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PERSONAL EXPLANATION
(House of Representatives - March 25, 1999)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages H1710-H1780] PERSONAL EXPLANATION Mrs. EMERSON. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 72 and 73, I was not present due to a [[Page H1711]] family emergency. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.'' The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Foley). Pursuant to House Resolution 131 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the concurrent resolution, House Concurrent Resolution 68. {time} 1148 In the Committee of the Whole Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 68) establishing the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2000 and setting forth appropriate budgetary levels for each of fiscal years 2001 through 2009, with Mr. Camp in the chair. The Clerk read the title of the concurrent resolution. The CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to the rule, the concurrent resolution is considered as having been read the first time. Under the rule, general debate shall not exceed 3 hours, with 2 hours confined to the congressional budget, equally divided and controlled by the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on the Budget, and 1 hour on the subject of economic goals and policies, equally divided and controlled by the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Saxton) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Stark). The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) each will control 1 hour of debate on the congressional budget. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich). Mr. KASICH. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, today we offer the first budget of the next century and a new agenda for the new millennium. I think this is a great day for the House, because we have been able to move forward from an era not very long ago when, as we looked out across the horizon, the economic horizon of this country, we saw deficits as far as the eye could see. The majority came into its position in 1995 when we first advanced the need for economic stimulus driven by tax relief, giving more power, providing more incentives for risk-taking, and at the same time a big dose of fiscal restraint; in other words, starting to get the Congress of the United States to live within its means. The fact is that in 1995, Mr. Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System, said that if you can offer a legitimate and credible plan to balance the Federal budget, he said that he believed that interest rates would decline by 2 points. I must also remind Members that in 1995, as we assumed control of the House of Representatives, interest rates had been rising, the economy had been slowing, there was concern about unemployment. The fact that we laid down a plan that would begin to put our fiscal house in order, to put us in a position where the Congress of the United States would operate really like the American family, and that we would restore some of the incentives to risk-take, I believe that has contributed significantly to the economic gains that we have had in this country. Now today, as we stand here, as I stand here in the well, we are about to pass a budget that not only captures the surpluses of Medicare and social security, but at the same time has the on-budget surpluses that so many people have sought for years. In other words, when we take a look at the balance sheets of the Federal Government, both in the social security and Medicare accounts and in the non-social security and Medicare accounts, we have been able to achieve not only a balanced budget, but also some huge surpluses. Let me say, at the outset, we are doing something that the Congress of the United States has never done: We are taking all the payroll taxes that we collect every day that are related to social security and Medicare and we are locking them into an account so that the politicians, Republicans and Democrats, cannot raid those accounts for any other spending item. That money will sit in an account, and until we enact a plan that actually saves social security, that money will be used to pay down part of the Federal debt. Last year we paid down about $50 billion of the debt. Most Americans do not know that. This year we would anticipate paying down at least $125 billion of the national debt. Of course, if I was a citizen listening to somebody in the well of this House make that claim, I would greet it with great skepticism, but the fact is that what I am saying is true. Last year the publicly-held debt was paid down by $50 billion, and in fact this year we anticipate at least $125 billion of the publicly-held debt to be retired. That does not allow us to rest on our laurels, by any stretch of the imagination, because we must work every day to make the power of government less and the power of people greater. We need to run America from the bottom up, so people can have control over the education for their children, so that the baby boomers and the younger generation can have hope of having a decent retirement by having more control, so Americans can have more money in their pockets. The fact is, as it relates to social security and Medicare, we know those programs have to be transformed, and not just to protect the retirement benefits of our seniors today. I would argue that that is a given. Because of a pay-as-you-go system, we know that the baby boomers are able to carry the load of their parents, but I want the moms and dads of this country to realize that the people who are really at risk are their children. I want mom and dad who are on social security and Medicare to realize that we are going to stand up and protect their benefits, but it is their children, their baby boomer sons and daughters, who are at risk. We must have the courage to transform this system so that the benefits just do not accrue to our seniors today, but that our baby boomers and their children will also have retirement security. Sad to say that the President has taken a leave of absence on this. He is missing-in-action as it relates to the issue of social security and Medicare. Just last week the Medicare Commission, headed by a member of his own party, was blunted by the action of the President. That Democrat, leader of this program to try to extend the life of social security and to reform it so it is available for the baby boomers, that Senator said last week that the administration and many in his party were more interested in using the issue of Medicare as a political weapon than they were interested in being able to transform and save Medicare, not just for today's seniors, but for the baby boomers and their children. That is the worst of American politics, to use the threat of destroying economic security for our senior citizens to try to win votes. That is not what makes America great. What makes America great is not just to debate when Republicans and Democrats disagree, but the ability to search for a common goal, to preserve some of the vital retirement programs for this Nation, to keep the demagoguery out of this debate. Let us work together to try to extend the life of Medicare and social security. At the same time, we are also honoring the 1997 budget agreement. The President breaks the spending caps. He breaks the discipline of the 1997 budget agreement. We will not do that. Not only will we not break the discipline of the 1997 agreement that has contributed to a stronger economy, but we will not raid the social security and Medicare trust fund the way the President does. We have decided to save it all, and to take that and coordinate with that the 1997 budget agreement by having fiscal restraint. It is about priorities in America today. What we are saying is that the programs of defense and education ought to be top priorities in our budget. There was a paper distributed on the floor with more misleading information about the fact that this bill does not include a pay raise for the military. That is false. That is patently false. I am beginning to believe that many people who stand in opposition to this bill are just going to ignore the facts. This is not going to be a debate about what is in the bill, this is a debate about what fictions we can create. [[Page H1712]] There will be provided for in this budget document a pay raise for our troops. The Committee on Armed Services will come to the floor and tell us that. We know that it is necessary to boost the spending for the military. That is precisely what we do in this bill. At the same time, we also believe we should emphasize education. The fact is, in education we have provided more money than the President has, not just for defense but for education as well. As Members know, we are very interested in education flexibility, so that the school districts can manage their challenges better at the local level without having to have a bureaucrat a thousand miles away who does not even know what time zone it is in these local school districts to tell them how to manage their challenges. In addition to all of this, Mr. Chairman, there is tax relief for the taxpayers. The fact of the matter is there are many on the other side of the aisle that bristle at the thought of a tax cut for Americans. It has become almost a philosophy, almost a mantra, to make the argument that there is something wrong with shrinking the size of the government and letting peoples' pocketbooks grow bigger. I want to warn a number of my friends, it is not only wrong for the country but it is very bad politics to make an argument that the budget of the government ought to grow while our personal and family budgets ought to shrink, and that somehow we should pound our chests in self- righteous indignation at the notion that we want to work to cut the size of government and give more money to the American people. {time} 1200 If we are going to run America from the bottom up, if we are going to let Americans be able to pursue their hopes and dreams, Mr. Chairman, the more money that one has in one's pocket, the more one can control one's own destiny, the more power that one has. The smaller this amount becomes, the less power one has. Power is a zero sum game. If one has less and the government has more, who has got the power? When the government has less and if one has more, who has got the power? In our country today, as we approach the new millennium and we set the new agenda for the next century, what we do know is that the strength of America, harkening back to where our founders was, was a limited government; the dignity of the individual was to be preserved; that the individual in our society was what was most important in a Nation that recognizes that freedom is precious; and that that the future is ours. So, Mr. Chairman, we intend not only to preserve Social Security and Medicare, we not only agree to prioritize the items of national security and education, but at the same time, we also believe that the American people ought to be empowered, that the American people ought to have more money in their pockets in order to provide, not just for themselves and not just for their communities, but for those that may live in the shadows of their communities who have less and cannot be ignored in America. That is the great tradition of America. More in one's pocket means more for one's family. For those who have not been so fortunate, we have an obligation to take care of them. So at the end of the day, Mr. Chairman, I think we present a budget for the new millennium that is right in pace with where the American people want to go. The American people hunger for more control over their lives and more power in order to fix the problems, to meet the challenges that they see every day. This budget will begin to preserve and reform and transform the programs for economic security in our senior years, at the same time paying down some of the national debt and, most important, beginning to transfer again, continuing to transfer power, money, and influence from the institution of government into the pockets of people. We will move forward on this. We will lay down a good marker as we enter the next millennium. We will set the pace and set the direction for what can be a glorious new century for, not just Americans, but for people all over the world who have come to see us as a model and as an example of the power of freedom and individuality and compassion and caring and vision. Vote for the budget. Reject these alternatives and, at the same time, reject the President's budget and set ourselves on the right course. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 6 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I was trying to get the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) to tell us why Function 950 of his budget resolution provides no adjustment as it is required to do to provide for the pay raise, the extra pay raise for selected pay grades and officers and NCOs and for the military retirement benefits. The fact of the matter is, Function 950, the military retirement account, where that charge needs to be made, is absolutely unadjusted in their budget resolution. So it does not provide for the pay raise and the benefits that our troops have been promised. Let me go to the overarching subject, the budget, and the happy occasion that we find ourselves in today. I did not ever think that I would serve to see the day where we have surpluses as far as the eye could see. I think it is worth taking just a minute to track down the trail we have followed for the last 10 years that have led us to this happy set of circumstances. In 1990, we had a budget summit that lasted 6 months. We finally brought it to the floor. It was defeated once. Then the Democrats put the vote up to pass President Bush's budget summit agreement. There were only 80 votes on that side of the aisle. It implemented discretionary pay caps, a pay-as-you-go rule, and the kind of disciplines that have served us well to get rid of the deficit. But it did not have any obvious effect because it was eclipsed by a recession. In 1993, when President Clinton came to office, he found on his desk awaiting him the economic report of the President. In it, Michael Boskin, his Economic Council chief, said the deficit this year will be $332 billion. That was the baseline from which the Clinton administration began. From that baseline, in 1993, we reduced the deficit with the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993, which had exclusively Democratic votes in the House and the Senate from $330 billion projected level, $290 billion actual level in 1992, to $22 billion in 1997. Then our colleagues on the other side of the aisle joined with us, and we finished the job and wiped out that additional $22 billion of deficit and lay the basis for going into the next century. It is critically important that we did this, because until we dealt with the year-to-year deficit, we could not deal with the next problem; and that is the problem, the challenge of an aging society. Our society is getting older and older. I am a war baby. A huge generation of young people were born, babies were born in 1946 until 1964, and they will start retiring in about 10 or 12 years. When they do, they will put unprecedented strain on the most popular, most successful program ever invented by the government, the Social Security program, so much so that they may put in jeopardy its solvency by the year 2032. The Medicare program, which runs a close second in popularity, is in even greater jeopardy because the cost of medical care is rising along with the demographic increases, and it, too, is threatened with insolvency in the year 2008. We have an opportunity to do something about that. We have an opportunity to take the work we began in 1990 and 1993 and 1997 and deal with the next problem, which is a daunting challenge, preparing this country and this government for the burdens of the next century cast upon us by an aging society. Our budget, the Democratic budget, rises to that challenge; theirs does not. We are going to have other speakers who will turn to this topic, but let me just give my colleagues the highlights and tell them what is the difference between us and them. I will give it to my colleagues in a nutshell. We protect the Social Security Trust Fund. We proposed to protect the Trust Fund so that 100 percent of the payroll taxes coming into it are spent exclusively for the benefit of that particular program for the first time probably in 30 or 40 years. We propose to do it by [[Page H1713]] directing the Treasurer of the United States to take that percentage of payroll taxes not needed to pay benefits that year and to buy down public debt. How does that happen? That means that, when the obligations come due in 2020 and 2030, the Treasury will be in better shape than ever because it will have lower debt and lower debt service to meet those obligations. We also, unlike the Republicans, do something about Medicare, because we see Medicare and Social Security as linked together. We extend the life of Medicare, the solvency of the Medicare program from 2020. They leave it as it is. They leave it in a lurch. We are still opposed to huge tax cuts in the out years, $143 billion in the first 5 years and $450 billion plus in the second 5 years, rising to as much as a trillion dollars between 2009 and 2014, which will drain the budget dry of the funds needed to do something about the Medicare program. Do my colleagues want to know the difference between us and them? Look at the Trust Fund account for Social Security. In our plan, Social Security will have $3.4 trillion more money at the end of 15 years. They will add $1.8 trillion. We are twice as good as they. With Medicare, we add $400 billion. To their Trust Fund, they add a paltry $14 billion. There are significant differences. If my colleagues care about meeting the challenge in the next century, this is a budget resolution to vote for. Mr. Chairman, I yield 14 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott), and I ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to control that time. The CHAIRMAN. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from South Carolina? There was no objection. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui). Mr. MATSUI. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, Social Security is probably the most important program Americans have had over the years. It takes care of the senior citizens of America. As anybody knows, if we did not have Social Security today, half the senior population would live in poverty. One-third of the benefits of Social Security go to families that have the bread winner disabled or perhaps dies. So many children who no longer have a mother or father who are the bread winners in that family can still go on to school and perhaps college. This is a very, very critical program. What the budget of the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) does is adds 18 more years to that program so that it will be solvent to the year 2050, 50 more years of solvency total. The Republican plan does not add one year to that solvency. As we continue this debate, it is my hope that the Republicans respond to the March 13 letter from the actuary of the Social Security, Mr. Harry Ballantine of which everyone bases their conclusions on. In that letter, in the second paragraph, he says, The proposal of the Republicans would not have any significant effect on the long-range solvency of the Social Security program under the intermediary assumptions of the Trustee's report. Thus, the estimated long-range actuarial deficit of 2.19 percent of taxable payroll and the year of combined trust funds exhaustion would not change. So when we hear that the Republicans are saying they extend the life of Social Security by protecting the money, they do not. In fact, they can use the money for a tax cut. They can use it for a tax cut. So bear in mind what this is all about, this debate, is to protect Social Security, and the Democratic bill does that. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Weygand). Mr. WEYGAND. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) for yielding me this time. I particularly want to thank the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) for providing us with this alternative. When we talk so much, as both sides have, about Social Security and Medicare, the people back home are listening to us and saying, have they really given us a solution? The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has done that, and the Democratic alternative has done just that. He has said let us take aside all of the surplus that we are getting in the area of Social Security, dedicate it to Social Security and Medicare, and make sure we come up with a fix, a solution. Set the money aside and take away the rhetoric of tax cuts and additional discretionary spending. Solve these problems first before we go home. Medicare is perhaps one of the most aching problems that is out there, home health care, prescription drugs. People each day are asking us in both Democratic and Republican districts, how do we solve this? It is indeed a problem back home in Rhode Island, because I know home health care agencies, the most cost effective, efficient agencies are going out of businesses. People that need the kind of home care, that is the least costly home care, are not getting it and eventually ending up in nursing homes and hospitals. I have a couple in Rhode Island that are 66 and 70 years old. Prescription drugs is something they never thought about when they retired. But after open heart surgery and bypass surgery, both of them, at age 66 and 70, are back working part-time just to pay for the $8,200 a year for prescription drugs they have to pay. Seniors are doing without paying their rent, without paying for food, and sometimes not even paying for the prescriptions because the cost is so high. That is going to come back to all of us in terms of higher taxpayer costs. We should not leave here until we resolve this problem. The only way to do it is, as the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has suggested, lock this money aside, not use it for all those rhetorical questions that are being asked all the time about tax cuts and discretionary spending, and fix the problem. Let us bring us to a solution rather than continuing putting us in this rhetorical oblivion that will never come to a conclusion. End this problem now. Fix Medicare. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Wisconsin (Ms. Baldwin). Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. Chairman, Medicare and Social Security have improved the lives of millions of elderly and disabled Americans. Together they provide a vital safety net which millions of Americans rely on. However, while Medicare is projected to run short of funds in just 9 years, and Social Security will run short of funds by 2032, the Republican budget resolution does nothing to extend the life of Medicare or Social Security. The Democratic budget alternative that will be offered later today will extend the life of Medicare through 2020 in addition to extending the life of Social Security to 2050. {time} 1215 Only after this commitment is fulfilled would we propose to spend money on high priority areas like health, education and the environment. I believe firmly that I would not be standing before my colleagues today if it were not for Medicare. Social Security and Medicare together enabled my grandmother to live independently until she was 90 years old. As her primary caregiver for the last several years, I know the role Social Security and Medicare play in making ends meet, in protecting her from making sure that a medical crisis would not lead to financial ruin. Medicare and Social Security are not just commitments we made to our seniors, they are commitments we made to families. And it is just as important to young people that we have Medicare and Social Security as it is to our seniors, because it keeps our families and our communities strong. We have an historic opportunity to make good on this commitment. The budget decisions we make today will have enormous consequences for decades. The Republican budget resolution squanders this opportunity before us; the opportunity to reduce public debt while protecting the existence of Social Security and Medicare. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means and a former member of the Committee on the Budget. Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding this time to me. [[Page H1714]] Mr. Chairman, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed Social Security and worked for its passage, the Republican Party was dead set against it. When John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson said that having Social Security was not enough, if there was no health security and advanced Medicare, 90 percent of the Republicans in this Congress voted to reject it. When Bill Clinton was elected President, the Republican Party in this House elected a majority leader, my colleague, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey), who said of Social Security, It is ``a rotten trick;'' who said of Medicare that he ``resented'' having to be a part of it as a compulsory government program. So I suppose that against that backdrop the American people should take some confidence and some reassurance in the fact that Medicare and Social Security are even mentioned in this budget resolution. They are indeed mentioned in the resolution. When we look to the budget resolution to see whether there is any money to match the promises made, there is not $1 truly set aside for Social Security and Medicare to assure solvency into the future. All that the Republican budget resolution says is that these vital programs can go broke on schedule, which is not much help to the people of this country. The second indication that we get out of this budget resolution of where the heart of the Republican Party is on these critical issues for hundreds of millions of American citizens who either benefit from these programs today or will in the future is to look to the instructions that they include in this resolution. What instruction do they have about Medicare and Social Security? They have one reconciliation instruction, and it is ``Give us our tax breaks.'' They say ``Give us our tax breaks.'' We say save Medicare and Social Security first. Do the fiscally responsible thing; pay down the debt, preserve these valuable programs, postpone the desire to help those at the top of the economic ladder to some future time, and help those Americans who want these systems preserved. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis), a member of the Committee on the Budget. Mr. DAVIS of Florida. Mr. Chairman, today we have a very fundamental choice before us; we can pass the budget resolution that proposes a tax cut over 10 years of approximately $800 billion, or we can do first things first, and that is we can take up and pass the Spratt amendment, which provides a tax cut of about $137 billion but pays down the publicly held debt, the Federal debt, by more than $137 billion more than the Republican budget proposal. Now, why is that so important? The first thing is it is the right thing to do for our children and grandchildren, and not for them to have to inherit this debt. The second thing is, as we begin to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers, of which I am one, and funding the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, we are going to need some of those funds to pay that. Thirdly, and perhaps most important, one of the best things we can do to protect our economy right now is to pay down the Federal debt. As Chairman Greenspan has testified before the House Committee on the Budget, it has a direct bearing on interest rates. In my home, Florida and Tampa, where the average mortgage for a homeowner is about $115,000, if we drop interest rates two points, down from 8 to 6 percent, that is $155 a month in that homeowner's pocket they would not otherwise have. Paying down the debt and providing that type of tax cut, simple and immediate, to homeowners, to people holding student loans and car loans, is the right thing to do for our children and grandchildren and, most importantly, will help preserve the solvency of Medicare and Social Security as we begin to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey), a member of the Committee on Commerce and also the Committee on the Budget. Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, this Republican bill is a complete fraud. That is the bottom line. They have got hundreds of billions of dollars for tax cuts, mostly for the rich, but not one penny to extend the Medicare trust fund, which is going bankrupt, by the way, in the year 2008. Let us go back to their balanced budget of 1997. The premise was that we would have to cut Medicare and home health care, those are visits made to people's homes who have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and other chronic diseases, $115 billion to give a $90 billion tax break for mostly the wealthiest in America. Now we have this huge surplus. Now, what do the Republicans say? We are going to give that money back to the Medicare recipients; we are going to give that money back to the HMO health care recipients? No, they say, we do not have enough money for those people. Now, the problem, of course, is that the programs were cut fraudulently, using numbers that were not accurate in 1997 in terms of the problem with Medicare. It turns out today that the CBO says that in fact they have found miraculously $88 billion more of savings in Medicare for this 5-year period, and they found an additional hundreds of billions of dollars of revenues that they did not project. How much goes back to Medicare on the Republican side? They do not have a penny. If we kick them in the heart over here, we are going to break our toes. They just do not want to help these old people on Medicare. So, my colleagues, our substitute, with the effort to try to help those most vulnerable, the senior citizens within our society, intends on guaranteeing that Medicare is extended 10 extra years in solvency, so that the senior citizens in our country are going to be given the protection which they deserve. My colleagues, the Republican substitute does nothing, nothing to help the solvency of the Medicare trust fund. Vote ``no'' on the Republican budget here today on the House floor. