[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 57 (Tuesday, April 30, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H4173-H4180]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE MYTH OF THE MAGICAL BUREAUCRAT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May
12, 1995, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra] is recognized for
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, before we start with our prepared remarks
this evening, I would like to assure the gentleman from Arizona that as
we move forward and as we get to another week of active reform in this
Congress probably around the middle of July, we expect that that piece
of legislation will have worked its way through the committee process
and will be one of the items that this full House will have the
opportunity to talk about.
Mr. SHADEGG. If the gentleman would yield briefly? I simply want to
thank the gentleman for his assistance in moving this piece of
legislation forward, thank him for cosponsoring the bill, and tell him
that I spoke today with the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Canady], the
chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Committee on the
Judiciary. He has indicated to me just what you have indicated; that
is, that we are hopeful that we will get hearings on this legislation
in the near future and that it can move forward. I appreciate the
gentleman's effort on its behalf. I appreciate your support, and I
think it is a step in the right direction.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. And the issue that we are going to be talking about
tonight builds very much off of the problem that you describe. We are
going to be talking about the myth of the magical bureaucrat, the myth
of moving all of this power and responsibility from parents, from local
levels of government to State governments, that the best place to make
these types of decisions is in Washington. And we are going to be going
through a number of examples this evening which we hope expose that
myth for what it really is. It is for a bunch of people in Washington
making decisions, spending money in areas where they really cannot have
a significant, positive impact or most importantly, where they are not
the most effective agent for bringing about the types of results that
we want.
Mr. SHADEGG. If the gentleman would yield again, let me just simply
say I commend you for this effort, and I want to pass on something. One
of the greatest influences in my life, as I suppose in, hopefully, many
American boys' lives, is their own father. My father was a tremendous
influence on me, and he was very fond in the later years of his life of
saying that the problem with the Congress was that it had come to
believe that it knew how better to run every American business and
every American's life than those individuals themselves. And that is
the kind of notion that I think your effort is going at.
The simple truth is that the 535 Members of this Congress, House and
Senate combined, no matter how well-intended, and the huge army of
bureaucrats that we control, and there are thousands, tens of thousands
of bureaucrats that we control, simply cannot know better how to run
the day-to-day lives of every American and the day-to-day businesses of
every American business or of every American church or synagogue. We
simply cannot run those organizations better than they, and the myth of
the mystical bureaucrat that can do it better than we can is indeed
dead wrong.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. As we move forward this evening, we are going to talk
about this myth as it applies to education, as it talks about creating
jobs, as we talk about Medicare, as we talk about environmental types
of legislation, so that is one of the key areas.
We could not have had a better introduction to our topic tonight than
the legislation that the gentleman talked about, and I again would like
to just reaffirm that I expect that this House will take positive
action on legislation like that this summer so that this Congress can
again begin focusing on the issues that Washington should be dealing
with, that Washington is good at, in moving the other types of
decisions, the other types of responsibility and the dollars back to
State, local, and maybe even back to the taxpayers, parents and
individuals who really are the driving force behind so much of what
goes on in this country.
Mr. SHADEGG. I commend you for your efforts and wish you the best.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Thank you.
Let me just give a little bit of a brief introduction about what we
want to accomplish this evening.
This is an election year. We are in the middle of a lot of rhetoric
flying around. Those of us in Congress who want to focus on the real
problems are finding it very difficult to break through what we call
the clutter, the clutter and the noise. As Members of the Republican
majority, we have grown accustomed to being called mean-spirited,
radical. We are accused of being against women, children, and the
elderly. We are accused of not caring for the poor or for the
environment.
In the middle of all this rhetoric, what is really going on? Many of
my constituents, many of the American people, seem to be very confused.
We want to take this hour to really set the record straight on what we
are trying to do in this Congress. We want to focus on what we believe
is the core issue that is defining this battle in Washington, that has
defined the battle, really, from January 1995 to the present point.
{time} 2045
Many have thrown around labels. Some have called us extremists. But
let us cast aside the labels for a little while. Let us cast aside the
accusations and other typical Washington political jargon, and let us
get down to the bottom of the debate. What are we really trying to do
here? What is the core of the debate?
We can go back to the 1930's, the New Deal. Ever since the 1930's
Congress has placed more and more of its faith in Washington, its
bureaucracy, its bureaucrats, and in its money, in its programs, and in
its services. As we have done that, we have moved much of the
decisionmaking away from parents, individuals, entrepreneurs, small
businesses. What we have done is we have created a myth that too many
people have come to believe, the belief in the Washington bureaucrat: A
belief in Washington money, a belief in Washington programs, and that
Washington services can solve many, if not all, of this Nation's
problems. This is really what all the fuss is about.
Since becoming the majority in Congress, Republicans have been
attacking the myth that Washington can solve everyone's problems. We
know that few Americans believe in Santa Clause. Even fewer believe in
the tooth fairy. But here in Washington, everyone
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seems to believe in the magical bureaucrat: this magical persons who
can solve everyone's problems.
It is as though we believe that bureaucrats are magicians and that by
spending tax money, taxpayers' money, your money on programs and
services, what can they do? they can raise and educate children better
than parents. They can build communities. They build communities and
homes better than parents or better than Habitat For Humanity; that
they are better at creating effective, income-generating jobs; that
they are better than entrepreneurs and small businesses.
It is time for us to confront this bureaucratic myth. Blind faith in
the Washington bureaucracy is hurting America. It is hurting America,
in I believe four specific ways.
First, the myth that Washington can solve everyone's problems has
created a belief that success is defined by spending money, success is
defined by spending money and creating programs, not by the results
that those programs or those dollars generate.
