[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 138 (Wednesday, October 13, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H9970-H9977]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BALANCES BUDGET WITHOUT DIPPING INTO SOCIAL SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Cooksey). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, this evening I will lead a special order 
on behalf of the leadership of the majority party. Our focus tonight is 
to talk

[[Page H9971]]

about a number of remarkable events that have occurred today, not the 
least of which was the announcement that the Federal Government has in 
fact balanced its budget for 1999 and it appears to have done so 
without dipping into Social Security at all.
  This is a long-standing goal of the Republican party and one goal to 
which we are exceedingly proud to represent.
  But before I get into that subject, I want to yield the floor to the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers).
  Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I do 
plan to participate in part of his discussion. But before we get into 
that, I just wanted to respond to the comments of the previous speakers 
on the issue that was being discussed and just give some additional 
comments.
  Today, the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) had a press 
conference at which he announced the development of a bill dealing with 
the Medicare issue and which the amount of money to be appropriated as 
well as administrative actions we are requesting be taken from the 
President will resolve the problem and will deal with all the issues 
and problems that were mentioned by the preceding two speakers.
  I also want to clarify, as Paul Harvey says, to give the whole story; 
and that is that many of the points that they were belaboring the 
Republican party for are in fact a direct result of the actions of the 
President and of his employees, particularly those at the Health Care 
Financing Administration. They have cut far more deeply than the 
legislation the Republicans got through asked them to do.
  As a result of that, the home health care agencies are severely in 
trouble, the rural hospitals and skilled nursing units are also in 
trouble, and even the major city hospitals are in trouble.
  The other factor that should be mentioned is that the President, who 
does have the responsibility for this and who has criticized us for not 
acting on this, has not come to the Congress with any suggestions of 
how to deal with it and has not initiated any actions as a result of 
the problem, although much of it he could do administratively through 
requests directed to the Health Care Financing Administration.
  So there is more to the story than was explained in the last 60 
minutes, and I just want to make sure everyone in the House and in the 
Congress, as well as in our Nation, is aware of the fact. It is a 
broader story. The President has not acted as we think he should have.
  Furthermore, the Health Care Financing Administration has cut more 
severely than the Congress intended; and Congress has taken action and 
will conduct a hearing on that, in fact, and final action on the bill 
in committee this week to ensure that the additional funds will be 
allocated for hospitals, skilled nursing units, and for home health 
care. We hope this will go a long way toward resolving the problem.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I look forward to the 
return of the gentleman to continue discussing some additional topics.
  Again, I want to go back to the news that was revealed here in 
Washington today. In fact, I brought with me a copy of the New York 
Times. This is an article that my colleagues would find if they 
ventured back to page 18-A. It is kind of remarkable, I point that out, 
because this is a landmark announcement and many in the media are 
hoping that this kind of news remains buried in the back of newspapers.
  In fact, if my colleagues look this up on the New York Times website, 
they find it even deeper into the paper. But I wanted to bring it on 
the floor today and magnify the impact of the article to show the 
impact and how big this really is.
  Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the 
Government may have balanced the budget in fiscal year 1999 without 
spending Social Security money.
  Now, that is a remarkable accomplishment. There still remains some 
additional accounting that needs to come forward as we shore up those 
numbers. But as of yesterday, it appears that we balanced the budget in 
1999 without dipping into the Social Security Trust Fund.
  Now, I just cannot overstate at all the magnitude of this 
announcement and how important this is. When the Republicans took over 
the United States Congress back in 1994, they pledged to balance the 
budget by the year 2002; and that seemed at the time to be a reasonable 
time frame to get to the point of balancing the budget. It was 
misrepresented by many.
  In fact, if my colleagues remember some of the rhetoric coming out 
the White House and from some of our friends on the left side of the 
aisle, they claim that balancing the budget would represent some kind 
of undue hardship on the American people, that balancing the budget 
entails drastic and dramatic cuts in Federal programs.
  If my colleagues remember, they talked about the notion that we would 
see seniors out on the streets and we would see children who would be 
denied meals and things of that sort and opportunity for education. But 
balancing the budget really did not entail dramatic cuts in spending. 
It did entail reductions in the overall growth of Federal spending over 
a certain time frame, and we did that to the extent that we allowed the 
American economy to catch up with Washington's spending habits by 
changing the appetite in Congress to spend and spend and spend and to 
reform the attitude that used to be very prevalent here to one of 
frugality.
  We allowed the American people to catch up with the spending in 
Washington, and it resulted in a balanced budget not on target for the 
year 2002 but a full 4 years ahead of schedule and in fact in 1999 
balanced without dipping into the Social Security revenues. Again, a 
remarkable success.
  I will tell my colleagues how remarkable it really is. If we look at 
what Congress projected back in January of 1995, here is where we saw 
the Social Security deficit projections at that point in time.
  In 1995, we expected that in 1999 we may be seeing a $90-billion 
deficit in Social Security projections for this year for 1999. We beat 
those odds. We, in fact, managed not only to balance the budget but to 
exercise the kind of regulatory restraint and concern for tax relief 
that really stimulated economic growth throughout the country that 
allowed the American people to beat those numbers, to beat those 
progressions from back there in 1995, to do it in a way that allowed us 
to balance the budget in 1999, without dipping into Social Security.
  Once again, the article that we find in the New York Times and 
elsewhere around the country this morning is one that I really hope the 
American people have an opportunity to evaluate and to consider. 
Because what this article tells us, Mr. Speaker, is that we are far 
ahead of schedule, we are far further along at this point in time than 
the American people ever gave us credit for when we took over the 
Congress.
  This is an example of the Congress under promising and over 
delivering. And I just cannot help but to remind the House one more 
time that that promise that I described as under promising was made 
back in 1994 to balance the budget by 2002 at the time seemed like it 
was insurmountable.
  In fact, there is a quote in the article from an individual named 
Robert Reischauer. He is the Director of the Budget Office or was from 
1989 to 1995. Listen to what he says. He says, ``If any budget expert 
told you in 1997 that we would have balanced the budget in 1999, that 
person would have been committed to an asylum.''
  Now, that is said with tongue in cheek certainly, but I think it 
shows the drama of how Washington has just been rocked by this 
particular announcement and decision.
  We have moved forward with a plan to try to stop the President's raid 
on Social Security. The President proposed when he stood here at the 
rostrum just at the beginning of the year to deliver a State of the 
Union address and laid out a plan to once again dip into the Social 
Security revenues to balance the budget for this year. He moved forward 
on his plan and his party's plan to move forward to a balanced budget, 
again dipping into the Social Security program in order to accomplish 
that.
  Well, the Congress has a very different message for the President, 
and that is we do not need to dip into the Social Security Trust Fund 
any longer. We should stop the White House raid

