[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 137 (Wednesday, September 6, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H8586-H8587]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1900
THE COMING TRAIN WRECK
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Chambliss). Under the Speaker's
announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from New York [Mr.
Owens] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority
leader.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I will use no more than half of the 60
minutes allotted.
I realize that we are in a transition period and moving from a
district work period to a capital work period is a bit of a strain, and
we want to take it slow. So I will not go on at great length today.
But I do think we should note the fact that serious business lies
ahead of us. There has been a great deal of talk about a train wreck
coming where the mean and extreme balanced budget philosophy of the
Republican majority will clash with the more moderate reform approach
of the President, and we are going to have some very difficult days.
I think it is quite clear that appropriations bills of the kind that
we passed before we left here cannot be left standing. We cannot have a
$9 billion cut in education, job training and social services. We
cannot have tremendous cuts in housing. There are a number of things
that just cannot be left standing. We cannot tolerate more than $280
billion in cuts over the next 7 years to Medicare. We cannot tolerate
more than $180 billion in cuts for Medicaid.
There has to be a train wreck.
Unfortunately, in the Congress, in the Senate and the House, the
Republican majority has the votes, and they have passed this mean and
extreme program. All we have left is a Democratic President who says
that he will veto these programs, and then we have a situation where
the government may be brought to a halt if the appropriations bills are
not signed and the Republican majority of the Congress is not willing
to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government going.
It is going to be exciting times. But we should all realize that the
basic direction for the Naiton is being shaped not only in the next few
months but it is already in the process; the direction that this Nation
will take is already being shaped faster than we think, and what
happens this year we will have to live with, this year and next year,
for a long time to come.
It is very important that everybody understands that radical changes
are under way. They are being proposed, ever more mean and radical
changes. But radical changes are under way right now.
The great majority of Americans feel that something is very
different, that there is something happening. The great majority feels
some aspect of this change. But they do not understand it.
So the majority of the people are angry, and they do not know why
they are angry. I am here to tell you you have good reason to be angry.
The problem in America is that we have to learn who to be angry with
and how to focus our anger. Where is the problem?
I hope that everyone will take time to read an article that appeared
in the New York Times on last Sunday, September 3. It is an article
that appeared on the op ed page. It was entitled ``Companies Merge,
Families Break Up.'' ``Companies Merge, Families Break Up.''
The article is by Lester Thurow. Lester Thurow is an outstanding
economist, recognized all over the world. He is a professor of
economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On the Hill
here in this capital we have seen and heard Lester Thurow many times
over the last two decades.
{time} 1930
It is our business to rein in the resources of the country, wherever
they may appear, and apply them to the problems that we face.
To get back to Mr. Thurow:
American companies are moving production overseas, using
technology to replace workers, engaging in mega mergers, such
as this week's Chase-Chemical deal, and otherwise downsizing.
Each year more than half a million good jobs are eliminated
by the Nation's most prestigious companies. More new jobs are
being generated in the service sector, but they come with
lower wages and fewer fringe benefits.
With the death of communism and later market socialism and economic
alternatives, capitalists have been able to employ more ruthless
approaches to getting more for less, to getting maximum profits but
with less effort. They do not have to worry about political pressure.
Survival of the fittest capitalism is on the march.
What other kind of capitalism can we have except survival of the
fittest capitalism. And that is appropriate for capitalism to be a
survival of the fittest operation. It is up to government to deal with
what the implications of that is.
Falling real wages have put the traditional American family
into play. As the one-earner middle class family becomes
extinct, with children needing ever more costly educations
for ever longer periods of time, the cost of supporting a
family is rising sharply just as earnings plunge.
Children exist, but no one takes care of them. Parents are
spending 40 percent less time with their children than they
did 30 years ago. More than 2 million children under the age
of 13 have no adult supervision either before or after
school. Paying for day care would use up all or most of a
mother's wages.
The traditional family is being destroyed. This is an economist named
Lester Thurow, who has written 10 or 20 books, professor of economics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is talking about the
economy and the impact of the economy on the family. We hear a lot of
talk about family but we do not acknowledge the fact that the economy
and what happens in the economy, what happens with wages, what happens
with jobs has a very serious impact, the most serious impact on
families. In fact, Mr. Thurow is about to say that.
