John Thune

Mr. THUNE

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, yesterday a number of us--I think the number now is somewhere in the 37-to-38 ballpark of Senators-- introduced legislation to expedite consideration of the Keystone XL Pipeline. What is interesting to me about all of this is that this is a project that has been literally reviewed and analyzed and studied and scrutinized now for the better part of 3 years. In fact, they have had two comprehensive environmental evaluations and 3 years of study and review. Then, just recently, the Obama administration deferred a decision on the permit until after the 2012 elections, essentially putting off the decision for about 18 months. Well, what is ironic and sort of interesting about that is this is a project which--after having been carefully vetted for the past 3 years, carefully reviewed, carefully studied, all of the environmental impact analysis done--would lead to all kinds of economic development for this country and job creation in many of the States that are impacted. Our State of South Dakota happens to be one of those. The pipeline traverses South Dakota as it heads down to refineries in other places in the country. But it would benefit my State by generating significant amounts of State and local tax revenue, revenue that is much needed by many of the local jurisdictions: school districts, counties, municipalities in the State of South Dakota. So there is a tremendous benefit to the construction of this pipeline to the various States that are impacted simply as a result of the additional tax revenue that would be raised by it. Add to that, in my State of South Dakota, the hundreds of jobs that would be created, the half billion dollars of economic activity that it would generate--and this is very clear, from the State of South Dakota's standpoint, which is why I believe our Governor has weighed in behind this project, that this is something that ought to at least be decided. There is no reason why, no rational reason why, no logical reason why this project would be delayed for 18 months simply to get past the next election. All of the work has been done. It seems to me at least there ought to be a decision made. We are talking about a $7 billion investment in this country and partly in Canada to get from where the oil sands are to get the oil to the refineries in the United States. If we look at the overall, as I said, economic impact, number of jobs created, it is pretty impressive--20,000 jobs, I think, is the estimate that it would create in this country. Those are jobs that, frankly, many of these States could certainly benefit from. Not to mention the fact that we are doing business with someone who is favorable and friendly to us. Canada is our biggest trading partner. I think we do about $640 billion annually in bilateral trade with Canada. Canada is a country with which we have a very good, strong trading relationship. It strikes me at least that if we are going to get oil from somewhere, it makes sense to get it from a country such as Canada as opposed to some of the other countries around the world that are much less friendly to the United States. In fact, the Keystone XL Pipeline would transport daily about 700,000 barrels of oil that would come through that pipeline. That is the equivalent of the amount that we get on a daily basis from Venezuela. So if you are thinking about getting 700,000 barrels of oil from somewhere in the world, would it not make more sense to get it from Canada as opposed to Venezuela? I think in terms of what it does for our energy independence, for our energy security, dealing with a friendly nation, and making it more possible for our country to become less dependent upon foreign countries for this energy we need, it strikes me that at least this particular project makes a lot of sense. You have not only the economic impact, in terms of the activity it would create in the various States that would be impacted by it, the number of jobs created--as I said, 20,000 jobs is the estimate, with a $7 billion initial investment--and all the tax revenue generated for State and local government along the way, but wouldn't it be nice if the United States got into the situation where we were actually an energy exporter? Believe it or not, this is the first year in the last 62 years--and this is according to a story that ran in the Wall Street Journal yesterday--according to data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Tuesday, the United States has sent abroad 753.4 million barrels of everything from gasoline to jet fuel in the first 9 months of this year, while it imported 689.4 million barrels. That means that, for the first time in 62 years, in 2011--if this trend continues--and it looks as though it will--we will have exported more energy than we imported. We are still a net importer of petroleum, or oil. Hopefully, we can change that in the future by developing these resources we have in this country, one of which is the Bakken Reserve in North Dakota, which is generating enormous amounts of oil for this country. So we are still a net oil importer. In terms of refined gasoline and other products--refined energy--for the first time in 62 years, in 2011, we may be a net exporter of energy. I think that is an amazing data point, and it suggests this is something that could benefit enormously the American economy. Well, in order for that to happen, we have to have those resources we can get from the oil sands in Canada and bring them into the United States, where they are refined here and then either used here or sent abroad. But it is a way we can generate additional economic activity and jobs for our economy. This is a quote from the Global Director of Oil, which tracks energy markets. He said this trend we are going to see this year, 2011--again, first time in 62 years we will be a net exporter of energy--he says it looks like a trend that could stay in place for the rest of the decade. That is a remarkable change in terms of the flow of energy from this country. The last time we were a net exporter of energy was during World War II and shortly thereafter. It has been over 60 years. That is what a project such as this could do for our country--not just the immediate impact on those States through which this pipeline would traverse, in terms of the tax revenue that would be generated for State and local governments, but you also have the economic activity it creates in those States, the jobs it creates in those States, and what it does in order to move us increasingly away from dependence upon other countries in the world with whom we have, at best, shaky relationships to start with. Doing business with our largest trading partner--a country with which we do enormous amounts of trade every single year--seems to me at least to be a much better solution to this country's energy needs than is getting that same amount of energy from other countries around the world. Madam President, 700,000 barrels a day is what the pipeline would transport into this country. That is the equivalent that we get on a daily basis from Venezuela. This is a project that ought to be decided. Whether it is decided affirmatively--obviously, as you can tell, I believe it should be. There are people in South Dakota who are opposed to this. There have been ample opportunities for public forums and hearings for people to comment on it. There have been lots of opportunities for those opposed to it to weigh in. Notwithstanding that, again, all the analyses have been done, the review done, and the studies are now completed, and they have indicated there is no reason for this not to move forward--particularly given the fact that the State of Nebraska has negotiated with TransCanada, the builder of the pipeline, an agreement that would take it in a different direction through that State. All those hoops have been gone through, and the hurdles have been cleared. There isn't a reason why this should be delayed another 18 months until after the next Presidential election--other than, purely and simply, for political reasons. I hope we will be able to get good, strong support in the Senate for this legislation that would allow this to be decided in a more immediate timeframe. As I said, right now, the administration has punted until after the next election, 18 months down the road. This legislation would enable this to be decided in the next couple of months--the next 60 days or so--subject, obviously, to some requirements that are in there--obviously, the strongest environmental requirements. But all that having been reviewed and having been accomplished, it is time for a decision on this important project. I hope we can get strong support in the Senate for this legislation. It has been introduced by a number of my colleagues, including the Senator from North Dakota, Senator Hoeven, Senator Johanns from Nebraska, Senator Murkowski from Alaska, and a number of others. I am a cosponsor. At last count, I think it has somewhere along the lines of 37 or 38 cosponsors. Incidentally, it passed in the House of Representatives already. So there is a vehicle out there that has passed one body of Congress. It is my hope we will be able to get action here in the Senate, and that it might be something we can do that would have an immediate impact on jobs. We always talk about shovel-ready projects. This is a shovel-ready project. This is ready to go. They are ready to start construction of this project. It has been through in the last 3 years all of the process this government can require it to go through in order to make sure this project should move forward. I think it is important for this body to act on this legislation and allow us to get to where we can get a decision on this project that will lead to more economic activity, more economic impact, more jobs for Americans, more energy security for this country, and hopefully, at the end of the day, a lessening of the dangerous dependence we have on foreign sources of energy, which we want to get away from. I think it is a win-win. I congratulate the sponsors of the legislation for the thoughtful way they have considered this and put this legislation together. I hope it gets consideration in the Senate. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. THUNE. This doesn't have anything to do with the managers' package.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, in honor of Veterans Day and the men and women of the Armed Forces and their families I ask unanimous consent that this poem penned by Albert Caswell be printed in the Record.