[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 9] [Senate] [Pages 12991-12993] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]CONGRESSIONAL TO-DO LIST Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, the to-do list in the Congress, and especially in the Senate, is long and difficult. We have witnessed all of this year a determined minority to act as a set of human brake pads. The minority has tried to stop almost everything in the Senate, including providing extended unemployment benefits for those who are out of work during the country's deepest recession since the Great Depression. It is unbelievable to me. It seems to me everyone should understand that when we are in a deep recession, as we have been--and we are coming out of it--that is the time to extend unemployment benefits because it is necessary to do. Yet it, too, has gotten caught in this trap of saying no to everything. I wish to go over just a bit of the to-do list in the Senate. First and foremost, there is no question that one of the most significant challenges facing this country is debt and deficits. Everybody understands that. The question is, How do we deal with it? The President is criticized for describing what he took over, but it is pretty important. You go to a rental car dealership and they want you to look around and see what the car is like before you rent it, right? This President ran for President, but when he took over this economy, had he done nothing, not lifted a finger, the Federal budget deficit was going to be $1.3 trillion. On the first month of his Presidency, the economy he was left with had 680,000 people losing their jobs in that month. This economy was in steep decline. That is what he inherited. It is not my taking a half hour to describe what was wrong in the previous 8 years, it is stating the obvious. What do we try to do about that? Well, the President has created this commission to try to address the deficits and debt that have come from this steep economic decline. When a country is experiencing a very deep recession, there is less revenue coming in. We were losing about $400 billion in revenue that we used to get. And then we have higher expenditures going out because we have the economic stabilizers that we pay for in order to help people during times of economic distress. So we had these unbelievable Federal budget deficits. That is not surprising. That will happen when there is a very steep economic downturn. But we can't, it seems to me, go into this with a structural imbalance, as we had, and then have a deep recession and have deficits explode and then not have a plan to deal with them. So the question is for all of us--the President and the Congress--what do we do? The President has created a high-level bipartisan commission to say: All right, come up with a set of recommendations by the end of this year of what we can do. What are the range of issues with everything on the table? Yes, discretionary spending, military spending, entitlements, all of it. What is the menu necessary to put this country back on track? In 2001, President Bush proposed very large tax cuts. I voted no on the floor of the Senate, and I said the reason I am voting no is that I don't think we should provide 10 years of very large tax cuts just because we had a surplus the last year of Bill Clinton's Presidency. We had a budget surplus--the first budget surplus we had in 30 years. They estimated that not only would we have a budget surplus that year, but we would have surpluses for the next 10 years. I said: Let's be a little conservative. What if something happens? What if we don't have the surpluses? They said: Don't worry about that; let's give large tax cuts--and the bulk of it, by the way, went to the wealthiest Americans. Without my vote, that passed. It did a lot of strange things. Among the tax cuts was a cut in the estate tax that took the estate tax over these 9 years down, down, down, and down so that this year we have a zero estate tax. Think of that. The estate tax in this country this year is zero. We have about 400 billionaires in [[Page 12992]] America. I believe four of them have died in this year. This is the ``Throw Mama From the Train'' year, as the title of the movie goes. This is the year when, if you have a lot of money and you are going to go, this is the year, I suppose, and those who are related to you might think there is divine providence here. Let me put up this chart. In today's newspaper, it says George Steinbrenner, the colorful owner of the New York Yankees, died. I didn't know George Steinbrenner, but he was quite an extraordinary man, I am sure--a successful businessman and a controversial owner of the New York Yankees. But he was also a billionaire. Today, the Washington Post talks about the fact that this year the estate tax is at zero, so his estate will have no tax obligation at all. Let me just observe that for the largest estates, most of the wealth comes from the appreciation of assets over the years and has never been taxed. So it has never had to bear a tax to send kids to school or build roads or provide for police or provide for our defense needs-- none of it. We have had four billionaires die this year. And we have this goofy process, which the previous administration created, to go to a zero estate tax this year and then spring back to an estate tax next year. It is just nutty. Do you want to know how to reduce the Federal budget deficit? How about fixing a few of these things. That ought to be on the to-do list. It is embarrassing, it seems to me, for those who understand fiscal policy and understand there is a responsibility for all Americans not just to be glad they are Americans, but also to participate in the things Americans have to participate in together, that that includes paying some taxes, yes, and some estate taxes. It is embarrassing that we have a zero estate tax for the wealthiest Americans at this point. That makes no sense to me. We have a proposed extension of the tax cuts