you kill reimportation, which would lower prices on us and hurt our profit margin. and the white house said, absolutely we agree. senator obama was full-bore for reimportation. candidate obama campaigned on the issue and was very strong and vocal about it. president obama cut the back-room deal and killed it. senators who are still fighting for lower prescription drug costs here in the senate are, quite frankly, still reeling from the setback, still trying to deal with it. but i believe we ultimately will deal with it and will recover from this major setback when the american people fully realize what went on. the corrupt, i would say, bac backroom deal that was cut between the white house and bigg

pharma and how seniors and other americans are paying the price. mr. president, obamacare passed and prescription drug prices continue to be sky high. they continue to hurt tens of millions of americans, particularly those on a fixed income like seniors. and we continue to need a solution to that very real problem. that's why i'll continue to fight, mr. president. i'll it into fight for any measure that makes sense to lower prescription drug prices: generics reform, other streamlining and, yes, reimportation, to level the playing field, to get a world price on the drugs we use and not force a higher price on americans. american seniors need that relief. i wish the obama white house

understood that and acted upon that. i wish president obama kept his word that he made as a senator and as a presidential candidate, but i'll continue to keep my word on the issue and to build that support for strong, effective reimportation legislation. thank you, mr. president. i yield the floor. mrs. gillibrand: mr. president in. the presiding officer: the senator from new york. jilmrs. gillibrand: i rise today to honor raoulalenberg with the nation's highest civilian award. i urge my colleagues to support conferring mr. wahlenberg with this honor. we already have 71 of my colleagues already supporting our effort. during world war ii, he chose to leave his life of ease in sweden for a diplomatic assignment in

hungary. his assignment was the result of a recruitment effort by the united states war refuge board and the office of strategic services to try to save remaining hungarian jews from the holocaust. in his effort, mr. wallenberg succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. he provided swedish passports for literally thousands of jews, which made the difference between life and death. mr. wallenberg rented 32 buildings in budapest, raised the swedish flag and declared them protected by diplomatic immunity. with these buildings he's housed, protected, and saved almost 10,000 precious lives. mr. wallenberg's bravely, his will to act are shining examples to us all. according to eyewitnesses, mr. wallenberg once climbed onto the roof of a train with departing jews for auschwitz handing them protective passes

through the doors. amid threats from the guards, he then marched dozens of those to safety. as the nationalcy front was collapsing and a move was made to kill all the remaining jews, it was mr. wallenberg who helped thwart that plan with threatening hanging for war crimes if the plot was carried out. sadly and selflessly, mr. wallenberg was later taken prisoner when the soviet army liberated budapest from the nazis and it is presumed that he died in a moscow prison. this hero's willingness to risk his own life for others exemplifies his dedication for humanitarian. his enduring legacy lives on in the countless decendants can'ts of those he saves, the lives like new yorkers like peter r

revenwerzel, a father who helped jews in budapest ghetto whose father-in-law only survived because of mr. wallenberg's efforts. i'd also like to take a moment to recognize andrew stevens, who is an active member of the jewish underground during the holocaust who worked alongside mr. wallenberg. as we move to award rule wallenberg with this congressional medal of honor, upon the centennial of his birth, we pay tribute to an extraordinary man whose life should serve ras a shining example to courage and leadership for all future generations to come. now, i'd like to address a second issue of something we've been debate on the floor all morning, and that's the issue of jobs and what this congress is doing to help our small businesses grow. i rise in support of the

landrieu-snowe amendment and the underlying bill, and these two proposals will address that every american expects us to take on -- that's coming together to create jobs, help our economy grow and focus squarely on the opportunities for creating our middle-class chance to thrive. all across my home state of new york, too many middle-class families are continuing to struggle in this very tough economy. now, of course the government doesn't create any jobs. businesses create jobs. ideas, people, they create jobs. especially small businesses. small businesses have been responsible for at least 60% of all new jobs that have been created and small businesses can give us the spark that we actually need to create a growing economy and a thriving middle class. i've spent months going on all across new york state, having round tables with businesses, and i've particularly hosted round tables focused on women-owned businesses. i've been to restaurants,

bookstores, recyclers,to incubators, home storks all businesses created by women across new york state. and women-owned businesses are among the fastest-growing sector in the small business economy. more than 10 million businesses are owned by women and generated more than $2 trillion worth of sales in 2008 alone. even though women-owned businesses start their businesses with about eight times less capital than their male counterparts, in the decade from 1997 to 2007, women-owned businesses added roughly a half a million dollars to our economy. that's the kind of growth and spark that could actually make a difference. we could do our part right here in congress this week. it is time tondal all the political posturing. it is time to come together around commonsense, core ideas like giving thesebitions the tax breaks they need to grow. we shouldn't wait another day to

eliminate capital gains on investments in these small businesses. we should extend the tax breaks for businesses that allow them to invest in new property, plant, or equipment and take those deductions up front. we should give them incentives to hire those new employees and it's our responsibility as lawmakers to do this kind of work together in a bipartisan way. , one that can set aside the political gamesmanship. and i know, just as women-owned small businesses are ready to lead to a lasting economic strength and growing economy, the women of the senate are there to support them. democrats and republican women have come together around this bill in a bipartisan way to urge our colleagues to support it. now, these tax provisions provide relief to the self-employed, to small businesses and their capital investments and encourage new investment. they work hand in hand with other tax credits thatten courage new hires and wage increases. the creation of these things really had harness their full potential for our american

businesses to grow. now, we know these proposals are effective. they helped boost the private sector for job creation over the past two years. but we all know that there's so much more we have left to do. and we can start by renewing these commonsense steps that unlock the power of our small businesses. now, these aren't democratic ideas, they're not republican ideas. they're just good ideas. they're good, commonsense ideas that can make a difference. we should be able to come together to do this for the american people to create a growing economy again p. and i yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

mr. kyl: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from arizona. mr. kyl: ask that further proceedings of the quorum call be dispensed with. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. kyl: thank you, mr. president. yesterday the senate voted by a wide margin to proceed to leader reid's small business jobs and tax relief act. everyone in this chamber claims to support both small businesses and tax relief. republicans know the best way to do that is to stop the $4.5 trillion tax hike that looms over the economy and its crippling job creators. fortunately, there is an easy

way to solve the problem: vote on and pass amendment 2491 introduced by senators hatch and mcconnell and cosponsored by myself and several colleagues. the amendment is simple: it prevents the looming expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax relief for one year and lays out specific conditions for pro-growth tax relief in the coming months. it is similar to the approach the house will take later this month. in other words, the hatch-mcconnell amendment stops income tax rates from h. from rising. it stops capital gains and dividends from rising. it stops the job-killing death tax from rising and the related exemption from falling. and it prevents the alternative minimum tax from engulfing millions more middle-income americans. it's an amendment that would protect our economy, more than any debt-financed stimulus bill or other kind of short-term tax

credit that the obama administration could dream up. and it's an amendment that, given the history of bipartisan support for tax relief in this chamber, should pass the chamber today. to be clear, stopping these tax hikes for one year is not a perfect solution. my preference is to continue the current rates, as we move towards comprehensive tax reform for both individuals and corporations. but let's be clear about what the other options are. first, we could let the top-two marginal tax brackets increase from 33% and 35% to 3 6% and 39.5% respectively. that's what president obama and leader reid would like too do. almost one billion business owners will be hit with massive tax increase on new year's day. that's according to the nonpartisan joint committee on taxation. that strategy means that 53% of

business income will be subjected to a tax hike in order to fund the historic levels of spending from the current administration. the strategy guarantees that more jobs will be lost, that unemployment will stay high, and that economic growth will remain subpar. let me just repeat that over half, 53%, of all business income would be subjected to this tax increase. if we do nothing, the current code expires and americans will see over $4.5 trillion taken from the private sector over the next decade. this will help push us into a recession next year, according to the congressional budget office. for any member of this chamber who cares about job creation and economic recovery, these two options should be unacceptable. they certainly were for president obama in 2010. less than two years ago when president obama signed legislation into law preventing

taxes from going up on any american, he noted that tax hikes -- and i'm quoting here -- "would have been a blow to our economy, just as we're climbing out of a devastating recession." evidently 40 senate democrats agreed with the president since they too voted to stop taxes from increasing in 2010. what's the difference now? our economy is in worse shape, growing now at less than 2%. at that time it was about 3%. so there's even more reason not to raise taxes now than there was in 2010 when the president thought it was a bad idea. i want to echo the sentiments of senator mcconnell this morning. even though the president's plan is bad for the economy, we should vote on it, and we should vote on the hatch amendment today. let's show the american people where we stand. a unanimous consent agreement to do just that was blocked this morning by the majority leader,

even though president obama said the following just two days ago -- quote -- "so my message to congress is this: pass a bill. i will sign it tomorrow. pass it next week. i'll sign it next week. pass it -- well, you get the idea." we should follow president obama's suggestion. we should vote on his proposals. let's vote on his proposal. let's vote on senator hatch's proposal. senator hatch's proposal will stop taxes from going up on any american. the other one will burden nearly one million business owners with job-killing higher taxes. i think americans deserve to know where their elected officials stand on these critical issues. mr. president, i note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

mr. webb: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from virginia. mr. webb: mr. president, is the senate in a quorum call? the presiding officer: yes.

mr. webb: i ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be dispensed with. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. webb: and i ask consent to speak on an amendment that i send to the desk. the presiding officer: amendments are not in order at this time. but it can be submitted. mr. webb: i ask permission to speak on a bill that i send to the desk. the presiding officer: the measure will be appropriately referred. mr. webb: thank you, mr. president. and i thank the parliamentarian for that clarification. mr. president, i am introducing a bill today in response to a recent supreme court holding that invalidated the provisions of what has become known as the stolen valor act of 2006. the supreme court decision

regarded a place in the stolen valor act that made all false statements about the receipt of military decorations a crime, stating that this act, in the view of the court -- quote -- "seems to control and suppress all false statements on this one subject in an almost limitless times and settings without regard to whether the law was made for purpose of material gain. and basically what the supreme court was saying is that you cannot freeze all first amendment rights to make claims about anything in this society unless there was a purpose at the end of it in terms of some sort of a material gain. i would start by saying i -- i understand and fully accept the court's holding in this case about the -- the overly broad measures of the stolen valor act of 2006.

and the legislation i'm introducing today is designed to remedy this issue and to bring criminal penalties to those who falsely claim military service or the seat of unearned -- receipt of unearned awards, medals and ribbons if these statements were made in pursuit of a tangible benefit or a personal gain. this is drafted, this legislation is drafted under the guidance of the holding of the supreme court in this case. i am a strong believer in the first amendment. i believe it is sacrosanct in our society. i believe the freedom to speak one's mind and to dissent when one opposes a proposal or an issue or a government policy is the very foundation of a truly free society. at the same time, the very special reverence for the first

amendment should be measured against the equally special place that our society holds for military service. there are strongly emotional reasons that this is so and there are other clearly tangible benefits that derive from military service. mr. president, i would point out something that for many of us seems obvious but i think it needs to be restated as we consider the supreme court decision on the stolen valor act and what the implications are for the legislation i'm introducing and that is that the experience of military service, and particularly hard combat, is a unique phenomenon in our society. there was a saying when i was in the marine corps many years ago that those -- for those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavor that the protected will never know. once you have been in hard combat, you will never see life around you in the same way aga

again. that doesn't mean you'll be worse or particularly better or damaged or in some way empower empowered. but for the rest of your life, you will truly see a lot of things differently. you will have seen horrible things that strain your emotions and yet increase your ability to understand tragedy and to value human courage in many different stripes and forms. you will have learned to appreciate the inherent contradictions between the pristine intellectual debates about war and the reality of a blood-soaked battlefield, where decisions must be made in an instant while human lives hang precariously in the balance. these realities comprise both the burden and the value of military service. neither the scars nor the lessons disappear when one leaves the battlefield or when one leaves the military. the men and women who step forward to serve carry this

burden and share these values for the rest of their lives. our veterans have given a portion of themselves to our country and our country has always been good at reciprocating. our veterans love america and america loves her veterans. it's important to understand the impact that military service can have on one's life in order to comprehend what a disservice it is for others to pretend to have served. there's an old country song that says you've got to suffer if you want to sing the blues. those who have not served have not paid the price that comes with earning the respect, and in many cases, they are, indeed, attempting to gain tangible benefits that have been designed to reward and honor military service when they pretend to have served. here are a few of those benefi

benefits. they are in the legislation that i am outlining. benefits relating to military service provided by the federal government or a state or local government. the ability to gain employment or professional advancement. financial remuneration, as, for instance, receiving money for books or writings related to the notion of having served. seeking an effect on the outcome of a criminal or civil court proceeding. and seeking to impact one's personal credibility in a political campaign. there are others but those all are clearly tangible benefits that come from stating that one served in the military when one did not. now, mr. president, the journey of this stolen valor legislation begins with one individual who i've known for a very long time.

his name is jug burkett. he was a vietnam veteran -- he is a vietnam veteran. like myself, he grew up in the military. his father was career military. he identified this problem many, many years ago looking at the impact of those who had claimed to have served or who had claimed to serve -- have served in areas where they did not on all the areas that i just mentioned. he wrote a book many years ago called "stolen valor." he had quite a journey with this book and has pursued the issue of honesty and integrity in our legal process and in other ways. and it was largely because of jug burkett's effort that the stolen valor act was passed in 2006. the supreme court decision i do not believe in any way invalidates the concerns that jug burkett and others have had

on this issue and, in fact, i think what we are doing with this legislation is to make sure that the proper concerns are laid out without being overly broad so that any words in a barroom or someone sitting around personally is going -- not going to have the legal authorities measuring every single word anyone says. we have designed this very specifically with respect to the concerns that the supreme court laid out. i may be offering this amendment as an amendment to the national defense authorization act. my hope is that this amended language could gain the support of all of our colleagues and that we could move this bill quickly, perhaps as -- as an independent bill. this bill respects the first amendment. it respects military service. and it assures the special place in our society that has always been reserved for those who have

stepped forward and gone into harm's way on our behalf. i yield the floor. mr. webb: suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

quorum call: quorum call:

quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from vermont is recognized. mr. leahy: mr. president, what is the parliamentary situation? the presiding officer: the senate is currently in a quorum call. mr. leahy: i ask consent the call of the quorum be dispensed with. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. leahy: following that, what is the current situation? the presiding officer: the senate is postcloture on the motion to proceed to s. 2237. mr. leahy: i thank the distinguished presiding officer, the senator from new mexico, for his comments. mr. president, let me just begin by noting that this morning in watching the "today" show, i saw a piece about the vermont national guard. we call them the green mountain

boys from the time of ethan allen. and it was fascinating to watch savannah guthrie, who is one of the anchors of the morning program on the "today" show, her brother is a colonel with the vermont national guard, flies f-16's. she got to ride on the plane with her brother, which i thought was remarkable. i had the opportunity to do that before with them. it is a -- for those of us who usually are confined to our flying with airlines, this is a little bit different both in takeoff, visibility, maneuvers. i've never been on a commercial airplane where it will hold anyone from five to nine g's as

this flight was. i was glad to see colonel guthrie recognized but also all the men and women on the vermont national guard. this is a group in the hours after 9/11, the tragedies of 9/11, they immediately took to the air and guarded the skies over new york city. i recall -- i recall when our add -- adjutant general called me to say the green mountain boys were giving protection around the clock over new york city. i asked him where are you basing them from? he said vermont. i said, well, how long does it take you to get to new york city? he told me with the after burners, a matter of minutes.

i've never been quite able to make that flight in a commuter plane from burlington, vermont, to new york city. but they refuel in midair. everybody, whether on vacation or not, showed up at the vermont guard. our mechanics, flight administrators, pilots, of course, and kept those planes going around the clocks for weeks. they didn't miss a single minute of their mission, with all the calibration of weapons, radar and everything else. it was a remarkable scene, and i'm glad to see them recognized this morning. as a vermonter, i'm extraordinarily proud of our vermont national guard, both our army guard and our air guard. they do all the people of our

state proud. mr. president, on another matter -- and i'd ask as in morning business. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. leahy: small businesses and working families throughout vermont and the rest of the country are facing incredibly challenging times. these problems are especially acute in my state where we rely so heavily on small businesses to create jobs for our citizens to make vermont the desirable place to live and to visit that it is. the federal government has rightly recognized the important role he that small businesses play in our economy. from s.b.a. loans to usda rural development grants, small business set asides, government contractors, a variety of targeted federal programs join with small businesses to help them grow and prosper.

