[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 109 (Tuesday, July 23, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1347-E1348]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         WASHINGTON WONDERLAND

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. ANDREW JACOBS, JR.

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 23, 1996

  Mr. JACOBS. Mr. Speaker, the eloquence and penetrating logic of the 
Taxpayers Unions' Sid Taylor graces the Congressional Record once 
again.

                     Money, Systems and Your Health

                            (By Sid Taylor)

       About 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ chased the money 
     changers out of the Temple. Today, they're back.
       This time, and in our Space Age temple of finance and 
     fiscal systems, the money changers have computers, satellite 
     communications networks and instant money transfer. With a 
     national debt now around $5.5 trillion--I have the feeling 
     that our American temple of democracy is about to experience 
     Fiscal Shock.
       Our American capitalistic system is now running on ``funny 
     money''. A government can do this for so long and then the 
     law of

[[Page E1348]]

     ``supply and demand'' begins to move in. When you print about 
     5 trillion paper dollars, the excess supply of these bills 
     begins to degrade the value of this kind of unfunded 
     currency.
       The future problem of American citizens today is not that 
     the stock market might collapse. It probably won't. There's 
     too much ``funny money'' now in circulation that's holding it 
     up. The real problem is not an unexpected decline in the 
     value of American stocks, but rather a decline in the value 
     of the American ``dollar'' itself. The dollar is the Common 
     Stock in USA Incorporated a national business that now has 
     about 255 million citizen/taxpayer shareholders. I'm one of 
     them.
       As a student of history, I feel that the shekel of ancient 
     days and our Space Age American dollar may have much in 
     common. With federal budget deficits in the $164 billion a 
     year range, and interest alone on the national debt now 
     heading for around $344 billion a year, this is what I mean 
     by Fiscal Shock. We're being strangled by red tape and 
     drowning in red ink.
       Shakespeare wrote ``All the world's a stage, and all the 
     men and women are merely players.'' Right? No, wrong. He 
     lived in the Elizabethan era, not today's high-tech Space 
     Age. All the world's a system, and all the men and women are 
     merely subsystems, activators, linkages or controls.
       The current battle in Congress over reform of our $1 
     trillion dollar national health care ``system'' illustrates 
     the point.
       This system is so big and complicated I feel that if we 
     taxpayers, the White House and Congress aren't careful we may 
     unwittingly legislate ourselves a medical ``Tower of Babel''. 
     The keyword is complexity. In computer software, for example, 
     W. Wayt Gibbs, staff writer for the Scientific American has 
     pointed out: ``When a system becomes so complex that no one 
     manager can comprehend the entirety, traditional development 
     processes break down.'' He also adds ``The challenge of 
     complexity is not only large but also growing.''
       Can you imagine the complexity problem that we American 
     taxpayers are about to face in reforming our trillion dollar 
     national health care system? We're going to need wits and 
     wisdom. This is why I keep preaching that what this country 
     needs is not a good 5-cent cigar, but rather a large dose of 
     System Simplification (SYSIM) in the planning, design and 
     operation of many of our billion (or trillion) dollar federal 
     programs or networks.
       Your life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be 
     affected by the final design of the national health care 
     SYSTEM. At the least, it's going to affect your health and 
     your taxes. And on the subject of abortion, it's even going 
     to involve a religious issue. This is what I mean by 
     complexity. The Devil hides in red tape, red lights and red 
     ink. Or to put it another way, delays, defects and deficits 
     can create ``hell'' in any big system or network.
       The message? Simplify, simp, sim, s.
       P.S. COLA-Indexation of federal pay scales, pension rates, 
     Social Security and other government entitlements is, in my 
     opinion, a form of fiscal cancer that eventually consumes the 
     entire economic body. It started around 1972. It's now time 
     to UNCOLA our federal fiscal system.

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