[[Page H9972]]

on the Social Security Trust Fund and we should move forward on a 
better plan to allow Congress to balance the budget and live within its 
means without robbing the security of current retirees and future 
generations.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) who 
has returned and joined us again.
  Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I would 
like to make a few additional points.
  First all, we talked in the past year about the tax cuts and the need 
to give money back to our citizens if we have a surplus. But let me 
point out to my colleagues how the citizens of our country are getting 
more money back than we could give them through a tax cut.
  Now, how could that possibly be? The point is simple. When I came 
here in late 1993, early 1994, we were running at an annual deficit of 
over $300 billion per year. We were going in the hole that much every 
year, using every penny I might add of the Social Security surplus. And 
then in the space of a short time, 5 years, we have changed that. And 
instead of a $300-billion deficit way done here, we are now up to over 
a $100-billion surplus. This is a $400-billion difference.
  Now, why does this help the people? It helps them in a lot of ways. 
First of all, we do not have as much interest to pay as we would have 
otherwise. But more directly, every economist I have talked to says, 
because we are not out there as a Government borrowing these huge 
amounts of money, the interest rates will go down and their estimate is 
the interest rate has dropped between one percent and two percent 
simply because we have balanced the budget and we have a surplus 
instead of the deficit.
  Now, how does that affect the average citizen? Just think about that 
for a moment. If the interest rates, just averaging the numbers they 
have given, is about 1\1/2\ percent lower, and recognizing that the 
average American home is worth $100,000 and so people have gone on to 
get a mortgage of roughly that amount for their first home on a 
$100,000 mortgage, a 1\1/2\ percent difference in interest rates means 
they are saving $1,500 per family, just on the mortgage every year, 
they are saving $1,500 a year because they have a lower interest rate 
on their mortgage.
  That is astounding. That is bigger than any tax cut we talked about 
giving them, even though we had proposed a very healthy tax cut in the 
Republican tax cut proposal. But we actually have given them more money 
back already just by balancing the budget and having a surplus because 
it has affected the economy. And this applies to purchases of cars, 
credit card debt, anything of that sort.
  So the average American is saving a lot of money just because we have 
balanced the budget, and that is very important to remember.
  The other point I would make about the comment from the gentleman 
from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer), and he has hit it right on the nose, once 
again, it amuses me, a couple of months ago we were being wrongly 
criticized by the folks on other side of the aisle that Republicans 
were raiding Social Security of all things. How could we do that? That 
was terrible. And even my Republican colleagues are starting to feel 
bad about this. Are we really doing that? We must not do that.
  So I got up and spoke at the Republican Conference a few weeks ago 
and said, hey, folks, remember, we may possibly dip into the Social 
Security reserve just a little bit yet this year and not do it next 
year, but I do not think we will even have to do that. But remember 
that the last several years the Democrats have not just dipped into it, 
they have run off with the whole pot. They have spent every single cent 
of the Social Security reserve for the past few years.
  Now, that is intolerable and it certainly means that they cannot 
criticize us for any actions we take in that regard this year but, 
rather, should thank us and congratulate us because we are determined 
not to touch this Social Security surplus, which is generated because 
people are paying more into Social Security than is currently be being 
taken out. And that money has to be saved for the future when the 
current people paying it in will retire and need their money back.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, this Congress has not balanced the budget 
without dipping into Social Security since 1960. We have to go back 
almost 40 years to find a schedule when the Congress acted in a way 
that honored and respected the full intent of Social Security and did 
not use the trust fund as some kind of a slush fund.