in this congress, has enacted several job-creating steps. last year i was able to lead the effort here in the senate to enact a major overhaul of our nation's outdated patent laws. the leahy-smith america invents act is going to create jobs but also very importantly is going to help unleash more american innovation. it doesn't add a penny to our deficit. in fact, last year vermont was awarded more patents per capita than any state in the union. of course those patents means more jobs for vermonters. two weeks ago we made further progress by passing a transportation funding bill. it could make vital investments in our nation's roads, bridges and transit systems. and a student loan bill that will lower the cost of college borrowing for thousands of students and their families.

in my state these student loans are extremely important. i remember the one i had when tpheufs law school, a -- when i was in law school, a ten-year loan. two things happened the year of that last payment, that tenth payment on my loan from law school: one, the satisfaction my wife marcella and i had in paying off the loan. the second was that same year i was sworn in to the united states senate. i wonder if i would have been here had we not been able to have the money to go through school. i think we can and must do more to help our struggling small businesses and working families. that's why i strongly support the bill before us today that provides small businesses with tax incentives to begin hiring again. the bill is a multipronged strategy for spurring job creation and creating tax credit for businesses to hire new

workers or increase wages for their current workers. in other words, instead of saying we'll give a tax break to extraordinarily wealthy people, we say let's see the jobs. show me the jobs. show me the jobs. you have a tax credit for businesses that hire new workers or increase wages for their current workers, then that is a good use of our tax code. secondly, it would allow businesses to immediately write off all the major purchases they make this year. that's a tangible incentive for new investments and new hires right away. i don't support this bill just because the president supports it or the democratic leader supports it or most of the members of my side of the aisle support it. they all do stand behind this effort and i'm grateful for that. i support this bill because i've heard from small business owners in vermont, democratic and republican alike, who tell me

they would make capital improvements and put people to work immediately if this bill were signed into law. and i suspect the same would be true in virtually every other state in this country. on the shores of lake champlain in the northern border town of high gate, vermont, sits one of america's most genuine, beautiful family resorts, the tyler place family resort. year after year families flock to the resort to spend time with their families swimming and boating and enjoying a summer camp fire. it is the kind of place that draws the same families year after year, multigenerational families take time to enjoy each other's company as well as the great views and magnificent views. it's easy to forget, especially when you're sitting there watching the sun set over a

beautiful, great big lake champlain it's one of the millions of small businesses that keep america's economy moving forward and americans at work. last year i heard from the owners of the resort, including pixley tyler hill, a dogged advocate for vermont's tourism industry and for lake champlain, about the interest in seeing an extension of the bonus depreciation provision that expired in december. her brother, ted tyler, summed it up by saying these changes in the tax law make all the difference in the world in decisions whether to spend money and thereby stimulate the economy and increase employment in the process. for example, consider a resort deciding whether to add tennis courts, put in a new sewer system, upgrade roads or do major landscaping work. say it anticipated costs of

$300,000. absent bonus depreciation, the company will pay $300,000 but it can only deduct $20,000 that year as an expense for tax purposes. true enough that over the next 14 years, the business can continue to write off $20,000, but how many small businesses can afford to wait that long to recoup the $280,000 they no longer have? pixley and ted had me sold the minute they explained that this tax incentive was the difference between making new investments and hiring someone to sit on their hands waiting for things to change. extending the provision alone is reason enough to pass the bill. mr. president, this bill is full of a million other reasons why we should be working with all the determination we can muster and promptly pass it, pass it

now when the economy needs it. it's a good, solid reason for each of the jobs we create for working families and businesses all over america. so i urge all senators to work without delay on this important legislation. businesses in each of our 50 states are waiting to lend another helping hand to the economic recovery act. i would ask unanimous consent that my full statement on that matter be placed in the record. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. leahy: mr. president, one last matter. it's been nearly three months since the senate passed the bipartisan leahy-crapo violence against women reauthorization act. three months. we are no closer to enacting this bill into law than we were in april when 68 senators, republican and democratic senators alike, voted for this critical legislation to protect

women from domestic and sexual abuse. i'm concerned that politics will get in the way of passing this critical legislation this year. protecting every victim from violence should be above politics. members of congress in both chambers set aside the political rhetoric to act swiftly to reauthorize this landmark legislation and save countless lives, and time is running out. there are only a few weeks left in this session before election year politics take over and congress comes to a standstill. there are critical improvements in the leahy-crapo reauthorization bill that will not take effect unless congress acts. we can't simply say that if we don't enact it, maybe we can do it next year or the year after. there are a lot of major

programs. they will only be enacted in this bill. not in appropriations, not any other way. we saw programs that will not receive the added support they need unless we pass our bill into law. legislation's emphasis on increasing housing protection for victims, preventing homicides would not have an opportunity to help vulnerable victims across the country. important improvements in campus safety, prevention program for teens will not occur. immigrant victims, native, lbgt programs will continue without the protection they deserve. the legislation is too important to wait. i hear from victims and the professionals who work on their behalf, they say they need the improvements made by the leahy-crapo bill and they need them today. the legislation is particularly important during difficult

economic times. because the economic pressures facing many americans can pose additional hurdles. active community networks are needed to provide support to victims in these circumstances, like emergency shelters and transitional housing and counseling. late last month, i had the opportunity to speak at the vawa national days of action rally where survivors and professionals in the field, those who have dedicated their lives to helping victims all over the country gather together to send congress a message, and they told me that they are very frustrated by the lack of progress in passing vawa, and rightfully so because they and the victims they serve are the ones who are affected by congress' inaction. they were so inspired when this body came together and 68 of us voted to pass it. now they say when are we going to finish? the message to congress was loud and clear -- do your job, pass

vawa now. according the work of these tireless advocates and the victims they help should be our priority. victims should not be forced to wait any longer. they're not going to benefit from the improvements we made in the senate bill unless both houses of congress vote to pass this legislation. the problems facing us are too serious for congress to delay. remember this kind of violence knows no political party. its victims are republican and democrat, rich and poor, young and old. i have said so many times a victim is a victim is a victim. helping these victims, all these victims should be our goal. i ask consent that my full statement be made part of the record. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. leahy: mr. president, i yield the floor and i suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

quorum call:

a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from rhode island is recognized. mr. whitehouse: i ask unanimous consent the pending quorum call be lifted.

the presiding officer: without objection. mr. whitehouse: i ask to speak as if in morning business. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. whitehouse: mr. president, we were here two winters ago in february when washington was hit by a snowstorm that achieved the nickname snowmageddon. the city, in fact, much of the mid-atlantic was buried under feet of snow, the biggest snowstorm in 90 years for this area, people in washington were struggling to get to work and to school, people went without power for days, and this being washington, some of our colleagues here in the senate seized on that opportunity to mock climate change and to suggest that these winter snowstorms were inconsistent with the projections of what

would happen from global warming and climate change. as an initial matter, that's just a false comparison from the very get-go, all by itself. climate science models have predicted consistently that as polar ice caps and glaciers melt and more water enters the system, we can expect heavier precipitation events. one of the ways it has been described, if you have a pot on the stove and you've got the heat underneath it and it's simmering and you turn up the heat, you get more activity in the pot. you add energy to a dynamic system like a pot of boiling water, and it creates more energy in the dynamic environment in the same way the extra energy coming in because of climate change, because of

our carbon pollution in the atmosphere is energy he energizing our weather and we're getting weather extremes as a result. there is an article in "science daily"-hand" arctic ice melt is setting stage for severe winters." and it says the dramatic melt-off of arctic ice is hitting closer to home than millions of americans might think. that's because melting arctic sea ice can trigger a domino effect leading to increased odds of winter outbreaks in the middle attitudes. think, the article continues, the snowmageddon storm that hamstrung washington, d.c. during february, 2010. i ask unanimous consent this

article be appended at the end of my remarks. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. whitehouse: that shows that the original challenge to climate change -- to climate change theory based on the incident of snowmageddon was like so much that is said to challenge climate change, phony, outright wrong, misrepresenting what it shows. scientists have recently published an article in oceanography that demonstrates again that link between climate change and severe winter weather in the northern hemisphere's middle latitudes. i think that can be swiftly debunked as a phony claim against the facts of climate change that are surrounding us. but look around at what's happening now. we're seeing extreme weather on

the other side. last week eugene robinson wrote in his "washington post" column feeling the heat, if you still don't believe in climate change, -- quote -- "you're either deep in denial or delirious from the heat." and he points out that the evidence is really mounting up in irresistible and ultimately irrefutable ways. to quote from his article, the the national oceanic and atmospheric administration says the past winter was the fourth warmest on record in the united states. to top that, spring which meteorologists define as the months of march, april, and may was the warmest since recordkeeping began in 1895. this spring, march, april and may, was the warmest since recordkeeping began in 1895. he continues if you don't

believe me or the scientists, ask a farmer whose planting seasons have gone awry. the blumberg news -- blumberg news recently wrote a story entitled u.s. corn growers farming in hell, as midwest heat spreads. the story reported that corn crops are in the worst condition since 1988, and that 5 % of the midwest is experiencing moderate to extreme drought conditions. and i'd ask unanimous consent that the blumberg article that i have referenced also be appended at the conclusion of my remarks. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. whitehouse: it's not just the agricultural sector that is being clobbered by the drought and the heat. as the presiding officer,

senator udall of new mexico, knows all too well, and to quote from a "new york times" story, explosive wildfires have burned across much of the west in recent weeks. in southwestern new mexico, your home state, the largest wildfire in state history has burned nearly 300,000 acres. and it describes other fires on the loose in colorado, in utah. the high park fire burning near fort collins is one of the largest and most destructive blazes in the state's history. also, colorado had more than half a dozen fires burning and it said conditions have not been this bad in a decade. so we are seeing exactly the kind of extreme weather conditions that the climate

scientists who the deniers have always mocked and made fun of actually predicted. they predicted that this would happen, and it is, in fact, happening. now, it's clear that you can't take a particular storm and say this storm, this fire, this drought was the product of climate change. the example that people used to describe what's going on is it's like loading dice, and the more you load the dice, the more the numbers you've loaded the dice to show up, show up. and so you will get more weather events. even if you don't load the dice, you're sometimes going to get double sixes, so you can't show that every double six is because the dice were loaded. but when you see more and more double sixes showing up, more than history would suggest, more than the odds would suggest, then something's going on

and that's what we have done by loading our atmosphere with carbon pollution, we have loaded the dice for these extreme weather events, and now we are reaping that bitter harvest from the pollution that we have thrown up there. and unfortunately, the bitter harvest here in this city is that we continue to listen to propaganda and nonsense from the polluters that is designed specifically to create enough doubt to prevent us from taking action about something that is creating these immense consequences for foresters and firefighters in the west, for corn farmers in the midwest and for anybody who has to experience extraordinary weather events like snow-mageddon, so-called, here in washington. these things are beginning to have an effect as real life begins to model with the climate -- what the climate scientists predicted.

noaa's chief jane lachenko spoke before an audience in australia which is experiencing very similar conditions. said that the extreme weather events are convincing many americans that climate change is a reality, and we are seeing that more and more. yale, george mason university and knowledge networks did some polling on this subject. 69% of the respondents said they agreed that -- quote -- "global warming is affecting the weather in the united states, versus 30% who said they disagree. better than 2-1, the american people are ready for us to do something about this. they know that there is a connection, and they expect us to take responsible action. gallup polls are reflecting a rebounded in the public's concern about climate change from 51% in 2011 up to 55% in march of this year. before the recession, it was all the way up to 66% before the economic issues pushed it aside.

the contention that the polluting industries and their mouthpieces here in washington make that the jury is still out on climate change caused by carbon pollution is simply false. the jury is not still out, the verdict is in, the verdict is clear, and we should start doing something about it. when i come to give these talks on the senate floor, i often quote a letter from back in october, 2009, that was signed by virtually every major scientific organization in the country. the chemical society, the geophysical union, the jeterier logical society, the botanical society, the soil science society, the association -- the american statistical association. i could go on and on, but the point is not to name all the multiple, responsible, respected scientific organizations that

find -- signed it but to read what they said. here's what they said. if you think about it as i read it, think about how cautious scientists orderly are -- ordinarily are in the language that they use. here's what they said. observations throughout the world make it clear, clear that climate change is occurring and rigorous scientific research demonstrates -- not suggests. demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are -- not maybe -- are the primary driver. these conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertion s are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the

vast body of peer-reviewed science. that's a very sciencey way of saying something that is pretty harsh, and that is that all these contrary assertions about climate change simply cannot be reconciled with an objective assessment of the facts, of the vast body of peer-reviewed research. so if it can't be reconciled with an objective assessment, what kind of assessment is it getting? what it's getting, i submit, mr. president, is a phony assess ment, a political propaganda-driven assessment, an assessment whose purpose is simply to create enough doubt, slow down political action to preserve the status quo and to allow the pollution to continue

to pour out of these smokestacks and i speak very specifically about smokestacks because rhode island is a downwind state and so much of the coal pollution that gets piped up into the atmosphere through midwestern smokestacks ends up landing in my state. it lands in the form of ozone in particular, and there are days in a rhode island summer that looks clear, it looks beautiful, you're driving by sparkling narragansett bay on your way to work, and off goes the radio and the radio jock says talking -- giving the news announcements of the day, today's a bad air day in rhode island and infants should stay indoors, the elderly should stay indoors, people with breathing difficulties should stay indoors, on an otherwise beautiful day, children, seniors, people with breathing

difficulties should stay indoors . because corporations pumping carbon pollution and other forms of pollution out of their midwestern smokestacks won't clean up their act. they can hold rhode islanders on a clear summer day captive indoors because they won't clean it up. it's just wrong, mr. president, it's just plain wrong. and so i'm going to continue to come back to this floor on a regular basis to keep pointing this out. for some reason, this has become the issue in washington that dare not be mentioned. well, enough of that. it's time we started to mention it and it's time we started to force this issue and it's time we started to do something about it, because any other form of activity faced with these facts would be wildly irresponsible. let me give the example that i have used before. you're a parent. you have responsibility for the

welfare and well-being of your child. your child is showing symptoms. you don't know quite what is wrong. you take her to the doctor and the doctor says something's wrong, he or she needs treatment. treatment is not going to be easy, it's not going to be cheap, but she needs it. you think okay, that's bad news. i'll tell you what, though. i'm going to be a responsible parent and i'm going to go get a second opinion. so you go and you get a second opinion, the doctor says the exact same thing, your daughter is sick, she needs treatment. so you ask a couple more doctors who are friends. you get a third opinion, a fourth opinion. let's say that you're the most determined parent in the world and you go out and you get 99 second opinions. you contact 100 doctors about your daughter's condition and 97 of them, 97 of those doctors say

your daughter is sick and she needs to be taken care of, she needs this treatment. at that point, you say well, there is still doubt. there are these three other doctors who aren't so sure about this, so i'm not going to do it. that's not something a responsible parent would do. i suspect in some circumstances, that would be so irresponsible that it might put you into the child and family services offices of your government. but that is exactly what we're being asked to do about climate change here, to ignore the 97% of peer-reviewed climate scientists who understand that this is real, this is man made and the consequences are going to be ferocious for us because

there is a 3% doubt. and it gets even worse because so many of the scientists involved in the 3% are scientists for hire who have economic ties to the polluting industries. some of them even go back to previous fights like over whether cigarette smoking is good enough for you or whether lead paint is safe for children. these are scientists who have made a career of manufacturing doubt on behalf of the cigarette and tobacco industry, on behalf of the lead paint industry and now on behalf of the big carbon polluters. in a nutshell, they are phonies and we're being asked to believe them. so i see that the senator from florida is here. i think my time at this point has probably expired. i appreciate the time to come

before this body and share these views again. i'll close by pointing out that if there is one place where we really need to worry about climate change and about the effects of our carbon pollution, it's not just in our atmosphere. it's not just in the climate. it's not just in the weather. it's in the oceans. it's in the oceans which are undergoing historic changes as a result of the amount of carbon in our atmosphere. we are acidifying our oceans at a rate that is unprecedented. we are out now of a bandwidth that's lasted for a thousand centuries, a thousand centuries. our entire species has developed within a safe bandwidth of atmospheric carbon and of ocean acidity that we have now for the first time stepped out of, and a long way out of. if we do not take this issue on

in a responsible way, we are going to bear an even more bitter harvest. i thank the presiding officer. i yield the floor. i will not suggest the absence of a quorum. a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from south dakota. mr. thune: are we in morning business, mr. president? the presiding officer: we are postcloture time. mr. thune: okay. great. when congress began debating health care in 2009, the goal was to lower the cost of care and to give americans the care they need from the doctor they choose. americans were promised that if they like the insurance they have and the doctor they had, they would be able to keep the plan and continue to see the doctor that they liked. americans were promised that the negotiations would be transparent and televised on

c-span. americans were promised that the bill wouldn't add a dime to the deficit and that it would lower the cost of care. americans were promised that their premiums would go down, down by $2,500. americans were promised that this president would not raise taxes on families with incomes below $250,000. instead, congress passed a massive governmental takeover of the health care industry. in the last two years, we've seen that americans can't keep the insurance they had, continue to see the doctor they like, and are paying more -- more -- for health care now than they would have if this administration had not punis pushed through the mae 2,700-page bill. the law adds billions to the deficit and at the end of the day, americans will find that they are hold being a bag full of empty broken promises. today i want to focus on the empty promises on taxes.