for middle-income workers that comes from the 2001 tax bill that President Bush pushed through this Congress. One of my colleagues was on a show this Sunday and said: Well, we want to also give a tax cut to the top 2 percent of the American income earners. The moderator of the show said: That is going to cost 680-some billion dollars in lost revenue. How do you pay for that? My colleague, who talks about the Federal budget deficits a lot and the need to deal with them, said: We don't have to pay for tax cuts. It seems to me basic arithmetic books allow us to add 1 and 1 and get 2--from time to time, at least. So we are going to deal with the Federal budget deficits by extending income tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans? We are going to deal with the Federal budget deficits by having a zero estate tax obligation for somebody who dies and has a billion or billions of dollars? What about the notion of going to war twice, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not paying a penny for it? We have all of these gatherings to say goodbye--particularly in the National Guard--to a National Guard unit that will be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. We say Godspeed and be safe. When they come home, we say welcome home. We do everything except pay the bill. We send them to war, have them strap on ceramic body armor in the morning, walk in harm's way and get shot at. But this Congress doesn't have the courage to decide that we ought to pay for wars we are fighting. All of it has been piled on the debt. Some of us stood in this well and said let's pay for it, and we were told if we do that and try to pay for it, the President will veto it because we are trying to raise revenue. That is right, raising revenue to pay for the cost of sending America's men and women in uniform to fight for this country. It used to be essential, not optional. It was the moral and responsible thing to do. All of this has been charged and added to the debt. So the soldiers go fight and come home, and they will pay the bill as well. That makes no sense to me. I have described at great length the tax avoidance going on in this country. I described that some of the highest income earners get to pay 15 percent carried interest. They get to pay some of the lowest tax rates, and that is not enough. Some of them are running them through tax haven countries and are playing deferred compensation games in order to avoid paying anything. They want all that America has to offer except responsibility to pay their taxes. That is true with some very large American corporations as well. The company that was drilling out in the gulf--the licensed company drilling for BP--Transocean had, I believe, 1,200 employees in Houston, TX, and 12 employees in Switzerland. What was the deal there? Well, they moved their home office to Switzerland, despite the fact that they just had a dozen employees there and they had 1,200 in Houston. Why did they do that? To avoid paying taxes, I assume. There is a to-do list. Maybe we can shut down some of these schemes. How about an estate tax for estates worth billions of dollars, or paying for the cost of war as our soldiers are asked to go fight it? Cutting spending--some come out here and talk about cutting spending. I support that--in the right way. We have a lot of areas where Federal agencies can tighten their belts. By the way, it is one thing to talk about it, it is another thing to do it. Some years ago, when I came to the Congress, there was $46 million allocated to build a new Federal courthouse in Fargo, ND. I said I thought that was outrageous. Yes, it is in my State, but I thought it was outrageous. I cut it to $23 million--from $46 million to $23 million--in half--and the courthouse got built for $19 billion. That was in my State. I was critical of spending in my own State. I have come to the floor recently critical of what is being proposed to be spent on the small northern border ports of entry, which I think is an excessive amount of money. Yes, those are in my State as well. I think we all ought to take a hard look at Federal spending and look at where we can and should begin to make some cuts. Finally, when we talk about deficits--we talk a lot about budget deficits. But nobody talks much about the trade deficit. This morning there was a story: Trade deficit jumps to $42 billion, economists downgrade growth forecasts. I wrote a book about this several years ago. I described in that book, in great detail, what is happening: shipping jobs overseas, going in search of low-wage countries where they can move their production in order to produce and sell the product back in our country. All of that ratchets up this unbelievable deficit. We have had trade deficits in recent years, with $700 billion and $800 billion in merchandise trade deficits. The budget deficit is money that we are going to owe to ourselves. We cannot make that case with the trade deficit. We owe that to other countries, and we are going to repay that with a lower standard of living in our country someday. This is not just about deficits, it is about jobs. When we run these kinds of deficits and see plants and factories closing in this country--5 million factory workers have lost their jobs because we see this unbelievable drain of jobs leaving our country in search of lower wages elsewhere. We have to address this, and we have to address it in the right way. I will talk about that at some point, on another day. It is not rocket science to understand that debt is debt and deficits are deficits. We have to address these issues. Now, one other point on this economy. I was on a program the other day on CNBC. They said: What about this notion that because of what you are doing on promoting additional regulations on Wall Street and other issues, you are antibusiness--you Democrats in Congress and the Democratic administration are antibusiness? I have heard a couple of CEOs say that. I said: You know, it is byzantine to me. If you