Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. If I may respond to the Senator, quoting comments he made in his opening statement, he said, ``There has been a lot of movement here.'' I agree with him, that there has been some movement here. But it is my observation that the movement has always come after the committee has decided to get tough, that the movement on this issue has come after the chairman said, ``We are going to issue a subpoena. We are going to go to the floor. We are going to demand Senate action.'' That is when the movement started to come. So when the Senator from Maryland says if it is my purpose to get the notes, we can drop this and get the notes through other means, I say to the Senator, I would be willing to drop this as soon as the notes appear. I would be willing to vacate the order for a subpoena as soon as the notes appear, and not provoke this kind of confrontation. But until the notes come along, the pattern of behavior that I have seen on the committee says to me the best way to keep the movement going is to keep the pressure on.

Mr. BENNETT. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. BENNETT. If my colleague will yield----

Mr. BENNETT. I believe he was aware of the meeting.

Mr. BENNETT. If I could respond to the Senator? I agree. If, in fact, the independent counsel has made this agreement, that is a significant step forward. He says that leaves only the House with which to deal. I am glad to know that, because the original condition that was sent to the committee had other agencies besides the independent counsel and the House. It had the RTC and the FDIC. I am assuming from the Senator's statement that means the White House has now dropped the demand that those people also have a veto power on whether or not the notes will be given to us?

Mr. BENNETT. Absolutely.

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Senator for that. It represents, in this Senator's view, a significant movement on the part of the White House from the position taken less than a week ago, when the same Jane Sherburne gave us five conditions, two of which the majority on the committee had recommended to her, and the other three of which many members of the committee found to be unacceptable. The two most objectionable of those conditions that she placed on giving up the notes, Nos. 4 and 5, in her correspondence of the 14th of December have been dropped from the letter that the Senator from Maryland just talked about. There is no relevance.

Mr. BENNETT. No. 4 has been dropped as proposed. It has been replaced, in my view, with the request that the House now be involved because she wanted the House involved in No. 4 in the original letter. It represents movement. But I think the tenor of No. 4 has, in fact, been dropped and replaced by the acceptance on her part of taking just the House. We no longer have any references to the Resolution Trust Corporation and its successor and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which were for this Senator the two most difficult requirements that the White House had placed. So we have had movement. We have had significant movement. We have seen that movement come in response to the pressure created by the requirement for this subpoena. The only other comment I would make with respect to Ms. Sherburne's letter of the 20th that the Senator from Maryland has just quoted is a personal disagreement with the opening clause in her sentence in paragraph 3 when she says, ``We have said all along that we are prepared to make the notes public.'' That does not coincide with this Senator's memory of the way the White House has proceeded. I will take the notes. I will read the notes as soon as they are provided. But I personally do not agree that the White House has indeed said all along that they are prepared to make the notes public. As I have said, I believe they have responded as the committee has gotten tough, and they are now saying things that in fact do not coincide with this Senator's memory of history. If I can proceed then, Mr. President, if my colleague from Maryland is finished with the colloquy on this issue, I want to make some general points about why it is necessary for the committee to continue this somewhat militant stance that we have taken. I have been interested to watch this thing unfold as covered by the media. If we were to go back to the beginning of the hearing, the reaction on the part of people covering this issue was that it was, frankly, a gigantic yawn and nothing for anybody to pay any attention to, nothing for anybody to get very excited about. I will not go back with a quotation trail beyond the month of December. But someone who wants to do a historical pattern of this could follow the pattern of media comments from the summertime on through the fall and then into December and see that people are beginning to pick up in their understanding, pick up in their concern about this. And, interestingly enough, it has come not just from the media that one would automatically assume would be favorable to the Republican point of view, but it has come from sources that have been traditionally, shall we say, somewhat skeptical of Republican positions. In this month alone, Mr. President, starting toward the first of the month we have the following paper trail, if you will, from some of the leading papers in this country. The New York Times on the 6th of December with the lead editorial entitled ``Whitewater Evasions, Cont.'' That is an interesting lead, an interesting title for an editorial. ``Whitewater Evasions, Cont.'' The Times has had previous editorials on Whitewater evasions, and they talk about it. The final sentence of the editorial says, ``* * * what we are left with is a portrait that grows cloudier by the day of an administration that always dodges full disclosure.'' I suggest that comment by the New York Times corresponds with my response to the Senator from Maryland about the latest White House letter that says ``We have said all along that we are prepared to make the notes public.'' On the 7th of December, the next day, the Washington Post has an editorial entitled ``The White House Mess.'' This editorial states ``And the conflicting statements keep coming. That is the problem. Ms. Williams told the Senate Whitewater Committee this summer that she has given the Clintons' lawyer access to some 24 files found in Mr. Foster's office that contained personal matters of the Clintons. But she did not say that she was with him when he reviewed the files or that the review occurred in the first family's residence, as he now maintains.'' The editorial continues with the specifics of that particular comment. How does this editorial conclude following on the editorial of the New York Times? ``Has the White House, through these twists, managed to throw suspicion over matters of little consequence, or is there something serious being covered up? The question is everywhere these days, in large part because of all of the improbable and implausible responses that have been made to inquiries so far. If the White House can clear them up, it surely should. Congress and the independent counsel are clearly not going to let things stand as they are now.'' That was the Washington Post on