Congressional Record Statement of Senator Russell D. Feingold on the Budget Resolution Conference Report April 28, 2005 MR. FEINGOLD Mr. President, this resolution is the latest in a string of budgets that continue to set records for fiscal recklessness. The test of any budget is the bottom line, and any civics teacher looking at the bottom line would have to give this budget an "F." It continues to drive us deeper into the deficit ditch, with little hope that we will ever climb out of it, and it is just as revealing for what it does not include as for what it does. Mr. President, this budget fails to include a single penny for the President's most important domestic priority, his plan to privatize Social Security. While I strongly oppose such a plan, if the President and Congressional Leadership are serious about pushing their plan to privatize Social Security, the very least they can do is pay for it. This budget fails to provide for long-term reform of the Alternative Minimum Tax, something on which there is widespread, bipartisan agreement. But here again, instead of ensuring that this clear priority can move ahead, this budget remains silent. And, perhaps most importantly Mr. President, this budget fails to restore the common sense PAYGO budget rule that helped restrain our collective fiscal appetites, and made us pay for what we wanted to do. That is such a simple, straightforward proposition -- pay for what you want. It's what every family has to do. It's how the Clinton-Gore Administration and Congress finally balanced the federal books during the 1990s. We are already in a deep budget hole. The only way we are going to get out is to stop digging. But instead of getting back on track to reducing our deficits, and beginning to pay down our enormous government debt, this budget has Congress digging the hole even deeper. Mr. President, this budget is deeply flawed in many other ways, but let me discuss just one, the use of expedited budget procedures to impose a controversial and environmentally reckless proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As I noted during the mark-up of the budget resolution in committee, this is a fight that we should have in open debate, not through the abusive use of the reconciliation process that itself relies on the most dubious of budget assumptions. As one of our colleagues put it, we should not abuse the budget and the budget reconciliation process "in order to be immune from unlimited debate." Allowing oil drilling in this wildlife refuge is an issue that is too important to the public to be passed like this. We should debate it in the open during an energy debate, not further degrade the already adulterated reconciliation process. Mr. President, this budget aggravates our fiscal problems by adding to the already mountainous federal debt. It fails to restore desperately needed budget discipline. It corrupts the reconciliation process, originally intended to facilitate deficit reduction, by using it to worsen the bottom line by expediting more unfunded tax cuts, and by using it to shield a controversial attack on an environmental treasure. In short, Mr. President, this budget is a disaster. The nation would be better off without any budget resolution than with this one.

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