the president pledged not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and families making less than $200,000 per year. yet the new individual mandate tax which the supreme court affirmed is a tax increase, will raise $54 billion in new taxes largely on middle-income americans between 2015 and 2022. in fact, according to the congressional budget office, 77% of those projected to pay the tax in 2016 will be those earning less than $120,000% year. americans earning less than $120,000 clearly meet the president's definition as middle income. the congressional budget office projections confirm that at least three out of every four americans subjected to the new individual mandate tax will be the same middle-income taxpayers that president obama promised would not see their taxes raised by one dime. in fact, when asked by testif ge

stephanopoulos if the president rejected the notion that the individual mandate was a tax, the president stated, "i absolutely reject that notion." the president wasn't equivocal and he didn't leave any room for interpretation. so let's be clear. this president and democrat leaders whoer in congress sold obamacare -- here in congress sold obamacare as if it did not increase taxes on the middle class. now we know what they're selling was an incredible bait-and-switch. they were enacting $54 billion in new individual mandate taxes, primarily on the middle class, by calling it something else. i would note that this tax increase is larger than the buffett rule tax increase that the president has spent much of the year promoting. the supreme court ruled that the individual mandate is not constitutional under either the

commerce clause or the necessary and proper clause of the constitution. so there are only two options: either the individual mandate is a tax -- and it happens to be a tax that falls hardest on the middle class -- or it is unconstitutional. it is estimated that the average tax on an american subject to this new tax increase will be about $1,100 per year. and after paying this tax, these americans still won't have health insurance. we should not forget that the national health insurance tax is not the only tax increase in obamacare affecting individuals. starting next year, individuals will be able to save less money tax-free in flexible spending accounts to pay for their own health care expenses. currently there is no statutory limit on f.s.a. limits. starting next year, obamacare will cap the limit at only $ $2,500 per year.

and obamacare will limit tax deductions for those with the largest health care needs by reducing the medical expense deduction from expenses above 7.5% of adjusted gross income to expenses above 10% of adjusted gross income. so at the very time that obamacare is driving up health care costs, it is also making it more difficult for american families to pay for their own health care needs. these tax increases don't even take into account the new 3.8% tax increase on investment income or the almost 1% medicare surtax that will be embody on higher-income americans -- that will be imposed on higher-income americans making it more expensive for small businesses to hire workers or invest in the economy. these taxes are in addition to the obamacare taxes on businesses such as the new medical device tax or the

tanning tax. these taxes will ultimately be passed on to the consumers. of the $552 billion of new taxes included in obamacare according to the joint committee on taxation and the congressional budget office, the joint economic committee has estimated that roughly $250 billion are tax increases that will hit the middle class either directly or through the health care products that they consume. in addition to this new national health insurance tax of $1,100 a year and other tax increases in obamacare, americans will see that health care costs will continue to rise. despite the president's promise that his health care plan would reduce insurance premiums, premiums have increased by over $2,200 since obama took office. and according to the president's own actuary at the center for medicare and medicaid services,

premiums under the new health care law will rise faster than if we had done nothing at all. i want to quote from that very report. it say, "in 2014 growth in private health insurance premiums is expected to accelerate to 7.9% or 4.1 percentage points higher than in the absence of health reform." think about that, mr. president, what's actually being said here. that the cost of health insurance would have gone up a lot less per year had we done nothing than what we did with this bill, which is to increase those expenditures for health care by about 7.9%. americans will going to be stuck paying higher costs for health insurance, medical devices due to the tax on the e-sectors that this bill imposes. americans know that we will continue to suffer with an economy that's not performing well.

now on the immediate horizon, the american people stare down an enormous health tax increase. americans are also seeing the law has impacted our economy. according to a recent poll, 48% of businesses that are not currently hiring list the potential cost of health care regulations as a reason for not seeking new employees. and according to the congressional budget office, obamacare will mean 800,000 fewer jobs over the next decade. the last three years have made it very clear: obamacare is make our economy worse by driving up costs and discouraging job creation. moving forward, congress needs to start by repealing obamacare. would end to repeal obamacare -- we need to repeal obamacare and enact step-by-step reforms that protect americans. republicans will not repeat the democrats' mistakes. we will not rush to pass a massive bill that the american

people don't support. we need to do this the right way. no backroom deals with 2,700 2,700-page bills that no one has read. this president owes it to americans to work with republicans to put in place real health care reforms that will actually help lower health insurance costs for individuals and families and ensure that americans can get the care they need when they need it. mr. president, the taxes that i've mentioned in the health care law are going to add up to a massive tax increase on average, ordinary americans and all the analysis that's been done by the joint committee on tax acres the congressional budget office, th comes to thaty same conclusion. this is a tax that will hit middle-income americans notwithstanding the president's promise that he would not raise taxes on those making less than $200,000 a year. 75% of that individual mandate tax will hit those making less

than $120,000 per year. so, the whole idea of promises made, promises broken, i think, is the narrative that has attached itself to this health care law, mr. president. i would submit that the united states congress and the president need to work together to repeal this law and work to put in place commonsense, step-by-step reforms that will drive the cost of health care down for americans. that is the one thing that americans, as they look at the health care economy today, want to see. they want to know that their costs are going to go down rather than up, continue to see these increases in premiums year over year over year and it continues to affect our economy. the mandates that are imposed upon employers in this health care law as well are going to lead to fewer jobs. that is the result, the outcome, if you will, of this health care law, mr. president. it's higher cost for americans, as i pointed out, and it's going to mean fewer jobs for american

workers. now, coupled on top of that, we have as recently as yesterday the president coming out and saying that he now wants to raise taxes on those small businesses in our country. the tax that he's proposed on those making more than $250,000 a year interestingly enough hits 940,000 small business owners, 53% of the pass-thru income would face higher taxes as a result of the proposal that he made just yesterday. and the people who run those businesses employ 25% of the american workforce. so we're talking about huge, new burdens on our economy at a time, mr. president, when we just absolutely cannot afford it. 41 consecutive months of 8% or higher unemployment, 23 million americans either unemployed or underemployed, 5.4 million americans who have been unemployed for a long period of time, and the weakest recovery

literally since the end of world war ii. those are the economic circumstances we findives in today. -- we find ourselves in today. now we have additional burdens imposed by obamacare that would lead to higher taxes on those we look to to get us out of this circumstance -- our small businesses, entrepreneurs, all of whom be faced with higher taxes because of the president's proposals. we can do better for the american people. we can get this economy growing again with commonsense health care reforms, commonsense tax reforms, regulatory reforms that lower the cost and the burden of doing business in this country, an energy policy, a comprehensive energy policy that will make sure that we're developing our own energy sources in this country, and getting federal spending under control. we need a smaller government, federal government, mr. president, and a bigger, more robust private economy. you can no do that by continually piling more taxes and more regulations and more mandates and more requirements on the very people that create

jobs. the american people deserve better. we can do better, mr. president. i yield the floor. mr. nelson: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from florida is recognized. mr. nelson: mr. president, i'd ask unanimous consent that senator inhofe be recognized after my remarks. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. inhofe: a unanimous consent request, you would. i request that at the conclusion of the senator from florida's remarks, that the senator from wyoming being recognized and then i be recognized after the senator from wyoming for up to 35 minutes. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection, so ordered. mr. nelson: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from florida is recognized. mr. nelson: mr. president, on the battlefield there's a code among the military that you don't leave anybody behind, and that principle ought to apply to our returning veterans from overseas as well, because it's

essential for us to care for our veterans when they get home and to show them the same respect and loyalty that they have showed us during their service. and during this economic downturn, it's been especially tough for many of our veterans, as they come back from iraq and afghanistan, the unemployment rate among veterans returning from those two countries has been 9.5% in june. and while this is clearly an improvement for the returning veterans, as is the improvement in the entire economy over the last couple of years, it is still more than a point of u unemployment higher than the national average. and for some of the youngest veterans, it's even worse; it's

29% in last year, 20111. well, our service members have already done the toughest jobs out there. they are highly trained, they are extremely skilled, and we ought to give them as many opportunities as possible to succeed when they get home. that means, when veterans come back from war, they shouldn't have to do battle with bureaucrats. and so, i want to make a suggestion to the senate, a commonsense suggestion, and i filed a bill which recently passed both the house and the senate to remove some of those bureaucratic obstacles in our veterans' way and to make it easier for them to get occupational and professional licenses when they get home.

so the veterans' skill-to-jobs act. it is a bipartisan bill, cosponsored by 16 senators, supported by veterans organizations like the american legion -- and, mr. president, i would ask consent that the american legion's commentary on this be entered in the "congressional record." the presiding officer: without objection. mr. nelson: what the bill does is direct the federal agencies to recognize relevant military training when certifying veterans for federal occupational licenses. in other words, it's common sense if a veteran is skilled because they have been trained in their military duties, they ought to be able to utilize that skill, that training without having to go through all of it

duplicated again when they get into a specialized civilian job. so this bill directs the federal agencies to recognize relevant military training when certifying veterans for federal occupational licenses. if the military training is found to be comparable to the civilian requirements, the veteran would be deemed qualified for that occupation. these are the licenses that people need in order to get jobs in the civilian sector. and i want to give you a couple of examples. say an air force or navy aircraft mechanic gets out of the service, they may want to use those skills learned in the military to work in the

commercial airline business. well, to do so, that veteran must be certified as an aircraft mechanic technician, certified by the federal aviation administration. and this requires an airframes and power plant license from the f.a.a. though the veteran has trained to do this, this highly skilled occupation for our military, what we're seeing all too often, common sense goes out of the window and that veteran may have to go through redundant and expensive training to get that airframes and power plant license. and of course that doesn't make sense. and this isn't just a federal issue. many states are starting to

recognize military training when certifying veterans for state licenses, like nurses and truck drivers. i'm pleased that the federal government will now move in this direction as well. we've already passed it unanimously here in the senate. likewise, they passed it in the house, both bills are down in the other's respective chambers. and so, we need to go ahead and pass this. and i think it's going to be sent around, and i know of no objection to this since we got it out of the senate unanimously. mr. president, one of the greatest honors i have in my job is getting to meet and thank veterans and our current members of our military and all our national security apparatus. it's up to us to stand by these

folks. and so passing this legislation to help employ veterans like the veterans skills to jobs act is one way that we can thank them. mr. president, i yield the floor. a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from wyoming is recognized. mr. barrasso: mr. president, i come to the floor today as i do week after week ever since the president's health care law has been passed, to offer a doctor's second opinion about this health care law, which i believe is bad for patients. it's bad for providers, the nurses and the doctors who take care of those patients. and it's terrible for taxpayers. what we saw, mr. president, is that the supreme court issued its historic decision on the president's health care law. the court confirmed -- the court confirmed, mr. president, that the individual mandate in the president's health care law is a

tax. the president said it wasn't a tax, but i will just tell you the supreme court confirmed that it is in fact a tax. and the decision makes it clear that the internal revenue service, the i.r.s., will now play an unprecedented role in america's health care system. that is not something that the american citizens have asked for or want. but it is something many american citizens fear. recently the associated press highlighted this concern in an article titled "tax man cometh to police you on health care." "tax man cometh to police you on health care." the article points out that the health care law contains the largest set of tax changes in more than 20 years. the largest set of tax changes in more than 20 years. to be specific, according to the congressional budget office,

there are at least 18 separate taxes contained in the health care law. these taxes are expected to cost taxpayers more than $500 million over the next ten years. the associated press points out that the i.r.s. is expected to spend over $880 million just to implement the law from 2010 to 2013. and to do this, they're going to hire more than 2,700 new government workers. well, mr. president, this could be just the tip of the iceberg. according to a report issued by the house ways and means committee, the internal revenue service -- yes, the i.r.s. -- may need as many as 16,500 additional bureaucrats to enforce the president's health care law, now the president's

health care tax. one of these taxes that the agents are going to be enforcing is something called the individual mandate. this is the part of the law that forces every american to have health insurance. they don't have it, the law forces them to purchase health insurance. opbd not just any health insurance. no, no, no. not at all. they need to purchase government-approved health insurance. not necessarily something that that family thinks is right for them and their needs and their insurance and their family. no, that's not good enough. they have to purchase government-approved insurance, and the i.r.s. is going to check on them to make sure that they do. according to the congressional budget office, 77% of those forced to pay the tax will be peek making less than -- will be people making less than $120,000

a year. mr. president, president obama repeatedly promised that he would not raise taxes on the middle class. specifically, he promised that no family making less than $250,000 a year would see any form of tax increase. let me quote. the president of the united states said -- and i quote -- "i can make a firm pledge. he said under my plan no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. the president went on to say not through income tax. he said not your payroll tax. he said not your capital gains tax. he finished it by saying not any of your taxes. but when the president's lawyers went before the supreme court, they did just the opposite. they argued that this mandate was indeed a tax. the solicitor general even stated that the court had an obligation, he said, to construe the mandate as a tax. he said if it could be upheld on

that basis. so as it turns out, the majority of the supreme court agreed that the mandate was constitutional but only, only because it's a tax. in short, the supreme court confirmed that the president has broken his promise to middle-class families, and it's the promise that he made to not raise taxes. in fact, the president's individual mandate tax will produce more tax revenue for the government than the so-called buffett rule that this administration has been supporting. while supporters of the health care law may support using the i.r.s. to scare people into getting health insurance, most americans don't think that this is the right policy for our country. back when congress was debating this health care law, the american people were looking for reform, health care reform that would actually lower the cost of

care, not raise their taxes. they wanted a law that helped train more doctors and more nurses to take care of them, not more tax collectors to look into their life and their records. the last thing they want is the i.r.s. breathing down their neck and banging down their doors. but, that's what the american people have gotten through the president's health care law. and that's what they are stuck with unless congress and the white house repeal and replace this flawed and failed law. as a physician with 25 years of experience taking care of families all around wyoming, i believe there's a better way. we can implement commonsense reforms in a step-by-step way that allow people to purchase insurance across state lines that reform medical liability laws and strengthen high-risk pools. these simple changes will help lower the cost of care without forcing millions of americans to

live in the fear of the internal revenue service. that's why i'm going to continue to come to the senate floor and call on congress to repeal the president's health care law. it is time for americans to get what they were looking for in the beginning but do not get as a result of the president's health care law. what they are looking for is the care they need from the doctor that they choose at a lower cost. thank you, mr. president. i yield the floor. the presiding officer: the senator from oklahoma is recognized. mr. inhofe: mr. president, i have to say that i enjoy the second opinions when they come from such a well-known doctor who knows what he's talking

about. quite often we in this body are forced to kind of assume that we are experts in every area, so it's nice to have a few who really are. i think that's a subject that he's -- this doesn't happen very often, but i actually learn something when i hear him talk. anyway, that's not why i'm here today, mr. president. i'd like to help provide some sense and balance and accuracy which is clearly lacking in the mainstream media's attempt to drum up global he support, global warming hysteria again. i have to say this that i feel like we're kind of back to the good old days. we talked about this for about ten years, and there are different people coming up with legislation -- the cap and trade legislation. they found out of course the american people realize it is a gigantic tax and there are no benefits. so it kind of went by the wayside. there's a new thing that's happening. it's kind of interesting because just last friday the national

oceanic and atmospheric administration, one of the obama appointees said to the associated press, they said that the wildfires and hot temperatures over the past few weeks are likely -- will likely convince americans that global warming is real. in other words, they're now trying to tie -- they never tried to do this before because that's one of the few things all experts agree on that one isolated case doesn't make a case for major changes in the weather. this is kind of a dangerous game to play because what are they going to say when winter comes? it's going to be cold. as soon as it turns cold, i can tell you what they're going to say. they're not going to use global warming. they're going to use climate change. as the season changes, the terminology changes. they'll start saying just because the temperatures are freezing doesn't mean that the planet isn't overheating. if you followed through with those double negatives, maybe you understand that.