Second, the myth that Washington can solve everyone's problems has
created the substitution effect, where people have a disincentive to
take personal responsibility for their future and for themselves, where
they have a disincentive to take care of their children and to
participate in their community, because someone from Washington is
supposed to do that; in other words, because a Washington magical
bureaucrat is going to solve the problem, I do not have to exercise
personal responsibility to solve it myself.
The third is the myth that Washington can solve everyone's problems
has caused Congress to legislate to the lowest common denominator,
creating one-size-fits-all programs which lower the standards. The
minimum wage fight, I think, is an excellent example. Here we are
debating a minimum wage, the lowest common denominator, instead of
talking about increasing wages for everyone, which is the highest
common denominator. Instead of focusing on the ideal, we are willing to
lower the standard for everyone.
Finally, the myth that Washington can solve everyone's problems has
cost the American taxpayers trillions and trillions of dollars. If it
were inexpensive to believe that magical bureaucrats actually exist, we
could keep spending money on the myth, but it is costing us. It is
costing us, the taxpayers and working American families, big bucks, too
many bucks to continue down this path. The myth that Washington can
solve everyone's problems produces harmful thinking, it costs too much,
it is hurting America in many different ways, and it is not working.
It is not a budgetary problem, it is a cultural problem: Magical
bureaucrats substituting for parents, magical bureaucrats shoving
everyone into one-size-fits-all programs, magical bureaucrats defining
success by the dollars they spend, instead of the results they achieve,
magical bureaucrats doing all this with trillions and trillions of
dollars that working Americans pay every year in taxes. We will never
restore fiscal and moral sanity to our Nation until we destroy this
blind faith in Washington to solve our problems.
Why is it so hard to balance the budget? Because Washington believes
the myth, Washington perpetuates the myth, and Washington works every
day trying to convince American people that the myth is real. Why is it
so hard to reform Medicare? Because Washington believes the myth and
sells the myth. Why is it so hard to improve environmental laws?
Because Washington believes the myth and perpetuates the myth.
Why is it so hard to eliminate the Department of Education? Because
Washington believes the myth and sells the myth each and every day that
magical bureaucrats sitting at desks in Washington educate kids better
than parents and better than teachers, and have more caring for local
students than parents and local school boards.
Why is it so hard to eliminate the Department of Housing? Because
Washington believes the myth that magical bureaucrats sitting at desks
in Washington build communities more effectively than local citizens or
than organizations like Habitat for Humanity. We cannot continue down
this path.
With this introduction, Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from
Wisconsin [Mr. Neuman].
Mr. NEUMANN. Mr. Speaker, what comes to mind today is one of these
mythical bureaucrats the gentleman is talking about. I was in a
committee meeting with them discussing housing, this very issue. I saw
in this meeting the almost fear that somehow, if Washington allowed the
people in Beloit, WI, or Kenosha, WI, to decide how to handle the
housing problems in their own community, if we gave them the
flexibility to make decisions how to best serve the needs in their own
community, that somehow things were going to go astray; but they are
not going to go astray, because I have a lot of faith in Tom Kelly in
Beloit, WI, and the people running the housing programs out there. They
best know how to take care of the people in Beloit, much better than
the people do here in Washington, DC.
I think this whole thing comes down to how can we best turn that
responsibility over to the people locally to best allocate those
dollars to do the best job for their people in their own community.
That is really what this should be all about.
This is America. This is not supposed to be a country where somehow
the people here from Washington are controlling all the lives of the
people out there. This is supposed to be America, where people are
taking responsibility for themselves, and the local school boards and
the local towns are deciding how to best spend that money, or how to
let the taxpayers keep their own money better. That really is what this
is all about.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Kansas [Mr.
Brownback].
Mr. BROWNBACK. I appreciate the gentleman from Michigan yielding to
me, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate very much the gentleman also taking us to
the root of the problem we are talking about today. That is the concept
and the idea that we are going to create governmental solutions, and
from a centralized planning authority in Washington, actually solve
problems.
I want to talk about one particular example in this area that we are
talking about, a magical bureaucracy being able to solve an issue. This
is the agency of HUD, Housing and Urban Development.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to start this off by saying that no one
here questions the good intentions of the people who work in these
agencies, of the employees at HUD, or the people even that design these
programs. These are good people with good intentions, but the problem
is we want to talk about reality and what has been the actual reality
of what has happened after all these good intentions and all this
investment of resources and all these people pouring in from a
centralized solution.
We are talking about a centralized bureaucratic organization in the
form of HUD, Housing and Urban Development as an agency, trying
centralized solutions from Washington for a Nation that covers 260
million people across five time zones that has the largest economy,
that is the international leader of the world. We are going to plan all
this in one central entity. That is the fallacy of what we are talking
about.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development began with great
fanfare in 1965. It was on the front lines of Lyndon Johnson's war on
poverty. It was charged with these things: Renewing our cities,
encouraging job creation, providing decent, safe shelter for low-income
Americans. That was the charge in 1965. You can say, did we adequately
fund HUD, this centralized planning model of what we were going to do?
Since then, in 1965, HUD and other bureaucracies have spent more than
$5.5 trillion on poverty programs, $5.5 trillion. That is basically
about the size of our national debt today. It would be virtually about
$19,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Yet, by virtually
any standard, any measure, poverty, crime, drug abuse, and violence are
far worse today than when HUD was created in 1965, and since we spent
the $5.5 trillion. This is what the good gentleman from Michigan is
pointing out about the fallacy of saying that, OK, if we are going to
solve a problem, let us create a bureaucracy with good people in it to
design a program that is going to fit the entire Nation in a one-size-
fits-all, and
[[Page H4175]]
then let us fund it, and if it is not working, the answer is for us to
put more money into it.
