[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 1 (Monday, January 24, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3-S5]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SECOND SESSION OF THE 106TH CONGRESS
Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, let me again welcome our colleagues back.
I had the opportunity this morning to discuss the schedule and the many
mutual matters of concern with the majority leader. Let me again
welcome back our staff and express heartfelt appreciation for the great
job that so many of our people have done over the last couple of months
while we have been gone. I welcome our colleagues back not only to a
new session but a new year, a new century, and a new millennium.
As we begin this new year, Americans have every reason to be proud
and optimistic. In the last decade of the last century, we saw freedom
and democracy triumph around the globe. We saw Eastern Europe abandon
communism and the Soviet Union disintegrate. We saw Nelson Mandela walk
out of prison and into history as the first democratically elected
President of the new South Africa.
Here at home we restored strength to America's economy. We started
the last decade with the biggest budget deficits in our Nation's
history, and we ended it with the biggest budget surplus. We have seen
more than 20 million new jobs created in the last 7 years. Today we
have the lowest unemployment in 40 years, and the lowest unemployment
ever among African Americans and Hispanics. Americans are working
again.
Finally, after 20 years, real wages for America's families are
growing again. Family incomes are up, and inflation is virtually
nonexistent.
We also made progress in the last decade on the many social problems
that some people thought were intractable. Since 1993, we have seen a
48-percent decrease in the welfare rolls, the largest decline in our
Nation's history. We put 100,000 new police officers on the street, and
today the violent crime rate is the lowest it has been in a generation.
We enacted the single largest investment in children's health since
1965 and the largest increases in higher education since the GI bill.
Today our Nation is prospering, and we are at peace.
The question facing us as we begin this new session of Congress, this
first session of the 21st century, is: How do we keep America moving in
the right direction? How do we provide the leadership that will help
continue the global march toward freedom and democracy?
Here at home, how do we keep our economy growing? How do we help
ordinary Americans provide for their families and prepare for their
future? How do we widen the circle of opportunity to include those who
have been left out up until now?
There are many, frankly, who believe we will not answer those
questions this year. They look at how little we accomplished last year
and the fact that this is a Presidential year and conclude that little
or nothing will happen between now and November. It does not have to be
that way.
A month ago, a lot of people thought the Y2K bug might cause all
kinds of chaos. Instead, almost nothing happened. When it comes to us,
when it comes to this Congress, people expect nothing to happen this
year. Why not surprise them? We have extraordinary opportunities to do
significant work this year, and we should work together to seize those
opportunities.
Let's not worry about who gets the credit. Let's worry about getting
the job done.
If the best minds in this country could work together to kill the Y2K
bug, surely the best minds in the Senate can work together this year
to protect Social Security, to modernize Medicare, and to pass a real
Patients' Bill of Rights. We can work together to improve our
children's schools. Working together, surely we can find new ways to
help ordinary working families earn more and keep more of what they
earn.
There are all kinds of reasons for inaction, but there is not one
good excuse. Henry Ford once said, ``You can't build a reputation on
what you are going to do.''
You cannot construct much of an argument for governing either just
talking about what you are going to do. Eventually, one has to act.
I believe there are essentially three challenges facing us this year.
If we meet these challenges, I believe, frankly, that it will be good
for both of our parties next November. Good policy, as they say, is
good politics.
More importantly, if we meet these challenges, it will be good for
America, for our economy, for our families, and certainly for our
future.
Our first challenge is to maintain our fiscal discipline. Later this
week, we expect new estimates from CBO and OMB about how large the
surplus might be in the year 2010. We do not know today what their
predictions will be, but we do know today that the best first use of
whatever surplus we have is to protect Social Security and strengthen
Medicare.
Now--when our economy is strong, when we have a surplus, when we
still have time on our side--is the time to prepare for the baby
boomers' retirement by extending the life of the Social Security trust
fund. Now is the time to modernize Medicare and add the prescription
drug benefit so people do not have to choose between filling
prescriptions and paying utility bills. That is an essential part of
maintaining fiscal discipline.
Maintaining fiscal discipline also means paying down our $5 trillion
national debt. Mr. President, $2,200 is how much our national debt will
cost every family in America this year. Think what a family could do
with that much money.
My colleagues and I support tax cuts that help working families with
real, pressing needs such as child care and paying for college and
caring for sick and aging relatives. We support eliminating the
marriage penalty tax for couples who pay a marriage penalty. We support
tax cuts that help small businesses grow and make it easier to keep
family businesses in families.
We want to work with our friends on the other side of the aisle to
pass responsible, targeted tax cuts this year, but we all know what the
best tax cut is. The best tax cut for America's families and America's
businesses is to pay down the Federal debt.
This year, because of the progress we have made since 1993 in
eliminating the deficit and reducing the debt, the average American
family will save $2,000 on
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their mortgage, $200 on their car loan, and $200 more on student loans.
The American people made it clear last year they do not want a tax
cut that is so big it wrecks the economy. They do not want a tax cut
that is going to explode in a few years and add to our debt. They do
not want a tax cut that disproportionately rewards the people at the
very top at the expense of everyone else. What they want is for us to
maintain our commitment to fiscal discipline and to Social Security and
Medicare.
Our second challenge is to expand our economic recovery, not just
sustain it, but to broaden and deepen it to include more families and
more communities.
These are extraordinarily good times for many Americans, but too many
families in this country are still struggling to afford even the
basics. Too many children go to bed hungry. Too many Americans still
live on the outskirts of hope. The people who have been left out of
this recovery include some of the hardest working, most decent people
you would ever want to meet.