my very good friend from rhode island commented on the famous igloo. put the igloo up there, will you? this was pretty prominent on two summers ago. let me, mr. president, tell you the story of where we got to the igloo. as everyone knows, most people know because i brag about it all the time, i've got 20 kids and grandkids. this happens to be one family here. this right here, you can't see them as well. six of the most beautiful people you've ever seen. it happens to be my daughter and her husband, their family of four kids. anyway, this would have been the -- in february of 2010. some of us remember how cold it was during that time. it happens that i, one of my kids, the only one who is adopted is the little girl who was an orphan in ethiopia we found and nursed back to health. my daughter molly who had

nothing but boys, she adopted this little girl. put her picture up there. she's a pretty little girl. she's become kind of a hero. every february i sponsor something called the african dinner where all of our friends from africa, about 400 of them, come over and we are establishing close relationships with them. it just so happens that little girl you're looking at there, it was 12 years ago we found her. she's now a 12-year-old little girl, she reads at college level, she is smart. she is the main speaker every time we have this thing. in february of 2010, little zigita marie was up here, she brought her whole family up, made her speech. it was a beautiful thing. afterwards, they were getting ready to take the plane back home and the blizzards came. all of the airports in the area shut down. there was no way that they could get back. so what do you do with a family

of six when you're snowbound and there is nothing but snow and ice on the ground? you make an igloo. so they did. put the igloo back up. that's a real igloo. that's not just something the kids play around in. it sleeps four people. and i know that. i was in it. but anyway, they did this igloo. it's right up by the library of congress. the sign on top says al gore's new home. well, anyway -- i think they said honk if you want global warming or something like that. anyway, everyone was having a good time. some of my liberal friends were so upset -- one was keith olbermann. keith olbermann with msnbc designated my family -- my daughter molly's family of six as the worst family in america. now, there is her husband, very prominent there in fayetteville, arkansas. my daughter molly is a professor at the university. she was actually designated as outstanding professor of the year this year. she will be marching out on their homecoming on november 3

to accept that award. anyway, it's quite an outstanding family. the kids are all straight-a students and all that wonderful stuff. anyway, that was the famous igloo. i will leave it there for a minute because i enjoy -- it's been a long time since we have had a chance to talk about it. so you have molly and james and jason and luke and jonah and marie enjoying that. believe it or not, mr. president, that's the worst family in america. well, just after the igloo story broke, a reporter, dana milbank, warned the alarmist -- now, keep in mind the terminology we use. those people who think the world is coming to an end because catastrophic global warming is coming, it's all due to man made gases so we need to shut down america, those are the alarmists. the skeptics are me, the ones who look at this sand say -- and say wait a minute, that science was cooked up by the united nations for an ulterior motive. so anyway, dana milbank has been very much on the other side of this issue.

warned the alarmists to stop using weather to justify global warming because then what do they do when the weather doesn't cooperate with their predictions of the melting planet? as he wrote -- and i'm quoting now -- in washington's blizzards, the greens were hoisted by their own batard. he concluded, he said if washington's snows persuade the greens to put away the slides of polar bears and pine beetles and keep the focus on jobs, it will have been worth the shoveling. but not everyone got that memo. in july of 2010, the hot summer that followed the intense blizzards when my family put up the igloo, john karl of abc news asked me to do an interview outside in the heat. now, this is obviously an ambush. people who know me well know i enjoy ambushes. so i went out there in the heat. they got ready with the cameras rolling and all this, and they had a pan with an egg in it.

they were going to fry the egg on the pavement. they put it in there and it didn't fry. so nice try, but it didn't work. now, i'm sure you noticed that somebody else tried just this last weekend. last weekend i happened to be at the farm bureau air show which i go to every year when i got a call from home that they have kind of resurrected the igloo, and were talking about that, and they were going to have a great big event on the -- on the mall. in that event, they were going to take the thing called hopes -- now, let me go back to 2003. in 2003, when i realized and i started hearing from a lot of the scientists, the really scientists that it was a hoax, i made the comment that the notion that catastrophic global warming is due to man made anthropogenic man made gases. that's where the hoax came. so they were going to have a

great big thing made with ice. apparently it was about the size of a car. it said "hoax" with a question mark. they were going to put it down there and it was going to melt and they were going to be making a big issue out of it. the problem is nobody showed, so what do they do? they thought we can't do this without any cameras here and all that. so they called it off. they used as an excuse that there had been a storm up here and they thought this might be offensive to people who had lost electricity in the storm. anyway, that thing went under, too. in addition to the recent activity from my alarmist friends, the hot weather has also brought some of my favorite global warming reporters out of hiding, and they have been all too eager to link today's weather events to man made greenhouse gases. of course, many of the most outspoken global warming alarmist scientists have been happy to play along. but the important point is this -- and i want to make this today -- is that no one, not even the most committed alarmists, can claim that any

percentage of the warm weather is due to man made greenhouse gases. and i will go into more details in just a minute. this is an inconvenient truth that global warming reporters have kept out of their headlines, and in some cases their stories as well. seth borenstein of the associated press -- he's a good guy. he is on the other side of this issue, but he is one of these guys that i still like. he is one of the most prominent global warming reporters. he came out last week with another scary headline proclaiming -- and i'm quoting this now -- "this u.s. summer is what global warming looks like. similar quotes and stories appeared in reuters, "the hill" and "politico." yesterday morning, "time" magazine ran a piece by byron walsh with the quote -- "now do you believe in global warming? ." i'm happy to see mr. walsh began his article in the "time" magazine with the picture of my family here and their igloo.

he concluded his piece with the quote -- quote -- we're living in an igloo in the summertime and the ice melt something melting all around us. it's kind of interesting, this is an article, they talk about warming, but if all of a sudden it's unseasonably cold, they change it to cooling. this was in "the new york times." they said -- this is when it was a cool summer last year. they said but this summer has been conspicuously different in new york city. not one 99-degree day in central park, not a single day that the temperature even approached 90. for just the second time in 140 years of recordkeeping, the temperatures failed to reach 90 in either june or july. the daily average last month was at or below normal every day but two days. the temperature broke 80 for 16 days in new york. so it goes on to say that the problem they're having there is it is unusually cool, but that didn't really inure to the

benefit of the alarmists, so that wasn't used. so it's time to take a trip down memory lane. don't forget that time -- "time" is the same publication that told us -- there it is, 1974, told us that we should be very concerned about the coming ice age. there it is. every magazine. "newsweek" had the same thing. all the other magazines said another ice age is coming, we're all going to die. you know, i would -- since there is time to do this, i will mention one thing that is not in my notes here, that if you just stop and think about how many times this has happened. if you take the last 100 years, starting in 1895. 1895-1925, we went through a 30-year period that was a cooling period. and everyone back there was saying that another ice age is coming, we're all going to die. from 1925-1945, for that 20-year period, we went through a warming period and everyone was saying that -- that's when they coined the phrase global warming. that was way back in the 1930's.

anyway, from 1945-1975, we went into a cooling period. again, they talked about global -- about an ice age is coming, and that's where you had had -- and then after that, we went into a warming period that went up to the turn of the century. now it's actually going down into a cooling period again. but that is -- that was actually a chart -- and i guess what i'm saying here is every 30 or -- 20 or 30 years, we go through this. we go through the same hysteria, everyone is going crazy and the world is coming to an end. but the interesting thing about this is the time in the world history when we had the greatest surge of co2 was right after world war ii. that was 1945, and that precipitated not a warming period with all that co2 but a cooling period that endured for 30 years. and there it is, headlines in the paper. now, 30 years later, during the height of the global warming

movement, they changed their tune. the image that is sealed in everyone's mind in the "time" magazine cover is -- there you have it right there." be worried, be very worried." there is the last polar bear standing on the last cube of ice, everything is melting and we're all going to die again. that is still the "time" magazine. you could have it either way. if i were on the board of directors of "time" magazine, i would probably do the same thing. it's a competitive business. you have to sell. the truth is even when you ask an alarmist directly, they will specifically link the recent weather events to human activity. put the -- no, i want to put the igloo back up just so people can enjoy it. how do we know this? we recently came across a recorded conference call held by a group called climate communications. this is a very liberal group. as their web site confirmed, this call was held to spoon-feed talking points to reporters on

how to link the heat over the past few weeks to man made global warming. to his credit, a.p. reporter seth borenstein asked the most important question of the call. he asked what percentage of the recent warm weather can be attributed to man made gases? now, i want to be completely accurate so i would like to quote in full borenstein's question as well as the answers that he got from the dr. michael oppenheimer and dr. steven runney, two of the most foremost global warming scientists. so this is what seth borenstein said. let me try to put you more on the spot, mike and steve, talking to the scientists. i know there is no anutrition -- attribution. you haven't done attribution studies, but if you ballpark it right now and have to put a percentage number on this on the percent that the heat wave, the percentage of blame, what percentage of blame would you

put on anthropogenic climate change, that's man made climate change, that's the heat wave and this current climate change. what percentage would you use? dr. open himmer is a scientist. he said come on, i will not answer that. oh, yes, i will answer it. my answer is we won't do it. you know we have to do things carefully because if you don't, we're going to end up with bogus information out there, people will start disbelieving because you will be more wrong more often. still quoting now. this is not the kind of thing i want to do off the top of my head, nor do i think it can be done. you know convincely without really taking, doing careful analysis, so i will pass on this one and see if steve -- that's the other scientist -- has a different view. well, dr. steve runney said well, i already got way too hypothetical on my last answer. it's probably really dangerous for us to just lob out an

answer. well, this goes on and on and on, and i have all this down, which will actually be in the record at this point, but it is redundant because he keeps trying to get them to say that there is a percentage of chance that this warm weather is due to global warming. now, we have got to stop for a minute because we are seeing that seth borenstein was asking the inconvenient question when the moderators try to step in and tell the a.p. reporter that his question was a bad one. let me quote that again. susan hassel, the moderator for the event. seth, most of the scientists i talk to say it's a controlling factor and that what we can say and that it's really not even really a well-posed question to ask for a percentage, just because it's just what our -- what you're asking for really, and she stammered around quite a bit, is for a model to determine the chances of this happening without climate change or with climate change, and the models

are not very good. so i would have to see how to respond. he said i understand. i have been covering this for 20 years. understand, i don't need a lecture from you, thank you very much. what i'm asking for is -- and he went on and tried to get it. obviously, he never was able to get it. here's the irony. their web site specifically explains that the purpose of the call is to give reporters a link relating hot weather to human-caused global warming. it states -- quote -- "climate communication hosted a press conference featuring experts discussing the connections between extreme heat and climate change, but when pressed, they couldn't make the link." again, borenstein asked a great question, a question that badly needed to be asked. unfortunately, none of the information appeared in his article for the a.p. without that link, borenstein was forced to make his article about what global warming could look like in the future, but in doing so, he left out any

mention of uncertainty expressed by the scientists. borenstein quoted chris field, a leading author of the intergovernmental panel on climate change -- keep in mind that's the united nations who started this whole thing, and they are the ones who are stacking the scientists and he was one of the individuals. he said, according to field, this report warns of unprecedented extreme weather events due to global warming, but as usual, borenstein failed to mention that even the ipcc which normally heightens the fear factor as much as possible admitted in that same march report that there is significant uncertainty regarding linking extreme weather events to human causes. also missing from the article is borenstein's interview with climatologist judith keury. she was good enough to pose her answers on her blog since he didn't use it as curry explained, -- quote -- "we saw

these kinds of heat waves in the 1930's and those were definitely not caused by greenhouse gases. weather variability changes on a multidecadal time scales associated with large ocean oscillations. i don't think what we are seeing this summer is outside the range of natural variability for the past century in terms of heat waves, particularly in cities, urbanization can also contribute to warming." now, there was another interesting part of the conference call that i think is worth mentioning. when abc news reporter bill blakemore asked about the effect of la nina and el nino on today's hot weather, dr. oppenheimer was unyou you comfortable about the question and said it was off message yet noaa, that's the n-o-a-a came

out yesterday with a different opinion as andrew revkin explained in his blog the national oceanic and atmospheric administration reviewed the most notable climate and weather events of 2011, many of these events from an extreme east african drought to australia deluges were significantly driven by a double dip la nina cooling of the tropical pacific ocean agency, the scientist said. in other words, it la nina and el nino that made the difference. in yesterday's tulsa world there was an opinion piece that directly addressed this el known yoa debate and how it affects oklahoma specifically, that's my state of oklahoma. the editorial mentions an interview in april of 2008 with the tulsa national weather service meteorologist nicole mcgavvett regarding record rainful that -- rainfall that

month. she said don't go blaming global warming but rather la nina which happens when the weather is cooler near the equator along the pacific ocean. has nothing to do with global warming. so that same question, the opinion piece mentioned another article published in december of 2011 which is about oklahoma's drought-filled summer of 2011. in it, associate state climatologist gary mcmahon uz said this hot summer happen due to global warming? no, i think when we study this summer we will find we would have had the warmest summer regardless of global warming. with all this in mind it's no wonder that when "time" magazine asked the question now do you believe in global warming the answer is resounding the american people are no longer buying it. as "the washington post" r50e7b8 reported global warming is no longer an issue of concern for

americans. and one of the reasons is the public doesn't trust those who try to use hot weather as proof of global warming. the public has clearly grown weary of the alarmist fear campaigns. they've been going on for 12 years. how bad have things gotten? one indication is no one is even talking about global warming except for myself and representative markey over in the house. as the political article said yesterday, representative markey accused republicans of being silent on the threat of global warming. and called for republicans to hold hearings. while representative markey is quick to accuse republicans of silence he says nothing about the silence we're hearing from the democrats here in the united states senate. we haven't heard anybody, haven't heard the term global warming coming from any senator. when was the last time anyone heard president obama or the democrats mention global warming? in fact, their campaign has

failed so miserably that president obama running for reelection is pretending to support oil and gas to gain votes. the irony is that the president who came into office promising to slow the rise of the oceans and all of that has presided over the complete collapse of the global warming movement. since president obama took office, nearly four years ago, not one global warming cap-and-trade bill has been debated on the senate floor. in fact, if anything they are regressing in support for their pet issue. last year 64 senators went on record in wanting to rein in the obama e.p.a.'s global warming regulations. you know, we've said several times that there have been numerous bills introduced ever since the kyoto treaty was never submitted for ratification back in the early 1990's, ever since that time there have been numerous bills that would be cap-and-trade bills and they've gone down each time they go down by a greater percentage than they did the one before.

in fact, if anything, they're regressing in their support. so the far left environmental community has clearly been instructed to keep quiet qet although sometimes they can't help themselves and get into trouble bikelike the 350.org that i referred to. they are no doubt assured if president obama is reelected he'll do everything he can to achieve his agenda though through regulation because the american people have rejected legislation. that's what's happened and actually the cost of it which is not controvertible, people recognize and nobody has actually refuted the fact that if we were to pass either by legislation or by regulation it would cost the american people between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. people now realize that and know we can't afford to do something that really is not going to accomplish anything. so anyway, the obama administration is already doing, we have identified right

now some $68 billion that he has through regulations been able to have on all this climate agenda. so it's been already very, very experienced, nobody's really aware of it but nonetheless that's what is happening. and he just doesn't want the american people to know it. how can he convince them of that so much economic pain is necessary now that the global warming movement has lost the trust of the public? that won't stop some of the usual suspects from continuing to try to drum up global warming hysteria but we wouldn't count on al gore coming out of hiding to help. or president obama doing anything to back them up, at least not now before the election. it was just the other day george mason i believe it was, university, did a polling of the tv, 480 tv meteorologists. only 19% of them said that we're

having global warming due to manmade gases. a major change from before so the trend line is going back the other way. the polling is definitely going the other way. and back to last weekend's failed effort to blame hot weather on global warming, i'd like to mention three things the scientists agree on. one, first of all, that you can't blame global warming on one event. let me share with you the roger pelke, the professor of environmental studies at the university of colorado over the long term there is no evidence that disasters are getting worse because of climate change. judith curry, another quote by her, this is a well established scientists, she said i've been completely unconvinced by any of the agreements -- arguments that attributes a single extreme weather event, a cluster of

events or statistics of exream weather events to anthropogenic forcing. miles allen, the at the university of oxford oceanic and at atmospheric, this is a quote, when al gore said scientists have clear proof climate change is responsible for the extreme devastating floods and droughts, my heart sank. that was on the rachel med-off, she is one of my favorite liberals and i enjoy being on. i found out bill nigh her science guy, don't fall into the trap of saying because somebody is very, very hot that somehow that supports the global warming. and in fact dana millbank of the "washington post" column, he said -- quote -- "when climate activists make the diewbies just

claim as a canadian environmental group did that global warming is to blame for lack of snow snowe at the winter olympics in vancouver, they invite similar specious conclusions about washington snow argument by anecdote isn't working." that was dana millbank who is on the other side of this issue. i mentioned there are three things. one is that a fact that incontrovertible that people agree on, that one or two events aren't going to be reflect the climate or having have anything to do with global warming. the second is the cost estimate. i wasn't -- years ago when the kyoto treaty was up i wasn't sure which way to go. i assumed the scientists were all together on this only to find out that they weren't but one thing we did find out when we got a report from several universities including m.i.t. that the cost of this if we were to pass any of the bills would have been between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. what i always do when i hear

