[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 141 (Friday, October 9, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H10343]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2010
        GREEDY PLAYERS, GREEDY OWNERS, AND PUTTING AMERICA FIRST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, we are all reading the reports about 
economic troubles all over the world. We are also being told that these 
problems are already starting to affect the economy here in this 
country. Yet at the same time a small group of people who are averaging 
over $2\1/2\ million a year are getting ready to go on strike. I am 
talking of course about the NBA.
  Today professional sports has become filled with greedy players and 
greedy owners, and nowhere is this more obvious than in pro basketball. 
Last year one of my sons told me that one little-known player had 
signed a 6-year, $123 million contract, 20\1/2\ million dollars a year. 
I told my son that the sports world has simply gone berserk.
  I hope the NBA players and owners cannot work out their differences. 
I hope the whole season is lost. If they do play, I wish people would 
just refuse to watch and instead go to college or high school games.
  I remember a couple of years ago hearing about a major league 
baseball player signing for 3 years for $6 million a year. The average 
person in this country today makes less than $25,000 a year. If a 
person worked for 40 years at 25,000 a year, he would make $1 million 
for his whole career. If he was way above average, making 50,000 a 
year, he would make $2 million over a 40 year career. A person would 
have to average $150,000 a year for 40 years to make $6 million.
  These pro sports salaries are simply out of whack. I do not support 
giving government more money because so much of it is wasted, and 
turning money over to government is the least efficient way to spend 
money and the least efficient way to create jobs that you could find. 
But with these ridiculous salaries as high as they are now and 
especially if they continue to escalate, then we should lower the taxes 
on middle-income people and make it up by raising the taxes on these 
athletes and movie stars who are making millions of dollars a year.
  Mr. Speaker, if we are about to hit some hard economic times, then we 
need to try even harder to see that we use our money and spend our 
money in the wisest ways possible. We need to give people more 
incentives to save and more incentives to invest especially in 
companies that create manufacturing and industrial jobs, good paying 
jobs. We need to stop giving tax breaks and spending huge sums of 
public money for pro sports companies so they can raise the salaries of 
athletes who are already being paid obscene amounts already.
  While I am discussing inefficient, unfair ways of spending public 
money, I should mention that unfortunately we are about to give many 
billions more to the International Monetary Fund in this end-of-the-
year omnibus appropriations bill. We will be doing this against the 
advice of people like George Schultz, the former Treasury Secretary; 
Jack Kemp, a former leader in this body; James K, Glassman, the 
Washington Post financial columnist and many others. Mr. Glassman wrote 
this past Tuesday that:

       The IMF bears responsibility for Asia's troubles. With the 
     U.S. Treasury in 1995, it delivered unprecedented sums to 
     bail out banks and investors who made reckless loans to 
     Mexico. That rescue then encouraged investors to make riskier 
     extensions of credit to Asia, Russia and Latin America. That 
     led to over capacity and to the current crisis.

  In other words, we are taking billions from lower and middle income 
Americans to send to foreign countries to bail out rich investors, 
banks and multinational companies for bad investments overseas and in 
some cases to help keep factories going in other nations which are 
taking jobs from American workers. Our Founding Fathers never would 
have believed this. We are told we have to do this because if we do 
not, other countries will not be able to buy as many American products, 
and some American workers will lose their jobs. What we would really be 
doing though is sending billions of American tax dollars to other 
countries so that we can get a portion of it back.
  Already our balance of payments deficit, our trade deficit is at 
record levels. We will lose about 3 million jobs to other countries 
because of a trade imbalance this year alone. If we kept all of these 
billions here instead of giving it to the IMF, some multi-national 
companies and international bankers and investors might be hurt. But 
this money would not disappear if we simply kept it here. More of it 
would then go to the benefit of American workers and small American 
businesses that do not do much or any business overseas.
  Mr. Speaker, as I have said on this floor before, we need to start 
putting our own workers and our own businesses first once again. We 
need to start putting America first once again, even if it is not 
politically correct or fashionable with liberal elitists to do so.

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