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I rise today in support of S.J. Res. 6, a resolution of disapproval of the FCC's net neutrality order. Over the last 2 years, the Federal Communications Commission put forward a variety of what are considered net neutrality policies. On September 23 of this year, the FCC published a final rule in the Federal Register which is set to go into effect on November 20 to impose harmful net neutrality regulations on our Nation's telecommunications companies. The digital world in which we now live has changed dramatically the way we retrieve information, communicate with one another, and engage in commerce. Technological advances, even in the last few years, have pushed our economy forward. These advancements in technology and their adoption often depend heavily on access to broadband technologies. While the telecommunications industry has flourished, boosted our economy, and made critical investments in broadband deployment across the country, this administration believes that imposing additional regulations is a step in the right direction. In places across the country, such as my home State of South Dakota, there is still work to be done when it comes to unfettered and affordable access to high speed broadband. With the FCC voting recently to reform the Universal Service Fund to shift to a focus on broadband deployment, it seems to me that simultaneously moving forward with net neutrality regulations will have a chilling effect on this now thriving industry. We learned last week from the Department of Labor that the unemployment rate still hovers around 9 percent. The American people want to see Federal policies that encourage innovation and spur job growth, not yet another regulatory overreach by an overzealous agency. Unfortunately, the FCC net neutrality policy will give considerable authority to unelected bureaucrats to decide what a company's network management should look like. The Federal courts have ruled that the FCC lacks the authority under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to move forward with net neutrality regulations. Still, the Democratic appointees of the FCC have persisted, without regard to the courts, to settle the political debt owed by the Obama administration to special interest groups in favor of regulating the Internet. The FCC and this administration must be brought into line and abide by the separation of powers. The FCC must only execute the responsibilities given to it by Congress and not overreach its regulatory authority. Freedom of the Internet belongs in the marketplace, not in the hands of Federal regulators. The FCC has moved forward to fix a problem that does not exist. This is a solution in search of a problem. Industry- imposed standards and transparency have the capability to increase competition, while more unnecessary government regulations will almost certainly have the opposite effect. Under a light regulatory structure, the Internet has become vital to commerce and our Nation's economy over the past 15 years. The Internet has helped digitally shrink the distance that otherwise would inhibit the free flow of ideas, information, and business transactions from one part of the world to another. The Internet's adaptability and decentralized characteristics are central to that success. This Federal regulatory action represents unnecessary government overreach and has the potential to seriously damage an increasingly important sector of our economy. I do not believe the Federal Government can successfully regulate network access and development without negative effects on the consumer or the industry. Allowing this unnecessary regulation to move forward has the potential to stifle broadband deployment and competition, which could ultimately lead to fewer choices for consumers, higher prices, and discourage innovation. I believe the net neutrality regulations, if allowed to move forward, will have negative effects on this industry and our economy, and I would encourage my colleagues, tomorrow, to support this resolution of disapproval. The economy does not need this. Our job creators do not need this. And the millions of Americans who are benefiting from the information revolution that has been brought about by the Internet do not need this either. This is an opportunity for us to send a little bit of a message to industry that we understand, we get what they are saying about overregulation, we get that these piles of regulations continue to drive up the cost of doing business in this country. My colleague, the Presiding Officer, noted in his remarks the need for economic certainty--businesses need to know what the rules are going to be. It seems to me, at least, that creating a whole set of new rules and piling new regulations on this very important medium--on a way in which we have grown commerce in this country, opened markets across the world, created opportunities for consumers in this country to become more productive with their lives--is an absolute wrong approach at this particular point in time, particularly with the unemployment rate being what it is. We want to make it less expensive, less costly, easier for our job creators to create jobs in this country, not put up unnecessary barriers and more obstacles and drive up the cost and make it more difficult for people in this country to create jobs. Businesses are looking for economic certainty. They are looking to Washington, DC for policies that will lessen the impediments and the number of obstacles to job creation in this country. Access To Capital For Job Creators Act Mr. President, I also want to mention in that vein that earlier today I introduced a piece of legislation called the Access to Capital for Job Creators Act. This bill will make it easier for small businesses to better access capital in order to expand and create jobs. If you think about the things the job creators around the country want and need in order for them to get that capital off the sidelines, to get out of cash and to get invested again and get that money back into our economy and back into creating jobs, they want to see a government that lives within its means. They want to see a government that does not spend money it does not have. We have to be serious about cutting spending here at the Federal level and getting back to more of a historic norm when it comes to the cost of our government as a percentage of our entire economy. Historically, for the past 40 years, that has run in the 20- to 21- percent range. That is what we spend on the Federal Government as a percentage of our entire GDP. Now it is up in the 24- to 25-percent range. That means the Federal Government, as a percentage of our entire economy, is growing relative to our private economy. We want to see the private economy grow and expand and the Federal economy get smaller. Our job creators also want to see our Tax Code reformed in a way that is simple, clear, and fair, and that provides the right types of incentives for them to create jobs and does not drive investment overseas and create jobs there as opposed to creating those jobs right here at home. If we can get tax reform that lowers rates on individuals and businesses and broadens the tax base in this country, I think you will see an explosion of economic growth, which is ultimately the best solution we could possibly have to all the fiscal, economic challenges our country faces. Our job creators want smart, commonsense regulations, not more and more regulation for regulation's sake, which I think is what we see a lot today. We have seen bill after bill that has passed the House of Representatives that is designed to sort of roll back the overregulation, the regulatory overreach we have seen from this administration. Many of those bills have come over here to the Senate, where they have died, unfortunately. But we need to be looking at these things in a way that will again lower the impediments, lower the barriers, lower the hurdles to job creation in this country. That is why I think smart, commonsense regulation is the way to go, and to get away from the regulatory overreach we are seeing all too much of today. We need affordable energy policies, opening access to the vast resources we have in this country. We need to open markets around the world and look at ways we can make our small businesses create more opportunities for them to export their products to other places around the world. But the legislation I have introduced today addresses yet another issue which I think small businesses have talked about; that is, access to capital. We need to better address the need for capital in order to create jobs and expand our economy. Last week, the House of Representatives passed this very bill. It was introduced by Representative Kevin McCarthy. On a near unanimous vote in the House of Representatives of 413 to 11 they passed this legislation and sent it this direction. This bill would allow small businesses to better attract capital from accredited investors nationwide under rule 506 of Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933 by removing the general solicitation provision. That sounds like a lot of Washington speak, and it is. But the very simple translation of that is this will make it easier for small businesses to access the much needed capital they need to expand and grow their businesses. This provision is a roadblock in its current form for small businesses that are looking to obtain needed capital because it requires investors to have a preexisting relationship with an issuer or intermediary before the potential investor can be notified that unregistered securities are available for sale. So if a small business is looking for investors, unless they have a preexisting relationship with that investor, there is no way for them to get the message out that they are looking for capital to those with whom they do not have that kind of relationship already in place. The provision as it currently exists severely hampers the ability of small businesses to obtain needed capital from investors, and as a result, many businesses are limited to only the universe of investors with which they clearly have these preexisting relationships. This legislation would remove that solicitation prohibition and allow businesses to attract capital from accredited investors nationwide. With unemployment at 9 percent, we need to pass legislation that will enable our job creators to expand and to create jobs. As I said, this bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House of Representatives. I would hope we can do the same in the Senate and address this very fundamental need among our businesses, our small businesses, to get access to much needed capital to expand their businesses; that, along with using a commonsense approach to regulation, an approach that gets away from this massive 61,000 pages of new regulations that we have seen issued since this administration took office, to tax reform that is simple, that is clear, that is fair, that provides incentives to keep jobs here at home as opposed to shipping them overseas, affordable energy policies, reducing government spending, improving export opportunities for our small businesses. Those are the types of policies our job creators have said they need. We are going to have an opportunity to vote on the rollback of this net neutrality regulation and some other regulations tomorrow that are making it more difficult, more costly for our small businesses to create jobs. I hope we will see strong bipartisan support both with the disapproval resolution that we are going to be voting on net neutrality, as well as the one on cross-State air permitting. Those are both things that I think will do a lot to make it less expensive for small businesses in this country to create jobs. I hope as well that we will look at other opportunities in the form of the legislation introduced by Senator McCain, Senator Portman, and others, that has a whole series of the things I mentioned, all of which will create jobs and grow our economy, make this country more prosperous and stronger, and put us on a more sound and economic and fiscal footing as we head into the days ahead. I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. We have to quit making promises we cannot keep. What we are seeing today in Europe and the meltdown that is occurring in the economies over there is a result of too many promises that were made, too much government debt, governments that have gotten too big, that can no longer be supported by the economy in those countries. That is where we are headed. That is why we have to start living within our means. We have to quit spending money we don't have, and this was a perfect example of the tendency around here to want to grow government, to have a government answer, a government solution for everything, when this makes matters not better but much worse. It makes it much worse for hardworking taxpayers in this country and for future generations of Americans for whom this would become an enormous liability added already to the $528,000 that every family in this country owes, the mortgage they have on their families already as a result of the unfunded liabilities we have already racked up. We cannot keep making promises we cannot keep. I hope we can get this repealed, and I appreciate my colleagues' hard work in that regard and look forward to getting an opportunity to get it voted on. I am sorry our request this afternoon to repeal it was rejected, but I hope we will get another opportunity to revisit that and perhaps a vote that will actually put people on the Record. I believe there is a majority of Senators who agree with us on this point.