Pearl Harbor day, the 7th of December. We go on to the 12th of December. The New York Times again, in an editorial entitled ``Traveling Whitewater Files,'' talks about the mysterious movement of files back and forth from closet to attorneys' offices and back to attorneys with occasional stops at basements of other attorneys. And it concludes with the point we have been discussing at such length here this morning, Mr. President. ``To be sure, citizen Bill Clinton is entitled to litigate all he wants and to claim whatever privacy the courts will give him. But President Clinton, the politician and national leader, cannot expect the public to be reassured by mysteriously mobile files and promises of openness that disappear behind the lawyer-client veil.'' Then we go on. We get closer to today. On the 14th of December, the Washington Post has an editorial entitled ``Now a Subpoena Controversy.'' It begins, ``In refusing to honor a Senate Whitewater Committee subpoena for notes taken by then-White House associate counsel William Kennedy during a November 5, 1993, meeting between White House officials and the Clintons' attorneys, the administration risks traveling down a familiar dead end.'' The Washington Post apparently is losing patience. The final comment of this editorial is: ``The overriding interest is to get at the truth. If, however, a satisfactory solution cannot be reached, then the courts must decide. It shouldn't have to come to that.'' Apparently, the lawyers that advise the editorial writers for the Washington Post are not as easily convinced as the lawyers who have sent their opinions to the Senator from Maryland. Just yesterday, in the New York Times again, the editorial is headed ``Averting a Constitutional Clash.'' And I quote: ``If Mr. Clinton relinquishes the documents, it would be a positive departure from the evasive tactics that have marked the Clintons' handling of questions about Whitewater since the 1992 campaign.'' ``Mr. Clinton's assertion that the subpoenaed material is protected by lawyer-client privilege, and his quieter claim of executive privilege, are legally dubious and risk a damaging precedent.'' Now, I cannot argue that the New York Times is as distinguished a legal source as the lawyer who gave the opinion that the Senator from Maryland quoted, but again the lawyers who advise the editorial writers in the New York Times must have looked at this and they find it, to quote, ``Legally dubious, risking a damaging precedent.''

Mr. BENNETT. Yes, I will be happy to yield.

Mr. BENNETT. I say to my colleague, I will get to it as quickly as I can. If I had not had the exchanges I had, I would have been through with this a long time ago.

Mr. BENNETT. Surely.

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Senator. Mr. President, before I leave the quotations from the media, I must share with my colleagues one last editorial which comes from a source that is clearly not generally favorable to Republican positions, from a man whose writings I am not familiar with. However, I can catch the flavor of his position simply from reading this particular editorial. His name is James M. Klurfeld. He is the editorial page editor for Newsday. I will just quote a few comments, but I think it summarizes what is happening on this issue. He says: I have to admit that I haven't paid that much attention to the Whitewater investigation. That is not only because it's too complicated to figure out, but also because an essential element of any real scandal is missing: the anticipation that the high and the mighty are about to be brought down. There has been, to be blunt, no scent of blood. Until now. Mr. Klurfeld then goes on to recite some of the specifics of what has come up. He says: At the crux of the Whitewater investigation is whether they knowingly got money from the Whitewater-related projects and mixed it illegally with campaign money for a gubernatorial re-election campaign. That case has not been made. But there has always been a second Whitewater issue: whether the Clintons have abused the power of the White House to obstruct the investigation. And here things begin to look more troubling. There are credible allegations of files removed from the White House, of improper interference with the investigation of Foster's death and, most recently, the White House has refused to give memos of conversations involving the Whitewater matter to the Senate committee, first claiming lawyer-client privileges and now invoking the doctrine of executive privilege. He continues later on in the article: What keeps nagging at me is that if my first assumption is true--that there is no criminal wrongdoing involved in the matter--then why is the White House and Hillary Clinton, in particular, so reluctant to come clean about everything? What does she have to hide? Why not just open all the files? After all, Hillary Clinton worked as an investigator on the Watergate matter. We all know she as smart and as sharp as any lawyer in Washington, let alone Little Rock. She knows, as we all know, Richard Nixon got caught up by the coverup of Watergate, not the burglary itself. It is inconceivable she would blunder into the same type of mistake. Unless, of course, there is something to hide. Then a cover-up makes sense, at least from her point of view. Once again we find a pattern. Mr. President, I quote the summary sentence. Mr Klurfeld says: There are enough unanswered questions and White House evasions to justify further investigation. And I am ready to pay some attention to it. The one area that has struck me as I have listened to this whole thing, that for some reason reached out and grabbed my attention, concerns the law firm records relating to Mrs. Clinton's billing for her services to Madison Guaranty. This first came up, Mr. President, when Mr. Hubbell was before our committee, and as part of the documents that were furnished to us at that time, we received a summary--recap, to use the word that is on the document--a recap of fees, from Madison Savings and Loan, and then typed below it says ``FINAL RECAP.'' And that is in all caps. Understand, Mr. President, to put it in context, this is the legal work for which Mr. McDougal has said Mrs. Clinton was paid a retainer of $2,000 a month. Mr. McDougal's testimony was that then-Governor Bill Clinton came to him and said, ``We're having financial troubles. Can you get Hillary some money?'' And he said, ``I'll pay $2,000 a month to the Rose law firm. And she can handle the Madison affairs.'' To be clear in the Record, denial from the Clintons that this ever happened has been entered in the record. So it is Mr. McDougal's word against the Clintons' word on that particular issue. But nonetheless, in the documents that came from Mr. Hubbell, here is the final recap of fees paid. When Mrs. Clinton was asked about these fees, she said--and I am quoting from her press conference--``The young bank officer did all the work. And the letter was sent, but because I was what you call the billing attorney--in other words, I had to send the bill to get the payment made, my name was put on the bottom of the letter.'' The strong implication there, you see, is she did little or no work, she simply signed the letter because she was the billing