Mr. KYL. Mr. President, the bill we are considering now was made available to us at 11 p.m. last night, long after the Senate was out of session. This is it. Now, I daresay that I doubt any of my colleagues have read this bill. I have not, I confess. Yet we are going to be voting on it in about 3 hours. We have relied on our staff to tell us what is in this bill, and we found some very interesting things.
There are changes from when the bill passed the Senate. My colleagues need to know what some of these changes are. I would note, by the way, that the middle-of-the-night, behind-closed-doors way this legislation was created is a far cry from what the President requested of us and promised on his Web site. He talks about ending the practice of writing legislation behind closed doors. He says: By making these practices public, the American people will be able to hold their leaders accountable for wasteful spending, and lawmakers won't be able to slip favors for lobbyists into bills at the last minute.
Well, would that it were. So, unfortunately, it looks as though a lot of favors were inserted for a lot of folks. I don't know whether it was because lobbyists requested it, but there are sure a lot of things that relate to specific Members and specific States. And, as I said, many of these items were not even included in the Senate-passed bill. Let me mention a couple because they are matters that have been in the media a great deal.
I think we have all heard discussed the fact that when Republicans raised the fact that ACORN could receive money from the neighborhood stabilization fund, this was a provision that the other side, the Democrats, said: Well, we will take that out. And, indeed, they removed the words ``neighborhood stabilization fund'' as a subheading. Then they just lumped that funding under the community development fund.
Bottom line is, they took out three words. The money can still be spent, including for ACORN; same thing for the billion dollars for a new prevention and wellness fund. This was in earlier committee reports that indicated it could be spent for things such as STD testing and prevention and smoking cessation. There was a lot of commentary about that in the media, and folks made fun of it. So the assumption was that has come out. No, it turns out there is still very clearly flexibility to use the funds for these kinds of things.
Let me mention two or three others: $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts, $500 million for Social Security Administration disability backlog, $60 million for Student Aid Administration, $50 million for the Compassion Capital Fund. There is $450 million for Amtrak security grants, which was not in either the House bill or the Senate bill. They simply put it in this legislation.
All of these items were new from when the Senate passed the bill. There is also $53.6 billion for a fund labeled ``Fiscal Stabilization Fund.'' In looking to figure out what the Fiscal Stabilization Fund is, we find it is really nothing more than a discretionary slush fund for States to use.
Now, the Senate has cut the fund from $79 billion. They cut that down to $39 billion. Some of our Members were proud that was accomplished. All of the Democrats voted for that. But it turns out in the conference--of course not the public conference; that was merely for show. But when the Members went behind closed doors, they tucked all of the money back in--added about $14 billion, I should say, back into the slush fund. But what is $14 billion when we are talking about $1 trillion?
There is an article today in the Washington Post that includes a story titled, ``Despite Pledges, the Package Has Some Pork.'' It begins:
The compromise stimulus bill adopted by the House and Senate negotiators this week is not free of spending that benefits specific communities, industries or groups, despite vows by President Obama that the legislation would be kept clear of pet projects, according to lawmakers, legislative aides and anti-tax groups.
Included in the pork called out by the Washington Post is $8 billion, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, for a MagLev rail line between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and other things. I mean, I had mentioned this before, the money for Filipino veterans, I think a very worthy cause except they are from the Philippines, and it does not create jobs in America.
There is money for the Nation's small shipyards. I wonder why the big shipyards were not adequately represented? And I mentioned before the $1 billion for a powerplant in Mattoon, IL. These are what we call earmarks. These are especially for a specific Member's congressional district or State. They may be good spending, some of them may even create jobs, but they violate what the President talked about when he talked about special projects put in these bills.
The bottom line is, this legislation continues to spend money in a wasteful [Page: S2282] way that our constituents strongly oppose.
