[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 20 (Wednesday, March 4, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H841-H848]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  EXPLAINING THE ATTITUDES, CONCERNS, AND BELIEFS OF OUR CONSTITUENTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) is 
recognized for half of the time until midnight as the designee of the 
majority leader.
  Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, tonight I am joined by 
some of my colleagues from the freshman Republican class, which 
includes individuals who were elected in 1996 and were sworn in at the 
beginning of 1997. This class is one that has come to this microphone 
often during special orders to talk about the agendas that we have set 
forward and that we are fighting to promote here in Congress, but more 
recently, we have had the opportunity to spend a considerable amount of 
time back at home in our respective districts, holding and conducting a 
number of town meetings and visiting with constituents and speaking 
about the issues that are taking place here, and describing our 
activities to our constituents.
  So tonight our focus is primarily to report back to the Congress and 
to our colleagues about those things we have heard from our 
constituents, and to in fact explain the attitudes and opinions and 
beliefs of those constituents to the rest of the House.
  With that in mind I am joined tonight by the gentleman from South 
Dakota (Mr. Thune) and also the gentleman from great State of 
Minnesota, Mr. Roy Blunt, is here. We may be joined by another 
gentleman from the State of Michigan, who has suggested he may join us 
tonight. I just wanted to have a general discussion with the Members 
here, and yield time back and forth and talk about the things we have 
heard.
  As for me, conducting several town meetings and visiting throughout 
the country, throughout the district, rather, the concern for the key 
issue in the country of the national debt seemed to be first and 
foremost on people's minds, at about $5.5 trillion. That debt, when 
divided by the number of citizens in the country, comes to about 
$20,000 per man, woman, and child.
  People are quite concerned about providing some real relief with that 
debt. People are encouraged by the news that we have heard and the 
reports that the economy has done so well and has allowed the American 
taxpayers to catch up with the spending of Congress, so we anticipate a 
budget surplus; that is to suggest that the debt may be eliminated, and 
that is, again, according to the way the government does its 
accounting. But the real question is what to do with a surplus if one 
is found to exist.
  What I am hearing for the most part is that people would like to see 
us find some strategy to retire that debt, either pay it off directly, 
to try to find a way to relieve the tax burden on the American people 
in a way that allows them to be more productive, and generate more 
revenue to the Federal Government through tax relief, and a number of 
other strategies that have been suggested to me.
  People would still like to see us move forward on our goals to 
provide further tax relief, to rein in the abuses at the IRS, and to 
begin treating taxpayers as though we are innocent until the IRS proves 
we might be guilty, rather than the other way around, as the burden is 
unfairly placed on taxpayers today when there is some question over tax 
obligation and liability.
  Education was the third key issue that I had heard back in my 
district. We have had a lot of discussion about the government trying 
to usurp an independent national testing strategy that we have today, 
with independent operations that provide national benchmarks for our 
schools. The Clinton administration, as we know, has been trying to 
establish a national testing procedure through the U.S. Department of 
Education in a government-owned sort of fashion.
  Many people in my district, in fact most people who are familiar with 
the proposal, have flatly rejected it and believe that we ought to 
defer authority back to our States and really focus on the freedom to 
teach and liberty to learn at the most local level. So that is a 
general sense of the key issues that have been raised in my town 
meetings.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from South Dakota (Mr. Thune) 
to tell us what he has been hearing.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for 
yielding to me.
  I would say that there has been a lot of talk lately about how great 
the economy is doing, and just yesterday the Congressional Budget 
Office announced that we actually have an $8 billion Federal surplus in 
1998. I think that is remarkable when we think about where we have come 
from, starting when our side took a poll of the

[[Page H842]]

