senate. then i was part of the gang of six, the group of six, my mother would prefer to call it, because she told me never to join a ga gang. but we spent over a period of at least 60 days, a lot of time and effort from morning until night trying to get a health care bill that would work for america. one of the things we discovered is that it is very extensive. nobody can comprehend how big health care is in america. we talk about it being 16% of the whole economy. does that register with you? we talked about the trillions that are involved. i don't understand trillions. we spend billions around here, but trillions is a whole nother level. i don't think the kids even understand. and when we kay $1 trillion," people say, that's just one.

well, it's $ its it's 1,000 bil. it's a lot of money. when we were doing this in this gang of six, what we did was divide the issues up into 13 different parts, and called them steps. we started working through them. sometimes we'd have to leave one because we had basic questions that we needed to ask about those sections so we'd have a big enough understanding to be able to draft legislation for it. basic questions. basic questions. now, we only made it through slightly more than half 1369 areas before we were faced with a phony deadline. they said september 15 is the drop-dead date for this and if you don't have anything we're going to put something together anyway. if you're still getting basic questions answered, don't you think you ought to work on it

longer? one of the groups we were working with was the governors. we were going to have a vast expansion of medicaid, not quite as vast as what's in here and not quite as vast as what i've heard in this new bill that we've never gotten to see at all, even though we're quite a ways into this discussion, but a vast expansion of medicaid. and medicaid works through the states, and the states have to pick up part of the cost. actually, a lot of the cost. and as we've expanded medicaid and expanded the roles on medicaid, we've put a greater burden otoknoll on the federal government but also on the state governments and the state governments don't get to vote on it at all. and the senator from tennessee, senator alexander, who used to be a college president and was the secretary of education, has pointed out a number of times that when governors are faced with this budget crunch on

medicaid, what do they do? virtually the only place they can cut is universities. and colleges. and that's why there's been this dramatic increase in college tuition, because what medicaid has done to the states. well now we're talking about another drastic increase in the number of people in medicaid. so we thought, you know, it would be a good idea if we got the governors on the phone. actually, we hoped that the governors' task force on medicaid would come and meet with us, and i think they might of, but we were trying to push this into a short period of time, so we did conference calls. and it was kind of fascinating. one of the thifntion they wanted to know is how it was going to affect their state. now, we knew that -- how many billions it was going to cost as a whole for those states, but we didn't have a breakdown individually. c.b.o., the congressional budget office, and the joint tax commission don't do breakdowns

by states. but we had some people on staff that -- on the democratic staff that thought that they could break that down, and they did. and so they presented us with these numbers, and i immediately called my governor and said, whoa, i know this is going to be a problem, you know, and i'll see what i can do about it, but it's a lot of money. and of course i' if i'm talking about how much money for wyoming as opposed to new york, it wouldn't sound like a lot. another surprising thing that happened to it is it looked like nevada and new york were going to be hit real hard. and the next day we got numbers, and -- now we had the same c.b.o.-joint tax score. that didn't change. didn't change a bit. one set of numbers. but the evaluation the next day look add lot better for nevada and new york, but it didn't bring it down enough, so there was a special provision that's been put in the bill -- this

wasn't done in the gang of six; this was done after the bill was written -- a special provision that made it much nicer for nevada and new york. we said, wait a minute. why are you doing that for nevada and new york? and some of the influential people around here from nevada and new york said, well, this economy is in a real downturn and we're being hit harder than anybody else. and i said, well, that's -- that's a nice gesture, but this bill -- this part of this bill isn't going to go into effect for four years. how do we know that in four years nevada and new york are the ones that are going to be hard hit? we ought to have some provisions for whoever is hard hit. but those are the kinds of things that we were trying to -- trying to take care of in committee with inadequate numbers. understand a as we worked through -- the president wanted to do a speech to the nation, a joint speech to the nation, the joint -- we do those over in the house building.

the house and the senate show up for t and it was on health care. and following that health care meeting, the next morning we went to our gang of six meeting, and i had kept notes on what the president had said. and i had about 12 areas that we had tried to draft legislation on that he had pretty specific suggestions on. and i had to say, you know, this is something we didn't do. we didn't do this yet. and we talked about that for a whole day. immigration was one of the big ones, medical malpractice was another. that's been a huge concern to the medical community. so i've got several things that i need to say on this health care bill, but i -- i know we're talking in the 30 hours following the appropriations bill, and i have some things to say about the appropriations bill, too. i usually don't talk for very long down here, but i have some