Returning to the article:
The traditional family is being destroyed not by misguided
social welfare programs coming from Washington, although
there are some government initiatives that have undermined
family structure, but by a modern economic system that is not
congruent with family values.
The traditional family is being destroyed not by misguided social
welfare programs coming from Washington, but by a modern economic
system that is not congruent with family values. When we look at
falling wages as a factor:
Beside falling wages, America's other economic problems
pale into insignificance. The remedies lie in major public
and private investments, in research and development, and in
creating skilled workers to ensure that tomorrow's high-wage
brainpower industries generate much of their employment in
the United States. Yet if one looks at the weak policy
proposals of both Democrats and Republicans, it is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
That is in quotes. As we all know, it is from Shakespeare that Mr.
Thurow is quoting. It is that the Democratic and Republican policies at
this present point, which focus on this problem, that constitute a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
We just passed legislation which refused to continue the Office of
Technology Assessment. The Office of Technology Assessment is a basic
tool very much needed by the Members of Congress, Members of the House
and Members of the Senate. We just threw it out. The one thing that was
most significant got axed. We will be passing an appropriations bill
for defense in the next few days and we are going to have a B-2 bomber
vote again. If past history is any guide, we know that the B-2 bomber,
which the Pentagon does not want, and the President does not want, and
the Air Force does not want, it will probably pass again. The most
unneeded piece of technology around will pass with votes from the
House.
That is the kind of thing we are in. When they say what we do and
what we say is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing, that is what they mean.
The American people should be angry about all this. Revenue policies
are needed to deal with the present problem. We need taxing policies to
take the
resources from where they are, the revenues in Wall Street, the
revenues
[[Page H 8587]]
that are in the high prices of corporations, we need to take some of
those revenues and put them into research and development and into
training workers.
Mr. Speaker, we have a transition period here, a period which will go
on for some time still to come where these great downsizings will make
more people unemployed. Something needs to be done during this
transitional period. Nobody knows where capitalism will go. It is not
planned. No one wants to stop progress, but you need to take some steps
to deal with it, and one of the steps that should be taken is to
balance the tax burden by taking more revenue from corporations.
Corporations now pay only 11 percent of the total tax burden.
Individuals are paying 44 percent. That is ridiculous. We need to bring
down taxes for individuals and raise taxes on corporations to get
enough revenue to sustain the programs that need to be sustained for
education and for job training.
Mr. Speaker, I am rushing, because I do not want to take too much
time today. We will expand on this in the future. We need a creative
revenue commission, a commission similar to the base closings
commission, which will look at the revenue situation, look at the fact
that over the years corporations have gone down from paying almost 40
percent of the tax burden to paying now only 11 percent of the tax
burden. At one point, under Ronald Reagan, it went down to 8 percent of
the total tax burden.
The Committee on Ways and Means has swindled the country. The
Committee on Ways and Means, part of this body, and other taxing
authorities, have allowed a situation to be created where the burden is
very lopsided. One of the things that a tax commission could do is find
ways to raise the taxes on corporations, pull out more revenue from
corporations while you are lowering families and individuals, and use
the money that you get to pour it into education, research and
development, and job training.
I am going to end at this point, Mr. Speaker. There are a lot of
proposals on the board: Flat tax proposals, consumption tax proposals,
various proposals that are on the drawing board for such a commission
to examine. I would want to add to that an anti-monopoly tax, where any
industry which gets more than 25 percent of the market would have to
pay a surcharge because it has an advantage that does not need as great
an expenditure.
I would also add that something should be done about the banking and
financial industry, to recapture the almost $300 billion that the
American taxpayers have put out through the Federal deposit insurance
to bail out the savings and loan associations. All of the industries in
the banking field and related financial institutions ought to have a
surcharge put on them to collect back some of that money. There are a
number of creative propositions by which we could get more revenue
instead of focusing only on cuts.
Yes, we should downsize government; yes, there is waste, but there is
a great problem. We need to balance the tax burden at the same time
that we are trying to balance the budget. In doing that, we will
produce a situation where the workers of America, the children of
America, the families of America would have more to look forward to in
terms of facing these tremendous radical changes that are presently
taking place in our economy and our society.