Mr. Speaker, I just beg to differ on that. The centralized command
and control type of model failed in the former Soviet Union, has failed
in command and control areas, and it is failing in America today. Past
and current attempts to fix HUD have met with a great deal of
resistance and past failure. Created in 1965, the entity has already
gone through four major reorganizations of where we are going to
reinvent HUD, four major reorganizations since 1965. All have failed.
Jack Kemp's efforts to reform HUD by giving power to tenants were
stifled by a reluctant Congress at that point in time and an inflexible
system. Yet the problem underlying HUD's national housing policy is the
myth upon which it is created: The notion that Washington can address
the housing needs for all Americans through a centralized system here
where we set here how it is going to be in Connecticut, in Kansas, in
California; this is how it is going to be. It just does not work.
There has been a surge of more than 200 separate Washington-based
housing programs that have tended to displace rather than encourage
local innovation and creativity. I want to add as a side note here as
well, there have been a number of these that are trying to engage now
more local creativity and innovation. I think those are on a positive
note, as they try to localize and get local solutions brought forward.
We have had a lot of rules and regulations coming out of HUD as well
that have stifled local creativity and innovative solutions to housing
needs. It has caused former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp to recently
conclude that HUD is an agency with a disparate and contradictory
mission. ``The more I was at HUD, the more I realized that the flaws
were endemic to the bureaucracy.''
He went on to say at a press conference we had, where Secretary Kemp
was calling for the elimination of HUD and us giving these decisions
back to local tenants, that there are good people that work at HUD. It
is a failed design of the system. It is a failure for us to think that
we can manage, and that a mythical Washington bureaucracy will solve
the problem, because it will not. It tends to get more of a centralized
focus.
Our model for housing opportunities is local empowerment. It is
rooted in the premise that housing policy should bypass governmental
bureaucrats and central planners and provide direct assistance to
tenants themselves. In other words, we would seek to give vouchers to
tenants that we want to help and ask them to go find their own housing
abilities, whether it be with public housing, whether they purchase a
housing unit, or whether it be in private renting. Housing is a local
issue. Washington cannot solve local housing needs. Indeed, the more we
focus on Washington, the more we take away from local housing
innovative solutions that we could come forward with.
Just recently the HUD bureaucracy has announced the planned
construction of a new project in Washington, DC that has an estimated
cost of $186,500 per unit, $186,500 per unit. This represents, I think,
an enormous waste of taxpayer money, not to mention those poor families
who will lose out because of the finite resources that will be spent on
this project. Instead, HUD could have provided housing vouchers to
individuals, they could have provided them to 35 families for 1 year
for the initial cost of building one new unit in this housing project.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that HUD has obligated the
Federal Government to spend, and get this number, $180 billion over the
next 30 years to pay for the public and private housing commitments,
most of which were made more than 10 years ago.
This experiment in central planning is already being passed on to our
children. Besides, HUD's attempts to fix our Nation's housing problems,
this bureaucracy applies Washington's answers to igniting economic
growth in our urban communities.
{time} 2100
A number of us believe that the key to economic growth in our urban
communities and other places is to cut the burden of Washington. Let us
cut that taxation, litigation, regulation and manipulation out of
Washington so that we can have those localized solutions spring up and
people go forward.
As Jesse Jackson once said, capitalism without capital is just
another ism. We need to remove the barriers to self-creating capital.
Block grants will not do this. People do it. People do these things.
The Republican Congress has already passed reforms to try to be able to
cut back on taxation, regulation, litigation and manipulation so people
and localized solutions can flourish.
On a worse note, the HUD bureaucracy has become in some cases a
catalyst of racial and economic segregation. That is according to a
doctor who has worked at HUD, and an April 1996 desegregation suit
brought against HUD, Thompson versus HUD, et al. by the American Civil
Liberties Union of Maryland on behalf of several Baltimore public
housing tenants who alleged that HUD illegally segregated black public
housing tenants for 6 decades. This resulted in a settlement which
caused HUD to break up several of the dilapidated Baltimore projects.
As one can see, there are direct social and economic costs to this
mythical bureaucracy. The American people realize that compassion is
not measured in how many billions we spend on bureaucratic solutions
when this is done and people are hurt by it. This is one of the most
uncompassionate solutions of all.
Fortunately, there is a better way. You have brought that to our
attention. Our society benefits when people realize their own freedoms
and creativity and our Government does not try to replace them. That is
why I think this is a good discussion about a mythical bureaucracy does
not solve things. Many times it can actually hurt or concentrate
problems.
It is people. It is individual solutions. We have those solutions we
are offering to the American people.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I would just ask the gentleman to go back to his first
statements where in 1965 we started creating this myth of HUD. And what
were the parameters and the directives that the President in 1965 laid
out? What was the myth that was created or started to be created in
1965. That continued to be driven even into 1996 as we try to change
some of these programs?
Mr. BROWNBACK. The myth that was created, I want to read these off,
it was on the front line of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, charged
with renewing our cities, encouraging job creation, providing decent,
safe shelter for low-income Americans. We followed up spending-wise,
spending nearly $5.5 trillion since then on HUD and other low-income
programs.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think we should just also say that if we go into
Washington, DC, we go to the public housing projects, to get to the
public housing projects that are inhabited today we go by 3 and 4 empty
buildings. We go into Chicago, we go by almost a mile of empty public
housing. We did not do any of those things very well.
I am sure my colleague from Wisconsin would like to say something
about this. He is a builder in his real life; when he has a real job,
he is in the construction industry. But my guess is, I just did some
rough numbers at $55,000 for a down payment for a smaller home, I
recognize over these 30 years we could have built 100 million homes.
