What’s become painfully clear to me this week is that folks here in the United States Congress, folks here in the Senate, aren’t listening to each other anymore, and as we lurch towards our latest fiscal crisis — the looming sequester that takes effect tomorrow — I rise today to speak directly to the folks I work for, my constituents. My fellow Delawareans. I’d like to continue a conversation that I’ve been having with my neighbors at the train station, in the Acme, outside church, and on the sidelines of my kids’ sporting events consistently since coming here to serve as Delaware’s junior senator.
And I’m focused a bit by a Facebook message I got from Sandi, a neighbor, this morning. It is fairly pointed. She writes, “In 2011 when we spoke, you assured me the sequester was so draconian it would never happen. I feel betrayed by Congress, the Senate, and all of Washington. I trusted you would hold up our end of the deal and now we go to sequestration. Disappointed is an understatement for how I feel. Why can’t you get anything done down there?”
To Sandi, to the non-profits in Delaware whose funding is about to get cut, to the civilian workers at Dover Air Force Base who are facing furloughs, to the educators throughout the state who may be laid off and the student who may well be crammed into more crowded classrooms, to the parents of children who won’t receive the vaccines that they need, to all my neighbors who will be abruptly impacted by what Washington has failed to do this week to deal with this sequester… on behalf of the United States Senate, I am frustrated. I am at my wits end. I am embarrassed by our dysfunction here. I am sorry.
This is simply not how your government is supposed to work. Our country, as we all know, has a real long-term problem: a national debt now approaching $17 trillion, annual deficits for years of $1 trillion dollars, literally adding to the problem each day we don’t act together. And while the solution to this problem is not easy, it is relatively obvious. Including interest savings, I do want to say this at the outset — including interest savings, we have already saved a little less than $2.5 trillion dollars since 2010, but it’s easy to miss since we’ve done it piecemeal through reductions in continuing resolutions, through Budget Control Act, through the recent fiscal cliff deal, I know the general impression all of us get at home is that we lurch from crisis to crisis, and it’s unclear that we’ve made any progress at all, but we have already locked in nearly $2.5 trillion in savings.
As a member of the Budget Committee, we got to hear from the Simpson-Bowles Commission, the Domenici-Rivlin Commission, a whole series of prominent economists who broadly agreed we need $4 trillion in savings to get our deficits under control and to stabilize our debt as a percentage of our economy. Well, we’ve made about $2.5 trillion in progress. That leaves us about $1.5 trillion, maybe even $2 trillion to go to achieve that target, depending on how you count. More than 70 percent of the savings we’ve already enacted have come from cuts — overwhelmingly cuts to domestic spending that is critical to the future of our economy.
So I think it’s important as we go forward that we achieve some balance in the remaining component. This chamber will have to pass a budget resolution this year. That’s what we’re already working towards in the Budget Committee, a meeting of which I just came from.
We must cut spending. We must, in my view, raise revenue and we must reform our entitlement programs.
All of these have some role to play in dealing with these long-term issues. None of these things, though, can solve the problem on their own, and this has been clear for the three years that I have been serving here. Our problem has been we have the vocal part of one party who largely wouldn’t entertain raising any revenue, and the vocal part of another party who largely wouldn’t consider reforming our entitlement programs. And so we’ve lurched from crisis to crisis as we try to force each other to do it on the backs of one piece of our large federal budget.
To my conservative neighbors or those in the other party: I’m sorry — the numbers — we just can’t do this through cuts in discretionary, non-defense programs alone or through entitlement reforms alone. We can’t responsibly deal with this deficit and debt just with those two areas. In the last two years, we’ve already made more than $1.5 trillion in discretionary spending cuts. And on the trajectory we’re on now, in the next decade, the percentage these programs make of our total federal government will drop to levels not seen since Dwight Eisenhower was president. Even as our revenues today are at their lowest as a percentage of our economy in 50 years.
Federal spending done right in the right sectors fuels our long-term competitiveness. I’m talking about investments in education and infrastructure and R&D and basic science and curing diseases and in speeding commerce. They are key to our future. One of our core areas of focus ought to be on how do we create jobs on a pro-growth agenda for our country and by simply focusing on hacking off the domestic discretionary piece of our federal budget, it’s like trying to lift an airplane that’s trying to have, trying to get lift by cutting off one of its engines. We need to sustain investment in some of these critical areas of the federal budget.