Congress back in 1994, and began to govern in 1995, and how 
progressively each year we have been able to whittle away at the 
deficit to the point today where the fiscal discipline has actually 
paid off and we are doing something in terms of talking about operating 
with a surplus. I think that is a remarkable achievement.
  It has been almost 30 years since that happened, since government was 
in the black. When we think about 30 years ago, most people now serving 
in Congress probably were probably closer to studying civics in high 
school or in the college classroom than they were to voting on the 
House floor. There are a lot of staffers, interns, and pages now 
working here in the House that were not even born yet back in 1969, 
which was the last time that we actually balanced the budget, the last 
time that it was at that point in time that we sent a man to walk on 
the Moon for the first time, and he took a giant step forward for 
mankind, and yet we have been walking backwards in terms of the fiscal 
path we have been on for this country.
  Our booming economy, the budget surplus, are really truly, I think, 
noteworthy and very positive developments for our Nation. However, I 
would also say that we still have a long way to go, because as the 
gentleman mentioned with the unified budget concept, we have reached 
balance. We are actually operating in the black.
  But the fact of the matter is that we continue to borrow from the 
Social Security trust fund, which masks the true size of the deficit. 
This year about $100 billion, and already some $650 billion, have been 
borrowed from the Social Security trust fund. That is a very, very 
serious issue which needs to be addressed.
  When I go back to my State of South Dakota, and I spent a long time 
out there over the President's Day break, and then again last weekend 
and talked to my constituents, they are not ready quite yet to break 
out the bubbly and start celebrating the surplus. We may be doing well, 
but that does not necessarily mean Congress can pat itself on the back 
and assume that everyone in America is satisfied.
  When I travel back to South Dakota, I meet a lot with young families 
where the husband and wife are trying to juggle jobs and schedules so 
that they can pay the bills, pay for day care, and still find a way to 
see their kids and each other at the end of the week.
  I meet college students who are taking a full load of classes plus 
trying to work 40 hours a week on top of it to pay for their school. I 
meet with retired South Dakotans and senior citizens across my State 
who are worried about the Medicare program and Social Security program. 
I meet a lot of young professionals who are just starting out in their 
careers who, when you ask them if they believe that Social Security is 
going to be there for them, laugh it off. In fact, a recent survey 
found that more people believe in UFOs than believe that Social 
Security is going to be there when they retire.
  So we may have a budget surplus in the unified sense, as we call it, 
here in Congress, but the people who created that surplus through their 
hard work and tax dollars are not necessarily seeing the benefits of 
our booming economy.
  The American people are still overtaxed, and we saw some statistics 
just the other day at USA Today where it talked about the overall tax 
burden on the average family in this country, and how it has increased 
in each decade, in the past several decades, to the point today that 
where the average family of four spends 38.2 percent of all their 
earnings just to pay taxes at one level, be it the Federal, State or 
local level. That is an enormous tax burden.
  In terms of the overall economy, we heard the President say the other 
night that we have the smallest government in 35 years. I am not sure 
which criteria he was using, but I think we would have to look far and 
wide to find anything that would suggest that.
  The fact of the matter again is that we are now, in terms of tax 
revenues, taxing people of this country at 20.1 percent, by the 
President's budget, of our total gross domestic product. That is the 
largest tax burden collectively on our society since the Second World 
War.
  So to make sure that we do not go back to the budget wilderness we 
have been wandering in for the last 30 years, I believe that we have to 
do some significant things, which I will talk a little bit about in 
terms of some of the solutions that I see out there in terms of a long-
term fix for the fiscal problems that are facing us as we head down the 
road with Social Security, as the number of people who are retiring and 
receiving benefits outnumber those poor who are paying in and working 
hard to pay into that system, and we look at what we can do in terms of 
a new tax code for a new century.
  Those are some things we had talked about collectively on our side of 
the aisle that we have established as priorities. I have some 
suggestions as well in terms of how we go about doing that.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for inviting me, and 
for letting an old-timer join them this evening. But having been here 
in 1993 when this President set his priorities, and then seeing his 
budget that he just submitted to the Committee on the Budget a couple 
of weeks ago, and having Alan Greenspan testify to the Committee on the 
Budget today, I cannot help but reinforce how positive is the direction 
that we are going in.
  Alan Greenspan came in and said that what we really need to do is we 
need to stick to the discretionary budget caps, because interest rates 
and the markets and the financial experts really are not taking us at 
our word. They are really not believing that we can actually hold tough 
on the discretionary spending.
  So he sent us a clear message today, saying hold tight on 
discretionary spending caps and we will continue to see the benefits in 
our economy, because what we will do is we will continue to see lower 
interest rates; holding spending, perhaps cutting taxes.
  But what is our President doing? His budget proposed increasing 
spending, so the 20.1 percent would go up; increasing taxes; and 
actually takes us back to a deficit. The President's budget proposal as 
scored by CBO says we will have a couple of years of surplus, low 
surplus, but by 2000, we are going to go back to deficit.
  If we did nothing, if we all went home for the next 5 years and did 
nothing, we would be better off than doing the President's budget, 
because he increases taxes, but it is back to the old policies that we 
saw before from this President: let us increase taxes, let us increase 
spending. We would be $43 billion better off in terms of reducing the 
deficit if we did nothing. This President wants to increase spending 
and increase taxes, and do it in such a way that government grows and 
the deficit comes back.
  Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, I think people around the 
country recognize that, when it gets right down to it. People are 
beginning to get wise to the budget manipulations that they see from 
the White House.
  I know in Missouri, and I apologize, earlier I mentioned that the 
gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Blunt) was from Minnesota. That is not the 
case. Let me apologize. I yield to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. 
Blunt).
  Mr. BLUNT. We have warmer winters in Missouri, and there are lots of 
other good things about our State.
  Mr. Speaker, one of those is, I think it was one of my predecessors 
in Congress from our State about 100 years ago gave our State the name, 
the Show-me State. He said, I am from Missouri, you have to show me. 
And certainly we are skeptical, as many people are in my district are, 
about really what is happening as we work to balance this budget.
  Now clearly, clearly the last two Congresses and the hard work of the 
American people have gotten us a long way. I think in January of 1995 
the projected deficit for last year was $365 billion. This was after 
the President's tax increase, this was after 2, 3 years of the Clinton 
administration, and the projected deficit was $365 billion.

  It turned out to be $22 billion. We got that announcement yesterday. 
As the gentleman from South Dakota (Mr. Thune) mentioned, it looks like 
now for the first time in 30 years we are running a surplus, but of 
course what Missourians wonder about is how

[[Page H843]]

we could be running a surplus and still be increasing the national 
debt. Clearly that does not make sense from the show-me standard that 
we would want to set for whether you are in a surplus situation or not.
  We need to continue to work to be sure that we quit, that we stop 
this process of borrowing from the trust funds, that we really do run a 
surplus, before we even think about how to spend that surplus. That 
does not mean we cannot do some tax relief, that does not mean we 
cannot take advantage of these good economic times, but it certainly 
does mean that we should not be committing the government to new 
programs based on some surplus, when we are still borrowing this year 
$100-plus billion from the Social Security trust fund, from the Highway 
Trust Fund.
  We want to see that surplus in our State become a real surplus. We 
would like to say that this unified budget is actually treating the 
trust funds like they were trust funds, and is actually paying all the 
bills that the government has coming in, and beginning to pay down the 
national debt, not continuing to increase the national debt.
  It would be pretty hard to convince any Missourians, particularly 
southwest Missourians, where I am from, that you have a surplus, and 
you are continuing to borrow and you are continuing to increase your 
debt by around $150 billion. That does not sound like a surplus to us. 
The Washington standard is not a good enough standard for hard-working 
taxpayers who want to see us have a real surplus.
  But again, I do not want to say that in a way that takes away from 
what has already happened, because we have gone from a projected 
deficit of $365 billion to, today, a surplus under the same standards, 
the same rules, the same guidelines, of about $8 billion. That is a 
pretty big turnaround. We just need to turn that corner a little bit 
more before we feel like we are totally in the kind of situation where 
we are starting to paying off the debt instead of increasing the debt.
  I think the hard work of the American people and the vitality of our 
economy, and frankly, the hard work of this Congress to set those 
budget caps that our friend, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) 
has talked about, and to stay within those caps and see the interest 
rates go down and the economic vitality that produces and the 
additional tax dollars that that produces, the additional tax dollars 
that the tax cuts that we were able to do last year have produced, have 
made a real change in America.

