have come from bipartisan commissions. We know if we do nothing, we are going to bankrupt the country and ensure that the programs that many Americans rely on today are not going to be available to future generations of Americans. I would hope this is the year in which we do a budget, and this is the year in which the President engages in this discussion in a meaningful way that allows us to put in place a path that will avert what is going to be a major crisis. The problem is not that we tax too little, it is that we spend too much. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE

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

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, we are at the last hour, if you will, the last day for sure, in dealing with what has become probably the biggest fiscal crisis our country has dealt with in some time. I have heard a number of my colleagues from the other side come down and talk about the importance of getting a solution. We all want to get a solution. We do not want to have a situation tomorrow where tax rates go up on everybody across this country who has an income tax liability. We obviously do not want to see our defense have to deal with what would be deep cuts in our national security budget. Those are two things that will happen tomorrow unless Congress can act to prevent that. So count me among those who want to see a solution. I certainly hope the negotiations that are occurring right now can conclude in a way that will give us an outcome that prevents those tax rates from increasing on Americans across this country and also put in place some things that would actually deal with the real problem. The real problem is our country spends too much. We are where we are because we have not done our work when we should have previously. Think about the fact that for 3 consecutive years--3 years in a row--in the Senate, we have not passed a budget. We spend $3.5 trillion of American taxpayer money every single year, and for 3 consecutive years we have not had a budget. The majority leader and the chairman of the Budget Committee and others on the other side have said: We passed a budget control act in August of 2011 and that sort of serves as our budget. Frankly, that is not the case. The law requires us to pass a budget. We have a budget act, enacted back in the 1970s, that requires the Congress, on an annual basis, to lay out a plan for how we are going to spend the American taxpayers' money. The reason we ended up with a budget control act back in August of 2011 is because we failed to pass a budget earlier in the year. For 3 consecutive years in the Senate we have not passed a budget. That is not to say our colleagues on the other side of the Capitol--the House of Representatives--have not acted responsibly. You may disagree with how they did it, but at least they did it. They passed a budget. The Senate, of course, has not for now 3 consecutive years. So we went through this entire year. Everybody knew this was coming. This is not a surprise. This is the most forecast and foretold disaster we have ever seen. As we approached December 31 and the deadline we are dealing with today, we knew that starting January 1 taxes were going to go up on all Americans, at least all Americans who have an income tax liability, and we knew these cuts that were put in place in the Budget Control Act in August of 2011 were going to occur. There should not be any element of surprise. We have known about this for a long time. Yet for month after month after month after month this year, nothing was done about it. I say nothing in the Senate; again, the House of Representatives, early this year--last summer--passed legislation that would extend the tax rates for everybody for 1 year. They passed legislation that would replace the across-the-board cuts that will start to take effect on January 2 with responsible spending reductions that actually do something to bend the curve of all these runaway programs, entitlement costs that are going to bankrupt this country in future years. They made some necessary reforms. Again, people may not agree with them. Obviously, there should be a process where in the Senate we have an opportunity to vote on a budget and make amendments. Perhaps we would do it a different way. I might have voted for something entirely different. But the point is, I did not have anything to vote for. Nobody over here did. We have been here for a whole year, and now we have people coming up and saying: Gee, I hope, I truly wish these negotiations will get us to an outcome. It is December 31. January 1 is tomorrow. It will be 2013. Taxes will go up. Everybody agrees it will be a disaster for the economy. We cannot allow that to happen. It will ruin the economy. Where were we? Where were we for the past month and the month before that and the month before that, dealing with what we knew was going to be this very set of circumstances we face today? I find it very hard to sit and listen to people come up now and wring their hands and talk about: Gee whiz, I hope we can get something done in the last day--as we put two people together basically to resolve this. There was a discussion--in fact, everybody says: Well, you know, the people who are getting together--it was the President and the Speaker at one time; it was Senator McConnell and Senator Reid at one time; now it is Senator McConnell and Vice President Biden--but up until Friday, Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, had not been consulted, had not been advised, had not been involved in any of this. So he gets the call at the last minute to try and come in and sort of rescue this, starts a negotiation that goes over the weekend, and then Saturday night makes a proposal to the Senate Democrats, and was told: We will react to your proposal by 10 o'clock Sunday morning. Ten o'clock Sunday morning passes, 11 o'clock, noon, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock. He