Given a nicer home, we could have built, at $110,000 a house, we could
have still built 50 million homes over the last 30 years. It is
amazing, $19,000 for each and every American is how much we have spent
on this program for the last 30 years with these kind of results.
I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.
Mr. NEUMANN. I will just point out with 250 million people in the
United States of America, that is literally one home for every 5 people
with the money we have spent.
The other thing I could not help but think, as the gentleman from
Kansas was going through some of these numbers, contrasting what you
are talking about to a program like Habitat for Humanity. Back when I
was in the building business when, before I got into the political
world in any way, shape or form, I had a group of people from
Janesville, WI come to me and say, ``Hey, Mark, you're building a lot
of homes. Would you consider giving us a hand in this Habitat for
Humanity project?''
Rather than the Government coming in to do this, we got together in
the
[[Page H4176]]
community and built the house. When the person moved into that house,
it was a truly needy person that received this help. Can you imagine
Habitat for Humanity, with the local support and local effort that they
get from the local people, spending anywhere near this kind of money,
and what they could have done with one-tenth of this amount of money if
the control had just been left out there locally and we had had
involvement with the local people to help the most needy people in
their community? Can you imagine what we could have done in this
country instead?
Mr. BROWNBACK. I think we would have renewed our cities, encouraged
job creation, and provided decent, safe shelter for low-income
Americans.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think if we take a look at Habitat for Humanity, it
is active in Michigan. They take a caring attitude in reaching out and
finding the people to move into these houses. These people are part of
the process. They maintain their dignity. They put in sweat equity.
They work hard. They put them on finance plans to enable them to buy
these homes. They put them in the middle of the community so they are
not segregated into little areas or pockets of the community.
Mr. NEUMANN. It is not only the person that is working on the home
that winds up moving into the home, it is the community leaders and the
community involvement that makes this process successful. I still ride
by that first house that we built in Janesville, WI every now and then.
It is still there, it is well cared for. Everything is right about it.
It is not only the person that moves into the house, it is the
involvement of the community in solving the problem. They own the
solution to this problem and they are going to make it real.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I would like to thank the gentleman from Kansas. You
have got us off to a good start in talking about exposing this myth.
I now want to turn our attention to another myth. We have talked
about the one that Washington creates communities, Washington creates
homes, and we have found out that after $5.5 trillion that is not the
reality. I would now like to address another myth, that Washington
bureaucrats create jobs, that they are better than entrepreneurs, they
are better than small business at creating jobs. To do that, I would
like to go back to my colleague from Wisconsin [Mr. Neumann] who has
created real jobs working in the private sector as a small businessman
in Wisconsin.
Mr. NEUMANN. I appreciate the gentleman yielding. This is an area
that I very much like to talk about because we need the American people
to understand that the American dream is not dead.
When my wife Sue and I started, we literally were in a position where
we could not afford to pay our bills, and we took a chance on the
American dream. As we fulfilled the American dream, many jobs were
created. We started in the real estate business and eventually got into
home-building.
The first year in it we lost money. We built 9 homes, providing 18
jobs, and we literally lost money. My dream in that first year was
simply to have the Government get out of our way, and allow our
business to concentrate on growth and expansion and the things that
would make a business successful.
As we stayed in the second year we basically had two choices, either
let the Government take our business away from us, that is, the banks
or whoever would take it, or we would turn the business around and
become profitable. The second year we built 27 homes, then to 81, then
to 120.
The key to this discussion is the way jobs are created is not by
going to the government and asking for Government spending or a
Government program. The way jobs are created is by entrepreneurs
allowing their businesses to grow and expand like ours did.
At the end of 4 years when we were building 120 homes a year, there
were 250 people in southeastern Wisconsin working because of that. Just
think what that means. What that means is those 250 families are not on
welfare.
Let us just go the next step. What were we really looking for to be
successful in business? We just wanted Washington, the Government, to
get out of the way so we could be successful at promoting job expansion
and job growth.
When we look at the homebuilding business, and this is one I am very
familiar with, what is the best thing that can happen for the creation
of jobs? It is not more Government spending. It is a balanced budget.
Why a balanced budget? It is because, like Alan Greenspan says, when
the budget gets balanced, interest rates will stay low, 2 percent, a
full 2 percentage points lower.
What happens when the interest rates are low? Our young people again
have a chance to live the American dream. When the interest rates are
low, people can afford to buy houses and cars, and people have to go to
work to make those houses and to make those cars. When they go to work,
they are no longer on the welfare rolls or on unemployment, costing the
government money, but instead they are paying money in.
We just did this. We have just been through a balanced budget battle
where everyone understood we were serious about getting to a balanced
budget. Look what happened. When I came here they were projecting
deficits for fiscal year 1996 of $200 billion. We said we cannot have
that. That is not good for our country. We are going to a balanced
budget.
As we went down this road to a balanced budget exactly as Alan
Greenspan said, the interest rates stayed low, we stayed on track. We
passed a rescission bill that took $16 billion out, then we passed the
appropriations bills that took another $23 billion out, and the markets
reacted.
This is the good news. It is not those numbers. The good news is the
markets reacted, interest rates stayed down, people went out and bought
Suburbans, they went out and bought Jeeps, they went out and bought
houses, and people went to work building those products.
When they went to work, they went off the welfare rolls, and guess
what happened? We not only hit the deficit targets that we had in our
glide path to a balanced budget, we actually for the first time are
about $13 billion ahead of schedule. We are not only on our glide path
to a balanced budget but we are actually ahead of schedule in this an
election year.
I have a chart that shows this. This red line is where we were with
the deficit when I first came here. This is so exciting to talk about
because America does not understand that we are actually winning this
battle against the budget. When we win the battle, it means jobs for
our young people and it means the American dream can once again be
fulfilled by American citizens.