                              {time}  1945

  You have to go back quite a long ways. In the ensuing 40 years that 
the other party, the Democrat Party has run this Congress, their record 
and legacy to the American people has been a perpetual use and abuse of 
the Social Security trust fund by year after year after year dipping 
into that trust fund in order to pay for the wants and desires of 
people here in Washington, D.C. It is a great day when we are able to 
turn the tables, turn things around and go back to the ways the 
Congress used to run the budget, and, that is, to pay for the things 
that government wants to spend with the dollars that are on hand today 
and not borrow and raid the Social Security trust fund.
  Mr. EHLERS. Just a brief comment on that, and a slight correction, 
but the correction is to make a point. There were several years in the 
late 1970s when Congress did not take anything out of the Social 
Security surplus. The reason for that is that there was no Social 
Security surplus. So what did they do? They still overspent but added 
it to the national debt. If you wonder why we have an almost $6 
trillion national debt at this point, you can recognize what happened 
in those years. You just look to it, and see that they just kept the 
spending on and added it to the national debt. I do not want to imply 
that you are wrong in any way, but the point is simply they could not 
take any in those few years because there was not any. It was about 6 
years longer.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. I appreciate the gentleman making that correction.
  I yield to the gentleman from Montana.
  Mr. HILL of Montana. I thank the gentleman from Colorado for 
yielding. I just want to reiterate the point that for 40 years when the 
other party controlled the House of Representatives, not one penny was 
set aside for the future of Social Security. When there were surpluses, 
they were spent. Obviously one of the reasons that there were increases 
in Social Security taxes is because the surpluses were spent and 
eventually went into deficit which incidentally is what the problem is. 
One of the problems that we are facing is that sometime around 2014, 
2015, there are not going to be Social Security surpluses again. The 
account will go into deficit. That is, the taxes going in will not be 
enough to pay the benefits going out. If we do not set aside the 
surpluses now, those extra dollars that are being paid in, the excess 
Social Security taxes, if we do not lock them away now for that 
purpose, then we are going to be faced with the kind of choices which 
were faced in the early 1980s which are massive tax increases or cut in 
benefits. In fact, what the trustees of Social Security say is that it 
is going to be a 25 percent reduction in benefits or a one-third 
increase in the taxes in order to keep it solvent. That is why 
maintaining the discipline that got us to this point is so important.
  I just want to point out a couple of things that I think kind of have 
been forgotten, I think many of my colleagues have forgotten, because 
it is a whole host of policies that were implemented with the new 
majority. When the new majority, when Republicans took over the House, 
let me remind you where we were. We had skyrocketing debt. Medicare was 
on the verge of bankruptcy. Social Security was facing bankruptcy. We 
were swimming in red ink. We had a record tax increase. If you recall 
in 1993, President Clinton and Democrats passed the largest tax 
increase in the history of the country. So when Republicans got elected 
to Congress, what did we do? We said, ``First of all, we have got to 
reform government.'' We said, ``Let's reform welfare.'' That helps us 
two ways. One, it can reduce the burden on the budget, but the other 
thing is that when people are working and paying taxes, they are adding 
to the equation rather than taking from the equation. We said, ``Let's 
shift power to the States,'' give States the authority to run programs 
more efficiently and use

[[Page H9973]]

that money better to get more done. We did that. We said we would 
balance the budget. How would we do that? We said rather than balancing 
the budget the way the President proposed, by raising taxes, we were 
going to do it by constraining spending. And, in fact, we eventually 
lowered taxes.
  And so we saved Medicare from insolvency. People forget that just 3 
years ago, we were facing the insolvency of Medicare this year or next 
year. Now it appears as though Medicare is going to be solvent well 
into the next century, sometime around 2015, without any changes, and 
certainly we can make changes to extend that further. It makes me 
breathless to think of how much we have accomplished in 3 years or 4 
years of a Republican Congress. But there is more to do. If we are 
really going to save Social Security, if we are going to make changes 
to Medicare that we know that need to be made, we have got to maintain 
the spending discipline.
  If you think about it, and I thought about this, on every single 
appropriation bill that we passed, the leading Democrat on the 
Committee on Appropriations has come to the floor and he has made the 
following statement: ``This is a great bill; it just doesn't spend 
enough money.'' The problem is that we have spent all the money that 
there is, all the surplus there is except Social Security. If we are 
going to spend anything more than what we propose to spend, it is going 
to start the raid on Social Security again. That is where we have to 
maintain the discipline. We have to maintain the discipline on the rate 
of growth of spending if we are going to maintain this balanced budget 
and if we are going to save Social Security for the long term.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. The Democrats on the other side of the aisle like to 
accuse Republicans, particularly in this Congress have engaged in what 
they call a do-nothing Congress. I guess if you evaluate progress in 
Washington based on their standards, we may be guilty of that because 
their standards involve creating new programs, building new government 
regulatory structures, manipulating a tax code which usually results in 
taking more money from the American people and bringing it here to 
Washington. I am not making this up. They have a 40-year record of 
coming to this floor and solving every problem in America by creating 
new programs, new government, new bureaucratic structure, new rules, 
new regulations, new laws, new taxes, new ways to spend it. That seemed 
like real progress to them. The result is trillions of dollars in debt 
and overexpenditures.