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, I was elected in 1970 and spent 15 years in the State legislature and spent 10 years here, and I have never seen a budget exercise like this one. Last year, we have to remember, the Republicans did not pass a budget. They never got a budget resolution through the United States Congress. This year they said, we are going to do it, but we are going to do it by jamming it past people so fast they can never figure out what is happening. We listened to a wonderful stump speech by the chairman of the committee today, but when he hands the budget to us 4 hours before and gives us two pieces of paper with the numbers on it, that is all we got, two pieces of paper, to spend $1.7 billion, I say this is a smoke and mirrors budget. My colleagues can look at these pieces of paper and say there is anything in here. They can promise the world. They can promise veterans, they can promise old people, they can promise the National Institutes of Health, they can promise anything on these two pieces of paper, because there is no specificity. There were no hearings. It was simply, ram it through. Now we come to the floor. We get 40 minutes on the Committee on the Budget to talk about this issue. Now, is that because we are busy tomorrow? No. People are going home. Could we have more time on this? No, the Committee on Rules said we have to be out tonight. Where are we going? I guess we are just going out for 2 weeks, yet we cannot spend another 1 or 2 hours on this issue. The gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) is right. I sat on the Medicare Commission, and the Medicare Commission rightly turned down the proposal being jammed through by the Republicans to privatize Medicare, but they are going to do it here. This budget has no money in it to deal with the problems of Medicare. What they are going to do is they are going to come in with their little voucher program. It is going to be called ``premium support.'' They are going to try to ram that out of the Committee on Ways and Means and run it through here and leave the old people holding the bag. This is a bad budget, and I urge Members to vote against the Republican alternative. [[Page H1715]] Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Chambliss). The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays) may yield time. There was no objection. Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. Chairman, I had hoped we were going to come to the floor today to talk about the real facts contained in the Democrat budget versus the Republican budget, but it appears we are getting off base here. But let us look at what the actual dollar numbers are when it comes to Medicare, and here they are. We are going to put $1.8 trillion aside over the next 10 years to save and protect Social Security and Medicare. What does the President do? He is well below us, right down here. These are the actual numbers, Members. Mr. Chairman, today the House is going to consider a budget for the fiscal year 2000 that addresses the issues that matter most to American families. This budget, the first for the new millennium, safeguards Social Security and Medicare, addresses priorities such as education, defense and agriculture, and provides historic tax relief. This budget meets the challenges of the 21st century head-on by adhering to several bedrock principles, each of which is set forth right here. First, we are going to lock away every penny of the Social Security surplus for our Nation's elderly. We are going to set aside more money than the President to strengthen Social Security and Medicare. We are going to create a safe deposit box to ensure that bureaucrats in Washington cannot get their hands on the Social Security Trust Fund money. We are going to pay down more debt than the President's budget. We are going to maintain the spending discipline that carries over from the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. We are going to make national defense a top priority by providing additional resources for things such as pay raises which are specifically set forth in the budget. We are going to provide the resources to train, equip and retain our men and women in uniform, who are in harm's risk as we speak today. We are going to offer security for rural Americans by providing reforms in crop insurance and money to fund that crop insurance reform. And we are going to enact historic tax relief. Yes, tax relief. And it is interesting that opponents of this budget would get up today and argue against tax relief. That is almost un-American, and I really cannot believe we are hearing that in the well today. But, yes, we favor tax relief, and we are going to support tax relief in our budget plan for hard-working Americans. Mr. Chairman, this budget is consistent with the common sense conservative principles of encouraging our communities and individuals to grow from the bottom up, not from Washington down. This is a budget Americans can be proud of, and I urge all of my colleagues to support the Republican budget. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. When I came here, we were paying interest on the national debt equal to about $52 billion. In the years I have been here that bill has gone up to $252 billion. Dead weight. Produces no goods and services for anybody. We have got a proposal in our budget resolution that will drive that debt down $3 trillion. It is good for Social Security, it is good for the economy, it is good for the Federal budget, and it is good for our children and grandchildren. {time} 1230 Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith). (Mr. SMITH of Michigan asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SMITH of Michigan. Mr. Chairman, this chart shows where we were when Republicans took the majority in 1995. For the foreseeable future, at that time, this government went deeper and deeper into debt--for as far as the economist could see. We came in, as the new majority, determined we were going to reduce and slow down spending. Look, we did it. This is historic. I went back over the last 40 years. In every one of those years that the Democrats had control they used the surplus coming in from Social Security for other Government spending. Please look, what we are doing now. We do not have to increase the national debt in this 5 year Republican budget. The President's plan, the Democrats' plan, has to increase the national debt. Their plan forces this country deeper into debt by $2 trillion more than the Republican proposal. I want to say that again to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt). Your plan goes deeper into debt by $2 trillion more than the Republican proposal. Nobody should just talk about the debt to the public. They have got to talk about the total Government debt. Because what we owe the Social Security Trust Fund is just as important as what we owe Wall Street. I want to talk about the caps. The Republicans stay under the caps. The Democrat proposal does not stay under the caps. I am chairman of the Committee on the Budget Task Force on Social Security. That bipartisan task force is working very well together. But I just want to say very clearly that what we are doing for the first time in recent history, is not spending the Social Security surplus for other Government programs. I mean, it is a giant step forward for saving Social Security. We are putting that money aside. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) says that they are saving Social Security by adding a giant IOU to the Medicare Trust Fund and the Social Security Trust Fund. That makes us go deeper into debt. It is not honest. It is a asset for Social Security but a deficit for the general fund. In short it is a mandate for future tax increases for our kids and grandkids. All the review of the President's proposal that suggests that we can save Social Security by adding more IOUs--conclude it is smoke and mirrors. It is! Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Sununu). (Mr. SUNUNU asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SUNUNU. Mr. Chairman, today we are debating the budget. In putting together a budget blueprint, it is important to remember that the Federal budget is an outline of priorities. It is not a detailed specification of every single appropriation bill that we are going to pass over the next year. The Federal budget is $1.7 trillion. The budget blueprint is intended to talk about what our priorities are as a Congress for the next year. In trying to establish those priorities, the Committee on the Budget tried to answer three questions. First and foremost, what about Social Security and Medicare? Those on the other side have talked about these important issues; and we came back with the answer first we should set aside every penny of the Social Security surplus, every penny of that trust fund surplus, to strengthen and protect Social Security and Medicare. As the debate goes on today, we will see time and again that we set aside more to preserve Social Security and Medicare than the President in his budget. We set aside every penny of the surplus for Social Security, not 60 percent as the administration suggested, because it is the right thing to do. Second, we wanted to set priorities about the size and scope of the Federal Government. And we thought it was appropriate that we keep to the commitments of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, a bipartisan agreement that set some control on the growth and scope of the Federal Government. Keeping those commitments again is an important part of the integrity of this budget resolution. And third, what about tax relief? Right now taxes in this country are at a peacetime high. They have not been this high since 1944. And we thought it appropriate that, after we set aside 100 percent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus, we ought to give back the additional surpluses to the American workers in the form of lower taxes. This is about priorities, our priority of saving 100 percent of the Social Security surplus, against the administration's priority, if we can call it that, of [[Page H1716]] only setting aside 60 percent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. Our commitment and priority to keep to the promises we made as part of the 1997 budget agreement. The administration's budget breaks those caps by $30 billion. Our commitment to lower taxes once we have ensured that we protect the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. The administration's commitment to raise taxes by $100 billion. That is the wrong direction for this country. In the end, this budget resolution pays down more debt, does more to protect Social Security and Medicare, and provides fair and honest tax relief. That is a set of priorities we can be proud of. It is a set of priorities that makes sense for the country. And that is why I am proud to support the budget resolution. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 8 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Rivers) and ask unanimous consent that she control the time for yielding to other Members. The CHAIRMAN. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from South Carolina? There was no objection. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen). (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. BENTSEN. Mr. Chairman, I rise in defense of fiscal responsibility and in support of the Democratic budget resolution and in opposition to the Republican budget resolution. When I was elected to Congress, my highest priority was to balance the unified budget. We have apparently accomplished that goal. Now my highest priority is to pay down the publicly held debt and extend Social Security and Medicare solvency. Mr. Chairman, a week ago the majority on the Committee on the Budget submitted two pages of numbers and called it a budget resolution. It is as much a budget resolution as a blank piece of paper is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The budget resolution is two pages, no explanation. Draconian spending cuts of $181 billion over 10 years are hidden in blue smoke and mirrors. This budget says we are going to increase defense spending and education and cut other programs by $27 billion. It is not going to happen. The budget builds on the hope that the CBO can re-estimate the base line just so we can put off until September either any cuts we have to make and either have a showdown or disaster like last year. What this budget will do is bust the caps and the pay-go rules. The majority's budget resolution gives more priority to enacting an $800 billion tax break than paying down the debt. It does not stop Social Security and Medicare from going insolvent. It locks in nearly a trillion-dollar tax cut betting on a 15-year projection that, if the surplus does not materialize, will result in more deficits and more debt. The Republicans say they are saving the surplus in Social Security in the trust fund, but they do nothing to honor the obligation to extending the life of Social Security and Medicare. Let us look at what Alan Greenspan has to say. He is adamantly clear that the best policy is debt reduction. Let me quote him. ``From an economic policy point of view I envisage that the best thing we can do at this particular state is to allow that surplus to run. What that means, of course, is that the debt to the public declines, interest costs on the debt decline, and in my judgment, that contributes to lower long-term interest rates.'' Make no mistake, the Democratic budget resolutions retires nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars of publicly held debt. The Republicans' do not. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, when asked about the rough-and-tumble world of politics, Margaret Thatcher said, ``Well, you don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.'' Mr. Chairman, I would suggest that there is considerable evasion in this budget. Starting with the issue that the Republicans claim to put aside all of the Social Security money for Social Security, in today's Wall Street Journal, page A-28, we find a very interesting article. The Wall Street Journal tells us that their commitment is essentially toothless and can be waived by a simple majority, which is done on the floor every day. This is the Wall Street Journal. They promise us that certain programs will be taken care of, that certain groups will get the things they need. But they forget to tell us, or they evade telling us, that $52 billion of cuts have to be found over the next 5 years to provide what they have in their budget. An earlier speaker talked about what was un-American. Well, I will tell my colleagues what is un-American, Mr. Chairman. What is un- American is not paying our bills, not dealing with our debts, not dealing with our existing obligations. And as a Nation, we have many: Social Security, Medicare, and a national debt that is nearing $6 trillion. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen) mentioned that Alan Greenspan said unequivocally that the best way to deal with our current situation is to pay down the debt and to use both surpluses, on-budget and off- budget. The Democratic proposal here today puts more than $474 billion over the Republican proposal in the next 15 years. The last piece of evasion that I want to speak to today is the suggestion that the tax cuts that are being proposed come purely from the on-budget surplus. That ignores the fact that as these tax cuts play themselves out over the years, by the year 2013 we will be dealing with an on-budget deficit and we will have to dip into Social Security money. Now, that comes at a time when the existing obligations I was talking about, our baby-boomers, begin to retire, and it will be the greatest strain on our budget to provide for them. Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on the Budget. Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. It is so amazing. I mean, really, when it comes right down to it, both sides have done not a pretty good job of coming up with a budget. All right? I mean, there are only so many ways we can do it, with mandatory programs and discretionary programs. There are only a certain few ways we can do it. And so what happened was the President sat down and he said, you know what? I can spend that Social Security surplus and I can have a whole bunch of new programs that I can pass out to people and make them feel good. The Republicans sat down and said, you know what? For the first time since 1969, we are going to set all of it aside, 100 percent of the Social Security surplus, so that it is there not only for Social Security but it is there if we need to find a fix for Medicare. We set all of it aside. The President did not set all of it aside. So what happens today? The last minute, the last opportunity, in run the Democrats, oh, but we did not mean that. We did not quite mean that. We can do better. We can do better than that. We are going to set 100 percent of it aside because they are. And so they rush in here at the last minute. Well, even their last-minute plan does not quite make it. Let me show my colleagues something here. They are talking about debt reduction and how much they want to reduce the debt for their grandchildren and children, and we heard all sorts of speeches waxing philosophical about that. Let us look at the plan. The Republicans set aside more money so we can pay down the debt. The Democrats do not. Those are the facts. Yet they run in here and say, we can do better than that. Let me tell my colleagues something else that is interesting here. When it comes to education, they say this is a priority. Look what we do. The Republicans, the Republicans, spend more time than the President, who stood up here for the State the Union address and said how he is going to support education. Well, let me take my colleagues one example further. Special education. Special education. Since 1975, a program that the Democrats, to their credit, passed one of the most beautiful civil rights pieces of legislation in history, saying every American child [[Page H1717]] ought to be able to attend public school. And what did they do? They did not fund it. And they have not funded it since 1975. {time} 1245 For the first time, the Republicans are funding IDEA, special education, $1 billion extra in our budget than the President's for special education. Plus we are saying to governors and States who are crying to Washington to give them more flexibility for education, we are letting them spend excess dollars from welfare, we are giving them the ability to transfer funds from other education programs, and we are allowing them, if we get more money at the end of the year, this surplus may grow as everyone has talked about so far, in our plan we allow special education to get a little bump up. That is not in their plan, either. Mr. Chairman, it just is amazing to me with the Academy Awards being last week how they can continue to win more Academy Awards for this budget. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Could I have the benefit of the chart of the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), the chart he just used that showed the President commits 62 percent of the surplus and you commit 100 percent of the surplus? Mr. NUSSLE. The gentleman did not bring his own charts today? Mr. SPRATT. That is 62 percent of the unified surplus which he quotes, $1.8 trillion. One hundred percent of the Social Security surplus, which is part of it, equals $1.8 trillion. They are the same thing over a different period. Over 15 years it works out to the same thing. Mr. NUSSLE. That is the problem, if the gentleman would yield. Mr. SPRATT. No, I cannot yield because I do not have the time to yield. Mr. NUSSLE. He wants to use my chart but I cannot talk about it? Mr. SPRATT. In a little while we will answer what he just said about education. Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, I hope he does. Mr. SPRATT. Because I do not think the facts will bear him out. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. I believe there was another problem with the charts that were just shown to us in that while the speaker, I am sure he misspoke, when the speaker said he was comparing the Republican plan to the Democratic plan on the floor from House Democrats today, I believe he used numbers from the President's proposal and not from our budget today relative to debt reduction. Secondly, the question of IDEA, special education, is one I am very interested in, because for several years I have offered an amendment to the Committee on the Budget as well as to the Congress to deal with fully funding IDEA, making the commitment that was passed so long ago real, to bring funding up to 40 percent of real cost. That was offered in the Committee on the Budget last week and to a person every Republican, including the gentleman from Iowa, voted against doing that. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley). Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, I thank the ranking member of our Committee on the Budget for the terrific job he has done. Mr. Chairman, if I could yield first of all to the gentleman from North Carolina. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, we want to talk about education. There is a lot that is wrong with this Republican budget resolution. We need to discuss these issues in depth. The budget resolution is arguably the most important single decision we make here. It is the blueprint for how Federal resources will be used for the coming fiscal year and on into the future. So the Democratic and the Republican proposals we are considering here today need to be debated in depth. They are a study, in fact, in contrasting priorities. The Republican budget would provide no help in extending the solvency of Medicare and Social Security. It falls short on veterans health care and crop insurance for our farmers and other critical needs. The Democratic alternative would extend the solvency of Medicare and Social Security, would provide more funding for critical priorities, would implement targeted tax relief, and would reduce the debt held by the public more than the Republican proposal. Mr. Chairman, we want to talk especially about education, because nowhere is the contrast more stark than with education. Our Republican colleagues boast about providing some increase for elementary and secondary education, but, overall, funding for education and training would be cut by $1.2 billion from the nominal 1999 level in the Republican budget for 2000. The result would be drastic cuts in funding for other priorities like higher education and teacher training and Pell grants and Head Start. Over 5 years, the Republican budget cuts to education and training would result in a 6.9 percent decrease in purchasing power, and over 10 years the decline in purchasing power for education would be over 18 percent. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, one of the things that I find interesting about this budget is we were told absolutely education is increased. They did increase it for elementary and secondary education. But what they do not tell us is that they are cutting it in all other parts of education. They do not say specifically where they are going to cut those budgets. But it is cut over 10 years from this level by $36.5 billion. So they are cutting programs like Head Start and Pell grants and work-to-school programs. That is where the cuts are. And so again it is one of those bait and switch budgets that they tell us we are doing great things over here and then they do not tell us what the other hand is doing, which is cutting education. This budget does not reflect that our school facilities are in a crisis situation. There was a study done by the engineers that said of all of our infrastructure, our school infrastructure is the one that is in the greatest need. We would not work in the schools that we send our children to. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price). Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I would like to engage the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt) and the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley) in a further discussion of this. It is important to get these facts out. Is it not true that the Democratic alternative would make room for school construction? The kind of proposal that the President has made to give tax credits in lieu of interest on bonds in these low-income areas that need desperately to build or modernize facilities, or like the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge) and I have introduced to target high-growth areas so that our kids are not going to school in trailers. I come from a district where we have hundreds of trailers, thousands of kids going to school in these kinds of facilities. We need to get ahead of the curve in school construction. Mr. HOLT. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey. Mr. HOLT. The Democratic budget does indeed provide for modernizing schools. In fact, it would provide tax credits that would allow modernizing of up to 6,000 public schools. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, one of the other things that I think is interesting to note, not only are schools in bad shape right now and we have talked about trailers. We have first graders that have to walk across an open area in Oregon where it rains all the time. This is not a wonderful thing to do to wash their hands or go to the bathroom. And some of the rooms are in such disrepair. Again, my colleagues would not work in that facility but we expect our children to learn in that facility. The other thing that I think is interesting is there have been studies that have been done that show that, in fact, students do better in schools that reflect our society and are not in such disrepair. They do better when our schools are repaired. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Those studies are very convincing, that the students perform better when they are in first-rate facilities. It is not just an abstract issue. We have thousands of [[Page H1718]] kids going to school in these facilities. Often they are going to lunch at 10:30 because the cafeteria facilities haven't kept pace with the addition of trailers. They do not have adequate gym or restroom facilities. It simply is a misplaced priority to say that we cannot afford to do this. The Republican budget squeezes it out. The Democratic budget would make room for that kind of school modernization. Let me ask my colleagues, also, to address the other major initiative that we are looking at in this Democratic budget: getting class size down and getting 100,000 new teachers in the classrooms of America. We made a start on that last year. What is it going to take to keep that going? Mr. HOLT. If the gentleman will yield further, indeed, these are connected. Simple math will tell us, we cannot have more teachers and get the smaller class sizes in the early years unless we have the classrooms to put them in. And so this Democratic budget does allow for both of those, continuation of the hiring of new teachers, the 100,000 new teachers that we are calling for, we will continue down that line with the Democratic budget, in addition to providing for the loans for the construction and modernization of facilities. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. We are talking about a stark contrast in these budget proposals. The one makes room for reduced class size and for school construction and also lets us make good on what we promised last year when we passed the higher education act, opening up opportunity through Pell grants and an improved student loan program. The other budget makes a short-term increase in education over the long haul but would drastically decrease this funding. Mr. HOLT. Unlike the Republican budget, the Democratic alternative does not cut higher education, training and social services in order to increase elementary and secondary education programs. That is a key difference. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. I used to be a teacher. I can guarantee my colleagues that smaller classroom sizes, you have much better performance by the students. Do not take just my word for it but go out and look at all of the research on this subject and you will find if we can get our classroom size to 18 and under, that students' performance goes way up. Not only does it go up, it stays up. We are trying to get it down in K through 3. But if you get it down, get that ratio down, the performance goes straight up and that performance stays up throughout their years in school. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. And the impact is the greatest in grades 1 through 3, is that right? Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Right. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the way my colleagues have chimed in here. There is no question that we are dealing with a stark contrast in many areas of this budget, but certainly in education. In dollar terms, the Democratic alternative next year provides $2.6 billion more for education and training, and then over the next 5 years we are talking about a $10.2 billion gap. It is a gap that we have got to close. Vote for the Democratic alternative. Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 45 seconds. Mr. Chairman, the bottom line is, this Republican budget locks away the entire Social Security trust fund surplus for our Nation's elderly, the entire amount. We set aside more than the President to save, strengthen and preserve Social Security and as necessary Medicare as well. We create a safety deposit box to assure Social Security trust funds cannot be raided. We pay down more public debt than the President. We maintain the spending discipline for the 1997 budget act. We provide additional resources to properly train, equip and retain our men and women in uniform. And we will enact historic tax relief after we have solved Social Security for our children and our children's children. That is what we do. The President wants to spend more. The Democrats want to spend more. We do not. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Herger). Mr. HERGER. Mr. Chairman, this Republican budget brings honesty back to the budget process and ends a 30-year assault on our Social Security system. For the first time, every single penny of Social Security taxes will be locked up for Social Security and Medicare. Over the next 10 years, this budget saves $1.8 trillion for these two critical programs for our seniors and future generations. As my colleagues can see on this chart, while the Republican budget saves every penny, 100 percent, of the Social Security surplus, the President's budget saves only 62 percent of Social Security over the next 10 years. Mr. Chairman, saving just 62 percent of the Social Sec

