we are going to use those numbers that have the greatest credibility and then once we have an agreement on numbers that we can leave out the options and make the tough decisions. >> if i asked you, each of you right now to tell the american people how donner the situation is in your opinion. >> the american people know something is terribly wrong. you can call on anybody from monuments to chapel hill to dubuque and say hey what's wrong with our country and that is why these organizations sprang out, the tea party and these other things, the hostility. sprick but there are no new tax organizations. tater don't touch my social security organizations. sprick but they know something is desperately wrong in america. that is the key. and as long as they do that is what we are trying to tell

people something is terribly wrong with this country, dysfunctional congress in that sense. weeper taught and trained by handlers to bring home the bacon. and now the pay is dead. [laughter] and the candy store is closed. >> he does the math. [laughter] if we can build the trust in this whole commission the two of us have we are going to get to the promised land. here is what i feel it could tell the students at chapel hill and the immediately get it and this is a fact, this is in the forecast, this is where we are today. if you take the revenue of the country today this year and put it against mant trey expenditures which are principally the and on its medicare and medicaid and social security they equal each other. what does that mean?

every dollar that we spend on education, infrastructure, transportation, homeland defense, every single dollar is borrowed and half of it is borrowed from foreign countries. now just stop and think about that. all of my friends who say all we ought to be talking that is jobs, jobs, jobs. i can tell you one thing having been a small business by you can't create jobs without what? cutdowns. there won't be, it will be crowded out. you talk to the people who think we live in a knowledge based global economy we better invest in education and in training and infrastructure and innovation if we are going to be competitive there won't be any money for it. we have got to take these big steps and the biggest of all half of that money is borrowed from foreign countries. somebody said what is -- what if

the chinese quit buying our debt? what if they start to somewhat? mike ghosh, the prices we are going to face is tremendous. greece and portugal just went through it. >> spain is coming up. >> what about the baby boom wave coming into social security and medicare, that has to be a tsunami that is we do it. >> that is basically and you can't solve the problem through increased taxes no matter what else you look at today. you have to go back to the gdp and guys like me that our aging into the problem that have all of these issues to be dealt with. >> senator simpson, you were on a commission in the 1990's with entitlements commission and apparently everybody on the commission absolutely understood even then how donner the entitlement situation was and yet nothing came of it.

it collapsed. so my question is what did you learn from that experience where it was a failure and it informs you for this one? >> when the economy is like roses, wine and roses and everybody is consuming everything they can and body everything they can that they ate more everything. these are different days and there was a great group and we did a lot of fact and in fact leave a game where it's called like what the mall is of we can cut spending. well what to cut? did you give them this little game and nobody wanted to do any of their stuff. but there was a good record of it. i've been on commissions before, they have it all field caruthers immigration, select commission on immigration we did to bills we couldn't get them more secure identifier because the right and the law said this is a national

i.d. on the iraq study group we had the degree on every word. they've adopted about 57 of those out of the 79 by now. so there's more than skepticism in the city which was here when i was here and now it's cynicism to guice will fail. all of the drinks are on me. i will go home. [laughter] spirit what happens, erskine come if you go through the exercise it's all public, we all watch it and you end up deadlocked. both sides have a veto out of the team. what then happens? >> in my opinion that won't be a victory but we will have made progress just like pete and michael are making here. if we can educate the american people s to with this problem is and we can get pushed from him on the elected officials

directly face up to these problems and i can tell you every crews restore right given to the especially when i am with this guy because everybody knows him, it is amazing. people come up everywhere and say please take this long, please do something about it, please do something for your grandkids. i've got seven and alan has six. and leslie, even if you think back to earlier in 1997 when president clinton asked me to lead the negotiations to balance the budget there was not a person in the press who didn't think it was a joke. there was little support in the congress and i must have spent months locked up in conference rooms with speaker gingrich and you owe me a lot for that i'm telling you. [laughter] but seriously it was great. and i didn't leave those meetings nor did they and we talked about the politics or the

discussions we had. we stayed at it and build up trust in each other and got to a solution the did balance the budget. that is what we have got to do again. >> i don't want to put words in your mouth. i assume you are both optimistic about this. but on day one which was yesterday of the first meeting a republican group held a big news conference and said that you had a trojan horse for the tax commission and said we need to raise spending on infrastructure and education something you alluded to. so both sides are shut off of their cannons. and you're going to go inside and have to already deal with something that is they've put on the table. >> went averitt your skin off it

grows back double strength. i've been called everything. i've been called pro-choice and baby killer, not a very pleasant thing. i worked hard on the gay and lesbian community so i get called a lot of stuff. never let them be store who you are never let them destroy who you are and that is and who we are. that tax, what the hell, if you do the vat tax you've got to do some adjustments for the income tax who think you are stopping them on top of the income tax. all those people won't have anything when it's all sucked up if people don't understand that we will do the best we can to let them know everything that you know will not be there. how's that for an answer? everything you deeply loved and you put your shirt and your heartfelt, everything there and government, the children, it isn't going to be there.

