Wednesday, July 28, 2010

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Floor Statement on Biennial Budgeting
Remarks as Delivered on the Senate Floor

Mr. President, we have been going through difficult economic times as a country, not only in our expenditures but in the revenues of our citizens of our States who face higher unemployment, lower productivity, and very difficult economic times.

As I have watched us on the floor time and again deal with paying for new amendments that have been proposed, we are all of a sudden scrambling to find a savings here to borrow from Peter to pay Paul to patch together an appropriations bill that hopefully keeps us out of debt but unfortunately continues to keep us in a downward spiral of borrowing.

I wish to talk today about legislation I have introduced and have been joined by other Members of the Senate, a bill that has a simple proposition to it, and that is that maybe as a government we should start doing what the people of our country have to do--determining how much we take in, prioritizing what we spend--and get back into balancing our budget, while providing oversight on what we spend to see where savings can come from.

There is a great American who has a syndicated radio show called Dave Ramsey. I don't know how many of my colleagues have ever heard him. He started Financial Peace University. He started it after he went bankrupt in the real estate business. He did a great job in real estate on the way up but leveraged himself all the way, so when times got tough and the leverage was too difficult, Dave Ramsey went bankrupt. After a couple years of struggling, he got himself back together and built himself a large company on the basis of a philosophy of staying out of debt and spending within your means. I commend everybody to look at his proposals, read his book, or attend Financial Peace. It is really an interesting concept because it works.

Dave Ramsey suggested that what you really ought to do when you get into economically difficult times and you owe more than you take in is sit down and say: All right, what do I make? And you write that down. You write down what you have to spend--utilities, food, whatever it might be--and then see what is left over. If nothing is left over, then you have to take the things you are spending on and don't have the money for and have been borrowing and begin to cut it piece after piece, so that each month and year you live on a budget that is not predicated on going into debt and living beyond your means.

We as a country must do the same. There may be an exception, obviously, for war. There may be an exception, obviously, if there is a significant terrorist attack or a tremendous international incident or a natural incident that takes place that might demand some short-term appropriations. But in the general expenditures of government, we have to get back to the business of spending within our means.

How do we do that? We have 12 individual appropriations bills or an omnibus bill that rolls in at the end of the year talking about spending $3.6 trillion. We cannot do it that way. We have to have a process where we are able to examine on what we are spending money, quantify how much money we are going to take in, and balance the two numbers so we do not go into debt.

My suggestion and what I want to talk about is a biennial budget or appropriations, a change in the way we do business and how we do it, which I believe will result in less debt, more reasonable spending, and a more rational expenditure by the U.S. Government. First of all, it is predicated on appropriating for 2 years rather than 1 year. The appropriations years should be the odd-numbered years, and the even-numbered years should be dedicated to oversight.

I know the distinguished Presiding Officer, as I do, sits on a number of committees. Every now and then, we will have an oversight meeting, but more often than not, oversight gets left out because the focus is on what we are going to spend next or what project is going to be added to what we spend our money on. That process itself builds more debt, builds a bigger appropriations act, and never allows us to do those things we should be doing; that is, focusing on prioritizing the expenditure of our money.

We all know, because from time to time we have found them, there are savings in the appropriations. We know that from time to time in oversight, we find dollars we did not realize we had. We need to make it a part of our culture in the Congress of the United States that when the even-numbered years come, two things ought to be happening: One, Congress ought to be doing oversight of its expenditures, and second is running for office. I would love to see a time when running for office is in a year when we are doing oversight so we are focusing more on what we are saving the American taxpayers than what we are going to spend to try to impress them to get their vote one more time.

We have a serious, difficult problem in our country. We have a debt of $13 trillion. I am going to be the first--not the first who ever said this. I am not going to let this speech end without saying it. I voted against appropriations bills under President Bush, and I voted against them under President Obama. I am not taking a target at anybody. We all have a responsibility, and it is time we focused on a way to start saving rather than continuing to spend.

I would like nothing better than that focus on savings to take place in the same election year where everybody is running to be reelected to come back and do the job. We would change the dynamics and paradigm of Congress toward a focus on savings rather than a focus on expenditures. Will it be difficult? Yes, but it is going to be a whole lot more difficult very soon. Our country owes $13 trillion today and is moving toward a number that could be as high as $19 trillion before the end of the next decade.

To put in perspective how much that is, I will tell a short story. I was in Albany, GA, making a speech at the end of last year, and I referred two or three times to $1 trillion.

At the end of the speech, this farmer raised his hand and said: Excuse me, Senator, can I ask a question?

I said: Sure.

He said: How much is 1 trillion?

I don't know if you ever thought about it, Mr. President, but when somebody asks you a question like that, you try to come up with a comparison to explain, and it is hard to do, and I had a difficult time. In fact, I fumbled around, and I am not sure I ever did a good job of quantifying how much 1 trillion really is.

I got home and talked with my wife. I said: I got stumped today, sweetheart.

She said: What happened?

I said: I was on the stump in Albany and was asked by a farmer to explain what 1 trillion was, and I couldn't quantify it. I didn't know a good comparison.

In her own inimitable way, she said: Why don't you figure out how many years have to go by for 1 trillion seconds to pass?

I thought, that is a great idea. I got a calculator out and multiplied 60 seconds times 60 minutes to get the number of seconds in an hour. I multiplied that times 24 to get the seconds in a day. I multiplied that by 365 to get the number of seconds in a year. And then I divided that product into 1 trillion.

Mr. President, do you know how many years have to go by for 1 trillion seconds to pass? It is 31,709 years. We owe $13 trillion. We are at a point where we are going to go one way or another. Fortunately, we are recognizing that we are at that point.

I submit one of the keys to stopping the growth of debt and improving the plight of our country in the future for our children and grandchildren is to begin spending within our means. And it takes a process such as a biennial budget or biennial appropriations where we combine the responsibility of spending with the absolute responsibility of oversight.

Everybody in America today during these difficult times is looking at where they spend their money, and they are trying to find savings. They are trying to find those places they can better allocate their money so they are not going into debt, not borrowing, and not raising the prospects of debt in the future. The American Government ought to be doing the same thing.

I voted for the supplemental for our troops in Afghanistan last week, and we will do it again. That is a special appropriation for our men and women, who deserve that backing at a time we commit them to war. We are not always at war. War is a special and difficult time, and we ought to give our troops the support they need. But in every other case, it ought to be an expenditure that is based on the priorities of what are the most important things we should be doing. When we find those things that do not meet that test through oversight, that is where we begin the cutting process. Over time, the process is motivated toward savings, motivated against borrowing, and motivated for a balanced budget. I submit that we can talk about it all day long, but until we put it in a framework that brings about that type of process, we will never really do it.

The biennial budget with appropriations in odd-numbered years and oversight in even-numbered years ensures we begin in an election year being accountable to the electorate on what we are spending. And in those off years when we are appropriating, we are doing it based on the previous year's oversight, so we know the effectiveness of the department we are appropriating the money for and whether it was prioritized appropriately the way it should have been.

At a time when we are focusing on spending money, focusing on an appropriations act which will come up this November after the elections, I think we can look this year at going to a biennial budget process in future years so that instead of rolling everything into an omnibus bill after the elections, we have a process that ensures it is done systematically, as it should be, in odd-numbered years for appropriations and in even-numbered years we are doing oversight, so our election is based on accountability of spending money, not how much we can borrow and how much we can spend.