[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 3 (Thursday, January 9, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S114-S116]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   HOMESTEAD ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY ACT

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there has been a great deal of discussion 
in recent days about the American economy. The President was in Chicago 
the middle of this week and proposed a new plan talking about tax cuts 
in order to stimulate the economy. Others in the Democratic Caucus in 
the Senate and the House have talked about various plans for tax cuts 
to stimulate the economy. While all this discussion about the economy 
is important, I wanted to mention something else that is happening in 
the American economy that gets precious little attention.
  There is an economic blight that is occurring in our country that is 
out of sight and therefore it is not very well understood by most 
Americans. I want to talk about it for a moment.
  In the last Congress, with Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska, I 
introduced legislation called the New Homestead Economic Opportunity 
Act. I visited briefly yesterday with Senator Hagel and we are going to 
be talking about reintroducing that legislation very soon in this 
Congress. I wanted to make a couple of comments about it and alert 
colleagues that this legislation is something we are going to work very 
hard to try and get approved by this Senate.
  There is a problem in this country with the economy. This is not a 
problem about the American economy in its entirety. It is a problem 
about the economy in the heartland of our country. This map shows the 
rural counties of high out-migration in the country, that is, counties 
in which people are moving out, not in; counties that are losing 
population.
  If we draw an egg shape from North Dakota down to Texas in the middle 
part of our country, we have the heartland of America being 
depopulated.
  This is the heartland of America, which is North Dakota, South 
Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, right on down to Texas, including some States 
on both sides. This is the part of the country that we populated a 
century and a half ago with something called the Homestead Act. My 
great-grandmother, named Caroline, with her six children--her husband 
having died, she was an immigrant widow from Norway--decided to move to 
the prairies of North Dakota. She pitched a tent, built a house, 
started a farm, and raised a family. She had a son, who had a daughter, 
who had me, and that is how I come from Hettinger County in North 
Dakota.
  A century and a half ago, we populated the middle part of our country 
through something called the Homestead Act, saying to people: move 
there, build there, and create a family there. We will give you some 
free land. It is called the Homestead Act. So they did. In covered 
wagons they came to the middle of our country. Now a century and a half 
later, people are moving out in a relentless depopulation. In every one 
of these States--North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, 
Wyoming--people are moving out of the rural counties. The percentage of 
out-migration is shown on this chart. In North Dakota, about 90 percent 
of the counties are losing population. I grew up in a county in 
southwestern North Dakota. My home county is bigger than the State of 
Rhode Island. When I left there were 5,000 people who lived there. Now 
there are 2,700 living there. In the year 2020 the demographers say 
there will be 1,700 living in my home county, a county larger than the 
State of Rhode Island.

  In this county, there is a town called New England, ND, a wonderful 
little community. Donna Dorman is the minister at the Lutheran Church 
in New England. She said that as a minister she presides over four 
funerals for every wedding. Think of that: Four funerals she officiates 
at for every wedding. This is a Lutheran minister. What does that say 
about the towns, where the population is getting older, people are 
moving out, young couples that stay are not having children. It is the 
opposite of the movie ``Four Weddings and a Funeral.'' Four funerals 
per wedding. That is a description of what is happening up and down the 
middle part of the country with this steady depopulation.
  Then we have people in other parts of the country who are trying to 
recreate what we have in the middle: Great schools, good places to 
live, safe neighborhoods, good places to raise children. They are 
trying to recreate that in other population centers of the country.
  We have people leaving the middle of America, in the heartland. The 
question is, What do we do about this? Can we do anything? William 
Jennings Bryant said destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter 
of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; destiny is a thing to be 
achieved.

