[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 19 (Tuesday, March 3, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E272-E275]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    ADDRESS OF SPEAKER GINGRICH TO THE WASHINGTON STATE LEGISLATURE

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. JENNIFER DUNN

                             of washington

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, March 3, 1998

  Ms. DUNN. Mr. Speaker, on January 13, 1998 House Speaker Newt 
Gingrich addressed a Joint Session of the Washington State Legislature 
in my home State of Washington. In his remarks, he suggested four goals 
for the country. First, that we as a society focus on being drug-free. 
Second, that we need to emphasize education and learning. Third, that 
we should talk about rethinking retirement. And fourth, that we ought 
to reduce the total amount of taxes the citizens owe their government. 
Mr. Speaker, these are nobles goals and I ask that the full text of his 
remarks be printed in the Record.

       I am delighted to be here. Let me start by saying to all of 
     you, we share a common future, that it is important to build 
     better abilities to communicate, and we are working very 
     hard, both with the governors and with the leaders of state 
     legislatures, to learn how to share what works, what does not 
     work, what the federal government is doing right, what it is 
     doing wrong, and whether we have a common, general direction 
     we are trying to go in. To recognize, in a country our size, 
     that there is an enormous difference between Washington, D.C. 
     and the state of Washington, just as there is an enormous 
     difference between Washington, D.C. and Georgia.

[[Page E273]]