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PERSONAL EXPLANATION
(House of Representatives - March 25, 1999)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages H1710-H1780] PERSONAL EXPLANATION Mrs. EMERSON. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 72 and 73, I was not present due to a [[Page H1711]] family emergency. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.'' The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Foley). Pursuant to House Resolution 131 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the concurrent resolution, House Concurrent Resolution 68. {time} 1148 In the Committee of the Whole Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 68) establishing the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2000 and setting forth appropriate budgetary levels for each of fiscal years 2001 through 2009, with Mr. Camp in the chair. The Clerk read the title of the concurrent resolution. The CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to the rule, the concurrent resolution is considered as having been read the first time. Under the rule, general debate shall not exceed 3 hours, with 2 hours confined to the congressional budget, equally divided and controlled by the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on the Budget, and 1 hour on the subject of economic goals and policies, equally divided and controlled by the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Saxton) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Stark). The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) each will control 1 hour of debate on the congressional budget. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich). Mr. KASICH. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, today we offer the first budget of the next century and a new agenda for the new millennium. I think this is a great day for the House, because we have been able to move forward from an era not very long ago when, as we looked out across the horizon, the economic horizon of this country, we saw deficits as far as the eye could see. The majority came into its position in 1995 when we first advanced the need for economic stimulus driven by tax relief, giving more power, providing more incentives for risk-taking, and at the same time a big dose of fiscal restraint; in other words, starting to get the Congress of the United States to live within its means. The fact is that in 1995, Mr. Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System, said that if you can offer a legitimate and credible plan to balance the Federal budget, he said that he believed that interest rates would decline by 2 points. I must also remind Members that in 1995, as we assumed control of the House of Representatives, interest rates had been rising, the economy had been slowing, there was concern about unemployment. The fact that we laid down a plan that would begin to put our fiscal house in order, to put us in a position where the Congress of the United States would operate really like the American family, and that we would restore some of the incentives to risk-take, I believe that has contributed significantly to the economic gains that we have had in this country. Now today, as we stand here, as I stand here in the well, we are about to pass a budget that not only captures the surpluses of Medicare and social security, but at the same time has the on-budget surpluses that so many people have sought for years. In other words, when we take a look at the balance sheets of the Federal Government, both in the social security and Medicare accounts and in the non-social security and Medicare accounts, we have been able to achieve not only a balanced budget, but also some huge surpluses. Let me say, at the outset, we are doing something that the Congress of the United States has never done: We are taking all the payroll taxes that we collect every day that are related to social security and Medicare and we are locking them into an account so that the politicians, Republicans and Democrats, cannot raid those accounts for any other spending item. That money will sit in an account, and until we enact a plan that actually saves social security, that money will be used to pay down part of the Federal debt. Last year we paid down about $50 billion of the debt. Most Americans do not know that. This year we would anticipate paying down at least $125 billion of the national debt. Of course, if I was a citizen listening to somebody in the well of this House make that claim, I would greet it with great skepticism, but the fact is that what I am saying is true. Last year the publicly-held debt was paid down by $50 billion, and in fact this year we anticipate at least $125 billion of the publicly-held debt to be retired. That does not allow us to rest on our laurels, by any stretch of the imagination, because we must work every day to make the power of government less and the power of people greater. We need to run America from the bottom up, so people can have control over the education for their children, so that the baby boomers and the younger generation can have hope of having a decent retirement by having more control, so Americans can have more money in their pockets. The fact is, as it relates to social security and Medicare, we know those programs have to be transformed, and not just to protect the retirement benefits of our seniors today. I would argue that that is a given. Because of a pay-as-you-go system, we know that the baby boomers are able to carry the load of their parents, but I want the moms and dads of this country to realize that the people who are really at risk are their children. I want mom and dad who are on social security and Medicare to realize that we are going to stand up and protect their benefits, but it is their children, their baby boomer sons and daughters, who are at risk. We must have the courage to transform this system so that the benefits just do not accrue to our seniors today, but that our baby boomers and their children will also have retirement security. Sad to say that the President has taken a leave of absence on this. He is missing-in-action as it relates to the issue of social security and Medicare. Just last week the Medicare Commission, headed by a member of his own party, was blunted by the action of the President. That Democrat, leader of this program to try to extend the life of social security and to reform it so it is available for the baby boomers, that Senator said last week that the administration and many in his party were more interested in using the issue of Medicare as a political weapon than they were interested in being able to transform and save Medicare, not just for today's seniors, but for the baby boomers and their children. That is the worst of American politics, to use the threat of destroying economic security for our senior citizens to try to win votes. That is not what makes America great. What makes America great is not just to debate when Republicans and Democrats disagree, but the ability to search for a common goal, to preserve some of the vital retirement programs for this Nation, to keep the demagoguery out of this debate. Let us work together to try to extend the life of Medicare and social security. At the same time, we are also honoring the 1997 budget agreement. The President breaks the spending caps. He breaks the discipline of the 1997 budget agreement. We will not do that. Not only will we not break the discipline of the 1997 agreement that has contributed to a stronger economy, but we will not raid the social security and Medicare trust fund the way the President does. We have decided to save it all, and to take that and coordinate with that the 1997 budget agreement by having fiscal restraint. It is about priorities in America today. What we are saying is that the programs of defense and education ought to be top priorities in our budget. There was a paper distributed on the floor with more misleading information about the fact that this bill does not include a pay raise for the military. That is false. That is patently false. I am beginning to believe that many people who stand in opposition to this bill are just going to ignore the facts. This is not going to be a debate about what is in the bill, this is a debate about what fictions we can create. [[Page H1712]] There will be provided for in this budget document a pay raise for our troops. The Committee on Armed Services will come to the floor and tell us that. We know that it is necessary to boost the spending for the military. That is precisely what we do in this bill. At the same time, we also believe we should emphasize education. The fact is, in education we have provided more money than the President has, not just for defense but for education as well. As Members know, we are very interested in education flexibility, so that the school districts can manage their challenges better at the local level without having to have a bureaucrat a thousand miles away who does not even know what time zone it is in these local school districts to tell them how to manage their challenges. In addition to all of this, Mr. Chairman, there is tax relief for the taxpayers. The fact of the matter is there are many on the other side of the aisle that bristle at the thought of a tax cut for Americans. It has become almost a philosophy, almost a mantra, to make the argument that there is something wrong with shrinking the size of the government and letting peoples' pocketbooks grow bigger. I want to warn a number of my friends, it is not only wrong for the country but it is very bad politics to make an argument that the budget of the government ought to grow while our personal and family budgets ought to shrink, and that somehow we should pound our chests in self- righteous indignation at the notion that we want to work to cut the size of government and give more money to the American people. {time} 1200 If we are going to run America from the bottom up, if we are going to let Americans be able to pursue their hopes and dreams, Mr. Chairman, the more money that one has in one's pocket, the more one can control one's own destiny, the more power that one has. The smaller this amount becomes, the less power one has. Power is a zero sum game. If one has less and the government has more, who has got the power? When the government has less and if one has more, who has got the power? In our country today, as we approach the new millennium and we set the new agenda for the next century, what we do know is that the strength of America, harkening back to where our founders was, was a limited government; the dignity of the individual was to be preserved; that the individual in our society was what was most important in a Nation that recognizes that freedom is precious; and that that the future is ours. So, Mr. Chairman, we intend not only to preserve Social Security and Medicare, we not only agree to prioritize the items of national security and education, but at the same time, we also believe that the American people ought to be empowered, that the American people ought to have more money in their pockets in order to provide, not just for themselves and not just for their communities, but for those that may live in the shadows of their communities who have less and cannot be ignored in America. That is the great tradition of America. More in one's pocket means more for one's family. For those who have not been so fortunate, we have an obligation to take care of them. So at the end of the day, Mr. Chairman, I think we present a budget for the new millennium that is right in pace with where the American people want to go. The American people hunger for more control over their lives and more power in order to fix the problems, to meet the challenges that they see every day. This budget will begin to preserve and reform and transform the programs for economic security in our senior years, at the same time paying down some of the national debt and, most important, beginning to transfer again, continuing to transfer power, money, and influence from the institution of government into the pockets of people. We will move forward on this. We will lay down a good marker as we enter the next millennium. We will set the pace and set the direction for what can be a glorious new century for, not just Americans, but for people all over the world who have come to see us as a model and as an example of the power of freedom and individuality and compassion and caring and vision. Vote for the budget. Reject these alternatives and, at the same time, reject the President's budget and set ourselves on the right course. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 6 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I was trying to get the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) to tell us why Function 950 of his budget resolution provides no adjustment as it is required to do to provide for the pay raise, the extra pay raise for selected pay grades and officers and NCOs and for the military retirement benefits. The fact of the matter is, Function 950, the military retirement account, where that charge needs to be made, is absolutely unadjusted in their budget resolution. So it does not provide for the pay raise and the benefits that our troops have been promised. Let me go to the overarching subject, the budget, and the happy occasion that we find ourselves in today. I did not ever think that I would serve to see the day where we have surpluses as far as the eye could see. I think it is worth taking just a minute to track down the trail we have followed for the last 10 years that have led us to this happy set of circumstances. In 1990, we had a budget summit that lasted 6 months. We finally brought it to the floor. It was defeated once. Then the Democrats put the vote up to pass President Bush's budget summit agreement. There were only 80 votes on that side of the aisle. It implemented discretionary pay caps, a pay-as-you-go rule, and the kind of disciplines that have served us well to get rid of the deficit. But it did not have any obvious effect because it was eclipsed by a recession. In 1993, when President Clinton came to office, he found on his desk awaiting him the economic report of the President. In it, Michael Boskin, his Economic Council chief, said the deficit this year will be $332 billion. That was the baseline from which the Clinton administration began. From that baseline, in 1993, we reduced the deficit with the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993, which had exclusively Democratic votes in the House and the Senate from $330 billion projected level, $290 billion actual level in 1992, to $22 billion in 1997. Then our colleagues on the other side of the aisle joined with us, and we finished the job and wiped out that additional $22 billion of deficit and lay the basis for going into the next century. It is critically important that we did this, because until we dealt with the year-to-year deficit, we could not deal with the next problem; and that is the problem, the challenge of an aging society. Our society is getting older and older. I am a war baby. A huge generation of young people were born, babies were born in 1946 until 1964, and they will start retiring in about 10 or 12 years. When they do, they will put unprecedented strain on the most popular, most successful program ever invented by the government, the Social Security program, so much so that they may put in jeopardy its solvency by the year 2032. The Medicare program, which runs a close second in popularity, is in even greater jeopardy because the cost of medical care is rising along with the demographic increases, and it, too, is threatened with insolvency in the year 2008. We have an opportunity to do something about that. We have an opportunity to take the work we began in 1990 and 1993 and 1997 and deal with the next problem, which is a daunting challenge, preparing this country and this government for the burdens of the next century cast upon us by an aging society. Our budget, the Democratic budget, rises to that challenge; theirs does not. We are going to have other speakers who will turn to this topic, but let me just give my colleagues the highlights and tell them what is the difference between us and them. I will give it to my colleagues in a nutshell. We protect the Social Security Trust Fund. We proposed to protect the Trust Fund so that 100 percent of the payroll taxes coming into it are spent exclusively for the benefit of that particular program for the first time probably in 30 or 40 years. We propose to do it by [[Page H1713]] directing the Treasurer of the United States to take that percentage of payroll taxes not needed to pay benefits that year and to buy down public debt. How does that happen? That means that, when the obligations come due in 2020 and 2030, the Treasury will be in better shape than ever because it will have lower debt and lower debt service to meet those obligations. We also, unlike the Republicans, do something about Medicare, because we see Medicare and Social Security as linked together. We extend the life of Medicare, the solvency of the Medicare program from 2020. They leave it as it is. They leave it in a lurch. We are still opposed to huge tax cuts in the out years, $143 billion in the first 5 years and $450 billion plus in the second 5 years, rising to as much as a trillion dollars between 2009 and 2014, which will drain the budget dry of the funds needed to do something about the Medicare program. Do my colleagues want to know the difference between us and them? Look at the Trust Fund account for Social Security. In our plan, Social Security will have $3.4 trillion more money at the end of 15 years. They will add $1.8 trillion. We are twice as good as they. With Medicare, we add $400 billion. To their Trust Fund, they add a paltry $14 billion. There are significant differences. If my colleagues care about meeting the challenge in the next century, this is a budget resolution to vote for. Mr. Chairman, I yield 14 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott), and I ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to control that time. The CHAIRMAN. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from South Carolina? There was no objection. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui). Mr. MATSUI. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, Social Security is probably the most important program Americans have had over the years. It takes care of the senior citizens of America. As anybody knows, if we did not have Social Security today, half the senior population would live in poverty. One-third of the benefits of Social Security go to families that have the bread winner disabled or perhaps dies. So many children who no longer have a mother or father who are the bread winners in that family can still go on to school and perhaps college. This is a very, very critical program. What the budget of the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) does is adds 18 more years to that program so that it will be solvent to the year 2050, 50 more years of solvency total. The Republican plan does not add one year to that solvency. As we continue this debate, it is my hope that the Republicans respond to the March 13 letter from the actuary of the Social Security, Mr. Harry Ballantine of which everyone bases their conclusions on. In that letter, in the second paragraph, he says, The proposal of the Republicans would not have any significant effect on the long-range solvency of the Social Security program under the intermediary assumptions of the Trustee's report. Thus, the estimated long-range actuarial deficit of 2.19 percent of taxable payroll and the year of combined trust funds exhaustion would not change. So when we hear that the Republicans are saying they extend the life of Social Security by protecting the money, they do not. In fact, they can use the money for a tax cut. They can use it for a tax cut. So bear in mind what this is all about, this debate, is to protect Social Security, and the Democratic bill does that. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Weygand). Mr. WEYGAND. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) for yielding me this time. I particularly want to thank the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) for providing us with this alternative. When we talk so much, as both sides have, about Social Security and Medicare, the people back home are listening to us and saying, have they really given us a solution? The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has done that, and the Democratic alternative has done just that. He has said let us take aside all of the surplus that we are getting in the area of Social Security, dedicate it to Social Security and Medicare, and make sure we come up with a fix, a solution. Set the money aside and take away the rhetoric of tax cuts and additional discretionary spending. Solve these problems first before we go home. Medicare is perhaps one of the most aching problems that is out there, home health care, prescription drugs. People each day are asking us in both Democratic and Republican districts, how do we solve this? It is indeed a problem back home in Rhode Island, because I know home health care agencies, the most cost effective, efficient agencies are going out of businesses. People that need the kind of home care, that is the least costly home care, are not getting it and eventually ending up in nursing homes and hospitals. I have a couple in Rhode Island that are 66 and 70 years old. Prescription drugs is something they never thought about when they retired. But after open heart surgery and bypass surgery, both of them, at age 66 and 70, are back working part-time just to pay for the $8,200 a year for prescription drugs they have to pay. Seniors are doing without paying their rent, without paying for food, and sometimes not even paying for the prescriptions because the cost is so high. That is going to come back to all of us in terms of higher taxpayer costs. We should not leave here until we resolve this problem. The only way to do it is, as the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has suggested, lock this money aside, not use it for all those rhetorical questions that are being asked all the time about tax cuts and discretionary spending, and fix the problem. Let us bring us to a solution rather than continuing putting us in this rhetorical oblivion that will never come to a conclusion. End this problem now. Fix Medicare. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Wisconsin (Ms. Baldwin). Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. Chairman, Medicare and Social Security have improved the lives of millions of elderly and disabled Americans. Together they provide a vital safety net which millions of Americans rely on. However, while Medicare is projected to run short of funds in just 9 years, and Social Security will run short of funds by 2032, the Republican budget resolution does nothing to extend the life of Medicare or Social Security. The Democratic budget alternative that will be offered later today will extend the life of Medicare through 2020 in addition to extending the life of Social Security to 2050. {time} 1215 Only after this commitment is fulfilled would we propose to spend money on high priority areas like health, education and the environment. I believe firmly that I would not be standing before my colleagues today if it were not for Medicare. Social Security and Medicare together enabled my grandmother to live independently until she was 90 years old. As her primary caregiver for the last several years, I know the role Social Security and Medicare play in making ends meet, in protecting her from making sure that a medical crisis would not lead to financial ruin. Medicare and Social Security are not just commitments we made to our seniors, they are commitments we made to families. And it is just as important to young people that we have Medicare and Social Security as it is to our seniors, because it keeps our families and our communities strong. We have an historic opportunity to make good on this commitment. The budget decisions we make today will have enormous consequences for decades. The Republican budget resolution squanders this opportunity before us; the opportunity to reduce public debt while protecting the existence of Social Security and Medicare. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means and a former member of the Committee on the Budget. Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding this time to me. [[Page H1714]] Mr. Chairman, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed Social Security and worked for its passage, the Republican Party was dead set against it. When John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson said that having Social Security was not enough, if there was no health security and advanced Medicare, 90 percent of the Republicans in this Congress voted to reject it. When Bill Clinton was elected President, the Republican Party in this House elected a majority leader, my colleague, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey), who said of Social Security, It is ``a rotten trick;'' who said of Medicare that he ``resented'' having to be a part of it as a compulsory government program. So I suppose that against that backdrop the American people should take some confidence and some reassurance in the fact that Medicare and Social Security are even mentioned in this budget resolution. They are indeed mentioned in the resolution. When we look to the budget resolution to see whether there is any money to match the promises made, there is not $1 truly set aside for Social Security and Medicare to assure solvency into the future. All that the Republican budget resolution says is that these vital programs can go broke on schedule, which is not much help to the people of this country. The second indication that we get out of this budget resolution of where the heart of the Republican Party is on these critical issues for hundreds of millions of American citizens who either benefit from these programs today or will in the future is to look to the instructions that they include in this resolution. What instruction do they have about Medicare and Social Security? They have one reconciliation instruction, and it is ``Give us our tax breaks.'' They say ``Give us our tax breaks.'' We say save Medicare and Social Security first. Do the fiscally responsible thing; pay down the debt, preserve these valuable programs, postpone the desire to help those at the top of the economic ladder to some future time, and help those Americans who want these systems preserved. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis), a member of the Committee on the Budget. Mr. DAVIS of Florida. Mr. Chairman, today we have a very fundamental choice before us; we can pass the budget resolution that proposes a tax cut over 10 years of approximately $800 billion, or we can do first things first, and that is we can take up and pass the Spratt amendment, which provides a tax cut of about $137 billion but pays down the publicly held debt, the Federal debt, by more than $137 billion more than the Republican budget proposal. Now, why is that so important? The first thing is it is the right thing to do for our children and grandchildren, and not for them to have to inherit this debt. The second thing is, as we begin to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers, of which I am one, and funding the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, we are going to need some of those funds to pay that. Thirdly, and perhaps most important, one of the best things we can do to protect our economy right now is to pay down the Federal debt. As Chairman Greenspan has testified before the House Committee on the Budget, it has a direct bearing on interest rates. In my home, Florida and Tampa, where the average mortgage for a homeowner is about $115,000, if we drop interest rates two points, down from 8 to 6 percent, that is $155 a month in that homeowner's pocket they would not otherwise have. Paying down the debt and providing that type of tax cut, simple and immediate, to homeowners, to people holding student loans and car loans, is the right thing to do for our children and grandchildren and, most importantly, will help preserve the solvency of Medicare and Social Security as we begin to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey), a member of the Committee on Commerce and also the Committee on the Budget. Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, this Republican bill is a complete fraud. That is the bottom line. They have got hundreds of billions of dollars for tax cuts, mostly for the rich, but not one penny to extend the Medicare trust fund, which is going bankrupt, by the way, in the year 2008. Let us go back to their balanced budget of 1997. The premise was that we would have to cut Medicare and home health care, those are visits made to people's homes who have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and other chronic diseases, $115 billion to give a $90 billion tax break for mostly the wealthiest in America. Now we have this huge surplus. Now, what do the Republicans say? We are going to give that money back to the Medicare recipients; we are going to give that money back to the HMO health care recipients? No, they say, we do not have enough money for those people. Now, the problem, of course, is that the programs were cut fraudulently, using numbers that were not accurate in 1997 in terms of the problem with Medicare. It turns out today that the CBO says that in fact they have found miraculously $88 billion more of savings in Medicare for this 5-year period, and they found an additional hundreds of billions of dollars of revenues that they did not project. How much goes back to Medicare on the Republican side? They do not have a penny. If we kick them in the heart over here, we are going to break our toes. They just do not want to help these old people on Medicare. So, my colleagues, our substitute, with the effort to try to help those most vulnerable, the senior citizens within our society, intends on guaranteeing that Medicare is extended 10 extra years in solvency, so that the senior citizens in our country are going to be given the protection which they deserve. My colleagues, the Republican substitute does nothing, nothing to help the solvency of the Medicare trust fund. Vote ``no'' on the Republican budget here today on the House floor. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, I was elected in 1970 and spent 15 years in the State legislature and spent 10 years here, and I have never seen a budget exercise like this one. Last year, we have to remember, the Republicans did not pass a budget. They never got a budget resolution through the United States Congress. This year they said, we are going to do it, but we are going to do it by jamming it past people so fast they can never figure out what is happening. We listened to a wonderful stump speech by the chairman of the committee today, but when he hands the budget to us 4 hours before and gives us two pieces of paper with the numbers on it, that is all we got, two pieces of paper, to spend $1.7 billion, I say this is a smoke and mirrors budget. My colleagues can look at these pieces of paper and say there is anything in here. They can promise the world. They can promise veterans, they can promise old people, they can promise the National Institutes of Health, they can promise anything on these two pieces of paper, because there is no specificity. There were no hearings. It was simply, ram it through. Now we come to the floor. We get 40 minutes on the Committee on the Budget to talk about this issue. Now, is that because we are busy tomorrow? No. People are going home. Could we have more time on this? No, the Committee on Rules said we have to be out tonight. Where are we going? I guess we are just going out for 2 weeks, yet we cannot spend another 1 or 2 hours on this issue. The gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) is right. I sat on the Medicare Commission, and the Medicare Commission rightly turned down the proposal being jammed through by the Republicans to privatize Medicare, but they are going to do it here. This budget has no money in it to deal with the problems of Medicare. What they are going to do is they are going to come in with their little voucher program. It is going to be called ``premium support.'' They are going to try to ram that out of the Committee on Ways and Means and run it through here and leave the old people holding the bag. This is a bad budget, and I urge Members to vote against the Republican alternative. [[Page H1715]] Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Chambliss). The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays) may yield time. There was no objection. Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. Chairman, I had hoped we were going to come to the floor today to talk about the real facts contained in the Democrat budget versus the Republican budget, but it appears we are getting off base here. But let us look at what the actual dollar numbers are when it comes to Medicare, and here they are. We are going to put $1.8 trillion aside over the next 10 years to save and protect Social Security and Medicare. What does the President do? He is well below us, right down here. These are the actual numbers, Members. Mr. Chairman, today the House is going to consider a budget for the fiscal year 2000 that addresses the issues that matter most to American families. This budget, the first for the new millennium, safeguards Social Security and Medicare, addresses priorities such as education, defense and agriculture, and provides historic tax relief. This budget meets the challenges of the 21st century head-on by adhering to several bedrock principles, each of which is set forth right here. First, we are going to lock away every penny of the Social Security surplus for our Nation's elderly. We are going to set aside more money than the President to strengthen Social Security and Medicare. We are going to create a safe deposit box to ensure that bureaucrats in Washington cannot get their hands on the Social Security Trust Fund money. We are going to pay down more debt than the President's budget. We are going to maintain the spending discipline that carries over from the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. We are going to make national defense a top priority by providing additional resources for things such as pay raises which are specifically set forth in the budget. We are going to provide the resources to train, equip and retain our men and women in uniform, who are in harm's risk as we speak today. We are going to offer security for rural Americans by providing reforms in crop insurance and money to fund that crop insurance reform. And we are going to enact historic tax relief. Yes, tax relief. And it is interesting that opponents of this budget would get up today and argue against tax relief. That is almost un-American, and I really cannot believe we are hearing that in the well today. But, yes, we favor tax relief, and we are going to support tax relief in our budget plan for hard-working Americans. Mr. Chairman, this budget is consistent with the common sense conservative principles of encouraging our communities and individuals to grow from the bottom up, not from Washington down. This is a budget Americans can be proud of, and I urge all of my colleagues to support the Republican budget. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. When I came here, we were paying interest on the national debt equal to about $52 billion. In the years I have been here that bill has gone up to $252 billion. Dead weight. Produces no goods and services for anybody. We have got a proposal in our budget resolution that will drive that debt down $3 trillion. It is good for Social Security, it is good for the economy, it is good for the Federal budget, and it is good for our children and grandchildren. {time} 1230 Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith). (Mr. SMITH of Michigan asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SMITH of Michigan. Mr. Chairman, this chart shows where we were when Republicans took the majority in 1995. For the foreseeable future, at that time, this government went deeper and deeper into debt--for as far as the economist could see. We came in, as the new majority, determined we were going to reduce and slow down spending. Look, we did it. This is historic. I went back over the last 40 years. In every one of those years that the Democrats had control they used the surplus coming in from Social Security for other Government spending. Please look, what we are doing now. We do not have to increase the national debt in this 5 year Republican budget. The President's plan, the Democrats' plan, has to increase the national debt. Their plan forces this country deeper into debt by $2 trillion more than the Republican proposal. I want to say that again to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt). Your plan goes deeper into debt by $2 trillion more than the Republican proposal. Nobody should just talk about the debt to the public. They have got to talk about the total Government debt. Because what we owe the Social Security Trust Fund is just as important as what we owe Wall Street. I want to talk about the caps. The Republicans stay under the caps. The Democrat proposal does not stay under the caps. I am chairman of the Committee on the Budget Task Force on Social Security. That bipartisan task force is working very well together. But I just want to say very clearly that what we are doing for the first time in recent history, is not spending the Social Security surplus for other Government programs. I mean, it is a giant step forward for saving Social Security. We are putting that money aside. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) says that they are saving Social Security by adding a giant IOU to the Medicare Trust Fund and the Social Security Trust Fund. That makes us go deeper into debt. It is not honest. It is a asset for Social Security but a deficit for the general fund. In short it is a mandate for future tax increases for our kids and grandkids. All the review of the President's proposal that suggests that we can save Social Security by adding more IOUs--conclude it is smoke and mirrors. It is! Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Sununu). (Mr. SUNUNU asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SUNUNU. Mr. Chairman, today we are debating the budget. In putting together a budget blueprint, it is important to remember that the Federal budget is an outline of priorities. It is not a detailed specification of every single appropriation bill that we are going to pass over the next year. The Federal budget is $1.7 trillion. The budget blueprint is intended to talk about what our priorities are as a Congress for the next year. In trying to establish those priorities, the Committee on the Budget tried to answer three questions. First and foremost, what about Social Security and Medicare? Those on the other side have talked about these important issues; and we came back with the answer first we should set aside every penny of the Social Security surplus, every penny of that trust fund surplus, to strengthen and protect Social Security and Medicare. As the debate goes on today, we will see time and again that we set aside more to preserve Social Security and Medicare than the President in his budget. We set aside every penny of the surplus for Social Security, not 60 percent as the administration suggested, because it is the right thing to do. Second, we wanted to set priorities about the size and scope of the Federal Government. And we thought it was appropriate that we keep to the commitments of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, a bipartisan agreement that set some control on the growth and scope of the Federal Government. Keeping those commitments again is an important part of the integrity of this budget resolution. And third, what about tax relief? Right now taxes in this country are at a peacetime high. They have not been this high since 1944. And we thought it appropriate that, after we set aside 100 percent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus, we ought to give back the additional surpluses to the American workers in the form of lower taxes. This is about priorities, our priority of saving 100 percent of the Social Security surplus, against the administration's priority, if we can call it that, of [[Page H1716]] only setting aside 60 percent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. Our commitment and priority to keep to the promises we made as part of the 1997 budget agreement. The administration's budget breaks those caps by $30 billion. Our commitment to lower taxes once we have ensured that we protect the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. The administration's commitment to raise taxes by $100 billion. That is the wrong direction for this country. In the end, this budget resolution pays down more debt, does more to protect Social Security and Medicare, and provides fair and honest tax relief. That is a set of priorities we can be proud of. It is a set of priorities that makes sense for the country. And that is why I am proud to support the budget resolution. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 8 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Rivers) and ask unanimous consent that she control the time for yielding to other Members. The CHAIRMAN. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from South Carolina? There was no objection. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen). (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. BENTSEN. Mr. Chairman, I rise in defense of fiscal responsibility and in support of the Democratic budget resolution and in opposition to the Republican budget resolution. When I was elected to Congress, my highest priority was to balance the unified budget. We have apparently accomplished that goal. Now my highest priority is to pay down the publicly held debt and extend Social Security and Medicare solvency. Mr. Chairman, a week ago the majority on the Committee on the Budget submitted two pages of numbers and called it a budget resolution. It is as much a budget resolution as a blank piece of paper is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The budget resolution is two pages, no explanation. Draconian spending cuts of $181 billion over 10 years are hidden in blue smoke and mirrors. This budget says we are going to increase defense spending and education and cut other programs by $27 billion. It is not going to happen. The budget builds on the hope that the CBO can re-estimate the base line just so we can put off until September either any cuts we have to make and either have a showdown or disaster like last year. What this budget will do is bust the caps and the pay-go rules. The majority's budget resolution gives more priority to enacting an $800 billion tax break than paying down the debt. It does not stop Social Security and Medicare from going insolvent. It locks in nearly a trillion-dollar tax cut betting on a 15-year projection that, if the surplus does not materialize, will result in more deficits and more debt. The Republicans say they are saving the surplus in Social Security in the trust fund, but they do nothing to honor the obligation to extending the life of Social Security and Medicare. Let us look at what Alan Greenspan has to say. He is adamantly clear that the best policy is debt reduction. Let me quote him. ``From an economic policy point of view I envisage that the best thing we can do at this particular state is to allow that surplus to run. What that means, of course, is that the debt to the public declines, interest costs on the debt decline, and in my judgment, that contributes to lower long-term interest rates.'' Make no mistake, the Democratic budget resolutions retires nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars of publicly held debt. The Republicans' do not. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, when asked about the rough-and-tumble world of politics, Margaret Thatcher said, ``Well, you don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.'' Mr. Chairman, I would suggest that there is considerable evasion in this budget. Starting with the issue that the Republicans claim to put aside all of the Social Security money for Social Security, in today's Wall Street Journal, page A-28, we find a very interesting article. The Wall Street Journal tells us that their commitment is essentially toothless and can be waived by a simple majority, which is done on the floor every day. This is the Wall Street Journal. They promise us that certain programs will be taken care of, that certain groups will get the things they need. But they forget to tell us, or they evade telling us, that $52 billion of cuts have to be found over the next 5 years to provide what they have in their budget. An earlier speaker talked about what was un-American. Well, I will tell my colleagues what is un-American, Mr. Chairman. What is un- American is not paying our bills, not dealing with our debts, not dealing with our existing obligations. And as a Nation, we have many: Social Security, Medicare, and a national debt that is nearing $6 trillion. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen) mentioned that Alan Greenspan said unequivocally that the best way to deal with our current situation is to pay down the debt and to use both surpluses, on-budget and off- budget. The Democratic proposal here today puts more than $474 billion over the Republican proposal in the next 15 years. The last piece of evasion that I want to speak to today is the suggestion that the tax cuts that are being proposed come purely from the on-budget surplus. That ignores the fact that as these tax cuts play themselves out over the years, by the year 2013 we will be dealing with an on-budget deficit and we will have to dip into Social Security money. Now, that comes at a time when the existing obligations I was talking about, our baby-boomers, begin to retire, and it will be the greatest strain on our budget to provide for them. Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on the Budget. Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. It is so amazing. I mean, really, when it comes right down to it, both sides have done not a pretty good job of coming up with a budget. All right? I mean, there are only so many ways we can do it, with mandatory programs and discretionary programs. There are only a certain few ways we can do it. And so what happened was the President sat down and he said, you know what? I can spend that Social Security surplus and I can have a whole bunch of new programs that I can pass out to people and make them feel good. The Republicans sat down and said, you know what? For the first time since 1969, we are going to set all of it aside, 100 percent of the Social Security surplus, so that it is there not only for Social Security but it is there if we need to find a fix for Medicare. We set all of it aside. The President did not set all of it aside. So what happens today? The last minute, the last opportunity, in run the Democrats, oh, but we did not mean that. We did not quite mean that. We can do better. We can do better than that. We are going to set 100 percent of it aside because they are. And so they rush in here at the last minute. Well, even their last-minute plan does not quite make it. Let me show my colleagues something here. They are talking about debt reduction and how much they want to reduce the debt for their grandchildren and children, and we heard all sorts of speeches waxing philosophical about that. Let us look at the plan. The Republicans set aside more money so we can pay down the debt. The Democrats do not. Those are the facts. Yet they run in here and say, we can do better than that. Let me tell my colleagues something else that is interesting here. When it comes to education, they say this is a priority. Look what we do. The Republicans, the Republicans, spend more time than the President, who stood up here for the State the Union address and said how he is going to support education. Well, let me take my colleagues one example further. Special education. Special education. Since 1975, a program that the Democrats, to their credit, passed one of the most beautiful civil rights pieces of legislation in history, saying every American child [[Page H1717]] ought to be able to attend public school. And what did they do? They did not fund it. And they have not funded it since 1975. {time} 1245 For the first time, the Republicans are funding IDEA, special education, $1 billion extra in our budget than the President's for special education. Plus we are saying to governors and States who are crying to Washington to give them more flexibility for education, we are letting them spend excess dollars from welfare, we are giving them the ability to transfer funds from other education programs, and we are allowing them, if we get more money at the end of the year, this surplus may grow as everyone has talked about so far, in our plan we allow special education to get a little bump up. That is not in their plan, either. Mr. Chairman, it just is amazing to me with the Academy Awards being last week how they can continue to win more Academy Awards for this budget. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Could I have the benefit of the chart of the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), the chart he just used that showed the President commits 62 percent of the surplus and you commit 100 percent of the surplus? Mr. NUSSLE. The gentleman did not bring his own charts today? Mr. SPRATT. That is 62 percent of the unified surplus which he quotes, $1.8 trillion. One hundred percent of the Social Security surplus, which is part of it, equals $1.8 trillion. They are the same thing over a different period. Over 15 years it works out to the same thing. Mr. NUSSLE. That is the problem, if the gentleman would yield. Mr. SPRATT. No, I cannot yield because I do not have the time to yield. Mr. NUSSLE. He wants to use my chart but I cannot talk about it? Mr. SPRATT. In a little while we will answer what he just said about education. Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, I hope he does. Mr. SPRATT. Because I do not think the facts will bear him out. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. I believe there was another problem with the charts that were just shown to us in that while the speaker, I am sure he misspoke, when the speaker said he was comparing the Republican plan to the Democratic plan on the floor from House Democrats today, I believe he used numbers from the President's proposal and not from our budget today relative to debt reduction. Secondly, the question of IDEA, special education, is one I am very interested in, because for several years I have offered an amendment to the Committee on the Budget as well as to the Congress to deal with fully funding IDEA, making the commitment that was passed so long ago real, to bring funding up to 40 percent of real cost. That was offered in the Committee on the Budget last week and to a person every Republican, including the gentleman from Iowa, voted against doing that. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley). Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, I thank the ranking member of our Committee on the Budget for the terrific job he has done. Mr. Chairman, if I could yield first of all to the gentleman from North Carolina. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, we want to talk about education. There is a lot that is wrong with this Republican budget resolution. We need to discuss these issues in depth. The budget resolution is arguably the most important single decision we make here. It is the blueprint for how Federal resources will be used for the coming fiscal year and on into the future. So the Democratic and the Republican proposals we are considering here today need to be debated in depth. They are a study, in fact, in contrasting priorities. The Republican budget would provide no help in extending the solvency of Medicare and Social Security. It falls short on veterans health care and crop insurance for our farmers and other critical needs. The Democratic alternative would extend the solvency of Medicare and Social Security, would provide more funding for critical priorities, would implement targeted tax relief, and would reduce the debt held by the public more than the Republican proposal. Mr. Chairman, we want to talk especially about education, because nowhere is the contrast more stark than with education. Our Republican colleagues boast about providing some increase for elementary and secondary education, but, overall, funding for education and training would be cut by $1.2 billion from the nominal 1999 level in the Republican budget for 2000. The result would be drastic cuts in funding for other priorities like higher education and teacher training and Pell grants and Head Start. Over 5 years, the Republican budget cuts to education and training would result in a 6.9 percent decrease in purchasing power, and over 10 years the decline in purchasing power for education would be over 18 percent. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, one of the things that I find interesting about this budget is we were told absolutely education is increased. They did increase it for elementary and secondary education. But what they do not tell us is that they are cutting it in all other parts of education. They do not say specifically where they are going to cut those budgets. But it is cut over 10 years from this level by $36.5 billion. So they are cutting programs like Head Start and Pell grants and work-to-school programs. That is where the cuts are. And so again it is one of those bait and switch budgets that they tell us we are doing great things over here and then they do not tell us what the other hand is doing, which is cutting education. This budget does not reflect that our school facilities are in a crisis situation. There was a study done by the engineers that said of all of our infrastructure, our school infrastructure is the one that is in the greatest need. We would not work in the schools that we send our children to. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price). Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I would like to engage the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt) and the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley) in a further discussion of this. It is important to get these facts out. Is it not true that the Democratic alternative would make room for school construction? The kind of proposal that the President has made to give tax credits in lieu of interest on bonds in these low-income areas that need desperately to build or modernize facilities, or like the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge) and I have introduced to target high-growth areas so that our kids are not going to school in trailers. I come from a district where we have hundreds of trailers, thousands of kids going to school in these kinds of facilities. We need to get ahead of the curve in school construction. Mr. HOLT. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey. Mr. HOLT. The Democratic budget does indeed provide for modernizing schools. In fact, it would provide tax credits that would allow modernizing of up to 6,000 public schools. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, one of the other things that I think is interesting to note, not only are schools in bad shape right now and we have talked about trailers. We have first graders that have to walk across an open area in Oregon where it rains all the time. This is not a wonderful thing to do to wash their hands or go to the bathroom. And some of the rooms are in such disrepair. Again, my colleagues would not work in that facility but we expect our children to learn in that facility. The other thing that I think is interesting is there have been studies that have been done that show that, in fact, students do better in schools that reflect our society and are not in such disrepair. They do better when our schools are repaired. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Those studies are very convincing, that the students perform better when they are in first-rate facilities. It is not just an abstract issue. We have thousands of [[Page H1718]] kids going to school in these facilities. Often they are going to lunch at 10:30 because the cafeteria facilities haven't kept pace with the addition of trailers. They do not have adequate gym or restroom facilities. It simply is a misplaced priority to say that we cannot afford to do this. The Republican budget squeezes it out. The Democratic budget would make room for that kind of school modernization. Let me ask my colleagues, also, to address the other major initiative that we are looking at in this Democratic budget: getting class size down and getting 100,000 new teachers in the classrooms of America. We made a start on that last year. What is it going to take to keep that going? Mr. HOLT. If the gentleman will yield further, indeed, these are connected. Simple math will tell us, we cannot have more teachers and get the smaller class sizes in the early years unless we have the classrooms to put them in. And so this Democratic budget does allow for both of those, continuation of the hiring of new teachers, the 100,000 new teachers that we are calling for, we will continue down that line with the Democratic budget, in addition to providing for the loans for the construction and modernization of facilities. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. We are talking about a stark contrast in these budget proposals. The one makes room for reduced class size and for school construction and also lets us make good on what we promised last year when we passed the higher education act, opening up opportunity through Pell grants and an improved student loan program. The other budget makes a short-term increase in education over the long haul but would drastically decrease this funding. Mr. HOLT. Unlike the Republican budget, the Democratic alternative does not cut higher education, training and social services in order to increase elementary and secondary education programs. That is a key difference. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. I used to be a teacher. I can guarantee my colleagues that smaller classroom sizes, you have much better performance by the students. Do not take just my word for it but go out and look at all of the research on this subject and you will find if we can get our classroom size to 18 and under, that students' performance goes way up. Not only does it go up, it stays up. We are trying to get it down in K through 3. But if you get it down, get that ratio down, the performance goes straight up and that performance stays up throughout their years in school. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. And the impact is the greatest in grades 1 through 3, is that right? Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Right. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the way my colleagues have chimed in here. There is no question that we are dealing with a stark contrast in many areas of this budget, but certainly in education. In dollar terms, the Democratic alternative next year provides $2.6 billion more for education and training, and then over the next 5 years we are talking about a $10.2 billion gap. It is a gap that we have got to close. Vote for the Democratic alternative. Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 45 seconds. Mr. Chairman, the bottom line is, this Republican budget locks away the entire Social Security trust fund surplus for our Nation's elderly, the entire amount. We set aside more than the President to save, strengthen and preserve Social Security and as necessary Medicare as well. We create a safety deposit box to assure Social Security trust funds cannot be raided. We pay down more public debt than the President. We maintain the spending discipline for the 1997 budget act. We provide additional resources to properly train, equip and retain our men and women in uniform. And we will enact historic tax relief after we have solved Social Security for our children and our children's children. That is what we do. The President wants to spend more. The Democrats want to spend more. We do not. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Herger). Mr. HERGER. Mr. Chairman, this Republican budget brings honesty back to the budget process and ends a 30-year assault on our Social Security system. For the first time, every single penny of Social Security taxes will be locked up for Social Security and Medicare. Over the next 10 years, this budget saves $1.8 trillion for these two critical programs for our seniors and future generations. As my colleagues can see on this chart, while the Republican budget saves every penny, 100 percent, of the Social Security surplus, the President's budget saves only 62 percent of Social Security over the next 10 years. Mr. Chairman, saving just 62 percent of the