of that pent-up passion from all of the calls and things that i've gotten sew and so i'm going it talk about -- and so i'm going to talk about both spending and health care. and i'll start with the spending because we just voted for a bill here that costs $487.8 billion and senators didn't have any ability to debate the critical issues within that bill. of the six bills, three -- finance services, labor,- h.s., and state foreign opposes -- were air-dropped into conference with no opportunity for debate on this floo floor. so we had no opportunity for consideration. now, the transportation bill, the h.u.d. bill, received a 23% increase over last year. the state foreign ops bill received a 33% increase over last year. collectively, the six appropriations bills account for a 12% increase in federal

spending over last year. our national deficit for the past fiscal year stands at $1.4 trillion. i don't see that going down at all. our current unemployment level is at 10%, despite the administration's insistence earlier in the year that congress pass a $1-plus trillion surplus package. the senate is in the middle of debate is on a health care bill that has a 10-year implementation cost of $2.5 trillion. sometime in the next month we'll be forced to raise the nation's debt ceiler for the second time this year to a level that exceeds the current ceiling of $12.1 trillion. the bill makes a number of significant policy changes with respect to the fairness doctrine. this omnibus does not include the fiscal year 2008 ban on

federal funds being used to enforce or implement the so-called fairness doctrine. the bill makes changes to several long-standing policy provisionsen contained in the financial services bill and specifically the district of columbia section dealing with abortion, medical marijuana, needle exchange, domestic partners, and the d.c. opportunity scholarships. the bill also contains 5,224 earmarks that total $3.8 billion. well, let me go into the definition of an earmark. according to the champion of it form years, senator mccain, it's not an earmark if you take a specific project to the committee of jurisdiction where they can debate it and decide whether that's a valid project and how it might fit in with other formulas and things that they're already working on. if the committee that actually works that issue approves it, it

is not an earmark. but, of course, it has to be put in the authorization process, not dropped in by airmail when the conference committee is meeting at the end of the bill. an earmark that is just sent to conference and nobody got to debate it here and vote on it here that's shoved into the bill is considered an earmark. so there are ways that special projects can be done and be approved by several votes. normally it would be the committee of authorization, then it would be the appropriations committee, and then it would be the floor of the united states senate, and tha same process would have already been done on the house of representatives side, because they have to start all the funding bills. so that's probably six votes, probably seven votes, on an item before it can actually get passed, if it goes through regular procedure. of course it's much easier if you've got somebody that'll champion it and just kind of

quietly slip it in at the end without any thing like a final voavment the final vote is what we're doing right now. it's on the whole package. you can't pick out a section sore an earmark and have a vote on that. and besides that, with 5,224 earmarks, that would take a long time. but it's $3.8 billion. and that's stale lot of money p it's been denigrated since we bent went into the trillion-dollar category. but $3.8 billion is still a lot of money. so how is this playing out around the country? i founded a blog that i -- i found a blog that i hadn't seen anymore and it kind of speaks a to what we're doing in appropriations right now. this is uglytruestudios.com and it begins, "don't tell me where your priorities are; show me where you spend your money and i'll it will you what they are."

that's bin james w.fric cnchts who is not the author of this. the author goes on to say, "i was mad when i decided to start this blog and podcast. i was mad about the current state of our congressional spending. i know -- i know a lot of folks are upset about the government and what they spend. my anger starts with the simple fact that they cannot complete the spending process. they haven't been able to complete the process, not even one time, since 1999." you can see that this is directed against both sides of the aisle. "folks, you're right to be mad about out-of-control spending of the federal government. but we all must start with a hard look at how the money is being spent before we can take an honest look at what it's being spent on. take, for instance, the topic of health care. you'll be hard-pressed to find a single soul in this country that doesn't think the system needs to be reevaluated. for the last eight-plus months, we've heard on the morning nurks the sunday talk shows from congressional leaders, the president of the united states and even concerned citizens

about the impending health care crisis. primetime television has been interrupted for presidential address. the president addressed a joint session of congress. he held town meetings. he held focus groups. he met with members of industry. congress itself has begged and pleaded for people to not get too exsided about their plans -- excited about their plans to work with them in putting reform in place. this was a crisis, a crisis that needed to be addressed immediate lymph the citizens of the united states of america needed to get behind the effort they were putting forth. the media was dominated with the urgency to get something done. television showed outraged americans at town hall meetings. congress exchanged ideas and both sides pointed the finger at other side trying to show that their side was most in tune with what our country needed. they were on top of this situation." "well, they have shofort been tending to the business of our nation's health care. the ugly truth is this: in their rush to be in the media

on the health care crisis, congress has not yet completed the labor, h.h.s., and education appropriation for the 2010 federal fiscal year. the house completed their version of the bill on july 27. the senate has not yet passed a version of this bill. the senate in all their talk about getting health care done has yet to even take the bill up on the floor for a vote." that part isn't true anymore because it has finally been taken up. it's supposed to be done october 1. but we're pretty tarred did i on this. "remind you, tomorrow night you'll probably have all your football game, familiar dinner or general aye et evening interrupted by the senate working through the weekend." that's where we are. "a vote of monumental importance during primetime television but not on the job they should have been doing. no, no. this is a vote on what they want to do. for simple reference sake, this is the equivalent of taking out a trillion-plus dollar loan, making commitments associated to the loan, and never sending a spend -- spending a second