partner, and the client did not want to pay a bill if it was from an associate. In an interview with the Office of Inspector General at the FDIC on the same matter, we find this characterization: ``Mrs. Clinton indicated she did not consider herself to be the attorney of record for Rose's representation of Madison before the ASD and presumed it to be Rick Massey. She recalled Massey came to her and asked her to be the billing attorney, which was a normal practice when an associate was handling a matter.'' Then, Mr. President, in her affidavit on this matter that was given to the FDIC Office of Inspector General, she, being duly sworn, says, ``While I was the billing partner on this matter, the great bulk of the work was done by Mr. Richard Massey, who was then an associate at Rose and whose specialty was securities law.'' ``I was not involved in the day-to-day work on the project. My knowledge of the events concerning this representation, as set forth in this Answer, has been largely derived from a review of the relevant documents, rather than my contemporaneous involvement in the representation since Mr. Massey primarily handled the matter.'' The reason this is important, Mr. President, is that Mrs. Clinton clearly had some relevant documents she reviewed in order to conclude that she was not involved in the day-to-day work on the Madison matter. She had no contemporaneous memory of it. She had to go back to the relevant documents. Now we have what I consider to be two relevant documents, and the first one is the one that came before the committee, the recap of fees for Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. I questioned Mr. Hubbell about this at some length, and Mr. Hubbell finally said, ``Senator, I apologize that I am unable to articulate to you exactly the way things are handled so that you can really understand what happened.'' I said, ``Mr. Hubbell, I'm sorry, I can't articulate to you my reaction to these numbers. I am not a lawyer. I have never made out a time sheet, but I have paid lots of legal bills. I think I can read a time sheet.'' And I went over this as I would if it were submitted to me, and I find the following, Mr. President. In the total amounts covered by this final recap, the amount billed by Mr. Massey by name is $5,000, rounded. I have not added up the odd dollars and cents, but I have rounded it. Mr. Massey, over the period of this representation by the Rose law firm, billed around $5,000. Mrs. Clinton, in that same period, billed approximately $7,700. She says she reviewed relevant documents that refreshed her memory, but that she was nothing more than the billing partner and that the work was done by Mr. Massey. But from these billings, Madison Guaranty was billed in Mr. Massey's name for around $5,000. If Mrs. Clinton was just the billing partner who signed for him, all of the billing should be in her name and his name should not appear. But if he is billing in his own name, then why was it necessary for her to bill significantly more than he did, if he was the one doing all the work? There is an interesting pattern here, Mr. President, because in the month of May, Mr. Massey billed $695, Mrs. Clinton, $840. Thus Mrs. Clinton billed more than Mr. Massey when the account was brought in. Then very dramatically the pattern changes. In June, she only billed $60. I assume that is a half hour's worth of work. Mr. Massey, $186. In July, she billed $144, he billed 10 times that, $1,400, and so on. Mr. Massey, in November billed $552; Mrs. Clinton does not appear. In December, he billed over a thousand; she billed around $4,200. Then it changes very dramatically and Mr. Massey disappears, as Mrs. Clinton starts billing heavy-hitter numbers to the point where at the bottom of the sheet, when you add it all up, Mr. Massey billed around $5,000. Mrs. Clinton has billed around $7,700. The other contemporary document which we have been able to obtain, which presumably Mrs. Clinton had available to her as she refreshed her memory, was the document that came before the committee this week where Susan Thomases took notes on a conversation during the campaign with Web Hubbell. These notes are very revealing against the background I have just outlined. This is what Susan Thomases testified Mr. Hubbell told her. She made it clear she did not know whether this was the truth or not; she was simply recording what she was told. To put it in context, Mr. President, her assignment on the campaign at the time this conversation took place was damage control over the Whitewater controversy.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I have listened with interest to my colleague from Maryland. We have discussed many of these issues in committee already, but I think it is necessary that we talk about them here on the floor. Let me state to my colleague, and any other colleagues who may be listening, that I will stand absolutely with the Senator from Maryland to protect the attorney-client privilege in every circumstance, whether it regards the President of the United States, any citizen of the United States, or a convicted felon who is incarcerated by the United States. Wherever you wish to go where there is a legitimate attorney- client privilege, this Senator will stand to protect that privilege. That is not an issue here. The President has the right to the attorney-client privilege. The President has the right to consult his attorneys on matters relating to his personal affairs, with the absolute assurance that no committee of Congress will ever intrude upon that consultation, and that no one will ever do anything that would weaken that right. It is one of the more fundamental rights established in American common law, and it must be protected. I make that strong statement so that people will understand that the issue here is not the President's right to an attorney, or the President's right to protect the attorney-client privilege. The issue here is whether or not Government attorneys, paid for by the taxpayers, attending a meeting with the President's private attorneys, discussing matters that did not impact the Presidency, matters that took place prior to the President's election, have the same attorney-client privilege. I am troubled by the number and type of people who attended the meeting with the President's private attorneys. This was a matter of discussing the President's private legal problems, so why was it necessary for four members of the White House staff to be present at this discussion, one of whom, though he has graduated from law school and has practiced as an attorney, at the time of his attendance, was not involved in legal matters for the White House. He was the head of White House personnel. He was not functioning in his capacity as an attorney when he attended that meeting. I recall, Mr. President, when the office of counsel to the President was occupied by a single individual. It was not necessary for the President of the United States to have a substantial law firm operating under the cloak of ``counsel to the President,'' paid by the taxpayers, handling the President's personal affairs. If I may, I will go all the way back to an era, which I realize has passed and cannot be reclaimed, to find an example and use it as an example