       And so, how do we have a common, general direction while 
     maximizing our decentralization, maximizing local leadership 
     and maximizing local initiatives? I want to share with you, 
     for a few minutes if I could this morning, what we have done 
     and where we were going. But frankly, it is exciting to me to 
     see what you have done. You have implemented Welfare Reform 
     in a very practical way. You have begun to take advantage of 
     the opportunity to help people move out of poverty and into 
     work, in what I think is a very, very important step in the 
     right direction. You are working on Education Reform in a way 
     that is very practical, and which is going to increase the 
     chance of learning for all the children of this state. You 
     recognize how much your state is connected to the world 
     market, whether it is through Boeing or Microsoft or 
     Weyerhaeuser or wheat farming; that, in fact, what happens in 
     Jacarta does matter in Spokane and Seattle and Olympia and 
     across the whole state.
       We are, in a sense, entering a new era together. In the 
     Capitol, in Washington, we tried to reach out. Let me say, 
     first of all, I think the Western Governors' University is a 
     very exciting project. I commend all of you who have voted to 
     have your state participate in it; the notion that you are 
     really now becoming pioneers for the whole country, in 
     telecommunications, in the use of distance learning, and in 
     making available to all citizens across an eight-state region 
     an opportunity to share educational resources. That is a very 
     important development, and it is ultimately going to allow 
     you to lead, not just the United States but the entire world 
     as people tie in and then learn from these experiences.
       I also have to say that the Western States Coalition that 
     Speaker Ballard talked about, I found last summer to be very 
     helpful. We brought a number of eastern members out, and as 
     you know, the West is different. It is bigger. It is more 
     complex. In some parts of the West, water problems are 
     dramatically different. We in Georgia never quite experience 
     the same water situation as in Eastern Washington. We are in 
     a situation where we have a huge surplus of water most of the 
     time. We do not understand Western water laws compared to 
     Eastern law.
       To be in situations where we can look at the coming 
     together of modern urban civilization, because in every 
     Western state there are urban areas, and in fact, some of the 
     Western states are more urbanized than some of the Eastern 
     states in terms of the way people are, to look at that next 
     to the environmental concerns, next to the agricultural, 
     mining and forest concerns, to see it first hand, is 
     important. I have already told the Speaker that I will be 
     back, hopefully, in August for a visit to Washington state to 
     look at the Columbia River Basin, to look at other concerns, 
     and to get a better briefing on the issues that matter. And 
     also to fly to Alaska, and look at our largest state and what 
     their unique concerns are.
       I commend those legislative and other leaders who began to 
     develop a Western state coalition to talk through what we 
     should do at the federal level to increase flexibility within 
     a framework of still getting to a common, general direction. 
     I think the information age, with Microsoft and many other 
     developments here is going to give us some opportunities that 
     are enormous. I think the world market gives us opportunities 
     that are enormous. And as the state that houses our most 
     successful exporter of manufactured goods, Boeing, you know 
     how important the world market is. But I think they also 
     offer us opportunities to work together.
       One of the things I hope to do is to introduce the spirit 
     of Peter Drucker and Edwards Demming into the whole way we 
     think about government. Peter Drucker is the leading 
     management consultant of the Twentieth Century, and Edwards 
     Demming developed the concept of quality and taught that 
     concept to the Japanese. In fact, the prize for the best 
     company in Japan is the Demming Prize. They are really 
     talking about a way of thinking that is a powerful, 
     information age modernization over the bureaucratic model we 
     have all inherited at every level. From school board, to city 
     council, to county commission, to state government, to 
     federal government, we have a model of structures that needs 
     to be thoroughly rethought.
       I will give you a simple example. I know this is true in 
     Georgia; I will let you decide if it is true in Washington. 
     My wife, Marianne, went to spend $15 last fall. She did not 
     go to a place like Nordstroms because she waited in line an 
     hour and a half. She was not buying Beanie Babies or some fad 
     that justifies that. She was getting her driver's license.
       I suggest to you that you have two clocks in your head. You 
     have been acculturated to have these two clocks. One clock 
     has a second hand and you use it every time you go into the 
     private sector facility. When you go to McDonald's, when you 
     go to a department store, when you stand waiting to be 
     served, there is a second hand which you watch prior to 
     getting impatient. The second clock has fifteen-minute 
     increments and you use it when you walk into public 
     buildings. You will inherently wait longer and be less 
     impatient. Now, in both experiences you are paying money. In 
     one case, it is taken from you in taxes and in the other case 
     it is voluntary. You are a customer in both cases. But we 
     have allowed, over the last 50 years, the private sector to 
     modernize, to rethink what it is doing, to maximize its 
     customer orientation, while allowing the public sector to 