about billions and trillions of dollars i try to go back and figure out how does that affect my family in the state of oklahoma. about back when we had the largest clinton-gore tax increase, you might remember that, 1993, they increased marginal rates, death tax, capital gains tax and all of that. and it was at that time the largest tax increase in three decades and we've were all pretty outraged about it. yet that was a $32 billion tax increase. here we're talking about a $300 billion to $400 billion tax increase. in the last thing i would say is if you have a tax increase like this, what do you get for it? i sometimes appreciate -- in fact, i always appreciate the administrator of the e.p.a., lisa jackson, an appointee of president obama, and i asked her the question live on tv one of our committee hearings. i said, you know, if you guys are going to do this by regulation or if you're going to have cap-and-trade and punish the american people, all the cost and everything else, if

they're successful, if that happened would this reduce the co2 worldwide? her answer, no, it wouldn't because this isn't where the problem is. the problem is in china, in mexico, in india, and you could carry that awmplet on out further and conclude that if you have that kind of a regulation in this country and drive our manufacturing base overseas, they would go to places like china and india where there are no emissions restrictions. so could have the effect of increasing co2. i thought -- i appreciate very much "time" magazine coming out and bringing up the igloo again. it's a thing of beauty and it's very meaningful to me and i think it told a story a lot of people needed to hear and they've heard it now and i yield the floor. a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from colorado is recognized. mr. bennet: thank you, mr. president. thank you for the recognition. i wanted to come to the floor

today to talk about, briefly, the supreme court decision on health care 346789 one of the things i want to say i was in colorado last week, we had a wonderful time traveling across the whole western senior open of -- slope of our state, spent time in gunnison county and other places. we fished in heartsle and one of thing people were not talking about there was the supreme court decision on health care. what they were talking about was how we get our economy moving again, how we recouple our economic growth in this country to job growth, and wage growth again. how we create a comprehensive and thoughtful approach to reducing our deficit and our debt. how we educate our kids for the 21st century, how we build this economy in this country to make sure that we leave our kids with something better than what we found. in short, they were talking about exactly what people in the

beltway are not talking about. today, the house of representatives -- mr. president, i don't know whether voting has started yet or not -- is voting to repeal -- in the wake of the supreme court decision is voting to repeal the health care reform bill for the 31st time. they have been successful 30 times. they have voted to repeal the bill 30 times, but they feel the need now to do it a 31st time. and, mr. president, i saw on the tv in my office today the twitter that was going, the traffic that was rolling at the bottom of the screen is is one person after another announced gleefully that they were voting to repeal the health care bill for the 31st time. and i thought about a facebook post i saw last week from somebody i know in denver named

mary -- mary sewell, on the school board there but she's not a politician. this is what she wrote the day after the supreme court reached its decision on health care. mary wrote "yesterday's supreme court decision upholding the affordable care act came on a hard day for our family. yesterday afternoon we learned that our 6-year-old annie has type 1 diabetes. she and i sat in the doctor's office crying through her first finger prick, her first insulin shot, our life is now different. she will have this disease for her entire life or until there is a cure. a few years ago, our 0 entire family might have lost our insurance. she now has a preexisting condition that likely would have made her uninsurable as an adult. what i am saying, mary wrote, is not political. it's a mother's sigh of relief. a mother's sigh of relief.

when i heard the supreme court ruling, i was waiting for the call, i was waiting for the call to tell me why my baby looked too thin, why she had to take breaks walking up a flight of stairs. why she had started wetting her bed. the ruling means she lives in a country that won't leave her behind. we are very lucky that we caught this early, before she lost consciousness or went into a coma. something that would have likely happened in the next few days. i know our luck came from health insurance that allowed her worried fiernts take her to the doctor -- parents to take her to the doctor because we had a -- quote -- "bad feeling." many families, even insured ones, can't do what we did. i was raised on the idea of better to be safe than sorry.

our health care system has been better sorry than safe for too long. mr. president, mary goes on to say that the supreme court decision couldn't have come at a better time. our family's worst day. i hope that the folks that are twittering out their repeal for the 31st time of this bill rather than working to try to improve it, rather than working to try to fix it, incapable of actually telling us what they would replace this with would take a moment to read what a mother in denver posted on facebook last week. i don't think this health care bill is perfect and i said that from the day that we passed it. there are issues around cost in particular that i continue to be very concerned with. because despite the rhetoric around this place, the reality is that we can't solve our deficit and debt problem in this country without dealing with a

restructuring of how we deliver health care in the united states. and maybe this bill isn't perfect and maybe there are suggestions that could be made to improve it. i have my own. i tried when we passed the bill to put a fail-safe in place that would actually hold this congress to the numbers that it said it would save, the dollars that we said we would save, and if we didn't, that we had to figure out how to cut or make other changes to get there. so there's more work to be done. but the thing that i find amazing -- and this is why i wanted to come to the floor, mr. president -- is how far away this conversation is from the people that i represent and what a masquerade so much of this conversation is. i know there are a lot of people that were disappointed that the health care bill was declared constitutional by the supreme court and there were people that said they were going to declare it unconstitutional and they didn't. and so the next day and really

for the next week what we heard was, well, the bill imposes a tax on the middle class in this country, that the president broke a promise because he said he wouldn't raise taxes on the middle class. i want everybody to know what's being talked about when people talk about this. they are talking about a piece of the legislation called the health care mandate. some people call it a penalty and some people call it a tax. that's something that's been debated around here for the last week. it hasn't been debated before this. and i don't care what label you put on it, frankly, because people at home are not talking to me about this. and you know why they're not talking to me about this? because it applies to 1% -- 1.2%, to be precise -- of the american people. that's what the congressional budget office told us when we were passing this legislation. and if you don't believe me, it is on page 37. mr. president, i won't enter the

whole opinion into the record. maybe it's page 33 of the supreme court's finding of fact, where justice roberts finds as a matter of fact that the c.b.o. said this mandate would cost $4 billion and that roughly 4 million people would be affected. those are the 4 million people after medicare and medicaid and private employers' insurance and their own -- and personal insurance that people buy. that is the group of people, a sliver, 1% of the american people that can afford to buy insurance but don't and choose to pay the penalty or the tax or the mandate instead of buying their insurance. $4 billion, 4 million people. what the health care bill was intended to do -- and, again, may not have done perfectly and there may be other ideas that we ought to be legislating

around -- what it was intended to do was solve a problem that confronted not 1% of the american people, not 4 million people but a problem that conservatively, extremely conservatively, affects 50% of the american people and is a $58.5 billion problem, not a $4 billion problem. because it's 50% of the people that are covered today by their employer who -- who have to pay $1,100 a year in premium -- in additional premiums to subsidize the uninsured in the united states of america. that was one of the big objectives of dealing with this health care issue. and i say it's conservative because this number doesn't even include the people that are buying insurance on their own. and so maybe if you add those numbers together, you get to about 70% of the american

people. so if we spent a week on the cable television on the floor of the senate occupied completely with this 1% number over here with no theory at all about what we're doing for 50% of america americans. that's how comical this conversation has become -- i shouldn't say comical. that's how detached this conversation has become from what's actually going on in the real lives of the people that i represent and others in this chamber represent. and what's so amazing to me, having watched this as somebody who has not been around here for very long and may not understand all the ways of washington, is that when you look at the history of this so-called mandate or so-called tax, it's really puzzling to understand the politics around it. this is a chart that is part of an article that ran in "the new yorker" a couple weeks ago called, "the unpopular mandate"

by esra klein. and i ask, mr. president, that the entire article be made part of the record. the presiding officer: without objection. a senator: and i urge people to read this. because what he does in this article is chart the political course of this mandate from about 1989 to the present. and the red are the years in which this was a republican idea advanced by republican members of congress and by think tanks like the heritage foundation, who actually came up with the idea to begin with to deal with the fact that there were people in this country that weren't buying health insurance and that we were all subsidizing. mr. bennet: and then when it became a democratic idea in more recent times. strikes me as one person watching all of this that this might have more to do with the party that's in the white house or not in the white house than it does with respect to the merits of the idea. but it's, of course, the merits

of these ideas that we should be debating and talk abouing aboutt we shouldn't be telling the american people that something that affects 1% of the american people is a broad-based assault on the middle class and we should be bringing to this floor the ideas we have for improving what 50% of the american people or 70% of the american people are already facing. that is what people in our state believe. here's part of a editorial from the "greeley tribune," which i think was published yesterday, where they wrote, "in 2010, the north colorado medical center provided more than 71 million inform services to indigent patients who didn't have health insurance. it wrote off another $29 million in bad debt. eventually, the greeley tribune writes, "insured patients must pay for that in higher premiums and co-pays." mr. president, i'd ask that that editorial be made a part of the

record. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. bennet: thank you, mr. president. so what i want to say is, i believe that folks in colorado have moved on here, that they want us to improve this legislation, that they want us to get focused on the real matters at hand, which is getting this economy going -- going again, getting us into an environment where we have rising jobs and rising wages again. and they're a lot less interested in these talking points. i don't understand why people that are in politics can simultaneously make such a big deal about this that affects 1% of the people in this country and at the same time support legislation, for example, that forces women, that mandates women to have procedures before

they can make a choice about their own reproductive health. it doesn't make any sense because it's completely inconsistent. and i have a daughter, annie, who's seven. not six, like mary's. but it's her health care and the certainty in her life and in her sister's life and the thousands of children across my state whose health care we should be interested in. so i can see that other colleagues of mine have come to the floor so i -- i'm going to move along here, but i -- i want to just before i do that and before i yield to the senator from maryland say that if this repeal happened in the house and then this repeal happened in the senate and it were signed into law, 932,000 coloradans who have preexisting conditions would lose their insurance.

50,000 young adults in colorado who can now stay on their parents' insurance until they're 26 would no longer be able to. women could once again be discriminated against simply because they're women. it's welcome to 69,000 women in colorado that need maternity care or other women's health services that they're not going to be charged higher premiums since this law is in effect. and when these exchanges are set up, 521,000 colorado children will for the first time have better vision and dental coverage. i want to work in a bipartisan way going forward to try to make sure we're doing everything we can to follow the examples of places like st. mary's hospital in grand junction or the university of colorado hospital in denver or denver health in

denver, to drive higher quality and to drive lower costs. it's essential. it's essential for our economy. it's essential for our competitive position in the world. and it's essential that we put these talking points down and start actually dealing with the facts as they are. and with that, mr. president, i thank you for your patience, and i yield the floor. a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from maryland. a senator: first let me thank senator bennet for his comments as it real to the affordable care act. i appreciate very much the point that you made what was passed by congress and signed by president obama was really an evolution of work that has been done and recommendations that have been made by democratic and republican administrations over a long period of time. mr. cardin: and that with the supreme court -- what the supreme court did was uphold congress' ability to move forward with a plan that will give every american access to affordable, quality health care. i couldn't agree with you more that we need to do work on this, we need to improve the bill. there are different things that we need to -- to work on. and democrats, republicans

should be working together to move forward on the health care debate. and i also appreciate the point that you raised that the house of representatives -- i think it's the 31st time that they're acting on legislation that repeals all or part of the affordable care act but their strategy is to repeal the law and they have nothing to move forward with. they don't have a plan. and as you point out, that if that were to become the case -- and it won't; we're not going to pass it in the senate -- that parents that now have their children on their insurance policy that are 23, 24, 2 25-year-olds, would lose that opportunity. that parents who can now get their children covered by insurance who have preexisting conditions would lose that protection. the patients' bill of rights that we've incorporated against abusive practices of private insurance companies so that if someone goes into an emergency room with emergency conditions, they need to be reimbursed under prudent layperson standards. that could be lost. and our seniors could lose their

wellness exam that's covered under medicare. and that we're closing the coverage gap on prescription drugs. that could be lost. and let me also point out that our seniors appreciate the fact that what we did in the affordable care act extends the life of medicare for about a decade. that would be lost. and small businesses who now will be able in 2014 to go into exchanges and not be discriminated against by paying more for their insurance than larger companies. that would be lost. and, as you know, the attack on women's health care -- this bill that is now law allows women to be treated equally with men as far as premiums are concerned. that would be lost. so i appreciate you taking the time on the floor to go over exactly what would happen if we were to repeal the affordable care act. what we need to do -- and i think the courts gave us this opportunity. they really spoke to the fact that it is up to congress to move forward on this.

it gives us a chance, democrats and republicans to say how can we make sure that our health care system is as cost-effective as possible? the senate finance committee today, we had a round table discussion with experts as to how we can do delivery system reforms, use -- a way that we can manage people with serious illnesses and bring down the costs. that's what we need to do. but the affordable care act reduced health care costs. look at the record. we would lose all of that. it would actually add to the deficit by repealing the affordable care act. as you know, the house changed their rules so they could repeal the bill, this evening it adds to the -- even though it adds to the deficit. so i wanted to first thank you for bringing this to the attention of our colleagues as to what is involved here, and i do think democrats and republicans need to work together. and i tell you, the one thing i hear more and more from my constituents, stop the gridlock in washington. stop debating the old issues. let's move forward. let's create jobs.

let's work together. let's get the job done for the american people. i want to ask consent that i could proceed up to ten minutes as if in morning business. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. cardin: mr. president, i rise to bring attention to turrets syndrome, a neurological disorder that affects mor affecs in a severe form and many more in a milder form. it is characterized by repetitive and voluntary movements and vocalizations called ticks. the disorder is named for a french neurologist who in 1885 first described the condition in an 86-year-old woman. t.s. occurs in people of all ethnic groups and is present in males three to four times as often than in feel females. early symptoms are recognized in children 3 to 9 years of age. although it can be a chronic condition with symptoms last ago

lifetime, most patients experience the most severe symptoms in their early teens, with s.o.s. some improvements occurring -- with some improvements occurring in the late teens and continuing into adulthood. a boy visited my office to tell me about his experiences with turrets. jackson first noticed symptoms five years ago during the summer of 2007 when on vacation with his family at the beach his body started to -- started making strange movements that he couldn't control. first came a head jerk, then eye splinting and rolling. later he started emitting high-pitched squeaking sound. as he put it, "i was a regular kid one moment with good grades and then the next i was rolling my eyes and making sounds like a fire alarm going off." parents of other children began complaining about his being in

their children's class. with teachers who were uneducated on t.s., the symptoms continued throughout the school year. he began skipping school or spending more time in the nurse's office than in class. fortunately, jackson's parents found a physician that was able to quickly diagnose the condition as turrets syndrome. jackson changed schools and spent the next few years in treatment trying various medications. those medicines were somewhat helpful. jackson tried other treatments and clinical trials at johns hopkins university where he met dr. matthew suspect who teaches children exercises to help control the ticks. that technique, c.p.i. ty, requires patients to use a great amount of focus and it does not work for everyone. but it did help jackson control his squeaks. in middle school he encountered

a guidance counselor named mrs. oat oats. she learned as much as she could about t.s. and helped me learn how to deal with the kids better and talk to teachers about what was hang. she also gave me a safe place to hang out when things were bad. through her and a group that my mom started to step h. help other families with t.s. in other area i made a few friend whose understood me b she also helped jackson develop a presentation for the sixth grade classes in his school. jackson is now 13 years of age and in september he will enter the ninth grade. he is no longer feeling depressed and he no longer retreats from earmarks. he welcomes the opportunity to use his experience to educate teachers and other students as a youth ambassador, a position for which he was trained at the national t.s.a. conference with about 40 other young people. recently he presented information about t.s. is more than 400 elementary school students and says he really

enjoys answering their questions of law he believes that it is important for people to understand that people are t.s. are not doing these things on purpose and just want to be treated like everyone else. jackson still has unpredictable and sometimes painful ticksment but he knows that t.s. will not stop him from accomplishing everything he wants to do in lifetime last year jackson's little brother was also diagnosed with t.s. jackson says that having a teacher who understands the problem and knows how to help is one of the most important things in the life of a child with t.s. he is preparing a special presentation for his brother davis' class that he will delivery when the 2013 school year starts. i am hopeful that the examples set by him, his guidance counselor, mrs. oats, and other t.s.a. counselors, are blazing a trail for those newly diagnosed. i am pleased that congress

understands how important public awareness of t.s. is. congress create and outreach program for turrets. the purpose is to increase recognition and diagnosis for t.s., reduce the stigma ttached to the disorder and increase the availability of effective treatments. the program also includes a public-private partnership, c.d.c. and the turret's syndrome association or t.s.a. that provides educational programs for physicians, school personnel as well as those who have t.s., their fathers and the general public. -- their families and the general public. to date, the program has conducted more than 520 educational programs for 32,000 professionals and community members nationwide. this program is working well. in addition t, the c.d.c. has