  So while we have been accused of being a do-nothing Congress, I think 
the record is quite the opposite and now we are starting to see the 
fruits of that quiet, behind-the-scenes labor that we have been 
involved in day after day after day. The results are we got government 
out of the way in many areas where business is concerned and job 
creation and wealth creation and economic growth, we lowered the tax 
burden on the American people, we allowed the American people through 
the power and economic strength of a free market capitalistic system 
that the United States represents to create more wealth in America, to 
catch up with Washington, D.C., to surpass where we were in 1999 in 
spending to allow us to begin to pay down the debt quicker, to allow us 
to focus on tax relief that will enable us ultimately to stimulate 
economic growth even further, to put more Americans back to work by 
reforming the welfare system and creating more jobs, to create a 
stronger and more vibrant education system throughout the country, to 
establish as a top priority defending our Nation through a strong 
national defense system.
  Americans frankly have to look hard to find these kinds of articles, 
because the White House and the President's allies in the national 
media like to put these great big stories on page A-18 as we can see 
right here in the New York Times. You have to flip a few pages before 
you find a landmark announcement like this that the ``Budget Balances 
Without Customary Raid on Social Security.'' Look at the headline right 
there. How many years have we been working for this very goal and 
President after President after President stood right up there at that 
podium, speaker after speaker has come down to these microphones in the 
well, party after party have all stated this as a primary goal, only 
one party has managed to accomplish that, it is the Republican Party 
and we managed to do that within the last 6 years that we have been 
running the Congress.
  This is truly a big announcement. Doing something in Washington 
sometimes means stopping the bad ideas that emanate from the other end 
of Pennsylvania Avenue. As I stated earlier, the Clinton-Gore spending 
proposals entailed raiding the Social Security trust fund this year to 
the tune of about $32 billion. That is equivalent to the yearly Social 
Security income for one out of every 10 seniors. Let me restate the 
number again. The Clinton-Gore plan proposed to raid the Social 
Security trust fund by $32 billion this year. That is equivalent to a 
10 percent cut in every senior's Social Security check. By raiding the 
Social Security trust fund as the Clinton-Gore plan entailed to the 
tune of $32 billion, their plan was equivalent to every senior citizen 
not receiving a Social Security check for the entire month of July. We 
accomplish something big by stopping those ridiculous plans that come 
out of the White House. It allows seniors to have a more comfortable 
retirement and enjoy their golden years, it allows for economic growth, 
to put more people back to work, it allows for Americans to afford more 
education for their children and for themselves when it comes to higher 
education.
  Before I yield again to the gentleman from Michigan, let me just make 
one more distinction between what they consider progress on the 
Democrat side and what we consider progress. Their idea of promoting 
education opportunity in the United States of America is taking tax 
dollars from the American people, confiscating those tax dollars, 
requiring them to be sent here to Washington, D.C. so that politicians 
can redistribute that wealth to the American people in general or to 
different political projects and so on, but at times to government 
schools. That is a fine thing. There is a legitimate cause for the 
Federal Government to appropriate dollars for education. I do not 
dispute that at all. But we can do even more. By balancing our budget, 
by being fiscally responsible here in Washington, D.C., that allows the 
American people to be full participants in an academic marketplace, 
picking and choosing the kinds of academic settings that make the most 
sense for them, picking the kinds of programs that will most directly 
allow them to enter into the workforce, whether that be through a 
traditional liberal arts education or one that is involved in technical 
training of various sorts. That is the point that the gentleman from 
Michigan has really led this Congress on. I yield to the gentleman on 
that note.
  Mr. EHLERS. I thank the gentleman from Colorado for yielding. Let me 
just make a couple of final comments on Social Security and then I will 
say something about education.
  I happened to pick up this morning a sheet from the Committee on 
Appropriations' office because I was interested in digging out these 
numbers. The chairman of the Committee on Appropriations had managed to 
get this out last week. In terms of the money taken from the Social 
Security trust fund to help balance the budget, if you go back to 1960 
as you mentioned earlier, the problem starts then but the amounts are 
fairly small. Nothing in 1960, $431 million in 1961, then really low 
again, then up to $600 million, but very modest amounts, until 1967. 
What happened in 1967? President Lyndon Johnson, with the unfortunate 
agreement of the Congress, combined all the money in the Federal budget 
into what is called the unified budget. Now, that sounds nice but I 
have to tell you, I was angered back then. I was not involved in 
politics at all. I never dreamed I would be involved in politics. But I 
thought that was voodoo economics, to coin a phrase, that they were 
cheating, because they were taking all the funds, the gas tax trust 
fund that people pay to get roads built, the aviation trust fund, the 
Social Security trust fund, Medicare trust fund, combined it all into 
one. And then look at the figures of what happened after that. 
Immediately, that year, almost $4 billion, the highest amount that had 
ever been taken out of the Social Security trust fund. And it continues 
to be high, partly to cover the cost of the Vietnam War. Then it 
dropped down in 1976 to zero. Why? Because there was

[[Page H9974]]

no surplus left in the Social Security fund. And then in 1984, 1983 and 
1984, we revamped the Social Security tax and really increased it. It 
is now for many people, the lower income people, the highest tax they 
pay, for Social Security. So there is a fresh influx of money. And 
immediately the Federal Government began using that money once again to 
cover the deficits. It goes up, it starts modestly again, $212 million, 
before long it is up to $58 billion, then continues all the way up to 
$60 billion in 1995 and so forth, until we finally got in office and 
started chopping it down.

  Now, the other point I would like to comment on is the one made by 
the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Hill), about this is not the end-all 
just because we balanced the budget. We have to make up for all that 
money that was taken out and basically is added to our national debt. 
We have to begin paying back the national debt to correct the problems 
we have had ever since President Johnson went in the other direction in 
1967. I am very pleased that last year we got the gas tax trust fund 
off-budget, so now when people pay their fuel tax, it actually goes 
into roads, bridges, highways and all the things that it was supposed 
to go into instead of being used for other purposes. This year, we are 
trying to get the aviation gas tax off-budget so the ticket tax that 
people pay when they travel will be used for better airports, runways 
and so forth. I hope someday personally that we can get the Social 
Security trust fund off-budget so we cannot even tinker with it and 
take that money out of there. That is a long-term goal.
  Now to shift gears a little bit and make some introductory comments 
about education. What should we do for education in this country from 
the Federal level? Here it is quite different from the previous topic 
we discussed. We have been criticizing the Democrats for a long time on 
their fiscal management, but I will commend them, just as I commended 
the Republicans, on their desire to improve education in the United 
States. I think that desire is shared throughout this entire Chamber.