     find excuse after excuse to avoid rethinking its development.
       Part of what I hope we can do together is think through 
     what a Twentieth Century information age, customer-oriented 
     model of governance would look like? How would you design it? 
     How would you staff it? How would you reward people who were 
     effective, and retrain people who were ineffective? Or 
     dismiss them if they refuse to learn? And how can we think 
     that process through so that people 20 years from now have 
     the same expectation of efficiency, customer orientation and 
     modern performance out of the public sector that they have 
     out of the private sector? And that would lead to a 
     revolution in the structure of our governments.
       I think it has to be done together because the truth is, 
     and this is a message I have for every state legislature as 
     well county commissions, school boards and city councils, 
     there are things we do in Washington, D.C. which make it 
     harder for you in Washington state to be effective. One of 
     the things I would encourage you to do is to identify in 
     literally every one of your legislative committees, and 
     report back to us, those things we should change which are 
     stopping you from modernizing the government of the state of 
     Washington. I think I can speak for all three of the members 
     here with me today--for Jennifer Dunn, who is now the 
     highest-ranking elected woman legislator in the U.S. Congress 
     as the vice-chair of our conference; for George Nethercutt, 
     who is doing a tremendous job on the Appropriations 
     Committee; for Linda Smith, who has been working very, very 
     hard on reform issues--I think they would say the whole 
     delegation is prepared to try to serve as a bridge to come 
     back and say to us, ``The following 37 laws are pretty dumb. 
     The following 600 regulations do not work. The following 
     micro-management is making it impossible to reform.''
       I want to extend to you an open door, to say we would like 
     to learn from you, at the grass roots, what you are 
     experiencing that you think makes it harder for you to do the 
     job for the people of the state of Washington.
       We have had an impact in the Congress. When we were sworn 
     in in January of 1995, the Congressional Budget Office was 
     projecting a $320 billion deficit for the year 2002. They are 
     now projecting a $32 billion surplus. Now you are 
     legislators. I would suggest to you that any legislative body 
     which, in three years, can move a system from a $320 billion 
     deficit to a $32 billion surplus has begun a process of 
     fairly dramatic change. Some of that was the economy. But we 
     also saved $600 billion in entitlements, we passed Welfare 
     Reform which, as you know, has had a dramatic impact. In New 
     York state alone there are 509,000 fewer people on welfare 
     today than there were three years ago. They have moved from 
     the public sector, where they were taking money from the 
     taxpayer, to the private sector where they are paying taxes. 
     It has been a major factor on what has happened with the 
     budget turnaround.
       Because we are committed to a balanced budget, we have 
     lowered interest rates by at least two percentage points over 
     what they would have been otherwise. That has had a huge 
     effect on farming, or purchasing cars and buying houses, on 
     paying off student loans, and on all the different things 
     people pay interest on, including what governments pay in 
     interest.
       We think we have begun. But we have a lot to do, and a long 
     way to go. I want to propose to you that there are four major 
     goals, lots of things we need to do together. I could talk 
     today about the ICE T bill in transportation, because I know 
     it is an important issue. I could talk about a wide range of 
     issues that matter. But I want to focus on four today. 
     Although, before I do, I do want to commend you for your 
     rainy day fund. I was calculating based on the size of your 
     budget; if we had a comparable rainy day fund, it would be 
     about $90 billion. I will let you imagine a Washington, D.C. 
     that would allow $90 billion to sit there without having 
     approximately $400 billion of new ideas! But I do commend you 
     because it is the right direction and it is the way we should 
     be moving.
       I want to suggest four goals to you. First, that we become 
     a society that focuses on being drug-free and, therefore with 
     dramatically less violence. Second, as you are already doing, 
     we really emphasize education and learning. Third, we have 
     now come to a point in our history where we should talk about 
     rethinking retirement. And fourth, that we ought to talk 
     openly about what is the total amount of taxes the citizens 
     should owe their government in a peacetime environment. Let 
     me briefly talk about each. Let me be candid and say these 
     will only work in collaboration. They will only work if we 
     work together.
       I think the number one goal we should establish is to break 
     the back of the drug trade and the back of the drug culture. 
     To insist that our children deserve to live in a drug-free 
     society where they are not threatened with addiction and 
     where they are not threatened physically. I believe, as a 
     historian, we can do it. We have done it before. We did it in 
     the 1920's. Other countries have done it. It is a matter of 
     willpower, focus, resources and management.
       I came today to ask you and your governor to work together 
     to tell us, from the state of Washington, what you need from 
     the federal government as your highest priority to enable you 
     to have a drug-free Washington state. What do we have to do 
     to do our share of the job? And then ask you to do your share 
     of the job and make a genuine commitment.