asking yourself the follow questions: is this in the budget? can we afford it? have we even thought about what we're willing to spend on it? have we decided yet what we're spending on health care this year? health care was not a big enough problem this year for the united states senate to complete the normal course of business by appropriating the spending for fiscal year 2010. however, it apparently is big enough to deal to forward-spend a conservative average of about $85 billion a year. it's not a big enough deal to spend the $160 billion-plus this year that includes labor and education as well. and i'd ask unanimous consent to have the rest of it printed in the journal. the presiding officer: without objection, it will be so printed. mr. enzi: we are finally getting to the spending. we've been spending all year, but we're finally getting to some of these pieces. it still leaves the defense piece undone.

so we've been operating without the appropriation -- we've just been continuing last year's appropriations up to the current time. i have some things that i've gleaned from different places. i particularly want to thank the "wall street journal" for their articles and editorials that inform america. i think if i were picking one source of information, that's the one that i would pick. i read "the washington post," "the washington times," the "wall street journal," aeupbd get clips from -- and i get clips from every newspaper in wyoming. and i get a couple of those newspapers complete. so i read a lot of news, but from a national perspective and one that's actually paying attention to what we're doing here, my favorite is the "wall street journal." earlier in the week i quoted from a cost article that i had found in the "wall street journal," and i was chastised for using them as a source.

and then countered by a senator using wikepedia. you can go into wikepedia and you can do your own editing on that. i'm not sure that is a good source. i'd prefer to rely on the "wall street journal." there isn't any article or opinion that can't be quibbled with. that's just like the amendments we have here. but what i prefer to think is when an amendment or an article or a speech is given that we ought to be looking for the idea, the grain of truth, the juice of it that should be used, and we're not doing that right now. we're just doing amendments there and amendments here, and we're defeating the amendments here and it kind of bothers me that we have all these amendments from this side,

because, first of all, our amendments were voted down, all except two, when we went through the health, education, labor, and pensions committee process to get the bill out of committee. and when we went to the finance committee, the same thing happened. i think we had two amendments there that were taken as well over a whole week of amendments. but that bill, the two bills were taken to a closed door back here and were massaged into a new bill. some pieces of those two bills can be found there, but not all of it and not in the same form. but we had no input to that at all. no input at all. and now it's on the floor, and we have the chance to do amendments. well, i would contend that the democrats are filibustering their own bill, because every time we put up an amendment, they put up an amendment. now if you wrote the bill, the

bill ought to be good enough that you don't have to keep countering your own bill. we didn't get to write the bill, so we ought to be able to make some, at least some points about what ought to be changed by using our amendments. and last week one of the most fascinating things around here that i've seen, there was a democrat amendment, and then a democrat side-by-side to it. normally we get to present the side-by-sides. and they're arguing within themselves. it's on a very important issue. but, getting back to the spending, i would mention that since taking office, mr. obama pushed through a $787 billion stimulus bill. i would mention that hardly any of that money has actually gone out. i would guess 25% of it is is

all. there's health i.t. in there, that's 47 billion. that's not going to go out for four years. i don't know how you put something in a stimulus bill where you're trying to get something done immediately and not release the money in four years. granted there's work that needs to be done in that four years in order to make the money worth anything at all. $780 billion stimulus bill that wasn't anticipated to go into effect right await a minute $33 billion expansion of schip, a $410 billion omnibus appropriation spending bill and $80 billion car company bailout. we also -- the president also pushed an $821 billion cap-and-trade bill through the house and is now urging congress to pass a nearly $1 trillion health care bill. the administration says it's now instructing agencies to either freeze pending or propose 5%

cuts in their budget for next year. this won't add up to much unless agencies use the budget they had before the stimulus inflated their spending on their baseline in calculating their cuts. that's why we're talking about this bill right now, this mini bus or omnibus that's pretty ominous with all of the spending in it, with every one of those bills have a huge ing in -- having a huge increase over a year ago. that would get built into the baseline so that next year there can be another huge increase. they compound dramatically. now, if the education department uses its current stimulus-inflated budget of $141 billion instead of the $60 billion budgeted it had before the president moved into the white house, freezing its budget will do nothing to fix the fiscal mess that has been created.