of the kind of separation between personal affairs and private affairs that we once had. Harry Truman, as President of the United States, kept a roll of 3-cent stamps in his desk. Whenever he wrote a letter to his mother, which he did almost daily, he would reach into his desk and pull out the roll of 3-cent stamps, lick the stamp himself and put it on the envelope because, he said, ``Letters to my mother are not public business and, therefore, I will pay the postage myself.'' I realize we have come a long way from that point, and I would not expect the President of the United States to take the time now to say in his correspondence, ``Well, I must pay the postage on this one,'' or ``I will not pay the postage on that one.'' All of us in official life are so beset with correspondence that we never know whether the answer to a letter is a response from our official capacity or our private capacity. We pay for our Christmas cards ourselves, but much of the correspondence that comes out of our office could easily fall into either category. But it is the mindset that there must be a separation between private affairs and public affairs that I want to appeal to. Here is a President who appoints--as it is his perfectly legitimate right to do-- as deputy White House counsel a man whose principal activity in the White House turns out to be handling the Clintons' personal affairs-- Vincent Foster, the focus of all of this investigation--who made himself the focus by virtue of his tragic suicide. He spent most of his time handling the Clintons' tax matters, the Clintons' investment matters, the Clintons' personal affairs. That came out in our hearings, as one of the support people on the White House staff--a secretary--was sufficiently concerned about the amount of time Mr. Foster was spending on nonpublic issues that she went to the general counsel for the President, Mr. Nussbaum, and asked the question, ``Is this a legitimate thing for Mr. Foster to be doing while being paid by the taxpayers?'' She made the comment that she, as a long-time employee of the White House counsel's office, had never seen anything like that being done in previous Presidencies. Specifically, she referenced the Bush Presidency. She was told that it is up to the counsel, Mr. Nussbaum, to make the decision as to what is appropriate and what is not in terms of time allocation, and as long as Mr. Nussbaum says that it is all right for Mr. Foster to spend the majority of his time handling the Clintons' personal affairs, that means it is all right for Mr. Foster to spend the majority of his time handling the Clintons' personal affairs. I raise this because it is at the core of the controversy we find ourselves in. The Clintons obviously believe that anyone who works for the counsel to the President immediately becomes subject to the Clintons' private attorney-client privilege. If Mr. Foster was spending his time doing the Clintons' personal tax affairs, I think the case could be made that those tax matters could be covered by the attorney- client privilege. I certainly hope that my consultation with my attorney on tax matters is covered by the attorney-client privilege, if anybody should ever challenge me. And if I use Government lawyers to do that--I have not and will not--I guess the presumption in my mind would be that even though they are paid by the taxpayers, because they are doing this personal work for me, the work would be covered by the attorney-client privilege if they were private attorneys, so it should be covered by the attorney-client privilege now that they are public attorneys. Let me digress, Mr. President, long enough to make the point that all of us in our official capacities do indeed have to call upon Government employees from time to time to advise us on private activities that impinge upon our public circumstance. For example, when I was called upon to put my assets in a managed trust by virtue of my election as a Senator, I turned to the attorney in my Senate office who is familiar with Ethics Committee positions and requirements and asked him for advice as to how this should be done. I would expect those conversations to be covered by the attorney-client privilege as I discuss with him matters of some confidentiality. The trust has been formed, the assets have been placed there, and documents have been filed with the Ethics Committee disclosing all of that. That is an example where I have a matter of personal concern that I discuss with an attorney who is on the payroll because he is in a position to advise me as to how my personal affairs impact in a public arena; in this case, the Senate Ethics Committee and the filings we are required to make here. Accordingly, if the President were to turn to a member of the counsel to the President's office and say, ``I have a matter that stems from my personal affairs but that impacts on my public duties. I would like you to counsel me on those affairs, and I would expect that your counsel would fall within the attorney-client privilege.'' I have no argument with that. The argument here is a meeting where the President's personal attorneys, concerned with actions that took place prior to his becoming President, concerned with allegations about impropriety if not illegality in those matters, holds a meeting with four employees of the White House to discuss those matters, and then says, ``Those employees of the White House are covered by attorney-client privilege, the same as we are.'' I find that a bit of a stretch, Mr. President. I made the point in the committee that there must be a dividing line somewhere between the President and Government employees. If you say, ``No, there is no such dividing line,'' you can then go to the point of saying any attorney who works for the executive branch anywhere in the executive branch can, by the President's direction, be covered by attorney-client privilege. Obviously, nobody would say that is common. Where does the line move back to? Does the President have attorney- client privilege just with the counsel to the President? Does the President have personal attorney-client privilege with everyone in the counsel to the President's office no matter how large it gets? I am alarmed at how large it is getting. I remember when a President needed only one lawyer. If he wanted a legal opinion on something other than his own direct office matters he called the Attorney General. We are getting away from that now. We have a whole law firm under the title of counsel to the President. It seems to be supplanting the Attorney General in the role of advising the President on legal matters. That is another issue. I think the line must be drawn as tightly to the President as possible. The President obviously thinks the line should be drawn as far away from him as possible. That is where the controversy for this Senator arises on this issue. I am happy to exchange with my friend, the Senator from Maryland, in any colloquy or exchange, as long as I do not lose my right to the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, as you know, I have joined with other members of the Utah delegation and Governor Leavitt in introducing S. 884, the Utah Public Lands Management Act, also known as the Utah wilderness bill. Since we