They include working mothers who get up before it is light and take
three buses to get to their jobs at nursing homes. They include former
factory workers who lost their economic footing when the plant closed,
who work now at jobs that pay one-third as much, with no benefits.
They include farmers and ranchers in South Dakota and across the
country who work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, who are out there right
now in the bitter cold and snow, not even making back their production
costs, earning less than their parents and grandparents earned in the
Great Depression.
Throughout our history, from our earliest days as a nation, Americans
have always strived to do better. We did not stop when we cured polio.
We said: Now let's cure cancer.
Next week, we will become the first Americans ever to achieve 107
consecutive months of economic expansion. Surely we will not be the
first Americans to say: This is all we can do. We have reached the end
of our possibilities.
Let us together expand this recovery.
Our third challenge this year is to finish what we left unfinished
last year. We need to pass a real Patients' Bill of Rights that lets
medical professionals, not HMO bureaucrats, make medical decisions.
Senator Lott and I discussed that just this morning. I do hope there is
a real possibility for compromise and ultimately for the successful
completion of our work on a Patients' Bill of Rights.
We need to increase the number of Americans with private health
coverage. We need to help communities repair schools that are falling
down and expand schools that are filled beyond capacity.
We also need to help communities hire qualified teachers and keep the
good teachers who are already in the classroom. It is the only way we
can fill the 2.2 million teacher vacancies we know will exist within
the next 10 years.
We need to keep the crime rates moving in the right direction by
making it harder for kids and criminals to get guns, keeping our
commitment to put another 50,000 new police officers on the beat by the
year 2005, and giving law enforcement the resources they need to combat
hate crimes.
We need to keep crime rates moving in the right direction by cracking
down on scam artists who target the elderly and by filling the
vacancies on the Federal bench this year--no more excuses, no more
delays.
Also this year, we need to make it easier for parents who work full
time to raise their families out of poverty by raising the minimum wage
$1 an hour and expanding the earned-income tax credit.
We need to pass meaningful, comprehensive campaign finance reform.
Finally, we need to continue opening up new markets for American
goods and services by passing the Africa trade/Caribbean Basin free
trade initiative this year.
So those three challenges ought to be ones we all share:
No. 1, maintain our fiscal discipline, protect Social Security and
Medicare, and pay down the debt;
No. 2, expand the recovery to families and communities that have not
yet benefited from it; and
No. 3, finish what we left unfinished last year.
In the weeks since we were together, I was fortunate to be able to
spend a wonderful holiday with my family. I got to spend a lot of time
in South Dakota. I talked with some remarkable people--from business
and education leaders who are working together in Sioux Falls to try to
keep up with the demand for high-tech workers, to family farmers and
ranchers who are working practically around the clock to scratch out a
living.
I talked to a farm wife who gets up at 4:30 in the morning and drives
over 90 miles to get to Howard, SD, to work at the PMB plant there, as
they wrap every Pokemon card that is distributed in the United States--
right there in Howard, SD--only to drive another 90 miles back getting
home, sometime after 7:30 at night, to do it all over again the next
day.
That work ethic is representative of the work ethic all across South
Dakota and the upper Midwest.
I had the privilege of traveling with Senators Akaka, Dodd, and Harry
Reid to one of the most amazing, and troubled, regions of the world:
India and Pakistan. We went to promote trade and understanding, but we
also went to encourage both India and Pakistan to defuse the tensions
between their nations and to step back from their increasingly tense
nuclear arms race. I am hopeful we made some progress on both matters.
Being in those two nations reminded me again of how fortunate we
Americans are. We talked to Tibetan refugees who fled Tibet over the
19,000-foot Himalayan Mountains, suffering the worst maladies in
health, recognizing that 40 percent of them might have to deal with
serious frostbite on their feet and hands by the time they arrived in
Nepal--only to do it because they wanted to be free, only to do it
because they, too, wanted to experience at least some element of
democracy.
There is so much we as beneficiaries of democracy take for granted. I
do not mean simply our material wealth and consumer comforts; I mean
our most precious possession of all, our freedom. You recognize that
every time you travel abroad, whether it is Pakistan, Nepal, India, or
any other country.
India, the world's largest democracy, is now celebrating the 53rd
anniversary of its independence this year and the 50th anniversary of
its Constitution. Perhaps because democracy is still relatively young
in India, perhaps because of the high price they paid for their
liberty, the people I spoke with in India seemed very much aware of how
rare and how fragile democracy is.
In Pakistan, we visited a country where a democratically elected
government had only a few months before been toppled and replaced by a
military ruler--another reminder of how privileged we are to live in
the world's oldest and most secure democracy.
I am encouraged by my discussions with General Musharraf and very
hopeful they can restore economic progress, restore democratic
institutions, and can find a way with which to begin resolving the
regional conflict that is so prevalent in all the conversations we had
with leaders in both countries, India and Pakistan.
Democracies are not perpetual motion machines. As the great poet
laureate Archibald MacLeish wrote:
America is never finished. America is always becoming.
Every American has a responsibility to make our democracy work. But
we who have been granted the privilege of serving in this body have a
unique responsibility. The Congress is no ordinary institution. This is
where Americans come to solve our common problems and shape our
national destiny. This is also where younger democracies of the world
turn for guidance and where people and nations not yet free look for
hope. That was so evident in our conversations with people in all the
countries we visited on this too brief a visit to the subcontinent a
couple of weeks ago.
Are we going to live up to our responsibility to make this
institution work, as we know it can? Are we going to meet the
challenges before us and pass measures that will make a real difference
in people's lives or are we simply going to pass time until the next
election?
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As we begin this new session of Congress, let us resolve together to
surprise everyone and do what needs to be done.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
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