now, as i mentioned, there's this little thing of second-degreing their own amendment, but the democrats are having a little problem on deciding on their message. on the one hand, the president said just this week that we have to -- quote -- "spend our way out of this recession." end quote. on the other, they keep telling us the deficit's too large and isn't sustainable. in this tug of political spin, watch what they spend, not what they say. that means watching this weekend's expected senate vote -- which we've had -- on the $440 billion omnibus spending bill to fund the government for 2010. the house passed a similar elephant earlier this week -- i don't know why they're referring to it that way -- while allowing

agency budgets to further spending from about 12% from 2009. that increase -- that increase, when inflation is negligible, is in addition to the $311 billion in stimulus already authorized or out the door for these programs. adding this new stash means that federal agencies will have received nearly 70% increase in the last two years. anybody gotten that kind of increases? that's not all. the president and congress also want to spend as much as $200 billion more from the troubled asset relief program, which is another sthrurbgs but it was done -- stimulus, but it was done as a series of loans. we were supposed to get the money back from that, but what they're talking about doing is taking the money from that and using it for some other programs. anything that came back is supposed to go to reduce the deficit. and lord knows, that's big enough. so, as i've mentioned, there are

224 earmarks in this, and that brings the total for the year to 10,000 or 23 for every congressional district. that's after a promise that the president wouldn't sign any bill that had earmarks. but he's already done that once. but hopefully he won't do it twice. been talking about jobs this week. i even got invited to the white house to talk to the president about jobs. of course the message that the senator from washington, patty murray, and i delivered to the president was we ought to get the workforce investment act done. that is a training program that would train 900,000 people a year to higher skill levels, to meet some of the skill levels we're missing in this country and we're having to export. what's been the status on this bill? we've been working on this for four years.

four years. this country didn't need jobs before. now we need jobs, so now maybe we're going to get something done on it. but she and i and senator kennedy have passed this bill through the senate twice unanimously, but the house has never taken it up. i don't know how we're going to get jobs done if something that is bipartisan, it passed the senate both times with everybody voting for it. you can't get more bipartisan than everybody voting for it. so when we're talking about bipartisan bills, that's really important. but, when we're talking about jobs, one of the things i mentioned at the white house was that two days before this meeting that i had, the e.p.a. had put out the notice of a new regulation where they're going to take care of greenhouse gas emissions. that would be co2 and seven

other chemicals. according to kimberly a.strassel, that's a high-stakes game of chicken that the white house is playing with congress over who will regulate the earth's climate. right now the copenhagen meetings are going on. the president's team just motored into a ditch. so much for threats. the threats the white house has been leveling at congress is the environmental protection agency's endangerment finding which e.p.a. administrator lisa jackson finally issued this week. the finding lays the groundwork for the e.p.a. to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across the entire economy on the grounds that global warming is hazardous to human health. from the start the obama team has wielded the e.p.a. action as a club, warning congress that it did not cop up with -- if it did not come up with cap-and-trade legislation, the e.p.a. would act on its own. and in a far more blunt fashion than congress preferred, now as

one anonymous administration official menaced again this week -- quote -- "if congress doesn't pass this legislation, the e.p.a. is going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty." the thing about threats, thoerbgs is that at some point -- though, is at some point you have to act on them. the e.p.a. has been sitting on this finding for months much to the agitation of the environmental groups that have been upping the pressure for action. president obama having failed to get climate legislation, didn't want to show up the cope hagan climate talks -- cop kagan climate talks with nothing. the e.p.a. exposed its own threat. far from alarm the feeling sweeping through many corridors of the democratic congress is relief. voters know cap-and-trade is washington's code for painful new energy taxes. with a recession on, the subject has become poisonous in

congressional districts. blue dogs and swing state senators watched in alarm as local democrats in virginia and new jersey elections were pounded on the issue and lost their seats. but now it's the administration's problem. no one can't say washington isn't doing something. the agency's move gave them further excuse not to act. the obama administration owns that political hot potato. why would i ever want to take it back? all the more so in congress's view, because the e.p.a.'s command-and-control threat may yet prove hollow. now that the endangerment finding has become reality, the litigation is also about to become real. green groups pioneered in the art of environmental lawsuits, it turns out the business community took careful notes, industry groups are gearing up for a legal onslaught and don't

underestimate their prospects. the leaked e-mails from the climate research unit in england are a gold mine for those who want to challenge the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming. but the e.p.a.'s legal vulnerabilities go beyond that. the agency derives its authority to regulate pollutants from the clean air act. to use the law to regulate greenhouse gases, the e.p.a. has to prove those gases are harmful to human health. that's the endangerment finding. one of those is co2, and i'm breathing that out right now. put another way, it must provide science showing a slightly warmer earth will cause america's injury or death. given the most climate scientists admit a warmer earth could provide net benefits to the west. that's a tall order. then there are the rules stemming from the finding. not wanting to take on the political nightmare of regulating every american lawn mower, the e.p.a. produced a tailoring rule that it says will allow it to focus solely on

