[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 102 (Wednesday, June 15, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2958-S2960]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SETTING FORTH THE CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
FOR FISCAL YEAR 2023 AND SETTING FORTH THE APPROPRIATE BUDGETARY LEVELS
FOR FISCAL YEARS 2024 THROUGH 2032--MOTION TO PROCEED
Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the United States has the largest economy in
the world and also has the largest government apparatus in the world.
This year, we will bring in $4.8 trillion and will spend about $5.8
trillion, and yet we will have no budget this year. How inexcusable,
how embarrassing it is for a country--the largest country in the world,
the largest government in the world, the largest bureaucracy in the
world--to have no budget. Is it any wonder that we are $30 trillion in
debt?
Most small businesses have a budget. Most businesses in our country
have a budget and a prediction for what will come in and what will go
out for the year, and this year there will be no budget. Not only will
there be no Democratic presentation about it, there will be no
Republican presentation as a party.
So today I will introduce my budget. This is a budget that balances
in 5 years. The reason we chose 5 years is that the constitutional
amendment to the budget amendment--the constitutional amendment that
would balance the budget--balances in 5 years. We voted on that
amendment previously in this body, and the Democrats, in unison,
opposed it. They were opposed to a balanced budget amendment to the
Constitution. The Republicans were unanimous in voting for the balanced
budget amendment, constitutional amendment. In that amendment, the text
of it would balance the budget in 5 years. So you would think, if all
50 Republicans are on record as being for a balanced budget amendment
that balances in 5 years, that all 50 Republicans would be for a
balanced budget, a budget that actually balances in 5 years.
Now, why is it important to have a budget? Well, you ought to have a
blueprint or a plan for what your government is going to do, so it is
inexcusable not to have any budget at all.
But also we have another problem that we are facing in our country:
We are facing the problem of inflation. Every American is seeing it.
You are seeing your gas prices go through the roof. You are seeing your
prices at the grocery store going through the roof.
Why do we have inflation? Well, inflation comes from debt. When the
United States runs up a debt, it is sold. Foreign countries buy the
debt, Americans buy the debt, but the biggest purchaser of our debt is
the Federal Reserve.
When the Federal Reserve buys the debt, do they buy it with money
that they have sort of laying around? Do you go to the Federal Reserve,
and some guy opens a big safe, and here is the money to buy the debt?
No. The Federal Reserve doesn't have any money, so the Federal Reserve
simply prints up the money and buys the American debt. But what does
that mean? When the Federal Reserve prints the money to buy the debt,
this floods the system with money. So we are flooded with money right
now. In the last 2 years, we borrowed $6 trillion, so $6 trillion is
entered into the system.
When you look at the amount of money that is being created, there is
a measurement of money supply called the M2. If you look at it on an
annualized basis, it has been going up at 15 percent a year.
So inflation is an increase in the money supply. It is an increase in
the money supply because they are buying the debt. So it is all related
to spending.
It is inexcusable that we will have no budget this year. It is
inexcusable that the projection is for a trillion-dollar deficit in 1
year and yet there won't even be a budget plan. There will be no plan
to try to make the deficit less or to try to manage our money.
But with this debt comes inflation. We are suffering from the worst
inflation we have had in 40 years. Who suffers the most from inflation?
The working class, those who are on fixed income, those who are
retired, they are getting creamed by this. People are spending over
$100 filling up their gas tank now. This is a real problem.
So a balanced budget is not an academic exercise. It is not something
that is theoretical. Our deficit has real impacts. Our deficit is
leading to inflation. So what I have proposed for the last several
years is a balanced budget, a budget that balances gradually over 5
years by having across-the-board cuts.
[[Page S2959]]
When I started introducing this budget several years ago, you could
simply freeze spending, and if you froze spending, we would grow out of
the deficit. By 5 years, by not increasing spending, you would have a
balanced budget. That was rejected by all the Democrats and about half
of the Republicans.
So then we went another year or two, and spending increased. As
spending increased and got worse, a freeze would no longer balance the
budget in 5 years, so we introduced the Penny Plan. The Penny Plan was
to cut 1 percent a year for 5 years, and it would balance. But still
the Congress ignored my admonition on this, and the spending got worse.
In the last couple of years, it has had to have been increased by a
two-penny plan, meaning a 2-percent reduction in spending each year for
5 years would still lead to balance in 5 years. But Congress once again
has ignored that.
So last year when we introduced the 5-year plan to balance the
budget, it was called the Five Penny Plan. You had to reduce spending
by 5 percent each year for 5 years.
This year, it has gotten even worse. The $6 trillion spending spree
of the last 2 years when they locked down the economy and basically
bankrupted almost every business in the country--when that occurred,
there was massive spending, massive debts, and now, this year, in order
to balance the budget, it would take a 6-percent cut.