Mr. THUNE. We all saw this coming and we tried our best to prevent it, but now we know and we have these statements that came out as part of the report that was done by the House and Senate, an investigative report called the CLASS Act, the untold story. It was published in September. What it revealed was that the Health and Human Services Department actuaries--the people who are the experts, not the politicians, not those of us who are making many of these statements during the political debate we are having here in the Senate--who are actually responsible for doing the math on this came up and called the CLASS program a recipe for disaster. Those were in internal e-mails we discovered when we were doing this investigation. Prior to their announcement in October that HHS is not moving forward with the CLASS program at this time, Secretary Sebelius and other officials at the Health and Human Services Department claimed through much of 2011 that the Department had sufficient authority to modify it. What they were trying to suggest is that we can make this work. Yet these internal documents cast significant doubt on all of those assertions. I will repeat this because I think this is important. The Chief Actuary, during 2009, when this program was being debated--it was a part of the health care bill. It was during the debate here in the Senate. Richard Foster said: . . . 36 years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant Federal subsidies to continue. That was what they were saying in 2009 before this vote ever occurred. He also went on to say: . . . this would end in an insurance death spiral because the coverage would only be attractive to sicker people who will need costly services. This will force premiums higher and deter healthy individuals from enrolling. You have all the experts who were putting all this information out there and sharing this with their superiors, all of who were out there on the record promoting this as being something that would work and something that is not a budget gimmick, but actually could, in fact, be actuarially sound. We all know now it was not. It wasn't then and isn't now and that is why we ought to repeal it. Again, I appreciate my colleagues' input and work on this. I think this is something we ought to end. We need to put the final touches on this program and end it once and for all so it doesn't come back in some other form and saddle future generations with trillions of dollars of additional unfunded liabilities and debt. There are ways we can approach this issue. In fact, I have some ideas that I introduced in 2007 that deal with long-term care and providing incentives for people that we all are going to be faced with at some point in our lives. But this is the wrong way. It was the wrong prescription at the beginning. It is the wrong prescription now. That is why it ought to be repealed.

Mr. THUNE. I would say to our colleague from Wyoming, who is a physician and has a lot of experience on these issues, who comes down every week with a second opinion talking about all the various issues regarding the health care bill--the more recent one, as we have all seen now is contrary to predictions--health care costs are going up. The predictions were that they would go down. That is also something many of us saw coming. The question is if we leave this on the books, and if they decide at some point to resurrect it--after they have already acknowledged it doesn't work--and come up with some new language that does away with the Judd-Gregg proviso, what are the fiscal consequences of this program being resurrected? We talked about this, and there were lots of predictions made at the time. In fact, the Senator from Arizona had statements from some of our colleagues who said on the floor at the time how this was going to be a great deal and how it was going to work. The administration said at the time that this was not a budget gimmick. That is what they were quoted as saying. Clearly this was a budget gimmick. We all know that now. It is a Ponzi scheme. Clearly that is what the actuaries are saying at Health and Human Services. If, in fact, we don't get this repealed and at some point this program ends up being resurrected, what are the fiscal consequences and implications for the country and future generations who will be saddled with yet another unfunded liability, another entitlement program that is not paid for?

Mr. THUNE. Too often, the practice around here is focused on the short term, the near term, the gain, to be able to have some sort of political victory at the expense of what is in the best interests of this country and our children and grandchildren. This is a perfect example of that. I appreciate my colleagues being here. This discussion will be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 720 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to the measure be printed in the Record.

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

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I appreciate the objection of the Senator from West Virginia and I appreciate his comments about the importance of long-term care. I agree, it is something we need to address in this country. There are other ideas out there, and I think better ideas, ideas that are based upon incentives as opposed to creating a new government program. But let me get, if I might briefly here, for a moment at what I believe is the real issue. This was a program destined to fail. It was clear from the beginning many of us said that. There were 12 of my colleagues on the other side, 12 Democrats who voted to strike this particular provision from the health care bill back in December of 2009. I think at that time many of us were making the same arguments the experts are now conceding at the Department of Health and Human Services. In fact, there were colleagues on the other side, one of my Democratic colleagues, who called this ``a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would be proud of.'' That is how it was described before it was voted on and put into the health care bill to help demonstrate the health care bill would actually reduce the deficit. The fact is, after having had several months to look at this, here we are 19 months or so later, the Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that this doesn't work. They can't make it work. Now the CBO has come out and said it doesn't impact the budget. My view is we ought to pull this, we ought to get it off the books, and we ought to address the issue in a way that makes sense for the American people, not in a way that adds trillions of dollars of additional debt. If we look at what we have today in terms of unfunded liabilities, we have $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities in this country or $528,000 for every family. That is five times what most families have in terms of home mortgages, car mortgages, other types of debt. That is what we are piling on the American people today. This would have been yet another unfunded liability, and the experts warned us at the time. Now, we did an investigation of this. It was published in September. I worked with some of my House colleagues on it. It was ``The CLASS Act, The Untold Story.'' It concluded that the actuaries at HHS were saying before this bill was even passed that it would be a recipe for disaster, that it would lead to an insurance death spiral, and the Chief Medicare Actuary at HHS said at the time: . . . 36 years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and would require significant Federal subsidies to continue. That is what the experts were saying about this program way back before it was even voted on in 2009. I think we ought to acknowledge what now everybody concludes to be the case; that is, this program will not work. It is actuarially unsound. We ought to repeal it. We ought to get it off the books, and that was simply what my motion would do. I regret that the other side has objected to it, but I have some of my colleagues today who have been very active on this issue. I say to my colleague from Arizona, in light of this report that came out from the HHS last month outlining exactly why they cannot move forward with CLASS, it seems difficult to understand why the administration doesn't support repeal of this program. Can my colleague make any sense out of this contradiction and apparent hypocrisy to say a program doesn't work, yet we want to keep it on the books?

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent we be able to enter into a colloquy now for 25 minutes?

Mr. THUNE. I would simply say--we have the ranking member of the Budget Committee here too--that it strikes me that there were probably lots of other budget gimmicks in the health care law that are going to come to the surface in the same way this CLASS Act gimmick has. The Senator from Arizona pointed out they tried to understate the true cost by taking a lot of savings in the early years as people were paying premiums, knowing full well in the outyears it was going to add billions of dollars to the deficit. So it was a gimmick that was used, again, to make this salable to the American people and salable here. In spite of that, there was still a majority of Senators who voted again against this, who actually voted to strike the provision from the health care bill in December of 2009 when I offered that amendment. It seems to me at least we ought to have bipartisan support now that everyone has come out and recognized what we were trying to tell them in advance: this doesn't work, it was a gimmick, and we ought to get it off the books. I ask my colleague, the ranking member of the Budget Committee, about this budget gimmick that was used. Is it illogical to think if we have this $2.5 trillion expansion of government in the form of this new health care bill that somehow it is going to reduce the Federal deficit because that was the argument that was made at the time, and that is one of the reasons they were able to make that argument? I suggest there are going to be lots of other gimmicks we are going to uncover to demonstrate this thing was way out of line at the time, but I ask for his comments as being the ranking member of the Budget Committee.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, as we debate here in the Senate how to get our economy going again to deal with what is a stagnant economic set of circumstances, something that we have been grappling with now for a few years, I think it is instructive to look at what is happening in Europe. It was interesting to me as we look even at the papers this morning, the front page of the Wall Street Journal, ``Fears of Political Chaos Tank Global Markets as Europe's Bailout Plan Teeters.'' Then much of the paper today, at least in the news reporting, is all about what is happening in Europe and the Greek crisis and the sovereign debt crisis that is being experienced in that country. The business page in the New York Times, ``Aftershocks for Athens and Wall Street; European Debt Crisis Tightens Its Chokehold On Global Markets.'' There is a whole series of stories again there about the same issue. The front page of the Washington Post above the fold, ``Europe Bailout Again In Doubt, Greece Seeks Referendum.'' My point is as we have observed now what is happening in Europe, it should be a lesson to us and a warning sign about what we need to be doing to get our economy back on track in this country. What is really saddling Europe right now is the fact that the European governments have gotten too big for their economies to support, so they are drowning in all of this debt. They have debt-to-GDP ratios that way exceed the normal levels that are required for admission into the European Union. Yet they continue to struggle with these huge amounts of debt, much of which was created over a long period of time. It didn't happen overnight. It is, frankly, that many governments made promises they could not keep. So now they are dealing with that and trying to figure out how they are going to work their way out of it. It is becoming increasingly concerning, I think, to people all across the globe and certainly to us in the United States. If we look at the debt-to-GDP ratios in some of these countries around the world, they are pretty