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PERSONAL EXPLANATION
(House of Representatives - March 25, 1999)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages H1710-H1780] PERSONAL EXPLANATION Mrs. EMERSON. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 72 and 73, I was not present due to a [[Page H1711]] family emergency. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.'' The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Foley). Pursuant to House Resolution 131 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the concurrent resolution, House Concurrent Resolution 68. {time} 1148 In the Committee of the Whole Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 68) establishing the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2000 and setting forth appropriate budgetary levels for each of fiscal years 2001 through 2009, with Mr. Camp in the chair. The Clerk read the title of the concurrent resolution. The CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to the rule, the concurrent resolution is considered as having been read the first time. Under the rule, general debate shall not exceed 3 hours, with 2 hours confined to the congressional budget, equally divided and controlled by the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on the Budget, and 1 hour on the subject of economic goals and policies, equally divided and controlled by the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Saxton) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Stark). The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) each will control 1 hour of debate on the congressional budget. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich). Mr. KASICH. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, today we offer the first budget of the next century and a new agenda for the new millennium. I think this is a great day for the House, because we have been able to move forward from an era not very long ago when, as we looked out across the horizon, the economic horizon of this country, we saw deficits as far as the eye could see. The majority came into its position in 1995 when we first advanced the need for economic stimulus driven by tax relief, giving more power, providing more incentives for risk-taking, and at the same time a big dose of fiscal restraint; in other words, starting to get the Congress of the United States to live within its means. The fact is that in 1995, Mr. Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System, said that if you can offer a legitimate and credible plan to balance the Federal budget, he said that he believed that interest rates would decline by 2 points. I must also remind Members that in 1995, as we assumed control of the House of Representatives, interest rates had been rising, the economy had been slowing, there was concern about unemployment. The fact that we laid down a plan that would begin to put our fiscal house in order, to put us in a position where the Congress of the United States would operate really like the American family, and that we would restore some of the incentives to risk-take, I believe that has contributed significantly to the economic gains that we have had in this country. Now today, as we stand here, as I stand here in the well, we are about to pass a budget that not only captures the surpluses of Medicare and social security, but at the same time has the on-budget surpluses that so many people have sought for years. In other words, when we take a look at the balance sheets of the Federal Government, both in the social security and Medicare accounts and in the non-social security and Medicare accounts, we have been able to achieve not only a balanced budget, but also some huge surpluses. Let me say, at the outset, we are doing something that the Congress of the United States has never done: We are taking all the payroll taxes that we collect every day that are related to social security and Medicare and we are locking them into an account so that the politicians, Republicans and Democrats, cannot raid those accounts for any other spending item. That money will sit in an account, and until we enact a plan that actually saves social security, that money will be used to pay down part of the Federal debt. Last year we paid down about $50 billion of the debt. Most Americans do not know that. This year we would anticipate paying down at least $125 billion of the national debt. Of course, if I was a citizen listening to somebody in the well of this House make that claim, I would greet it with great skepticism, but the fact is that what I am saying is true. Last year the publicly-held debt was paid down by $50 billion, and in fact this year we anticipate at least $125 billion of the publicly-held debt to be retired. That does not allow us to rest on our laurels, by any stretch of the imagination, because we must work every day to make the power of government less and the power of people greater. We need to run America from the bottom up, so people can have control over the education for their children, so that the baby boomers and the younger generation can have hope of having a decent retirement by having more control, so Americans can have more money in their pockets. The fact is, as it relates to social security and Medicare, we know those programs have to be transformed, and not just to protect the retirement benefits of our seniors today. I would argue that that is a given. Because of a pay-as-you-go system, we know that the baby boomers are able to carry the load of their parents, but I want the moms and dads of this country to realize that the people who are really at risk are their children. I want mom and dad who are on social security and Medicare to realize that we are going to stand up and protect their benefits, but it is their children, their baby boomer sons and daughters, who are at risk. We must have the courage to transform this system so that the benefits just do not accrue to our seniors today, but that our baby boomers and their children will also have retirement security. Sad to say that the President has taken a leave of absence on this. He is missing-in-action as it relates to the issue of social security and Medicare. Just last week the Medicare Commission, headed by a member of his own party, was blunted by the action of the President. That Democrat, leader of this program to try to extend the life of social security and to reform it so it is available for the baby boomers, that Senator said last week that the administration and many in his party were more interested in using the issue of Medicare as a political weapon than they were interested in being able to transform and save Medicare, not just for today's seniors, but for the baby boomers and their children. That is the worst of American politics, to use the threat of destroying economic security for our senior citizens to try to win votes. That is not what makes America great. What makes America great is not just to debate when Republicans and Democrats disagree, but the ability to search for a common goal, to preserve some of the vital retirement programs for this Nation, to keep the demagoguery out of this debate. Let us work together to try to extend the life of Medicare and social security. At the same time, we are also honoring the 1997 budget agreement. The President breaks the spending caps. He breaks the discipline of the 1997 budget agreement. We will not do that. Not only will we not break the discipline of the 1997 agreement that has contributed to a stronger economy, but we will not raid the social security and Medicare trust fund the way the President does. We have decided to save it all, and to take that and coordinate with that the 1997 budget agreement by having fiscal restraint. It is about priorities in America today. What we are saying is that the programs of defense and education ought to be top priorities in our budget. There was a paper distributed on the floor with more misleading information about the fact that this bill does not include a pay raise for the military. That is false. That is patently false. I am beginning to believe that many people who stand in opposition to this bill are just going to ignore the facts. This is not going to be a debate about what is in the bill, this is a debate about what fictions we can create. [[Page H1712]] There will be provided for in this budget document a pay raise for our troops. The Committee on Armed Services will come to the floor and tell us that. We know that it is necessary to boost the spending for the military. That is precisely what we do in this bill. At the same time, we also believe we should emphasize education. The fact is, in education we have provided more money than the President has, not just for defense but for education as well. As Members know, we are very interested in education flexibility, so that the school districts can manage their challenges better at the local level without having to have a bureaucrat a thousand miles away who does not even know what time zone it is in these local school districts to tell them how to manage their challenges. In addition to all of this, Mr. Chairman, there is tax relief for the taxpayers. The fact of the matter is there are many on the other side of the aisle that bristle at the thought of a tax cut for Americans. It has become almost a philosophy, almost a mantra, to make the argument that there is something wrong with shrinking the size of the government and letting peoples' pocketbooks grow bigger. I want to warn a number of my friends, it is not only wrong for the country but it is very bad politics to make an argument that the budget of the government ought to grow while our personal and family budgets ought to shrink, and that somehow we should pound our chests in self- righteous indignation at the notion that we want to work to cut the size of government and give more money to the American people. {time} 1200 If we are going to run America from the bottom up, if we are going to let Americans be able to pursue their hopes and dreams, Mr. Chairman, the more money that one has in one's pocket, the more one can control one's own destiny, the more power that one has. The smaller this amount becomes, the less power one has. Power is a zero sum game. If one has less and the government has more, who has got the power? When the government has less and if one has more, who has got the power? In our country today, as we approach the new millennium and we set the new agenda for the next century, what we do know is that the strength of America, harkening back to where our founders was, was a limited government; the dignity of the individual was to be preserved; that the individual in our society was what was most important in a Nation that recognizes that freedom is precious; and that that the future is ours. So, Mr. Chairman, we intend not only to preserve Social Security and Medicare, we not only agree to prioritize the items of national security and education, but at the same time, we also believe that the American people ought to be empowered, that the American people ought to have more money in their pockets in order to provide, not just for themselves and not just for their communities, but for those that may live in the shadows of their communities who have less and cannot be ignored in America. That is the great tradition of America. More in one's pocket means more for one's family. For those who have not been so fortunate, we have an obligation to take care of them. So at the end of the day, Mr. Chairman, I think we present a budget for the new millennium that is right in pace with where the American people want to go. The American people hunger for more control over their lives and more power in order to fix the problems, to meet the challenges that they see every day. This budget will begin to preserve and reform and transform the programs for economic security in our senior years, at the same time paying down some of the national debt and, most important, beginning to transfer again, continuing to transfer power, money, and influence from the institution of government into the pockets of people. We will move forward on this. We will lay down a good marker as we enter the next millennium. We will set the pace and set the direction for what can be a glorious new century for, not just Americans, but for people all over the world who have come to see us as a model and as an example of the power of freedom and individuality and compassion and caring and vision. Vote for the budget. Reject these alternatives and, at the same time, reject the President's budget and set ourselves on the right course. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 6 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I was trying to get the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) to tell us why Function 950 of his budget resolution provides no adjustment as it is required to do to provide for the pay raise, the extra pay raise for selected pay grades and officers and NCOs and for the military retirement benefits. The fact of the matter is, Function 950, the military retirement account, where that charge needs to be made, is absolutely unadjusted in their budget resolution. So it does not provide for the pay raise and the benefits that our troops have been promised. Let me go to the overarching subject, the budget, and the happy occasion that we find ourselves in today. I did not ever think that I would serve to see the day where we have surpluses as far as the eye could see. I think it is worth taking just a minute to track down the trail we have followed for the last 10 years that have led us to this happy set of circumstances. In 1990, we had a budget summit that lasted 6 months. We finally brought it to the floor. It was defeated once. Then the Democrats put the vote up to pass President Bush's budget summit agreement. There were only 80 votes on that side of the aisle. It implemented discretionary pay caps, a pay-as-you-go rule, and the kind of disciplines that have served us well to get rid of the deficit. But it did not have any obvious effect because it was eclipsed by a recession. In 1993, when President Clinton came to office, he found on his desk awaiting him the economic report of the President. In it, Michael Boskin, his Economic Council chief, said the deficit this year will be $332 billion. That was the baseline from which the Clinton administration began. From that baseline, in 1993, we reduced the deficit with the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993, which had exclusively Democratic votes in the House and the Senate from $330 billion projected level, $290 billion actual level in 1992, to $22 billion in 1997. Then our colleagues on the other side of the aisle joined with us, and we finished the job and wiped out that additional $22 billion of deficit and lay the basis for going into the next century. It is critically important that we did this, because until we dealt with the year-to-year deficit, we could not deal with the next problem; and that is the problem, the challenge of an aging society. Our society is getting older and older. I am a war baby. A huge generation of young people were born, babies were born in 1946 until 1964, and they will start retiring in about 10 or 12 years. When they do, they will put unprecedented strain on the most popular, most successful program ever invented by the government, the Social Security program, so much so that they may put in jeopardy its solvency by the year 2032. The Medicare program, which runs a close second in popularity, is in even greater jeopardy because the cost of medical care is rising along with the demographic increases, and it, too, is threatened with insolvency in the year 2008. We have an opportunity to do something about that. We have an opportunity to take the work we began in 1990 and 1993 and 1997 and deal with the next problem, which is a daunting challenge, preparing this country and this government for the burdens of the next century cast upon us by an aging society. Our budget, the Democratic budget, rises to that challenge; theirs does not. We are going to have other speakers who will turn to this topic, but let me just give my colleagues the highlights and tell them what is the difference between us and them. I will give it to my colleagues in a nutshell. We protect the Social Security Trust Fund. We proposed to protect the Trust Fund so that 100 percent of the payroll taxes coming into it are spent exclusively for the benefit of that particular program for the first time probably in 30 or 40 years. We propose to do it by [[Page H1713]] directing the Treasurer of the United States to take that percentage of payroll taxes not needed to pay benefits that year and to buy down public debt. How does that happen? That means that, when the obligations come due in 2020 and 2030, the Treasury will be in better shape than ever because it will have lower debt and lower debt service to meet those obligations. We also, unlike the Republicans, do something about Medicare, because we see Medicare and Social Security as linked together. We extend the life of Medicare, the solvency of the Medicare program from 2020. They leave it as it is. They leave it in a lurch. We are still opposed to huge tax cuts in the out years, $143 billion in the first 5 years and $450 billion plus in the second 5 years, rising to as much as a trillion dollars between 2009 and 2014, which will drain the budget dry of the funds needed to do something about the Medicare program. Do my colleagues want to know the difference between us and them? Look at the Trust Fund account for Social Security. In our plan, Social Security will have $3.4 trillion more money at the end of 15 years. They will add $1.8 trillion. We are twice as good as they. With Medicare, we add $400 billion. To their Trust Fund, they add a paltry $14 billion. There are significant differences. If my colleagues care about meeting the challenge in the next century, this is a budget resolution to vote for. Mr. Chairman, I yield 14 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott), and I ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to control that time. The CHAIRMAN. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from South Carolina? There was no objection. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui). Mr. MATSUI. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, Social Security is probably the most important program Americans have had over the years. It takes care of the senior citizens of America. As anybody knows, if we did not have Social Security today, half the senior population would live in poverty. One-third of the benefits of Social Security go to families that have the bread winner disabled or perhaps dies. So many children who no longer have a mother or father who are the bread winners in that family can still go on to school and perhaps college. This is a very, very critical program. What the budget of the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) does is adds 18 more years to that program so that it will be solvent to the year 2050, 50 more years of solvency total. The Republican plan does not add one year to that solvency. As we continue this debate, it is my hope that the Republicans respond to the March 13 letter from the actuary of the Social Security, Mr. Harry Ballantine of which everyone bases their conclusions on. In that letter, in the second paragraph, he says, The proposal of the Republicans would not have any significant effect on the long-range solvency of the Social Security program under the intermediary assumptions of the Trustee's report. Thus, the estimated long-range actuarial deficit of 2.19 percent of taxable payroll and the year of combined trust funds exhaustion would not change. So when we hear that the Republicans are saying they extend the life of Social Security by protecting the money, they do not. In fact, they can use the money for a tax cut. They can use it for a tax cut. So bear in mind what this is all about, this debate, is to protect Social Security, and the Democratic bill does that. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Weygand). Mr. WEYGAND. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) for yielding me this time. I particularly want to thank the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) for providing us with this alternative. When we talk so much, as both sides have, about Social Security and Medicare, the people back home are listening to us and saying, have they really given us a solution? The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has done that, and the Democratic alternative has done just that. He has said let us take aside all of the surplus that we are getting in the area of Social Security, dedicate it to Social Security and Medicare, and make sure we come up with a fix, a solution. Set the money aside and take away the rhetoric of tax cuts and additional discretionary spending. Solve these problems first before we go home. Medicare is perhaps one of the most aching problems that is out there, home health care, prescription drugs. People each day are asking us in both Democratic and Republican districts, how do we solve this? It is indeed a problem back home in Rhode Island, because I know home health care agencies, the most cost effective, efficient agencies are going out of businesses. People that need the kind of home care, that is the least costly home care, are not getting it and eventually ending up in nursing homes and hospitals. I have a couple in Rhode Island that are 66 and 70 years old. Prescription drugs is something they never thought about when they retired. But after open heart surgery and bypass surgery, both of them, at age 66 and 70, are back working part-time just to pay for the $8,200 a year for prescription drugs they have to pay. Seniors are doing without paying their rent, without paying for food, and sometimes not even paying for the prescriptions because the cost is so high. That is going to come back to all of us in terms of higher taxpayer costs. We should not leave here until we resolve this problem. The only way to do it is, as the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has suggested, lock this money aside, not use it for all those rhetorical questions that are being asked all the time about tax cuts and discretionary spending, and fix the problem. Let us bring us to a solution rather than continuing putting us in this rhetorical oblivion that will never come to a conclusion. End this problem now. Fix Medicare. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Wisconsin (Ms. Baldwin). Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. Chairman, Medicare and Social Security have improved the lives of millions of elderly and disabled Americans. Together they provide a vital safety net which millions of Americans rely on. However, while Medicare is projected to run short of funds in just 9 years, and Social Security will run short of funds by 2032, the Republican budget resolution does nothing to extend the life of Medicare or Social Security. The Democratic budget alternative that will be offered later today will extend the life of Medicare through 2020 in addition to extending the life of Social Security to 2050. {time} 1215 Only after this commitment is fulfilled would we propose to spend money on high priority areas like health, education and the environment. I believe firmly that I would not be standing before my colleagues today if it were not for Medicare. Social Security and Medicare together enabled my grandmother to live independently until she was 90 years old. As her primary caregiver for the last several years, I know the role Social Security and Medicare play in making ends meet, in protecting her from making sure that a medical crisis would not lead to financial ruin. Medicare and Social Security are not just commitments we made to our seniors, they are commitments we made to families. And it is just as important to young people that we have Medicare and Social Security as it is to our seniors, because it keeps our families and our communities strong. We have an historic opportunity to make good on this commitment. The budget decisions we make today will have enormous consequences for decades. The Republican budget resolution squanders this opportunity before us; the opportunity to reduce public debt while protecting the existence of Social Security and Medicare. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means and a former member of the Committee on the Budget. Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding this time to me. [[Page H1714]] Mr. Chairman, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed Social Security and worked for its passage, the Republican Party was dead set against it. When John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson said that having Social Security was not enough, if there was no health security and advanced Medicare, 90 percent of the Republicans in this Congress voted to reject it. When Bill Clinton was elected President, the Republican Party in this House elected a majority leader, my colleague, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey), who said of Social Security, It is ``a rotten trick;'' who said of Medicare that he ``resented'' having to be a part of it as a compulsory government program. So I suppose that against that backdrop the American people should take some confidence and some reassurance in the fact that Medicare and Social Security are even mentioned in this budget resolution. They are indeed mentioned in the resolution. When we look to the budget resolution to see whether there is any money to match the promises made, there is not $1 truly set aside for Social Security and Medicare to assure solvency into the future. All that the Republican budget resolution says is that these vital programs can go broke on schedule, which is not much help to the people of this country. The second indication that we get out of this budget resolution of where the heart of the Republican Party is on these critical issues for hundreds of millions of American citizens who either benefit from these programs today or will in the future is to look to the instructions that they include in this resolution. What instruction do they have about Medicare and Social Security? They have one reconciliation instruction, and it is ``Give us our tax breaks.'' They say ``Give us our tax breaks.'' We say save Medicare and Social Security first. Do the fiscally responsible thing; pay down the debt, preserve these valuable programs, postpone the desire to help those at the top of the economic ladder to some future time, and help those Americans who want these systems preserved. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis), a member of the Committee on the Budget. Mr. DAVIS of Florida. Mr. Chairman, today we have a very fundamental choice before us; we can pass the budget resolution that proposes a tax cut over 10 years of approximately $800 billion, or we can do first things first, and that is we can take up and pass the Spratt amendment, which provides a tax cut of about $137 billion but pays down the publicly held debt, the Federal debt, by more than $137 billion more than the Republican budget proposal. Now, why is that so important? The first thing is it is the right thing to do for our children and grandchildren, and not for them to have to inherit this debt. The second thing is, as we begin to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers, of which I am one, and funding the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, we are going to need some of those funds to pay that. Thirdly, and perhaps most important, one of the best things we can do to protect our economy right now is to pay down the Federal debt. As Chairman Greenspan has testified before the House Committee on the Budget, it has a direct bearing on interest rates. In my home, Florida and Tampa, where the average mortgage for a homeowner is about $115,000, if we drop interest rates two points, down from 8 to 6 percent, that is $155 a month in that homeowner's pocket they would not otherwise have. Paying down the debt and providing that type of tax cut, simple and immediate, to homeowners, to people holding student loans and car loans, is the right thing to do for our children and grandchildren and, most importantly, will help preserve the solvency of Medicare and Social Security as we begin to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey), a member of the Committee on Commerce and also the Committee on the Budget. Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, this Republican bill is a complete fraud. That is the bottom line. They have got hundreds of billions of dollars for tax cuts, mostly for the rich, but not one penny to extend the Medicare trust fund, which is going bankrupt, by the way, in the year 2008. Let us go back to their balanced budget of 1997. The premise was that we would have to cut Medicare and home health care, those are visits made to people's homes who have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and other chronic diseases, $115 billion to give a $90 billion tax break for mostly the wealthiest in America. Now we have this huge surplus. Now, what do the Republicans say? We are going to give that money back to the Medicare recipients; we are going to give that money back to the HMO health care recipients? No, they say, we do not have enough money for those people. Now, the problem, of course, is that the programs were cut fraudulently, using numbers that were not accurate in 1997 in terms of the problem with Medicare. It turns out today that the CBO says that in fact they have found miraculously $88 billion more of savings in Medicare for this 5-year period, and they found an additional hundreds of billions of dollars of revenues that they did not project. How much goes back to Medicare on the Republican side? They do not have a penny. If we kick them in the heart over here, we are going to break our toes. They just do not want to help these old people on Medicare. So, my colleagues, our substitute, with the effort to try to help those most vulnerable, the senior citizens within our society, intends on guaranteeing that Medicare is extended 10 extra years in solvency, so that the senior citizens in our country are going to be given the protection which they deserve. My colleagues, the Republican substitute does nothing, nothing to help the solvency of the Medicare trust fund. Vote ``no'' on the Republican budget here today on the House floor. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, I was elected in 1970 and spent 15 years in the State legislature and spent 10 years here, and I have never seen a budget exercise like this one. Last year, we have to remember, the Republicans did not pass a budget. They never got a budget resolution through the United States Congress. This year they said, we are going to do it, but we are going to do it by jamming it past people so fast they can never figure out what is happening. We listened to a wonderful stump speech by the chairman of the committee today, but when he hands the budget to us 4 hours before and gives us two pieces of paper with the numbers on it, that is all we got, two pieces of paper, to spend $1.7 billion, I say this is a smoke and mirrors budget. My colleagues can look at these pieces of paper and say there is anything in here. They can promise the world. They can promise veterans, they can promise old people, they can promise the National Institutes of Health, they can promise anything on these two pieces of paper, because there is no specificity. There were no hearings. It was simply, ram it through. Now we come to the floor. We get 40 minutes on the Committee on the Budget to talk about this issue. Now, is that because we are busy tomorrow? No. People are going home. Could we have more time on this? No, the Committee on Rules said we have to be out tonight. Where are we going? I guess we are just going out for 2 weeks, yet we cannot spend another 1 or 2 hours on this issue. The gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) is right. I sat on the Medicare Commission, and the Medicare Commission rightly turned down the proposal being jammed through by the Republicans to privatize Medicare, but they are going to do it here. This budget has no money in it to deal with the problems of Medicare. What they are going to do is they are going to come in with their little voucher program. It is going to be called ``premium support.'' They are going to try to ram that out of the Committee on Ways and Means and run it through here and leave the old people holding the bag. This is a bad budget, and I urge Members to vote against the Republican alternative. [[Page H1715]] Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Chambliss). The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays) may yield time. There was no objection. Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. Chairman, I had hoped we were going to come to the floor today to talk about the real facts contained in the Democrat budget versus the Republican budget, but it appears we are getting off base here. But let us look at what the actual dollar numbers are when it comes to Medicare, and here they are. We are going to put $1.8 trillion aside over the next 10 years to save and protect Social Security and Medicare. What does the President do? He is well below us, right down here. These are the actual numbers, Members. Mr. Chairman, today the House is going to consider a budget for the fiscal year 2000 that addresses the issues that matter most to American families. This budget, the first for the new millennium, safeguards Social Security and Medicare, addresses priorities such as education, defense and agriculture, and provides historic tax relief. This budget meets the challenges of the 21st century head-on by adhering to several bedrock principles, each of which is set forth right here. First, we are going to lock away every penny of the Social Security surplus for our Nation's elderly. We are going to set aside more money than the President to strengthen Social Security and Medicare. We are going to create a safe deposit box to ensure that bureaucrats in Washington cannot get their hands on the Social Security Trust Fund money. We are going to pay down more debt than the President's budget. We are going to maintain the spending discipline that carries over from the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. We are going to make national defense a top priority by providing additional resources for things such as pay raises which are specifically set forth in the budget. We are going to provide the resources to train, equip and retain our men and women in uniform, who are in harm's risk as we speak today. We are going to offer security for rural Americans by providing reforms in crop insurance and money to fund that crop insurance reform. And we are going to enact historic tax relief. Yes, tax relief. And it is interesting that opponents of this budget would get up today and argue against tax relief. That is almost un-American, and I really cannot believe we are hearing that in the well today. But, yes, we favor tax relief, and we are going to support tax relief in our budget plan for hard-working Americans. Mr. Chairman, this budget is consistent with the common sense conservative principles of encouraging our communities and individuals to grow from the bottom up, not from Washington down. This is a budget Americans can be proud of, and I urge all of my colleagues to support the Republican budget. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. When I came here, we were paying interest on the national debt equal to about $52 billion. In the years I have been here that bill has gone up to $252 billion. Dead weight. Produces no goods and services for anybody. We have got a proposal in our budget resolution that will drive that debt down $3 trillion. It is good for Social Security, it is good for the economy, it is good for the Federal budget, and it is good for our children and grandchildren. {time} 1230 Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith). (Mr. SMITH of Michigan asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SMITH of Michigan. Mr. Chairman, this chart shows where we were when Republicans took the majority in 1995. For the foreseeable future, at that time, this government went deeper and deeper into debt--for as far as the economist could see. We came in, as the new majority, determined we were going to reduce and slow down spending. Look, we did it. This is historic. I went back over the last 40 years. In every one of those years that the Democrats had control they used the surplus coming in from Social Security for other Government spending. Please look, what we are doing now. We do not have to increase the national debt in this 5 year Republican budget. The President's plan, the Democrats' plan, has to increase the national debt. Their plan forces this country deeper into debt by $2 trillion more than the Republican proposal. I want to say that again to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt). Your plan goes deeper into debt by $2 trillion more than the Republican proposal. Nobody should just talk about the debt to the public. They have got to talk about the total Government debt. Because what we owe the Social Security Trust Fund is just as important as what we owe Wall Street. I want to talk about the caps. The Republicans stay under the caps. The Democrat proposal does not stay under the caps. I am chairman of the Committee on the Budget Task Force on Social Security. That bipartisan task force is working very well together. But I just want to say very clearly that what we are doing for the first time in recent history, is not spending the Social Security surplus for other Government programs. I mean, it is a giant step forward for saving Social Security. We are putting that money aside. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) says that they are saving Social Security by adding a giant IOU to the Medicare Trust Fund and the Social Security Trust Fund. That makes us go deeper into debt. It is not honest. It is a asset for Social Security but a deficit for the general fund. In short it is a mandate for future tax increases for our kids and grandkids. All the review of the President's proposal that suggests that we can save Social Security by adding more IOUs--conclude it is smoke and mirrors. It is! Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Sununu). (Mr. SUNUNU asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SUNUNU. Mr. Chairman, today we are debating the budget. In putting together a budget blueprint, it is important to remember that the Federal budget is an outline of priorities. It is not a detailed specification of every single appropriation bill that we are going to pass over the next year. The Federal budget is $1.7 trillion. The budget blueprint is intended to talk about what our priorities are as a Congress for the next year. In trying to establish those priorities, the Committee on the Budget tried to answer three questions. First and foremost, what about Social Security and Medicare? Those on the other side have talked about these important issues; and we came back with the answer first we should set aside every penny of the Social Security surplus, every penny of that trust fund surplus, to strengthen and protect Social Security and Medicare. As the debate goes on today, we will see time and again that we set aside more to preserve Social Security and Medicare than the President in his budget. We set aside every penny of the surplus for Social Security, not 60 percent as the administration suggested, because it is the right thing to do. Second, we wanted to set priorities about the size and scope of the Federal Government. And we thought it was appropriate that we keep to the commitments of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, a bipartisan agreement that set some control on the growth and scope of the Federal Government. Keeping those commitments again is an important part of the integrity of this budget resolution. And third, what about tax relief? Right now taxes in this country are at a peacetime high. They have not been this high since 1944. And we thought it appropriate that, after we set aside 100 percent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus, we ought to give back the additional surpluses to the American workers in the form of lower taxes. This is about priorities, our priority of saving 100 percent of the Social Security surplus, against the administration's priority, if we can call it that, of [[Page H1716]] only setting aside 60 percent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. Our commitment and priority to keep to the promises we made as part of the 1997 budget agreement. The administration's budget breaks those caps by $30 billion. Our commitment to lower taxes once we have ensured that we protect the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. The administration's commitment to raise taxes by $100 billion. That is the wrong direction for this country. In the end, this budget resolution pays down more debt, does more to protect Social Security and Medicare, and provides fair and honest tax relief. That is a set of priorities we can be proud of. It is a set of priorities that makes sense for the country. And that is why I am proud to support the budget resolution. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 8 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Rivers) and ask unanimous consent that she control the time for yielding to other Members. The CHAIRMAN. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from South Carolina? There was no objection. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen). (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. BENTSEN. Mr. Chairman, I rise in defense of fiscal responsibility and in support of the Democratic budget resolution and in opposition to the Republican budget resolution. When I was elected to Congress, my highest priority was to balance the unified budget. We have apparently accomplished that goal. Now my highest priority is to pay down the publicly held debt and extend Social Security and Medicare solvency. Mr. Chairman, a week ago the majority on the Committee on the Budget submitted two pages of numbers and called it a budget resolution. It is as much a budget resolution as a blank piece of paper is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The budget resolution is two pages, no explanation. Draconian spending cuts of $181 billion over 10 years are hidden in blue smoke and mirrors. This budget says we are going to increase defense spending and education and cut other programs by $27 billion. It is not going to happen. The budget builds on the hope that the CBO can re-estimate the base line just so we can put off until September either any cuts we have to make and either have a showdown or disaster like last year. What this budget will do is bust the caps and the pay-go rules. The majority's budget resolution gives more priority to enacting an $800 billion tax break than paying down the debt. It does not stop Social Security and Medicare from going insolvent. It locks in nearly a trillion-dollar tax cut betting on a 15-year projection that, if the surplus does not materialize, will result in more deficits and more debt. The Republicans say they are saving the surplus in Social Security in the trust fund, but they do nothing to honor the obligation to extending the life of Social Security and Medicare. Let us look at what Alan Greenspan has to say. He is adamantly clear that the best policy is debt reduction. Let me quote him. ``From an economic policy point of view I envisage that the best thing we can do at this particular state is to allow that surplus to run. What that means, of course, is that the debt to the public declines, interest costs on the debt decline, and in my judgment, that contributes to lower long-term interest rates.'' Make no mistake, the Democratic budget resolutions retires nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars of publicly held debt. The Republicans' do not. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, when asked about the rough-and-tumble world of politics, Margaret Thatcher said, ``Well, you don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.'' Mr. Chairman, I would suggest that there is considerable evasion in this budget. Starting with the issue that the Republicans claim to put aside all of the Social Security money for Social Security, in today's Wall Street Journal, page A-28, we find a very interesting article. The Wall Street Journal tells us that their commitment is essentially toothless and can be waived by a simple majority, which is done on the floor every day. This is the Wall Street Journal. They promise us that certain programs will be taken care of, that certain groups will get the things they need. But they forget to tell us, or they evade telling us, that $52 billion of cuts have to be found over the next 5 years to provide what they have in their budget. An earlier speaker talked about what was un-American. Well, I will tell my colleagues what is un-American, Mr. Chairman. What is un- American is not paying our bills, not dealing with our debts, not dealing with our existing obligations. And as a Nation, we have many: Social Security, Medicare, and a national debt that is nearing $6 trillion. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen) mentioned that Alan Greenspan said unequivocally that the best way to deal with our current situation is to pay down the debt and to use both surpluses, on-budget and off- budget. The Democratic proposal here today puts more than $474 billion over the Republican proposal in the next 15 years. The last piece of evasion that I want to speak to today is the suggestion that the tax cuts that are being proposed come purely from the on-budget surplus. That ignores the fact that as these tax cuts play themselves out over the years, by the year 2013 we will be dealing with an on-budget deficit and we will have to dip into Social Security money. Now, that comes at a time when the existing obligations I was talking about, our baby-boomers, begin to retire, and it will be the greatest strain on our budget to provide for them. Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on the Budget. Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. It is so amazing. I mean, really, when it comes right down to it, both sides have done not a pretty good job of coming up with a budget. All right? I mean, there are only so many ways we can do it, with mandatory programs and discretionary programs. There are only a certain few ways we can do it. And so what happened was the President sat down and he said, you know what? I can spend that Social Security surplus and I can have a whole bunch of new programs that I can pass out to people and make them feel good. The Republicans sat down and said, you know what? For the first time since 1969, we are going to set all of it aside, 100 percent of the Social Security surplus, so that it is there not only for Social Security but it is there if we need to find a fix for Medicare. We set all of it aside. The President did not set all of it aside. So what happens today? The last minute, the last opportunity, in run the Democrats, oh, but we did not mean that. We did not quite mean that. We can do better. We can do better than that. We are going to set 100 percent of it aside because they are. And so they rush in here at the last minute. Well, even their last-minute plan does not quite make it. Let me show my colleagues something here. They are talking about debt reduction and how much they want to reduce the debt for their grandchildren and children, and we heard all sorts of speeches waxing philosophical about that. Let us look at the plan. The Republicans set aside more money so we can pay down the debt. The Democrats do not. Those are the facts. Yet they run in here and say, we can do better than that. Let me tell my colleagues something else that is interesting here. When it comes to education, they say this is a priority. Look what we do. The Republicans, the Republicans, spend more time than the President, who stood up here for the State the Union address and said how he is going to support education. Well, let me take my colleagues one example further. Special education. Special education. Since 1975, a program that the Democrats, to their credit, passed one of the most beautiful civil rights pieces of legislation in history, saying every American child [[Page H1717]] ought to be able to attend public school. And what did they do? They did not fund it. And they have not funded it since 1975. {time} 1245 For the first time, the Republicans are funding IDEA, special education, $1 billion extra in our budget than the President's for special education. Plus we are saying to governors and States who are crying to Washington to give them more flexibility for education, we are letting them spend excess dollars from welfare, we are giving them the ability to transfer funds from other education programs, and we are allowing them, if we get more money at the end of the year, this surplus may grow as everyone has talked about so far, in our plan we allow special education to get a little bump up. That is not in their plan, either. Mr. Chairman, it just is amazing to me with the Academy Awards being last week how they can continue to win more Academy Awards for this budget. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Could I have the benefit of the chart of the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), the chart he just used that showed the President commits 62 percent of the surplus and you commit 100 percent of the surplus? Mr. NUSSLE. The gentleman did not bring his own charts today? Mr. SPRATT. That is 62 percent of the unified surplus which he quotes, $1.8 trillion. One hundred percent of the Social Security surplus, which is part of it, equals $1.8 trillion. They are the same thing over a different period. Over 15 years it works out to the same thing. Mr. NUSSLE. That is the problem, if the gentleman would yield. Mr. SPRATT. No, I cannot yield because I do not have the time to yield. Mr. NUSSLE. He wants to use my chart but I cannot talk about it? Mr. SPRATT. In a little while we will answer what he just said about education. Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, I hope he does. Mr. SPRATT. Because I do not think the facts will bear him out. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. I believe there was another problem with the charts that were just shown to us in that while the speaker, I am sure he misspoke, when the speaker said he was comparing the Republican plan to the Democratic plan on the floor from House Democrats today, I believe he used numbers from the President's proposal and not from our budget today relative to debt reduction. Secondly, the question of IDEA, special education, is one I am very interested in, because for several years I have offered an amendment to the Committee on the Budget as well as to the Congress to deal with fully funding IDEA, making the commitment that was passed so long ago real, to bring funding up to 40 percent of real cost. That was offered in the Committee on the Budget last week and to a person every Republican, including the gentleman from Iowa, voted against doing that. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley). Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, I thank the ranking member of our Committee on the Budget for the terrific job he has done. Mr. Chairman, if I could yield first of all to the gentleman from North Carolina. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, we want to talk about education. There is a lot that is wrong with this Republican budget resolution. We need to discuss these issues in depth. The budget resolution is arguably the most important single decision we make here. It is the blueprint for how Federal resources will be used for the coming fiscal year and on into the future. So the Democratic and the Republican proposals we are considering here today need to be debated in depth. They are a study, in fact, in contrasting priorities. The Republican budget would provide no help in extending the solvency of Medicare and Social Security. It falls short on veterans health care and crop insurance for our farmers and other critical needs. The Democratic alternative would extend the solvency of Medicare and Social Security, would provide more funding for critical priorities, would implement targeted tax relief, and would reduce the debt held by the public more than the Republican proposal. Mr. Chairman, we want to talk especially about education, because nowhere is the contrast more stark than with education. Our Republican colleagues boast about providing some increase for elementary and secondary education, but, overall, funding for education and training would be cut by $1.2 billion from the nominal 1999 level in the Republican budget for 2000. The result would be drastic cuts in funding for other priorities like higher education and teacher training and Pell grants and Head Start. Over 5 years, the Republican budget cuts to education and training would result in a 6.9 percent decrease in purchasing power, and over 10 years the decline in purchasing power for education would be over 18 percent. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, one of the things that I find interesting about this budget is we were told absolutely education is increased. They did increase it for elementary and secondary education. But what they do not tell us is that they are cutting it in all other parts of education. They do not say specifically where they are going to cut those budgets. But it is cut over 10 years from this level by $36.5 billion. So they are cutting programs like Head Start and Pell grants and work-to-school programs. That is where the cuts are. And so again it is one of those bait and switch budgets that they tell us we are doing great things over here and then they do not tell us what the other hand is doing, which is cutting education. This budget does not reflect that our school facilities are in a crisis situation. There was a study done by the engineers that said of all of our infrastructure, our school infrastructure is the one that is in the greatest need. We would not work in the schools that we send our children to. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price). Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I would like to engage the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt) and the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley) in a further discussion of this. It is important to get these facts out. Is it not true that the Democratic alternative would make room for school construction? The kind of proposal that the President has made to give tax credits in lieu of interest on bonds in these low-income areas that need desperately to build or modernize facilities, or like the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge) and I have introduced to target high-growth areas so that our kids are not going to school in trailers. I come from a district where we have hundreds of trailers, thousands of kids going to school in these kinds of facilities. We need to get ahead of the curve in school construction. Mr. HOLT. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey. Mr. HOLT. The Democratic budget does indeed provide for modernizing schools. In fact, it would provide tax credits that would allow modernizing of up to 6,000 public schools. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, one of the other things that I think is interesting to note, not only are schools in bad shape right now and we have talked about trailers. We have first graders that have to walk across an open area in Oregon where it rains all the time. This is not a wonderful thing to do to wash their hands or go to the bathroom. And some of the rooms are in such disrepair. Again, my colleagues would not work in that facility but we expect our children to learn in that facility. The other thing that I think is interesting is there have been studies that have been done that show that, in fact, students do better in schools that reflect our society and are not in such disrepair. They do better when our schools are repaired. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Those studies are very convincing, that the students perform better when they are in first-rate facilities. It is not just an abstract issue. We have thousands of [[Page H1718]] kids going to school in these facilities. Often they are going to lunch at 10:30 because the cafeteria facilities haven't kept pace with the addition of trailers. They do not have adequate gym or restroom facilities. It simply is a misplaced priority to say that we cannot afford to do this. The Republican budget squeezes it out. The Democratic budget would make room for that kind of school modernization. Let me ask my colleagues, also, to address the other major initiative that we are looking at in this Democratic budget: getting class size down and getting 100,000 new teachers in the classrooms of America. We made a start on that last year. What is it going to take to keep that going? Mr. HOLT. If the gentleman will yield further, indeed, these are connected. Simple math will tell us, we cannot have more teachers and get the smaller class sizes in the early years unless we have the classrooms to put them in. And so this Democratic budget does allow for both of those, continuation of the hiring of new teachers, the 100,000 new teachers that we are calling for, we will continue down that line with the Democratic budget, in addition to providing for the loans for the construction and modernization of facilities. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. We are talking about a stark contrast in these budget proposals. The one makes room for reduced class size and for school construction and also lets us make good on what we promised last year when we passed the higher education act, opening up opportunity through Pell grants and an improved student loan program. The other budget makes a short-term increase in education over the long haul but would drastically decrease this funding. Mr. HOLT. Unlike the Republican budget, the Democratic alternative does not cut higher education, training and social services in order to increase elementary and secondary education programs. That is a key difference. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. I used to be a teacher. I can guarantee my colleagues that smaller classroom sizes, you have much better performance by the students. Do not take just my word for it but go out and look at all of the research on this subject and you will find if we can get our classroom size to 18 and under, that students' performance goes way up. Not only does it go up, it stays up. We are trying to get it down in K through 3. But if you get it down, get that ratio down, the performance goes straight up and that performance stays up throughout their years in school. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. And the impact is the greatest in grades 1 through 3, is that right? Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Right. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the way my colleagues have chimed in here. There is no question that we are dealing with a stark contrast in many areas of this budget, but certainly in education. In dollar terms, the Democratic alternative next year provides $2.6 billion more for education and training, and then over the next 5 years we are talking about a $10.2 billion gap. It is a gap that we have got to close. Vote for the Democratic alternative. Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 45 seconds. Mr. Chairman, the bottom line is, this Republican budget locks away the entire Social Security trust fund surplus for our Nation's elderly, the entire amount. We set aside more than the President to save, strengthen and preserve Social Security and as necessary Medicare as well. We create a safety deposit box to assure Social Security trust funds cannot be raided. We pay down more public debt than the President. We maintain the spending discipline for the 1997 budget act. We provide additional resources to properly train, equip and retain our men and women in uniform. And we will enact historic tax relief after we have solved Social Security for our children and our children's children. That is what we do. The President wants to spend more. The Democrats want to spend more. We do not. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Herger). Mr. HERGER. Mr. Chairman, this Republican budget brings honesty back to the budget process and ends a 30-year assault on our Social Security system. For the first time, every single penny of Social Security taxes will be locked up for Social Security and Medicare. Over the next 10 years, this budget saves $1.8 trillion for these two critical programs for our seniors and future generations. As my colleagues can see on this chart, while the Republican budget saves every penny, 100 percent, of the Social Security surplus, the President's budget saves only 62 percent of Social Security over the next 10 years. Mr. Chairman, saving just 62 percent of the Social Sec

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PERSONAL EXPLANATION