But equally, I’ll say, to my liberal neighbors — to folks in my party — we can’t solve this budget problem just by raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations. The math just doesn’t work. There’s not enough we can raise there to deal with the whole challenge. And remember, the fiscal cliff deal that we just passed within the last few weeks will bring in another $600 billion in revenue over the next ten years, so we are making progress. We also can’t do it if we simply ignore the poor fiscal health of our long-term entitlement programs either. Last year, Medicare and Medicaid programs, plus interest on the debt, made up almost 30 cents of every dollar the federal government spent. In two decades on our current trajectory, it may be 50 cents of every dollar.
Demographics and steadily rising costs of health care will keep driving this, and we must deal with it. Unless we change course, putting all these things together, productive expenditures that grow our economy — medical research, R&D — will be crowded out. Progressive priorities like Head Start, low-income housing assistance, breast and cervical cancer screenings — the things that help care for the least among us or that help make us healthier, will be gone.
So in my view, why not take this moment when we still have a Democrat in the White House and Democrats in control of this chamber to make tough choices — while we have historically low interest rates — and fight to preserve the legacy of the earned benefits — Medicare, Medicaid and the vital entitlement programs we treasure. In my view, we can’t simply hope that the cost of our entitlement programs comes down, and we can’t simply tax our way to economic health. Anyone who tells you that either of these is enough is just wrong.
Spending has to be cut. Entitlements have to be reformed. Revenue needs to be raised. They’re all a part of the problem and they should all be part of the solution.
Somehow, though, when we actually do manage briefly to have a substantive debate on these questions, we tend to spend all of our time focusing on the smallest facet of the federal budget: discretionary spending, but almost no time discussing these others — the rest of the equation — the big drivers. This place has become somewhat of an alternative reality, where if we dig in real hard and people get really scared and we use fancy words like sequester or fiscal cliff, we can ignore the facts.
There’s no question — we do have to reduce spending. But the sequester is the worst way to do it. When conceived, the sequester was such a bad idea that both sides were supposed to be motivated to move heaven and earth to prevent it from taking effect. That’s how terrible it is as policy. Yet, here we are.
I’m dumbfounded.
It’s not like we haven’t had plenty of time to make this better. Eighteen months by my count.
Why are people talking now in the press here on Capitol Hill about whether Boehner will lose his speakership or whether the first person to suggest the sequester worked in the White House or in the Capitol, whether the Republicans have more to gain by the sequester kicking in or Democrats? How much time have we been spending here to fix blame rather than fix the problem. “Who owns the sequester” seems to be the fight of the day here. “Who cares,” is my question. There are no winners in this fight. And I think the question of how we reduce our deficits, stabilize our economy, prioritize spending that will grow jobs, this debate can either dominate the next ten years as we lurch every three months from crisis to crisis or we can address the broader, bigger question and fix it. And lay a groundwork for health, for growth, for recovery.
Again, the math is not that hard. The politics are. We here in Congress, with the Executive Branch have largely created this problem, and now we need to solve it. Tomorrow, leaders from this Chamber and the House will go to the White House to meet with President Obama about how to address the sequester on the very day it takes effect.
On behalf of my constituents, on behalf of the teachers, the police officers, the non-profits, the personnel at Dover Air Force Base, the kids, their parents, my neighbors — on behalf of my state — I urge our leaders to embrace this moment and to work not only to avert not only this short-term sequesters — not just this $85 billion in cuts — but to resume their work on the “grand bargain.”
We need a big deal. We need it to be balanced. We need it to be fair.
Spending. Entitlements. Revenue. They all need to be on the table and they all have to be part of the equation.
My question for everyone, everyone, both parties, both chambers, who go to this important meeting at the White House tomorrow: how much more time do we have to fight and not to act? To attack and not compromise, to spin rather than solve?
Based on the e-mails, the calls, and the contacts I’ve gotten from my constituents — from my neighbors — the time to step up and address this larger problem is now. The sequester, while savage, is not the underlying problem. It’s our unwillingness to come together across parties and chambers and deal with the underlying challenges of our budget. It is my hope, my prayer, that we will take this moment and act.
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