Now, the Coburn amendment was adopted to reflect our constituents' concerns. We voted for that amendment, 73 to 24. We are in favor of ending wasteful Washington spending, we said. Specifically, the amendment prohibited funds from being used for a casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project. And that is where we thought it ended. But not so. In this group of negotiators who met behind closed doors for at least a couple of nights, it turns out that a lot of these things have crept back into the bill.
So now section 1604 of the conference report includes part of the funding limitation from the Coburn amendment but drops its applications to museums, stadiums, art centers, theaters, parks, or highway beautification projects. So a lot of the good that we thought we had accomplished, it turns out, does not carry at the end of the day.
The end result of this is, the CBO scores the long-term consequences of the spending in this bill not to be $800 billion, as has been discussed, or even $1 trillion when you add in the interest. But, as you know, the Congressional Budget Office, nonpartisan, scores for 10 years what is the cost the real cost, over a 10-year period.
They say the cost will jump to $3.27 trillion. So when we are talking about the $800 billion stimulus bill, let's understand it is really a $3.27 trillion bill.
Now, there are a couple of other interesting things
about this. It is not temporary. There are 31 new programs totaling $97 billion, in fact, 31 percent of all of the appropriations. It expands 73 programs by $92 billion. These should be part of the regular appropriations process.
It is interesting that while the Congressional Budget Office confirmed the bill might provide a short-term boost to the gross domestic product in the next few years, the added debt burden and crowding out of private investment will actually become a net drag on economic growth and wages by 2014. That means a lower standard of living for all of us.
This is fascinating to me. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the time period where economic growth is boosted, 2009 and 2010, is the same timeframe when 98 percent of the tax cuts are disbursed. But between 2011 and 2019, when only 2 percent of the tax cuts are left, you have over half of the spending in the bill, and yet the bill actually reduces economic growth. Let me repeat that. This is from the Congressional Budget Office. Their forecast is that economic growth will be boosted in the years 2009 and 2010. I talked about it like a sugar high for kids. That is when 98 percent of the tax cuts are disbursed.
We like to say tax cuts can do a lot of good here. Our Democratic friends say: All you want to do is talk about tax cuts. We think tax cuts would really help. So the period where 98 percent of the tax cuts are disbursed, but less than half of the spending is where you have the economic growth.
Then in 2011 to 2019, when there is only 2 percent of the tax cuts and over half of the spending, you actually have reduced economic growth. That is why Republicans have been emphasizing tax cuts. It is interesting the actual incremental tax cuts represent only 20 percent of the overall size of the bill, and we do not know all of the exact totals in the bill. But an analysis of the earlier passed House version would result in 22 million families getting a check back from the IRS that is bigger than what they paid in both payroll and income taxes combined.
So when we say, well, this goes to folks who do not pay income taxes, our friends on the other side said: Yes, but they pay payroll taxes. Yes. Combine the two. The check they get back, in 22 million cases, is still more than the combination combined.
There are so many other concerns that we have expressed with this package. We talked about the fact that small businesses create 80 percent of the jobs in the country. So you would think this bill would contain all kinds of things to help small businesses create more jobs.
Well, we looked in vain. It turns out that about one-half of 1 percent of this package is dedicated to helping small businesses produce jobs, one-half of one percent. In fact, only $7 billion total is provided for all business incentives combined, and one of the key features relating to net operating losses that passed the Senate was taken out of the conference report.
There are other provisions that will expand the cost dearly. If you look closely in this package you will find a $17 billion tax, in effect, on Government spending because we included a requirement that the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rules must apply to most of the spending in the bill. That adds a cost of $17 billion because of the requirements of Davis-Bacon. There are provisions that expand welfare dependents. It reduces or eliminates current work requirements for welfare and will obviously or ultimately lead to less work and more poverty.
There is even a provision relating to unemployment benefits that allow people to leave a job to care for a family member and then collect employment insurance compensation. Now, States, interestingly, have to amend their State laws in order to take advantage of this provision.
We really missed an opportunity to create private sector jobs through trade. Yet that is the area where the----
