Economy & Budget

Every year, hundreds of thousands of America’s finest look to the Veterans Benefits Administration to process the claims due to them as a result of their unselfish and steadfast service to our nation. Among many other worthwhile programs, this critical legislation will give the Veterans Administration the funding it needs to reduce the current backlog of claims and ensure all processing personnel make more accurate decisions.

I am proud of my Senate colleagues for ensuring that our Veterans receive the benefits they so rightly earned and deserve. In March, Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and I introduced an amendment to the FY 2008 Budget Resolution that will help the Department of Veteran Affairs better manage and reduce its current backlog of pending disability and compensation claims. The amendment, which passed unanimously in the Senate, provided an additional $70.3 million in funding to train and hire claims processors and help our nation’s Veterans receive their benefits and compensation in a more timely and cost efficient manner. Read more...

I like to say this is a balanced budget with balanced priorities. It moves us in the right direction, and to balance in five years, without raising taxes.  It posts smaller deficits than the President’s budget over five years; adheres to the Pay-As-You-Go principle and contains no new mandatory spending not paid for; and it adds "program integrity initiatives" to root out wasteful spending.  Within this framework, our budget does more for veterans’ health care, more for education, and more for children’s health care.

It’s a new direction for America -- an ambitious agenda, but one framed in a fiscally sound way.

Yesterday I introduced legislation to assist student borrowers and their families by ensuring that they have an exit strategy to make sound repayment decisions and manage their loan debts after graduation.  When students graduate and step into the real world, they need to understand how to manage their student loan debts.  With the increasing debt level of many students, borrowers must have good options for managing debt, and good information on the options available so they can make wise, informed decisions.

This bill will give student borrowers better, clearer information to develop smart exit strategies for repaying their federal loans.  It will help students better manage their debt and help them make smarter decisions, not add more repayment plans and confusing choices.

The “Student Information Means a Positive Loan Experience (SIMPLE) Act Read more...

Today Congress will be voting on the annual appropriations for the Department of Defense in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Throughout the House Armed Services Committee mark-up, Democrats made clear their intentions to cut entire programs from our Ballistic Missile Defense program. In defense of their decisions, leadership in the Committee stated, "...we need real capabilities to address real threats." Somehow it seems they've lost sight of the fact that we live in a nuclear age, when failure to anticipate "emerging" nuclear threats could undeniably cost millions of lives.

With that in mind, I will be offering an amendment today to restore the full $764 million being slashed from the president's budget back to missile defense programs. This would enable us to take a gigantic stride towards closing the gap in missile defense and enable us to identify and address future threats. The amendment would restore funding for the Space Test Bed (which had been eliminated completely,) as well as the Airborne Laser program, which our only missile defense system capable of effectively destroying missiles in their boost phase when they are most vulnerable. While these amendments will no doubt be vehemently opposed, the issue of preserving a strong national defense- for both real and emerging threats- should be a non-partisan one, and must be addressed for this and future generations.

Under current law, students must complete a financial application and disclose private information to receive financial aid. Today I introduced legislation to protect student borrowers and their families by establishing clear, standard operating procedures to manage access to this private student financial information.

In the same way that banks protect the privacy of their customers, so too must the Department of Education protect the personal financial information of students and their parents who receive federal financial assistance. Action is needed to restore faith in the ability of the Department to protect students and families from bad actors who would misuse private, financial data. Read more...

With the introduced the AMT Rate Reduction Act of 2007, I hope to provide much needed relief to the burgeoning number of American taxpayers who are impacted by the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).  The proposal, paired with a continued extension of the AMT exemption, will save millions of taxpayers from the unintended burden of the AMT.

This legislation is aimed at reversing the ill-conceived tax increase enacted during the Clinton administration.  It will reduce the rate to a more manageable 24%.  If signed into law, the AMT Rate Reduction Act will reduce both the burden of the AMT on all affected taxpayers, as well as reduce the number of taxpayers slugged by this tax.

This proposal offers a common sense, straight forward approach to removing the burden of a stealth tax which was initially intended to hit a small group of millionaires.  It clearly missed its mark. Read more...

This trade agreement will allow us to move the American trade agenda forward. I believe it is a good and fair compromise that takes into account the concerns of all parties. I urge all Members of Congress who care about making sure our nation remains a leader on trade to support this agreement.

It is of the utmost importance that we continue to be a world leader in trade. As we debate, Europe and our other trading partners are concluding their own free trade agreements around the world. Failing to move our agreements and Trade Promotion Authority would put the United States at a substantial disadvantage in the international economy.

We asked the top nine foreign based companies in 2006 that used nearly 20,000 of the available H-1B visas to disclose further details about their workforce and their use of the special visa program.

As members of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee we have a responsibility to oversee and evaluate our country’s visa policies.  More and more it appears that companies are using H-1B visas to displace qualified, American workers. Now, as we move closer to debate on an immigration bill, I continue to hear how people want to increase the number of H-1B visas that are available to companies. Considering the high amount of fraud and abuse in the visa program, we need to take a good, hard look at the employers who are using H-1B visas and how they are using them. A copy of the letters we sent can be seen on my website.

Last week, I joined two of my fellow Senators on the members of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Sherrod Brown (D) of Ohio and Tim Johnson (D) of South Dakota, to unveil the bipartisan Industrial Bank Holding Company Act.

This legislation would restore the separation of banking and commerce by preventing additional commercial firms from acquiring or establishing industrial loan companies (ILCs).

Congress has made it clear a number of times that we do not support the mixture of banking and commerce. As a member of the Senate Banking Committee when the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill was adopted, the committee had a spirited debate regarding banking and commerce. In the end, we determined that banking and commerce should not mix, which we spelled out by closing the unitary thrift loophole. Since that time, Congress has continued to deliver a loud message on this point. Read more...

Foreign direct investment is critical to the U.S. economy, but our nation’s security is our primary responsibility.  Our goal is to establish a thorough process to review transactions without unnecessarily restricting the flow of foreign investment while at the same time establishing a clear line of accountability.  This Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) reform legislation strikes that critical balance, and I am pleased to join with Chairman Dodd (D-Conn.) in moving it forward.