there won't be automatic pilot. >> how do you get the public to really accept the idea that everybody is going to have to make a sacrifice. how do you get the american people into that mind because they are not there now. >> we have to convince in my opinion that the problem is real. we have to convince them that paul rye and was 100% right and in eastern was 100% right that this is the most predictable economic crisis in the nation's history and if we don't do something about it we are going to be a second-rate power before you know it to the estimate is pretty tough. >> somebody said we will do something with the money supply and do this. we made the fault, then instead of america the beautiful and a powerful we become a second-rate

we will not expire we will just become a second-rate. >> on that note we wish you the best of luck. >> yeah, sure. thank you. [laughter] [applause] ♪ we heard from chris dodd and richard shelby of the banking committee as well as senator blanche lincoln and saxby chambliss of the agricultural committee. while the democrats aligned the measures the republicans address their concerns including derivatives regulation and consumer protection the debate with a message for those who've seen the acrimony in the

chamber over the past couple of weeks and include that this senate is enough to getting the job done on a piece of legislation on this importance and of this size and i will be the first to admit sometimes we become discouraged and disappointed with each other. it's the nature i suppose of the legislative body where you have as different views and strongly held views as we have. i myself was frustrated of course by how long it took to bring the bill up to the floor and others are frustrated by what they see in the bill. all of this can have a rationale so while we can express our frustrations. but the thing that gets to this point is to be about to get to the finish line on this important legislation as well. and that is the trust that we have each committee to getting the job done. senator shelby and i both pointed out this evening we worked closely together over 37 months by chaired the banking committee. we brought 42 measures out of the committee 37 of which have become the law of the land and why we don't agree on this bill

or at the stall of it, the confidence this legislation can become law as well. if we work together and try to achieve common ground even if it wouldn't be exactly what we would write if we were writing it on our own is what i think our colleagues in the country expect of us. simply put mr. president we've no other choice but to do so. the status quo as we all know is unacceptable. we cannot leave the american people vulnerable to the president's construct of the financial regulatory system. the american people have paid too high a price for the failure of the system to stop wall street greed and reckless underlining of the stability of the economy. we've heard over and over again the last number of weeks the eight and a half million jobs lost. the 7 million homes that have been lost to foreclosure or are in for closure. trillions of dollars some say even come some say 13, some say higher $3 trillion in loss of household wealth in the last 18 months. home values again the numbers i think everyone agrees on about a

30% decline in home values across the nation. some states say the numbers are much higher. we see the decline and with farm and income like 20% as well across the nation. now all of this wasn't caused by one particular event or set of circumstances. there was a variety of circumstances the combination and expansion of which brought us to the brink of financial collapse and disaster so i described the legislation first at the too big to fail. senator shelby and i have been working on that and have a long discussion agreeing on principles of what need to be done and my hope is the first part of next week the staff will work over the weekend to take the principles on which we have reached some agreement and then do a delicate job of writing the language that reflects the principles and ideas and i want to thank him and his staff as well as my own for the work they've engaged in those conversations to try to get to the point where we've reached the level of comfort that we

have done we said we are going to do and that is in the two big to fail. no longer would be that implicit understanding the federal government is a major financial institution tries to feel that somehow it is when to be propped up by the taxpayer dollars. colleagues in california barbara boxer before already the language of her mind that has once again will add i think the voice to this effort to say that when the loss occurs to detail will never opposed the american taxpayer to writing a check to undermine the cost and i would presume there may be others who have ideas on how best to nail this down and we welcome those ideas and again, senator shelby and i will work on the amendment we intend to offer the first part of next week as we reflect the values as well and i think him and his staff for the time we've already spent mr. president. i cannot count the hours that we've spent talking about these ideas and how to achieve them. obviously we want to involve the treasury department and others