                              {time}  2245

  But we have to be careful that we do not follow the lead of the 
President just a month ago, 6 weeks ago in this Chamber where in 75 
minutes, in a 75-minute State of the Union message, he proposed about 
$75 billion in new spending. That sounds like the era of big government 
is definitely back. And certainly a $75 billion, $1-billion-per-minute 
record is probably the record for anybody's State of the Union address 
ever in the history of the country, and this Congress and the taxpayers 
of America really cannot let that happen. I do not think they want that 
to happen.
  Frankly, I think that is why we have not heard much about the 
President's spending proposals since he walked out of here at the State 
of the Union message and nobody responded to an America that goes right 
back into deep, deep debt the first time we think we may be able to 
make our payments in one month. That is not going to happen. I think we 
are all hearing that as we have had time to go back home.
  Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, let me issue a word of 
encouragement to conservatives and Republicans across the country based 
on what I heard back home. I want to share some statistics briefly. It 
was not too long ago in Colorado that we had runaway spending at the 
State level and high taxes. The voters in Colorado through a series of 
initiatives and ballot proposals capped spending of our State budget 
and spending of all of our local governments. They additionally placed 
pretty severe tax limitations on State government and local government.
  I remember at the time when I was serving back in the State Senate, 
that the liberals in Colorado were just whining and crying about these 
limitations on spending and tax increases as though it was somehow 
going to crush the State. And those of us on the conservative side and 
the Republican party back in Colorado stood our ground and maintained 
that, no, we believe very firmly in these conservative economic 
principles that if we lower taxes, we increase revenue to the State 
because of economic growth and prosperity. And when we lower spending, 
we move more authority out of the halls of government and into the 
homes of free people throughout the State.
  Back in Colorado during the town meetings I just returned from, 
things are pretty good economically when it comes down to it. Colorado 
is almost an oasis in the west when it comes to economics. And here is 
the real impact of tax reduction and spending reductions in my State 
for those who doubt that these principles work and that the Republicans 
and conservatives here in Congress are on the right track.
  This is a report I am going to refer to from the Center on Budget and 
Policy Priorities, a very liberal organization in its goals and 
objectives. But here is what they found in one of the lowest tax States 
in the union: The poorest one-fifth of our population in my State since 
the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s realized the greatest amount of economic 
growth and income growth in poor households. This is the poorest fifth. 
Their incomes over that 10-year period grew 39 percent.
  The second fifth of income categories, their income grew 21 percent. 
The middle fifth saw income growth of 12 percent. The fourth group 
there, which is almost to the richest category, had a 6 percent growth 
and the richest fifth of Colorado citizens saw 16 percent growth. All 
income categories saw a remarkable growth over a 10-year period.
  Mr. Speaker, that is very impressive. What is most impressive is that 
low taxes, smaller spending has resulted in a 39 percent growth rate 
for the poorest one-fifth of the residents of my district in my State.
  I would suggest when we talk about spending and taxes within the 
context of compassionate and humanitarian approaches to serving our 
people, the proof is right here. That it is far more humanitarian, it 
is far more compassionate to take cash out of Washington, D.C., not 
even bring it here but to leave it back into the hands of the people 
who earned that wealth, who are able to turn income into jobs or are 
willing to take the risks as entrepreneurs and create wealth on a local 
level and at the State level in a way that honest to goodness has 
helped the poorest fifth of my State.
  That means that there is more dollars to spend not on welfare, not on 
various entitlement programs and handout programs in my State, although 
we continue to do that, but more dollars are going to classrooms, for 
example. More dollars are going to the important priorities that when I 
travel around the State people tell me they want to see us invest in.
  So we are doing it on a State level. These are accomplishments that 
Congress does not deserve a whole lot of credit for and should not try 
to take that. But what it does show is that if we can find strategies 
to turn more of the authority of Washington, D.C. back to our States, 
we can find strategies to shrink the size of the Federal Government and 
empower our people locally, that we can expect more of this. We can 
expect to see more of the poorest families in the country begin to 
become self-sufficient and move toward higher income categories and 
achieve real success. That is a Republican vision and a strategy that 
we all stand for and one that I am proud to say that it is working and 
it ought to be a point of encouragement for this Congress and the rest 
of the States of the Union.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I can understand why the gentleman from 
Colorado might be reluctant to yield to the gentleman from Michigan 
only because we have talked about the oasis in the west, but Michigan 
in many respects is the oasis of the Midwest.
  Under our governor, the State I believe since 1990 has had 24 tax 
cuts. We have moved from a point where our structural unemployment was 
higher than the national average for a number of years. It was 
structural. It was said

[[Page H844]]

that Michigan's unemployment rate cannot get below the national 
average. I think now for the last 2 or 3 years our unemployment rate 
has been below the national average. Surprisingly, but not really 
because we have implemented the same strategies, tax cuts, aggressive 
business promotion, Michigan last year led the Nation in terms of job 
creation.
  So, again, by returning power at the State level, we have returned it 
back to families, to businesses to grow jobs. That helps everybody. 
That benefits everybody.
  The governor across the lake from us in Wisconsin I believe announced 
that he was recently signing the last welfare checks because now in 
Wisconsin they are going to restore the dignity that anybody receiving 
State assistance is going to be receiving a paycheck. They are going to 
be working for their benefits. So the kinds of strategies that the 
gentleman was talking about in Colorado are taking place and being 
successful all around the country. Lowering taxes, cutting spending and 
returning power back to the local level.
  Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, it is interesting we find 
Republican governors or Republican legislators leading the way at the 
State level. It is a clear distinction that is exhibited here between 
what our party represents and what our liberal colleagues on the other 
side of the aisle represent.
  They define compassion by how much money government can give away to 
the charity of politicians' choices. We believe we define compassion by 
how much money we leave in the hands of those who earn it and encourage 
more to earn higher wages. The experiences in Michigan and Colorado are 
great examples.