This red line shows where we were when I came here, the deficit where
it was headed. After 12 months here, yes, through lots of budget
fights, very difficult budget battles and a couple of presidential
vetoes, we had made progress. The yellow line shows where we were after
12 months.
We dared to dream, to dream that we were actually going to balance
the budget, not the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings stuff that did not get done
because they hit an election year and failed. We dared to dream we were
actually going to do it.
This green line shows our dream, our glide path to a balanced budget.
But here is what is different about this Congress versus the other
Congresses that have been here before us. This Congress not only
maintained their path to a balanced budget in this, an election year,
we are actually ahead of schedule.
America does not seem to know that through all of those budget
battles that we went through last year, we are winning. And when we
were winning, everything worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
People started buying those houses and cars, they started going back to
work, and the cost of the Federal Government for welfare rolls and for
unemployment went down just the way it was supposed to work. That is
what led us to this point where we are ahead of schedule.
Having said that, I have to caution what is going on today. For some
reason, a lot of people in this city have kind of lost sight of the
fact that we have to keep working, that it is not going to be easy to
get to a balanced budget.
And when we start losing sight of the fact that we have to keep our
efforts focused on a balanced budget, let me go
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right back to jobs and job creation. What is going to happen is, the
interest rates are going to start to climb and inflation is going to
pick up. When that happens it is much more difficult for the
entrepreneurs to be successful out there and it just plain does not
work. It is a spiral in reverse.
We cannot allow that to happen. We have to refocus our attention on
balancing the budget, which is what I am doing here and which is what
many of the freshman class came here to do.
Just one more thing. We have accomplished what is on this chart not
by raising taxes on the American people like we saw in 1993, not by
making it more difficult for our families to make ends meet because
they have to pay higher taxes. We did this by reduced spending. The
reality is that is the way it should be done. From the entrepreneurship
from the private sector here, the best thing that government could do
is get the mythical bureaucrat out of our way and allow the businesses
to have the capital available to grow and expand and employ people so
people can once again live the American dream.
I just have one final point on this, and I think it is very
important. The American people need to understand that when the Federal
Government balances their budget, that means the government is not
going to borrow $150 billion a year. When the Government does not
borrow that money, it is available out there in the private sector for
our young people to use to buy houses and to buy cars.
That is the whole cycle, the positive cycle. If we can get to a
balanced budget, the government does not borrow that money, it is not
available in the private sector for our people to build houses and buy
cars and so on, and when they do those things, there are more jobs
created. When they create those jobs, businesses have to expand.
What is necessary for businesses to expand is the availability of
capital. Then we are right back to balancing the budget. If the Federal
Government does not borrow that money, the capital is available for our
businesses to expand, and when the businesses expands, that is job
opportunities. Those are real job opportunities for real American
people. That is what this should be all about. That is what the budget
battle is about.
The final words here, we are winning. We have been through a lot in
the last year and a half in the budget battles and doggone it, we are
winning. We are winning the battle and we are doing it without raising
taxes on the American people.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the gentleman for his discussion on that point,
because really the giant sucking sound here in Washington is the
Federal Government sucking capital out of the capital markets, away
from entrepreneurs, away for young people, away from people who want to
start businesses or build homes or start their futures. The magical
bureaucrats in Washington here define their success by how much money
they spend on, quote-unquote, job creation programs, not by how many
jobs they actually create.
{time} 2115
If I had to make a choice about where I wanted to invest my dollars
or who I wanted to have spending dollars to create jobs, I would go
with entrepreneurs and not sending them to Washington and having
Washington try to pick winners and losers.
Washington would never have picked Steve Jobs at Apple Computer as
saying that looks like a good investment. Here is a guy working out of
his garage. Let us go pump some money into that because I think that is
going to create a new industry. I doubt if they would have picked Bill
Gates. Those are not the type of people bureaucrats look at and say
that is the wave of the future, because they are out of the mold.
Entrepreneurs break the rules. Bureaucrats live by the rules. They
cannot accept these kind of challenges.
I would like to yield to my colleague from Minnesota, who has joined
us from the exalted Speaker's platform.
Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Michigan for
yielding. I was listening probably more intently than most of the
Members of Congress to this debate. I got excited by the discussion you
have been having, and particularly about this chart, listening to what
you are talking about. I think you have really sort of hit on what is,
if I could describe it as, the nub of the great debate we are having in
America today and the great debate we are having in this Congress.
In fact, let me say it this way: Senator Phil Gramm from Texas said
it so well earlier this year when he was accused by some of the
administration, I think it may have been the President. He said, you
know, if Phil Gramm's budget passes, it means that there is going to be
less money spent on education, there is going to be less money spent on
children, and there is going to be less money spent on nutrition. And
he really said it right. He said this is not a debate about how much
money is going to be spent on education, or children, or nutrition.
This is a debate about who gets to do the spending.
Ultimately, whether we are talking about housing policy, Medicare
reform, all these others things we are talking about, the debate is
about who gets to decide. Is it going to the American families or some
magical bureaucrat here in Washington? We know it in our hearts, and I
think the people understand this better than we sometimes give them
credit for. They can make those decisions much better for themselves
and their own families, and they will spend the money much more firmly
than we can spend it here in Washington.
We can beat on the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats, and as I think
the gentleman from Kansas, Representative Brownback, said, these are
good people. They are trying to do the right thing. But ultimately the
system consumes the participants. In fact, I was reminded as you were
speaking earlier of something Thomas Jefferson said so long ago. He
said, ``Those who would trade freedom for security will lose both and
deserve neither.''