[[Page S115]]

  The question is, What kind of an economy do we want in this country? 
Do we care about the heartland? Do we want to do something about the 
depopulation of the heartland? When America's cities were in deep 
trouble several decades ago, with the decay of America's cities and the 
economic blight affecting America's metropolitan areas, guess what the 
Congress did. The Congress said, let us help; let us develop an urban 
renewal program, a model cities program. And we did. We invested in 
America's cities. And America's cities are doing well. We turned around 
the major metropolitan areas of this country with programs deciding 
that the cities are too good, too important, to be allowed to fail. So 
we had model cities and urban renewal programs.
  What about America's heartland? Is that important enough to save? Is 
it important enough to care about? Senator Hagel and I introduced a 
piece of legislation called the New Homestead Economic Opportunity Act. 
We do not have land to give away to people who would come out and 
homestead anymore. We did a century and a half ago. We gave them free 
land. We do not have land to give away. What we do have is tax and 
other financial incentives to offer to encourage people to stay there, 
to come there, to live there, to grow there, to build there, and to do 
business there. We have the capability to say to them: If you are going 
to run a business in a rural county that has lost more than 10 percent 
of its population in the last 20 years, you may benefit from investment 
tax credits. You are a new student who has graduated from school and 
are employed in a high out-migration rural county, you will get some 
help paying off your college loans. There are tools we can develop and 
use to do that.

  Senator Hagel and I have written a piece of legislation that has now 
been joined by 10 other members of the Senate, Republicans and 
Democrats, saying this country owes it to itself to save the heartland.
  Let me describe why I think this is important to do. Some would say, 
well, whatever is, is; whatever happens, happens, and do not pay too 
much mind to it. If for some reason the incentives for life in America 
in the year 2003 do not provide people some inertia or encouragement to 
settle in Hettinger County, ND, that is just the way it is. I suppose 
you could have said that a century and a half ago and we would not have 
the wagon trains taking the pioneers out to go homestead. They did not 
say it then. They said it is important to populate the heartland of our 
country for a number of reasons.
  I will discuss the value system in rural America that nourishes and 
refreshes the values of our country. I come from a wonderful State of 
640,000 people. I grew up myself in a very small town. There were 400 
people when I was living in that town. Now there are fewer than 300 
people in that same community. I graduated from a senior high school 
class of nine students. In my State, in communities like that, there 
are wonderful people and they are great places in which to live. In my 
State, there is a small town called Sentinel Butte, ND. They have one 
gas station. The man and his wife who run the gas station are nearing 
retirement age and do not want to work all day long, so when they close 
the gas station in early afternoon, they hang the key to the gas pumps 
on a nail in the front door. If you want gas and they are not open, 
take the key, unlock the pump, pump gas, and write your name on a 
tablet that is right below the key.
  That is a value system that is important. It works in rural America. 
There is a place called Marmarth. They have a hotel in Marmarth that is 
a very small town but no one works at the hotel. If you need a bed, go 
take a bed and get some rest. And there is a cigar box tacked on the 
inside of the door when you leave. When you are done sleeping at that 
hotel, when you leave, please put a little money in the cigar box.
  Is that a big business? No. Is it important to Marmarth? Sure. In a 
town called Tuttle, the grocery store closed. That little community 
understood you need to have a grocery store. No one would come in and 
build a grocery store. So the city government built it. The city 
council decided we have to build a grocery store. And I was there the 
day they cut ribbons on the grocery store in Tuttle, ND. They blocked 
off Main Street and had the high school band play. What was that about? 
Cutting the ribbon on a new grocery store in Tuttle, ND, that was 
developed by the city council of Tuttle, ND.
  In Havana, ND, they cannot keep a cafe open, unless they have people 
in town sign up for the time they are going to work for nothing to keep 
the cafe open. When is it your turn to work in the cafe? That is the 
way the community keeps the cafe open.
  All of these things represent a value system that I think is 
important to this country--wonderful small communities making do for 
themselves, great places in which to live, great places in which to 
raise children, safe streets, good neighbors. We are going to lose all 
of that unless the Congress decides the heartland is worth saving. The 
New Homestead Economic Opportunity Act is a piece of legislation 
Senator Hagel and I will reintroduce in the next couple of weeks. My 
hope is that Senators, Republicans and Democrats, up and down the 
heartland, will join us as cosponsors once again this year and that we 
can work together creating tools by which these States, these counties, 
these small cities that are losing population, can begin once again to 
build a future home and opportunity for themselves.
  There are some who say, well, this is just the way things are, just a 
force of life that is not going to change. People are moving from rural 
areas to the cities. My State is also an agricultural State with a lot 
of family farmers. I know there are some who look at that and say, Why 
would someone farm? I suppose you have to live on a farm to understand 
the values and the forces that make you believe it is a wonderful way 
of life.
  I notice that there is a television network that is going to do a 
reality show which I read about yesterday--and shook my head once 
again, as is so often the case with modern television shows. They are 
looking for a poor farm family somewhere in this country. They are 
going to take that poor farm family, they said, and put them in a 
mansion in Beverly Hills and then do reality television to see how they 
react, a poor farm family in a Beverly Hills mansion, kind of like 
``The Beverly Hillbillies.'' They are doing what I think they call 
their ``hick search'' now, looking for these people who would not fit 
in. Then they would send them out to a mansion in Beverly Hills so they 
can do a television show and make fun of them. There is precious little 
to make fun of, in my judgment, about the value system of life on the 
family farm in this country. It is about struggling against the odds. 
It is about perseverance, sometimes against hope, almost. It's about 
developing survival skills.