on their advice and counsel because they'll be asked to implement a lot of what we talked about so we will be busy over the coming two or three days on those issues. senator boxer and her idea and again i discussed it with senator shelby already and without committing any one tall that seems to be at least in this juncture a good response or reaction to what she intends to do. so too big to fail has been a subject major conversation and we all agree what we want to achieve and the question is do we do this and my confidence is we can. i would like us to become a positive note as well there will be times during this debate we will be at very different sides. there's nothing wrong with that at all but i would think would be be better to be a process you can agree on things and setting out at least your ability to come to some common understanding. too big to fail is an area where again there is no disagreement in my view what you're trying to

achieve the degree starting point and i hope we can do that in the coming two days. we put in an early warning system and i talked about this. this hasn't been a subject of a lot of debate i think we all agree to have the ability to sort of watch and monitor what is occurring domestically and internationally i think it's very important that we establish what we call systemic risk of council that would allow us to observe what is occurring on a regular basis by the way so that we can spot problems before they metastasize and grow into the problems that create as much harm for the economy as the present recession has. and again i won't go into the details of it but i think there is a general agreement this makes a lot of sense. third we bring derivatives out of the shadows into the sunlight before the wall street accountable again for action and i don't sense a lot of disagreement and not what we are trying to achieve. there is some disagreement about how this has the support but again i am hopeful over the

coming weeks that we can resolve those differences as we deal with these exotic instruments. but clearly getting more transparency we think it would be a great asset as well. and finally we've put cops on the beach with consumer protection of americans to make decisions based on full information when they're planning for their financial futures. again, it is a general agreement that having a consumer protection agency and your division makes sense. there is disagreement on with the power of the agency will be and where should operate and what can be working and again we've to work on that to see if we can reach common ground and if not on whether or not you are for or against the additions and subtractions and what it can do and what jurisdiction, over which jurisdiction has authority. these are the principles again there isn't much disagreement about what we are trying to achieve there will be certain areas how best to do it. there remains the disagreements about how they're actually going

to accomplish these goals. i said before we agree to move forward on this bill and i will allow each member in the chamber to offer his or her suggestions to vote up or down on ideas. i would like to see this occur mr. president. this is like taking on a large issue that this institution has been damaged over the last number of years and i think it amounts to this. senator john connally by engaged in a colloquy the other day on not a planned one at all which i think the issue of trust has been people are concerned about and i think we need to restore that if we can. i think it is incumbent we try to at least understand each other's motives and not question them and then deal effectively with ideas as they come up so my hope is not only will we end up with a good bill at the end of all of this but we could also in the preparing some of the tensions and stress that have existed in our legislative body. this legislative body. when i said i want members to be

put to offer their amendments to be able to debate those amendments and have votes i mean it and i know that my colleague shares that view as well. the people with limited time withdraw filibusters' occurring the people to have adequate time to respect their ideas and then have a vote on those ideas i mentioned last evening the amendment proposed by senator boxer. i discussed that already and others will have amendments to come next week as well. i can't promise the final result will be a bill 100 senators will feel they can support. by understand that but my goal is to get the post dee dee to this most effective legislation we can and the belief is we can make that happen by acting like united states senators listening to each other and insuring the debate is settled and a dispassionate as factual as fierce. para three's we didn't ask for the job of saving the financial system from the inefficiencies but that is our job today. that is what we have been asked to do and why is the greatest

confidence in my colleagues that we can get that job done. i look forward again to working with my colleague and friend senator shall be moving forward as well as the leadership and others to achieve the desired results we have on this bill and withhat, mr. president, i would yield to my colleaguerom alabama. >> mr. president? >> the senator from alabama is recognized. >> before proceeding to my remarks on the bill, i want to thank senter mcconnell for his leadership and the also the members of the banking committee on both sides for their hard work and dedication that brought us this far. also i want to thank my colleague and the chairman, my friend senator chris dodd. over the years as he said we'd work together on a number of bills and quite often found the way to compromise to work for work on some very difficult and complex issues. unfortunately, this far

compromise has eluded us on this particular piece of legislation. it leads some of it. throughout our discussions, mr. president, we shared roughly the same goals. where we have deferred however is how to achieve those goals. michael during the consideration of this legislation will be to reshape this bill so that it actually ends bailouts, protect consumers without jeopardize in our small community banks and brings transparency as senator dodd mentioned to the world of derivatives without sacrificing economic growth and job creation with which we desperately need in this country. i, mr. president, along with many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, democrats and republicans will seek to remove dozens of provisions that on necessarily expand the reach of the federal government and private affairs of americans and