[[Page E274]]

       I will just give you one specific statistic that I find 
     staggering. If you are a woman, you are 27 times more likely 
     to be killed if you are in a home with hard drugs than if you 
     are in a drug-free home. Not 27 percent, but 27 times. That 
     is 2700 percent more likely to be killed. And when we talk 
     about violence in America, I do not think we can talk about 
     the future without realizing how much of that is tied to 
     drugs. We realize that in New York City alone, there are 32 
     drug-addicted babies born every week. The human and financial 
     cost of not taking on drugs is horrendous.
       We are challenging General McCaffrey to produce a World War 
     II-style victory plan. I think we need a decisive, sharp, 
     two- or three-year effort to break the back of the drug 
     culture, to make it too expensive to use drugs. And to 
     recognize that the problem is not in Colombia. The problem is 
     not in Mexico. The problem is in the streets, the 
     neighborhoods and the schools of America, and in the 
     professional sports of America and among some of the rock 
     stars of America. If we are not buying it, they are not going 
     to be shipping it. We have an obligation to start in America 
     to win the war on drugs--to be the model country for 
     everyone else, to not just lecture Mexicans and Colombians 
     on what we wish they would do because we do not have the 
     guts to do it here at home.
       If you will let us know, whether by resolution, by report, 
     or by letter, what we need to do to help you win the war in 
     the state of Washington, and if we can get every state 
     legislature engaged and every state government engaged, I 
     truly believe, in three or four years, we will be a drug-free 
     country. And I can imagine nothing, nothing that will do more 
     for children's health than to be able to win the war on drugs 
     and save them from that kind of a future.
       Second, I want to pledge to you our commitment to work with 
     you on Education Reform. I want to draw one distinction 
     between education and learning. I think we want the best 
     education system in the world, and I think we want the best 
     system of learning in the world. They are not necessarily the 
     same. Here again, I want to thank Microsoft, where I will be 
     spending part of the afternoon studying. We have an education 
     system that is teach-focused. A learning system is student-
     focused.
       We have the potential in the next decade to build a seven-
     day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day learning system available for a 
     lifetime, which you can access from anywhere at anytime at 
     your convenience and learn as much as you are capable of 
     learning. We should make it a national goal to really 
     encourage the development of that kind of learning system. To 
     some extent, your Western State Governors' University is a 
     step in the direction, but we are only scratching the 
     surface. We have the potential for everyone to learn, and to 
     do it at their convenience. Now, this is not a panacea. It is 
     not a replacement for an education system. But it is an 
     important enhancer, and it will allow us to leapfrog, not 
     catch up, not match up with, but leapfrog the Japanese, 
     Germans and others in providing the best system of learning 
     in the world, which is essential if we were going to have the 
     best economic competition in the world. Because, if you do 
     not have good learning in the information age, you cannot 
     produce the technology you need in order to have the best 
     jobs in the world. So this is vital to our entire future.
       In addition, we need the best education system. I favor 
     scholarships, so that in really bad neighborhoods parents 
     have the right to choose. But this is not going to solve the 
     problem. Most children in America are going to learn in 
     public schools for the rest of their lifetimes. I am a 
     product of public schools. My wife is a product of public 
     schools. Both of our daughters went to public school. I 
     taught part-time when I was a college teacher. I also taught 
     in the public high school. Most schools do pretty well. But 
     every one of you knows that there are some schools in this 
     state you would not send your children to, just as you know 
     there are some schools in my state that I would not send my 
     children to.
       And here is the test for us. We say in our Declaration of 
     Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain 
     inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the 
     pursuit of happiness. We have to take that passionately and 
     apply it to education reform. This means that every child of 
     every ethnic background in every neighborhood has been 
     endowed by God with the right to pursue happiness. In the 
     information age, if you are not learning how to read and 
     write, and you are not getting an education, you are more 
     likely to go to prison than to go to college, and you are 
     not being given the true opportunity to pursue happiness. 
     I think that is how we ought to approach education reform.
       We ought to say first of all to a school system, let us 
     start writing into the contract that if your school is in the 
     bottom 20 percent in scoring, the contract does not apply any 
     more, as of that date. Not ``Let us slowly modify tenure.'' 
     Not ``Let us have a study commission.'' You would not leave 
     your children in those schools. We have too many of our 
     friends who are very big passionate supporters of the worst 
     public schools, but their kids go to private school. We have 
     too many teachers who pay the union dues and they want to 
     make sure that we do not reform public schools; but their 
     children go to private school. There are some big city 
     systems where 40 percent of the public school teachers send 