                              {time}  2000

  But there is a basic difference in philosophy, and I think it is very 
important to highlight that. The approach of the other party is to have 
a Washington down program; in other words, it starts here, we think of 
the ideas, we do the work here, and we filter all that down, and in the 
process we lose a lot of money.
  We can tell endless stories, and you may hear some of those later 
from my colleagues about the money that is wasted in that.
  The Republican philosophy is, first of all, that the Federal 
Government has a limited role in K-12 education. That is not the job of 
the Federal Government to dictate how the schools should operate; it is 
our job to try to help them in ways that they determine are best, and 
so that we should serve as a resource for the local and State 
governments as they attempt to run our schools and that our program 
should make sense. Furthermore, it is our philosophy that the Federal 
money should go directly down to the local schools where it will do 
some good.
  Right now, current estimate I am aware of is that only about 65 
percent of the education dollars from Washington actually get down to 
the classroom. Thirty-five percent is lost in administration and other 
parts of the bureaucracy. Our goal, by virtue of a resolution we passed 
just yesterday, is to get 95 percent of the Federal money right down in 
the classrooms where it will do some good.
  Also, it is not the Republican philosophy to mandate precisely how 
that money is to be used. Just compare, for example, President 
Clinton's proposal to provide 100,000 new teachers. Now that is a noble 
gesture, but what would be accomplished? Governor Wilson in California 
tried to do exactly the same thing, and he found out that in fact the 
result was not what he had expected. Adding teachers to the California 
system, reducing class size, did not help. If you look at the students' 
scores, they really did not change. Why not? Because there are not 
enough qualified teachers available in California or, in fact, in the 
United States, and so they proceed to hire 100,000, or I forget precise 
number; they hired a large number of new teachers, most of whom are not 
qualified, and there was no net improvement in the schools.
  Rather than taking a Federal approach that says we will help you hire 
100,000 new teachers, a far better approach is to say we want to hear 
from you at the local level what you could do to improve education in 
the schools and to work with them, and that has been the emphasis in 
the Committee on Education and the Workforce of which I am a member. 
And we have just passed out major legislation today, two different 
bills which will help the schools, but give them much greater 
flexibility than they have had in the past and reduce the amount of 
money spent at the Federal level trying to evaluate programs, telling 
them what to do and saying: You do it our way or the highway.
  So I think it is very important to recognize the distinction in 
philosophy. The people of this Nation can pick and choose which 
philosophy they want, but I happen to think just from my years in 
education; I spent 22 years teaching. As far as my money is concerned 
that I send to the Federal Government, Mr. Speaker, I would rather have 
it come back to the local schools and the teachers where they know how 
to use it and can use it well.
  Something else the Federal Government can help in tremendously is 
that we have to recruit and train and keep good teachers. Over the next 
decade we are going to lose 2 million teachers in the schools. There is 
going to be a great shortage, and that is something the Federal 
Government can help with through various scholarship programs to make 
sure that we get the best possible teachers, we train them the best 
possible way and we make sure we keep them and that they do not go off 
to other jobs.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield back for a couple of 
questions perhaps and just some observations.
  Your expertise is in science, is in physics, and, you know, the third 
international math and science study was released, I think about a year 
ago, showing that there is something to be concerned about in the 
United States where our graduates are concerned and their competitive 
rating compared to the rest of the world. Our results were not quite 
nationally where we would like to see them, but to contrast that we see 
pockets throughout the United States where school districts and 
specific schools are doing remarkably well and where our students are, 
in fact, the best in the world. But trying to allow for a system to 
occur where children anywhere at the K-12 level, or even at the higher 
ed level, have access to good professors and good school teachers that 
get the basics of math and science at the very early ages and are able 
to cultivate those skills into marketable and competitive skills as 
they grow is the real challenge for the country.

  And you are right. There seems to be an attitude by some in 
Washington, typically on the Democrat side of the aisle, that suggest 
that we here in Washington can magically come up with the answers, 
spend a little money, create a few new rules, and we will resolve that 
issue. But I think that our answer is right, that the strength really 
does lie out there in the States. They may need the resources and 
support of the Federal Government, but they do not need us to take 
over, and I yield to the gentleman to comment on that point.
  Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Speaker, I will be pleased to comment on that. You 
have touched on something that means a lot to me and I pursued a long 
time.
  For those who are not aware, I just mentioned that I happen to be a 
physicist, I have a doctorate in nuclear physics, and never in my life 
intended to get into politics, enjoyed teaching and research, but here 
I am.
  I was given an assignment by the previous Speaker of the House to 
work on improving our Nation's science policy and improving math and 
science education, and I am continuing this year under the direction of 
Speaker Hastert and the Chairman of the Committee on Science, the 
gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) both of whom have a deep 
interest in this and have given a lot of help and support.
  And you are quite right. The third international science and 
mathematics