entered into agreement with the university of south florida to better understand the public health impact of tick disorders including t.s. for indiduals and their families and the community. one of the areas being assessed in education as they're looking is the effect of t.s. on standardized test scores, grade retention and the presentation of individual education programs. significantly, they're also measuring teachers' understanding of t.s. and this information will be used to inform and improve outreach programs i urge my colleagues to support full you understanding of this program again this year so that we might expand awareness of t.s. and lead to better quality of life for people like jackson and families across the nation who are affected by this disorder. with that, mr. president, i would yield the floor. mr. cornyn: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from texas. mr. cornyn: mr. president, i'd ask unanimous consent to speak up to 15 minutes. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. cornyn:man, i've listened to some of my friends across the

aisle talk about the vote in the house to repeal wha repeal whatw come to be known as obamacare. i think history has now demonstrated that it is not the affordable care act. it is the unaffordable care act. and my colleagues suggest that the only way that we could possibly protect people from preexistinexisting disease excls under their insurance policy or make sure that young adults can remain covered under their parents' coverage is to pass this monstrosity. that's just not the case. we could easily address these other issues as well as affordability if we were take a step-by-step approach to try to make sure that the

patient-physician decision-making process is preserved while making health coverage for affordable for more americans. unfortunately, that was not the approach taken under obamacare. in fact, under obamacare, there was almost no attention paid to trying to make coverage more affordable. the focus was on expanding coverage, an admirable goal, but one that ignored affordability almost entirely. and we now know that obamacare was based -- the vote in favor of and the public support such as it is for obamacare was based on a litany of what has now proven to be broken promises, the promise that if you like what you have, you can keep it. we know that's not true. more and more employers are dropping their employer-provided coverage for their employees. the president himself said that a family of four would actually see their premiums reduced, on

average of $2,500 a year. what's happened? premiums continue to go up, roughly at the rate of 10% a year. the president said -- and i heard my colleague from maryland just say -- obamacare cut the deficit. well, how you can spend $2.5 trillion and take $500 billion more from medicare, an already fragile, unsustainable program -- unless we fix it -- and that cuts the deficit is, i think, beyond the understanding of most americans, certainly it's beyond me. so i would like to ask my colleagues this question: what we now know is that now the supreme court has decided the constitutionality of obamacare. the supreme court has said -- and under our system of government it is the supreme court that is the final word on

these matters -- it said, the only way obamacare could be constitutional is for the individual mandate to be considered a tax -- a tax. and indeed it is a tax, a broad-based tax on the middle class. i want to know how many votes in the house, how many many o of or colleagues in the senate would have voted for obamacare if it had been equaled i called what y is, a middle-class tax increase -- a middle-class tax increase? i think it is important to have a vote in the house today and i think it is important to have a vote in the senate, as senator mcconnell has proposed to do, to see whether based on the fact that the supreme court has fin finally decided that that is tax on the middle class, whether it would enjoy the support across the thiol i aisle that it did i9 and 2010. but i want to talk a moment more

about taxes and indeed the challenges that face small businesses and working families across the country and the need for the senate to stop contributing to the class warfare rhetoric and game gamesmanship that seems to encompass us 118 days now before the general election, and the importance of actually addressing taxes in a constructive manner, in a way that will hopefully get our economy growing again. to that end, it is my sincere hope that the majority leader will allow an open-amendment process on this piece of legislation and allow it to go forward and have senators given the opportunity to offer ideas about how to improve this legislation and help small business job creation. what we do know for a fact is that unless congress and the president act before december

31, 2012, american taxpayers will face the single-largest tax increase in american history. why is that? well, because tax provisions we passed in 2001 and 2003 and then again in 2010 under president obama will expire at the end of this year. for example, in less than six months, the highest individual tax bracket will rise from 35% to just under 40%. and i think it's important for everyone to realize, we're just talking about federal taxes. we're not talking about your state taxes or your local taxes. many states -- thank goodness not texas -- but many states have a state income tax added to the burden. and almost everyone pays some form of sales tax. when we add to the tax burden of

the american people, we need to think what that means in terms of their cumulative tax burden including federal, state, and local taxes. unless congress acts, people in the lowest tax bracket will see a 50% tax increase. indeed the marriage penalty will increase. the child credit will be cut in half, and taxes on capital gains and dividends will increase. why are lower taxes on capital gains and dividends important? on capital gains, it's important because we want to incentivize people to make long-term investments to create jobs. why is a lower dividend rate important? well, many seniors who are retired depend on dividend income from their retirement funds in order to help pay their costs of living. so the bottom line is unless congress and the president act before december 31 -- and i would submit it is important to

ask sooner rather than later -- to send a signal to the markets and job creators about what their tax burden is going to be january 1, that unless we act, every taxpayer in the country will pay higher taxes. everyone. unfortunately, instead of engaging in a serious manner on this issue, the president earlier this week reverted to his old play book of class warfare and gamesmanship, and he advocated again another policy which has failed to pass the laugh test really, if you want to think about it. the president has previously proposed the so-called buffett rule, pointing to warren buffett. saying if we just pass the buffett rule and raise taxes, our problems would all be solved. you know how much revenue would be generated by the buffett rule if congress were to pass it? enough revenue to run the federal government for 11 hours.

11 hours. less hahn a half a day -- less than a half a day. well, i have to admit the president's recent announcement that he wants to raise taxes on small businesses has left me scratching my head. i remember back in 2010 when president obama said that raising taxes during a from jill economic recovery -- quote -- "would have been a blow to our economy." that's what president obama said in 2010. but in 2012, he seems to be singing an entirely different tune. at the time in 2010, economic growth was roughly 3.1%. that's when president obama said raising taxes would be a blow to our economy. you know what the economic growth numbers are today? our economy is growing at roughly 2% of g.d.p., our gross domestic product. so it's instead of 3.1%, it's

growing at an even slower rate now. of course, as i mentioned, this tax increase that the president and the majority leader are proposing is on top of the obamacare taxes. and you know it's not just the individual mandate that i alluded to earlier that will penalize people who don't buy government-approved health care. but that is on top of approximately 20 different other tax increases that are part of the obamacare legislation. not only do these new taxes break the president's own pledge not to raise taxes on individuals who make less than $200,000 a year or families making less than $250,000 a year, but it also creates barriers to new investment and

job creation. you know, recently i attended downstairs on the first floor a meeting with bob zoellick, the head of the world bank and the president of the federal reserve, the new york tprefrbg tprefrbg -- federal reserve office. the gentleman who is president of the federal of the new york l reserve, i asked people what is your mood? are you going to invest or sit back on the sidelines? he said almost universally the message is we're done. we're done. we're not doing anything else until washington -- in other words, congress and the president, figure this out. who in their right mind would want to start a new business with the uncertainty as far as taxes are concerned? or the burden that are imposed upon individuals and small businesses because of obamacare. i mentioned that in addition to

what the supreme court found to be a tax, the individual mandate, obamacare includes a new 3.8% surtax on capital gains, dividends, rents and interest earned by many taxpayers. this surtax goes into effect next year in 2013. another thing i found just amazing in terms of the audacity of those who supported obamacare in 2009 and early 2010 is a lot of the taxes that were included in the bill didn't go into effect until after this next election. isn't that just an amazing coincidence? well, enacting this permanent tax hike was a mistake then and it continues to be a mistake now. it would discourage savings and investment. it will reduce productivity. and it will depress wages and the standard of living for millions of americans.

according to one nonprofit economic policy research and educational organization, a 2.9% tax increase would depress economic growth by 1.3%. you heard me a moment ago say that our economy is growing roughly at 2%, and this think tank says they estimate that a 2.9% tax increase would depress economic growth by 1.3%. and it would reduce capital formation by 3.4%. now, those are numbers that come out of obviously a think tank, but what that means is fewer jobs and a lower standard of living for many americans. the damage to job creation and economic growth would be even greater, from a 3.8% investment tax. so, you don't have to be an economist or a rocket scientist to figure out that higher taxes are going to depress economic

activity. indeed, it's all about incentives. if we create incentives for people to be productive, work hard and make investments, then they will respond. if we raise the bar and make it more expensive and make it harder, they're going to do less of it. it's just that simple. taxpayers, including small businesses, are already scheduled to get hit with the largest tax increase at the end of the year, as i've already mentioned. well, i'll just close on this as far as this subject is concerned. we know the key to job creation is to grow the economy and allow small businesses to flourish, invest and create jobs. that's what we're missing now. government has grown and grown and grown. government spent money it didn't have under the stimulus bill that was passed early in the obama administration. you know what the projection was at that time, that unemployment would be today? if we just passed this spending

bill using borrowed money. the president's administration said that unemployment would be at 5.6%. and yet it continues to persist over 8%. so we know that obviously didn't work. but i believe it's important we put in place an insurance policy against any senate effort that would increase taxes on small businesses. for that reason, i've offered time after time a proposal that would require a supermajority to raise taxes on small businesses. the last time i raised this proposal, when we considered the 2010 budget, actually which is the last time the senate passed a budget, that's another subject altogether, the amendment passed with the support of 82 senators. 42 democrats, many of whom still serve in the senate. raising taxes on small businesses who represent the primary engine of job growth in this country is not the answer

to getting our economy back on track. i know that about 400,000 small businesses in texas that employ four million people especially cannot afford to pay higher taxes, particularly at this time. and we know that it is small businesses that create the vast majority of new jobs. so, given that the administration has said it's committed to creating jobs, i'm left wondering why they'd want to increase taxes on those that we're depending upon to do just that. i know that millions of americans who remain out of work are wondering just the same thing today. finally, on a separate note, mr. president, i want to make a brief comment about the voter identification debate. this is particularly important in my state, but it's important across the country because many states have passed commonsense voter identification laws to

protect the integrity of the ballot and to prevent dilution of the vote for majority and minority members and everyone across the board, and to protect against voter fraud. yesterday attorney general holder spoke in houston, texas, at a gathering of the naacp. and i'm sorry to say that his remarks were completely inappropriate and misleading. mr. holder knows, or he should know that the texas law that requires a photo i.d. in order to cast a ballot will be issued free of charge -- free of charge -- to any voter that asks for one. free of charge. he conveniently ignores the fact that the supreme court of the

united states dispositively held that voter i.d. laws are constitutional and necessary to protect the integrity of the vote. and this is really the low point of the attorney general's remarks. he once again defamed my state and our state legislature by equating our sequence voter i.d. law -- our commonsense voter i.d. law with a poll tax. by injecting the specter of jim crow racism, the attorney general is playing the lowest form of identity politics. mr. holder knows better. this rhetoric is irresponsible and a disgrace to the office of the attorney general. shame on him. mr. president, i yield the floor.

the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll quorum call:

quorum call:

a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from florida. mr. rubio: i ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be suspended. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. rubio: thank you, mr. president. i wanted to come to the floor today -- i think the good news is i have read recently that the senate is going to spend the next couple of weeks, maybe the whole month, talking about tax policy. i think that's very encouraging, because this is one of the issues i was hoping we would deal with early when i got here last year. i'm quite frankly surprised that it's taken a year and a half to pivot to this issue, but i'm glad we're finally on it. and i'm hopeful -- i don't know if that has been determined yet, but i'm hopeful that on this legislation that's currently before the senate, that the minority will be given an opportunity to introduce ideas. i think that's important for this place to work well. i read the history of this distinguished place, and it only works well, it only functions when both sides are -- their ideas are allowed to be heard. i know that we can count votes

here. from time to time, we may have a chance to pass a few things, but when you're in the minority as i am, it will be harder for us to get some ideas passed, but i would love for you to at least get a vote on some of the ideas that we are hoping to push forward and our hope is that will happen. let's hope that works out. but what i wanted to talk about today a little bit is to kind of remind us of what our goal is in all these conversations because ultimately i think that's important. you can't arrive at the right solutions if you don't know exactly where it is you're trying to get to. our goal, i believe -- and this is a consensus now throughout this country, and i think it's actually something that unites both political parties. our goal needs to be to grow the economy. that's our goal. to grow the economy. what it means, when you grow the economy, good things happen for everybody. now, how does the economy grow is the first fundamental question we have to understand. the economy grows when two things happen. either someone starts a business or someone grows their existing

business. that's what leads to economic growth. it's that simple, really. someone starts a new business because they think they can make money at it or someone goes into their existing business and says i think we can make more money, let's grow this thing. that's how the economy grows. and so the issue before us here as federal policymakers has to be what can we do, what can the federal government do to help that kind of growth? in essence, what can the federal government do to encourage people and make it easier for people to either start a business or to grow their business? and if that is our goal, then every -- then every time a measure comes before this body, tax policy, regulatory policy, what we should ask ourselves is does this make it easier or harder for someone to start a business? does it make it easier or harder for someone to grow an existing business? does this measure make it easier or harder for the economy to grow? because if we are indeed united by this goal of growing the economy, that should be the measure of anything that we take

on. and it's through that lens that i want to examine some of the things we're talking about right now because it seems to me, at least in some of the policies that i have heard proposed this week, that maybe some folks have the goal wrong, because if you closely examine some of these policies, it sounds like the goal is let's take a limited economy that isn't growing and let's divide it up. and primarily it sounds like let's take this limited economy that isn't growing and let's allow us to take money from people that maybe are making a little too much so you can give it to the government and the government can spend it on behalf of people that maybe aren't making enough. now, i know that may sound appealing to some folks that are in the part of -- those americans that aren't making enough money, but i want you to know something. it never works. that idea never works. here's why it never works. it actually never works because, first of all, the money doesn't get to you. when you give government money to spend, it invariably doesn't

usually spend it very well. and, in fact, when you give government money to spend, the people who end up getting that money are the people who can afford to hire people to come to washington and influence how the money is spent. so sometimes the money never even gets to you if, in fact, you allow the government to do this. but it's more complicated than that, really. it can really cost people their jobs, and here's why. how you create businesses or how you expand an existing business is pretty straightforward. someone is in business, someone makes some money or gets a hold of some money and they decide to take that money and invest it. they use the money they have made and they reinvest it back in their business so that the business grows or they use the money they have made to start a brand-new business. this stuff works. this is how the american economy has grown and how we became the most prosperous people on the earth. and i don't just know that it works because i read about it in a magazine. i know that it works because i lived it. as i have detailed and talked

about in the past on this floor, my father was a bartender. that's what he did. he worked at hotels as a bartender. my mom was a lot of different jobs, but for a while she worked, for example, as a maid in a hotel as well. the reason i tell you that is because the reason why my mom and dad had a job that paid the money so they could raise us and give us the chance to do all the things that me and my siblings have been able to do is because somebody made some money and they took that money and open up this -- opened up this hotel. that's why my parents had a job. they didn't have a job because the president of the united states back in 1965 or 1975 gave them a job. they had a job because someone who made money took that money they had and used it to start a new business, or to grow an existing business and hire them. they also had a job because other people who had money decided to use that money to go on vacation, and they came to miami beach or they came to las vegas when i lived in las vegas and they spent that money at these hotels. the point is that people had money and they either invested

it or spent it, and it allowed a bartender and a maid, my mother and father, to raise me and our siblings and to give us opportunity. that was true in the 1950's, in the 1960's, in the 1970's, the 1980's and 1990's. it's still true. that's what you need to grow this economy. and the problem is that if you go after these people, if you go after this money that they have made and you give it to the government, maybe they'll decide not to open up that new business. maybe they will decide this is not the year to take that vacation. or instead of taking the five-day vacation, they take the three-day vacation. and you know who gets hurt? the bartender and the maid. the people that work at these places. because there is -- money has to go somewhere. and if you're taking it out of the hands of the people who invest it and spend it, they can't invest it, they can't spend it, and it's people that are trying to make it like my parents were who get hurt by it. so we have got to get our goal right because if our goal is to grow the economy, we don't have

to call trick plays. what we can do at the federal level to grow the economy is pretty straightforward. all you have to do is talk to the people who grow the economy. go out there and talk to the people who have a great idea and are trying to start a business. they'll tell what you they're looking for. it's pretty straightforward stuff. tax reform. what do we mean by tax reform? it's simple. we want a tax code that's stable, predictable and affordable. of course we have to have taxes. government needs revenue to be able to pay for the things that we all expect from government, but it has to be a predictable system and it has to be an affordable system. you see, if your taxes get too high, people may decide not to invest it in this country or to leave it in the bank, and that doesn't help anybody. and so the point is that we need to have a tax code that's stable, predictable and affordable. we need regulations that are the same, stable, affordable and predictable. now, look, we need to have regulations, right? i mean, i want this water to be clean. i don't want that water to

poison me. we don't want to walk out on the street and breathe in air that's going to hurt us. there is a role for regulation. the problem is that most federal regulations are set by bureaucrats that work for the government, and all they think about is can this regulation maybe help? they don't think at all about what the impact of that regulation is going to be on businesses. that's not part of the equation. when they sit down and write a regulation, that's not part of the equation at all. and so you end up having these regulations that may not even help that much but hurt a lot, that help wipe out entire industries but whose impact on helping the environment or something else is nebulous at best. and so we have got to change that. that's why we need to pass a law here like the rains act which says that any regulation that has an economic impact beyond a certain amount of money should have to be approved by elected people who are accountable, who have to measure both the effectiveness of the regulation but also whether it's going to