staggering. Greece is somewhere in the 180 percent debt-to-GDP area; in Portugal, Spain, countries like that, in some cases it is in excess of 200 percent debt-to-GDP. Where are we in this country? We are already at 100 percent. We are 1 to 1. Our debt-to-GDP now is at a level we have not seen since the end of World War II. Spending as a percentage of our economy, debt as a percentage of our economy, deficits as a percentage of our economy--all at historic highs relative to anytime in history, at least in recent history going back to World War II. I think, hopefully, the lesson to take away from all of this is we have to get our fiscal house in order. We are in a deep hole. We cannot continue to dig that hole deeper. When I hear the discussion about how to revive our economy, and I hear it revolve around we need to have more government intervention, we need to have more government spending, to me, that is literally a warning sign that we are on the wrong path. That is exactly what has happened in Europe. Governments have gotten too big. Their economies can no longer support them, and they are now faced with untenable circumstances; serious, dramatic austerity measures, accompanied by contracting economies, all leading to a complete mess in Europe. Hopefully, one that will not spill over into this country and around the globe. That concern clearly exists today, which is why we see so many of these headlines in our American papers focusing on that particular issue. My point is simply this: I think as we look at how we deal with our economy in the United States, it starts with balancing our budget, getting our fiscal house in order, trying to get that debt and spending as a percentage of our economy down to more normal historic levels. If we go back over the past 40 years in American history, our spending as a percentage of our GDP has been in the 20-percent to 21-percent range on average. That is a 40-year historical average. Incidentally, the five times we have balanced the budget since 1969--and there have only been five times, regretably, where we actually balanced the budget--the spending-to-GDP ratio was 18.7 percent on average. So, clearly, in those times when we balanced the budget going back to 1969, those 5 years, we had an economy, obviously, that was expanding and growing, but also we had government spending under control at a reasonable level. Today we are in the 24-percent to 25-percent range of spending as a percentage of our economy. Debt to GDP is now literally at 100 percent. That is something we have not seen. It is historic in terms of our country's economy and our fiscal situation. I think it suggests that we cannot spend our way out of this; we cannot borrow our way out of this. All that will do is compound the situation, make it worse rather than better. I think we have seen that in the first couple of years of this Presidency. President Obama, when he came into office, had a very aggressive agenda. He wanted to expand the role of government. So we had a stimulus program funded with borrowed money that was focused on government spending, government stimulating the economy. We had a massive new health care bill, $2.5 trillion when it was fully implemented. That was a big expansion, the biggest expansion of government we have seen, literally, in the last 40 years. We have seen excessive regulation to the point that there are now 61,000 pages of new regulations that have been issued or pushed through this year, all of which, again, compounds and makes worse the problem we have of growing spending as a percentage of GDP, growing debt as a percentage of GDP, and a shrinking private economy, or at least an economy that is not growing at the rate we would like to see, and continuing to run unemployment rates that are north of 9 percent. So these are serious economic circumstances and worsened, I believe, by the policies that have been put in place since this President took office. I believe we need to take a different approach. We need to move in a different direction. We cannot continue to double down on what we know does not work. Clearly, government spending, government stimulus of the economy--if the last stimulus bill was any indication of that, certainly it has not worked. So much of what I hear being talked about now from my colleagues on the other side and from this administration is very similar to that. We are talking about a lot of the same prescriptions for our economy: We need to spend more here--which, of course, entails more borrowing or higher taxes on the people who create jobs. In fact, the more recent iterations of that have entailed a tax increase on people who create jobs--a permanent tax increase, I might add--to pay for temporary spending programs, temporary spending ideas that have already been proven not to work. It seems ironic, in a way, that we are having that discussion. It strikes me at least that there are lots of other ideas we ought to be thinking about if we are serious about getting the American economy back on track and growing and expanding. Of course, we all talk about the issue of taxes. Taxes are clearly an issue when it comes to our competitive place in the world and our ability to compete with other countries around the world. We continue to see companies move jobs to other places because our tax structure in this country is not competitive. We have the second highest tax on business in the entire world right now, which I think makes us anticompetitive and makes it more difficult for us to attract jobs and investment in this country. We have, as I said, a regulatory structure that is spinning out of control in terms of new regulations, new mandates, new requirements on American businesses. Quite simply, we are making it more costly and more difficult for American businesses to create jobs when we ought to be looking at how we can make it less difficult and less costly, less expensive, cheaper, if you will, to create jobs. So that is where we ought to be looking. Of the things that strike me that fit into that debate, No. 1 is tax reform. I think getting tax rates down on businesses and individuals, broadening the tax base, is something we ought to be having a debate about, and tax reform that would put policies in place that are going to be there for a while, that there is some permanence to. We continue to change tax law every year or two, and that kind of economic uncertainty makes it very difficult for American businesses to invest. Who in their right mind is going to make investments based upon a set of policies that are going to be in place for at best 2 years, at worst maybe a year? That is how we have been setting tax policy of late. We need to create economic certainty through more permanent tax changes that promote long-term economic growth, not this decisionmaking that is designed for people in the near term. Do something that might give us a little bit of economic pop in the next 6 to 12 months, but something that actually puts in place conditions where businesses will make long-term investments, create long-term good-paying jobs right here in America. I think that is the kind of economic debate we need to have. Frankly, instead of talking about redistribution of wealth or redistribution of income, which is so often what we hear coming out of the White House, we ought to talk about what we can do to promote economic growth. How can we get this economy growing and expanding, and what are the policies that will make that happen? Tax reform, clearly, in my view, is one, and tax reform that is focused on getting rates down and making us more competitive with the rest of the world. Then I think we ought to have a debate about what we are going to do about these regulations. Regulations are out of control. There are a series of things that have been passed by the other body, by the House of Representatives, which they call the ``forgotten 15.'' There are a whole series of things dealing with domestic energy production and development, doing away with some of these costly regulations. All of these are pieces of legislation, bills that have passed in the House of Representatives this year. Since January when we came into this new session of Congress, 15 bills have passed in the House of Representatives that have not been acted on in the Senate. Many of us have tried and will continue to try to get votes on some of these as amendments, perhaps, to bills that might be moving through the Senate. If we are serious about supporting policies that will create the right conditions for economic growth, it seems to me at least we could start by taking legislation that has passed the House with broad bipartisan support. These are policies that have come through one body of the Congress that we could put on the Senate floor and the agenda in the Senate that would impact the economy and the job creators. These are all things we have heard people say they want and they need. If we look at the number of regulations coming out of Washington, DC, and what it would take in terms of our job creators to comply with all of that, it is an astonishing 82 million hours. It is 82 million hours to comply at a cost of $80 billion. That is what these new regulations that are coming out of Washington just in this last year, or since this administration has taken office, that is the cost to our economy of all of these new requirements that are being imposed upon our businesses. We know regulations, excessive redtape kills jobs. It increases our dependence on foreign oil, and it imposes costs on our businesses that we, frankly, cannot afford. If we look at what the Federal regulations cost job creators annually, it is somewhere along the order of $1.75 trillion. That is the composite of all of the regulations that exist on the books today, not just those that have been enacted since this administration came to power. They have taken it to a whole new level. It is interesting because the chairman of the business roundtable and the chairman, president, and CEO of Boeing company, a gentleman named Jim McNerney, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and printed on Monday, noted the following: A tsunami of new rules and regulations from an alphabet soup of Federal agencies is paralyzing investment and increasing by tens of billions of dollars the compliance cost for small and large businesses. He goes on to say: What we face is a jobs crisis, and regulators charged with protecting the interest of the people are making worse the problem that is hurting them now. . . . An increasingly skeptical business community needs proof Washington can put America on a sustainable fiscal footing and promote economic growth. The recognition that we have to get our fiscal house in order, the recognition that this alphabet soup of Federal agencies is paralyzing investments, increasing by tens of billions of dollars the compliance for large and small businesses is what this particular CEO, who leads a large business organization in this country, has put his finger on in terms of the things we need to get the economy in this country growing again. I hope as we continue to have this discussion in the Senate, rather than focusing, again, on raising taxes on people who create jobs--and that is what these proposals that have been put in front of us would do. We had one we voted on the last time we were in, the week before last, and we have one we will probably have a vote on sometime this week--essentially saying we are going to permanently raise taxes on job creators to pay for temporary spending programs that have already been proven not to work. That doesn't sound like a jobs plan to me. That sounds like another futile attempt to have Washington become relevant to this debate, knowing full well it really is the job creators out there in this country, it is our private economy where the jobs are really going to be created. As the American people follow this debate, this is a very real issue for them because it affects their jobs. It is something about which they care deeply and profoundly. Economic issues, bread-and-butter issues, kitchen table issues are what the American people focus on. So I think they care deeply about this debate, and they should because what we do here impacts them and their children and grandchildren for generations to come. If