  Mr. THUNE. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, not to be 
outdone here, since we have heard from Michigan and Colorado, but let 
me just say as well that in South Dakota we are leading the way in many 
respects. We are one of the few States which does not have a personal 
corporate income tax. For that reason we have attracted a lot of 
economic development to a State where certainly the climate is not 
always conducive to attracting people.
  We have businesses coming into our State because we are very 
attractive and have a great work ethic. And we have in a systematic way 
in the last few years as well lowered taxes. On property taxes, our 
legislature went 5 percent farther. They lowered those taxes by 20 
percent a couple of years back. Cumulatively, over the past 3 or 4 
years, a 25 percent rollback in property taxes in our State. I think 
that is significant.
  What it tells us that it is consistent with our philosophy and I 
think it is something that should apply here at the Federal level too. 
That is that we want to make the Federal Government smaller and the 
family budget bigger. I think that is a principle that is shared by a 
lot of our governors, our State legislatures around this country. 
Frankly, we want to see Washington do less so that the American family 
can do more.
  Mr. Speaker, when we in a systematic way work to that end, I think we 
give the opportunity to our people, our families, the hard-working 
Americans in all of our States and congressional districts to do what 
they do best.
  So I would still say, and I think in having this discussion tonight 
it is important to remember that one of our first priorities and it has 
been mentioned earlier and I think we would all agree with it, is that 
we have to preserve Social Security. We have to do something about this 
enormous debt that we have accumulated.
  Washington has not had the fiscal discipline up until recently for a 
very long time. And inasmuch as our States are doing well, the Federal 
Government is not doing so well when it comes to the debt that we have 
racked up on the next generation. I think that we need to put a 
systematic plan in place to address that issue.
  Mr. Speaker, I am cosponsoring legislation offered by the gentleman 
from Wisconsin (Mr. Neumann) which would do that. I think perhaps some 
of my colleagues in the Chamber this evening are as well. That bill 
basically says that if there is a surplus, and there is some debate 
about that, but to the extent that there is a surplus, two-thirds of 
that should go to paying down the debt and restoring our trust funds, 
Social Security, transportation, environmental et cetera, and the last 
third should be used for lowering our tax burden on the people in 
America.
  Furthermore, it puts a plan in place, a discipline over time that 
says the Federal Government cannot spend more than 99 percent of what 
it takes in in revenue. Each year we set aside 1 percent and apply that 
toward the debt. And having done that based on economic assumptions 
that I think are fairly modest in a period of 30 years, we would have 
actually eliminated in its entirety the $5.5 trillion debt that we have 
accumulated.
  This is very significant because as we pare down that debt, we also 
pare down the interest payment which is chewing up a good part of the 
Federal budget. This year about $250 billion in interest. I use the 
illustration because it is something in my part of the country people 
will understand. But every personal income tax dollar raised west of 
the Mississippi River and then some is applied just toward the interest 
on the debt. That is something that when the Committee on 
Appropriations does the budget here in Congress that they do before 
anything else. They have to write the check to pay the interest on the 
debt.
  That is tax dollars from hard-working Americans that do not go to any 
important governmental or public purpose. We are not paving any roads 
with that or doing anything to advance education or improve the quality 
of our kids' education in this country. We are simply saying that that 
is a product of the 30 or 40 years of fiscal neglect.
  Mr. Speaker, I think it is high time we do something to address that. 
I would certainly encourage my colleagues here this evening to work 
with us as cosponsors of that legislation and move us in a direction 
that will address the long-term issue, and that is the irresponsible 
spending patterns that we have had here which have led us to this 
point.
  Mr. Speaker, I notice we have the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Peterson) here in the Chamber. I am wondering if he might have 
something to add to the discussion. We have been talking about what 
most of us have heard over the course of listening and town meetings 
back in our home districts.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, it is interesting. I 
wanted to share my perspective of the President's message that we heard 
here in this hall a few weeks ago. It was a pretty smooth message. But 
in the first two paragraphs, he talked about Social Security first. 
That is pretty basic. That has been applauded throughout the country.
  But when he went on in the hour-long speech, he spent the money that 
could have put Social Security first. I guess it is pretty basic 
fundamentals. My colleagues have already chatted about it a bit. But we 
are balancing the budget by borrowing $100 billion in his proposed 
budget from Social Security. And when we add up all of the trust funds, 
we really will increase the debt if we pass the President's budget by 
about $140 billion to $150 billion. That is increasing the debt.
  We may not be spending more general fund revenues than we are taking 
in, but we are spending more money than we are taking in. To me that is 
basically fundamental. So I think the President in his smooth talk, as 
I call it, talked about Social Security first and then put it last.
  The other issue about his overall proposal that bothered me in basic 
budgeting, this is only my second Federal budget but I have dealt with 
19 State budgets. In the State, whenever we got a one-time funding 
source where we had a windfall of a few million dollars, in the State 
it was millions, here it is billions, but he was going to use the 
supposed talked-about tobacco settlement to build a budget. And when we 
take one-time revenues, and we may get them 2 or 3 years, I am not sure 
what the settlement will be or how soon it is going to pay out, but it 
is not forever revenue. It is temporary revenue.
  When we build a budget with temporary revenue, down the road we are 
either going to cut that spending or raise taxes to replace that 
spending. That is bad budgeting. That is basic,

[[Page H845]]

fundamental poor budgeting. That is part of the President's proposal.

