• Forum
• SITREP
• Military
• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security

• Space

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Public Eye

I voted against the Senate budget resolution for a number of reasons. Among them was the fact that the Senate-passed budget resolution called for non-defense discretionary spending cuts totalling $190 billion below a 1995 freeze, while military spending w ould not be cut at all over the next seven years. I did so, as well, because the Senate-passed budget resolution called for cutting Medicare by $256 billion and Medicaid by $175 billion, mainly for budgetary reasons, without any plan to improve health car e or to contain health care costs. And, I did so because the Senate-passed budget resolution called for a tax cut for the wealthiest in our society of $170 billion over the next 7 years.

Mr. President, as bad as the national spending priorities in the Senate-passed budget resolution were, the pending conference agreement is worse in virtually every area. For nondefense discretionary spending, this conference agreement would cut $499 billi on, or $2 billion more than the Senate-passed budget resolution, while at the same time military spending would go up $33 billion above CBO's capped baseline over the next 7 years. In other words, while we will be destroying the programs which are investm ents in our future and that of our children by cutting nondefense discretionary spending--cuts totalling $500 billion--we will be adding $33 billion over the baseline to military spending, even though we have repeatedly seen massive boondoggles and wastef ul military spending uncovered in the past, and I am sure that we will again see them in the future.

Mr. President, the budget agreement would increase defense spending by some $6 billion for fiscal year 1996, and the Armed Services Committee is now allocating that money to additional spending. Does the Nation really need to bump up the defense budget by such a large sum at a time when the threat of the Soviet empire has essentially vanished?

The preoccupation with defense spending at the very time when cold war tensions are a memory stands logic on its head. For what will the extra money be going? Are we going to dust off the big ABM projects of the early years of Mr. Reagan, outmoded concepts of strategic defense involving big new systems, expensive new surveillance systems, space-based interceptors and the like? Are we going to junk the ABM Treaty to make way for new, expensive strategic defense gadgetry? Has the Soviet Unio n been reconstituted? Hardly. It continues to disintegrate. Are there new threats confronting us? Certainly. But those new threats, including terrorism, biological proliferation and warfare, and activities of powerful drug cartels and criminal syndicates and, particularly, brutal economic competition do not cry out for a neo-Reagan Star Wars response. We do not have billions to waste on such systems.

The same kind of inexplicable drive to enhance and protect the defense accounts has led the committee to erect firewalls between domestic and defense spending for 3 fiscal years. Therefore, we cripple our ability to respond to unforeseen needs as the fisc al year evolves, allowing money to be shifted to areas of greatest need, or to respond to emergencies. It is as if we trust our judgment only when we put the budget resolution together, erecting numbers which must be treated as sacred icons, and we do not trust our judgment to make sensible adjustments thereafter. With the limited resources that we are working with for all our needs, this is not either efficient or wise.

For Medicare, the conference agreement calls for cuts of $270 billion, or $14 billion more than the Senate-passed budget resolution. And, for Medicaid, the cuts amount to $182 billion, $7 billion greater than the Senate-passed budget resolution. But, for the wealthiest in our Nation, this conference agreement calls for a tax cut of $245 billion, $75 billion greater than was projected in the Senate-passed budget resolution.

The specifies of this $245 billion tax package have not been decided. However, it will likely contain many of the key elements of the so-called `Contract With America.'

Who would get the lion's share of the benefits from these tax cuts? According to a Treasury Department analysis, less than 16 percent of the benefits of the bill as passed by the House Ways and Means Committee would go to the 60 percent of all families wi th incomes below $50,000. The top one percent of families with incomes of $350,000 or more a year would receive 20 percent of the tax benefits, while more than half of the tax goodies would go to the top 12 percent of families--those with incomes over $10 0,000 per year.

According to an analysis by the Treasury Department, over half the benefits from the House Ways and Means Committee's capital gains provisions would go the wealthiest three percent of families who have incomes over $200,000, while three-fourths of the ben efits would go to the top 12 percent of families who have incomes over $100,000 a year; and the House Ways and Means Committee's reduction in the proportion of Social Security benefits that are subject to taxes would give a tax break to the top 13 percent of Social Security beneficiaries.

Similarly, the changes proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee in rates of depreciation and the repeal of the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax would substantially reduce taxes paid by the Nation's largest corporations.

How are we to be sure, Mr. President, that the $245 billion windfall will actually take place over the next 7 years which will enable the tax cuts called for in this conference agreement to be undertaken without adding to the deficit? Senators will recall that under the Senate-passed budget resolution, no tax cuts would be allowed until after a reconciliation bill had been signed into law. At that time, CBO would advise Congress of the so-called windfall amount, which could be used for a tax cut. What hap pened to that requirement in the conference on the budget resolution? It simply disappeared.