comes to the floor and says: We have not heard back. Then the majority leader comes up and says: Look, we do not have a counteroffer. We do not have a proposal. So Senator McConnell then gets on the phone with Vice President Biden, and that is now where those discussions are occurring. They are occurring between Vice President Biden and Senator McConnell. But my point is this: There are two people in a room deciding incredibly consequential issues for this country, while 99 other Senators and 435 Members of the House of Representatives--elected by their constituencies to come to Washington and to represent them--are on the sidelines. Why didn't we have a bill on the floor of the Senate we could actually debate? Why didn't we put something out here under regular order, open it, allow Senators to offer amendments, allow them to have amendments voted on? I might not have liked that outcome. Maybe I would not have. Maybe I could not have voted for the final product. But at least we would have had an opportunity to debate this, instead of waiting now until the eleventh hour, where two people are gathered in a private room, trying to negotiate something that has enormous consequences for this country and for our economy. We are where we are because this process was grossly mismanaged up until this point. So now we are faced with a crisis. There is great drama. If we listen to all the TV stations--at least those that cover what is going on here--they are all talking about the fiscal cliff. Instead of a countdown to the new year, we have a countdown to when we hit the fiscal cliff. What does that say? It is the most predictable financial crisis we have ever known about. We have known about it for months. We have known about it since the temporary tax provisions were put in place 2 years ago. Yet here we are in the eleventh hour on the final day trying to negotiate with two people in a room making decisions that will have a profound impact on the future of this country. I have to say that as I think about those negotiations that are going on, most of what is being talked about is who will pay more in taxes. It is not a question of if, it is who is going to pay more in taxes. The ironic thing about it is that in those discussions--at least to my knowledge of them--there is very little being discussed, if anything, that deals with how this country is going to figure out a way to spend less, which is the problem. OK, I mean, let's face it, Washington, DC, does not have a taxing problem, we have a spending problem. Now, Republicans have said and we are willing to consider, contemplate this idea of having more revenues in the equation. Granted, the President won an election and there is a majority of Democrats here in the Senate. That is their view. Obviously, we have a Republican House of Representatives that has a different point of view about how to solve this and is trying to do it by extending the rates for everybody so that nobody has their rates go up in the middle of a weak economy. There is a big difference of opinion about how to resolve this. But I would argue to my colleagues on both sides that if what comes out of these discussions is something that raises additional revenue, that raises taxes on people in this country, it will not do anything to solve the problem. In fact, if you give the President of the United States everything he wants in terms of tax increases, you will raise enough revenue next year to fund the Federal Government for less than a single week. So what do we do for the other 358 days of the year? A single week--that is what all of these tax increases would amount to in terms of additional revenue. This is not a revenue problem. This is a spending problem that can only be solved by having the political courage to confront the challenges that face this country, not just in the near term but in the long term, and get us on a sustainable fiscal path. That means we have to confront runaway spending and programs that, if not reformed, are going to bankrupt this country and saddle our children and grandchildren with an unbelievable burden of debt and a lower standard, a lower quality of life than anything we or any previous generation-- well, not any previous generation but certainly our generation has experienced. That is where we are today. We are talking about how much taxes are going to go up. And those taxes are going to hit people who create jobs. If you use the $250,000 level, there are about 1 million small businesses that will be impacted by these tax increases, and they employ 25 percent of the American workforce. So we have a lot of middle-class Americans whose jobs depend on the very small businesses that are going to see their taxes go up. This will impact middle- income, middle-class families in this country if taxes go up on small businesses. If that level is raised to $400,000, it will affect fewer, obviously. If it is raised to 500,000, it will affect even fewer small businesses. But the point simply is this: You are hitting literally hundreds of thousands of small businesses that create millions of jobs for middle- class Americans with new taxes they will be paying, and that can't do anything but hurt the very economy we all say we want to get back on its feet. So we are talking about tax increases at a time we ought to be talking about spending. Why do I say that? Well, if we go back to 2007, before the recession, the revenues coming into the Federal Government were about $2\1/2\ trillion give or take, round numbers, about $2\1/2\ trillion. Well, this year revenues coming into the Federal Government are going to be back to about $2\1/2\ trillion. We went through a terrible recession. People call it the great recession. It had a profound impact on the economy--obviously a lot less economic growth, and a recession leads to lower government revenues. So we had a period where government revenues dropped. Well, government revenues are now back to where they