  These are people who put a seed in the ground and then have to pray 
and hope the seed comes up to a plant, so that it grows into a plant 
and perhaps it will rain, so it grows and perhaps it won't rain too 
much so it doesn't drown out, maybe the insects won't come in and eat 
it, maybe it won't get crop disease, maybe it won't hail, maybe you 
won't get a windstorm that knocks the crop over. But, in any event, in 
the fall when you have grown that seed into a crop, having put all your 
money into it in the spring to try to get the seed into the ground, 
then if you are lucky enough to get a crop, then you have to hope that 
the price is decent in August, September, October, because if you lost 
the crop you lost everything, and if you get a crop and don't get a 
price in the fall you have lost everything.
  Those are the odds these farmers have faced, those who have elected 
to go to the prairies in the heartland of our country and begin to 
farm. They produce America's food. But they do more than that. They 
produce communities. They are a seedbed of values that, as I said, 
nourishes and refreshes the value system of our country.
  My fervent hope is that we will find a way in this Congress to 
understand, just as we did in dealing with the blight of America's 
cities, that we have responsibility to deal with the relentless out-
migration that is crippling so many rural counties up and down the part 
of America's heartland that you see marked in red.
  I think there is a tendency for some to think what is between 
California and New York is simply 6 hours in an

[[Page S116]]

airplane seat. That, of course, is not the case at all. What is between 
California and New York is a wonderful part of America and a part of 
America that we should care a great deal about, a part of America that 
is suffering a great deal at this point with the out-migration of 
people. You see it in red on this map.
  As we proceed, there will likely be things that are very partisan 
here on the floor of the Senate, and perhaps properly should be because 
the political parties come to this debate on a range of issues 
believing in different things--not different goals, but dramatically 
different ways to achieve the same goal, in many cases. But my hope is 
that even as we have those debates which can and perhaps will be 
partisan debates from time to time, there will be some issues on which 
Republicans and Democrats can say: Sign us up together. This is not 
about getting credit. It's not about forcing the other side to lose or 
demanding that we win. It is about doing together that which needs to 
be done for the preservation of this country, for the preserving of 
values in this country, and for the nourishing of hope for certain 
people in this country who have lost hope, especially those living in 
the heartland and living in circumstances where their neighbors have 
left, their community is shrinking, family farmers are leaving.
  We can do better than that. My hope is that we will find a bipartisan 
way in this Congress to decide this, too, is an urgent priority for our 
country and pass legislation of the type Senator Hagel and I will 
reintroduce once again, called the New Homestead Economic Opportunity 
Act.
  I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cornyn). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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