                              {time}  2300

  I think if we really want to put Social Security first, I think we 
have a very short window. I think in the next 2 to 3 years, we have 
some unusual revenue growth, if we do not somehow screw up the economy 
in this country, if we do not take this opportunity to back out of 
borrowing from Social Security and actually start a trust fund, leave 
that 100 million, make that 100 billion. In a 3-year period if we could 
stop borrowing at all, we would already have accumulated 200 billion 
actual money in the bank to be invested wisely and could be building 
for those who are worried about Social Security in the future.
  If it was my choice, if I were king, I would take the tobacco 
settlement and whatever payments are part of it. I know we have farmers 
to take care of. There is a lot things to solve with the tobacco 
settlement because there are people that are going to be displaced out 
there. I have sensitivity to that. But whatever money is not allocated 
in that settlement, I would put in the Medicare Trust Fund. Now we have 
started to help extend the Medicare program for more than 10 years out 
because that is all that it is solvent today. Those are two things that 
would send the right message to especially the seniors in this country.
  A couple other things that I wanted to mention was the sunsetting the 
IRS. I see the President has taken us on for sunsetting the IRS in the 
Tax Code as if that is irresponsible. I think the gentleman from 
Oklahoma (Mr. Largent) did an outstanding job the other day of his 
theory that it should be a national debate in the next Presidential 
election. And if we sunset it and give ourselves the time to go through 
the next election, when we are electing the next President, we can 
elect a President that tells the American people what kind of a 
simplified Tax Code they want and that he is going to give them. I 
think it would be an absolute time to debate that nationwide.
  Those are just a few of the things that I think are very important.
  Mr. BLUNT. Let me say in that regard, the President, I think 
yesterday, started right down the path that we all should anticipate in 
the fight to sunset the Tax Code. The President said, if we sunset the 
Tax Code, we would not have mortgage deductions anymore. Who says we 
would not have mortgage deductions anymore? The President takes a 
couple of hundred words, a couple thousand words, maybe, out of a 5.5 
million word Tax Code and holds those up to the American people and 
says, now, to save this, we have to have all of this.
  The pressure to maintain the Tax Code is going to be right here in 
Washington. There is not a single thing in the Tax Code that somebody 
did not want in there. There is not a single thing in the Tax Code that 
some special interest did not want in there.
  The Tax Code is out of control. It is not a creature of the IRS. It 
is a creature of the Congress. But I think yesterday we saw exactly the 
reason that we need to go ahead and commit to slay the dragon of the 
Tax Code and then have the debate about a new system, because we saw 
the President get some response by just taking one appealing thing in a 
Tax Code that largely does not appeal to anybody and saying, you do not 
want to lose this. And if you slay the Tax Code without a new plan, you 
are going to lose this.
  The truth is that the folks who are really out there to protect the 
5.5 million word Tax Code, and by the way, the Declaration of 
Independence had 1,300 words in it, the entire Old and New Testament 
has 773,000 words in it. The Tax Code is eight times as big as the Old 
and New Testament. I think it is 42,000 pages of Tax Code and 20,000 
pages of the IRS interpretations of what the 42,000 pages mean, and 
nobody understands that Tax Code.
  But if we do not commit ourselves to eliminate the code first, the 
debate on what to replace it with will be used as the way to ensure 
that we never eliminate the code, because you will see the greatest 
efforts at class warfare. You will see the greatest efforts at 
generational warfare, all waged by people who want to save some sliver 
of that Tax Code that they worked so hard to get in there that does not 
help anybody in America but them.
  The commitment that we would make as a Congress to eliminate the Tax 
Code at a future date, and I believe the bill that many of us, I am 
certainly cosponsoring the legislation, the date on our legislation is 
December 31, 2001, with the commitment to have a new system in place by 
Independence Day 2001, 6 months in advance of when it would necessarily 
have to go into effect, to slay that Tax Code and then have this 
national debate that has to meet the framework of being fairer, being 
simpler, producing no more revenue than the current Tax Code produces 
and to really truly eliminate the IRS as we know it, because the IRS is 
only the IRS because of a Tax Code that nobody fully understands. And 
that is what allows the IRS in its worst cases to be the IRS.
  One of the most frustrating things in the world would have to be a 
well-intentioned IRS employee with a Tax Code that can mean anything 
somebody at the IRS decides it may mean in any given instance. We need 
to commit to eliminate that code, and I think the President is just as 
wrong on this as he was last spring when he told us the IRS does not 
need to be reformed. And then, again, 6 weeks ago here he turned to the 
Senate and says, and why do you not pass those IRS reforms that the 
House passed last year. Remember, he was opposed to those IRS reforms 
and said the IRS was running better than it ever had in any time 
certainly than it was 5 years ago when he took office. That is just not 
true. He admitted as much in the State of the Union message.
  Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, it was so ironic when the 
President made this speech about characterizing our efforts to rein in 
the IRS as somehow irresponsible, it is important to note where he made 
the speech. I do not want to malign the group he was before and 
speaking in front of, but it was a special interest group of a 
particular group of individuals who are involved in a certain aspect of 
financial institutions.
  But that really illustrates what is sick about tax policy in 
Washington in the first place. You stand in front of the interest group 
that happens to be in town for one week or another, tell them what they 
want to hear about their little part of the Tax Code, and that, over 
time, if you look at it in reverse, is how the Tax Code was created to 
be the way it is now, why it is so ridiculous.
  I think what brings us all here together as Republicans tonight is 
that we want to put the average American taxpayer first. We have spent 
a considerable amount of time traveling around our districts listening 
to real people who do not care about this loophole or that loophole or 
that advantage or this disadvantage in the Tax Code. They want the 
entire program reined in. They want us to exercise our authority and 
provide the oversight and demand the accountability that we ought to 
do, and they want us to focus on liberating the American public so that 
this Tax Code, which now represents about 20 percent of the burden just 
in Federal income tax to the average American family, is reduced.