we think about the fact that today we have a $15 trillion Federal debt and what that translates into per family in this country, it is about $126,000 per family. Every family owes their share of the Federal debt, $126,000. Now, compound that by adding the total unfunded liabilities of our Federal Government, which now total over $60 trillion, and those are the obligations we have to pay Social Security and Medicare benefits for future generations. That share of that unfunded liability per family in this country exceeds $500,000 per family, and that exceeds the amount they pay for their mortgages and for all the other things combined in their daily lives. Take their mortgage payments, car payments, the payments they are making on their student loans, all those sorts of things are all exceeded by that amount--the mortgage, in effect, they have because of the unfunded liabilities their government has racked up. So we look at where we are, we look at what we are doing to the American people with the spending and the borrowing here in Washington, DC, and we look at what is happening in Europe, and we can see some real parallels there, and it is a path I hope we will not go down. But it is clear to me at least that we continue to try to make promises to people in this country that we can't keep. When we get to the point--and I think we are there--where the size of government, the growth in our government in this country cannot be supported by our economy, we have to make some decisions, and those decisions are not going to be easy. We need to get government back into a more normal, historical size relative to our economy, and I think that will help unleash the job creation we need in this country. By the way, as I mentioned, the amount of debt many of these European countries have racked up as a percentage of their GDP--we are not far behind. We are 1 to 1, about 100 percent. As I said, today Greece is about 180 percent. But if we look at the studies that have been done and how sovereign debt impacts the economy and jobs, there is a clear correlation and clear connection. A good body of research done by a couple of economists, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, suggests that when we get a debt-to-GDP level that exceeds 90 percent and we sustain that, it will cost about a percentage point of economic growth every single year. In this country, when we lose a percentage point of economic growth, it costs about 1 million jobs. So these high, sustained, chronic levels of debt-to-GDP at the ratios we are at and continue to be at today continue to make it more difficult for our economy to create jobs, that coupled, as I said, with all of the new requirements we are imposing on businesses. I want to mention a couple of other things in wrapping up when I talk about those requirements because, in those cases, the ``forgotten 15'' that have been passed by the House of Representatives do focus on some areas that are costing a lot of money in our economy for our job creators. Again, these are 15 bills passed by the House of Representatives, all with bipartisan support, none of which has been taken up and acted on here in the Senate. It seems to me we ought to at least have votes on these, and these are things American businesses are telling us they need to get the economy growing again. The other thing we know that is making it more difficult and costly for American businesses to create jobs is the new health care bill. The Des Moines Register reports that last week Iowa-based insurer American Enterprise Group announced that ``it will exit the individual major medical insurance market, making it the 13th company to pull out of some portion of Iowa's health insurance business since June of 2010,'' mere months after ObamaCare passed. As a result, 35,000 individuals receiving coverage from American Enterprise's individual insurance policies will now lose their current coverage. For these individuals, the promise that they will not have to change plans, that nothing will change under the Obama plan except they will pay less, has once again proven to be hollow. Another example of an insurance company that is moving out of the business--and if we look at the more recent reports about companies that are dropping or talking about dropping coverage, we now know there is a McKinsey & Company report out there. They surveyed a bunch of companies in this country, both large and small, and 30 percent of employers and 28 percent of large employers will definitely or probably stop offering coverage after 2014. So all of those people who derive their health insurance coverage from their employer or the individual marketplace are seeing not lower costs but higher costs and probably fewer options. That is the trend we are seeing. That is the experience so far, after passage of ObamaCare, the impact it is having on American businesses and American businesses' ability to create jobs in our economy. So the health care heavy weight, the anchor that is putting on American businesses, coupled with all the other regulations that are coming out of Washington, DC, coupled with a tax code that is riddled with uncertainty and questions about what is going to happen next in terms of raising taxes on job creators in this country, focused more on income and wealth redistribution rather than economic growth, which is where we ought to be focused, suggests that we are headed in the wrong direction fiscally. We are headed in the wrong direction economically. We are headed in the wrong direction with regard to tax and regulatory policies in this country. We still have time to change direction. I hope we start by taking these 15 bills passed by the House of Representatives and putting them on the floor of the Senate for a vote instead of having yet another political vote, which is what we are going to have this week, that would permanently raise taxes on the people who create jobs in this country--permanently raise taxes--to pay for temporary programs that have proven not to work, as is evidenced by the failed stimulus bill from 2 years ago. We can do better. We can do better by the American people, and we need to. But it has to start here, and it can start by picking up things that we know have bipartisan support. Madam President, I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. THUNE

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

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, today I recognize Neil Bowes for 50 outstanding years at WNAX Radio. When Mr. Bowes first arrived at WNAX Radio, he was a new graduate of the University of South Dakota. He began his career on the business side of WNAX operations in 1961 and remained there for seven years before he decided to venture into sales in 1968. Ever since this transition, businesses that advertise on WNAX have had the privilege of dealing with Neil. For many of those clients, besides being a trusted businessman, he is also a friend. Neil's duties have allowed him to broadcast live from numerous State fairs, Dakota Fests, parades, grand openings, and other events over the years. Through his work, he has been able to see many parts of our great State in an effort to, as he puts it, ``give businesses the opportunity to share their good news with listeners of WNAX.'' Neil also enjoys exploring the never-ending, ``out-of-the-way spots'' in South Dakota when he takes the long way home. Mr. Bowes lives with his wife Mary Ellen near the Missouri River just west of Yankton. They have raised four kids who have in turn blessed them with seven grandchildren. His family, at home and at WNAX, is grateful for his long commitment to radio and dedication to his work.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I rise in support of S. 1726, the Withholding Tax Relief Act of 2011. I know we are currently debating several appropriations bills which we hope to be concluded sometime later today. But in that process, my expectation is that we are going to get an opportunity to vote on a couple of amendments that deal with the real issue I think that is on the minds of most Americans today, that is, jobs and the economy. The bill I referenced, S. 1726, is identical to the measure that was introduced earlier this year by Senators Scott Brown and Olympia Snowe and of which I and 28 of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle are cosponsors. Given that we may get a chance to vote on this legislation, perhaps in the form of an amendment to the bill that we are currently on later today, I want to say a few words as to why I believe this represents the right approach to spurring our economy. I think there is a right approach and there is a wrong approach to getting people back to work in this country and getting the economy growing and expanding again. American businesses need access to capital. They need to be able to deploy their existing capital as efficiently and effectively as possible. If we do not act, come January 1, 2013, 3 percent of contracts between private businesses and Federal, State, and local governments will be withheld. This means that dollars that could be reinvested by businesses in new equipment or new employees will instead be used essentially to give the IRS an interest-free loan. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that permanently eliminating this burdensome withholding requirement will allow taxpayers to keep an additional $11.2 billion over the next 10 years. While 3 percent of a contract may not seem like a large amount, consider that for many businesses 3 percent could be their entire profit margin. In effect, the withholding requirement--if we allow it to take effect--will result in a large transfer of funds from local economies all across this country to the Internal Revenue Service. Imposing this new wealth transfer makes absolutely no sense while our economy remains very fragile. The good news is that there is broad bipartisan support for repealing the 3-percent withholding requirement. The Obama administration's Office of Management and Budget last month released the President's jobs plan entitled ``Living Within Our Means and Investing in the Future.'' On page 8 of this document it reads: ``The President's plan calls for the Congress to remove burdensome withholding requirements that keep capital out of the hands of job creators.'' I could not agree more. Unfortunately, the details of the President's plan, as introduced by Majority Leader Reid only provides a 1-year delay in implementation of the withholding provision. American businesses need more than a 1-year delay. They need certainty. This is the reason that a long list of businesses and trade job groups support this legislation. In fact, the documents prepared last week by the House Ways and Means Committee lists 170 businesses and groups supporting repeal of the 3-percent withholding requirement. This diverse list includes groups such as the American Farm Bureau, the American Bankers Association, the Associated Builders and Contractors, the American Gas Association, the American Ambulance Association, to name a few. It should be no surprise that this bill also enjoys broad bipartisan support. The House version of the bill, likely to be voted on next week, has 269 cosponsors, 62 of whom are Democrats. In the Senate bill, there are a number of both Republican and Democratic cosponsors. The bill is fully offset by rescinding unobligated discretionary funds. This is the same offset we voted on in February when Senator Stabenow proposed it to pay for repeal of the 1099 reporting requirement. That vote passed by 81 to 17, with 34 Democrats voting aye. To summarize, we have a bill before us we will soon vote on that will allow businesses to keep more of their own funds rather than sending them in advance to the IRS, that has broad bipartisan support, that is fully offset using an offset that is supported by a majority of both Republicans and Democrats in this Chamber. So why would we not want to enact this legislation as soon as possible? I would note that this approach stands in stark contrast to the ministimulus bill that is being proposed by the majority leader. The Reid bill goes in exactly the opposite direction. It would raise taxes on the private sector to pay for new spending on the public sector. Let's think about