Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, later this week, we will consider a spending measure to fund the United States Government through the remaining 6 months of this fiscal year. While the majority leader is on the Senate floor, I want to thank him, as well as Appropriations Chairman Inouye and Senator Patty Murray, for their hard work in negotiating an end to the budget stalemate and preventing the threatened government shutdown. The battle over that spending measure brightly illuminated the contrast between the priorities of the two parties. The priorities of the House Republicans, I believe, are completely upside-down. In the debate over the spending bill, they fought to cut programs that helped the middle class and for extreme tea party policy riders that had nothing to do with the budget. These included a prohibition on funding for women's health and eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to protect us against carbon and other pollution. At the same time, the House Republicans refused to even consider raising revenue by closing tax loopholes, for instance--not one. They refused to entertain ending even one corporate tax giveaway or one special treatment for wealthy taxpayers. If that debate didn't make the contrast between the two parties crystal clear, the House Republican budget for 2012--the so-called Ryan budget--sure did. In his budget, Congressman Ryan proposes privatizing Medicare and requiring seniors to pay the majority of their health expenses with their own money. They would get a voucher, which actually would go to the insurance company, and the difference would be up to them. In the same document in which Congressman Ryan would decimate Medicare, he would cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires by trillions of dollars. Now, one major factor that contributed to our budget deficit is the economic crisis that we recently weathered. It is amazing the amnesia we can have in Washington. We are not even through the recession that has been so painful for so many families in Rhode Island, and yet we seem to have forgotten that economic crisis. Well, those of us who were here ought to remember the desperate urgency that was displayed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as they, having looked into the economic abyss, came to this building--to the LBJ Room right here in the Senate--to plead with us for help to save the world economy. These are not two easy men to frighten, and they were very frightened. We are now past the worst depths of the financial and economic crises, and as this chart shows, the economic recovery measured in jobs is proceeding, although all too tentatively and all too slowly in Rhode Island. We are still at 12 percent unemployment in the Providence metropolitan area and over 11 percent statewide. Now that we are finally creating jobs--but very few compared to the job losses of the crisis--now that we are finally at least on the good side of the equation, House Republicans have proposed yanking government support for the recovery and jeopardizing many of the jobs that are on this chart. Their spending proposal, H.R. 1, would have cut spending so severely that former McCain Presidential campaign economic adviser Mark Zandi estimated it would cost as many as 700,000 jobs. Just look at our job gains: For February, 222,000; for January, 68,000; for December, 167,000; and for November, 128,000. We would wipe out months and months of job gains with a 700,000 job loss. Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, said this bill--H.R. 1--could reduce the growth in our annual gross domestic product by two full percentage points over the rest of the year. We were only expecting about three percentage points of growth, so to knock off two of them is a big hit on jobs. So I will begin by pointing out that as we deal with the debt and deficit, we cannot forget about jobs. It is growth, ultimately, and a recovering economy that will help reduce our national debt. As you will recall, the Republicans also resisted any efforts to close any corporate tax loopholes. Corporations, our Republican friends contend, are overtaxed, and any closing of a loophole would amount to an unacceptable tax hike. So let's look for a minute at the actual state of things. Let's look at the facts for a minute. This is the actual state of corporate tax payments in America. In 1935, for every $1 an American individual contributed to our revenues, American corporations also contributed $1. By 1948, American individuals were contributing $2 for every $1 that corporate America contributed. By 1971, it broke through 3 to 1. In 1981, it broke through 4 to 1. And in 2009, we broke through 6 to 1, with American individual taxpayers contributing every year to our annual revenues six times as much as American corporations. So we have gone, in a lot of people's lifetimes--you have to be pretty old, but there are plenty of people who remember 1935--from, basically, even-Steven between corporate America and individual Americans, with individual Americans carrying six times the tax burden of corporate America. So when people say how overtaxed corporate America is, it is worth looking at this history of ever-diminishing corporate contributions to our Nation's revenues. Let's look now at one of the factors that is driving the erosion of corporate tax revenues. This is an interesting house--a building located down in the Cayman Islands. It is not particularly large, kind of nondescript. Our Budget Committee chairman, Kent Conrad, uses this photograph quite often. This building may not look like a beehive of economic activity, but over 18,000 corporations claim they are doing business in this building. That is correct; 18,000 corporations claim to be doing business in that little building. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ``small business'' when you think of trying to pack 18,000 corporations into that little structure. Well, as Chairman Conrad has pointed out, the only business being done in that building is funny business or monkey business with the Tax Code. Tax gimmickry. This nonsense is estimated to cost America as much as $100 billion every year. For every one of those dollars lost to the tax cheaters, honest taxpaying Americans and honest taxpaying corporations have to pay an extra dollar or more to make up the difference. Now, let's go to another building that has a tax story to tell. This is the Helmsley Building in New York City. It is a nice-looking place. The building is big enough to have its own Zip Code. That means the IRS reports of tax information by Zip Code can tell us a lot about this building. Here is what this building tells us from actual tax filings and actual tax payments. The well-off and very successful, indeed, admirable occupants of that building paid a lower tax rate than the average New York City janitor. The average tax rate of a New York City janitor is 24.9 percent. The average tax rate of a New York City security guard--I am sure the Helmsley Building has security guards--is 23.8 percent. But the average tax rate actually paid by the occupants, the successful, capable, but well-compensated occupants of that building, is 14.7 percent, about three-fifths of the rate that their janitors and security guards are likely paying. So that seems as though it must be extraordinary, but, believe it or not, that is no fluke. The IRS reports the tax rate that is actually paid by the highest earning 400 Americans. They have to go back a few years to do the calculations, but here is their most recent information, and the story is the same. The highest earning 400 Americans each earned on average more than $344 million--more than $1/3 billion in 1 year--and the average tax rate those 400 high-income earners actually paid was 16.7 percent. I applaud their success. It is the American dream writ large when somebody can make $1/3 billion in a single year. But when they only pay 16.7 percent, it makes you wonder. You might wonder, for instance, at what wage level does a regular single working person start paying 16.7 percent in total Federal taxes? If you are a single filer without deductions, you hit 16.7 percent of your salary going to the Federal Government in taxes at $18,650 in salary. So what does that equate to for jobs? The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that in my home State, in the Providence labor market, a hospital orderly is paid on average $29,000 a year. That means that the 400 biggest income earners in America, each earning on average $1/3 billion, are paying the same tax rate as the hospital orderly pushing that cart down the linoleum hallways of the Rhode Island Hospital at 2 o'clock in the morning. That is the way the code actually works. There are a lot of people in between that and making what a hospital orderly makes, and they pay a lot more in taxes than 16.7 percent. But when you get to the very high end, when you get to the occupants of the Helmsley Building, when you get to the people making $1/3 billion a year, those tax rates actually paid go down to the point where they are paying the same rate as the janitor--less than the janitor--and the same rate as the hospital orderly. I have heard my colleagues say that rates go up the higher income you pay, and nominally they do. But when you look at what is actually paid, when you look at what goes through our contorted Tax Code system, out the back end come these extraordinarily low actual tax payment rates for the most well-off and well-compensated Americans. If you go to the corporate Tax Code, that makes little more sense. Decades of lobbyists have carved our corporate Tax Code into a Swiss cheese of tax loopholes, of tax earmarks for the rich and powerful. The result? We have a nominal corporate tax rate of 35 percent. But here is what the New York Times reported recently. General Electric, one of the Nation's largest corporations, made profits of over $14 billion last year and paid no U.S. taxes--none. Indeed, it actually received a $3.2 billion refund from the American taxpayer. I read recently that Goldman Sachs in 2008 reportedly paid income tax, Federal tax, of 1 percent. Maybe those were 1-year anomalies, but if you look at a previous analysis by the New York Times, of 5 years of corporate tax returns, consolidated, that analysis found that Prudential Financial only paid 7.6 percent--less than our hospital orderly; Yahoo, 7 percent; Southwest Airlines, 6.3 percent; Boeing, 4.5 percent; and what looks to be our tax avoidance champion, on $11.3 billion of income, the Carnival Cruise Corporation paid less than 1.1 percent in Federal taxes averaged over those 5 years. One recent paper actually calculated Carnival Cruise Lines' effective tax rate at 0.7 percent on $11.3 billion in income. Carnival Lines doesn't just take you for a cruise, they are taking all of us for a ride. Good, honest CVS, a corporation in my home State, pays full freight. Why should they pay 30 times the tax rate of Carnival Cruise Lines? It makes no sense. But wait, there is more. Don't forget that we make the American taxpayer subsidize big oil to the tune of at least $3 trillion a year, and big oil has made $1 trillion in profits this decade. They hardly need to raid the pockets of the American taxpayer, but on an effective tax rate basis, the petroleum-gas industry pays the lowest