potentially endanger our civil liberties. as always on will try to focus on policy and not politics. unfortunately, over the last several days that the date is become tainted by accusations and misrepresentations. this is nothing new. the process has already become overly political with allegations republicans are blindly following the advice of the pollsters political memo. mr. president, i would like to say for the record here that i voted against the chrysler bailout of 1979i believe it was when this particular pollster they are talking about was still so i have a long record of fighting against bailouts and trying to protect the taxpayer. i also, mr. president, advance the peace of legislation that would rein in fannie mae and freddie mac years ago. but that was supposed

unanimously by the democrats in the banking committee. i was the only senator criticizing the fcc lack of supervision of the nation's largest investment banks while some of my democratic colleagues including some senator obama were endorsing that. mr. president also oppose the position of a basil ii capital courts that would have left the banks in far worse shape than if they were in the crisis hit. i was questioned and regulators, mr. president, about a growing housing boy and the stability of the housing market years before the collapse. mr. president, as the chairman of the banking committee before senator dodd, i offered my get past with the help of the senators the only attempt to address the lack of competition in the credit rating industry once again over a lot of opposition. finally, mr. president, when the

congress repealed and restrictions put in place by glass-steagall i was the only one of the republican committee to vote no. if they wish to discuss my record i am standing here on the floor right now. mr. president, before i can consider supporting it. i think that we should begin by listening to the people who will be negatively affected by this bill if it were to become law. if a small-business owner from my home town in alabama tells me he fears and out of control consumer regulator i listen to the defense or the honest from mobile alabama fuehrer's regulatory burdens because she offers an installment payments on a listen. if the makers of the mars candy bars fears cost increases from this legislation that will

threaten american jobs and prices, on a listen. mr. president, there's of years we should be listening to as well. for example large financial firms like goldman sachs and citigroup are in favor of this bill. why is that? the answer is as now written, the note that the bill will bring them and wall street firms like them under the federal safety net where they will get preferential treatment just like goldman sachs got in the aig bailout. yes, mr. president, the bill as written would guarantee that goldman sachs could again be saved 100 cents on the dollar if the debt goes bad. that is a huge benefit for the wall street firms at the expense of others, namely the taxpayers. the resolution of already established by this bill at the moment would ensure that the politically influential investors in the firm's, such as

foreign government, sovereign of all funds would get special taxpayer bailout not available to the creditors of small financial companies. this would give the firms a permanent funding advantage over smaller competitors on the main street. macmillan stake, mr. president, this bill will help the big banks get bigger as is written today and further tilt the competitive playing field against small and less politically connected firms. mr. president, the legislation we are about to consider will help the likes of goldman sachs part of the american people. it would lead to job losses, lost opportunities for business to invest in the future and it would ensure future bailouts with senator dodd and i both want to prevent. chairman dodd has assured me, as your president, he would address a number of concerns i have expressed with respect to bailouts.

we talked about this at length. i appreciate his insurance taking him at his word but i am concerned there appears to be no changes in the relevant sections of the bill that would reflect such assurances yet. therefore it is the conclusion of my remarks picking up on what you talked about earlier i would like to hear how the chairman intends to address the following the removal of the $50 million bailout fund some people call the honeypot, not allowing the government to take creditors and shareholders of the stair to field firm or than they would be entitled to. modeling the fdic to prop up the failing firms with the government debt guarantees, meaning the taxpayer. not allowing, mr. president, the federal to land on bad collateral. honing the fdic accountable if it fails to properly conduct resolution that uses the

resolution of a ready to provide bailouts and not allowing the government to be in any nonbank financial company systemically important and worthy of taxpayer funds at the fed discount lender. mr. president, as many of my colleagues are beginning to realize it doesn't matter what we say. what matters is what is in the bill language. and the language in this bill right now would allow for bailouts. i urge my colleagues to read the language carefully. i've been assured, however, the about provisions would be addressed the they have not been addressed yet in the german's substitute language. we need to see language from the majority that clearly addresses the issues i've set forth. my hope is by tuesday this can be resolved quickly with both of us offering a joint amendment. nonetheless we are left with a bill this afternoon that will create massive intrusive new

government bureaucracies, damage job creation, reduce private investment in productive projects, make risk-management more difficult and threaten the economy. this bill that is before us now establishes overarching bureaucracy without any meaningful protection for the financial privacy rights. also, the bureaucracies have been designed to address many issues that have little, mr. president, or no bearing on the recent crisis of any financial crash. it is a power grab that can reach into virtually every aspect of the economy and it needs to be restrained. mr. president, i wonder how many crisis will be prevented from the data collections from banks about deposit accounts of customers to identify community development opportunities has found in section 1071 of this bill. small businesses across the country fear