The material previously referred to is as follows:
[From the New York Times, Sept. 3, 1995]
Companies Merge, Families Break Up
(By Lester C. Thurow)
No country without a revolution or a military defeat and
subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp shift
in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last
generation. At no other time have median wages of American
men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a
majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions
while the per capita domestic product was advancing.
So on Labor Day this year, as with a lot of Labor Days,
most laborers don't have a lot to celebrate. The median real
wage for full-time male workers has fallen from $34,048 in
1973 to $30,407 in 1993.
Wages of white men are falling slightly faster than those
of black men, and the young have been clobbered; wages are
down 25 percent for men 25 to 34 years of age. Median wages
for women didn't start to fall until 1989, but are now
falling for every group except college-educated women. The
pace of decline seems to have doubled in 1994 and early 1995.
The tide rose (the real per capita gross domestic product
went up 29 percent between 1973 and 1993), but 80 percent of
the boats sank. Among men, the top 20 percent of the labor
force has been winning all of the country's wage increases
for more than two decades.
Adding to the frustrations, the old remedy for lower
wages--more education--no longer works. True, wages of males
with only a high school education are falling faster than the
pay of those with college degrees. But investing in a college
education doesn't get one off the down escalator and onto an
up escalator--it merely slows one's descent.
No one knows exactly how much of the decline can be traced
to any particular cause, but we do know the set of causes
that has been responsible
New production and distribution technologies require a much
better educated work force. If decisions are to be pushed
down the corporate hierarchy, those at lower levels have to
have skills and competency beyond what was required in the
past.
With our global economy, where anything can be made
anywhere and sold everywhere, the supply of cheap, often
well-educated labor in the third world is having a big effect
on first-world wages. One month's wages for a Seattle
software engineer get the same company an equally good
engineer in Banagalor, India, for a year. Ten million
immigrants entered the United States during the last decade,
competing for jobs and lowering wages.
American companies are moving production overseas, using
new technology
to replace workers, engaging in mega-mergers such as this
week's Chase-Chemical deal, and otherwise downsizing. Each
year more than a half-million good jobs are eliminated by
the nation's most prestigious companies. More new jobs are
being generated in the service sector, but they come with
lower wages and fewer fringe benefits.
With the death of Communism and, later, market socialism as
economic alternatives, capitalists have been able to employ
more ruthless approaches to getting maximum profits without
worrying about political pressure. ``Survival of the
fittest'' capitalism is on the march.
What economists call ``efficiency wages'' (a company paying
higher salaries than the minimum it needs to pay, so that it
gets a skilled, cooperative, loyal work force) are
disappearing to be replaced by a different form of
motivation--the fear of losing one's job.
Falling real wages have put the traditional American family
into play, as the one-earner middle-class family becomes
extinct. With children needing ever-more-costly educations
for ever-longer periods of time, the cost of supporting a
family is rising sharply just as earnings plunge.
Thirty-two percent of all men between 25 and 34 years of
age earn less than the amount necessary to keep a family of
four above the poverty line. Mothers have to work longer
hours if the family is to have its old standard of living.
Children exist but no one takes care of them. Parents are
spending 40 percent less time with their children than they
did 30 years ago. More than two million children under the
age of 13 have no adult supervision either before or after
school. Paying for day care would use up all or most of a
mother's wages.
In the agricultural era, children had real economic value
at a very early age. Students who use college loans owe their
parents less. Living thousands of miles apart, families lose
track of one another. The family is no longer the social
welfare system when one is disabled, old or sick, and it will
not resume these duties even if the state were to withdraw.
The traditional family is being destroyed not by misguided
social welfare programs coming from Washington (although
there are some Government initiatives that have undermined
family structure) but by a modern economic system that is not
congruent with ``family values.''
Beside falling real wages, America's other economic
problems pale into insignificance. The remedies lie in major
public and private investments in research and development
and in creating skilled workers to insure that tomorrow's
high-wage, brain-power industries generate much of their
employment in the United States.
Yet if one looks at the weak policy proposals of both
Democrats and Republicans, ``it is a tale, told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.''
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