Senate Proceeding on Apr 29th, 2009 :: 6:57:00 to 7:09:50
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6:56:52 to 6:57:14( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: quorum call: a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from mr. coburn: i'd ask that the quorum call be dispensed with. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. coburn: thank you. i wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the budget that's

6:57:00 to 7:09:50( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Tom Udall

6:57:15 to 6:57:35( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: before us. and make a simple notes. in $3.5 trillion in

6:57:36 to 6:57:59( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: that's an astounding amount of money. and it spends $17.9 trillion, at a minimum, over the next five years. this budget is more than just a document full of numbers. it's a statement of priorities.

6:58:00 to 6:58:20( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: my feeling is, that it does not address some of the key fundamental challenges we face as a nation. and in fact it's going to make some of the challenges that we have worse because we're going to be spending money that we don't have on things that we don't need.

6:58:21 to 6:58:42( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: every family in this country today, as we can note by t decreased consumer spending, is making hard choices. they're making priorities. and their priorities are how do we do the absolute minimum things necessary and also how we save if we're going to have the largest savings rate we've

6:58:43 to 6:59:04( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: had in 40 or 50 years in this country, so we can save for and most of the time those families areust thinking about the adult members of those families. most of the time those families are making because they're thinking into the future with their children. we're not doing that in this budget. as a matter of fact, the only th

6:59:05 to 6:59:26( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: this budget for our children is w much we're going to put on the back of them, becausee refuse to face the realities of living within our meansike every family is trying to do out there today, and we're going to transfer a doubling of the publicly hel five years, it's going to double. and over the next ten years it's

6:59:27 to 6:59:47( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: going to triple. and that is going serious impact on us as a nation, but it's going to have personal impact on every young child out there today. and let me tell you what the impact's going to be. is we're going to steal opportunity from them because we refuse to make the hard choices toda the impact is going to be -- a

6:59:48 to 7:00:10( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: large portion of them aren't going to be able to afford to go to college. we know that education is one of the areas that advanced our society, that create opportunities for american exceptionalism. that create opportunities for advancement of all through education. today by stealing the money from

7:00:11 to 7:00:33( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: them in the future them with an interest that most of them won't earn the amount that we're going to have to pay every year seems, to me, to be penny wise and pound foolish. the other thing this document does is it doesn't have pay-go in it. what it says is we're not going

7:00:34 to 7:00:54( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: to be responsible so you, as the next two generations, you go and pay for it. we have seen payo. but we have seen there is no pay-go to the biggest expenditure in the bill. we take it off line and we allow us to create all of newt

7:00:55 to 7:01:17( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: programs an items and yet we don't have to be responsible to make the hard choices about what's important, what's a priority and what's not a priority. families across this country last year saw less increase in their incomes. and after a 9% across the board -- not counting the stimulus,

7:01:18 to 7:01:39( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: just the omnibus bill, we're going tohen bump up another 7.2%. we're going to grow the government four times faster than the income increase was last year and now we're going to grow it 3 1/2 times more than what personal income has risen. and 70 times greater than what the net inflation is going to be.

7:01:40 to 7:02:01( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: that's called real spending, real growing the federal government, not making the hard choices. and what it results in in spite of what we call it, whether it is my favorite pet program or somebody else's, what it results in is less liberty. less freedom for the generations that are following us.

7:02:02 to 7:02:23( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: you tell me a country where you can have real freedom when you have no economic freedom. there isn't freedom when there's no economic freedom. and when economic liberties of the children and grandchildren that follow us.

7:02:24 to 7:02:44( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: during the sen i offered numerous amendments that were designed to make us make hard choices. allo withdrawals from retirement accounts, to make some of the mortgage payments that people are having trouble today. to allow us to help the mortgage. it was accepted unanimous. not

7:02:45 to 7:03:06( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: it is not in this final document. ending bogus by government contractors an executives. not one person expressed an objective to that. it is not in the final budget. reviewing the budget line by line for waste, fraud, inappropriateness, and metrics was

7:03:07 to 7:03:27( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: as a matter of fact, the chairman said in -- right before we voted on the final bill, this is one we'll try to protect in the conference. it comes out of conference, nothing's there. that's one of president obama's promises. we won't even help him do the things that he said that he wanted to do. set performance standards to identify programs.