  Is that what you are hearing in your part of the State?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, that is exactly what I hear, listening to 
our colleague from Missouri. What we are finding is at the State level 
Governors are aggressively slaying the dragons of big State government, 
whether it is South Dakota, whether it is Colorado or Michigan. They 
are trimming back on bureaucracy. They are lowering taxes. They are 
doing all the things that the other side said you cannot do it.
  The people need this. Government has to deliver these services. And 
what we are seeing at the State level is kind of like, we can slay 
those dragons, and when we do, the average person benefits because they 
keep more of their own money.
  We create more jobs which increases wages, and we have to learn that 
same lesson here in Washington, that we can go out and slay those 
dragons. We can slay the Tax Code and develop a better Tax Code than 
what has developed over the last 30 years because of special interests.
  We can change the education bureaucracy here in Washington so that we 
are focusing on kids again. The education bureaucracy here in 
Washington

[[Page H846]]

focuses on special interests. It focuses on everything but kids 
learning. The study that came out last week, the Timms international 
study, devastating for America. I think in science and math we scored 
19, 20 out of 21 countries. That is an improvement because in some of 
the other studies that have been done internationally, we scored about 
38 or 39. These were high school seniors. The only reason we moved up 
is we are not compared to as many countries as we were in the other 
studies.
  But it is devastating that we are not turning out the kinds of kids 
out of our education system that we need to be turning out. We have 
gone around the country listening, and we will be in your State in a 
couple weeks. We have been, I think, in 14 different States. You have 
to focus on parents, local control, basic academics in the classroom 
and safe and drug-free schools. That is the message.
  What we have learned is Washington programs are focused on 
bureaucracy and paperwork. We have 760 programs and, you say, 
hallelujah, now I know why we have an Education Department to 
coordinate all these 760 programs. Wrong. They go through 39 different 
agencies. We have got to slay that dragon, get the education 
bureaucracy in Washington out of here and get it focused on kids, 
parents and local control, and helping those children learn, not 
bureaucracy, bureaucrats or paperwork in Washington.
  Mr. THUNE. Let me just pick up on what the gentleman from Michigan 
said there, because I think the underlying theme that we are hearing in 
all these discussions this evening is the whole issue of personal 
freedom, taking the bureaucracy out of Washington, D.C., and allowing 
families and State and local governments to do what they do best.
  And really I think that seems to me, the gentleman from Missouri 
talked about the Tax Code, 34\1/2\ pounds, we put it on a scale. It is 
an atrocity. And you think about the captivity that that puts people in 
this country in. They are so dependent and need to be released and 
unburdened from the shackles of big government.
  If we can come up with a way that simplifies that process, I did mine 
a couple weeks ago. I speak firsthand from this. It is a remarkable, 
remarkable experience to try and go through and sort through all those 
forms and try and come up with, get your tax return prepared and 
completed in a way that satisfies all those regulations. But I think 
the same thing is true in education.
  We are not viewed, I do not believe, out there as people who want to 
do anything to undermine the education of our children. We want a 
higher quality system, a better value to the taxpayers which puts more 
of the choice and freedom back home in living rooms with the men and 
women of this country.
  I happen to believe, as I think everybody in the Chamber this evening 
does, that fundamentally we are a lot better served, my children are 
infinitely better off and your children and grandchildren, if we have 
that focus, that point of control back home as opposed to here in 
Washington.
  I think the underlying theme in everything we are talking about is 
liberating people from big government programs, from an education 
bureaucracy, from a tax bureaucracy, a revenue collecting bureaucracy, 
and putting more control and power in their hands. As the gentleman 
from Missouri mentioned earlier, there has been a lot of foot-dragging 
along the way.
  IRS reform was an issue which was very popular with us, and the 
President basically pooh-poohed it until he found it was also popular 
with the American public. Then all of a sudden he was back at the table 
saying this is a great idea. You look at, along the way, welfare 
reform. Nobody said that could happen. A balanced budget, nobody said 
those things could happen. Now we are talking about scrapping the Tax 
Code. He is saying that is irresponsible.
  The only thing that is irresponsible is defending the status quo. We 
have an opportunity here over the next couple of years to do something 
that is significant and historic, which builds upon the progress of 
welfare reform, balanced budget, lower taxes, Medicare reform, and that 
is to reform this Tax Code, to scrap the old one and start from the 
ground up with something that makes sense because the one that we have 
today does not.
  If we have to bring everybody kicking and screaming at the White 
House along on this journey, so be it, because I think the American 
public supports us. They are going to be leading the way when we give 
them some opportunities to look at the alternatives that are out there. 
I think it is all about more personal freedoms, smaller government, 
lower taxes and putting more control and more decisionmaking authority 
in the hands of individuals as opposed to government.
  Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. The Tax Code keeps cash out of the 
hands of families who might want to put their kids into a higher 
education setting or some other academic setting that would make them 
more marketable and more profitable in the job market, and these 
regulations that we talk about with respect to education drive up 
effectively the cost of education for all of our children throughout 
the country.
  The gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Blunt) is a former college 
president.
  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that. One of the things that we 
all worked for and voted for last year right here on the House floor 
was a resolution that did exactly what you and the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) and others want to do and the gentleman from 
South Dakota (Mr. Thune) was mentioning with education. I know the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) was an advocate of this. 
That was, let us get what money we spend where it does the most good. 
Let us be focused on education, not focused on bureaucrats. This is the 
right kind of solution that we need.
  I think 310 Members of the House, which means that lots of Democrats 
joined virtually all the Republicans, and we passed a resolution that 
said that 90 cents out of every dollar in every Federal elementary and 
secondary program needed to get to the classroom, the Dollars to the 
Classroom Act. And suddenly we are reducing all that money that is used 
up by bureaucrats, all that money that is used up by people figuring 
out new forms to fill out and by people that have to fill out those 
forms and by people that monitor those forms. We are saying, let us get 
that money to where it will do some good.