introduced this bill earlier this summer, we have been criticized up and down by opponents of S. 884 that the extensive process we engaged in to study and eventually recommend over 1.8 million acres in 49 wilderness areas was not extensive enough. Since January, over 22,000 public comments have been submitted, over 45 public hearings were held and 600 personal testimonies were accepted. However, our critics choose to overlook this fact as well as the fact that it is time to bring to closure this 20-year-old debate. Mr. President, I ask that the following document be printed in the Record at the proper place as proof that the public comment process has indeed been extensive. This is an excerpt from a publication by the Coalition for Utah's Future/Project 2000. It details the extensive process which the coalition, joined by members of Utah's environmental community and county commissioners and citizens of Emery County, undertook to discuss and resolve the issue of wilderness. Unfortunately, cost and space limitations will prohibit the inclusion of the entire text. I would encourage those who are interested in the full report to contact the coalition at the address following the excerpt. I commend these folks for their tremendous efforts to reach consensus on one of the most difficult and contentious public lands issues in our State. I believe this report illustrates just how extensive the process has been. I wish to express my thanks to the Coalition for Utah's Future/Project 2000 for the time and effort they have spent in conceiving and implementing this pilot project. The material follows: A Project of The Coalition For Utah's Future/Project 2000 Introduction In twelve short months, a traditional rural community in Utah moved from what appeared to be a deeply seated, anti- environmental sentiment to a protection oriented public lands agenda. Involved Emery County leaders and citizens alike, are now publicly espousing the desire to work with disparate parties and land managers to solve problems and seek mutually beneficial land protection mechanisms. How did this rather dramatic transformation in the county's approach to public lands issues occur? The answer involves the willingness of several visionary county and environmental leaders to be the ``guinea pig'' in a cooperatively designed Community and Wild Lands Futures Pilot Project sponsored by the Coalition for Utah's Future/Project 2000 (CUF), a non-profit, multi-issue organization comprised of diverse community leaders interested in a quality future for all Utah citizens. It also involves the surfacing of values, long held within the county but unacknowledged, due to the acrimonious nature of environmental disputes throughout Utah and the West over the past fifteen years. The pilot was conceived in the summer of 1993 when CUF's conflict resolution consultant, Susan Carpenter, put a hypothetical question before a group of some 25 disparate stakeholders interested in resolving the conflict over Utah's BLM wilderness designation issue. She asked participants to assume the year is 1999, and that a Utah BLM wilderness bill, which everyone could support, had just been signed into law. ``What'', she asked, ``are the steps beginning in 1999 and then working backwards to 1993, that led to the passage of this bill?'' The group's response to this question became the basis for the conceptualization of the Community and Wild Lands Futures Pilot Project (CWFP). CWFP, they hoped, could become a model for other rural Utah communities and interested parties in the West. The word future is key here. Conservationists in the design group reasoned that helping communities articulate their values, visions, and goals for an ``ideal'' future, would enable citizens to move beyond current problems and contentious issues toward a more pro-active plan based on commonly shared community values and ``sense of place''. This, they also theorized would lay a more productive foundation for subsequent discussions regarding environmentally sensitive, adjacent public lands. Rural leaders in the design group supported this community-based, grassroots approach. They expressed the need for local empowerment and a seat at the table when making decisions regarding public lands issues affecting their future. The group boiled these ideas down to three community questions, which were to be followed by broad-based wild lands futures deliberations in a focused geographic area. The community questions were: What do we have?, What do we want?, and What can we do?. In short, the hypotheses proved correct. Asking citizens what they valued, how they wanted the future to look, and exploring options to achieve this vision on the front side of a county-wide general planning initiative, led to outcomes such as: 1. the formation of a public lands council, 2. county agreement to enter wild lands futures deliberations with a broad range of interests and affected parties from within and without the county, 3. a county proposal for the protection of over 500,000 acres of BLM land (including 184,000 acres of wilderness), and 4. the conceptualization of a public lands institute involving cooperative partnerships with the BLM and other agencies for the preservation and management of the San Rafael Swell. Community and Wild Lands Futures Pilot Project (CWFP) In the summer of 1993, the broad-based group of stakeholder volunteers known as the Process Advisory Group, including decision-makers and resource representatives, gave birth to the Community and Wild Lands Futures Pilot Project. As described in the opening of this paper, when challenged to consider how a wilderness bill passed Congress by working backwards from 1999, the Process Advisory Group agreed that the first step should be community-based. Out of the discussions came the following project goals: 1. Address community and wild lands futures in a rational and scientific manner. 2. Create a grass roots process for comprehensive local community planning and sustainability. 3. Identify resources to enrich the process and generate useful information to share. 4. Connect the local visioning/planning process with the issue of public wild land futures and with state and national processes and players. 5. Develop a broad based recommendation for the classification of public wild lands in the pilot region. 6. Educate the broader general public about rural planning and community self-determination, and ecosystem management of natural systems and wild lands issues. 