rate of any industry. I think these are all noteworthy landmarks of where we are in our budget and debt and deficit discussion. But the big landmark, what I call the Mount Everest of landmarks that casts its shadow over the entire budget discussion, is health care. Representative Ryan's health care budget proposal is radical and would create terrible harm for seniors. But I do agree with Representative Ryan on his statement that says the following: If you want to be honest with the fiscal problem and the debt, it really is a health care problem. He is right, and the landmark feature of this landmark problem is this: The health care cost problem is a health care system problem. Our national health care costs are exploding. The health care system is driving up the costs of Medicare. The health care system is driving up the costs of Medicaid. The health care system is driving up the costs of private insurance--of BlueCross, of United. The health care system is driving up the cost of the military's TRICARE system and the VA system. No one is exempt. It doesn't matter who your insurer is, the health care system is what is driving the costs in public and in private programs alike. We have to address the health care system problem if we are going to get our health care costs under control. Simply going after one manner of payment, such as the Medicare system, misses the real target and will cause us to fail at our endeavor. Instead of tackling this vital problem of the underlying growth in health care costs, the Ryan budget would end Medicare as we know it. Just look at these numbers. I was born in 1955. It was at $12 billion, the entire national health care system. By 1979, it was up to $219 billion; by 1987, $512 billion; by 1992, $849 billion; and from 1992 to 2009, it has soared to $2.5 trillion. This is a rocket every insurer is on, and you can't just throw the Medicare people off of their health care and pretend you are going to do anything about bringing down that accelerating curve. But instead of tackling the underlying growth, the Ryan budget would end Medicare as we know it. That would be a tragedy and a mistake. Medicare, along with Social Security, is one of the most successful programs for human well-being in the history of the world. It allows tens of millions of older Americans to enjoy their golden years with minimal concern about paying for health care. Paired with Social Security, Medicare guarantees American seniors the freedom to retire without fear of privation or destitution. As with Social Security, American workers pay for this privilege through payroll taxes, and they have a right to the retirement benefits that they have been promised and that they have earned. The House Republican budget drafted by Mr. Ryan would break our pledge with Americans who have been paying Medicare payroll taxes by ending Medicare as we know it and replacing the single-payer system with vouchers for private care that will not come close to paying the full cost of insurance. Indeed, that may be an understatement. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Ryan plan would leave the average senior with over $12,500 in out-of-pocket expenditures that they would have to pay by 2022. That is nearly as much as the average Rhode Islander gets from Social Security now. The current Medicare system is projected to cover 68 percent of a senior's health care costs in 2012, and the Ryan plan would only cover 25 percent. Three-quarters of a senior's health care responsibility would be on them, and Medicare would only pick up 25 percent. That is an unaffordable and a indefensible burden that destroys the freedom and the security Medicare provides to seniors and provides to their children as well. Don't forget that we all enjoy the freedom of knowing our parents will be taken care of no matter how dread the disease they suffer, and we do not have to compromise our choices in life in order to hedge against the fear that our parents will suffer such an indignity, such a terrible result. It helps all Americans to have that freedom in our seniors' hands, to have that fear lifted from their and our hearts. The Ryan plan is 180 degrees from where we should be on health care reform. It would greatly increase costs. Costs go up because of how inefficient private insurance is--for the average senior, from a projected $14,770 under current policy to $20,510, a 39-percent increase in the underlying cost--in other words, a huge giveaway to the private health insurance industry that would get these vouchers. It would ignore the potential for tremendous savings in delivery system reform and saddle seniors with enormous out-of-pocket expenses. As I said, rising Medicare costs are not driven by Medicare. Every insurer has their costs going up like a rocket on that chart I showed. We have to get at the problem of the underlying cause. How do we do this? We actually have a pretty good health care toolbox that has five major tools in it. One is quality improvement. Quality improvement saves the cost of errors, of missed diagnosis, of disjointed care, and so forth. For example, hospital-acquired infections alone cost about $2.5 billion every year, and they are virtually entirely avoidable. They should be and could be ``never'' events. That alone would save $2.5 billion, and quality improvement can extend far beyond just the realm of hospital-acquired infections. Two is prevention programs. Prevention programs avoid the cost of getting sick in the first place. More than 90 percent of cervical cancer is curable if the disease is detected early through Pap smears. Three, you pay doctors for better outcomes rather than for ordering more and more tests and procedures. That will save money while improving outcomes for Americans. Four is a robust health information infrastructure which will save billions of dollars a year and open exciting new industries once it takes life. We are approaching that tipping point now, I am glad to say. Finally, five, the administrative costs of our health care system are grotesque. The insurance industry has developed a massive bureaucracy to delay and deny payments to doctors and hospitals. So the doctors and the hospitals have had to fight back and hire their own billing departments and their own consultants. I visited, a little while ago, our little Cranston, RI, community health center. They told me there that half their staff is dedicated not to providing health care but to fighting to get paid. On top of dedicating 50 percent of their staff to trying to get paid, they have to spend another $200,000 a year on fancy consultants. All of that, the entire war over payments between insurers and hospitals, adds zero health care value. We have heard that on the private insurance side, anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of the health insurance dollar gets burned up in administrative costs. We know we can do better because the cost of administering Medicare is closer to 2 percent of program expenditures. So you add up all of this, all those five strategies, the numbers are enormous. The President's Council of Economic Advisers has stated that 5 percent of GDP can be taken out of our health care system costs without hurting the health care we receive. That is about $700 billion a year. The New England Health Care Institute says it is $850 billion a year. The well-regarded Lewin Group has estimated the probable savings at $1 trillion a year, a figure that is echoed by former Bush Treasury Secretary O'Neill. Those are very big numbers, but not only are they big numbers, they represent results that are a win-win. Remember the five strategies: higher quality care with less errors and infections; prevented illnesses so you do not get sick in the first place; secure, complete health records that are there when you need them electronically, so your doctors, your lab, your pharmacy, your hospital, your specialists all know what everybody else is doing; payments to doctors and hospitals based on keeping you well and getting you well, rather than on giving you more procedures and more tests; and, finally, not so much of that infuriating insurance company bureaucracy hassling both patients and doctors. Those are not bad outcomes even without the savings. So what do we draw from this if we keep all these landmarks in mind, landmarks of where we are as we approach this budget debate? Well, our colleagues on the other side, particularly our House Republican colleagues, say they are determined to reduce our annual deficit on our national debt. That is their top priority. But they only want to seem to address 12 percent of the budget, the nonsecurity discretionary spending, and examine no savings at all on the revenue side. If we are serious about deficit and debt reduction, why risk destroying 700,000 jobs, when job destruction only adds to the deficit and to our debt through lost economic activity and lost revenue? If we are serious about deficit and debt reduction, why is there not one corporate tax loophole--not one--on the chopping block? Why is the entire Tax Code off limits in this discussion as it burns up 6 billion hours that Americans spend every year--6 billion hours that Americans spend every year--complying with its contorted requirements. Why must that hospital orderly, pushing his or her cart down the linoleum hallway at midnight, pay a higher tax rate than some of the most fortunate and able Americans making hundreds of millions of dollars each in a single year? If we are serious about this, if deficits and debt are the most important thing we face, why no discussion of corporate America's ever-diminishing contribution as a share of our Nation's revenue? Should that not be something we at least consider? If we are serious, why is there no plan for even one of the 18,000 corporations in that phony-baloney headquarters in the Cayman Islands to pay its proper taxes? If we are serious, why is there so much pure political nonsense about ObamaCare and socialized medicine, instead of a mature discussion about using and improving the tools in the health care bill to address our grave national health care system problem. Why has Representative Ryan proposed taking a sledgehammer to Medicare, instead of making thoughtful and efficient investments to improve the way we deliver health care? It seems to me that until one corporate tax loophole is on the table, until one subsidy to big oil is on the table, until one subsidy to big agribusiness is on the table, until we are even beginning to talk about billionaires contributing Federal revenue beyond the share of their income that hospital orderlies contribute, until we are not so casual about threatening 700,000 jobs and perhaps $20 billion in related tax revenue that job loss would cause, until then, it is still politics as usual and it is not a sincere desire to tackle our debt. I have always found that you get a better read looking what people actually do, rather than just believing whatever they say. If you look at what Republicans made their priorities on the CR debate and in the Ryan budget, look at what they do. It is the same old Republican agenda: attacking programs that help the poor, attacking women's right to choose, attacking national voluntary service, helping polluters get around public health measures, reducing the share of revenues paid by corporations, and very high-income individuals. It is the same old song. Most important, the problem is that if you go that road, it is not adequate to meet the serious problems at hand. We need to look throughout the budget and across all our opportunities to bring down our Nation's deficits and to bring down our Nation's debt. Everyone needs to participate, including our corporate community, including our wealthiest, most talented and most fortunate, everyone. We cannot--we simply will not--get out of the debt and deficit problem we have if we put the whole load of that on the backs of the American middle class. I look forward in the months ahead to a serious, fair, and sensible discussion, a mature discussion of how to reduce our deficits and our debt. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President we have come to the end of a long process that has had some signal moments to it. Clearly, one signal moment was a few days ago when the tea party activists came to the Capitol--came to this building--gathered outside, and were led by Republican House Members in chanting about the U.S. Government: ``Shut it down! Shut it down! Shut it down!'' Shortly after that, there was a discussion between the Republican Speaker and the Members of the Republican caucus in which the Speaker indicated that they were to prepare for a government shutdown, and the response was a standing ovation, as reported by the Washington Post. As the distinguished Senator from Maryland knows, we sit through our caucus meetings, and there has never been anything like an ovation on our side for the concept of a government shutdown. There is silence, maybe an occasional groan of disappointment, when we have heard about how the goal posts have been moved yet again to keep an agreement from being reached. Recent polling shows there is a reason for this difference between the parties here, or the different attitudes and desires with respect to a government shutdown. Democratic voters prefer compromise to a shutdown by better than 3 to 1. By better than 3 to 1, Democratic voters would prefer us to work this out than to shut down the U.S. Government. On the other side, Republican voters actually favor shutting down the government. So it should come as no surprise that these public demonstrations demanding ``shut it down'' take place; that the Republican caucus on the House side gives standing ovations to the notion of shutting down the U.S. Government, and that we are now at the brink of a U.S. Government shutdown as a result. There was a time when this appeared to be about the deficit. Clearly, we have had to make progress on the deficit, and we have made significant progress on the deficit, as was announced from last night's meeting between the Senate leaders, the President of the United States, and the House leaders that they had agreed on a $78 billion number out of the $100 billion number that had been the Republican goal. It is hard to say that we have not gone the extra mile when we are settling on a point of $78 billion out of the $100 billion that was requested. As we have looked at the actual cuts that the other side has pushed for, there has appeared to be a pretty strong overlay between the cuts themselves and the political agenda of the other party. Things such as focusing 100 percent of their cost-cutting energy on only the spending side of the budget and only 12 percent of the pie. A slice of the pie that is only 12 percent was where they focused 100 percent of their attention. A tax on programs such as Head Start that help poor children get a head start in life and prove exceptional outcomes, to the point where the mayor of our capital city, Providence, RI, is a child who got his start in life in a Head Start Program. From there he went through the public school system and ended up at Harvard University. He became a lawyer, and he is now the mayor of Rhode Island's capital city. That is the kind of story that Head Start starts. Yet it was the focus of terrible cuts. City Year and Teach For America--programs that take bright young Americans and put them into our schools to help younger kids learn to be better students and have more productive futures--catastrophic wipeout cuts were driven at those programs. National Public Radio: Catastrophic wipeout cuts. The Environmental Protection Agency was singled out for the worst treatment of all, reflecting the long relationship that has existed between the other party and corporate interests that do considerable damage to our air and water. So if we look at what they are doing there, there were a number of people who became suspicious and concerned that the Republican cost- cutting agenda was a Trojan horse. We remember the Trojan horse. Troy was in its walls, the Greeks were outside. They couldn't get through the walls of Troy, so they built a horse. The Trojans thought it was a gift and they allowed it in, but the Trojan horse contained within it Greek soldiers who came out in the night and were able to open the gates and the attack came on Troy. That is the legend of the Trojan horse. So there is a pretty good case I think some of us could make that a lot of what these cuts were was a Trojan horse to bring in, through the deficit-cutting agenda that we all agree on, a different ideological agenda that has long been associated with the Republican Party and that is not very popular. Indeed, at this stage, the tea party has less than one-third public support. So the notion of driving their agenda through isn't fair play. But if you know you are that unpopular, you want to attach yourself to something essential. You want to force your ideological agenda. I think that is where we are right now. It has been made clear by what has happened. Because once a number has been agreed to in a budget, clearly, the fight is no longer about the budget. A number has been agreed to: $78 billion. Yet, the fight persists and the fight persists over women's health care. I wish to share a few stories from Rhode Island, first about the title X family planning program, which is the target here. It was signed into law in 1970 by President Richard Milhous Nixon, a Republican. He said at the time that ``no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.'' Representative George H.W. Bush strongly supported the enactment of the program. Title X clinics provide reproductive health services to low-income women and young adults. It is an essential element in our American strategy to reduce unintended pregnancies. Notably, Federal law prohibits any title X funds under the Hyde amendment from being used for abortion services--none, zero, not permitted. So the effort to zero out funding for title X is not about Federal funding being used to support abortion services. It just isn't. Instead, it is about denying access to health care programs that serve over 5 million low-income individuals every year, and it is available to them because no one can be refused service based on the fact that they don't have the ability to pay. We have a medical student who wrote in from Rhode Island who works at a community health center. He said he has been able to perform cervical cancer screenings and prescribe birth control for hundreds of women who would otherwise not have had access to these services, all thanks to title X. He described his patients: ``Most of my patients worked hard at low-wage jobs that did not provide adequate health coverage.'' Indeed, they may not have provided any benefits at all. He concluded: ``These women would not have been able to afford such vital health care without the support of Title X.'' In Rhode Island, title X goes to 17 different community health centers and clinics, from the Northwest Community Health Center up in Pascoag, RI, to the Chaffee Health Center in Providence, to the Tri- Town Community Health Center in the Johnston area. It is across the State. One of those recipients is Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood would appear to be the real reason--although they take the whole program out, it is probably because Planned Parenthood is in it. They have overtargeted here. The proposed budget would also prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving any Federal funding. It is remarkable, because Planned Parenthood provides primary and preventive health care to 3 million Americans each year, and in rural or medically underserved areas, Planned Parenthood health care providers are often the only source of health care in the community. They are often the only source of health care for women in the community. Ninety percent of the care that is provided at Planned Parenthood health centers is primary and preventive health care: cancer screenings, Pap tests to identify women at risk of developing cervical cancer, mammograms to help detect breast cancer, routine gynecological exams and annual physicals, immunizations, and tests and treatments for STDs. They are cost effective and accessible. Let me read some of the things that have come in from Rhode Island. Here is Rebecca from Cranston, RI, telling her story: After I graduated college, I found myself without health insurance for the first time in my life. While uninsured and job hunting, I had no doctor or gynecologist, and I turned to Planned Parenthood for my basic health care needs. This lasted for almost 4 years because I couldn't get a job with health insurance. If Planned Parenthood had not been there while I was getting on my feet, I would not have received cancer screening, breast exams, or have had a health care professional to answer my questions. My mother had breast cancer twice and Planned Parenthood providers gave me peace of mind. If the Federal funding is cut from Planned Parenthood, other young women will find themselves with nowhere to go and put off lifesaving tests. I plan on doing everything I can for this amazing, caring facility that stood by me when I needed them. This is Nora who wrote to me from Warwick, RI: Please do not let the loss of funding happen to Planned Parenthood. This health care agency has been a boon to myself and my two daughters for decades. If not for the availability of low-cost health care screenings through Planned Parenthood, we would not be able to afford regular checkups or things like cervical cancer and HPV because we cannot afford health insurance. Planned Parenthood provides us the opportunity to have these tests done at a price we can afford. I hope you will take my message to heart and vote to keep the funding in place for this wonderful organization. Yes, Nora, I will take your message to heart. Saren from Coventry, RI, wrote in to tell her story: In 2004, I went to Planned Parenthood for a pap smear test. I didn't have a regular gynecologist or even a primary care doctor. Further testing revealed I had the beginnings of cervical cancer. I was stunned. Never in a million years did I ever expect to be told I had cancer, especially at the age of 24. The doctors at Planned Parenthood told me that the cancer was found early and formulated a course of action, but I was always worried that my chances of having children were low because of the surgery to remove the cancer. Seven years later, I am happy to say I have not had an abnormal pap smear and I have two beautiful, healthy children. I can only wonder where I would be had I not gone to Planned Parenthood and had that pap smear. Those doctors saved