     their children to private school because they know better. We 
     have an obligation to be passionate about this. Winston 
     Churchill had a phrase for World War II. He would pass a note 
     that said, ``Action this day.'' This should be our attitude 
     across the board to the system.
       I want to suggest three reforms that are very specific. Two 
     of them we are not going to do at the federal level, one we 
     have to. But I am here as a citizen sharing ideas; I am not 
     here to say we are going mandate any.
       I do want to suggest as a general principle that we should 
     have a passionate, deep commitment to every child in American 
     learning how to read by end of the fourth grade. We should 
     focus overwhelmingly on learning how to read and write in the 
     fourth grade. I am going to be very direct: we should learn 
     how to read and write in English, because that is the 
     commercial language of the United States, and they are having 
     their future crippled if they cannot read and write by the 
     fourth grade.
       Second, I think that the federal government should modify 
     the bilingual education law to make it local option. You at 
     the state level and the school boards at the local level 
     should have the right to decide for your children what is the 
     most effective way to make sure that they are capable of 
     reading and writing in English at the earliest possible time.
       And third, I would really like to suggest you consider, and 
     I say this upon the state with some trepidation, but I would 
     like you to consider mandating that, once a year, at every 
     grade level, a day be spent looking at the Declaration of 
     Independence and the Constitution. I say this for two 
     reasons. First, as a historian, I actually think it is kind 
     of good for Americans to learn how they became American. We 
     are multi-ethnic, but we are one civilization. We are bound 
     together by this thing of being American. We signed a 
     contract with ourselves. We the people of the United States, 
     we issued a declaration that says ``we hold these truths to 
     be self-evident.'' And if our citizens do not grow up 
     learning these things, how can we expect America to continue?
       But secondly, the Declaration says, ``We are endowed by our 
     Creator . . .'' Now, I want to see the ACLU lawsuit that 
     explains why the teacher cannot explain what the Founding 
     Fathers meant when they used the word ``Creator''. I think 
     it would be a very edifying moment in American history.
       America is radically different than Europe. In the European 
     model, power went from God to the king and was loaned to the 
     citizens. This is why Brussels is worse than the IRS. In the 
     European model, the citizen only has those rights loaned to 
     them by the state. In the American model, from our opening 
     date of our first document, we said power goes from God to 
     the citizen, and you loan it back to the government. It is a 
     very different model. And I just think if we spent one day a 
     year from the first grade to twelfth grade studying that 
     model, coming into contact with the great people who created 
     this country, we would be a healthier country. We would be a 
     country with a better sense of where our rights come from. We 
     would be a country with a more serious sense of why being a 
     citizen matters. And so I want to commend that to you.
       Our third goal is to look at retirement. A lot of that is 
     federal. But I also have a proposal that I think you will 
     find interesting at the state level. And this is very simple. 
     We are moving from 60 years of deficit spending. We were 
     about to move to a generation of surpluses. This is not like 
     1969, the last surplus. We had lots of deficits, one year of 
     surplus, and then lots of deficits. If we were disciplined in 
     Washington, and if we avoid war, we will be in a position to 
     have twenty or thirty years of surpluses.
       This gives us for the first time a chance to talk seriously 
     about retirement, to recognize that Social Security is a very 
     powerful and tremendous system developed in 1925 when there 
     were no computers. But Social Security is neither personal 
     nor modern. In fact, in one study that Congressman Mark 
     Sandford of South Carolina put out, he looked at his 20-year-
     old son. He said ``You know, Einstein was asked, `What is the 
     most powerful thing in the universe?' And he said, `Compound 
     interest.' '' If you simply take the FICA tax a 20-year-old 
     will pay today and invest their FICA tax over their lifetime, 
     in an average market basket investment, not buying Microsoft 
     when it is young, but an average market basket investment, 
     they will make $975,000 for their retirement. If you give 
     them the current government payment, they will make $175,000. 
     So, we are condemning 20-year-olds to lose $800,000 by the 
     way we have designed the system.
       I am proposing a National Commission on Retirement, made up 
     of one-third baby boomers, one-third older than baby boomers, 
     and one-third younger than baby boomers. I suggest to my 
     colleagues in the House and Senate that they set up a 
     citizens committee in their district tied in by the Internet 
     to the National Commission. I think we ought to look at the 
     totality, because I believe that by using a good part of the 
     surpluses intelligently, we can make the transition to a 
     personal, modern social security system, tied into the 
     development of better pensions and tied into the development 
     of better savings. And we can leave our children and 
     grandchildren a dramatically better retirement in a much 
     wealthier country with a much higher savings rate with much 
     lower interest rates and much more capital investment. And 
     that is a much healthier America in the future.