greenhouse gas emitters. yet, the clean air act authored by congress clearly directs the e.p.a. to also regulate small emitters. this is where the green groups come in. the tailoring rule invites suits. that's from john barrasso, who is the other senator from wyoming, who has emerged as a top senate watch doug of e.p.a. -- watchdog of e.p.a. actions. he sees most of the lawsuits coming from environmental groups who want to force the e.p.a. to regulate everything. so the president will emerger from copien haggen with some sort after deal but his real problem is getting congress to act and his e.p.a. move may have just made the job harder. i thank him for those words. staying on the topic of jobs, the house democrats have been stepping on president obama's

applause lines about immigration. on tuesday, the president announced that we are proposing a complete elimination of capital gains taxes on small business investment for one year. responding with rare dissparchg the house voted yesterday -- actually, the day before yesterday now. some of these things are -- i wrote and had hoped that i would give before now -- the house voted yesterday to change the capital gains rate for venture capitalists who invest in start-ups. the house more than doubled the tax, move the tax rate to 35% from 15% by reclassifying such gains as "ordinary income." private equity fund managers and managers of real estate and oil and gas partnerships would also get socked with 133% tax increase. that's the way to encourage economic growth and jobs. and knowing how popular tax increases are with the unemployment at 10%, the house majority rushed the bill to the floor without a hearing, without

a committee vote, and then they buried it in a package advertised as an extension of tax cuts for research and development. that's how it will come over here. then of course there are some other problems in the united states with jobs. the projections that show unemployment in the construction will rise by 1.3 million. that will be outweighed by the continued drop in manufacturing and mining jobs. goods producing employment as a whole is expected to show no growth in total jobs according to the report. by 2018 that sector will account for 12.9% of the jobs down from 14.2% of the jobs. you know, in order to grow the economy, you either have to produce something or you have to sell something. so separately, the number of workers filing new jobless claims rose 17,000 to 474,000 last week, the labor department

said, which is ane an unwelcome change after five weeks of declines. of course, account something one of my favorite things. i am the accountant in the senate. and we've been doing some accounting on jobs that are saved. now, clear back at the very beginning of the administration when secretary geithner was appearing before the finance committee, i said, well, if the president says that he will create or save 3 million jobs, what's the definition of "save a job?" and after he explained a little bit on that i said, well, i think probably anybody who's employed, still employed, would meet that criteria. so why you don't say you're going to s.i.v. or create 108 million jobs -- you're going to save or create 180 million jobs? now we've had some measurements on jobs that were saved and this one particularly stuck with me. there is a report on the stimulus for a shoe store in kentucky. since i used to be in the shoe business as well, that kind of

stuck out. this is from the "washington examiner," a ticker on stimulus jobs created. and what they said was a shoe store owner claimed he created nine jobs on an $889 contract when in fact he supplied nine pairs of shoes to the army corps of engineers. a lot confidenting problems around here. -- a lot of accounting problems around here. talking about saving jobs without a good definition is only one of them. i'd say the government has taken over the banking industry, the car industry, trying to take over the health care industry, trying to take over the energy industry, none of which washington knows much about but one that hasn't had much said about it yet is student loans. and i'm not sure exactly when that's coming to this body.

but did i want to mention that the department of education right now is pressuring schools to move to a government-run student loan program in lieu of utilizing private lenders who are more efficient and have traditionally ofortsdz better customer service -- that's why people stay with them, better customer service, prices are the same. it is also important to note that the proposed student loan takeover, which is h.r. 3221, would cause private lenders to cut an estimated 35,000 jobs across the country. that's according to a survey by the federal family education loan program industry groups, with the unemployment rate lingering around 10%, it's nothing shofort amazing that presumably vulnerable politicians continue to advocate big government programs that will result in private-sector job loss. so we'll be saying more about that when it comes up. i'm not sure when it is going to

be coming up. but did i hear the secretary of education -- but i did hear the secretary of education say it would provide another $80 billion for them to work with. under the best of governmental accounting, it would be $40 billion, i believe, and even that is only because of the way that it's accounted for. another problem we've got right now is with taxes, with the estate tax, and that's one that won't die because the democrats are fraid to let the tax rate hit zero. for years we've had people saying that the estate tax is not fair, that in this country you get taxed when you earn money, you get taxed when you buy something, you get taxed when you use something, you get taxed when you sell something, but the tax that people are really upset about is the tax that you get after you're dead. and we've had -- we had a bill

that has already passed, the hated death tax is scheduled to expire with the rate falling fag from 45% to zero for 2010. then it will be restrusmed at 2011 at a rate of 5%. this -- at a rate of 5%. this policy goes back to 2001 when the democrats wouldn't let president bush permanently kill the death tax. the democrats bet if the tax were eliminated for one year, it would never come back. the house democrats recently voted to cancel that repeal and hold the rate permanently at 45% with a $3.5 million exemption. so now the majority leader wanted to do the same and would suspend the health care debate and turn to that estate tax. he would need 60 votes to do that. so -- and i think that's because all the republicans and many of the democrats are saying "no" to that.