my life and gave me the chance to become a mother. It is getting rid of that, that is what is motivating our Republican colleagues to push this country into a government shutdown, and the price of that government shutdown is going to be high. We are just in the beginning of our recovery. We are still deep in unemployment. In my State of Rhode Island, we are at 12 percent in the Providence metropolitan area, over 11 percent statewide. We are just beginning to recover. A government shutdown would cut off funding for Federal employees; it would stop their paychecks, it would shut down government projects as their funding ran out and they ground to a halt; it would shut down the private businesses, the corporations, the consultants who are working on government contracts as that funding ran out and their work ground to a halt; around the country, 800,000 people will be off the payroll. That is not good for America. If we pass H.R. 1, the folks at Goldman Sachs--and we can say a lot of things about them, but I don't think anybody in this room will say they are not good with numbers about the economy--they have said it will drastically knock down our recovery 2 full percentage points out of the 3-percentage point growth we are predicting. That is about the same number of jobs. If we were to pass H.R. 1, our recovery is basically gone at that point. We will be back to where we started when President Obama took office and turned around the 700,000 job-a-month crash we were in--losing 700,000 jobs every month. So it will slowly go back in a painful way. We don't want to knock that down with H.R. 1--the extreme House bill--and with a government shutdown that takes all that money out of the economy. Even more, we don't want to do it over a dispute that is now no longer about the budget, about the deficit, but only about trying to punish the program that allowed Saren from Coventry to discover her cervical cancer in time to be treated so she could survive that dangerous illness and have her dream of becoming a mother come true and have two beautiful children. I urge us to get through this moment. I hope my colleagues will, frankly, declare victory, gloat a little, and say: We wanted $100 billion and we got $78 billion. We got way more than halfway. But don't knock this country down, don't knock our government into a shutdown in order to score a political point about an organization that is so important to women's health care. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Senator for his courtesy in yielding for a question.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. My time has expired. I thank the Senator from New York for his question. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I agree with the Senator from New York. I cannot recall a single Senator expressing any desire for a shutdown. I have been present in our caucus meetings. Not one person has once said there is anything good about a shutdown. We are all gravely concerned about what a shutdown would do to our fragile economic recovery. This is still about jobs, ultimately. We still have to grow an economy in this country. And when we shut down every government contract and put those people out of work, when we shut down every government project and put those people out of work, when we take paychecks away from government workers and when we furlough government workers, what does that do to the economy? Any economist will tell you it strikes a terrible blow. We recognize that, and that is why no elected Democratic official has said one good word about a shutdown. That is very different from what we are seeing from the other side, where standing ovations, where chanting mobs, egged on by sitting Members of Congress, where public statements by candidates for President and by Members of Congress have all said that the shutdown-- --

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have been listening to the remarks of my friend from Wyoming. I noticed that he repeatedly indicated that what we needed to do in this building was to keep the military funded, to deal with the deficit, and to cut spending. It is my firm belief that if we were sent a bill that kept the military funded, that dealt with the deficit, and that cut spending, it would pass in the Senate very readily. Indeed, we have already agreed to $73 billion in spending cuts. As Senator McCaskill said earlier, the problem is that the Republicans won't take yes for an answer. The issue dividing us at this point is not the need to keep the military funded. We completely agree on that. It is not the need to deal with the deficit. We agree on that. Indeed, the last time we successfully dealt with the deficit, it was under the Democrats. Clearly, we have gone way more than halfway by agreeing to cut $73 billion in spending. So as to those three points, the answers are yes, yes, and yes. So what is the problem? The problem is two riders that are being insisted on in the negotiations, one of which would eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood and the second of which would gut the Clean Air Act--Planned Parenthood and the Clean Air Act. I thought this was about the deficit. I thought this was about solving our fiscal situation. The facts are a little different. Here we are, mere hours away from the first government shutdown since Newt Gingrich forced one during President Clinton's first term. We are facing some 800,000 Federal workers being furloughed; millions more, including men and women in uniform, who will begin working without pay. Projects will grind to a halt. People working under government contracts will stop. There will be a real danger to our fragile economic recovery that is just starting to gain steam. Why take that risk? In front of cameras all week, Republicans have been saying that despite these dangers, they will threaten a government shutdown because we need to tackle the deficit. The story behind the scenes is quite different. Even though the tea party has focused 100 percent of its cost-cutting fury on only 12 percent of Federal spending--only the nonsecurity, so-called discretionary spending--we agreed to the level of cuts Republicans wanted. Nothing on the revenue side, everything on the spending side, and only from 12 percent of the budget, and yet we were still able to come far more than halfway to where the Republicans are, virtually within single-digit billions of dollars of agreement. Yet we still find ourselves without funding for the government beyond tomorrow night. We have heard today that it has to do with the fact that we did not pass a budget last year. Well, we did not pass a budget last year, but we tried. As Senator McCaskill pointed out, she and I were on the floor when the omnibus spending bill came to the floor. It had been negotiated in a bipartisan fashion. It had come through all the different appropriating committees. It would have funded the government through September 30. We thought we had an agreement, and at the last minute all of the Republicans who had agreed to it changed their minds, literally while we were on the floor. The bill went down. One Republican Senator even took to the floor to gloat about the end of that bill. So it is a little bit of crocodile tears to blame the Democrats for not having an appropriations and budget bill at this point from the side of the Chamber that took that bill down, that pulled their individuals who had participated in that bipartisan bill out of the deal, that filibustered it, and that shut it down. That is why we are here today. The minority party used its filibuster power, walked away from a deal it had already signed off on, and took down the spending bill. So here we are. It is important to stay somewhat close to the facts. So now the Republicans are using the deficit concerns, which I think Senator Barrasso said very clearly: Keep the military funded, deal with the deficit, and cut spending. That is what we are prepared to agree to do. But the bill we are being asked to agree to now is a Trojan horse. It is a Trojan horse that looks like a deficit bill, but inside it is filled with tea party ideology. It is filled with an extremist rightwing political agenda to do things like eliminate Planned Parenthood and give America's polluters free reign in violation of the Clean Air Act as it has been determined by the U.S. Supreme Court to apply. This is no longer about the deficit; this is about trying to force a very radical agenda down America's throats in a Trojan horse that looks like it is about the deficit. What is it really about? Well, you do not have to go very far from this building. Just a few days ago, outside, you had the tea party ralliers, and what were they chanting outside of the Capitol? They were chanting, ``Shut it down. Shut it down. Shut it down.'' That is what the tea party wants. That is why we are here. And, sure enough, when the Speaker went to his caucus on the Republican side and announced to them--to the people who are actually here making decisions in this Congress--that he was notifying the administrative staff on the House side to prepare for a shutdown, what was the reaction? It was a standing ovation supporting the Speaker in that. So on the outside of the building, you have the tea partiers chanting, ``Shut it down. Shut it down. Shut it down.'' You have the extreme Members of the House Republican caucus out there with the tea partiers, egging them on, ``Shut it down. Shut it down. Shut it down.'' They come back into the building. The Speaker says: We have to get ready to shut it down. They give him a standing ovation. They could not be happier about this. They load the bill up with things that have nothing to do with funding the military, nothing to do with cutting the deficit, nothing to do with bringing down spending, but instead accomplish ideological missions that the Republican Party has been on for years.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. If, in fact, this is really about the deficit and if, in fact, this is really about reducing spending and if, in fact, this is really about ensuring the military remains funded, why is it necessary to have it be a nonnegotiable condition of the bill that Planned Parenthood be zeroed out and that the EPA be prevented from enforcing the Clean Air Act? I do not see that there is any connection between those two requirements and the deficit, and I think, if the party were willing to give up those two demands, we could solve this very quickly. It is those two demands that are fouling things up and forcing a shutdown.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Absolutely. I yield for a question.