[[Page H9975]]

study which compared students from our high schools with students from 
high schools across the country really, I think, shamed us in the sense 
that our students came out near the bottom. They were at the bottom in 
physics, they were barely above the bottom in mathematics, and overall 
there were only two nations below us in the rankings of knowledge of 
math and science in high school.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. If I remember right, it was Cyprus and South Africa.
  Mr. EHLERS. Yes, in the overall rating, and we were behind Slovenia 
and a lot of other nations. This was all developed nations of course.
  It was a real shock, but there are other factors.
  Just recently our science Olympiad students went to compete on an 
international level, and they were bright students. I met with them, 
and they were very capable. But once again we did not win the 
international championship, and it was certainly not the fault of the 
students. It is just that we have to do a better job throughout our 
educational system of educating and preparing.
  Now there are several reasons for that. Number one, of course, is to 
produce good scientists and engineers, and that is very important in 
this technological age because, as my colleagues know and have heard 
repeatedly here, over one half of our economic growth today comes from 
science and technology, and if we do not train the people, we are going 
to lose that to other nations. We already are losing some and have to 
Japan which spends more on this, on scientific research and training, 
than we do, a greater percentage of their gross domestic product, and 
also Germany does the same, and, believe it or not, South Korea is 
almost overtaking us. So we have to watch this very carefully and do a 
better job.
  But there are other reasons why we have to do a better job in math 
and science education, and that is I am personally convinced that 
within 20 years you will not be able to get a decent job in America 
without some good understanding of science and technology. It even 
happens in my office here, and you would not think a congressional 
office would be that way.
  But I have told my employees; I said, just imagine, suppose you had 
worked here 20 years ago, and you fell into a Rip Van Winkle sleep, and 
you just woke up this morning and came to work here. Would you know 
what to do? And everyone of them said, no, they would not have the 
slightest idea because they could not even operate the telephones 
because telephones are basically computerized today. They obviously 
could not operate the computer, so they could not get letters out, and 
they could not handle mail and so forth.
  And you just go right down the line, so many things we do. If I asked 
them to find out what is in a particular bill, they would not know how 
to get on the Internet or the Intranet and look it up. We work much 
more efficiently in the Congress today because of our computerization, 
but it takes knowledge and skill, and the more that they learn in the 
school, the less they have to be trained when they get a job.
  That relates to another issue of what I call workplace readiness. We 
are spending a huge amount of money in this country, individual 
companies are spending that, training their employees to be able to do 
their work when they hire them, and we certainly have to do a better 
job of preparing them for the workplace.
  Third major reason for improving math and science education is just 
better educated citizens and voters. We deal with a lot of complex 
scientific issues here. How are the voters going to be able to judge us 
and judge the issues if they do not have some background in it?

  And similarly in the marketplace, as consumers; how are they going to 
be able to judge individual products when they evaluate the claims? As 
my colleagues know, are these claims, too, or are they not, 
particularly when you get to health supplements, or health care or 
issues like that. It is very complex, and we certainly need to do a 
better job of training them.
  Now how can we do that? Again, I mentioned earlier trying to find, 
train and keep better teachers. But there is more to it than that. 
There are a lot of teachers out there who did not receive adequate 
training. We should not talk in terms of they cannot do their job, is 
that not terrible? We should say, hey, they were trained in a different 
era.
  Our job in the government is to try to offer retraining, and that is 
why I have been a very strong advocate of what is called professional 
development, helping teachers who are out there, doing a good job but 
suffering because they have not had the proper training and they do not 
generally have the best textbook because there are not really good 
textbooks out there in many of these areas. Let us help them by 
providing professional development funds so that they can learn more 
about it.
  I am impressed every time that I go in the class. The teachers really 
want to do the job well, and they really are fearful when they have not 
had adequate training, and that is what we have to provide.
  One last thing the Federal Government could do without interfering 
with the local schools, but helping them a lot, and that is by funding 
research on better ways to teach, particularly teaching math and 
science. There are a lot of new ideas out there, and I have another 
aspect of that. I am hoping that we can, as a Federal Government, fund 
a national clearinghouse which will take all the supplementary 
materials available from chemical companies, from NASA, from the 
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They all have 
individual units. Put them all on the Internet, have them all 
catalogued so if a teacher wants to go and do a unit on Antarctica; 
there is an interest now because they are trying to save this doctor 
down there. She can just go right to the Net, she can give her students 
experiments that are ready on the Internet and say, hey, we read about 
Antarctica; why is it so cold there? And they can do a unit right that 
day.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. Your comments about science technology and education 
give me a perfect opportunity to switch the subject and jump to another 
topic that the gentleman from Montana and I work on quite a lot as 
western legislators.
  But, as my colleagues know, there are a lot of scientists that we 
count on and rely on and training that we hope to impart in our 
universities and research universities with respect to forestry. 
Forestry, the area of forestry, seems that science has kind of gone by 
the wayside especially with some of the latest decisions that have come 
out of the White House. The National Forest system is a system that was 
designed back in 1910 as a system, or was it 1903? Somewhere back there 
in the early part of the century as a service designed to manage these 
vast natural resources that the American people own and enjoy and 
maintain to help stabilize our economy, to utilize these lands for 
multiple use, and that concept of multiple use is, as I say, going by 
the wayside. The President made an unfortunate announcement just today 
that has caught many of us in western States I cannot say by surprise, 
but it has certainly grabbed our attention because it has tremendous 
economic consequences, and I will yield to the gentleman from Montana 
to elaborate further on the President's most recent antics on National 
Forest management.
  Mr. HILL of Montana. Mr. Speaker, as my friend from Colorado 
commented, this is not a good day for rural western America. The 
western States, as my colleagues know, those of us from the west often 
have to remind our colleagues from the east how big our western States 
are and how much of our western States are public lands. My State is 
148,000 square miles, and about 30 percent of that is public land, 
Forest Service land and BLM lands, and the concern that we have and I 
have today is the President announced today that he is going to be 
locking up about 40 million acres of US Forest Service land, in essence 
making it de facto wilderness area. As my colleagues know, the Congress 
and the Constitution provides that the Congress will determine whether 
or not lands will be designated as wilderness, and the President by 
executive order has in effect allocated this 40 million acres to 
wilderness.
  And you made note of the Forest Service. The total Forest Service 
acres in the country is about 191 million acres, so this is over a 
fourth or over a

[[Page H9976]]

fifth of the total US Forest Service acres, and this designation means 
there is going to be less access. They are going to close roads, they 
are going to remove roads, they are going to eliminate timber harvest 
in these areas, no mining.