7:03:28 to 7:03:48( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: not one person objected on the senate it was unanimous. yet when it comes out of the conference, none of it's there. ending no-bid contracts. something every american knows this congress has a problem with. because we let the favorite one

7:03:49 to 7:04:10( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: get no-bid contracts, the well required competive bidding on anything above $25,000 outside of national security issues, yet, nobody objected to that. it's actually had a vote prior where we had a 97-0 vote. when it comes out of the

7:04:11 to 7:04:31( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: conference, it's not in there. protecting patients and health care providers from heth care coersion. it's not in there. so we're going to pass a budget and say you go pay and all the things that we really need to do to make efficient the programs that we have today and to

7:04:32 to 7:04:52( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: measure the programs that we have today and to control some of the waste, fraud, and abuse, it's over $300 billion a year, alof the things that needed to be in this budget to make sure that happens got rejected in the conference. what should the american people think about that? they're certainly not going to go out and have their plumbing

7:04:53 to 7:05:14( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: redone in their bathroom without getting some quotes on it. they're going to make people competitively bid. not just going to go to an automobile showroom and pay the first vehicle they see, they're going to price that because it's a necessity to get today. and, yet, we reject that as a body. the house rejected it.

7:05:15 to 7:05:37( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: the senate rejected in conference. what should the american people think about us? we won't do any of the commonsense things they're having to do right now so we can get rid of some of the $300 billion waste that we don' want to charge to our children. we won't do it. why is that? why is it that we won't do that?

7:05:38 to 7:05:59( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: is there some can somebody explain to me why we would not want to go through the budget in a time when we're going to run close to a $2 trillion budget deficit that's all charged to our kids that we wouldn't want to go through there and find out the waste, fraud, and abuse in the programs that don't work. and, yet, this conference report rejects doing that.

7:06:00 to 7:06:21( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: are just lazy? maybe we don't care. which is it? it certainly can't be that there's a logical reason why we wouldn't do that. yet we didn't do it. why would we not get rid of some of the -- we've got $80 billion worth of fraud a year in

7:06:22 to 7:06:43( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: medicare and medicaid. nothing's being done about it. and now we're going to have a reconciliation process that's going to history of the senate forever in terms of and we going to hand them to us a redo of all of the health care and the health care we run

7:06:44 to 7:07:07( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: today, which accounts for 61% if you count that everything that the government is into, most wasteful, fraudulent-laid system in the world, and, yet, we won't address it. i don't want a legacy of stealing opportunity from my grandchildren or anybo else's.

7:07:08 to 7:07:28( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: and if you vote for this budget without this kind of hard work that we should be required to do of accountability to the american people get rid of some of the waste and do what any other prudent person would do in terms of bidded projects, you're saying

7:07:29 to 7:07:49( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: that's ok. it's ok to steal. and there's no other word for it. it's theft of opportunity from our children and our grandchildren. because we don't have the backbone to stand up and do the hard president obama's asked for this. he's asked for us to do line by line.

7:07:50 to 7:08:11( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: we have an opportunity to -- a bill moving through the senate to do that. what do we do? we say, no, it's our way or the highway, president. you can do it ove we're the ones that control all of these programs an we've done a terrible job. -- and we've done a terrible job. as a matter of fact, if you look at the over-the-sight hearings that occurred in the senate and

7:08:12 to 7:08:32( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: measure them compared to all the other hearings, they account for about 2% of the hearings that we have. and what do we do when a new problem comes up? we don't look to see how the present program's working and what we can do to fix it, we just create another one charge that to our grandkids. rather than say: where's the

7:08:33 to 7:08:58( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: metrics to measure what this program's doing? is it accomplishing what we want? is it efficient? could we do it a different way? we just ignore it and we create a brand-new program. and this budget is full of that. so i'll finish my remarks by, again, saying if you vote for this budget, there's a real

7:08:59 to 7:09:19( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: question in actually can represent to your constituencies that you feel that their children are not worth the hard work of this body. there's also the question of whether or not what president obama ran on in terms of doing the line by line, of getting rid

7:09:20 to 7:09:42( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: of the waste, measuring the effectiveness of programs, whether or not we're going to help him do that. this document says we're not. commonsense reforms that would put a burden on us and we've take eben them out. and in this budget -- taken them out. and in this budget, we said,

7:09:43 to 7:09:50( Edit History Discussion )

Tom Udall: chil at $17.3 trillion in publicly held debt in three years, and you go pay for you go pay for it.