United States Senate Committee on Finance

“ Amounts not allocated In the House of Representatives or the Senate, if a committee receives no allocation of new budget authority or outlays, that committee shall be deemed to have received an allocation equal to zero for new budget authority or outlays. ”

“ At an early period in the deliberations, when the outline of the Constitution was prepared in a committee of the whole, a proposition was brought forward to restrain the Senate from originating money bills, upon the ground that the House would be the body in which the people would be the most directly represented, and in order to give effect to the maxim which declares that the people should hold the purse-strings. ”

“ Two domestic items I want to talk about, because they're both very much on the President's mind and he has discussed them this morning. The President is looking forward to the vote this afternoon in the United States Senate on the budget for the country. The President believes that the Senate this afternoon will move in the right direction, to provide the American people with substantial tax relief, very much like what he promised during the course of the campaign. ”

“ I've been a long-time supporter -- offered the first, one of the first pay-as-you-go budgets back some 23 years ago in the United States Senate -- the question that came up earlier about specific policies and ideas.
I think, with rare exceptions you ought to be able to have accounting for either the tax cut or the spending program and pay for them.
We've gone on too long allowing for these things to build and grow, and the deficits are a problem. Dennis is right: $2.2 trillion of public debt being held outside the country. ”

“ It has come to be infinitely more trouble to spend our enormous national income than to collect it. The chief embarrassments have arisen, not from deficits, but from surpluses. It is very fortunate that such has been the case, because for the best management of the finances of a nation, when revenue is scant and economy imperative, it is absolutely necessary to have financial administration in the hands of a few highly-trained and skillful men acting subject to a very strict responsibility, and this is just what our committee system does not allow. ”

“ No man can answer that. It is just as much a debt as any other portion of the debt of the United States."
Finally, after more than three months study and debate, a majority of the committee agreed upon a measure and directed me to report it to the Senate. It fixed the maximum limit of the United States notes at $382,000,000. It provided for a gradual payment of these notes in coin or in five per cent. bonds, at the option of the Secretary of the Treasury, from the 1st of January, 1876. ”

“ Still more preposterous is the fabulous notion that we can issue paper money enough to secure to everybody who wants it a loan, or to discount every man's note at as low a rate of interest as he desires. It is indeed incredible that such propositions should be seriously advanced and advocated on the floor of the Senate of the United States. Why, we might as well in the shortest way solve the problem by saying: Let every man issue his note for all his debts, past, present and prospective; and then let us enact a law making that note legal-tender. ”

“ During another comparatively recent fiscal debate in the United States Senate, a Senator, who is popularly and justly accredited with statesmanship, advocated certain proposed appropriations of the public money, which were opposed on the ground that they were in the nature of extravagances, by saying that they could not be grievous to the people "since they would not amount to more than three cents per day per capita." ”

“ It is my conviction that down in their hearts the American public--industry, agriculture, finance--want this Congress to do whatever needs to be done to raise our national income to eighty billion dollars a year.
Investing soundly must preclude spending wastefully. To guard against opportunist appropriations, I have on several occasions addressed the Congress on the importance of permanent long-range planning. ”

“ Oversight of Government performance In the Senate , all committees are directed to review programs and tax expenditures within their jurisdiction to identify waste, fraud, abuse, or duplication, and increase the use of performance data to inform committee work. ”

“ There are no spending reductions required to make it work. The only thing that's required is to have spending increase at a reasonable rate of growth, as opposed to an extravagant rate of growth. And the manner in which the Congress, or at least the Senate has proceeded so far, if they actually increase spending by the amount the Senate passed, which is closer to 10 percent, if you take out -- there's a little asterisk in the Senate budget resolution of unnamed future budget cuts -- without that, spending is actually 10 percent. ”

“ I took occasion to reply to this article in the following letter:
"United States Senate Chamber,} "Washington, January 10, 1875.} "Dear Sir:—As I am a subscriber to 'The Financier,' you will probably allow me to express my surprise at the course you have pursued in respect to the finance bill recently passed by Congress. Claiming as you do to be a 'monetary and business' journal, you might be expected to treat fairly a measure affecting so greatly the interests you represent; but you have not done so. You have treated it as a political trick, an evasion, a disgrace to Congress. ”

“ All of us have a great deal at stake in the outcome of these Senate-House negotiations for the sake of both our national security and our economic well-being. If the conference committee reports a budget that achieves substantial and permanent changes, it will pave the way for continuing the low inflation and falling interest rates that will keep our economy growing and keep Americans working.
If, on the other hand, the process breaks down and the Congress can't do what's right on defense or on controlling domestic spending, then the consequences will be very bad. ”

“ So again I say to the Republican Congress, don't do that. We can't afford to bleed money and productivity at a time when we should be putting all our efforts into saving money, serving the American people, strengthening our economy, and moving forward.
I also urge the Congress to deal responsibly with the Federal debt ceiling. Congress should never threaten to default on America's debts. I'm encouraged that Republican leaders have acknowledged that Congress should not put the creditworthiness of the United States at risk in our budget negotiations. ”

“ We must deal with facts as we find them and not as we wish them. We must aim at results based upon practical experience, for what has been probably will be. The best prophet of the future is the past.
"To know what measures ought to be adopted we should have a clear conception of what we wish to accomplish. I believe a majority of the Senate desire, first, to provide an increase of money to meet the increasing wants of our rapidly growing country and population, and to supply the reduction in our circulation caused by the retiring of national bank notes ”

“ They then proposed, in order to avoid an alleged ambiguity, that bills for raising money for the purpose of revenue, or appropriating money, should originate in the House, and should not be so amended or altered in the Senate as to increase or diminish the sum to be raised, or change the mode of levying it, or the object of its appropriation. ”

“ Those are the principles that the economic team has been working with. Those are principles that were forwarded to the Senate last week to -- in preparation for the vote on the second $350 billion. Larger decisions on how exactly to use that money going forward are part of an ongoing process that the economic team is formulating so that the President can make some decisions on.
[REPORTER] : I have a follow-up. Are you not prepared today to say that it would be an administration benchmark not to allow any major financial institution in this country to fail? ”

“ Keep in mind that what we've heard from some Republicans in both the House and the Senate is that they will only increase the debt ceiling by the amount of spending cuts that they're able to push through and -- in order to replace the automatic spending cuts of the sequester -- that's $1.2-trillion. Say it takes another trillion or trillion-two to get us through one more year, they'd have to identify $2.5 trillion in cuts just to get the debt ceiling extended to next year -- $2.5 trillion. ”

“ Essential to the stable economic growth we seek is a system of well-adapted and efficient financial institutions. I believe the time has come to conduct a broad national inquiry into the nature, performance and adequacy of our financial system, both in terms of its direct service to the whole economy and in terms of its function as the mechanism through which monetary and credit policy takes effect. I believe the Congress should authorize the creation of a commission of able and qualified citizens to undertake this vital inquiry. ”

“ The evil effects of the stringency in monetary affairs, the want of confidence, the reduction of the national revenue, the decline of domestic productions, all these contributed to impress Congress with the imperative necessity of providing some measure of relief. Instead of inflation, of large issues of paper money by the United States and the national banks, there grew up a conviction that the better policy was to limit and reduce the volume of such money to an amount that could be maintained at par with coin. ”