that for a minute. We all agree that the private sector creates the vast majority of jobs in this country. And since the beginning of the recession, there has been a decline of 5.4 percent of private sector jobs, or 6.2 million jobs lost. However, during that period, government jobs at all levels declined by less than 2 percent and Federal Government jobs increased by over 2 percent, or by 63,000 jobs. So the Federal Government is getting larger at the same time the private economy is shedding jobs. While we all want to find ways to help public sector employees, let me suggest that we need to do it without imposing new burdens on the private sector at a time when we should be focused on finding ways to promote private sector job creation. The Withholding Tax Relief Act will do just that. This measure will promote job creation by allowing businesses to keep more of their capital, and it will send a message that Washington understands that promoting the private sector is the key to reviving our economy, not another government bailout. Only 8 days ago, we voted in favor of the three pending free-trade agreements, votes that garnered broad bipartisan support, which we all agreed will stimulate the economy and grow jobs in this country. During my remarks as part of that debate on those agreements, I noted that we were setting a precedent I hoped would be able to continue in the coming weeks. I noted that instead of considering divisive and controversial measures, such as the President's new surtax on small businesses and job creators, we should be considering legislation that helps our economy and can actually become law because it has strong bipartisan support. That was true of implementing legislation for the three free-trade agreements that the President will sign into law tomorrow, and it is true in the Withholding Tax Relief Act of 2011. Let's take this opportunity to demonstrate that when we are willing to work together, we can enact legislation that will help spur economic activity and create jobs in the private sector economy. We can do this without new taxes and without new burdensome regulations. We can accomplish this simply by getting the government out of the way of American entrepreneurs. Let's help Americans in a free and open society do what they do best: take risks, create business opportunities, and grow our economy. We don't need yet another stimulus bill, heavy with government spending; we need a little common sense. Passing the Withholding Tax Relief Act is a good place to start. When these votes come up later today, I hope my colleagues on both sides will recognize the importance of stimulating and spurring economic activity in the private sector, giving our entrepreneurs in this country incentives to create jobs by keeping the tax and regulatory burdens low and move away from this notion and idea that the way to get the economy growing again is to spend more government money, come up with yet another stimulus plan, which we know doesn't work. We have seen that picture before. We know many of these same types of ideas were tried and they have failed. Unemployment today is still over 9 percent. When the first stimulus bill was passed, the contention at the time was this would keep unemployment under 8 percent. Well, the opposite has happened. More people are unemployed since the stimulus bill passed. There are over 1.5 million more unemployed Americans than when it passed. We should recognize that those are not the correct for our economy. It is to get our entrepreneurs, our small businesses back out there investing their capital, buying new equipment, and creating jobs for American workers. The way to do that is to make it less costly, cheaper, and easier for them to create jobs rather than harder. What has been happening in Washington lately is making it harder, not easier, because of the uncertainty created by tax policy and regulatory policy. Putting in place another withholding tax, having that to plan for, knowing that will take effect come 2013, and now layered on top of those other things--you have the new health care mandates, and many small businesses are saying they are not going to hire people until they know with greater certainty what the impact of the health care reform bill will be on them and their employees. This is a clear winner, something that enjoys broad bipartisan support. The way it is paid for enjoys broad bipartisan support. I hope we will pass it and defeat what is the ill-conceived approach proposed by the majority leader, which is to try to put a tax on job creators, the people who are out there and have the capital to put people back to work, and to invest in more government spending, more government programs, all of which have proven that they don't work. Let's do what works and use a little common sense and get the American people working again. I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak as in morning business.

Mr. THUNE

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

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I rise to speak to an issue that I think has been on the minds of a lot of people here and hopefully people across this country too; that is, this failed CLASS Act Program, which last week we finally got some--I would characterize it as good news because I think this is a program that was destined to fail. On Friday last week, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius came out and said: Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a path forward for CLASS implementation at this time. Essentially, what came with that and what accompanied that was a big volume of analysis that had been done that essentially supports the conclusion that it doesn't add up. We can't make the math work. I think that is something that hopefully my colleagues, as what we know now, will recognize; that we ought to eliminate and we ought to repeal this CLASS Act once and for all. That is something I tried to do as we were debating the health care bill almost 2 years ago. I offered an amendment in December of 2009 that would repeal the CLASS Act, believing at the time it wasn't going to work. We had, at that time, plenty of evidence to that effect. Unfortunately, it was included as a part of the health care reform bill to help pay for it. At that time, it was estimated it would generate about $70 billion in revenue to be used to offset the cost of the health care bill or at least to put it in balance and to claim there was some deficit reduction associated with it. I think the more recent estimate of what it would generate in terms of revenues in the early years is on the order of about $86 billion. But we--those of us who have been skeptics about this program-- suggested at the very beginning that this was not, in fact, the case, that it was a budgetary gimmick, and that it was going to saddle the Nation with additional debts. That was what the Congressional Budget Office concluded. There would be revenue in the early years, but as you got into the outyears, as the premiums came in there would be some revenues, but in the outyears, when the demands on the program started to come in, it just didn't add up and would add significantly to the Federal deficit. I think that is a conclusion now that has been drawn even by those who supported the program. So my thinking at this time is that we, as a Senate--and hopefully the House of Representatives--ought to move to repeal the CLASS Act once and for all. We should not leave this on the books and allow it to become an opportunity at some point in the future for someone to say we ought to try to reactivate this or implement this, knowing full well it does not work. There were a lot of warning signals along the way that were ignored. There were repeated warnings by the Actuary and the administration that this was not going to work that were ignored by the Obama administration in their push to pass health care reform. We did a report not that long ago. There was a working group that examined this. The report was called ``CLASS's Untold Story.'' It was myself and some of my colleagues in the Senate and some of my House colleagues who requested it and delved into a lot of the e-mail traffic that occurred prior to its inclusion in the health care reform bill. We came across a number of warnings that were issued by the HHS Actuary. The Chief Actuary predicted at the time that this would result in an ``insurance death spiral.'' He said: This could be a terminal problem for this program. The program is intended to be actuarially sound, but at first glance this goal may be impossible. The resulting premium increases required to prevent fund exhaustion would likely reduce the number of participants, and a classic assessment spiral or insurance death spiral would ensue. That was in May 2009. In May 2009, that warning was coming from the Actuary at HHS. Some time passed. This continued to be part of the discussion with regard to the health care bill. Come August or July of 2009--and this was again after additional analysis, review, and examination of this particular proposal--the Actuary went on to say: Thirty-six years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant Federal subsidies to continue. It would collapse in short order. That is what was said by the HHS Actuary in July of 2009. So they continued to plow forward, thinking that somehow they were going to be able to salvage this program, figure out a way to make it work. In the August and September timeframe of 2009, the Actuary again says: As you know, I continue to be convinced that the CLASS proposal is not actuarially sound. That was the expert advice that was given to the administration about this proposal way back in 2009. Yet they plowed ahead and in December 2009 added it to the health care bill, assuming it would help offset the cost of that health care legislation. At the time, many of my colleagues here on the floor talked about what a great program it was and how it all was going to pay off and was all going to balance out. We had people say it was a critical program, it was a breakthrough program, it was a win-win. We had Democrats come over here and talk about the virtues of this program--I believe knowing full well there were questions about it. Having said that, there was a big push on at the time to pass health care reform. As a consequence, this piece of that reform was included notwithstanding our efforts to repeal it or to strike it at the time. So we went forward. Here we are now 18, 19 months later, and there is full recognition of the fact that this does not pencil out, it does not add up, the math flat does not work. Where do we go from here? In my view, what we ought to be doing is repealing this bill, which is why it seems mystifying to me that the administration is now suggesting that if Congress were to repeal the CLASS Act, he would veto the repeal bill. You have all this actuarial data; you have all these statements; you now have all this analysis that has been done that demonstrates the very point we were making at the initial consideration of this; that is, it was just not going to work. So I hope and invite my colleagues here on both sides of the aisle to join me in the effort to repeal this legislation. I introduced a bill, along with Senator Graham, back in April of this year that would repeal the CLASS Act. It has 32 cosponsors. I hope we get enough cosponsors here in the Senate to where we can put an end to this once and for all. We are going to be looking for opportunities to do that in the weeks and the months ahead because, as I said, this is something that clearly does not work. It now not only has all the arguments that were being made at the time prior to its passage, but subsequent to its passage all the analysis that has been done comes to the same conclusion; that is, the numbers just do not add up. What does that mean for the future of long-term care? I submit there are other things we should do. I don't think this is an issue which is going to go away. We have more people who are living longer in this country. Long-term care is a very serious issue. But going about it and trying to fix it in a way that would burden future generations with more and more mountains of debt piled on their backs--the cost of this over time--is the wrong way