cost jobs or wipe out an industry because that's important, too. protecting our industries and our source of job creation is just as important as some of these other things that we're trying to protect through regulations, and they have to be balanced against one another, not simply made a decision in a vacuum. along those lines, something that's both a tax and a regulation is obamacare. we have a health insurance problem in america. there's no denying that. but there are better ways to deal with it. and the problem is that this bill that passed has created a tremendous amount of uncertainty. for example, it says if you have more than 50 full-time employees, these are certain requirements that you're going to have to meet. imagine if you're a company with 48 or 49 employees. this may not be the year to hire the 50th. and maybe you were going to be the 50th but now you don't get hired. or worse, maybe you will decide this is the year to turn all my employees into part-time

employees. that's not good for the workers. and yet, that's the impact this law is having. not to mention the fact that it's a tax increase. that's what the i.r.s. does. the i.r.s. collects taxes. and guess who you have to prove to that you have insurance. and not just any old insurance, but insurance that they deem to be acceptable, the i.r.s. millions of americans now every year will have to prove to the i.r.s. that they have insurance or you owe the i.r.s. money. that's a tax, and that's not going to help job creation, especially if you're a small business. i outlined this last week. imagine a small business run by a husband and wife with two kids and the business -- not them, the business makes $95,000 a year. it would cost them between $4,000 and $6,000 to buy health insurance. if they don't, they will owe the i.r.s. $2,000. now, you tell me that's good for that business. or imagine if you're thinking about going into business and you realize that this is what's

going to happen to you, you decide not to go into business. that's not good for growth. that's why this law needs to be repealed and it needs to be replaced. something else we need is how about a pro-american energy policy. do people realize that the american innovator has come up with this technology over the last five years that now has made us a very energy-rich country? i don't know if people fully understand how energy-rich america is. do you want a small glimpse of what it can mean to our future? go to north dakota. that's having a jobs boom. they can't find enough people to work there because energy is important. we need to start behaving like an energy-rich country with a true all of the above strategy, where the energies we choose, by the way, are decided by the marketplace, not by a politician. when politicians decide which energy source to get, do you know who wins? the people with the best lobbyists, the people with the

best lobby, the people with the most political influence. that's how you get a solyndra-type situation or a company that was going to go bankrupt gets all this money of your tax dollars. meanwhile, america is sitting on over 100-some odd years of natural gas at our disposal and no concise natural energy policy to utilize it. let me tell you why energy matters. because if we can get energy costs down and stable and predictable, manufacturing will start coming back to america. that's one of the leading -- that's one of the leading costs of manufacturing is energy. we're an energy-rich country. some of those factories that close, we can actually get them to come back here. imagine what that would do for economic growth. not to mention the fact that america could potentially now begin to sell overseas as well, creating yet another industry and all the things that come with it. how about free and fair trade? there is an emerging middle class all over the world now. one of the great things that's

happened over the last 20 years is that all over the world there are people that just a decade ago were living in poverty that now can afford to buy the stuff we invent and build. people all over the world, by the way, that can now afford to take vacations. and do you know where they want to come? to the united states of america. they want to come to florida, but they also want to go to all kinds of -- they want to come here. i think that's fantastic, that now that there are millions of people all over the world that can afford to visit the united states and leave their money at our hotels, at our restaurants, at our amusement parks, that creates jobs, that creates growth. free and fair trade that allows the american people to build things that we can sell overseas to other places and lowers the cost of buying certain things here. just last year we ratified the free trade agreement with colombia, panama and south korea. we are already seeing the economic benefits of that in south florida. imagine in if we were able to do that with more countries in a free and fair way.

has to be fair. one last thing we could probably do to help grow this economy is deal with the long-term debt. that's what it is, it's a long-term debt problem that hovers over all over this conversation and creates some uncertainty. people are afraid especially people with lots of money are afraid to investigate in the american -- invest in the america economy, and they think that country is destined for confiscatory tax rates. they're going where europe is going. we don't want to invest in a country that will wind up like europe in five years. that's why we have to deal with the long-term debt and the sooner the better. and to deal with the long-term debt, by the way, you have to deal what with what's causing it. that's why it's so important we save medicare. medicare is a very important program. my mother is on medicare. i would never support anything that hurts my mother or people like her. but people in my generation need to understand that if we want to keep medicare the way it is for

our parents and we want medicare to even exist when we retire, medicare is going to have to look different for us perks for 41-year-olds. we have to save medicare and to deal with the long-term debt we have to deal with that. that's what's driving part of the debt. that's not being driven by foreign aid which is less than 1% of our budget. the debt is not being driven by food stamp programs. the debt is not being driven by defense spending. now, look if money is being misspent or wasted it's never a good idea to do that. if there are ways to save money in foreign aid, we should save it. if there are ways to save money in the food stamp program, we should save it. if there are ways to save money in the defense budget, we some should save it but that's not what is driving our long-term debt and to pretend were going to get 100% of our savings from 25% or 20% of our budget leads to the kind of catastrophic cuts we talk about in this town because no one wants to touch the big issues. that has to be dealt with.

now, what would happen if we did these six things? let's say that tomorrow oversight -- overnight magically we got real tax reform, real regulatory reform, replaced and replaced obamacare, had a pro-american energy strategy, expanded free and fair trade and we had a plan in place that began to deal with the long-term debt in a serious and sustainable way. let me tell you what would happen. explosive economic growth, primarily by the creation of jobs. and you know what more jobs means? it means number one, more taxpayers. it means we can generate revenue for government to pay for the kinds of stuff we all want government to do and you don't have to raise tax rates to do that. it means you have more taxpayers who are now paying into the tax system that give you the revenue you need to bring the debt under control. everything gets easier if the economy grows. the debt gets easier, our budgets get easier. let me tell you, that means

more customers for your business. if someone is unemployed it's hard for them to spend money. hard for them to buy a house you have less the things that go in it. hard for them to take vacations. more jobs means more stability for your business or for the place you work in. more jobs means more taxpayers, more customers for your business and, by the way, it means a more stable society. a place where people, hard work can earn them a decent wage so they can save money for their kids' college, save money for their retirement, so they can buy a home and punish it, take a couple weeks vacation a year with their families. millions of americans can't do that anymore. millions of americans have done everything we've asked of them. they went to school, they graduated, they were told if they did that, they could find a job that paid them a decent wage and they're struggling to do that now. by the way, all the strategies for growth aren't at the federal

level. it's important that states take on the issue of education reform. it's important for us as parents to be honest with our kids. in the 21st century it's going to be really hard to find a job if all you have is a high school diploma. it's just that simple. you look at the unemployment rate between people that have a college degree or a post-high school degree and those that don't, it's stunning. if you don't have more than high school education, you are going to struggle to succeed in this new century. we have throat our kids understand that. it's our jobs as parents and as a community to do a that. by the way, it's important to work with the states as i outlined earlier to modernize our education system. why have we stigmatized career creation? why can't we graduate kids from high school with a diploma and an industry certification in a career? we need to compete with a world, not just with other states.

these oar things that have to happen as well. ultimately, look, i think the point i want to drive today is we need to remind ourselves of what the goal is here. the goal is growth. the goal is what can we do at the federal level to help grow the economy? ultimately, the economy grows because of the private sector. because someone who has made some money takes that money and invests it. by starting a new business or by growing their existing business. and we should find ways to make that easier and encourage people to do that. that has to be our goal. it doesn't require trick plays, doesn't require some complicated new gimmick. we don't have to reinvent the wheel. the american people haven't run out of good ideas. americans haven't forgotten how to start businesses or even entire new industries. even as i speak to you right now i am 100% convinced within walking distance of this

building there is some juan where drawing up a business plan on the napkin or scrap piece of paper. we are still the same people we've always been. there's nothing wrong with the american people. they just need a little help from their government. and i think if we get our goals right around here, we can do a few simple but important things that allow americans to do once again what we do better than any country or any people in the history of the world. and that's create prosperity and create opportunity. so thank you for the opportunity to speak today. i yield the floor. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

a senator: madam president? the presiding officer: the senator from new york is recognized. mr. schumer: i ask unanimous consent the quorum be dispensed with. the presiding officer: without objection, so ordered. mr. schumer: before i get into the substance of my remarks shall, i heard of the remarks of my colleague or the concluding part of it, senator

rubio, talking about ideas and education and small business growth. i hope -- i agree with his basic concept. that america, we are still the greatest country in the world, that we encourage entrepreneurs and people with great ideas, that education means a great deal to making that happen, that no other country inspires young people, middle aged people, even older people to start new businesses. and i hope it means he's going to vote for the proposal that's now before us. because what this proposal does is take that young person within walking distance of washington, d.c. who has a great idea and once they start a business, allows them to get that business to move more quickly and there are lots of those businesses, probably some within washington, d.c. as well. so i hope my colleague from florida will vote for our small business jobs and tax relief act. the proposal will spur economic growth. it will create nearly one

million new jobs in this country. if my republican colleagues cared about small business in america, they'd work with us to pass this commonsense bill immediately. instead of playing procedural games that are thinly veiled attempts to block these tax cuts that spur hiring. the bill is based on bipartisan ideas that have traditionally enjoyed republican support, yet they are -- they are obstructing their passage. why are our republican colleagues changing their tune? the only explanation is that republicans continue to block proposals that will help create jobs and spur our economic recovery for their own political gain. this is a simple proposal. it's a smart proposal. it's a tax cut proposal. in my home state of new york, small businesses from clinton county are poised to grow and make the jump to the next level.

these business owners know that the economy is slowly turning a corner, but we're not there yet to full unthrottled growth. so they're looking for congress to do more, not less, to spur hiring. this initiative is aimed at the small businesses that are truly the lifeblood of our nation. and we need to help them jump-start expansion plans this year. no time to wait. there's a business in cortland, new york, in central new york, called precision e forming. it's a great small business intis that would use this tax cut to buy a new piece of equipment called a dip coder to help the company create high-end acoustics like hearing aids. with the dip coder, precision e forming will need to hire new employees. and there are stories like this, madam president, throughout my state. napoleon engineering services, a ball bearing plant hopes to

hire more employees in the near future and will purchase new equipment for its growing business. quinnland's pharmacy in livingston county wants to add an additional location in sexual are a county -- -- schuyler county and in statten island a restaurant owner told me this could help him expand to additional locations. simply put, this bill makes equipment purchases and capital improvements for thousands of small businesses cheaper and by doing that provides a real jolt 0 the economy. in fact, it's estimated that every $1 of tax cuts devoted to writing off the cost of business purchases generates $9 of g.d.p. growth. let me repeat that. $1 of tax cuts generates nine times that in g.d.p. growth. why wouldn't we do it? economists of every stripe will

tell you hiring incentives like the ones in this bill are the best ways to kickstart an economy and bet people back to work. why wouldn't we do it? in fact, a new nonpartisan analysis of the proposal before us has determined that it could create -- it will create nearly one million jobs this year. look at your state, my colleagues. 22,000 in washington state. 10,000 in nebraska. 11,000 in iowa. 40,000 in pennsylvania. 63,000 in my home state of new york. 77,000 in texas. huge numbers of new jobs that will be created by this proposal. why won't our colleagues move forward on it? it's estimated that 93,000 jobs would be added to the construction industry, 61,000 new jobs added to manufacturing. the report concludes that the

proposal's impact would be felt across every state and in a range of industries with significant jump in employment in construction and manufacturing. the proposal's targeted towards the mom and pop main street businesses that will benefit most from this relief. you want to talk about job creators? you want to help job creators? well, these small business owners are real job creators and they're the ones who make this country run. they come in early, they stay late, they work hard, and they deserve a tax break. here lies an important contrast between what we're proposing and a different tax cut proposal that the house republicans have passed. the house republican proposal is neither focused on true small business nor does it make the tax cut dependent on a company doing any hiring at all. our proposal rewards actual job creation by true small

businesses rather than giving more tax breaks to millionaires, billionaires, who may not create a single job. they get -- they have profits, they get a cut in -- cut in their taxes for their profits even if they fire people. does that make any sense? our bill's commonsense measures have had broad bipartisan support. there's no reason that democrats and republicans alike should not support them now. the relief in this bill would be a grand slam for our economy as a whole. it puts more people to work, expedites the expansion of successful small business throughout the country, expands businesses to new communities, and keeps money flowing through local economies. for too many business owners, this relief simply cannot wait. so let's get this bill to the president's desk and get our business owners started on the developments that will propel them into the next decade.

once we pass this bill, we must work together to give certainty to american families that won't see a massive tax hike at the end of the year. we should all agree that our small businesses deserve tax cuts in the small business jobs and tax relief act that will happy them hire a million workers. we agree no middle-class families should face a tax increase at tend of the year. then we can turn to debate on whether or not our country can afford to give more tax breaks to the wealthiest 2%. mr. president, i yield the balance of my time. i yield the balance of my time and note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from louisiana is recognized. ms. landrieu: madam president, i'd like to ask unanimous consent to dispense with the quorum call. the presiding officer: without objection, so ordered. ms. landrieu: thank you, madam president. as chair of the small business committee in the senate, i'm pleased to come to the floor today to give some supporting remarks for senator schumer's

small business tax reduction bill. the bill will invest basically $20 billion to the bottom line of small businesses, owners of businesses that are dynamic and that are growing. and i'd like to make that distinction. it's not all small business that will get a tax relief. it's small businesses that are dynamic and growing, adding employees or increasing wages. the bill is smartly and narrowly targeted to motivate and to reward those small businesses, subgroup of the 28 million small businesses that exist in the country today, madam president, many of whom are in your state -- minnesota, that has some very high-growth,

high-potential small business development in the medical field, i understand. in my state, it would be those businesses that are growing because of the increased demand for energy and the new technologies that are coming out not only for oil and gas production, which is important, but also other sources of energy. in ohio and michigan, it could be those small business suppliers that are rallying around the emerging and strengthening automobile industry which president obama and the democrats, democratic members of this congress had so much to do in salvaging. our bill is not just throwing money against the wind. it's taking precious taxpayer dollars and targeting it to those businesses that are growing. that's why, as the chair of the small business committee, i want to strongly endorse senator schumer's proposal over the proposal that came from the house of representatives.

the house of representatives' bill basically is taking $40 billion that we don't have -- we don't have the $20 billion either. but one is half the cost. taking the $40 billion and throwing it at businesses, 50% of which, according to the c.b.o. study, will accrue to the highest income earners in the country over $1 million. it is not targeted. it is just about business profits which are important. i know that businesses are in business to make profits. i have no problem with that. we want our businesses to be profitable. but what our -- the schumer proposal relative is targeted to those businesses making a profit and reinvesting it in the business to grow. hiring workers and putting this recession that we're coming out of because of poor policies of previous administrations, coming out of this recession to help

grow the economy. so you can give tax cuts in a variety of different ways. if we had all the money in the world, maybe we could afford to do both. but we're not that fortunate, and we have to make choices. and that's what we do on the floor of this senate every day. make choices, make distinctions between wise ways to spend money and poor ways to spend money. i would suggest if we have $20 billion to spend, if everybody he agrees that we have at least that, that the schumer approach is much more efficient, will be much more effective, will get much more bang for the buck than the cantor approach. so i want to commend senator schumer for putting his bill on the floor, the small business tax relief and job creation act of 2012. according to the national economic council, the tax credit would provide $20 billion in

direct tax relief for businesses that hire new workers or increase wages and it could encourage an additional $200 billion to $300 billion in new wages in jobs this year. this tax credit, as i said, makes sense. it will help create jobs. according to the congressional budget office report released last year, policies that have the largest effects on output and employment per dollar of cost in 2012 and 2013 are the ones that would reduce the marginal cost of hiring. a c.b.o. report from november of 2011 that,'s exactly what the schumer bill does. firms that make capital investments in 2012 would be allowed to deduct the full value of the investment on their 2012 return. we know that this kind of targeted tax cut can spark demand that small businesses have been clamoring for.