But I would like to put this in perspective. If you ask people in
Washington, their heads explode because they could never conceive of
ever reducing spending. In fact, spending hasn't gone down really ever
in real terms in recent history because the government grows and grows
and grows. Your economy may shrink, your income may shrink, you may be
unemployed, but the government gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
So if we want to tame government, if we want to get government to
live within its means, if we want government to balance its budget, it
would take some work. People in Washington seem to think, oh, it could
never happen, but if you talk to a business man or woman who has ever
been through a recession or ever been through tough times, they will
tell you that sometimes a business has to reduce by 10 percent, 20
percent, 30 percent, to live within their means.
What we are calling for here is not no government. We are not even
calling for a minimal government. What we are calling for is a
government that lives within its means. Right now, living within its
means would be a government that brings in $4.8 trillion, which is how
much tax revenue comes in, would spend $4.8 trillion. So still the vast
majority of things the government does, it could still continue to do,
but it would have to spend less. We would have to have real restraint
in spending.
The best way to perceive it is this: Imagine the thing that you want
from government that you think is so popular, nobody could touch. Let's
take for example research for cancer or research for Alzheimer's
disease, something that so many people advocate, so many people are
emotionally charged with.
Well, when people come to Washington and they ask me about ``I have
this'' or ``My parents have this, and I want research money to go to
this,'' what I typically will say to them is ``You know we are out of
money. You know that we have this massive deficit, and it has led to
this great inflation that is across the land. What if we told everybody
that they had to have a little bit less?'' They look at me and they say
``Well, what would that mean?'' and I say ``Well, let's say that your
research project--the cancer research or the Alzheimer's research--got
$100 million last year. In order for all of us to tighten our belt, in
order for all of us to balance the budget so we can be stronger, in
order to tame the inflation that is eating us alive, you would get $94
million next year.''
So we are not talking about sort of eliminating whole facets of
government; what we are talking about is everybody would have to deal
with less.
There is so much waste throughout government. You look at the
National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation is one of
the most wasteful Agencies in government.
You go back 50 years, and you look at William Proxmire. In the early
1970s, William Proxmire began giving an award called the Golden Fleece
Award. What he would give an award for was wasteful spending, and
almost always, it came to the National Science Foundation. One of the
first ones he gave an award for was $50,000 to discover what makes
people fall in love. He just thought it was ridiculous that we would be
spending money on that, and I agree. But it didn't get better; it got
worse.
The National Science Foundation has never had a reduction in its
money. It always gets more money. This year--and this is why this is a
bipartisan problem--the Republicans and Democrats got together, and we
nearly doubled the income or nearly doubled the appropriations for the
National Science Foundation.
What are some other kinds of great research coming out of this
organization?
Well, they did a study to see whether or not selfies make you happy.
So if you take a selfie of yourself smiling and then look at it later
in the day, does that make you feel better about yourself? That would
cost a little over a million dollars.
They did a study also on the mating call of male Panamanian frogs.
They said: Well, we want to know whether the country frogs have a
different mating call than the city frogs. As someone who comes from
the country, I can tell you there is a different mating call in the
country than there is in the city. But that cost us about half-a-
million dollars.
Another study was $2 million to find out if the person in front of
you sneezes on the food in the cafeteria, are you more or less likely
to take that food?
Another study was three-quarters of a million dollars, studying
whether or not Japanese quail, on cocaine--whether or not they are more
sexually promiscuous when they use cocaine.
I mean, the studies go on endlessly.
So what did Congress do? Instead of telling them: Why don't we give
them one penny less; why don't we give them 99 percent of their budget,
or this year why don't we give them 94 percent of the budget, instead
we gave them 200 percent of their budget. Do you think the National
Science Foundation is going to be more frugal now that we have nearly
doubled their budget?
But this is the kind of great ideas that are coming out of Congress,
and this one turned out to be a bipartisan idea. All of the Democrats
and half the Republicans voted to nearly double the size of the
National Science Foundation. So you will get more waste, more abuse,
and more debt.
The thing is, we bring in a lot of money. We bring in $4.8 trillion.
Could we not simply spend what comes in? Part of the problem also is
most of the bills are not read. Most of the appropriations bills come
in here at the last moment, are 2,000 pages, and no one gets to read
them until hours beforehand.
And so what they do is they have renewed programs year after year.
There is a process up here where we authorize spending. So one
committee is supposed to say, is the spending working, and then the
other committee appropriates the money. We don't even bother to
reauthorize these things. We just keep reappropriating the money year
after year.