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for 20 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, Abraham Lincoln began his famous ``house divided'' speech with simple, homespun advice that we should first ``know where we are and whither we are tending,'' before we ``judge what to do and how to do it.'' We are embarked on a journey of great consequence regarding what to do about our Nation's budget and how to do it. This is a vital conversation. We simply must reduce our annual Federal deficits and our Nation's debt. But it would seem wise at this important time to take President Lincoln's advice and examine where we are and whither we are tending as we go about making these decisions. I will touch on a few factual landmarks that may help orient us to where we are and help us learn whither we are tending. The first and most obvious is that we just weathered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Few of us who were here then--I know the Presiding Officer was--will ever forget the animal fear and desperate urgency displayed by Treasury Secretary Paulsen and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke as they, having looked into that abyss, came to this building, to the LBJ room, and pleaded for our help to save the world economy. We are now past the worst depths of the financial and economic crises. As this chart shows, the economic recovery measured in jobs is proceeding, though all too tentatively and all too slowly. In Rhode Island, we are still at 12 percent unemployment in the Providence metropolitan area and over 11 percent statewide. To Lincoln's question where are we, well, gradually trending in the right direction. But no one can yet rule out a double dip back into deeper recession. Into this gradual and tepid recovery, the Republicans want to inject H.R. 1. What can we know about that? Mark Zandi, an economic adviser to Senator McCain's 2008 Presidential campaign, says this legislation, the House bill, will cause 700,000 job losses. That wipes out about half of the recovery, if that number is correct. Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, says that bill, H.R. 1, could lower GDP growth by two full percentage points in the remaining two quarters of the fiscal year. Goldman Sachs is no fool where economic numbers are concerned. It would be a perilous choice to dismiss their warning. Our present rate of economic growth is only about 3 percent. So reducing that by a full 2 percent over a year could wipe out more than half of our economic recovery. Of course, economic growth correlates to Federal revenues so the cuts' damage to economic growth would in turn create revenue loss, so there would be less deficit reduction. That is one landmark of where we are. We are in a too-slow economic recovery from what was nearly a second great depression, and we face a bill from the House that threatens that too-slow recovery. Another mark of where we are and whither we are tending relates to the balance between regular Americans and corporate America's respective contributions to our Nation's revenue. In 1935, regular Americans and corporate America evenly split the responsibility to fund our country's obligations. Then in each of these indicated years, it broke through the following ratios: humans twice as much as corporations in 1948; three times as much in 1971; four times as much in 1981; and recently the ratio broke through 6 to 1, individual Americans contributing more than six times the revenue that corporate America contributes. When people say how overtaxed corporate America is, it is worth looking at the facts of where we actually are and whither for decades we have been tending--ever diminished corporate contributions to our Nation's revenues. Look next at how we collect revenues. Look at the landmarks of our dysfunctional Tax Code. Start with what it takes to comply with our beast of a code. The National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent office within the IRS, has calculated that Americans spend 6.1 billion hours of time engaged in tax compliance each year. Think of what could be invented, what could be built with 6 billion hours of human work. Instead, it is all consumed, every year, in the economic dead weight loss of tax compliance. In terms of where we are, that is an important fact, and it is an abysmal place to be. Let me take my colleagues to another place. Here is a picture from our Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad taken in the Cayman Islands. This nondescript building doesn't look like much. It certainly doesn't look like a beehive of economic activity. But over 18,000 corporations claim this building as their place of business. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ``small business'' when we think of 18,000 corporations claiming that building as their place of business. As Chairman Conrad has pointed out, the only business going on here is funny business, monkey business with the Tax Code, tax gimmickry. This is estimated to cost us as much as $100 billion every year. For every one of those dollars lost to the tax cheaters, honest tax-paying Americans and honest tax-paying American corporations have to pay an extra dollar or more to make up the difference. Here is another building with a tax story to tell about where we are as we look at our budget debate. This is the Helmsley building New York City. This building is big enough to be its own zip code so that the IRS reports of tax information by zip code can tell us a lot about this building. Here is what this building tells us from actual tax filings. The well off and very successful occupants of that building paid a lower tax rate than the average New York City janitor paid. It seems extraordinary, but it is not a fluke. The average tax rate of the New York City janitor is 24.9 percent of their income. Of a New York City security guard, is 23.8 percent of their income. And of the occupants of that wonderful building, 14.7 percent of their considerably larger incomes. That seems as though it must be extraordinary, but it is not a fluke. The IRS reports that the tax rate actually paid by the highest income 400 Americans--the story is the same--the highest earning 400 Americans, in the IRS's most recent calculation, each earned an average of $34 million-plus a year, over a third of a billion each and every year, 400 of them. I truly applaud their success. It is a magnificent thing. But here is the rub. They actually paid on average only a 16.7 percent total Federal tax rate. I asked my staff to calculate the wage level where a regular single worker starts paying 16.7 percent in total Federal taxes. It is at a salary of $28,650. A representative job at that income level in my home State, in the Providence labor market, is that of a hospital orderly which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates pays $29,100 a year. At that point, they are paying the same as the 400 biggest taxpayers who each earned over a third of a billion dollars, 16.7 percent. So it is not just the fortunate and successful residents of the Helmsley building who pay a lesser share of their income to support their country than does the janitor, it is also the top 400 income earners, those averaging over a third of a billion in income, who contribute a lesser share of their income than the hospital orderly pushing his cart down the halls of Rhode Island Hospital at night. Where are we? Well, it seems to me we are upside down as far as this is concerned. I believe no less an economic titan than Warren Buffett, the fabled ``oracle of Omaha,'' agrees with me that this needs to be corrected. The corporate Tax Code makes little more sense. Decades of lobbyists have carved it into a Swiss cheese of tax loopholes, of earmarks for the rich and powerful. The result? We have a nominal corporate tax rate of 35 percent. But here is what the New York Times reported last week. General Electric, one of the Nation's largest corporations, made profits of over $14 billion last year and paid no U.S. taxes. In fact, it actually received a $3.2 billion refund from the taxpayers. Maybe that was a 1-year anomaly. But a previous analysis by the New York Times of 5 years' worth of corporate tax returns found that Prudential Financial only paid 7.6 percent; Yahoo, 7 percent; Southwest Airlines, 6.3 percent; Boeing, 4.5 percent; and what looks to be our tax avoidance champion, on $11.3 billion of income, the Carnival Cruise Corporation paid 1.1 percent in Federal taxes. One recent paper actually calculated their cash effective tax rate at 0.7 percent on $11.3 billion in income. Carnival lines is not just taking us for a cruise, they are taking us for a ride. But wait, there is more. Don't forget that we make the American taxpayer subsidize big oil to the tune of $3 billion a year, and big oil has made a trillion dollars in profits this decade. Indeed, on an effective tax rate basis, the petroleum-gas industry pays the lowest rate of any industry. These are all noteworthy landmarks and each should inform us about where we are and whither we are tending as we face our budget. But the big landmark, the Mt. Everest of landmarks casting its vast shadow over the entire budget discussion, is health care. I agree with Congressman Paul Ryan. He said: If you want to be honest with the fiscal problem and the debt, it really is a health care problem. He is dead right. And the landmark feature of this landmark problem is this. The health care cost problem is a health care system problem. Our national health care costs are exploding. The health care system is driving the costs of Medicare. The health care system is driving the costs of Medicaid. The health care system is driving the costs of private insurance. The health care system is driving the costs of the military's TRICARE system. No one is exempt. The health care system is what is driving the cost problem in public and private programs alike. So we have to address the health care system problem if we are going to get our health care costs under control. How do we solve this? We actually have a pretty good toolbox that has five major tools in it. One, quality improvement. Quality improvement saves the cost of errors, misdiagnosis, disjointed care, and so forth. For example, hospital-acquired infections alone cost about $2.5 billion every year, and they are virtually entirely avoidable. They should never be events. Two, prevention programs. Prevention programs can avoid the cost of getting sick in the first place. More than 90 percent of cervical cancer is curable if the disease is detected early through pap smears. Three, paying doctors for better outcomes rather than for more and more tests and procedures can save money while improving the outcomes. Four, a robust health information infrastructure has been estimated to save $81 billion a year by the RAND Corporation, and that number may very well be low as the system builds itself out. Finally, five, the administrative costs of our health care system are grotesque. The insurance industry has developed a massive bureaucracy to delay and deny payments to doctors and hospitals. The doctors and hospitals have had to fight back, so they have had to hire their own billing departments and consultants. In the little Cranston community health center, which I visited a few months ago, half of the staff are dedicated to trying to get paid, and they have to spend another $200,000 a year on consultants. All of that--the entire war over payment between insurers and hospitals and doctors--adds no health care value--zero. We have heard that on the private insurance side, anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of the health insurance dollar gets burned up in administrative costs. We know we can do better because the costs of administering Medicare are closer to 2 percent of program expenditures. Add this all up, and the numbers here are enormous. The President's Council of Economic Advisers has stated that 5 percent of GDP can be taken out of our health care system without hurting the health care we receive. That is about $700 billion a year. The New England Healthcare Institute says it is $850 billion a year. The well-regarded Lewin Group has estimated the probable savings at $1 trillion a year, a figure echoed by former Bush Treasury Secretary O'Neill. Not only are the numbers enormous, but the results are a win-win. Consider the five strategies: higher quality care with fewer errors and infections; prevented illnesses, so you do not get sick in the first place; secure, complete health records that are there when you need them, electronically, so your doctors, your lab, your pharmacy, your hospital, your specialists all know what everybody else is doing; payment to doctors and hospitals based on keeping you well and getting you well rather than on giving more procedures and things to you; and finally, not so much infuriating insurance company bureaucracy, hassling both patients and doctors. Those are not bad outcomes even without the savings. So what do we draw from this if we keep all these landmarks in mind, landmarks of where we actually are in this budget debate? Well, our colleagues on the other side, particularly our House Republican colleagues, say they are determined to reduce our annual deficit and our national debt, that it is their top priority. But in evaluating that claim, look at H.R. 1, which spends all its cost-cutting fury on only 12 percent of the budget--the nonsecurity discretionary spending-- and zero percent on the revenue side. If they are really serious about deficit and debt reduction, why risk destroying 700,000 jobs when job destruction only adds to the deficit and to our debt through lost economic activity and revenue? If they are really serious about deficit and debt reduction, why is not one corporate tax loophole on the chopping block--not one? Why is the Tax Code off limits in this discussion, as it burns up 6 billion of our precious hours every year and makes that hospital orderly, pushing that cart down the linoleum hallway at midnight, pay a higher rate than those fortunate and able Americans who made more than $1/3 billion each in a single year? If they are really serious about this, if deficits and debt are really the most important thing we face, why is there no discussion of corporate America's ever-diminishing contribution as a share of our national revenue? If our friends are really serious, why is there no plan for even one of the 18,000 corporations in that phony-baloney headquarters in the Cayman Islands to pay its proper taxes? Finally, if they are really serious, why is there so much pure political nonsense about ObamaCare and socialized medicine instead of a mature discussion about using and improving the tools in the health care bill to address our grave national health care system problem? Further, why is it necessary to throw Planned Parenthood and Head Start and every single idealistic young kid in City Year and Teach for America under the bus? Not one kid in an American school doing Teach for America can be spared, and yet we must keep our full deployment of 57,000 troops in Germany? Is it necessary to single out the Environmental Protection Agency for the gutting that polluters long have lusted for? Why go after Social Security, which has never contributed a nickel to America's debt or deficit? It just seems to me that until one, just one, corporate tax loophole is on the table; until one, just one, subsidy to big oil is on the table, one, just one, subsidy to big agribusiness; until we are even beginning to talk about billionaires contributing Federal revenue in the same share of their income as that hospital orderly; until our friends are not so casual about threatening 700,000 jobs and perhaps $20 billion in related tax revenue; until the cuts and all those riders in H.R. 1 make it something other than a Republican Trojan horse of political favors and ideology, then count me a skeptic about their real priorities. I have always found that you get a better read looking at what people actually do rather than just believing whatever they say. If you look at what H.R. 1 actually does, it is the same old Republican agenda-- attacking programs that help the poor, attacking women's right to choose, attacking national voluntary service, helping polluters get around public health measures, reducing the share of revenues paid by corporations and very high income individuals. It is the same old song. And most important, if you go that road, it is just not adequate to meet the serious problems at hand. We need to look throughout the budget and across all of our opportunities to bring down our Nation's deficits and to bring down our Nation's debt. I look forward in the months ahead to a serious, fair, and sensible discussion, a mature discussion of how to reduce our deficits and our debt. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, as we continue to debate important small business legislation, I rise today to discuss an amendment to further support investment and job creation in U.S. companies. In particular, my amendment would bolster our domestic manufacturing industry, which has historically been the engine of growth for the American economy. The manufacturing economy has been especially important in the industrial Northeast, including my State of Rhode Island. From the Old Slater Mill in Pawtucket--one of the first water- powered textile mills in the nation--to modern submarine production at Quonset Point, the manufacturing sector has always been central to our economy. Sadly, as American companies have faced rising production costs and increased--and often unfair--competition from foreign firms, U.S. production has plummeted. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of manufacturing jobs declined by almost a third over the past decade from 17.2 million in 2000 to 11.7 million in 2010. This decline has been felt most sharply in old manufacturing centers like Rhode Island. In Rhode Island, the loss of manufacturing jobs over the past decade has topped 44 percent. The decline of the manufacturing sector is a primary reason why Rhode Island has had greater difficulty than most states in recovering from the recent recession. Over and over, I have travelled around Rhode Island to meet with local manufacturers, listening to their frustrations and discussing ideas to help their businesses grow. During these visits I have heard one theme over and over again: unfair foreign competition is killing domestic industries. One Pawtucket manufacturer told me that they recently lost eight percent of their business to a Chinese competitor. It is clear to me that if we want to keep manufacturing jobs in Rhode Island, we need to level the playing field with foreign competitors. My amendment would remove one incentive to move jobs offshore and help to make competition fairer for companies struggling to keep their factory doors open here in the United States. Based on the Offshoring Prevention Act, cosponsored by Senators Leahy, Sanders, Boxer, Durbin, Brown of Ohio, Harkin, Johnson, and Levin, my amendment would end a costly tax incentive that rewards companies for shipping jobs overseas. Under current law, an American company that manufactures goods in Rhode Island or in the Presiding Officer's State must pay Federal income taxes on profits in the year that the profits are earned. But if that same company moves its factory to another country, however, it is permitted to defer the payment of income taxes, and declare them in a year that is more advantageous--for example, one in which the company has offsetting losses. It makes no sense that our Tax Code allows companies to delay paying income taxes on profits made through overseas subsidiaries, and my bill will put a stop to this practice for profits earned on manufactured goods exported to the United States. To put it simply, we should not reward companies for eliminating American jobs. In addition to ending an incentive to ship jobs overseas, my amendment would reduce the Federal deficit by $19.5 billion over the next decade. At a time when Republicans are promoting painful cuts to popular Federal programs to save similar amounts, these are savings we cannot afford to pass up. If we are going to be serious and fair about deficit reduction, we need to look at these corporate loopholes and giveaways, not just at cuts to Head Start, NPR, and Planned Parenthood. I hope that my colleagues will show their support for American jobs and for deficit reduction by supporting my amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, we are not at this moment without votes on this important legislation for lack of effort by the distinguished Senator from Louisiana. She has been extraordinarily determined, as she was with her earlier small business legislation which she fought through to a success, and I am sure this will be fought through to a success as well. One of the ways in which our friends on the other side are seeking to harass and impede this important piece of legislation is by putting on unrelated amendments--particularly poisonous unrelated amendments, including the one Senator Rockefeller just spoke about--to completely gut and strip the authority the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized EPA has to protect us from the hazard of carbon pollution. Underlying this procedural maneuver which would interfere with this significant jobs-related bill is a fundamental disagreement about whether our atmosphere is being affected by the carbon pollution we have been pumping into it. I would submit the facts are entirely on one side of that debate, and the polluters are entirely on the other. It is only in a building such as this in which so many special interests have such sway that the debate has the currency it appears to have achieved. Much of what is happening is nondebatable. Scientists know--not from theory but from observation, from calculation--what the range of parts per million of carbon dioxide has been in the atmosphere for 8,000 centuries. We can go back and find the carbon record in ice and in other ways, and we can establish what the range was of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. For the last 800,000 years, it has been between 170 and about 300 parts per million. That is the bandwidth--170 to 300 parts per million--over 800,000 years. For the first time in 800,000 years, we are out of that range. The present concentration--again, a measurement, not a theory--exceeds 391 parts per million. Scientists can draw a trajectory which is something that people do all over this world. It is not complicated. It is not theory. If you draw a trajectory based on where we are going, the trajectory puts us at 688 parts per million in the year 2095 and 1,097 parts per million in the year 2195. These are levels that not only haven't been seen in 800,000 years, they haven't been seen in millions of years. This is an experiment in the very nature, the very physics of our planet. It has been known since just after the Civil War when the Irish scientist Tyndall discovered that CO2 in the atmosphere had a warming effect, had a blanketing effect and warmed the atmosphere. That has been bomb-proof science for more than a century. It is in basic textbooks. When we take that scientific theory--basic, established, more than 130, 140 years old--and then combine it with the facts as we see it, that it has been in this range, it is now