7. Create a replicable model. A concept paper was circulated among approximately 300 interested parties at national, regional, state and local levels requesting constructive feedback. The reviews were favorable, which meant the next task was to select from one of several receptive pilot communities. In October of 1993, Emery County became the chosen community for the pilot project, and the newly formed Canyon County Partnership (CCP) received CUF funding to initiate staff support. Today, the seed is germinating and concepts are maturing. County initiated deliberations include ideas to 1. develop a resource area partnership among Emery County, the BLM, the Forest Service, and other public land users, 2. become a nationally supported pilot program, and 3. conceptualize a non-profit San Rafael Swell Institute. Today, Emery County is proposing and exploring a planning/management partnership arrangement with the BLM. The purpose would be to: Incorporate direct local involvement in land management agency planning processes. Incorporate direct local involvement in land management agency decision-making processes. Reconcile differences between the Emery County Master Plan and the planning goals and objective of the land management agencies. Develop consistency between the ordinances and regulations of the federal and county entities. Cooperate in law enforcement activities. Cooperate in the provision of emergency services. Cooperate in the permitting, design, placement, construction, and costs of public facilities (roads, buildings, etc.). Cooperate in the facilitation of allowable uses. Cooperate in the mitigation of impacts from various uses. Cooperatively work to resolve local conflicts between uses, users, and stakeholders. Leverage the limited resources of the local and Federal entities through coordinated efforts. Share in a joint stewardship over the public lands within Emery County. CUF believes it is a major accomplishment that Emery County is now adopting cooperative, problem-solving principles in newly conceived public lands initiatives within the County. Application of the Model In conclusion, the Community and Wild Lands Futures Pilot Project did advance environmental decision-making through inclusive community and interest group participation. Outcomes are evolving and project participant evaluations were overwhelmingly favorable. OPB's Brad Barber writes, ``It [the project] taught us that this type of thing may work in the future. Once a wilderness bill is done in Utah--we should talk about moving into cooperative management.'' CUF board member and Moab Times Editor, Sam Taylor says, ``In the event the [Utah delegation] bill does not become law, CUF has laid the ground work that will still lead to piece-meal resolution for the BLM wilderness issue. We have given them a road- map,'' he concludes. Many participants believe that the pilot has application value for comprehensive planning efforts in rural areas, and some can see it being applied to growth management, transportation, education and topical problems in urban areas. It clearly is recognized as being superior to the conventional approach of deriving local input from a couple of perfunctory public hearings. Jane Brass suggests that the need for disseminating information regarding the pilot model ``is pervasive as states struggle with public lands issues.'' She cautions that communities should not have consultants dictate a quick way out. Rather, she recommends working through a process to ``find answers that will be more acceptable to your community''. Another participant echoed the concern that it could be dangerous to create a ``cook book approach''. The emphasis from a model should be on need and a few questions to ask in the beginning, he cautioned. Chairman Petersen advises other rural county leaders, who might be considering a similar planning model, ``1. Put together a good steering group, 2. Listen to their input, and 3. Listen to people from other areas and take advantage of their successes and failures.'' Community Visions: a Catalyst for Creating Positive Futures CWFP demonstrated that engaging local citizens in discussions about their values and visions of the future enabled them to develop solid plans for economic development and empowered them to approach the highly polarized issue of wilderness as an issue which could be resolved with their traditional adversaries, not as a battle to be won. The constructive progress made by the county in the relatively short time will continue to bear fruit for the county on public lands issues and other matters of county interest. In reference to ``Discovering Common Ground'' by Marvin Weisbord, project consultant, Susan Carpenter, summarizes her perspective. She writes, ``Weisbord makes the point that creating the tension between what we have and what we really want is a much more effective way to get what we want than the more traditional methods of problem-solving and conflict management (identify the problem and then develop options to solve it). My experience bear this out. I see the Coalition's Emery County Community/Wild Lands Futures Project as a powerful, effective model which can be applied to a wide range of issues at the county and state level across the West.'' Currently, CUF is moving forward with an initiative focused on quality growth in Utah. History will reveal whether we, as a whole and increasingly diverse community in Utah and the West, are able to build on the lessons learned from the Emery County experience.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, in this morning's Washington Post, there was a very interesting op-ed piece that I cannot refrain from commenting on. It is written by Terry Deibel, and it is entitled, ``A Liberal Deficit Hawk's Dilemma.'' Mr. Deibel describes himself as a liberal who believes in Government, believes that the Federal Government can and does do wonderful things, but that the Government should not ``spend more money to do these things than it collects.'' He then offers us this fascinating solution to our present dilemma from his position as a self-styled liberal deficit hawk. And I am quoting, Mr. President. To be sure, a good deal of budget balancing could be done in a policy-neutral fashion. A simple freeze on outlays at current levels or a small across-the-board cut in everything--all spending, all entitlements, including Social Security--prolonged over several years of economic and revenue growth eventually would do the trick without any allocation decisions. I was stunned when I read this. Here is a man who is a liberal, describes himself as a liberal deficit hawk who is proposing a program far more draconian than anything the Republicans have ever contemplated, a freeze, Mr. President, in all spending across the board, or even a small across-the-board cut in everything-- entitlements, including Social Security. No Republican has dared offer anything that drastic or that draconian. What this says to me, Mr. President, is that Mr. Deibel has fallen victim to the rhetoric of this Chamber and, if you will, of the White House. He has come to believe, as do many of my constituents, that the Republicans are calling for drastic cuts in everything, and he says let us solve the problem with a simple freeze. Let me give you a few numbers, Mr. President. Total Medicare spending in 1995 was $178 billion. If this proposal were put in place, that means years from now Medicare spending would be frozen at $178 billion in contrast to the draconian Republican call for spending of $301 billion in the year 2002. He is calling for a commonsense, neutral position that would freeze the budget at $178 billion but, no, those stingy Republicans want to increase it from 178 to 301--a 69 percent increase. I say to you, Mr. President, he, like too many people, has fallen victim to the rhetoric of this debate without looking at the facts. On Medicaid--another area where we are being told the Republicans are calling for heartless slashes--this man, a liberal, says, no, let us take care of Medicaid