We have bought into this idea over the last 30 or 40 years that
somehow Washington knows best and somehow that elected officials and
bureaucrats in Washington can make better decisions than families and
communities and individuals back in their neighborhoods. So I am
delighted to just take a few minutes to say I think we are on the right
track. We are winning this battle.
When we say we, I think we mean we, the American people, because this
ultimately is not a debate between Republicans and Democrats, it is not
a debate between the Congress and the President; it really is a debate
about the future of this country. It is about real individuals and
about real families. It is not about dollars and cents and CBO and GAO,
because sometimes we get bogged down in this debate about numbers and
accounting. This is not an accounting exercise, it is about whether or
not we are going to preserve the American dream for our kids.
So I congratulate you for participating in this special order
tonight. I think the American people need to hear more about this,
because as I have said before, facts are our friends. The more the
American people see about what is really going on here in this
Congress, I think the more they are going to agree that this is the
direction the United States of America is going to have to move.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the gentleman for his comments. I would like to
move on and talk briefly about what the gentleman introduced, which was
the issue of education. I think when Senator Gramm actually got into a
little bit of a debate with a bureaucrat from the Department of
Education, who said that I think I know more about educating your kids
and I care more about educating your kids than what you do, his retort
was if you know so much about my kids, what are their names? I do not
know that much about your kids was the answer.
But you know, that is the other myth that we are fighting here, that
Washington bureaucrats, that a Washington bureaucracy cares more about
the education of our kids than what parents in local communities do.
This myth is also hurting America. It creates the illusion that the
magical Washington education bureaucrat can substitute, think about it,
that the people in Washington can substitute for parents and local
teachers. The myth again creates the illusion that spending equals
results. The more dollars you spend, the better results you are going
to have. And the myth leads
[[Page H4178]]
to policy designed for the lowest common denominator.
Let us take a look at each one of those. The myth creates the
illusion that many Washington education bureaucrats substitute for
parents and local teachers. The myth assumes that parents have not
addressed the major issues their children face, assumes that parents do
not have the will to make the sacrifices on behalf of their children,
assumes that parents do not have the knowledge and the expertise to
solve their children's educational problems. Therefore, the magical
Washington bureaucrat must step forward, meet the social obligations
that families, citizens, local schools and communities are ignoring.
The reality is that Federal programs displace parents and local
initiatives and solutions. They drive parents out of the process.
I have gone back and talked to parents, I have talked to local school
administrators, and what you find is that the schools that work best
are the ones that have the open door policy, that say any time a parent
wants to come into their kid's school, the doors are open.
But what has happened is more programs come from Washington, more
mandates come from Washington, the end result is that administrators at
the local level are starting to look more toward Washington for their
direction about what they should be doing in their schools rather than
looking to the parent and the local community for what should be going
on in their schools.
Once that link between the local community and the local school is
broken, education goes only one way, and that is down, because once the
local community no longer trusts the local schools because they do not
reflect the values, the priorities, of the local community, the school
system is lost.
The myth creates the illusion that spending equals results. Hey, if
you are spending $1 billion on the Save the Kids Program, you must be
saving kids, right? Otherwise why would you spend those kinds of
dollars and why would you have a program with that kind of name on it?
The myth says the problem is not with the programs themselves, but
with the taxpayers. According to the myth, the taxpayers never cared
enough to increase taxes and spend money on these programs when they
had control at the local level, and Washington had to step into the
process.
The myth says that the people who want change, those of us saying
this does not work and what is ``this,'' what we have created here in
Washington by showing that we care, it is kind of like what my
colleague from Kansas described in the housing and urban development.
What we have created here in Washington is 760 programs. We really
care, 760 programs. We care even more, because we have created 40
agencies, departments, or commissions, and boy, we really care because
we are spending $120 billion.
But what is the reality of all of this spending? The reality at HUD
was that we were going to improve America. The reality of 40
commissions, 760 programs, is SAT scores are dropping. In 1994, 17-
year-olds scored 11 points worse in math than 1970. Sixty-six percent
of 17-years-olds do not read at a proficient levels and reading scores
have consistently fallen since 1962. U.S. students scored worse in math
than all other large countries except Spain. Finally, freshmen, think
about it, 30 percent of all college freshmen, think about it, 30
percent of all college freshmen must take remedial education classes.
In 1996, despite the poor results in educational achievement, many of
us that are advocating this, for saying take these dollars, move it to
the parents, move it to local school districts, to get involved with
the kids, we are extremists. We do not care when we say the system is
broke. The myth, the reality that Washington is trying to perpetuate,
is not reality. The reality is a failed program. It is a myth that we
care.
The myth leads us to develop policies that are for the lowest common
denominator. We are not driving for excellence in education. We are
trying to design something for the lowest common denominator. There are
lots of problems here in education.
Mr. BROWNBACK. If the gentleman would yield for just a minute for a
question, I would ask you, you came from the private sector in the
business world. What would happen to your business had you done
something similar, investing this sort of time, resources, and focus in
a particular program area and had the types of results that you have
just articulated?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If I were still employed, most likely if these were the
results of my area of responsibilities, I would be unemployed. The
business would have never let such a key part of its future languish
with these kinds of results for this long. They would have stepped in a
long time ago and said ``You are selling us down the wrong track. You
are out. We have got to take a new look at addressing it,'' because
this is a very critical matter. We are talking about the education of
our kids, the kids that are going to be running this country in 5, 10,
15 years, the kids that have to compete on an international basis if
this country is going to continue to be the leading example for the
world. Business would have never survived if they let this problem go
on.