blanche lincoln and jon kyl, arc, and arizona, have -- arkansas and arizona have placed some proposals out there. the correct way to tax a gain and the value of assets bequeathed to an heir with a tax of 15%. there ought to be some action that derives some revenue for t otherwise people out our way are having to sell off ranches prematurely in order to have the money to pay for the death tax when the founder of the family passes away. and a recent problem that we've had with that is that the land values are going up. i suppose they've stagnated at the moment, but it's hard to tell. these ranchers were putting money in, trying to do estate planning so that they could pay this with not having to sell off part of the farm, and we're doing a -- and were doing a pretty good job of that. they made some adjustments where we made adjustments and started giving them a a a decliefnlt

there's going to a lot more said on that yet. we've got this massive spending bill. this huge increase in spending. and i wanted to share with you some of the words of douglas holtzs eakin, who is the former director of the congressional budget office, who we talk about here regularly and point out as being a nonpartisan office. and he spoke recently at the senate committee on the budget, relatively recently. it was november 10. but this is kind of what he said. president barack obama took office promising to lead from the center and solve big problems. he has exerted enormous political energy, attempting to reform the nation's health care system, but the biggest economic problem facing the nation is not health care. it's the deficit. recently the white house signaled that it was getting serious about reducing the deficit this year after it locks in place the massive new tech

entitlements. this is a recipe for disaster, as it will create a new appetite for increased spending and yet another powerful interest group to oppose deficit reduction measures. our fiscal situation has deteriorated rapidly in the past few years. the federal government ran a 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion, the highest since world war ii, as spending reached nearly 25% of g.d.p. and total revenues fell below 15% of g.d.p. shortfalls like these have not been seen in more than 50 years. going forward, there's no relief in sight, spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be an enormous deficit every year. our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion ten years from now. moreover, $50,000 per american -- that's every man, woman, and child. by 2019, according to the congressional budget office, analysis of the president's

budget, the budget deficit will still be roughly $1 trillion, even though the economic situation will have improved and revenues will be above historical norms. the planned deficits will have destructive consequences for both fairness and economic growth. they will force upon our children and grandchildren the bill for our overconsumption. federal deficits will crowd out domestic investment and physical capital, human capital and technologies that increase potential g.d.p. and the standard of living. financing deficits could crowd out exports and harm our international competitiveness as we're already seeing happening with the large borrowing we have going from competitors like china. yes, the president went to china recently. secretary geithner has been to china. they were over there trying to visit the great wall. they weren't there trying to explain to china how we'd be able to pay off our bonds.

and last week it was said that the standard & poor's and moody's were taking a look at the united kingdom and the united states to see if there shouldn't be a downgrade in their rating. and so he says at what point some financial analysts asked rating agencies to downgrade the united states? when do lenders provides price additional risk to federal borrowing leadings to a damaging spike in interest rates? how quickly will international investors flee the dollar for a new reserve currency? and how will resulting higher interest rates, diminished dollar, higher inflation, and economic distress manifest itself? given the president's recent reception in china, friendly but fruitless, these answers may come sooner than any of us would like. the president and his advisors say they understand these concerns, but the administration's policy changes are the equivalent of steering the economy toward an iceberg. perhaps the most vivid example of send the wrong message to

international capital markets are the health care reform bills. one tha passed the house earlier this month and another in consideration in the senate. whatever their good intentions, they have too many flaws to be defenseful. first and foremost, neither bends the health cost curve downward. the c.b.o. found the house bill fails to reduce the pace of health care spend growth. an audit of the bill by richard fost he, the chief -- by richard foster, the chief actuary of c.m.s., a division of health and human services, and this is the chief actuary, found that the pace of national health care spending will increase 2.1% over ten years or about $750 billion. senate majority leader harry reid's bill grows just as fast as the house version. and yesterday -- the day before yesterday we got a new actuarial report that actually addressed the reid bill, as opposed to the house bill, and we talked about that fairly extensively.