to go about it, and that is precisely what this particular approach would do. We have had many discussions about various remedies for the long-term care issue. We will continue to put our ideas forward in hopes we can address it as part of some bill that would take a look and examine these issues but do it in a way that is fiscally responsible, fiscally sound, that is actuarially sound, and that does not create the massive amount of borrowing, the massive amount of debt, and that does not put in place a flawed program that we knew at its inception was not going to work. I hope we will put an end to this, that we can get colleagues on both sides together to agree to that, and that we will be able to add cosponsors to that piece of legislation and look for the first opportunity to repeal this legislation and make sure we end it once and for all, knowing full well this was ill-conceived and ultimately would be a failed program. I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, late last week the American taxpayer got some very good news, and that was that the administration announced they were not going to move forward with implementing the CLASS Act. It was a stunning end for something many of us have believed is a fiscal timebomb for our country. They acknowledged it is simply not workable. In fact, HHS Secretary Katherine Sebelius said, ``Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time.'' The Washington Post went on to say that ``the Obama administration cut a major planned benefit from the 2010 law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.'' The Hill reported that ``HHS officials acknowledged that CLASS fell apart simply because it was too flawed to salvage.'' From Politico: `` . . . a stunning end to a financially troubled long-term care insurance program and a major setback to the health care reform law.'' Even the New York Times editorialized that ``it was too costly and would not work.'' This is good news for the American taxpayer. This is something many of us argued was the conclusion that inevitably people would come to, when this was discussed and debated as part of the health care reform bill over a year ago. In fact, on December 4, 2009, I offered an amendment to repeal the CLASS Act. It was then offered as one of the pay-fors for the President's health care reform bill. At that time, it was said it would generate somewhere on the order of $70 billion in additional revenue that could be used to pay for the health care bill. More recent estimates of that number are somewhere in the order of $86 billion that would be generated in the first 10 years. One of the reasons for that was, of course, people would begin to pay premiums even though they would not start demanding benefits until later. Even at that time, there was tremendous concern that this would run up deficits, blow up deficits in the outyears when you got outside of that 10-year window; that after people were through paying their premiums and started demanding benefits, this would get into sort of a downward death spiral and would never pay for itself. That was a conclusion many people were drawing already, at the time, that there was such a rush to pass health care reform through here and to come up with ways to pay for it, that this ill-fated program was included. It was interesting because that amendment I offered back in December 2009 actually had pretty broad bipartisan support. At that time, every Republican voted for the amendment and 12 Democrats as well. We had a majority of Senators--51 Senators said in December 2009 that we ought to repeal the CLASS Act from the underlying health care bill simply because it was not workable and it was going to run up deficits in the outyears and everybody knew it. Instead, we proceeded and plowed forward, and the health care bill was going to be passed irrespective of concerns that had been raised by many of us but, more importantly, also by people who really study these things, people in the Congressional Budget Office, the Actuary at the Health and Human Services Department. There were a lot of warnings going forward about this program and what a bad idea it really was. It is time that we be honest with the American people about this particular budget gimmick. I can't help but think that if we had come to this conclusion a long time ago, we would have saved some money when looking at whether this could be implemented, whether it could actually work. The inevitable conclusion is that it would not. I want to read for my colleagues something that was stated by the Actuary at the Health and Human Services Department way back in 2009. In fact, this goes back to July 2009, well before the final vote occurred on the health care reform bill, particularly the vote on the amendment that would have stripped this provision from the health care reform bill. The Actuary at the Health and Human Services Department, Mr. Richard Foster, said: I'm sorry to report that I remain very doubtful that this proposal is sustainable at the specified premium and benefit amounts . . . 36 years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant federal subsidies to continue. That was from the Actuary at the Health and Human Services Department. Later that year, in the August-September timeframe, he said: As you know, I continue to be convinced that the CLASS proposal is not actuarially sound. I believe these are statements by somebody who had looked closely at this program and had come to the right conclusion way back then--that it flat was not going to work. Yet, because of the mad rush to pass health care reform and to argue to the American people that somehow it was going to be paid for, this particular program was included. It clearly was a colossal mistake. Fortunately, it looks as though the administration has concluded the same. Hopefully we can get this killed once and for all so that it doesn't become a drain on our children and grandchildren, which it, of course, would when the bills started to pile up in those outyears and the deficits started to mount. If you think about the fact that every American today owns about $48,000 of the Federal debt--I mean, for most Americans the Federal debt is like having a second mortgage or, for that matter, a first mortgage on their homes. They have an enormous amount of debt for which they are responsible. Instead of looking at ways to reduce that debt, reduce the size of government, and get spending under control, Washington, DC, continues to look for ways to expand government and to add to the amount of debt we are passing on to our children and grandchildren. Last week, when the announcement was made by the administration that this program is simply not workable and they are not going to implement it, it was a huge victory for the American taxpayer and a huge victory for our children and grandchildren--future generations of Americans who would end up having to pay for this. If you think about the fact that we already have somewhere along the lines of $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities in other entitlement programs, piling on yet another one seems to be digging the hole ever deeper than it already is. What you do not want to do when you are in a deep hole is keep digging, and this plan, the CLASS plan, would have kept digging that hole even deeper for our children and grandchildren. Interestingly enough, this was the analysis that was done by Health and Human Services when they came to the conclusion that it should not be implemented. Now, as you can see, this is a volume that is several inches thick, so obviously they looked very carefully at this. Unfortunately, they came to that conclusion 19 months later than they should have. But this is what they came up with in terms of concluding that the CLASS program would not work. So, having done that analysis, one would think the next logical conclusion would be, let's repeal this piece of legislation. Let's get this off the books. Yet the administration is still talking about and still somehow wedded to the idea that somehow this might work, so they are saying they don't want to see it repealed. Well, Senator McCain, my colleague from Arizona, was down here earlier today talking about this program and this report, and he is a cosponsor, as I am, of a piece of legislation we put forward to repeal the CLASS Act. We will work as quickly as we can to put together legislation, now that we have this report from HHS, that will actually move forward with the intention to repeal this. But it strikes me that this is something most of my colleagues, given what we know now, should be willing to support, and especially given the fact that there were 12 Democrats who voted with the Republicans back in December 2009, to constitute a majority here in the Senate. There were 51 Senators who voted to repeal the CLASS Act from the health care bill back in December 2009 before all of this analysis came out. So now that we have this analysis in front of us, it seems to me that the logical thing we should do is to move forward with repealing this piece of legislation. It is interesting; when we were debating in the Senate back in December 2009, many of my colleagues in the Senate said things about the CLASS Act that were very supportive; that they actually, I guess, believed this was going to work. I will not mention names to protect the guilty, but they called it a breakthrough. Some referred to it as a ``win-win.'' Others referred to it as ``critical.'' One of my colleagues said: So we get a lot of bangs for the buck, as one might say, with the CLASS Act that we have in this bill. Another one of my colleagues said: One of the critical pieces of the bill is the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, or the CLASS Act. Another one said: The CLASS plan is a win-win. One went so far as to suggest that certain colleagues on our side of the aisle who argued that the CLASS plan would lead to a financially unstable entitlement program that would rapidly increase the deficit--he went on to say that was simply not accurate. There are many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who at the time believed wrongly this was going to work. I hope, now that we have this voluminous copy of the analysis done by the Department of Health and Human Services, they will join with us in repealing this really bad piece of legislation and get it off the books once and for all. We have 32 cosponsors on a bill that would do that. I hope that we, at the very first opportunity--and perhaps that will be even sometime this week--in the legislation we are considering now, could have an amendment that would repeal the CLASS Act so we can put this issue to bed once and for all for the American people. It seems to me, with the kinds of year-over-year deficits we are running--$1.3 trillion, $1.4 trillion deficits--the very least we can do is take something we know is not going to work and focus on those things that actually will work. We ought to be talking right now about that which will reduce government spending, make the Federal Government smaller, expand the private economy, and look at what we can do to create jobs. I am not suggesting for a minute that the issue of long-term care is not important; it is. There are right ways and wrong ways to deal with that. The CLASS Act represented the very worst way to deal with that; that is, to come up with a program that has been described as a downward death spiral and actually add to the debt we are going to pass on to our children and grandchildren, knowing full well this program would not pay for itself. It is a farce. It was never going to reduce the deficit. We now have that demonstrated in this analysis that has been done. So I hope my colleagues here in the Senate on both sides of the aisle will come together and recognize that and repeal once and for all this very bad piece of legislation. It was good news when the administration recognized they couldn't implement it, it was not workable. It would be better news for the American taxpayers and for future generations of Americans if the Congress would repeal this legislation and do it soon. I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded and that I be allowed to speak in morning business for as much time as I may consume.