by simply freezing it at its present level. Its present level is $83 billion. Under the Republican proposal, by the year 2002, it will reach $143 billion, a 58-percent increase. But we are being pilloried for being heartless when common sense tells this man we can solve the problem if we just freeze it. Again, he is a victim of the rhetoric. He does not realize, as, unfortunately, too many people do not realize, the Republicans are not saying let us slash these programs. The Republicans are saying the programs are legitimate, the programs need to grow, as the needs of our people need to grow, but let us let them grow at some kind of intelligent rate. But with the rhetoric, even a man of his knowledge and understanding--and he is identified in the Washington Post as chairman of the Department of National Security Policy at the National War College--even a man of his position and understanding has fallen victim to this rhetoric. I hope he will understand now that the freeze he is calling for as the logical solution is so much more draconian than what the Republicans have suggested that if we were to in fact embrace his proposal, we would be crucified --I think justly--by both the press and, of course, the members of the opposite party. Now, I cannot conclude without referring to one specific that he talks about which is a further demonstration of the way the rhetoric has distorted the reality. He says: It is quite possible, after all, to cut corporate welfare or end the great-western-lands-grazing-and-mining free-lunch program, for example, rather than cut poor people's welfare and the school lunch program. Once again, if you listen to the rhetoric on this floor, you would think that the reason the budget is out of balance is because of the tremendous spending in the West on grazing and the reason we are heartless is because of our cuts in school lunches. I participated in the filibuster that was mounted on this floor to prevent the Secretary of the Interior from implementing his increase in grazing fees, which we were told would be the way to make everything fair. The total amount of money that would have come to the Federal Government if the Secretary of Interior had been successful in his effort to increase those grazing fees is $19 million per year. That is million, ``m'' as in ``minuscule,'' Mr. President, $19 million. That is less than we spent to put the new subway between the Capitol and the Senate office buildings. By comparison, his implication is you could pay for school lunches if only you did away with the grazing program in the Midwest. In 1995 we will spend $7.9 billion on child nutrition, ``b'' as in ``big.'' And in 7 years, under the draconian Republican budget, spending on child nutrition will increase to $9.2 billion a year, a 16.4-percent increase. I challenge anybody to try to pay for the present program, let alone the increased program, by doing something about a grazing plan in the United States that is currently, by the Secretary of the Interior's own analysis, costing the taxpayers $19 million. Before I leave that, however, because $19 million is, after all, $19 million, I would refer you to the study that demonstrated that had the Secretary's proposal gone through, instead of receiving $19 million in additional revenue, in fact it would have driven enough marginal operators off the range that the actual income to the Federal Government would probably not only have been less than $19 million, but in fact might have endangered the money that they were receiving from the present grazing fees. The revenues could have gone down rather than up. I will not pursue this any further, Mr. President. I think this is an example of what is wrong with our political dialog. The Republicans are proposing increases, in many cases very substantial increases, in some of our most fundamental programs, and yet the rhetoric around it has been so extreme that even a man of Mr. Deibel's position and understanding thinks he can improve on the Republican's proposals by freezing everything at the present level. If there was ever a demonstration of the excess and inaccuracy of the rhetoric of this debate, it is Mr. Deibel's op-ed piece in this morning's Washington Post. I yield the floor. Mr. MACK addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to continue up to 10 minutes as if in morning business.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I may proceed as in morning business for up to 10 minutes.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, at one point in my business career I was called upon to act as a consultant to a firm that was having difficulties. In Washington language, it had a deficit. In the language of the business world, it was losing money. I sat down with the CEO of this company and we looked at the coming year and he had, as is always the case in an accounting circumstance, the figure of what it was going to cost to keep the company doors open throughout the year. The cost was going to be x number of dollars every month to meet the payroll, pay the overhead, the gas bill, the light bill, the rent, et cetera. I knew what the margins were. For those who are not acquainted with accounting, ``margin'' means that portion of the sale price of your goods that is not covered by the cost of goods. If you are selling a widget for a dollar and you buy the widget for 60 cents from the widget manufacturer, your margin is 40 cents, or 40 percent. This was a manufacturer, so he had a pretty good handle on what his costs were for his particular widget. He knew what the sales price was. I looked at the size of his margin, as I recall it was around 30 percent, and then multiplied the number of widgets he was going to sell over the year by 30 percent and said to him, ``The total margin that you have for the year is not enough to cover the monthly expenses that you have in overhead to keep this place open. That is your problem.'' It did not take an MBA from Harvard to figure that one out, but that is the problem. He came back a little while later and he had new projections. I looked at his numbers and I noticed that he had done nothing to cut the monthly expenses but he had raised the estimate of his sales. Now, 30 percent of that sales number was a number big enough to cover the monthly expenses. I said to him, ``How did you get there? This is wonderful. You now have a projection that shows you are going to make a little money this year.'' He said, ``Well, I went back to all the salespeople and I told them that they were being too pessimistic and that they needed to take another look at what they might be able to sell. And every one of them responded wonderfully to my pep talk and everyone said, `We are going to sell this much more, we are going to sell this much more, we are going to sell this much more.' And now, you see, my company is projected to make a profit.'' I said, ``That's terrific.'' And he said, ``Oh, I did something else. I raised the prices on some of my products. So a product that costs me 70 cents to make and I sell for $1 and I have 30 cents of margin, now I am going to sell for $1.10, so I have 40 cents of margin. So, the combination of increased prices and increased projections brings my proposal for the coming year into balance and