this tax cut is an extension of a tax provision that expired in 2011 and had yielded an estimated $50 billion in added investments and lowered the cost, the average cost of capital for business investment by over 75%, according to the national council of economic advisors. so we've had a lot of experience, madam president, in the small business committee and in the finance committee which senator schumer serves on, in the last couple of years designing and implementing tax cuts for the middle class, tax cuts for the job creators. and again, if you look just very objectively, considering the schumer proposal cost half as much as the cantor proposal and will probably do three times, if not four times better, it really is a no-brainer which one is

more effective. and that is the schumer proposal. i hope as the senators come to the floor and begin to look more carefully at the schumer proposal versus the proposal that came from the house, they will realize the benefit of the schumer approach and give it the 60 votes we need to move it forward. and will reject the cantor approach as being too expensive relative to the other option that is on the table and much less effective. in the event, madam president, that the senate decides to do neither, which might happen because they have been -- there have been logjams around here for awhile now, which i was very proud of my colleagues barbara boxer and jim inhofe working together to break the logjams in a spectacular way just two weeks ago on this same floor when they finally negotiated a two-year

transportation bill, the flood insurance bill, the restore act and the student loan reduction bill which is remarkable work that the congress did just last week. in the event that the cantor proposal fails and the schumer proposal fails, i'm hoping to offer an amendment that the leadership is considering now that was put together by the snowe staff and senator snowe and the landrieu staff and myself over the course of the last several weeks. i'm not the only name -- the only name an this right now is mine but it has been put together by a variety of senators who have been working across the aisle for months now on items that are really important to the small business community. again, we have 28 million small businesses in america. 22 million of them are single

employers. in other words, they are self-employed professionals that are either doctors or lawyers or landscape architects, architec architects, service -- other service providers, network professionals, i.t. professionals that are working in their own business. they employ themselves. they're very value. able. we encourage that in america. we have more entrepreneurs in america than any other place in the world. we believe in it and we're excited. we're also excite for ourbitions that stash with two or three -- we're also excited with our businesses that start with 200 or 300 employees and then you close your eyes and they have 2,000 or 3,000. we call them the gazelles or we look for accelerating opportunities. so this package we've put together with this, as i've

said, -- the significant input of senator snowe and her staff along with input from senator kerry, who has been an extraordinary leader in this way, senator merkley, senator cardin and a list of other senators that i'm going to refer to, have been working for years on some of these issues. the and i want to make sure that i give them the -- and i want to make sure that i give them the credit for these issues. first in our package is a very popular and very effective 100% exclusion of capital gains for investments in small business. it was in the small business tax extenders package. president obama has recommended this, and senator kerry is the lead sponsor along with senator snowe on the finance committee. this would -- let me just by way of background, in 2009 noncorporate taxpayers were

allowed to exclude 50% of the gain from the sale of stock of a qualified small business if taxpayers held the stock for five years. the recovery act increased the 50% to 75%, and the small business act of 2010 subsequently increased it to 100%. but as of january of this year, it was reverted down to 50% and start-up investments are no longer entitled to the preferred capital gain treatment. our proposal would basically take this up to 100% exclusion from the sale of capital gains that noncorporate taxpayers purchased in 2012 and 2013 and hold for five years. it has bipartisan support. as i said, senator kerry has been the lead advocate. senator snowe has worked side by side with him, and senator moran, senator coons and senator rubio have all called for this provision making it permanent.

now, i wish we could make it permanent. this bill will not -- we will not make it permanent in the landrieu amendment. but we will extend it for another year and a half. and according to the kaufman foundation paper published earlier this year -- and the kaufman foundation, for those that don't know, is really the leading think tank. it is not political at all. it is just a middle-of ha-the-r, well-respected think tank on small business development. they published a paper earlier this year. the 100% exclusion boosts the after-tax returns on such investments and tartups and should -- start-ups an. they estimate that by making this provision permanent would increase investments conservatively by 50%, more than the overall cost of the provisions. so, they are supporting the -- this provision very strongly and

would like to see it permanent, but we can only afford in this package to have it for a year, the next year, as we again build out of this recession. let me say, the -- i guess from a conservative point of view, one of the good things about this provision, after we vote on the schumer proposal and the cantor proposal, only scores at $4 billion. so we get a tremendous benefit for a very small investment of taxpayer dollars, not that $4 billion is chump change, but compared to the $40 billion from the cantor package, we think when you take that $4 billion and like yeast really make it stretch and grow to affect a lot of people and spur a lot of investment. the next provision is the small

business tax extenders, the increased deduction for start-up expenditures. again, this has been a snowe and merkley initiative. i think senatormarkl senator mes really stood up to fight for this. under current law, taxpayers can elect to deduct up to $5,000 of start-up expenditures in the taxable year in which they start a trade or business. the $5,000 is reduced but no below zero to the amount by which it exseated $50,000. examples are labor markets, transportation systems, advertisements for the owning of a new business, et cetera, et cetera. compensation for consultants that help you get your business started up. the small business jobs act temporarily increased the amount of a start-up expenditures could deduct from their taxes from $5,000 to $10,000 with a

phase-out threshold of $60,000. senatormarkly thought to have this provision in the small businessage of it has been repeatedly endorsed bier the national association for the self-employed, national federation of independent businesses and part of the start-up america legislative agenda president obama has called for making this permanent. again, my amendment doesn't make it permanent but it does make it effective through 2013. according to the kaufman foundation on average new firms inject about $80,000 into their businesses in the first year of operation. the vast majority of small business owners invest 800% and 90%, also invest significant amounts of their own money. the way this amendment came together is we conducted in the small business committee and had very good turnout about three or four high-level hearings -- well, excuse me, not hearings

but round tables, where instead of having just two or three people testify, we had 20 people at a round table show up. and for two hours in a very informal setting they were answering questions. what is the best thing that we could do help you now? what are the barriers to growth? what is -- what are the healthy -- what does a healthy pico system for small business look like? and what could we do strengthen and make healthier that ecosystem in america? that's where these ideas came from. and senator merkley, of course, picked up on some of this and understood -- the kaufman foundation was there. they said that even though i've talked a lot on the floor about small business needing to borrow money -- and many do -- when you start up a company, you really don't want to borrow money unless you absolutely have to, because the chances of it not working are pretty significant.

most of new start-ups tail, as you know-- --most of new start-ups fail, as you know, madam president, and so people don't really want to go into debt unless they have to or unless they're a little more sure that their idea is going to work. so the benefit of this proposal is that you're actually rewarding the risk takers that are digging into theavag out on their homes, that areingr savings at risk lined their idea. what we're saying is if you do that we will give you a significant tax break, considering it costs about $88,000 to, you know, start on average a business. so this is really targeted to those risk takers. it is not just taking money out of the treasury and throwing it at all small business. it's taking what little money we think -- and this is only $4 billion totally -- and saying, okay, let's really, really target it to those individuals

that are putting their life on the line, they're putting their livelihood on the line, they're putting their future on the line. what can we do to support them? i am a really big believer in this provision, and i thank senator merkley for bringing it to us. i see that senator casey 0 is on the floor to speak and also senator shaheen and that my time under sort of informal agreement has expired. and so, madam president, since i'm going to be here on the floor most of the afternoon explaining this amendment, i would be happy to yield the floor, and i see senator sessions here, and i ask unanimous consent that senator casey could speak for ten minutes, senator sessions, the next five or minute sinss, and senator shaheen after that.

is that acceptable to everyone? mr. sessions: madam president, if you could make that ten minutes, that would be fine? ms. landrieu: i would amend that to ten minutes, in the order senator casey, senator sessions, and senator shaheen. the presiding officer: without objection. the senator from pennsylvania is recognized. mr. casey: thank you, madam president. i want to commend the work of the senator from louisiana, the senior senator, for her work on this legislation but for her many years laboring in the vineyards, so to speak, on job-creation strategies to help our small business owners across the united states. i rise to speak about this legislation as well because when i go to pennsylvania and travel across our state, i get two basic messages from the people of our state. and they're very clear about this. they say two things: work on job creation, put your time into putting in place ways

to create and incentivize the creation of jobs. that's the first message. the second message is, work together, get things done, work with people in both parties to move forward a strategy to create jobs. and i think this legislation does both. it's -- it's focused on creating jobs, especially as it relates to our small business owners and their workers and their communities. but it also is a way to bring democrats and republicans together to create jobs. the small business jobs and tax relief act will indeed help small businesses hire people by reducing the cost to small firms of bringing on a new worker or increasing their hours or pay. the economics of this are clear and compelling. by providing small businesses with new incentives to hire, we can create jobs and bolster economic recovery. small businesses are at the

center of the economy of the united states and are vital to our recovery. i know in pennsylvania that there are nearly 250,000 small businesses. four out of every five firms in the state is in fact a small business. this legislation is commonsense legislation, and i hope it will have strong bipartisan support when we have -- we vote on the bill itself. it includes a business payroll tax incentive similar to legislation i introduced back in the year 2010 that will make it easy for small businesses to grow and to encourage economic growth throughout the country. it'll give businesses a 10% income tax credit on new payroll for hiring new workers or increasing employee wages. it is in fact targeted legislation. it's targeted to small business owners. it's -- because it's capped at 5

$$500,000 per firm or 10% of a payroll increase of $5 million. in addition to being targeted, it's timely. it'll be available immediately for any new-hires or increased workers for the remainder of this year 2012. and authorizedly it's very if he couldive. the congressional budget office, as we know around here by the acronym c.b.o., said that a tax credit based on increased payroll would create the most jobs and have the greatest positive impact on america's gross domestic product when impaired to other job-creation policies that have been proposed. under this legislation, small businesses that hire a new worker would, on average, see more than $4,000 in tax savings per worker hired. that's a substantial help to a small firm, and you can just do the math as you hire more than one person. that's a smart step in the right

direction to help these businesses themselves and also to boost job creation throughout our country. as the chairman of the joint economic committee, our committee just produced a report recently -- i know you can't see the -- all the lettering on this report i'm holding -- but it's a very simple report, just a couple of pages, where it outlines in very clear fashion the impact that small businesses have on our economy in terms of the predominance of small businesses when you consider businesses across the board. the name of the report is, "tax incentives for small business hiring and investment: strengthening the backbone of the economy." in fact, that's the truth, the backbone of the american economy is our small business sector. the report finds that enacting a tax credit for businesses that hire additional workers or increase the hours and wages of

existing employees will help both sustain and accelerate the recovery. across the nation, 79% of business establishments are either single-establishment businesses with fewer than a hundred employees, or are parts of multiestablishment companies with total employment under a hundred employees. small businesses are -- are responsible for more hiring in the u.s. than any -- than, i should say, medium-size or large businesses. as the labor market has begun to recover, small businesses have led the way again and again. if you look at the time period february 2010 to february 2012, small establishments were responsible for 46% of the hires versus 34% for medium-sized businesses and 20% for large establishments. this is a critical point. small firms accounted for nearly

half of the hiring from early 2010 to early 2012. small businesses truly are the engine that powers our economy. the recent monthly unemployment reports which show job growth at a slower pace than earlier in the year underscore the need to provide new incentives to hire and invest in businesses. many small firms want to hire more workers and they also want to increase hours, and this legislation will help them do that. in addition to the payroll tax credit, the legislation would extend the 100% depreciation deduction for major purchases through the end of 2012 so that businesses who want to make a big investment -- a new building, a new significant piece of equipment -- can get the benefit of that this year. an extension of this business expensing would reduce the cost of investment and promote economic growth.

so in summary, madam president, the small business jobs and tax relief act would help create jobs and strengthen the economy and move our recovery forward. these are objectives we all share and i hope we can move forward in a bipartisan manner to pass this legislation. because in the end, it meets that two-part test that my constituents give to me everyday, which is they want me to do everything i can to help create jobs and they want me to do it in a bipartisan way. this legislation in fact does this. madam president, i would yield the floor. mr. sessions: madam president? the presiding officer: the senator from alabama is recognized. mr. sessions: madam president, this afternoon the house of representatives voted 244-185 to repeal the health care bill, the affordable care act. it was a bipartisan vote.

a number of democrats voted for it. not as many as last time because a lot of the democrats, even those who voted against it, got shellacked in the last election. and it was a pretty rough, intense debate. the american people never felt comfortable with this legislation, and i believe it will be repealed. i do not believe it will be implemented. and the reason is, whether you like it or not, we don't have the money. we do not have the money, and i want to talk about that. i'm the ranking republican on the budget committee and would share some thoughts today for my colleagues as we wrestle with what to do and how to get out of the legislation that passed by the narrowest single margin on christmas eve based on false accounting in this senate. president obama promised before a joint session of congress in

2009 to spend $900 billion over ten years on the law. he said -- quote -- "now add it all up, and the plan i'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years." that's a lot of money, $900 billion. that's twice the defense budget almost. and he actually went on to say, and his supporters did, that it would reduce the debt of the united states. we're going to add all these new people and we're going to pay for itself and reduce the debt. no one really believed that, but that's what the arguments were and the representations were made. but once you add up all the different spending provisions in the health care law, including closing the doughnut hole -- that's the prescription drug area that did not -- that was not funded -- implementation

costs of the health care reform, including all those i.r.s. agents, and other spending in the bill, the total gross spending in the 2010-2019 period, the first ten years that he was proposing in the bill that passed, was truly $1.4 trillion. now just show this on the chart because it's very important. so the president promised in his state of the union to the american people that it would cost $900 billion. people knew it would cost more. but even then, the first ten years, as he proposed, when you counted the other factors, the enforcement mechanism through the i.r.s. agents, through the doughnut hole fix and other manners, it truly was $1.4 trillion over ten years. that's almost 50% more right there.

that's undisputable i think. i'll ask my colleagues, if i'm wrong, come tell me. and i would just note parenthetically, one of the most important things to have health care reform would include fixing the doc fix. in other words, we're projected without legislation that takes effect to reduce the expenditures, the payments to doctors, by 20-some-odd percent for medicare-medicaid patients. that's what we would reduce the pay-for if we don't do something each year. it adds up to about $200 billion to $250 billion over ten years. it was part of the promise that would be fixed in the bill. but when they looked at their numbers, if you paid for the doc fix, which was critical and needs to be fixed permanently -- not continuing to hang out there every year and to be fixed by

borrowed money -- if we fix it, the bill wouldn't have -- couldn't have been contended to be in surplus. in fact, it couldn't contend to be paid for, as the president was saying. and so they just didn't do it. they just decided they wouldn't fix one of the most important areas in health care and it remains that today. so we're using congressional budget office nonpartisan numbers and -- as i work through this. most of the major spending provisions in the law, as our colleagues should know, do not take effect until 2014. so when the law is implemented, the ten-year score should be 2014-2023. that's the ten-year window of full implementation. and how much will the bill cost then? each year it goes up, because

until 2014, you don't really get the full cost of the legislation. so what they did was -- and the president deliberately did with aid from his o.m.b. director, mr. peter orzag, who was at c.b.o., and they contended this was going to be fine, they would do the first ten years and only six of them would have the real expenditures in the bill. and they would score it over ten and say it only cost $8900 $900 billion. well, that was not correct. so you -- you look at this from 2014-2023, each year, these red lines represent a situation in which you're closer and closer to full implementation and how much the cost would be. and when you go to 2023, 2014, the next ten years when the bill

is fully implemented, it would cost $2.6 trillion. $23,600,000,000,000, almost three times the estimated cost of the legislation. so people ask, how do we get in a situation where we're borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend? this kind of math. it's not correct. a c.b. -- a c.e.o. in a court of law would go to jail if he proposed that kind of numbers to the court as his business practice and asking people to invest in their stock. analysis by my staff on the budget committee, based on the estimates and growth rates that the congressional budget office utilizes, finds that the total spending under the law -- that's including the other spending not

directly related to coverage provisions -- will amount to at least $2.6 trillion and could be much more. now, how -- how did they get this happen? it's really a sad state of affairs, frankly. the obama administration, mr. orzag and his office of management and budget director that works directly for the president, they -- they asserted that this health care bill, that -- about it, that health care reform is entitlement reform. in other words, this was going to fix our entitlement danger, the problems we have with medicare, social security, medicaid, entitlement programs, each one of which are growing at fast rates that are unsustainable, that will head to bankruptcy in the years to come.

however, a simple comparison of the federal government's unfunded obligations for health care programs before and after the health care law was enacted clearly proves that the president's health care reform is not entitlement reform. it will not fix our deficit course. it will not make these programs sustainable. it did not put social security, medicare, and medicaid on a sustainable basis. those programs remain disastrously unsustainable. and the president won't even talk about that. here we are running into a reelection campaign and the country is facing a colossal financial danger from unsustainable debt and the president won't even talk about it. he says things are getting along fine. i think it's a failure of leadership for him not to talk honestly with the american people about our challenges.

so before the president's law -- health care law was enacted, unfunded obligations for the federal health care programs totaled $65 trillion over the 5-year period. that's ho-- over the 75-year pe. that's how much we are going to run short in money to pay for the obligation as that we have incurred under medicare, medicaid, and social security. and some other programs but those are the big three. after the recent passage of this health care bill, however, the figure, according to the congressional budget office, has gone up to $82 trillion. the difference in the two numbers is the president's health care law -- madam president, i would ask for two additional minutes. unanimous consent. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection, so ordered. mr. se