i haven't seen any articles about it yet. but just one summary comment on it is that, according to this actuary of c.m.s., a part of the administration, said that the cost of health care under the reid bill will increase by .7%. that doesn't sound like much. but it is .7% more -- move -- than if we did nothing. that's not bending the cost curve down. mr. holtzs-eakin says each bill sets up a new entitlement program that grows at 8% annually, as far as the eye can see, faster than the economy will grow, faster than tax revenues will grow, and just as fast as the already-broken medicare and medicaid programs. they also create a second, new entitlement program, a federally run long-term care insurance

plan. the bills are fiscally dishonest using every budget gimmick in the book. leave out inconvenient spending, backload spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let inflation push up the revenues. promise cut tax cuts to doctors and hospitals that have no way of materializing and so on f there really are savings in medicare, these should be directed toward deficit reduction and preserving medicare. not to financing huge new entitlement programs, getting long-term budgets under control is hard enough today. the job will be nearly impossible with a slew of new entitlements in place. in short, any combination of what is moving through congress is economically dangerous and invites the rapid acceleration of a debt crisis. it's a dramatic statement to finance markets that the federal government does not understand that it must get its fiscal house in order. the time to worry about the

deficit is not next year, but now. there is no time to waste. again, mr. holtz is the former director of the congressional budget office and a fellow at the manhattan institute. and that's adapted from testimony that he gave at the senate committee on the budget on november 10. since at that time i've been talking about how we've maxed out our credit cards. this is something known kind of across the nation. i have to share something i get from all the papers in wyoming this comes from the level chronicle. that is a place probably about 120 miles from yellowstone park. that is how i describe our state in terms of yellowstone park. her name is diane badgett and she writes a column regularly. she begins by saying my dad used to play this silly game. we'd hear thump coming from the kitchen. one of us would ask dad what are you doing?

he would reply beating my head against the wall. at that time one of us would ask dutifully why? then we'd wait. "because it feels so good when i quick." has the bickering in washington sickened you to the point that you almost don't care what they do shropbg they shut up? be careful. they hope if we beat our heads against the wall long enough, we realize how much better we'd feel if we just quit. she goes on to talk about copenhagen, the plans for building safe, clean nuclear power plants to provide electricity evaporated when a secure place to store spent nuclear fuel ended. yet, this same administration has decried coal-fired plants as ecological disasters and large-scale wind and solar energy as too expensive to build yet. nothing has been done to utilize the vast resources of alaska. okay, if you can't use coal plants, can't afford wind or

sun, alaska doesn't exist, and nuclear options just got flushed, what should we do? i know, let's gather up half of the overzealous geniuses who supported the decision and put them on giant hamster wheels hooked to generators and then take the other half and utilize their hot air to turn the turbines, makes as much sense as anything in the cap-and-trade bill. she goes on to say my grandkids can't pray in school, but other kids are provided with prayer mats. so no wonder so many terrorists are found right here in our very country they've sworn to destroy. how many radicals are walking among us undetected? she talks about the 9/11 conspirators in our court system. says it is a travesty. these murderers have already pleaded guilty in the military tribunal. they're not entitled to our constitution to a trial. u.s. citizens are entitled to a trial before a jury of peers.

i hate to see how this is going to come out. she does move on to health care as well. are you confused yet? apparently congress is. the health care plan that the senate voted to send to the floor debate is a perfect example. one side says it will be deficit-neutral. will ensure competition, will not affect medicare and won't result in more tacks. the other side -- in more taxes. the other side says it will cost too much, slash medicare and tax us out of our underwear. barbara boxer touted medicare is a great example of how seniors are able to choose a public option. excuse me, when we turn 65 we're required to sign up for medicare. how is that optional? i think at this point both sides of the aisle are trying to sell us snake oil and somewhere in the middle is the truth. are you worried yet? your children and grandchildren are going to enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that we enjoyed? the future of my grandchildren should have been better than the life i had, and my life has been pretty doggone good.

instead future generations are going to be paying financially and personally for the mistakes being made right now by a president who presumes too much power in a system of checks and balances that no longer works. so, we've been talking about having a bipartisan bill here, and maybe that would end some of the contradiction and furor that we're talking about here. and i think that a lot of people must have missed the speech that olympia snowe made about durable social reform always being bipartisan. what a -- i want to share some comments on that. i know her speech wasn't noticed by the press corps. with harry reid's announcement of a double-secret bargain that democrats hope will squeeze obamacare through the senate after nine whole days of debate, so far in the world's greatest

deliberative body, the main republicans' words seem to be more pertinent than ever. mrs. snowe began by noting this year's health debate is -- quote -- "one of our most complex and intricate undertakings the senate has ever taken and she too has tkwoetd much of her political career to promoting cheaper, better-quality insurance. and she definitely has. but it must be done in an effective bipartisan way, she cautioned far from systematically working through the concerns, issues and teufrs. mrs. snowe added democrats have instead favored artificially generated haste and settled on this a strategy to ram it through congress. the senator details her good-faith participation in the group of six on the senate finance committee which met some 31 times over the spring and summer and reflected the kind of extensive, meticulous process that an issue of this magnitude requires. the negotiators tried to build a