Someone will have this great idea and say, well, we need to do
something about homelessness, and everybody will say, well, that is
such a well-meaning--they intend to do it, and they will do it. But
nobody looks up the fact that we already have 80 other programs doing
the same thing.
Nobody ever looks at whether the program is working. Nobody ever
figures out whether anything that we are spending on money is viable
and doing us any good, and so it just adds up.
People come and say: Oh, well, this is something we have to do. We
have to send $40 billion to Ukraine. Where does it come from? If you
really think it is such a great idea, why don't we have a Ukraine war
tax? Why don't we do $500 per taxpayer, and you would have enough for
Ukraine. No, they just want to add it on the tab.
But it is worse than that. It is so irresponsible that the party in
charge will produce no budget. So we have nearly $5 trillion coming in;
nearly $6 trillion going out the door, and there will be no budget. It
is inexcusable.
We have the largest economy in the world. We have the largest
government
[[Page S2960]]
in the world, and we will have no budget this year. So what I have done
and will continue to do is to produce a budget that balances in 5
years; this is consistent with the balanced budget amendment to the
Constitution.
And the other reason we do 5 years is that some people have come
forward in the past and said that we will balance it in 10. It becomes
so long and unbelievable with the cuts in years 9 and 10 that they
never happen; that it really hasn't become a good document even when
budgets are put forward.
I think if we were to balance our budget, I think we would be a
stronger Nation. It is the way we would combat inflation. If you see
the people representing the party in power, the Democrats, you see them
on TV, they are scratching their heads; they have no idea. They are
like we have tried everything. But they don't even understand the
problem. They have no idea where inflation is coming from.
Inflation comes from debt. When the Federal Reserve buys the debt,
that creates the inflation. Because the Federal Reserve has no money,
the money is printed up, and the money floods the system.
But it is also part of a bait and switch. These are people who run
for office and say: We will bring you free things. We will bring you
baubles. We will bring you manna. We will give you free stuff. We all
instinctively know that nothing in life is really free.
So the free stuff that they are going to bring to you is paid for
through inflation.
So we have to get away from this. We have to get to the point where
we say that we are smarter than this. When a politician calls you up
and says: Give me your Social Security number and I will send you a
thousand dollars, that is what this is. It is an internet scam. It is a
phone scam.
They are asking for your vote by saying: We are going to give you
free stuff. There is no free lunch. There is nothing in life that you
will get without working. But what we have done is political parties
and politicians--sometimes in both parties--offer free stuff to people.
But right now we are paying the penalty. We are paying the piper. We
are paying the inflation tax.
And the inflation tax is a tax because we have overspent. Inflation
will continue to get worse until we begin to reduce the debt. You have
got to quit digging the hole. We have this massive hole of debt, and we
have to quit digging the hole deeper. So this budget will be a budget
that balances in 5 years, and I recommend a ``yes'' vote.
Motion to Proceed
And with that, I move to proceed to Calendar No. 397, S. Con. Res.
41.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Smith). The clerk will report the motion.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
Motion to proceed to Calendar No. 397, S. Con. Res. 41, a
concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget
for the United States Government for fiscal year 2023 and
setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal
years 2024 through 2032.
Vote on Motion
THE PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Mr. PAUL. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator
from Montana (Mr. Daines), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran), the
Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey), and the Senator from
Mississippi (Mr. Wicker).
The result was announced--yeas 29, nays 67, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 228 Leg.]
YEAS--29
Barrasso
Blackburn
Braun
Cassidy
Cotton
Cramer
Crapo
Cruz
Ernst
Fischer
Grassley
Hagerty
Hawley
Hoeven
Hyde-Smith
Johnson
Kennedy
Lankford
Lee
Lummis
Marshall
Paul
Risch
Romney
Rubio
Scott (FL)
Scott (SC)
Sullivan
Tuberville
NAYS--67
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Blunt
Booker
Boozman
Brown
Burr
Cantwell
Capito
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Collins
Coons
Cornyn
Cortez Masto
Duckworth
Durbin
Feinstein
Gillibrand
Graham
Hassan
Heinrich
Hickenlooper
Hirono
Inhofe
Kaine
Kelly
King
Klobuchar
Leahy
Lujan
Manchin
Markey
McConnell
Menendez
Merkley
Murkowski
Murphy
Murray
Ossoff
Padilla
Peters
Portman
Reed
Rosen
Rounds
Sanders
Sasse
Schatz
Schumer
Shaheen
Shelby
Sinema
Smith
Stabenow
Tester
Thune
Tillis
Van Hollen
Warner
Warnock
Warren
Whitehouse
Wyden
Young
NOT VOTING--4
Daines
Moran
Toomey
Wicker
The motion was rejected.
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