Mr. BROWNBACK. If I can ask another question, and I am just giving
you this hypothetical question, if this was your company and this was
your core product that you had to have good results out of, and you
were having these sort of results, they would not have said to you, OK,
Mr. Hoekstra, we are going to give you another $1 billion to spend
because you have not produced on this, and the reason is we just did
not give you enough money.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. No; they would not have given me $1 billion. They would
have asked me to come up with a new plan, to come up with a new
process, to systemically take a look at what I was trying to do and
figure out what the real problem was.
It is very evident here in education. The problem is not money. Some
of the best school districts in the country have some of the lowest per
pupil spending. It is not an issue of dollars, it is an issue of where
decisions are made. As we are trying to reform this and improve it, we
do hear the extremists now calling us. Like you said, if I were making
the kinds of decisions and changes we are trying to make here in
Washington in the business world, I would be called too conservative,
not willing enough to really face the issues.
We are proposing change here in Washington and we are gutting
programs that in reality do not work.
Mr. BROWNBACK. If the gentleman will yield further, let me put you in
another role and ask you if you were the superintendent of schools at a
particular local school district and had these sort of results,
spending this sort of money in this sort of program design, what do you
think the school board would ask of you there?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. The school board would ask for my resignation. They
would say ``These are our kids. We need to get somebody in here that
can get the job done.'' So they might, before that, they might ask me
what the problem is? The problem is, I think, as we have talked about
it, we have asked administrators and bureaucrats to look to Washington
for their direction. When you take a look, I have oversight on the
Education Department. The Education Department, they are not
educational experts. You would think they would be educational exports.
They are accountants, primarily, because they are moving money around
the country rather than really providing expertise.
I would be glad to yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.
Mr. NEUMANN. Just a couple of points. With the 760 different
educational programs, would you have any idea how many bureaucrats are
necessary to run each one of the programs?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Well, at this point in time we are trying to gather
that information. Finding 760 programs is difficult. Having them
scattered over 40 different agencies, we are calling up these agencies,
trying to get that data. No, I do not know how many people there are in
Washington.
Mr. NEUMANN. Is it safe to say there are a good number of bureaucrats
necessary to run each one of these 760 different programs?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. There are bureaucrats at every level. There are over
[[Page H4179]]
5,000 in the Department of Education, which administers about 260 of
these programs. There are bureaucrats at the local level who are trying
to figure out what is coming from Washington.
Mr. NEUMANN. How many of these bureaucrats work for nothing?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. At last count, I do not believe that there were any.
Actually, it would be illegal for them to volunteer.
Mr. NEUMANN. Let me go on with the point. With 760 different programs
and a large number of bureaucrats, Washington bureaucrats, necessary to
run each one of the programs, and each one of those bureaucrats drawing
a salary, we have many, many tax dollars designed to help the education
of our young people that are going to pay salaries of people here in
Washington, as opposed to getting out to the young people these dollars
were designed to help.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. We have a tremendous number of dollars that should be
intended to educate kids that are never making it down to the local
classroom.
Mr. NEUMANN. I would just like to point out as it relates to
education there is another way to do this. Before I built homes, I was
a math teacher. I came out of college as a math teacher. I would go
downtown and hear from our businesses downtown that my students did not
understand the math that the people downtown thought they should
understand.
We did not turn to Washington, DC, for a solution. I was teaching at
Milton, WI, at the time. What we did was a survey. We developed a
survey and we sent it out to our local people. You see, I took offense
at the idea that my math students did not know the math that they
thought they should know coming out my classroom. That somehow was very
offensive to me.
So we did a survey. We asked them what is it you are expecting our
students to know when they come out of our classrooms? We got lots of
people that responded to our survey. We developed a test to see whether
or not the people downtown were right or whether or not our students
actually did not know what they were supposed to know when they
graduated from high school. Guess what we found?
{time} 2130
We found the vast majority of them did not know what our businesses
expected them to know when they came into the private sector to take a
job. So what we did at that point is initiated a program locally, at
Milton, WI, at Milton High School, and through the school system there
that corrected the problem. Within 2 to 3 years we found the problem
was corrected and the vast majority of the students graduating gained
the knowledge that was necessary, that the business people downtown
expected them to know before they graduated from our high school.
But that is the difference between the idea of Washington, DC and the
bureaucrats here solving a problem versus the people in Milton, WI; the
local control and the local people being involved and what it is they
expect their students to know and how to develop solutions to problems
locally. It does not have to be done from Washington, DC.
The other thing that happens when Washington starts doing it, and the
gentleman alluded to it, every time we take a responsibility for
education away from the parents and away from the community people,
that is one less reason that they have to be involved in the education
of the young people. And as their involvement decreases, the test
scores go down, as the gentleman was alluding to.
So the gentleman is right on the money here. We need to get education
back to the local level and get the local businesses and the local
employers, we need to get those folks actively involved with the school
systems deciding what it is that our students need to know in order to
function in our society when they get out of high school.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I would like to now yield to the gentleman
from Kansas [Mr. Brownback] to talk about, I am not sure we will have
time to get all the way through with it, but to at least talk about one
other myth that is being perpetuated here in Washington.
Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Speaker, I want to again thank the gentleman for
yielding to me for a few moments. I want to take a few moments to
explain how the myth of the magic of Washington bureaucracy is actually
at times hurting the environment which it is designed to protect.
The environmental movement has produced some wonderful results of
protecting the environment, especially in improving people's attitudes
and people's outlooks and actually improving the environment. We are
all committed to a good, clean, healthy environment. If we do not
provide a good, clean healthy, environment for our kids and our
grandchildren, they will not have anyplace to live.
We have to take care of Mother Earth, we have to do the right things
to take care of the environment, and I know of no Member in Congress,
no Member whatsoever that is not strongly supportive of a good, clean
environment. We have to provide that. But I want to provide one bit of
information that I do not know if it is commonly known about Washington
bureaucracy and the environment.