(House of Representatives - March 25, 1999)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages H1710-H1780] PERSONAL EXPLANATION Mrs. EMERSON. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 72 and 73, I was not present due to a [[Page H1711]] family emergency. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.'' The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Foley). Pursuant to House Resolution 131 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the concurrent resolution, House Concurrent Resolution 68. {time} 1148 In the Committee of the Whole Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 68) establishing the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2000 and setting forth appropriate budgetary levels for each of fiscal years 2001 through 2009, with Mr. Camp in the chair. The Clerk read the title of the concurrent resolution. The CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to the rule, the concurrent resolution is considered as having been read the first time. Under the rule, general debate shall not exceed 3 hours, with 2 hours confined to the congressional budget, equally divided and controlled by the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on the Budget, and 1 hour on the subject of economic goals and policies, equally divided and controlled by the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Saxton) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Stark). The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) each will control 1 hour of debate on the congressional budget. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich). Mr. KASICH. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, today we offer the first budget of the next century and a new agenda for the new millennium. I think this is a great day for the House, because we have been able to move forward from an era not very long ago when, as we looked out across the horizon, the economic horizon of this country, we saw deficits as far as the eye could see. The majority came into its position in 1995 when we first advanced the need for economic stimulus driven by tax relief, giving more power, providing more incentives for risk-taking, and at the same time a big dose of fiscal restraint; in other words, starting to get the Congress of the United States to live within its means. The fact is that in 1995, Mr. Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System, said that if you can offer a legitimate and credible plan to balance the Federal budget, he said that he believed that interest rates would decline by 2 points. I must also remind Members that in 1995, as we assumed control of the House of Representatives, interest rates had been rising, the economy had been slowing, there was concern about unemployment. The fact that we laid down a plan that would begin to put our fiscal house in order, to put us in a position where the Congress of the United States would operate really like the American family, and that we would restore some of the incentives to risk-take, I believe that has contributed significantly to the economic gains that we have had in this country. Now today, as we stand here, as I stand here in the well, we are about to pass a budget that not only captures the surpluses of Medicare and social security, but at the same time has the on-budget surpluses that so many people have sought for years. In other words, when we take a look at the balance sheets of the Federal Government, both in the social security and Medicare accounts and in the non-social security and Medicare accounts, we have been able to achieve not only a balanced budget, but also some huge surpluses. Let me say, at the outset, we are doing something that the Congress of the United States has never done: We are taking all the payroll taxes that we collect every day that are related to social security and Medicare and we are locking them into an account so that the politicians, Republicans and Democrats, cannot raid those accounts for any other spending item. That money will sit in an account, and until we enact a plan that actually saves social security, that money will be used to pay down part of the Federal debt. Last year we paid down about $50 billion of the debt. Most Americans do not know that. This year we would anticipate paying down at least $125 billion of the national debt. Of course, if I was a citizen listening to somebody in the well of this House make that claim, I would greet it with great skepticism, but the fact is that what I am saying is true. Last year the publicly-held debt was paid down by $50 billion, and in fact this year we anticipate at least $125 billion of the publicly-held debt to be retired. That does not allow us to rest on our laurels, by any stretch of the imagination, because we must work every day to make the power of government less and the power of people greater. We need to run America from the bottom up, so people can have control over the education for their children, so that the baby boomers and the younger generation can have hope of having a decent retirement by having more control, so Americans can have more money in their pockets. The fact is, as it relates to social security and Medicare, we know those programs have to be transformed, and not just to protect the retirement benefits of our seniors today. I would argue that that is a given. Because of a pay-as-you-go system, we know that the baby boomers are able to carry the load of their parents, but I want the moms and dads of this country to realize that the people who are really at risk are their children. I want mom and dad who are on social security and Medicare to realize that we are going to stand up and protect their benefits, but it is their children, their baby boomer sons and daughters, who are at risk. We must have the courage to transform this system so that the benefits just do not accrue to our seniors today, but that our baby boomers and their children will also have retirement security. Sad to say that the President has taken a leave of absence on this. He is missing-in-action as it relates to the issue of social security and Medicare. Just last week the Medicare Commission, headed by a member of his own party, was blunted by the action of the President. That Democrat, leader of this program to try to extend the life of social security and to reform it so it is available for the baby boomers, that Senator said last week that the administration and many in his party were more interested in using the issue of Medicare as a political weapon than they were interested in being able to transform and save Medicare, not just for today's seniors, but for the baby boomers and their children. That is the worst of American politics, to use the threat of destroying economic security for our senior citizens to try to win votes. That is not what makes America great. What makes America great is not just to debate when Republicans and Democrats disagree, but the ability to search for a common goal, to preserve some of the vital retirement programs for this Nation, to keep the demagoguery out of this debate. Let us work together to try to extend the life of Medicare and social security. At the same time, we are also honoring the 1997 budget agreement. The President breaks the spending caps. He breaks the discipline of the 1997 budget agreement. We will not do that. Not only will we not break the discipline of the 1997 agreement that has contributed to a stronger economy, but we will not raid the social security and Medicare trust fund the way the President does. We have decided to save it all, and to take that and coordinate with that the 1997 budget agreement by having fiscal restraint. It is about priorities in America today. What we are saying is that the programs of defense and education ought to be top priorities in our budget. There was a paper distributed on the floor with more misleading information about the fact that this bill does not include a pay raise for the military. That is false. That is patently false. I am beginning to believe that many people who stand in opposition to this bill are just going to ignore the facts. This is not going to be a debate about what is in the bill, this is a debate about what fictions we can create. [[Page H1712]] There will be provided for in this budget document a pay raise for our troops. The Committee on Armed Services will come to the floor and tell us that. We know that it is necessary to boost the spending for the military. That is precisely what we do in this bill. At the same time, we also believe we should emphasize education. The fact is, in education we have provided more money than the President has, not just for defense but for education as well. As Members know, we are very interested in education flexibility, so that the school districts can manage their challenges better at the local level without having to have a bureaucrat a thousand miles away who does not even know what time zone it is in these local school districts to tell them how to manage their challenges. In addition to all of this, Mr. Chairman, there is tax relief for the taxpayers. The fact of the matter is there are many on the other side of the aisle that bristle at the thought of a tax cut for Americans. It has become almost a philosophy, almost a mantra, to make the argument that there is something wrong with shrinking the size of the government and letting peoples' pocketbooks grow bigger. I want to warn a number of my friends, it is not only wrong for the country but it is very bad politics to make an argument that the budget of the government ought to grow while our personal and family budgets ought to shrink, and that somehow we should pound our chests in self- righteous indignation at the notion that we want to work to cut the size of government and give more money to the American people. {time} 1200 If we are going to run America from the bottom up, if we are going to let Americans be able to pursue their hopes and dreams, Mr. Chairman, the more money that one has in one's pocket, the more one can control one's own destiny, the more power that one has. The smaller this amount becomes, the less power one has. Power is a zero sum game. If one has less and the government has more, who has got the power? When the government has less and if one has more, who has got the power? In our country today, as we approach the new millennium and we set the new agenda for the next century, what we do know is that the strength of America, harkening back to where our founders was, was a limited government; the dignity of the individual was to be preserved; that the individual in our society was what was most important in a Nation that recognizes that freedom is precious; and that that the future is ours. So, Mr. Chairman, we intend not only to preserve Social Security and Medicare, we not only agree to prioritize the items of national security and education, but at the same time, we also believe that the American people ought to be empowered, that the American people ought to have more money in their pockets in order to provide, not just for themselves and not just for their communities, but for those that may live in the shadows of their communities who have less and cannot be ignored in America. That is the great tradition of America. More in one's pocket means more for one's family. For those who have not been so fortunate, we have an obligation to take care of them. So at the end of the day, Mr. Chairman, I think we present a budget for the new millennium that is right in pace with where the American people want to go. The American people hunger for more control over their lives and more power in order to fix the problems, to meet the challenges that they see every day. This budget will begin to preserve and reform and transform the programs for economic security in our senior years, at the same time paying down some of the national debt and, most important, beginning to transfer again, continuing to transfer power, money, and influence from the institution of government into the pockets of people. We will move forward on this. We will lay down a good marker as we enter the next millennium. We will set the pace and set the direction for what can be a glorious new century for, not just Americans, but for people all over the world who have come to see us as a model and as an example of the power of freedom and individuality and compassion and caring and vision. Vote for the budget. Reject these alternatives and, at the same time, reject the President's budget and set ourselves on the right course. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 6 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I was trying to get the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) to tell us why Function 950 of his budget resolution provides no adjustment as it is required to do to provide for the pay raise, the extra pay raise for selected pay grades and officers and NCOs and for the military retirement benefits. The fact of the matter is, Function 950, the military retirement account, where that charge needs to be made, is absolutely unadjusted in their budget resolution. So it does not provide for the pay raise and the benefits that our troops have been promised. Let me go to the overarching subject, the budget, and the happy occasion that we find ourselves in today. I did not ever think that I would serve to see the day where we have surpluses as far as the eye could see. I think it is worth taking just a minute to track down the trail we have followed for the last 10 years that have led us to this happy set of circumstances. In 1990, we had a budget summit that lasted 6 months. We finally brought it to the floor. It was defeated once. Then the Democrats put the vote up to pass President Bush's budget summit agreement. There were only 80 votes on that side of the aisle. It implemented discretionary pay caps, a pay-as-you-go rule, and the kind of disciplines that have served us well to get rid of the deficit. But it did not have any obvious effect because it was eclipsed by a recession. In 1993, when President Clinton came to office, he found on his desk awaiting him the economic report of the President. In it, Michael Boskin, his Economic Council chief, said the deficit this year will be $332 billion. That was the baseline from which the Clinton administration began. From that baseline, in 1993, we reduced the deficit with the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993, which had exclusively Democratic votes in the House and the Senate from $330 billion projected level, $290 billion actual level in 1992, to $22 billion in 1997. Then our colleagues on the other side of the aisle joined with us, and we finished the job and wiped out that additional $22 billion of deficit and lay the basis for going into the next century. It is critically important that we did this, because until we dealt with the year-to-year deficit, we could not deal with the next problem; and that is the problem, the challenge of an aging society. Our society is getting older and older. I am a war baby. A huge generation of young people were born, babies were born in 1946 until 1964, and they will start retiring in about 10 or 12 years. When they do, they will put unprecedented strain on the most popular, most successful program ever invented by the government, the Social Security program, so much so that they may put in jeopardy its solvency by the year 2032. The Medicare program, which runs a close second in popularity, is in even greater jeopardy because the cost of medical care is rising along with the demographic increases, and it, too, is threatened with insolvency in the year 2008. We have an opportunity to do something about that. We have an opportunity to take the work we began in 1990 and 1993 and 1997 and deal with the next problem, which is a daunting challenge, preparing this country and this government for the burdens of the next century cast upon us by an aging society. Our budget, the Democratic budget, rises to that challenge; theirs does not. We are going to have other speakers who will turn to this topic, but let me just give my colleagues the highlights and tell them what is the difference between us and them. I will give it to my colleagues in a nutshell. We protect the Social Security Trust Fund. We proposed to protect the Trust Fund so that 100 percent of the payroll taxes coming into it are spent exclusively for the benefit of that particular program for the first time probably in 30 or 40 years. We propose to do it by [[Page H1713]] directing the Treasurer of the United States to take that percentage of payroll taxes not needed to pay benefits that year and to buy down public debt. How does that happen? That means that, when the obligations come due in 2020 and 2030, the Treasury will be in better shape than ever because it will have lower debt and lower debt service to meet those obligations. We also, unlike the Republicans, do something about Medicare, because we see Medicare and Social Security as linked together. We extend the life of Medicare, the solvency of the Medicare program from 2020. They leave it as it is. They leave it in a lurch. We are still opposed to huge tax cuts in the out years, $143 billion in the first 5 years and $450 billion plus in the second 5 years, rising to as much as a trillion dollars between 2009 and 2014, which will drain the budget dry of the funds needed to do something about the Medicare program. Do my colleagues want to know the difference between us and them? Look at the Trust Fund account for Social Security. In our plan, Social Security will have $3.4 trillion more money at the end of 15 years. They will add $1.8 trillion. We are twice as good as they. With Medicare, we add $400 billion. To their Trust Fund, they add a paltry $14 billion. There are significant differences. If my colleagues care about meeting the challenge in the next century, this is a budget resolution to vote for. Mr. Chairman, I yield 14 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott), and I ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to control that time. The CHAIRMAN. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from South Carolina? There was no objection. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui). Mr. MATSUI. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, Social Security is probably the most important program Americans have had over the years. It takes care of the senior citizens of America. As anybody knows, if we did not have Social Security today, half the senior population would live in poverty. One-third of the benefits of Social Security go to families that have the bread winner disabled or perhaps dies. So many children who no longer have a mother or father who are the bread winners in that family can still go on to school and perhaps college. This is a very, very critical program. What the budget of the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) does is adds 18 more years to that program so that it will be solvent to the year 2050, 50 more years of solvency total. The Republican plan does not add one year to that solvency. As we continue this debate, it is my hope that the Republicans respond to the March 13 letter from the actuary of the Social Security, Mr. Harry Ballantine of which everyone bases their conclusions on. In that letter, in the second paragraph, he says, The proposal of the Republicans would not have any significant effect on the long-range solvency of the Social Security program under the intermediary assumptions of the Trustee's report. Thus, the estimated long-range actuarial deficit of 2.19 percent of taxable payroll and the year of combined trust funds exhaustion would not change. So when we hear that the Republicans are saying they extend the life of Social Security by protecting the money, they do not. In fact, they can use the money for a tax cut. They can use it for a tax cut. So bear in mind what this is all about, this debate, is to protect Social Security, and the Democratic bill does that. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Weygand). Mr. WEYGAND. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) for yielding me this time. I particularly want to thank the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) for providing us with this alternative. When we talk so much, as both sides have, about Social Security and Medicare, the people back home are listening to us and saying, have they really given us a solution? The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has done that, and the Democratic alternative has done just that. He has said let us take aside all of the surplus that we are getting in the area of Social Security, dedicate it to Social Security and Medicare, and make sure we come up with a fix, a solution. Set the money aside and take away the rhetoric of tax cuts and additional discretionary spending. Solve these problems first before we go home. Medicare is perhaps one of the most aching problems that is out there, home health care, prescription drugs. People each day are asking us in both Democratic and Republican districts, how do we solve this? It is indeed a problem back home in Rhode Island, because I know home health care agencies, the most cost effective, efficient agencies are going out of businesses. People that need the kind of home care, that is the least costly home care, are not getting it and eventually ending up in nursing homes and hospitals. I have a couple in Rhode Island that are 66 and 70 years old. Prescription drugs is something they never thought about when they retired. But after open heart surgery and bypass surgery, both of them, at age 66 and 70, are back working part-time just to pay for the $8,200 a year for prescription drugs they have to pay. Seniors are doing without paying their rent, without paying for food, and sometimes not even paying for the prescriptions because the cost is so high. That is going to come back to all of us in terms of higher taxpayer costs. We should not leave here until we resolve this problem. The only way to do it is, as the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has suggested, lock this money aside, not use it for all those rhetorical questions that are being asked all the time about tax cuts and discretionary spending, and fix the problem. Let us bring us to a solution rather than continuing putting us in this rhetorical oblivion that will never come to a conclusion. End this problem now. Fix Medicare. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Wisconsin (Ms. Baldwin). Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. Chairman, Medicare and Social Security have improved the lives of millions of elderly and disabled Americans. Together they provide a vital safety net which millions of Americans rely on. However, while Medicare is projected to run short of funds in just 9 years, and Social Security will run short of funds by 2032, the Republican budget resolution does nothing to extend the life of Medicare or Social Security. The Democratic budget alternative that will be offered later today will extend the life of Medicare through 2020 in addition to extending the life of Social Security to 2050. {time} 1215 Only after this commitment is fulfilled would we propose to spend money on high priority areas like health, education and the environment. I believe firmly that I would not be standing before my colleagues today if it were not for Medicare. Social Security and Medicare together enabled my grandmother to live independently until she was 90 years old. As her primary caregiver for the last several years, I know the role Social Security and Medicare play in making ends meet, in protecting her from making sure that a medical crisis would not lead to financial ruin. Medicare and Social Security are not just commitments we made to our seniors, they are commitments we made to families. And it is just as important to young people that we have Medicare and Social Security as it is to our seniors, because it keeps our families and our communities strong. We have an historic opportunity to make good on this commitment. The budget decisions we make today will have enormous consequences for decades. The Republican budget resolution squanders this opportunity before us; the opportunity to reduce public debt while protecting the existence of Social Security and Medicare. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means and a former member of the Committee on the Budget. Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding this time to me. [[Page H1714]] Mr. Chairman, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed Social Security and worked for its passage, the Republican Party was dead set against it. When John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson said that having Social Security was not enough, if there was no health security and advanced Medicare, 90 percent of the Republicans in this Congress voted to reject it. When Bill Clinton was elected President, the Republican Party in this House elected a majority leader, my colleague, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey), who said of Social Security, It is ``a rotten trick;'' who said of Medicare that he ``resented'' having to be a part of it as a compulsory government program. So I suppose that against that backdrop the American people should take some confidence and some reassurance in the fact that Medicare and Social Security are even mentioned in this budget resolution. They are indeed mentioned in the resolution. When we look to the budget resolution to see whether there is any money to match the promises made, there is not $1 truly set aside for Social Security and Medicare to assure solvency into the future. All that the Republican budget resolution says is that these vital programs can go broke on schedule, which is not much help to the people of this country. The second indication that we get out of this budget resolution of where the heart of the Republican Party is on these critical issues for hundreds of millions of American citizens who either benefit from these programs today or will in the future is to look to the instructions that they include in this resolution. What instruction do they have about Medicare and Social Security? They have one reconciliation instruction, and it is ``Give us our tax breaks.'' They say ``Give us our tax breaks.'' We say save Medicare and Social Security first. Do the fiscally responsible thing; pay down the debt, preserve these valuable programs, postpone the desire to help those at the top of the economic ladder to some future time, and help those Americans who want these systems preserved. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis), a member of the Committee on the Budget. Mr. DAVIS of Florida. Mr. Chairman, today we have a very fundamental choice before us; we can pass the budget resolution that proposes a tax cut over 10 years of approximately $800 billion, or we can do first things first, and that is we can take up and pass the Spratt amendment, which provides a tax cut of about $137 billion but pays down the publicly held debt, the Federal debt, by more than $137 billion more than the Republican budget proposal. Now, why is that so important? The first thing is it is the right thing to do for our children and grandchildren, and not for them to have to inherit this debt. The second thing is, as we begin to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers, of which I am one, and funding the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, we are going to need some of those funds to pay that. Thirdly, and perhaps most important, one of the best things we can do to protect our economy right now is to pay down the Federal debt. As Chairman Greenspan has testified before the House Committee on the Budget, it has a direct bearing on interest rates. In my home, Florida and Tampa, where the average mortgage for a homeowner is about $115,000, if we drop interest rates two points, down from 8 to 6 percent, that is $155 a month in that homeowner's pocket they would not otherwise have. Paying down the debt and providing that type of tax cut, simple and immediate, to homeowners, to people holding student loans and car loans, is the right thing to do for our children and grandchildren and, most importantly, will help preserve the solvency of Medicare and Social Security as we begin to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey), a member of the Committee on Commerce and also the Committee on the Budget. Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, this Republican bill is a complete fraud. That is the bottom line. They have got hundreds of billions of dollars for tax cuts, mostly for the rich, but not one penny to extend the Medicare trust fund, which is going bankrupt, by the way, in the year 2008. Let us go back to their balanced budget of 1997. The premise was that we would have to cut Medicare and home health care, those are visits made to people's homes who have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and other chronic diseases, $115 billion to give a $90 billion tax break for mostly the wealthiest in America. Now we have this huge surplus. Now, what do the Republicans say? We are going to give that money back to the Medicare recipients; we are going to give that money back to the HMO health care recipients? No, they say, we do not have enough money for those people. Now, the problem, of course, is that the programs were cut fraudulently, using numbers that were not accurate in 1997 in terms of the problem with Medicare. It turns out today that the CBO says that in fact they have found miraculously $88 billion more of savings in Medicare for this 5-year period, and they found an additional hundreds of billions of dollars of revenues that they did not project. How much goes back to Medicare on the Republican side? They do not have a penny. If we kick them in the heart over here, we are going to break our toes. They just do not want to help these old people on Medicare. So, my colleagues, our substitute, with the effort to try to help those most vulnerable, the senior citizens within our society, intends on guaranteeing that Medicare is extended 10 extra years in solvency, so that the senior citizens in our country are going to be given the protection which they deserve. My colleagues, the Republican substitute does nothing, nothing to help the solvency of the Medicare trust fund. Vote ``no'' on the Republican budget here today on the House floor. Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, I was elected in 1970 and spent 15 years in the State legislature and spent 10 years here, and I have never seen a budget exercise like this one. Last year, we have to remember, the Republicans did not pass a budget. They never got a budget resolution through the United States Congress. This year they said, we are going to do it, but we are going to do it by jamming it past people so fast they can never figure out what is happening. We listened to a wonderful stump speech by the chairman of the committee today, but when he hands the budget to us 4 hours before and gives us two pieces of paper with the numbers on it, that is all we got, two pieces of paper, to spend $1.7 billion, I say this is a smoke and mirrors budget. My colleagues can look at these pieces of paper and say there is anything in here. They can promise the world. They can promise veterans, they can promise old people, they can promise the National Institutes of Health, they can promise anything on these two pieces of paper, because there is no specificity. There were no hearings. It was simply, ram it through. Now we come to the floor. We get 40 minutes on the Committee on the Budget to talk about this issue. Now, is that because we are busy tomorrow? No. People are going home. Could we have more time on this? No, the Committee on Rules said we have to be out tonight. Where are we going? I guess we are just going out for 2 weeks, yet we cannot spend another 1 or 2 hours on this issue. The gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) is right. I sat on the Medicare Commission, and the Medicare Commission rightly turned down the proposal being jammed through by the Republicans to privatize Medicare, but they are going to do it here. This budget has no money in it to deal with the problems of Medicare. What they are going to do is they are going to come in with their little voucher program. It is going to be called ``premium support.'' They are going to try to ram that out of the Committee on Ways and Means and run it through here and leave the old people holding the bag. This is a bad budget, and I urge Members to vote against the Republican alternative. [[Page H1715]] Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Chambliss). The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays) may yield time. There was no objection. Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. Chairman, I had hoped we were going to come to the floor today to talk about the real facts contained in the Democrat budget versus the Republican budget, but it appears we are getting off base here. But let us look at what the actual dollar numbers are when it comes to Medicare, and here they are. We are going to put $1.8 trillion aside over the next 10 years to save and protect Social Security and Medicare. What does the President do? He is well below us, right down here. These are the actual numbers, Members. Mr. Chairman, today the House is going to consider a budget for the fiscal year 2000 that addresses the issues that matter most to American families. This budget, the first for the new millennium, safeguards Social Security and Medicare, addresses priorities such as education, defense and agriculture, and provides historic tax relief. This budget meets the challenges of the 21st century head-on by adhering to several bedrock principles, each of which is set forth right here. First, we are going to lock away every penny of the Social Security surplus for our Nation's elderly. We are going to set aside more money than the President to strengthen Social Security and Medicare. We are going to create a safe deposit box to ensure that bureaucrats in Washington cannot get their hands on the Social Security Trust Fund money. We are going to pay down more debt than the President's budget. We are going to maintain the spending discipline that carries over from the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. We are going to make national defense a top priority by providing additional resources for things such as pay raises which are specifically set forth in the budget. We are going to provide the resources to train, equip and retain our men and women in uniform, who are in harm's risk as we speak today. We are going to offer security for rural Americans by providing reforms in crop insurance and money to fund that crop insurance reform. And we are going to enact historic tax relief. Yes, tax relief. And it is interesting that opponents of this budget would get up today and argue against tax relief. That is almost un-American, and I really cannot believe we are hearing that in the well today. But, yes, we favor tax relief, and we are going to support tax relief in our budget plan for hard-working Americans. Mr. Chairman, this budget is consistent with the common sense conservative principles of encouraging our communities and individuals to grow from the bottom up, not from Washington down. This is a budget Americans can be proud of, and I urge all of my colleagues to support the Republican budget. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. When I came here, we were paying interest on the national debt equal to about $52 billion. In the years I have been here that bill has gone up to $252 billion. Dead weight. Produces no goods and services for anybody. We have got a proposal in our budget resolution that will drive that debt down $3 trillion. It is good for Social Security, it is good for the economy, it is good for the Federal budget, and it is good for our children and grandchildren. {time} 1230 Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith). (Mr. SMITH of Michigan asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SMITH of Michigan. Mr. Chairman, this chart shows where we were when Republicans took the majority in 1995. For the foreseeable future, at that time, this government went deeper and deeper into debt--for as far as the economist could see. We came in, as the new majority, determined we were going to reduce and slow down spending. Look, we did it. This is historic. I went back over the last 40 years. In every one of those years that the Democrats had control they used the surplus coming in from Social Security for other Government spending. Please look, what we are doing now. We do not have to increase the national debt in this 5 year Republican budget. The President's plan, the Democrats' plan, has to increase the national debt. Their plan forces this country deeper into debt by $2 trillion more than the Republican proposal. I want to say that again to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt). Your plan goes deeper into debt by $2 trillion more than the Republican proposal. Nobody should just talk about the debt to the public. They have got to talk about the total Government debt. Because what we owe the Social Security Trust Fund is just as important as what we owe Wall Street. I want to talk about the caps. The Republicans stay under the caps. The Democrat proposal does not stay under the caps. I am chairman of the Committee on the Budget Task Force on Social Security. That bipartisan task force is working very well together. But I just want to say very clearly that what we are doing for the first time in recent history, is not spending the Social Security surplus for other Government programs. I mean, it is a giant step forward for saving Social Security. We are putting that money aside. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) says that they are saving Social Security by adding a giant IOU to the Medicare Trust Fund and the Social Security Trust Fund. That makes us go deeper into debt. It is not honest. It is a asset for Social Security but a deficit for the general fund. In short it is a mandate for future tax increases for our kids and grandkids. All the review of the President's proposal that suggests that we can save Social Security by adding more IOUs--conclude it is smoke and mirrors. It is! Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Sununu). (Mr. SUNUNU asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. SUNUNU. Mr. Chairman, today we are debating the budget. In putting together a budget blueprint, it is important to remember that the Federal budget is an outline of priorities. It is not a detailed specification of every single appropriation bill that we are going to pass over the next year. The Federal budget is $1.7 trillion. The budget blueprint is intended to talk about what our priorities are as a Congress for the next year. In trying to establish those priorities, the Committee on the Budget tried to answer three questions. First and foremost, what about Social Security and Medicare? Those on the other side have talked about these important issues; and we came back with the answer first we should set aside every penny of the Social Security surplus, every penny of that trust fund surplus, to strengthen and protect Social Security and Medicare. As the debate goes on today, we will see time and again that we set aside more to preserve Social Security and Medicare than the President in his budget. We set aside every penny of the surplus for Social Security, not 60 percent as the administration suggested, because it is the right thing to do. Second, we wanted to set priorities about the size and scope of the Federal Government. And we thought it was appropriate that we keep to the commitments of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, a bipartisan agreement that set some control on the growth and scope of the Federal Government. Keeping those commitments again is an important part of the integrity of this budget resolution. And third, what about tax relief? Right now taxes in this country are at a peacetime high. They have not been this high since 1944. And we thought it appropriate that, after we set aside 100 percent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus, we ought to give back the additional surpluses to the American workers in the form of lower taxes. This is about priorities, our priority of saving 100 percent of the Social Security surplus, against the administration's priority, if we can call it that, of [[Page H1716]] only setting aside 60 percent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. Our commitment and priority to keep to the promises we made as part of the 1997 budget agreement. The administration's budget breaks those caps by $30 billion. Our commitment to lower taxes once we have ensured that we protect the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. The administration's commitment to raise taxes by $100 billion. That is the wrong direction for this country. In the end, this budget resolution pays down more debt, does more to protect Social Security and Medicare, and provides fair and honest tax relief. That is a set of priorities we can be proud of. It is a set of priorities that makes sense for the country. And that is why I am proud to support the budget resolution. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 8 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Rivers) and ask unanimous consent that she control the time for yielding to other Members. The CHAIRMAN. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from South Carolina? There was no objection. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen). (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. BENTSEN. Mr. Chairman, I rise in defense of fiscal responsibility and in support of the Democratic budget resolution and in opposition to the Republican budget resolution. When I was elected to Congress, my highest priority was to balance the unified budget. We have apparently accomplished that goal. Now my highest priority is to pay down the publicly held debt and extend Social Security and Medicare solvency. Mr. Chairman, a week ago the majority on the Committee on the Budget submitted two pages of numbers and called it a budget resolution. It is as much a budget resolution as a blank piece of paper is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The budget resolution is two pages, no explanation. Draconian spending cuts of $181 billion over 10 years are hidden in blue smoke and mirrors. This budget says we are going to increase defense spending and education and cut other programs by $27 billion. It is not going to happen. The budget builds on the hope that the CBO can re-estimate the base line just so we can put off until September either any cuts we have to make and either have a showdown or disaster like last year. What this budget will do is bust the caps and the pay-go rules. The majority's budget resolution gives more priority to enacting an $800 billion tax break than paying down the debt. It does not stop Social Security and Medicare from going insolvent. It locks in nearly a trillion-dollar tax cut betting on a 15-year projection that, if the surplus does not materialize, will result in more deficits and more debt. The Republicans say they are saving the surplus in Social Security in the trust fund, but they do nothing to honor the obligation to extending the life of Social Security and Medicare. Let us look at what Alan Greenspan has to say. He is adamantly clear that the best policy is debt reduction. Let me quote him. ``From an economic policy point of view I envisage that the best thing we can do at this particular state is to allow that surplus to run. What that means, of course, is that the debt to the public declines, interest costs on the debt decline, and in my judgment, that contributes to lower long-term interest rates.'' Make no mistake, the Democratic budget resolutions retires nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars of publicly held debt. The Republicans' do not. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, when asked about the rough-and-tumble world of politics, Margaret Thatcher said, ``Well, you don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.'' Mr. Chairman, I would suggest that there is considerable evasion in this budget. Starting with the issue that the Republicans claim to put aside all of the Social Security money for Social Security, in today's Wall Street Journal, page A-28, we find a very interesting article. The Wall Street Journal tells us that their commitment is essentially toothless and can be waived by a simple majority, which is done on the floor every day. This is the Wall Street Journal. They promise us that certain programs will be taken care of, that certain groups will get the things they need. But they forget to tell us, or they evade telling us, that $52 billion of cuts have to be found over the next 5 years to provide what they have in their budget. An earlier speaker talked about what was un-American. Well, I will tell my colleagues what is un-American, Mr. Chairman. What is un- American is not paying our bills, not dealing with our debts, not dealing with our existing obligations. And as a Nation, we have many: Social Security, Medicare, and a national debt that is nearing $6 trillion. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen) mentioned that Alan Greenspan said unequivocally that the best way to deal with our current situation is to pay down the debt and to use both surpluses, on-budget and off- budget. The Democratic proposal here today puts more than $474 billion over the Republican proposal in the next 15 years. The last piece of evasion that I want to speak to today is the suggestion that the tax cuts that are being proposed come purely from the on-budget surplus. That ignores the fact that as these tax cuts play themselves out over the years, by the year 2013 we will be dealing with an on-budget deficit and we will have to dip into Social Security money. Now, that comes at a time when the existing obligations I was talking about, our baby-boomers, begin to retire, and it will be the greatest strain on our budget to provide for them. Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on the Budget. Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. It is so amazing. I mean, really, when it comes right down to it, both sides have done not a pretty good job of coming up with a budget. All right? I mean, there are only so many ways we can do it, with mandatory programs and discretionary programs. There are only a certain few ways we can do it. And so what happened was the President sat down and he said, you know what? I can spend that Social Security surplus and I can have a whole bunch of new programs that I can pass out to people and make them feel good. The Republicans sat down and said, you know what? For the first time since 1969, we are going to set all of it aside, 100 percent of the Social Security surplus, so that it is there not only for Social Security but it is there if we need to find a fix for Medicare. We set all of it aside. The President did not set all of it aside. So what happens today? The last minute, the last opportunity, in run the Democrats, oh, but we did not mean that. We did not quite mean that. We can do better. We can do better than that. We are going to set 100 percent of it aside because they are. And so they rush in here at the last minute. Well, even their last-minute plan does not quite make it. Let me show my colleagues something here. They are talking about debt reduction and how much they want to reduce the debt for their grandchildren and children, and we heard all sorts of speeches waxing philosophical about that. Let us look at the plan. The Republicans set aside more money so we can pay down the debt. The Democrats do not. Those are the facts. Yet they run in here and say, we can do better than that. Let me tell my colleagues something else that is interesting here. When it comes to education, they say this is a priority. Look what we do. The Republicans, the Republicans, spend more time than the President, who stood up here for the State the Union address and said how he is going to support education. Well, let me take my colleagues one example further. Special education. Special education. Since 1975, a program that the Democrats, to their credit, passed one of the most beautiful civil rights pieces of legislation in history, saying every American child [[Page H1717]] ought to be able to attend public school. And what did they do? They did not fund it. And they have not funded it since 1975. {time} 1245 For the first time, the Republicans are funding IDEA, special education, $1 billion extra in our budget than the President's for special education. Plus we are saying to governors and States who are crying to Washington to give them more flexibility for education, we are letting them spend excess dollars from welfare, we are giving them the ability to transfer funds from other education programs, and we are allowing them, if we get more money at the end of the year, this surplus may grow as everyone has talked about so far, in our plan we allow special education to get a little bump up. That is not in their plan, either. Mr. Chairman, it just is amazing to me with the Academy Awards being last week how they can continue to win more Academy Awards for this budget. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Could I have the benefit of the chart of the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), the chart he just used that showed the President commits 62 percent of the surplus and you commit 100 percent of the surplus? Mr. NUSSLE. The gentleman did not bring his own charts today? Mr. SPRATT. That is 62 percent of the unified surplus which he quotes, $1.8 trillion. One hundred percent of the Social Security surplus, which is part of it, equals $1.8 trillion. They are the same thing over a different period. Over 15 years it works out to the same thing. Mr. NUSSLE. That is the problem, if the gentleman would yield. Mr. SPRATT. No, I cannot yield because I do not have the time to yield. Mr. NUSSLE. He wants to use my chart but I cannot talk about it? Mr. SPRATT. In a little while we will answer what he just said about education. Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, I hope he does. Mr. SPRATT. Because I do not think the facts will bear him out. Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. I believe there was another problem with the charts that were just shown to us in that while the speaker, I am sure he misspoke, when the speaker said he was comparing the Republican plan to the Democratic plan on the floor from House Democrats today, I believe he used numbers from the President's proposal and not from our budget today relative to debt reduction. Secondly, the question of IDEA, special education, is one I am very interested in, because for several years I have offered an amendment to the Committee on the Budget as well as to the Congress to deal with fully funding IDEA, making the commitment that was passed so long ago real, to bring funding up to 40 percent of real cost. That was offered in the Committee on the Budget last week and to a person every Republican, including the gentleman from Iowa, voted against doing that. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley). Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, I thank the ranking member of our Committee on the Budget for the terrific job he has done. Mr. Chairman, if I could yield first of all to the gentleman from North Carolina. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, we want to talk about education. There is a lot that is wrong with this Republican budget resolution. We need to discuss these issues in depth. The budget resolution is arguably the most important single decision we make here. It is the blueprint for how Federal resources will be used for the coming fiscal year and on into the future. So the Democratic and the Republican proposals we are considering here today need to be debated in depth. They are a study, in fact, in contrasting priorities. The Republican budget would provide no help in extending the solvency of Medicare and Social Security. It falls short on veterans health care and crop insurance for our farmers and other critical needs. The Democratic alternative would extend the solvency of Medicare and Social Security, would provide more funding for critical priorities, would implement targeted tax relief, and would reduce the debt held by the public more than the Republican proposal. Mr. Chairman, we want to talk especially about education, because nowhere is the contrast more stark than with education. Our Republican colleagues boast about providing some increase for elementary and secondary education, but, overall, funding for education and training would be cut by $1.2 billion from the nominal 1999 level in the Republican budget for 2000. The result would be drastic cuts in funding for other priorities like higher education and teacher training and Pell grants and Head Start. Over 5 years, the Republican budget cuts to education and training would result in a 6.9 percent decrease in purchasing power, and over 10 years the decline in purchasing power for education would be over 18 percent. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, one of the things that I find interesting about this budget is we were told absolutely education is increased. They did increase it for elementary and secondary education. But what they do not tell us is that they are cutting it in all other parts of education. They do not say specifically where they are going to cut those budgets. But it is cut over 10 years from this level by $36.5 billion. So they are cutting programs like Head Start and Pell grants and work-to-school programs. That is where the cuts are. And so again it is one of those bait and switch budgets that they tell us we are doing great things over here and then they do not tell us what the other hand is doing, which is cutting education. This budget does not reflect that our school facilities are in a crisis situation. There was a study done by the engineers that said of all of our infrastructure, our school infrastructure is the one that is in the greatest need. We would not work in the schools that we send our children to. Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price). Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I would like to engage the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt) and the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley) in a further discussion of this. It is important to get these facts out. Is it not true that the Democratic alternative would make room for school construction? The kind of proposal that the President has made to give tax credits in lieu of interest on bonds in these low-income areas that need desperately to build or modernize facilities, or like the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge) and I have introduced to target high-growth areas so that our kids are not going to school in trailers. I come from a district where we have hundreds of trailers, thousands of kids going to school in these kinds of facilities. We need to get ahead of the curve in school construction. Mr. HOLT. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield? Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey. Mr. HOLT. The Democratic budget does indeed provide for modernizing schools. In fact, it would provide tax credits that would allow modernizing of up to 6,000 public schools. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, one of the other things that I think is interesting to note, not only are schools in bad shape right now and we have talked about trailers. We have first graders that have to walk across an open area in Oregon where it rains all the time. This is not a wonderful thing to do to wash their hands or go to the bathroom. And some of the rooms are in such disrepair. Again, my colleagues would not work in that facility but we expect our children to learn in that facility. The other thing that I think is interesting is there have been studies that have been done that show that, in fact, students do better in schools that reflect our society and are not in such disrepair. They do better when our schools are repaired. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Those studies are very convincing, that the students perform better when they are in first-rate facilities. It is not just an abstract issue. We have thousands of [[Page H1718]] kids going to school in these facilities. Often they are going to lunch at 10:30 because the cafeteria facilities haven't kept pace with the addition of trailers. They do not have adequate gym or restroom facilities. It simply is a misplaced priority to say that we cannot afford to do this. The Republican budget squeezes it out. The Democratic budget would make room for that kind of school modernization. Let me ask my colleagues, also, to address the other major initiative that we are looking at in this Democratic budget: getting class size down and getting 100,000 new teachers in the classrooms of America. We made a start on that last year. What is it going to take to keep that going? Mr. HOLT. If the gentleman will yield further, indeed, these are connected. Simple math will tell us, we cannot have more teachers and get the smaller class sizes in the early years unless we have the classrooms to put them in. And so this Democratic budget does allow for both of those, continuation of the hiring of new teachers, the 100,000 new teachers that we are calling for, we will continue down that line with the Democratic budget, in addition to providing for the loans for the construction and modernization of facilities. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. We are talking about a stark contrast in these budget proposals. The one makes room for reduced class size and for school construction and also lets us make good on what we promised last year when we passed the higher education act, opening up opportunity through Pell grants and an improved student loan program. The other budget makes a short-term increase in education over the long haul but would drastically decrease this funding. Mr. HOLT. Unlike the Republican budget, the Democratic alternative does not cut higher education, training and social services in order to increase elementary and secondary education programs. That is a key difference. Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. I used to be a teacher. I can guarantee my colleagues that smaller classroom sizes, you have much better performance by the students. Do not take just my word for it but go out and look at all of the research on this subject and you will find if we can get our classroom size to 18 and under, that students' performance goes way up. Not only does it go up, it stays up. We are trying to get it down in K through 3. But if you get it down, get that ratio down, the performance goes straight up and that performance stays up throughout their years in school. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. And the impact is the greatest in grades 1 through 3, is that right? Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Right. Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the way my colleagues have chimed in here. There is no question that we are dealing with a stark contrast in many areas of this budget, but certainly in education. In dollar terms, the Democratic alternative next year provides $2.6 billion more for education and training, and then over the next 5 years we are talking about a $10.2 billion gap. It is a gap that we have got to close. Vote for the Democratic alternative. Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 45 seconds. Mr. Chairman, the bottom line is, this Republican budget locks away the entire Social Security trust fund surplus for our Nation's elderly, the entire amount. We set aside more than the President to save, strengthen and preserve Social Security and as necessary Medicare as well. We create a safety deposit box to assure Social Security trust funds cannot be raided. We pay down more public debt than the President. We maintain the spending discipline for the 1997 budget act. We provide additional resources to properly train, equip and retain our men and women in uniform. And we will enact historic tax relief after we have solved Social Security for our children and our children's children. That is what we do. The President wants to spend more. The Democrats want to spend more. We do not. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Herger). Mr. HERGER. Mr. Chairman, this Republican budget brings honesty back to the budget process and ends a 30-year assault on our Social Security system. For the first time, every single penny of Social Security taxes will be locked up for Social Security and Medicare. Over the next 10 years, this budget saves $1.8 trillion for these two critical programs for our seniors and future generations. As my colleagues can see on this chart, while the Republican budget saves every penny, 100 percent, of the Social Security surplus, the President's budget saves only 62 percent of Social Security over the next 10 years. Mr. Chairman, saving just 62 percent of the