                              {time}  1315

  Let us be sure that we do not waste $1,800 for every classroom in 
America every year, like we are doing now when we are getting about 65 
cents out of every dollar in the classroom. Let us get 90 cents out of 
every dollar in the classroom. Let us let parents be involved in that 
decision. Let us let local building administrators be involved in 
spending that money. But mostly let us let teachers and kids get 
together. Let us put that money not in the hands of some bureaucrats in 
Washington, or even in all of our State capitals, let us put that money 
in the hands of a teacher who knows every child's name in that class. 
That can make a difference.
  Mr. THUNE. The gentleman presiding, it is his legislation we are 
talking about.
  Mr. BLUNT. That is exactly right.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Pitts). The Chair would advise the 
gentlemen that there being no designee of the minority leader, the 
gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) may proceed for up to 15 minutes 
more.
  The gentleman is recognized.
  Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, you are in the chair and 
cannot join us in the discussion, but also a Member of the freshman 
class the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Pitts) has led the way in 
urging this Congress and our Federal Government to put more cash into 
the classrooms and basically starve the bureaucracy back in Washington 
and put children first. And it is a project that we are all very happy 
to be a part of and be supporting and we commend him for his 
leadership.
  The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) also has worked on 
similar efforts back in his home State, and he may have a little more 
to add to that.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. The gentleman used the words ``starve 
the bureaucracy.'' As I look at the Washington bureaucracy, I do not 
think there is anybody starving.

[[Page H847]]

  The President, in his message, also talked about that government was 
smaller, I forget by what percentage than when he came here. When we 
add back the million people who have been taken out of the military, 
our government bureaucracy has grown immensely under the administration 
of the present President. I am told there are departments that have 
doubled. I think EPA has doubled in numbers of employees. There are 
other departments that are 50 percent bigger. While we were cutting the 
military immensely, the rest of this government, as far as personnel is 
concerned, has exploded.
  There is a line item in the budget called general government. And I 
am going on memory here tonight because I have not looked it up 
recently, but if my memory is correct it was a $10 billion line item 
that in his budget was going to increase to 17 billion. It was general 
government. That is personnel. That is bureaucracy. So he was asking 
for a 42 percent increase in that line item in this year's budget.
  That is an area we need to take a look at it. I know I am personally 
having an audit done on how many employees there are in each department 
and how many there have been for the recent years. And if we want to 
waste money, build a huge bureaucracy. The Federal Government should 
not have these huge bureaucracies.
  I know my communities cannot deal with EPA, my businesses cannot 
effectively deal with EPA, but they can effectively deal with their 
State environmental agencies, who should be implementing the programs 
that we designate or that we prioritize. So I think we can take a huge 
look at cutting back.
  Pennsylvania had a Governor a few years ago by the name of Dick 
Thornberg. I think my colleagues know him or know of him. He cut the 
size of government from about 105,000 to 92,000. Now, at that time I 
was a State legislator and then ran for the Senate about that same 
period of time, but I was serving in government. As he cut the 
bureaucracy and improved the management, our casework in our offices, 
helping people deal with government, went down measurably because he 
made those departments much more efficient, more professionally run, 
with less people, so our workload of helping communities and people 
deal with government became much less.
  As soon as we got a new Governor who did not pay attention to that 
and started adding more people to the payroll, our workload in our 
offices went up because of the inefficiency of the bureaucracy that was 
not well managed.
  That is another point I wanted to make in my concluding comments. We 
measure Governors and Presidents on what they propose, not on what they 
do. We really should be taking a look at this administration and why 
did we have $23 billion in wrongful spending in Medicare; why do we 
have 21 percent error rate in the tax credits? We could go on and on 
with the long list. That is poor management.
  That is the job of an administrator, is to run government. But we 
only talk about what they propose, what they promise, and what they are 
going to do for us, when the first job of a CEO is to manage a company. 
The first job of a President or a Governor is to manage their 
government. And we should be measuring our leaders on how they manage 
the resources that we give them and the programs we give them.
  I think if we did that, things would change a lot because they would 
stop talking about new programs and they would start paying attention 
to managing government. And I think we need to change our whole focus.
  Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. I have a question I would like to pose 
to my four colleagues, and that is with respect to this issue of 
reining in government and the success we have seen at the State level, 
what the President is criticizing, trying to rein in the IRS through 
sunset provisions is not new throughout the country. I am curious how 
many of my colleagues' States have sunset provisions that we deal with 
at the State regulatory level. Are any of my colleagues' States 
involved in those back home?
  There are several States that do. I will give an example out in 
Colorado. Pennsylvania does. In Colorado, if we look at every 
regulatory agency in our State laws, at the end of the statute there is 
a termination date. The Public Utilities Commission, by way of an 
example. Eight billion dollars worth of commerce and industry is 
regulated by that agency in my State. At the end of the act, if we open 
up the law books, it says this agency expires and terminates, goes away 
effectively on, and it will say June 31 in some year out in the future, 
5 or 10 years out in the future.
  What these sunset dates do, and many people do not understand this, 
this does not mean the agency goes away, but what it does do is it 
shifts the burden away from the government and it takes the advantage 
away from the bureaucracy, away from the status quo, and gives all of 
the advantages for reform to the taxpayers and the people.
  That is what would happen if we sunsetted the IRS, and the reason we 
are pushing so hard for it. Getting any incremental change in that act 
is so difficult here because we have to get 218 majority votes here, 
another majority vote in the Senate, we have to compromise it, too, and 
somehow find a way to get the President to sign it. That is a tall 
order. But if we shift the burden and say we must come up with majority 
agreement in all three, the House, Senate and the President, or else 
the whole agency expires, well, I think people will start negotiating a 
lot more seriously. They start putting the taxpayers ahead of the 
bureaucrats, they start putting real reform ahead of status quos.
  And that is why sunset dates are so effective. They are responsible. 
They are done in several States and done so quite effectively. And I 
think we ought to take a lesson from the playbook from many States and 
employ sunset dates, not just on the IRS, although that is the best 
place to start, but in several regulatory agencies.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will yield there, I 
would like to ask this question of the gentleman from Michigan, who is 
our education expert; if we had a sunset provision in all 700-some 
programs in the Department of Education, the gentleman's committee 
would be pretty busy, would it not, reviewing all those as their times 
came due?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the gentleman for asking the question. 
Absolutely. Because if there is another agency in a department that 
needs to be sunsetted, not that we need to get rid of it but that we 
need to reevaluate its purpose, because we know we are not getting the 
kind of results that we want so we know we have to do something; then 
we have to go through and we ought to be evaluating those 760 programs. 
We know that out of those dollars, 30 to 35 cents never gets to the 
classroom, which is where the leverage point is.