out of an 8,000-century range and climbing, and we look at some of the effects that are beginning to happen that are also consistent with that, a fairly undeniable story begins to emerge. The day will come, I am confident, when our grandchildren will look back at this moment at our unwillingness to deal with the plain scientific evidence in front of us and to instead be persuaded by merchants of doubt with big checkbooks who have a vested interest in the outcome, who have a conflict of interest. We are listening to them, and we are not listening to the plain facts and to the plain science and the theories that have been known for more than a century. People will look back at us with real shame--there is no other word for it-- shame and disgust, that this was the way we addressed this problem on our planet. We can look back at other events such as this. Galileo had a view based on his observations on science as to how the planets worked, and he was intimidated out of it by the power of the day which couldn't abide that, and he was taken before the inquisition and was forced to recant. The legend is that when he recanted, he quietly said to himself: I recant, but the planets stay their courses. Well, the planets stay their courses, the laws of physics and chemistry don't change, and we are on a slope toward a very severe problem. We can't just simply, like the ostrich, put our heads in the sand over and over. It is just wrong. So this amendment is wrong that would strip EPA of their authority. It will hurt people who depend on this. It has always been good for America when we have made our air and water cleaner. We simply cannot go on this way. It is bad for this bill because it puts a poisonous amendment on it when this should be a bill we should all be getting behind. It is certainly wrong from a point of view of history and science and the obligation we have to our younger people and to their children who have to live in a world that faces the consequences of our negligence this day. I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I do not intend to speak long. I know we are getting ready to wrap up. I will not interfere with that. But I did not want the day to end without a reminder of the concern that H.R. 1 and the significant, serious cuts it imposes will produce significant, serious job losses. That is not something being manufactured on our side of the aisle. It comes from careful analysis from very neutral forums. Many people will have seen this graphic already. Chairman Bernanke of the Federal Reserve is one of the observers who has looked at the bill and said it will cut significant jobs. I believe his testimony was that it was not trivial, that it would be hundreds of thousands of jobs. Economist Mark Zandi has advised Republicans and Democrats. He is a neutral, independent economist. He has calculated that the GOP plan would cost 700,000 jobs. When we consider the good news that we have just heard of job growth in the past reporting period, which was, I believe, around 170,000 jobs--less than 200 anyway--the idea of wiping out 700,000 jobs acquires a real scale and a real significance. Finally, at the bottom is Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is no great friend of the Democratic Party. It is a group of financial advisers and investors who look at data as dispassionately as possible, because if they are wrong, they don't make money. Goldman Sachs has estimated that the spending cuts will hurt economic growth. My memory is, they estimated it would be 2 percentage points off of our economic growth. When we consider that our economic growth is under 3 percent right now, if we take two of the percents out, we are basically getting pretty close to flat-lining the American economy. So prudence dictates that we go about the necessary adjustments to get rid of our debt and our deficit in a way that does not snuff out the gradually emerging recovery. In my State of Rhode Island, we have just gone from 11.5 percent unemployment down to 11.3 percent. It is still pretty darn serious out there. While clearly things appear to have bottomed out and started to go in the right direction, nothing prevents what everybody calls the double dip. Things such as the gas crisis we are experiencing now have been discussed as potentially creating a double dip. To knock out hundreds of thousands of jobs, to knock 2 full percentage points out of growth out of a ratio that is not much over 3 percent is a very big hit to the economy. It may be wiser to allow the economic recovery to continue a little bit further, as the Bowles-Simpson group recommended, that you couldn't snuff out the recovery early. Let the blaze catch a little more. Let it get going, and then we can move into these areas. I will come to the floor later to talk about not just prudence but also fairness. There are two issues we need to address as we face up to our debt and deficit challenge. We have to do it prudently. We also should do it fairly. The way the House does it does not meet the standard either of prudence or fairness. On prudence, I think we have pretty strong agreement when Ben Bernanke and Mark Zandi and Goldman Sachs all talk about significant job losses as a result, and fairness is a topic for another day. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I thank Chairman Boxer for pulling us together. I want to make three quick points in the time I have. The House bill cuts $2 billion out of the clean water and safe drinking water infrastructure loan programs at a time when EPA calculates we have a $600 billion water infrastructure deficit. We are behind on rebuilding America's clean water infrastructure, and yet they cut it. We need the infrastructure. We could certainly use the jobs. This is a very misplaced cut. From a clean air perspective, the bill cuts $60 million from State and local grants that ensure clean air and clean water and attacks clean air programs. In 2010, the Clean Air Act is estimated to have saved 160,000 lives, compared to where things would have been without it. Physicians for Social Responsibility says that U.S. coal plants alone cause about 554,000 asthma attacks each year. Why do I talk about asthma? Rhode Island has a 10-percent rate of asthma, despite not having a single coal-fired powerplant. Why is this? Because out in the Midwest, they are pumping their pollution up into the sky, where it falls down on our New England States. Average smokestack height increased from 200 feet tall in 1956 to over 500 feet tall in 1978. In 1970, there were only two U.S. smokestacks over 500 feet tall. By 1985, there were 180 smokestacks taller than 500 feet, and 23 were over 1,000 feet tall--so tall that they had to be put on air traffic control maps. Why? Because it exports their pollution to us. A State such as Rhode Island has no shot at controlling the pollution that is dumped on us that originates in other States if there is not a strong national EPA to do this. So it is very vital to us. And asthma is a real threat. Lastly, on carbon pollution, we hear a lot of talk about this, and there are certain things that are just factual at this point. It is a fact that over the last 800,000 years, the atmosphere has been in a range between 170 and 300 parts per million of CO2. That is a measurement, not a theory. In 1863--a long time ago, during the time of the Civil War in this country--an Irish scientist, John Tyndall, determined that carbon dioxide has a blanketing effect in the atmosphere and increasingly warms the Earth. That has been textbook science for more than a century. It is not a negotiable or debatable proposition. We have burned 7 million to 8 million gigatons of carbon dioxide every year, and it is having an effect. We are now at 391 parts per million--well outside of a benchmark that has lasted for 800,000 years.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today to speak in support of legislation I have introduced with Senators Reed, Merkley, Sanders and Tester to enhance foreclosure protections for our servicemembers and their families, and to help ensure that their rights under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act are not violated. We have all heard horror stories about how servicers treat homeowners in distress. When these abusive mortgage practices harm the men and women who are sent into harm's way to protect our country, it is a particular tragedy and it deserves our urgent attention. Not only are these practices illegal and morally repugnant, they can also be a dangerous distraction from our military mission. Holly Petraeus, General Petraeus' wife, leads the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Office for Service Member Affairs, and she testified on this issue during a recent hearing before the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. As she put it, ``[i]t is a terrible situation for the family at home and for the servicemember abroad who feels helpless.'' Service members over at the point of the spear in Afghanistan have enough to worry about without worrying about the bank foreclosing on their family. According to recent media reports, it has come to light that financial institutions have repeatedly failed to comply with the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act or ``SCRA''. These violations led to thousands of mortgage overcharges and a number of unlawful foreclosures. Under the SCRA, it is illegal to foreclose on a protected servicemember unless an authorization by a judge is obtained. Then, the judge can only act after a hearing is held in which the military homeowner is represented. One of the most troubling cases is the story of SGT James B. Hurley, who lost his home while he was serving in Iraq. Like many Reservists, Sergeant Hurley made less money serving on active duty than he did in his civilian job. So, when he was mobilized, it became a real struggle for his family to afford his mortgage and they fell behind in making his payments. The SCRA was designed to protect our servicemembers from financial challenges associated with deployments, and it should have prevented the bank from foreclosing on Sergeant Hurley. However, the bank violated the SCRA, foreclosing on Sergeant Hurley illegally, and forcing his wife and children out of their home. Sergeant Hurley returned from combat, as a disabled veteran, only to find that the bank had sold the home that he worked so hard to build. The current economic climate has hit our returning veterans particularly hard, adding to the financial challenges our deployed servicemembers already face. According to a recent Department of Labor report, the unemployment rate for veterans rose to 9.9 percent overall, and 15.2 percent for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These heartbreaking statistics underscore how difficult it can be to readjust economically to life at home. For our returning servicemembers that need time to get back on financial solid footing, to rebuild what they had to walk away from to defend the rest of us, we should do everything we can to accommodate their needs, especially during these difficult economic times. The Protecting Servicemembers from Mortgage Abuses Act of 2011, which I am introducing would encourage compliance with the SCRA by doubling the maximum criminal penalties for violations of its foreclosure and eviction protections. It would also double civil penalties in cases where the Attorney General has commenced a civil action against the lender. In addition, the bill will give servicemembers the time they need after returning from deployment to regain solid financial footing, by extending the period of foreclosure protection coverage from 9 to 24 months after military service has ended. I hope Senators on both sides of the aisle will come together and join me in supporting legislation to discourage loan servicers from further violations and help to protect the financial and emotional well-being of our troops.