[[Page E275]]

       And I know it takes some courage for elected officials to 
     raise the issue, but I just think we are at a magic moment of 
     transition. I believe the grandparents, as long as they are 
     secure in getting the current system, will want their 
     grandchildren to have the best possible future. And I believe 
     we can have an honest, adult, dialogue about this without the 
     kind of mudslinging and the kind of 30-second commercials 
     that so badly weaken our political structures. So, I 
     encourage you to look at it, to offer us advice, but I also 
     encourage you to look at the state program. I do not know the 
     details of your program, but I will tell you that Michigan 
     has now adopted a new, personal pension system that vests 
     within two years, where the new employees are controlling 
     their own money in a way that is a very dramatic departure 
     from the way we have done pensions in the last 60 years.
       Finally, I want to ask a very touchy question, and you are 
     the first group of legislators I have done this with. So I 
     will be very curious to see your reaction after I leave and 
     you no longer have to be polite because I am around. I want 
     to raise a serious question: In peacetime, in a free society, 
     how much should your government be allowed to take from you?
       I was fascinated when I read Paul Johnson's new History of 
     the American People. He is a former socialist in Britain 
     turned conservative and he has written a wonderful history of 
     the American people. And he said that in 1775, we were 
     probably the lowest-taxed people in the history of the world 
     and we hated every penny. And he said we were so grateful 
     that we were so low-taxed as to say, ``How come you need 
     this?'' And the part about how much freedom, in part, is a 
     function of how much time you have. How much money do you 
     have? Not how much does your government have to give to you. 
     How much do you have? And it turns out that when you study it 
     that the American people said for forty years that they 
     believe, in peacetime, the most their government should take 
     from them is 25 percent. We currently--federal, state and 
     local--take 38.
       And what I would like to propose is that we set a goal over 
     the next ten to fifteen years to get to 25 percent taxation. 
     The feds currently take about 22 percent. I propose we go 
     down to 14 percent. So we lose 8 percent. State and local 
     currently takes about 16 percent, I propose state and local 
     goes down to abut 11 percent. So we will drop by more than 
     you will have to drop. But, I think it is fair for you to 
     come back to us and say, ``Fine, how about block-granting 
     education money rather than having 700 little programs? How 
     about dropping this kinds of red tape?'' I think it is a two-
     way dialogue.
       But, if we take Demming and Drucker; if we are prepared to 
     prioritize, modernize, downsize and privatize, we can create, 
     over the next ten to fifteen years, a country where people 
     have more take-home pay, a better retirement system, a 
     lifetime learning system, and an education system that either 
     works or is changed rapidly when it starts to fail. People 
     will be competitive in the world market, having the highest 
     technology and the greatest entrepreneurship to produce the 
     best goods, giving us the highest incomes with the greatest 
     economic security and the capacity to lead the world.
       Yes, this is big. Yes, it is a lot. But, frankly, the 
     Contract With America was pretty different when we started 
     and I am very proud that at the key moment in the fall of 
     1994, we bought a two-page ad in TV Guide that did not attack 
     anybody, did not have any pictures. It just said, ``You hire 
     us and we will try to do these ten things.'' And I think the 
     time has come as citizens, across the board in both parties, 
     to talk about for the next generation, ``What are the goals 
     worth doing? Let us work together to do it.''
       I accept fully the responsibility today that I have come 
     here and said, you come up with ideas on the drug war; we 
     have to listen to you and at least try to help. You come up 
     with what we need to do to get out of your way in education; 
     we have an obligation to listen and try to help. You tell us 
     what we are doing wrong about pensions that make your job 
     harder, let us know. And you tell us how you think we should 
     change federal pension law. It would be very helpful and we 
     would listen to you.
       And finally, if we are going to get there together, we have 
     an obligation both to shrink the federal government and to 
     shrink the burden the federal government imposes on you. But, 
     I think for our citizens, the America I just described would 
     be a vastly better place.
       And let me just close with this thought. Every time I come 
     out here, I have to tell you, I just love coming to this 
     state. I think part of it relates to the fact that I was 
     here--some of you will be able to identify this--a few years 
     ago on a stopover and went down to the fish market and bought 
     a geoduck and took it to my mother-in-law, who promptly 
     chopped it up and made stew out of it. I have to say, also, 
     that I just brought back a very wonderful salmon that they 
     identified with much more immediately and ate immediately.
       But, it is a fabulous state. You sort of have this sense, I 
     always have this sense, when I come here what Lewis and Clark 
     must have felt. As an easterner, when I fly in and look out 
     at Mt. Rainier, when I look at Puget Sound, when I see the 
     weather, even on rare days like yesterday--again, for a 
     Georgian, it was very exciting--I think we lose, sometimes, 
     the romanticism of what this country is about. This country 
     is a romance. This country has the most magical way of saying 
     to the whole planet, ``I do not care what your background is, 
     I do not care what your religion is, I do not care what your 
     ethnicity is. If you have a big enough dream and you are 
     willing to pursue it, come to America and try it out.'' And 
     the result has been to put together the most exciting 
     opportunities for people in the history of the world.
       This is a great country filled with good people and given a 
     chance to achieve remarkable things. I believe we can work 
     together in a partnership--not us dictating to you--but in a 
     partnership. And we can give our children and grandchildren 
     an even greater America with an even greater future. And 
     through that, we can give the entire human race an 
     opportunity to live in freedom and prosperity and safety.
       Thank you for honoring me by allowing me to come here 
     today. Thank you.

     

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