Does the gentleman know who the biggest polluter in America is? The
biggest polluter in America today?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would yield, it is the U.S. Federal
Government.
Mr. BROWNBACK. It is the Federal Government. It is the Federal
Government. For example, hundreds of billions of dollars and many
decades will be required to clean up Federal hazardous waste sites. I
will give the gentleman some General Accounting Office numbers on this.
And the General Accounting Office is the watchdog of the Federal
agencies of the Federal Government.
GAO says Federal agencies expect to spend $54 billion this year, this
year, to clean up their own facilities as far as environmental waste
and environmental problems created. And the Office of Management and
Budget estimates that as much as $389 billion in additional funds may
be needed through 2070 just to clean up pollution and waste caused by
Washington.
There are many government programs in Washington and run by
Washington, and enacted by this Congress even, or past Congresses, and
operated by government bureaucracies that actually harm the
environment. The Government should take steps to make sure its own
house is in order. If we could clean up the Federal Government's own
mess, the bureaucracy mess that we have created, that the bureaucracy
has created, we will go a long ways towards improving the environment
in America, towards making this country better for our children and our
grandchildren.
It makes no sense for Washington, a Washington bureaucracy to
subsidize environmental destruction on the one hand while establishing
laws and regulations and bureaucracies to mitigate that damage on the
other hand. And here is a classic example of a place working against
itself on an overall policy that we all support: a clean, good, healthy
environment, better for our children and grandchildren in the future;
and yet the Federal Government being the biggest polluter in America.
I yield back to the gentleman from Michigan.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I do not know if my colleague from Wisconsin has any
closing comments. I think we are about at the end of our time.
Mr. NEUMANN. Do we have a little time left to do an environmental
quiz?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. We have 4 minutes.
Mr. NEUMANN. Would the gentleman like me to do a little environmental
quiz here tonight? I want to see where the gentleman stands.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Only if the gentleman asks my colleague from Kansas all
the questions.
Mr. NEUMANN. I will ask my colleague from Kansas. This is a question
I ask the American people in virtually every town hall meeting I go to.
I do a little environmental quiz and I just ask a few questions.
The first one is, does the gentleman think it makes sense for the
Federal Government, before they initiate a new rule or a new
regulation, to do a cost-benefit analysis; that is, to decide if the
cost is worth the benefit received?
Mr. BROWNBACK. That would seem basic to me, something we should ask
of everything.
Mr. NEUMANN. That is the first antienvironment vote that we took,
because that is what we said. We want a
[[Page H4180]]
cost-benefit analysis before we enact a new regulation.
Does the gentleman think it makes sense, when we talk about spending
the American taxpayers' dollars to clean up waste sites, that we first
do a risk assessment and we clean up the sites that are the highest
risk to the environment first and the other ones later?
Mr. BROWNBACK. Well, I would think that it would make absolute sense
to clean up the highest priority ones first.
But I want to inquire of the gentleman of one. Does the gentleman
think when we clean up an environmental site that we should pay more to
lawyers and lawsuits on cleaning up an environmental site or should we
actually pay money to clean up that site?
Mr. NEUMANN. It is clear to me we should be using the dollars to
clean up the site. And right now only 50 percent of the tax dollars are
actually getting out there to be used on cleaning up the site.
And I would point out that is another vote that has been scored as
antienvironmental if we do a risk assessment.
Now let me ask another one. If the Federal Government initiates a new
rule or a new regulation, and that new rule or new regulation causes an
individual's property, has individual property, to decrease in value by
more than 20 percent, say, the public is going to gain by this new rule
or regulation. They want a waterway through a farm, so a farmer can no
longer farm his land. So they initiate this new rule or regulation.
Does the gentleman think it is reasonable that the Federal Government
should compensate the individual citizen for the loss of his property
value?
Mr. BROWNBACK. Not only reasonable, but I believe constitutional.
Mr. NEUMANN. That is called takings, and that is the third
antienvironmental vote we took.
Let me do one more question. If there was a forest fire and the trees
burned out, and we are now looking at all this charred timber out
there, and a lumber company says I can still harvest some of the
timber, even though it is charred, we can still harvest some of this
timber.
So the lumber company makes a deal they will buy the charred timber
and replant the forest. Would it make sense to the gentleman that we
would allow the lumber company to go in and harvest the charred timber
and replant the forest, as opposed to leaving the charred timber to
stay there to rot?
Mr. BROWBACK. That would make sense to me.
Mr. NEUMANN. That was the fourth antienvironmental vote that has been
scored by the environmental groups in this country today.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, I think just recently the
fifth environmental vote was if a Member votes against allocating
family planning, which is the code word for worldwide abortion, if we
vote against family planning as part of the foreign aid package, is
that an environmental vote? If a Member voted against promoting
abortion on an international basis, that is an antienvironmental vote.
I think the gentleman has a great quiz, and I want to thank my
colleagues for joining me. I think we are going to keep raising this
issue over the coming weeks.
Washington has drawn its strength from this myth for way too long.
Washington cannot solve everybody's problems, and when it pretends to,
it really ends up too often hurting America and Americans.
When we move decisionmaking to Washington, we substitute Washington
wisdom, ``Washington wisdom,'' for the common sense of the American
people. That is not the direction we want to be going. That is not the
direction we need to go to address the problems that are facing this
country. It is costing us trillions and trillions of dollars.
I think working together we will one way restore Washington to its
proper role in American society. That is what our colleague from
Arizona talked about when we began this an hour ago. There is much work
to do to make that happen, but we are committed to working on that and
seeing what we get back to common sense America and away from
Washington wisdom.
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