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I, too, rise in strong support of the pending trade agreements with America's allies, Colombia, South Korea, and Panama. These agreements hold great promise for American farmers, manufacturers, service providers, and American consumers. I would echo my colleague from Oregon, who chairs the Subcommittee on Trade on the Finance Committee; that is, these trade agreements position American businesses to capture more of that supply chain to enable us to create jobs here at home and to grow the economy, to generate economic activity out there that otherwise we would not see happening. At a time when we need to focus our efforts on measures that will promote economic growth and job creation, these agreements are exactly the type of legislation we ought to be considering. There is broad consensus these agreements are going to benefit our economy. The Obama White House estimates that enactment of these three trade agreements will boost exports by at least $12 billion, supporting over 70,000 American jobs. The Business Roundtable estimates that passage of these trade agreements will support as many as 250,000 American jobs. These are not only jobs at large businesses but increasingly at smaller companies that are accessing international markets. As an example of that, more than 35,000 small and mid-sized American businesses export to Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, and these firms now account for more than one-third of U.S. exports to these countries. Passing these three trade agreements will provide export opportunities to American businesses of all sizes, creating good-paying jobs here at home. The benefits to U.S. agriculture from passing these agreements are especially compelling. These three agreements are estimated to represent $3 billion in new agricultural exports that will support 22,500 U.S. agricultural-related jobs. My State of South Dakota is a good example if you look at the export potential for U.S. agriculture represented by these agreements. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, these agreements will add $52 million each year to South Dakota's farm economy. South Dakota is projected to gain $22 million from increased beef exports, $25 million from increased exports of wheat, soybeans, and corn, and $5 million from increased pork shipments each year. America's market is already largely open to imports from many of our trading partners. In fact, almost 99 percent of agricultural products from Colombia and Panama, for example, already enters the United States duty free. Without trade agreements to ensure similar treatment for our exporters, American businesses will continue to face high tariff and nontariff barriers abroad. Consider just one example, the market for agricultural products in Korea, which is the world's 13th largest economy. Korea's tariffs on imported agricultural goods average 54 percent compared to an average of 9 percent tariff on their imports into the United States. So passage of the Korea Free Trade Agreement will level this playing field. Think about that. Fifty-four percent for our exporters to get into the Korean market, 9 percent tariff for their exports coming here. That is a huge discrepancy that will be rectified by passage of this agreement. Korea's market for pork products in particular underscores how removing barriers to trade can benefit U.S. farmers and ranchers. U.S. pork exports to South Korea have increased 130 percent from January to July of this year because Korea temporarily lifted its 25 percent duty on pork imports due to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Korea. During this period, the Korean market surpassed Canada to become the third largest export destination for U.S. pork producers after Japan and Mexico. Korea's tariff on pork imports is expected to return but would be permanently eliminated by 2016 under the terms of the United States and South Korea Free Trade Agreement. We know when we eliminate barriers to U.S. exports, American producers will compete and win in the global marketplace. However, if we fail to act and continue to delay implementation of these agreements, the cost to our economy will also be substantial. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce study warns that failure to enact the three pending free-trade agreements could threaten as many as 380,000 American jobs and the loss of $40 billion in sales. The cost of inaction on trade is high because today we live in a global economy where American producers rely on access to foreign markets. Consider that in 1960, exports accounted for only 3.6 percent of our entire GDP. Today exports account for 12.5 percent of our entire GDP. Exports of U.S. goods and services support over 10 million American jobs. When America stands still on trade, the rest of the world does not. Today there are more than 100 new free-trade agreements that are currently under negotiation around the world. Yet the United States is only party to one of those negotiations; that is, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If we do not aggressively pursue new market-opening agreements on behalf of American workers, we will see new export opportunities go to foreign businesses and foreign workers. Unfortunately, that is exactly what we have experienced under the current administration. The three trade agreements we are considering today were signed over 4 years ago, and this administration had more than 2\1/2\ years to submit them to Congress for consideration but failed to do so. Instead, the President chose to sit on these agreements and not send them to Congress for nearly now 1,000 days. We cannot quantify precisely the cost of this unfortunate delay, but we know it put American exporters at a competitive disadvantage in the Colombian, Korean, and Panamanian markets. For example, on July 1 the European Union-Korea trade agreement went into effect. In just the first month after this agreement took effect, EU exports to Korea jumped nearly 37 percent, while U.S. exports to Korea rose by only 3 percent. Let's be clear about what this means. Korean consumers are choosing to buy German, French, and British cars, electronics, and agricultural products rather than American-made products because those European products now have a price advantage. This would have been entirely preventable if we had acted on the U.S-Korea trade agreement sooner. Likewise, the Canada-Colombia agreement went into effect on August 15 of this year. This is resulting in an advantage for Canadian goods such as construction equipment, aircraft, and a range of other industrial and agricultural products. Colombia is now reporting that since the Canada-Colombia trade agreement took effect, there has been an 18.3- percent increase in Colombian imports of Canadian wheat. Much as with Korea, U.S. businesses are finding themselves disadvantaged because the President waited so long before sending these agreements to Congress. Unfortunately, the negative impact of the Canada-Colombia agreement on U.S. exporters is just a continuation of the lost export opportunities we have seen over the past few years as these trade agreements have lingered. Just a few years ago, American wheat producers dominated the market in Colombia with a 73-percent market share, as of 2008. Today we are facing a situation where U.S. wheat producers are likely to be completely shut out of the Colombian market if we do not act. Hopefully, by passing this agreement today and by swiftly implementing the U.S.-Colombia trade promotion agreement, our wheat producers will be able to recover much of their lost market share. But they should never have been placed in this position to begin with. In 2010, for the first time in the history of U.S.-Colombia trade, the U.S. lost to Argentina its position as Colombia's No. 1 agricultural supplier. Now, consider the story of three of the major crops that we grow in South Dakota: soybeans, corn, and wheat. The combined market share in Colombia for these three U.S. agricultural exports has decreased from 78 percent in 2008 to 28 percent as of 2010, a staggering decline of 50 percentage points in our market share. U.S. corn sales to Colombia fell from 3 million metric tons in 2007 to 700,000 metric tons in 2010. This is the high cost of delay while our trading partners pursue new regional and bilateral trade agreements. There has also been the cost of duties that have been paid on U.S. exports while these agreements are waiting. U.S. companies have paid more than $5 billion in tariffs to Colombia and Panama since the trade agreements with these nations were signed more than 4 years ago. Let's consider the cost of delay to just one American company, Caterpillar. We all know Caterpillar is a leading producer of large construction and mining equipment and a major U.S. exporter. Caterpillar exports 92 percent of its American-made large mining trucks. Caterpillar's large truck exports to Colombia face a 15-percent duty which adds about $300,000 to the cost of each of these trucks exported to Colombia. I mean, how does that work? Think about that. Every truck that Caterpillar sends into the Colombian market, it is an additional $300,000 on top of the cost of that piece of equipment for the tariff that has to be paid. Just imagine the advantage that Caterpillar could have had for the last several years over its Japanese and Chinese competitors if the House of Representatives--at the time was controlled by the Democrats back in 2008--had not refused to consider the Colombia agreement when President Bush submitted it or if the current administration had acted sooner, and that is just one example of countless others out there with American businesses. So I am glad we are here today. I expect all three trade agreements to pass with what I hope is broad bipartisan support. I hope we also have learned an important lesson. We cannot afford to delay when it comes to international competition in trade. I hope the White House has learned an important lesson as well rather than submitting to Congress divisive measures where there are fundamental disagreements, such as new tax increases. This administration should identify measures such as these trade bills that will spur our economy and where there is broad bipartisan agreement. The President sent his American Jobs Act to Congress exactly 1 month ago today. Yet we only, just last night, voted on whether we should consider this bill--a vote that did not get a single Republican vote, and it did not get every Democratic vote either. Contrast that approach with these free-trade agreements which were submitted to Congress by the President on October 3, just 9 days ago. Within about a week and a half, these trade agreements will have passed the relevant committees in the House and the Senate with large bipartisan votes and will be on the President's desk awaiting his signature. Clearly, reaching across the aisle on measures where both parties can find agreement is a much more effective approach. So I would urge my colleagues to support these job-creating trade bills based upon their merit. I would also urge my colleagues to support these bills to send a message that when this administration is willing to send us commonsense, progrowth legislation, we are ready and willing to pass it. We can only hope our votes on these trade agreements will set that precedent. I look forward to voting for these long overdue agreements on behalf of American businesses and consumers. I look forward, hopefully, to being able to act on what are truly progrowth job measures in the coming weeks and months. We have an economy that continues to struggle with over 9 percent unemployment. Month after month we continue to see a lot of Americans who are without jobs, and this is one example of something we can do to address that concern. But there are lots of other things out there we can be doing as well if we are willing to identify those things on which there is agreement and those types of policies that actually do create jobs that are about getting Americans back to work and not about making some sort of a political statement. I hope this will set a pattern and a trend that will be replicated in the future and that we can do some things that are good for our American economy and for American jobs.