consensus blending their best ideas or at least they did before the group of six and mrs. snowe became a liberal target for proposed obstructionism. chairman max baucus pushed unfinished work to the senate floor where mr. reid is pressing to pass a bill in a race against rising unpopularity and president obama's falling approval ratings. mr. reid made this case with his usual intellectual nuance this week -- quote -- "instead of joining us on the right side of history, all republicans can come up with is 'slow down, stop everything, let's start over.' if you think you've heard these excuses before, you're right. when the country recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough. equating opposition to medicare cuts, he related that to women's suffrage, social security and

medicare. he would have done better if he listened to mrs. snowe's comments about durable social reform needing to be bipartisan, because while social security passed when the democrats controlled both congress and the white house, she pointed out that 64% of the senate republicans and 79% of the house g.o.p. supported it. civil rights passed with 82% of republicans in the senate and 80% in the house. while 41% and 51% respectively voted for medicare. so, senator snowe could have added that the 1996 welfare reform that president clinton signed was the support of nearly all republicans in congress, 98 democratic represents and 25 democratic senators. policies that will affect more than 300 million people simply could not be decided by partisan one-vote margin strategy, senator snowe exclaimed and

congress should not be railroading solutions along party lines. her point about one vote pw-pship is -- bipartisanship is especially apt now that we're nearing the moment of senate truth. on the debate that we've had, one of the points of contention has been medicare. they talked about how good medicare is on that side of the aisle. we talked about how medicare is being harmed on this side of the aisle. i think what we're really giving people the impression is that when we pass the bill, all of it will be free. that won't happen. there were some contention that private insurance was less fair to people. medicare was always fair. so, i dug up some information on it, "investors business daily" has done a little bit of research in that area, and they found that throughout the health

care debate, insurance companies have been cast as greedy villains that gleefully deny medical claims, but when it comes to rejecting claims they can't hold a candle to government. they found that the most claims are the ones denied by medicare. not the private sector. so what's happened in the last couple of days? medicare has been so popular that the leader has said that he's going to include now a piece that will bring the age down to 55. we've been talking about how under the present circumstances, with the money that's being stolen from medicare, that it's going to go broke. and, the majority leader -- and evidently it is just the majority leader, because we asked to see a copy of it, and yesterday a little colloquy that

we had with the senator from illinois, senator durbin, he said that he hadn't seen it. so i think -- i know that they have been briefed on it probably in a general way the night before, but it was explained to us that if anybody knew what was actually in that, that then the c.b.o. score that comes out on that, how much it will cost would have to be shared with everybody. i thought we were in the new era of transparency. that doesn't sound very transparent to me. even the democrats didn't get to see it, because if they did, then all of us could see how much it's going to cost. as soon as the congressional budget office has declared that. that bothers me. i think that it kind of bothers america. what we're worried about is that it's going to come to the floor all of a sudden, and we're going to have to make decisions on it. it evidently is being talked about a little bit on the other end of the building because i saw speaker pelosi stop short of

endorsing the full senate compromise saying she needed to see something in writing, and there certainly is a lot of appeal in expanding medicare. but "the washington post" did a little editorial. this would have been on december 10. it called it medicare sausage. the emerging buy-in proposal could have costly unintended consequences. incidentally, our side has only seen what's in this based on what the media has heard. and i don't know what kind of briefings the media has had on what this particular proposal has. so, "the washington post" says the emerging buy-in proposal could have costly unintended consequences and begins by saying the only thing more unsettling than watching legislative sausage being made is watching it being made on the fly. the 11th hour compromise on health care reform and the public option supposedly includes an expansion of

medicare to let people ages 55 to 64 buy into the program. this is an idea dating to at least the clinton administration and senate finance committee chairman max baucus originally proposed allowing the buy-in as a temporary measure before the new insurance exchanges got underway. however, the last-minute introduction of this idea within the broader context of health reform raises numerous questions, not the least of which is whether this proposal is far more dramatic step toward a single-payer system than the lawmakers on either side realize. the details of how the buy-in would work are still sketchy and still being fleshed out, but the basic notion is that uninsured individuals 55 to 64 who would be eligible to participate in the newly created insurance exchanges could choose instead to purchase coverage through medicare. in theory, this would not add to medicare costs because the coverage would have to be paid for either out of pocket or with

the subsidies that would be provided to those at lower income levels to purchase insurance on the exchanges. the notion is that because medicare pays lower rates to health care providers, the new -- than do private insurers, the coverage would tend to cost less than a private plan. the complication is understanding what effect the buy-in option would have on the new insurance exchanges. and more important, the larger health care system. currently medicare benefits are less generous in significant ways than the plans to be offered on the exchanges. honey... the credit fairy... doesn't exist. what? it's make-believe. nobody left anything under your pillow. if there's no credit fairy then who will make our credit score go up? we will. by doing things like paying our bills on time. announcer: there's no magic to improving your credit.