  So then we should come back, and I have a list here of what does the 
Federal education program do or what does the President want it to do. 
The President wants the Federal education program to build our schools 
and hire our teachers. Are those Federal responsibilities? I do not 
know. We really should have a good debate about that. I am not sure. I 
do not think so.
  We want it to develop our curriculum, test our kids, feed them 
breakfast, feed them lunch, teach them about sex, teach them about 
drugs, do after-school programs. But other than that, it is our local 
schools. Now, are those, are all of those decisions best driven from 
Washington?
  This is where the education department has evolved from since 1979. 
And if we go back through the debate, in the debate in 1979, the people 
who participated in support of the education department said we do not 
want to move control from parents and the local and the State level to 
Washington. We just want to facilitate. Well, in reality if we take a 
look at where that bureaucracy has gone, it has moved well beyond its 
original mandate. It should have been sunsetted so we could have 
reevaluated the direction and the impact and the performance on an 
ongoing regular basis, rather than creating an agency where bureaucrats 
are just feeding themselves and getting bigger and bigger and bigger 
and losing focus of their real job.
  Mr. THUNE. If the gentleman will yield on that point, because it is 
an important point. The fact we do not have sunset provisions in 
Federal programs is what I think makes the President's budget so 
dangerous.

[[Page H848]]

  The gentleman from Pennsylvania made the point earlier about the fact 
that there is all this new spending: 39 new entitlement programs. We 
cannot create a program in this city and ever hope, even though its 
purpose ceases to exist, to get rid of it if the time ever comes.
  So I think before we embark on this road of new Federal spending, new 
government, new Washington programs, which is clearly the direction 
that the President wanted to go when he came out with his budget, and I 
did not count it up, but a billion dollars a minute is a pretty 
astonishing rate of government growth, but that is what the State of 
the Union address was all about, creating new Washington bureaucracy 
and new Washington spending.
  And I think that is a very dangerous road to start down, given the 
fact that any time we create entitlement programs in this city, they 
are there to stay.
  I think that he is assuming a whole lot of things about the 
performance of this economy that we really do not know about. I think 
we would be much better served to the extent that we have addressed 
long-term issues like Social Security, like Medicare, having done that, 
that any dollars that are left, we ought to give them back to the 
taxpayers whose dollars they are in the first place and really ought to 
have first claim.
  So I think you make an important point when you talk about all the 
various programs over time that have been created, never been 
evaluated. Before we head down that road again, I think the American 
public would be better served if we talk in a very fundamental way 
about ensuring that we do not create new Washington spending. I think 
that is an important point that we probably all agree on.
  Mr. BLUNT. If the gentleman will yield, I think that is exactly 
right. I think what happens is, if you do have sunset provisions, every 
agency not only is aware that it is going to have to come up for 
review, but every assignment it is given is going to have to come up 
for review, and that just does not happen now.
  We have lots of programs on the books that are not funded, are 
underfunded, or just out there waiting for that moment when they can 
come back in and grab some more money. Nobody ever challenges those 
things. I think that one of the great reviews we could do would be to 
do that.
  I think one of our freshman colleagues, the gentleman from Texas 
(Kevin Brady) has legislation he is working on that would really put 
sunset provisions in as an automatic part of any new program that goes 
into effect, any new agency that goes into effect. Then of course we 
ought to go back and attach those same provisions to old agencies.
  I think what happens in Colorado and other States that have this is 
the departments themselves pretty quickly come back to the legislature 
and say, when they see something that is going to be a problem for 
them, when it comes time to defend it, when it comes time for them to 
be reauthorized, they say in advance, you know, we think this is really 
not working out like we thought it would. We think you ought to 
eliminate this, because we do not want to come back 2 years from now 
and explain why we have not been able to make it work. I think that is 
one of the things we could do to begin to get this government under 
control.
  Also the other thing that has been mentioned so often tonight that we 
have taken great advantage of over the last 3 years has been the States 
themselves. How many times tonight in our discussion have we talked 
about, whether it is welfare programs or education programs, how much 
benefit we are getting by letting the 50 States be 50 laboratories for 
change?
  There are great results happening in State after State after State 
where we have allowed them leeway in areas like welfare that they have 
not had before. The Governor of Wisconsin just the other day, as was 
pointed out, wrote the last welfare check. There are not going to be 
any more of those checks issued in that State. It has made a dramatic 
difference in the way they approach this problem.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I guess a concluding remark for me is 
one of the first things I said tonight. I think we really have 3 years 
to back out of the trust funds. If we do not stop borrowing from the 
trust funds the next 3 years, we probably will not have an economy that 
will allow us to do that. I think we have a limited time to stop 
borrowing from them. I think the pressure ought to be on.
  I do not think we have to whack and cut with a cleaver. I think we 
just have to be a little bit frugal like we are with our own money, 
just a little bit frugal here in Washington. We can stop borrowing from 
the trust funds, and we can make sure Social Security and Medicare are 
strong and that our children do not have the debt that we are going to 
leave them if we do not do it.
  Mr. SCHAFFER of Colorado. Our time has expired this evening. I 
appreciate the Speaker and his indulgence and for presiding tonight. By 
the way, Republican freshmen have an hour scheduled again next week on 
Wednesday, so I hope everybody will join us here again. We will 
continue our discussions about how we can move authority out of 
Washington back to the States and back to the policymakers and leaders 
who are closest to the people and know most about how to lead this 
great country.

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