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to speak about a report that was released by the Centers for Disease Control, which I think is instructive for the American health care system. We are currently in a process of change in health care. Changing the way health care is delivered in our country is going to take years of hard work, of experimentation, and of learning. There are stakeholders on both the Federal and State level who are out there right now, working to implement models of care that increase the coordination and efficiency with which health care is delivered, improve the quality of the care that is delivered, improve the outcomes that patients experience, and control costs--bring down costs. This delivery system reform is the real issue of health care reform in our time. I emphasize, it is a win- win for system--improving the quality of care while lowering the cost for the system. This report, called ``Vital Signs,'' released this week by the Centers for Disease Control, illustrates how just one type of quality reform, reducing hospital-acquired infections, has already improved health outcomes and resulted in significant cost savings. Hospital- acquired infections are a tragic reality of our health care system. Nearly 1 in every 20 hospitalized patients in the United States is affected by a hospital-acquired infection each year. The most deadly of these infections occurs when a tube inserted into a patient's vein is either not put in properly or not kept clean. Bloodstream infections resulting from these tubes--what are called central line infections-- kill as many as 1 in 4 patients who become infected. I suspect, if we sat all the Members of the Senate down, there would be very few of us who could not identify a friend, a loved one, a family member, somebody we knew who had been exposed to a hospital- acquired infection. The deaths from hospital-acquired infections are not only numerous but tragic and particularly tragic because they are largely preventable. These are what should be considered a zero event. Studies have shown that when providers follow a strict checklist of very basic instructions, including things as simple as washing your hands with soap, cleaning a patient's skin with antiseptic, and placing full sterile drapes over the patient, those rates of hospital-acquired infection plummet. The CDC's ``Vital Signs'' report is further evidence of how effective these guidelines are at reducing and in some cases nearly eliminating central line bloodstream infections from intensive care units. The report's findings show that from 2001 to 2009, State and Federal efforts to promote and adopt CDC guidelines and best practices for preventing hospital-acquired infections contributed to a 58-percent decrease in the number of central line bloodstream infections among ICU patients--58 percent decrease in just 8 years, from 2001 to 2009. A percentage is a fine thing, it is a statistic, but it does not have a lot of meat on its bones. What does this 58 percent mean? It represents up to 27,000 lives saved, 27,000 families who got their loved one home from the hospital instead of having that terrible conversation with the doctor, explaining to them why their loved one passed away. If that were not enough, it also represents approximately $1.8 billion in cost savings to our health care system--27,000 lives and $1.8 billion saved from reductions in just one type of hospital- acquired infection in just one type of care setting. The promising news from the CDC report is that the steps health care providers are taking to prevent this type of infection are working. The bad news is, we are not doing enough to reduce the occurrence of bloodstream infections in other health care settings. The report found that in 2009, approximately 60,000 central line bloodstream infections occurred in nonintensive care unit settings such as hospital wards or kidney dialysis clinics. This should not be acceptable to us, especially given the tools we know we have to prevent these infections from happening. Simply put, we can do better. We can save more lives. We can improve the quality of care people receive and, in the process, save billions of dollars in our health care system. The CDC is already working to support partnerships between health care providers to more broadly implement these now-proven quality reforms. This is a good start. In my home State, I have very proudly watched the Rhode Island Intensive Care Unit Collaborative, a partnership of health care stakeholders led by an organization called the Rhode Island Quality Institute, take the lead in implementing similar quality reforms to reduce the rate of hospital-acquired infections in our intensive care units. Rhode Island is the only State in the country to have 100 percent of its adult intensive care units participating in a collaborative of this kind, and I commend it to any one of my colleagues. It began years ago in Michigan with the Keystone Project and it spread across the country to the Pronovost principles, and in Rhode Island we have run with it. It has only been a few years, but the results, much like those reported by the CDC, are eye-opening. I will quantify this by saying we began with very first-rate hospitals in Rhode Island. We are in that high-tech Northeast corridor. We are near the Boston medical centers, so we are starting from a very high base of care in Rhode Island hospitals. But even from that good base, the collaborative reported significant improvements in two types of deadly infections: central line bloodstream infections and pneumonia, among patients on ventilators. The collaborative estimates from 2007 to June 2010, just over 7 years, the effort had saved 73 intensive care unit lives--73 lives of intensive care unit patients--it eliminated the need for over 3,200 expensive hospital days, and it saved hospitals, patients, and insurers $11.5 million. This evidence underscores the potential for similar types of delivery system reforms which, by improving the quality of care, lower the cost. An array of different strategies can lead to these savings, quality reforms such as this that avoid errors and adverse consequences; prevention programs that save lives and money by getting in there before the disease takes off; a robust health information infrastructure that allows for safer and better coordinated care between your primary health care provider, your specialists, your imaging place, the laboratory, the hospital where you had to be admitted; payment policies that reward better results, not just more procedures; and, finally, better administrative efficiency so more health care dollars actually go to health care instead of being burned up on bureaucracies and battles over who gets paid and all the rest that weighs down our health care system. The President's Council of Economic Advisers noted recently that up to 30 percent of health care costs, or about 5 percent of GDP, could be saved without compromising health outcomes. Five percent of GDP is around $700 billion. Mr. President, $700 billion a year saved through this kind of win-win is a target worth fighting hard to achieve. I agree with the Council's observation, but from my experience, I think we can achieve these savings not just without compromising health outcomes, I think we can achieve these savings while improving health outcomes. Implementing these reforms and achieving these reforms will not be easy. It is not just flipping a switch, it is a journey and that journey will have turns and it will have obstacles. It is a process, as very expert reviewers have said, of learning, of experimentation, of adaptation. But we have been down paths such as that before with great success, and the evidence I presented today shows how well it can work in health care. So I urge my colleagues, I urge the administration and State leaders to continue working together in all of these areas to make reforming our health care delivery system a priority. The future of our health care system and the good health of our constituents and the good health of our country's fisc all depend on it. I will conclude by saying something I have said before, which is that I give great credit to the Obama administration for working in this area. I believe our health care reform bill put every possible pilot, experiment program, and model for testing these different types of delivery reform systems on the table. Very expert reviewers have looked at it and said: I cannot think of a thing they did not try. Everything is in there. On top of that, the Obama administration has put first- rate people who really get this side of the equation, people such as Don Berwick and David Blumenthal, in charge. So a lot of very good things have lined up to take full advantage of these kinds of win-win savings. The only thing that I think is missing is that the administration has not yet set a hard goal for itself to hit. It still talks about bending the health care cost curve. Well, fine, but that is not a measurable goal. We are coming up on the anniversary of President Kennedy's pledge to put a man on the Moon. Way back then, when we feared losing the space race to the Soviet Union, if the President of the United States had said: I am committed to bending the curve of the rate of America's space exploration, that would have been an unmemorable and an ineffective Presidential intervention. Instead, President Kennedy put a hard benchmark out there that everybody in the world would know we had failed at if we missed it. That was to put a man on the Moon within a decade and bring him home safely. We did not know then how we could do it. We believed we could. We are optimists. We are innovators. This is a country of innovation and of the ``big idea.'' By putting that marker out there, President Kennedy drove what was then a smaller Federal bureaucracy toward that goal. I believe we need an equally specific goal from the administration on this front in order to make sure our considerably larger Federal bureaucracy is fully purposed toward achieving that because the goals are going to be so significant. I congratulate the CDC on their report. I wish to remind my colleagues how valuable this kind of health care reform is. It is not what we yell about here, but it is out there right now saving lives and saving money. We need to encourage it and we need to expand it, and the more the administration can put a hard goal out there for itself, the quicker we will get where we need to be, to the great benefit of ourselves as a country and our individual fellow American citizens. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is my understanding that this amendment is agreeable to both sides; therefore, I ask for its adoption.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.