want to run a big company in this country and do business here and look at something that is antibusiness, look at Wall Street and see what they did. See the cesspool of greed they created with a bubble of speculation that was unprecedented in the history of this country--selling and [[Page 12993]] buying things that had no value, wagering rather than investing, using exotic instruments such as credit default swaps and much more, and planting loans out there for homeowners who could not repay them-- giving a $780,000 home loan to somebody making $18,000 a year, creating liars loans, saying: Come and get a loan from us, and you don't have to disclose your income. It is called a no-doc loan. Come and get a loan from us, and you don't have to disclose your income or pay any principal the first year--or come and get a loan from us, but don't tell us your income, don't pay any principal the first year, or any interest, and we will make the first 12 payments for you. Then what would they do, Countrywide mortgage? They would take these loans, pay big bonuses to the people who put the loans out there--the brokers--and wrap them into securities and sell the securities up to hedge funds, investment banks, and they were all making massive profits. Then we had others who would look at these securities and make credit default swaps--wagers on whether these bonds would be good. What was going on in this country is unbelievable. The whole thing was a house of cards, and it came collapsing down. Now we decide we are going to put regulations in place to say: You cannot do that anymore. You damn near ruined this country's economy, and we won't let you do it anymore. One of the top manufacturing CEOs in this country said it is antibusiness--the administration is antibusiness. It is not antibusiness to put into place effective, tough regulations to say: Do business the right way. If you do what you have been doing, we are going to put handcuffs on you because it almost ruined this country's economy. It is not antibusiness to insist that business be done in the right way, when in the basement of the SEC four companies came in to get the SEC, in the last decade, to change the rules so they could go from 12 times leverage to 30 times leverage, and they did it with almost no notice from everybody, with all these handshakes that go on. When that goes on and regulators say: You know what. Don't worry. It is going to be a new business-friendly place. We won't look. Do what you want. We don't care--when that all happened and it caused the near collapse of the American economy and our way of life, we have a right, it seems to me, without being called antibusiness, to say there needs to be effective regulators and regulations to make sure this doesn't happen again. Fifteen years ago, I wrote the lead story for the Washington Monthly magazine, and the title was ``Very Risky Business.'' That was the lead story in the Washington Monthly magazine that I wrote 16 years ago. What was it about? It was about banks in America trading derivatives on their own proprietary accounts. I said then that we just as well put a blackjack table in their lobby. That is just gambling. We ought not allow it. We know who is going to pick up the bill--the American taxpayer. It was 11 years ago on the floor of this Senate that I stood up and opposed repealing the laws from the Great Depression--Glass-Steagall and others--that were put in place to protect our country, that separated banking from securities and prohibited certain practices that led to the Great Depression. Then, all of a sudden, it is time to modernize; that is old-fashioned. The proposal to repeal those laws went through here like a hot knife through butter. Eight of us voted no--eight of us. I stood on the floor of the Senate and said: I think within a decade we are going to see massive taxpayer bailouts. I did not have a crystal ball; I just felt this was an unbelievable mistake. The fact is, we have a right and a responsibility to put together effective regulatory mechanisms that will prevent this from happening again. I understand there are interests out there that will howl so loud, you will hear them coast to coast. It does not matter. This is about what is best for the American people, what is best for this country's economy to expand and create jobs once again. The to-do list, as I indicated, is fairly lengthy. I have not touched a number of issues. The most important point, obviously, is to find a way to create new jobs. As I indicated, it is like a bathtub where you have a faucet and a drain. The faucet is, we need to try to create conditions in which new jobs will be created. How do we do that? We give people confidence about the future. It is hard to have confidence when you take a look at the economic circumstances of this country right now. If people are confident, they do things that manifest that confidence and the economy expands. That is our responsibility to do. Even as we try to provide more confidence, that means tackling tough issues that will give people a feeling that they can expect a better future, can make investments, can hire people. That is part of the faucet--to put new jobs into this economy. We also need to plug the drain. Every single day, we have jobs leaving for China and elsewhere in search of cheap labor. I have spoken about that many times as well. As I said, I have written a book about that. We need to work on all of those issues, and jobs has to be issue No. 1. It is the most important issue. It makes everything else possible for the American people. Right now, as I speak, there are millions and millions of people who are out of work. Million Americans have lost their jobs just in the manufacturing area in the last 8 years. We are short somewhere perhaps in the neighborhood of 18 to 20 million jobs in this country. We have to get the engine moving again. We have to get opportunities to expand jobs all across this country. There is a lot to do to make that happen. ____________________