were in 2007. Spending in 2007 was about $2.7 trillion. Today it is more than $3\1/ 2\ trillion. So spending has increased by almost $1 trillion--almost $1 trillion in the last 5 years, at a time when the revenues have stayed relatively flat. But the point simply is this: The reason we are running a trillion-dollar deficit this year and the year after that and the year after that is because the spending of the Federal Government has exploded in the last 5 years. So this is not a revenue problem. The revenues are essentially the same as they were 5 years ago. Arguably, people would say that if we have a growing economy, we ought to get more revenue. And we would if we had a growing economy. The goal ought to be to get the economy growing again in a more robust fashion so that we are generating additional revenues coming into the Federal Government that would make these problems, the dimensions of those problems look smaller by comparison. That is why policies that hurt the economy, that slow economic growth--and everybody concludes that raising taxes in the middle of a weak economy is a bad idea if you are interested in generating more economic growth and creating jobs. That, to me, seems to be just intuitive. I think everybody would agree with that, but certainly it is a well-known, documented fact among economists that if you raise taxes, you are going to have lower economic growth, you are going to reduce the rate at which the economy grows and expands and therefore allows for job creation in this country. The best thing we can go to is to get the economy growing and expanding again, and then all of these problems look much smaller by comparison. That means having policies in place that allow small businesses to do what they do best, and that is to create jobs, that provide incentives to invest and to hire people. When you operate in a period of economic uncertainty like we have today with these uncertain tax rates, where you have tax rates that are going to go up, regulatory burdens that continue to go up, you constantly make it more expensive and more difficult for small businesses to create jobs. Creating jobs and growing the economy ought to be our goal. That is so counterintuitive, to think that raising taxes would somehow accomplish that goal. So as we sit here on the last day before these tax rates go up, as we try to scramble now at the last minute to find a resolution, I would simply say and urge my colleagues that we not let this happen again, that we not be here next year or the year after waiting while two people sit in a room and try to cut a deal that most of us have not been privy to or consulted about. The American people obviously are the ones who are ultimately impacted by that, but they have not had an opportunity to have a role in this, to observe what their elected leaders are doing to solve the big problems that face this country. We ought to be functioning the way the Senate used to function; that is, put bills on the floor, allow amendments to be offered and voted on, and then whatever that outcome is, ultimately the House of Representative will pass their version of it, perhaps we will have a conference committee, and hopefully we can get something we can put on the President's desk. That is the way it used to work. But now we are sitting here because we have twiddled our thumbs for month after month after month in the Senate and not passed a budget, not dealt with this issue in any substantial or meaningful way, and now we are sitting here on New Year's Eve--on New Year's Eve. The countdown on the television is not how many hours and minutes are left until we hit the new year, the countdown on the television is the number of hours and minutes that are left until the country goes over the fiscal cliff. Think about what that says about this process, about the Senate--100 people elected to make big decisions to advance the interests of and put this country on a better path to a better future that is more secure, more safe, and more prosperous for our children and grandchildren. That is what should happen, but it should have happened months ago. So I hope we get a result here today that addresses some of these issues--certainly, hopefully, something that will address the tax issue. But that does not solve the problem. If the President gets everything he wants in new taxes, it will fund the government for less than a week. This is not a revenue problem. Washington does not tax people too little, it spends too much. Until we recognize that and deal with what is driving Federal spending, we are going to continue to saddle future generations with more debt, with more liabilities, and with a lower standard of living and lower quality of life than we have experienced. That is not fair to them. It is time for us to demonstrate the political courage that is necessary to take on the big issues and to have the votes. Let's have a budget. Let's put it on the floor. Let's vote on it. Let's do something around here that matters, that is meaningful to the future of this country, rather than wait until the last day and the last hour and allow two people to sit in a room and decide the fate and the future of this great country. I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE

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

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, today I recognize Tyler Stenberg, an intern in my Washington, DC, office, for all of the hard work he has done for me, my staff, and the State of South Dakota. Tyler is a graduate of Mobridge-Pollock High School in Mobridge, SD. Currently, he is attending The University of South Dakota, where he is majoring in political science and criminal justice. He is a hard worker who has been dedicated to getting the most out of his internship experience. I extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to Tyler for all of the fine work he has done and wish him continued success in the years to come.