                              {time}  2015

  In fact, if the previous activities of the administration are any 
indication, there will be little recreation in these lands, too.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield for a request, 
and that is, would the gentleman just explain to the House what this 
wilderness designation means, because for many people, this term 
wilderness sounds like a great thing. That sounds like a good thing. We 
like wilderness when it comes right down to it, but the term 
``wilderness designation'' has a very specific legal meaning, which 
robs the American people of access to their precious lands.
  I would ask the gentleman to just go into that a little further and 
make sure we do not skip over that point, because it is an important 
distinction that we need to reinforce here on the floor.
  Mr. HILL of Montana. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is exactly right. 
Sometimes I think people confuse the idea of wilderness with wild 
areas, and those do not have the same meaning at all. Wilderness has a 
legal meaning, a very specific legal meaning, and it means that the 
land can only be used in more primitive ways.
  For example, if people want to enter the land, they have to do it by 
horseback or on foot or hike in, they could not even take a bicycle in 
there. So motorized vehicles are not allowed in there, chain saws are 
not allowed in there. Basically they are areas that are allowed to 
remain entirely wild and allow natural forces to be at work.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, so the 
elderly, the handicapped, the infirm who currently enjoy access to 
their national forests, under the new designation, the de facto 
wilderness designation, what happens to them?
  Mr. HILL of Montana. Well, those people will not have access to those 
areas. But even more important than that, the gentleman from Colorado 
has counties I know in his State and I have some in my State, and in 
fact, I have one county where 97 percent of the land in the county is 
Forest Service land. So that community really depends on that land for 
its livelihood, whether it is timber harvesting or mining, and of 
course the people recreate on that land. They hunt and they fish, pick 
berries. All of those things occur on that land. All of that kind of 
activity will be restricted in these areas under the President's 
designation.
  Now, the President is saying, this is his environmental legacy. The 
President is trying to establish legacies for his administration. But 
the record, the environmental legacy with regard to public land 
management of this administration is dismal. It has been an absolute 
failure. It has failed the environment. The General Accounting Office 
has reported to the Congress, and the gentleman serves on the Committee 
on Resources with me, that the condition of our western forests is in a 
disastrous condition, catastrophic condition. When they say 
catastrophic, they mean that the ecology of these areas is subject to 
catastrophic risk. Catastrophic fire risk, risks for disease and 
infestation. This administration's record in managing this resource is 
dismal.
  But also, its impact on these rural communities has been abysmal. 
These communities rely on these lands for grazing and for timber 
harvesting and for mining, and all of those sorts of things, 
recreation, and the President is basically saying, there will be no 
more of that.
  This latest decision on the part of the President really will put the 
nail in the coffin for many of these rural communities. Much of the 
economy of this country has prospered over the course of the last 
decade, but in rural America, things are not so good. In agriculture, 
we suffered a great deal.
  Those communities that are dependent on the public lands and 
appropriate management of the public lands have suffered greatly. The 
economy of those communities is in trouble; unemployment rates are 
extremely high. In my State, many of those counties have unemployment 
rates of 15 to 20 percent. And what happens when we have that kind of 
unemployment, the social fabric of the community breaks down, churches 
cannot afford to stay in business, schools suffer.
  As the gentleman knows, these rural communities share in the income 
that the government produces from the development of these resources. 
All of that the President is writing off. And it is because, of course 
there are not many votes out there, there are not a lot of people out 
there. So the President is more interested in the people that can 
contribute millions of dollars of soft money to his campaign. He is 
interested in supporting the people, the glamorous people in Hollywood 
and the Silicon Valley. But these are the salt of the earth people; 
these are people with simple needs. The President today has said that 
these people do not matter, and it is a disaster for rural America.
  I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.
  Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Montana and my 
colleague from Colorado for taking this time on the House Floor to 
really address these issues of vital concern. I listened to my friend 
from Montana talk about the counties. As he explained his own 
situation, I thought about Gila County, Arizona. Ninety-seven percent 
of the land in Gila County, Arizona is under some governmental control. 
The bulk of it is under Federal control.
  And, there is a misnomer at work. My colleague from Colorado 
mentioned the designation of wilderness, but there is a far more 
misleading moniker given to these federally controlled lands. Mr. 
Speaker, for our friends in the east and indeed in the Bay Area of San 
Francisco and other major metropolitan areas, when we hear the term 
``public land,'' that suggests in the mind's eye a public library, a 
public park, a public facility. But in essence, Mr. Speaker, a far more 
accurate moniker is federally controlled land.
  So many of our colleagues from the east fail to understand the 
distinction. The State of Arizona, the youngest of the 48 contiguous 
States, not becoming a State until Valentine's Day of 1912 under 
President William Taft, Arizona, as a condition of its Statehood had to 
offer, in essence, a dowry to the Federal Government. And that dowry, 
if you will, was over half the landmass of the State of Arizona given 
to the Federal Government.
  Now, our friends in the east, our friends in the inner city fail to 
understand what that means. Because the fact is, vast holdings of land 
as personal property are not found in the State of Arizona or in the 
American west. But I must tell my colleagues, I get a kick out of those 
in the think tanks who talk about welfare or socialist cowboys, as if 
applying for grazing permits is somehow pledging one's trough to the 
Federal Government. Mr. Speaker, my constituents have no choice. They 
do not own the land. And yet, time and again they are good stewards of 
the land that they lease from the Federal Government.
  But what we see here is really yet another gulf between rhetoric and 
reality. My colleague from Montana mentioned the contributions to the 
Clinton-Gore campaign. Let the record show, and I say this 
unapologetically and clearly to the American people, Mr. Speaker, vast 
sums of money came from the Communist Chinese to those coffers, and yet 
the partisan press wants to ignore that inconvenient fact. Yet, we also 
see, even as the Clinton-Gore gang extols the virtues of campaign 
finance reform which, for that crowd, is akin to Bonnie and Clyde at 
the height of their crime spree holding a press conference calling for 
tougher penalties on bank robbers, they also wrap up rhetoric about the 
children.
  Mr. Speaker, I would note for this House the vote that took place 
earlier this summer on the new Education Land Grant Act, what my staff 
has nicknamed HELGA, the Hayworth Education Land Grant Act, which deals 
with public land, federally controlled land and sets up a uniform 
method of conveyance at a minimal cost to rural school districts in 44 
of our States, but especially in the American west. And, Mr. Speaker, 
even though the left insisted on a rule to bring that to the floor and 
debate, in the final analysis, even the left could not abandon the 
logic of that common sense approach,

[[Page H9977]]

and all 421 Members of the Congress who were here on that day voted in 
the affirmative for the new Education Land Grant Act.
  How sad it is, Mr. Speaker, that the President, who rhetorically 
embraces the cause of children, has asked a liberal Senator in the 
other body to put a hold on that legislation. The gulf between rhetoric 
and reality is profound.
  I yield to my friend from Colorado.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. We 
only have just about 5 minutes left, but I want to say the Education 
Land Grant bill that the gentleman has introduced is a brilliant bill 
and earned quite a lot of support here in the House, and I would submit 
it did so because it typified the original deal, if you will, that 
existed with all of these Federal lands that we are here discussing, 
the national forestlands in particular, but also some of the other 
Federal lands. That is, these lands should be managed for multiple use, 
keeping in mind that they are to be used for livestock raising, for 
timber harvests, for mining, for recreation, for wildlife habitat 
management, for a whole assortment of forest products being used and 
taken from the forests, all of that within the context of sound forest 
management. Because if one is not in the forest working the land, 
taking care of it, keeping the diseased trees treated, getting the bugs 
out, helping to thin the forests so that they do not catch fire or 
deplete water resources and so on and so forth, if we fail to do all of 
those things, not only do we damage the environmental integrity that we 
are concerned about our national forests, but at the same time, by 
pushing people off of public lands, we do lose a valuable source of 
income for schools, for communities. Because these public lands, while 
they do not pay taxes, there is what is called a payment in lieu of 
taxes that comes from the economic activity that is generated by those 
lands.
  So when the President pushes this policy forward, and I would ask the 
gentleman from Montana to elaborate further on this point, further 
restricting access to public lands means further restricting the 
economic activity on those lands; it means further restricting the 
management of those lands, and it threatens not only the forest health, 
but threatens severely the economic livelihoods of thousands of 
communities not just across the west, but across the whole country.
  But I think disproportionately, that burden falls in our respective 
districts.
  I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. HILL of Montana. The gentleman is exactly right. I have 10 
national forests in my district, so when we learned of the President's 
intention to announce this, it was in the Post last week, we called 
those regional supervisors and said, how is this going to impact the 
regional forests? What we found is that the White House had not 
consulted with the regional forests or with the individual forest 
supervisors, with the biologists that are out there in the field. This 
is a policy that was made up in the West Wing of the White House, not 
by the land managers out there that understand the resource.
  That is why this policy, seven years of this administration, has been 
so devastating to the natural resources in the west, because they have 
made these as political decisions. They are decisions that have been 
made by people that do not understand these communities; they do not 
understand these resources, and they have made the wrong decisions.
  They say they want to preserve the West, but as the gentleman from 
Arizona pointed out, the reason that the West is such a wonderful, 
beautiful place is the people that live there have been outstanding 
stewards of this land for as long as we have been there, and that has 
included multiple use of the land. We have mined the land, we have 
timber harvests, grazing on the lands, hiking, recreation on the land, 
and the resource is an incredible resource.
  We know how to take care of the land, work with the land, live with 
the land. Frankly, we also understand that people are part of the 
environment too, that the environment is not just about birds and 
animals, it is about people too, and that a healthy environment for 
these communities is a prosperous community with opportunity as well.
  That is what the President does not understand, that this decision is 
just the next step in this administration's top-down perspective on 
managing this natural resource. It is not only bad for these 
communities and for my district and my State, but it is bad for the 
environment as well.
  I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.
  Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Montana.
  Just one final point. Again, the gulf between rhetoric and reality. 
In the 1960s, critics of Lyndon Johnson spoke of a credibility gap. 
With this administration, sadly, we have a credibility canyon such as 
the gulf between rhetoric and reality, and as my friend from Montana 
was making this point, Mr. Speaker, I could not help but think of the 
slogan of the Clinton-Gore 1992 campaign: Putting People First. How 
falsely that rings in the years of western Americans.
  I yield to my friend from Colorado.
  Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from 
Arizona, the gentleman from Montana and the gentleman who has left us 
now from Michigan for joining me in this Special Order, and we will 
come back as often and as frequently as we can to talk about the great 
accomplishments of the Republican Party.

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