we are going to make a profit this year.'' The first month passed. I looked at the reactions for the first month. His costs were right where they said they would be. But his sales were a little low. ``Well,'' he said, ``we had bad weather in January. You cannot expect January to be the real test. Wait, we are going to do just fine.'' February came in. His costs were right where they said they were going to be, but his sales were a little low. ``Well,'' he said, ``we had a little trouble in February. We had difficulty with suppliers and so on.'' I went out to talk to some of the people who were actually selling the product and I said, ``What is happening?" They said, ``For one thing, we cannot get the increased prices. The customer won't pay $1.10 for these widgets. The customer is used to paying $1, and furthermore, the widget seller down the street only gets $1 for these widgets, so in order to get any sales at all we have to give back this price increase. It is there in the projections but it's not there in reality. Furthermore, the increased optimism in sales did not come to pass either. We are selling at the same rate we sold last year.'' I sat down with the CEO and I said, ``You now have 3 months in for the year. If you take the sales pattern for those 3 months and extrapolate it over the whole year you are going to lose $1 million this year, if you do not take $1 million out of your monthly costs.'' Well, taking $1 million out of his monthly costs meant firing some people. He said to me, ``Some of these people have worked at this company for 20 years.'' He said to me, ``Some of these people are my best friends. I have worked at this company for 20 years along with them. We socialize together. Our wives know each other. I cannot do that. They will lose their jobs.'' Mr. President, the year went on. At the end of the year the company lost $1 million. And I said, ``What are you going to do next year?'' ``Oh,'' he said, ``we are going to tighten down. Oh, boy, we are going to solve this problem.'' And the next year the company lost $3 million. Because they tried the same solution. Change projections and raise the prices but do not deal with your structural problem. Does this sound familiar, Mr. President? I believe it is the description of what we are seeing with our Government right now. They look at the structural costs and they say: We cannot do anything about these structural costs. Let us change the forecasts to be more optimistic, like the forecasts of the sales force, and let us raise our prices, only in Government the way you raise prices is to raise tax rates. The reason I harp on that is because--I gave a speech on this earlier but I think it is worth repeating--Marty Feldstein, the economist, did a study and an analysis of the President's tax increase passed in 1993. I put the analysis in the Congressional Record. People can find it. He analyzed the revenue derived from that tax increase and found that it was one-third the amount projected. Just as in the case of my business friend, the people would not pay the extra price that he put on his product, so the people in the economy, when faced with increased tax rates, changed their behavior, changed their investment pattern, and did not pay the taxes that it was projected that they would. And, according to Dr. Feldstein, the revenue coming in to the Government was one-third the revenue projected at the time all of this was made. Why is all of this important? Because right now one of the things we are arguing about is who gets to make the projections? We are saying it ought to be the Congressional Budget Office. The President is saying no, he wants to be like my businessman friend and have his own sales force make the projections because it will make it look better. People say to me, how can you be sure that the Congressional Budget Office numbers will be right? I can be absolutely sure that the Congressional Budget Office numbers will be wrong, because nobody on this planet has the capacity to look 7 years ahead and tell us what is going to happen to the economy with any degree of absolute certainty. The best we can do is guess. And the Congressional Budget Office numbers are better guesses than the Office of Management and Budget numbers, but they are guesses nonetheless. So, we must recognize that going in. But guesses are made and then people go ahead and do the best they can. In the case of the business I have talked about, investors took one look at the accuracy of the guesses that were being made and they made an investment decision. They sold the stock. And the price of the stock went down. That is the key to this whole debate, Mr. President, because up until now the market--that is, the people that do the trading on the bond market, the people that do the trading on the stock market referred to collectively as the market--has looked at the numbers and the projections, and the suggestions that have all come out of this Congress. They have bet that it is all going to work, that the Republican proposal is going to pass, that we are going to get a balanced budget, that we are going to get the benefits that the Senator from Iowa was talking about, and the stock market is up 40 percent year over year, and the bond market has seen interest rates drop 2 full points since the Republicans were elected in November of 1994. Over the weekend when the President did not come forward with a proposal, and when the congressional leadership responded by saying there is no point in talking anymore, for the first time the signal was sent to the market that the fix might not occur. And today the stock market dropped 100 points--just as the investors could not tell with any exactness how much money the company I was talking about was going to lose but they could sure tell the trend, and sold the stock on the trend. The market today cannot tell us with exactness what is going to happen in 7 years. But they are worried about the trend. And the trend is signs of business as usual around here, signs of solving the budget balance issue by changing the forecasts around here, signs of talking about the thing being taken care of in the outyears, and no action being taken right now around here. And they do not like it, and they are selling the stock. They are selling their investment in America because they believe for the first time that we may not be successful in our effort to get a balanced budget. I learned in private business that the market can be ruthless. The market can be unfair. But long term the market is the best barometer of all of what is finally going to happen. We had a serious signal today, Mr. President. The market is telling us to get our act together, and make this happen--not with phony estimates, and not with price increases that do not ever come to pass in terms of actual revenue but with firm resolve to deal with the structural costs built into our balance. I conclude, Mr. President, with this analogy that illustrates what it is we must do. I was watching television about a week ago. There was a tribute on television to the memory of the late Jack Benny. I remember laughing at Jack Benny when I was a preteenager. Some people may not remember Jack Benny. But I remember him very, very fondly. In this tribute to Jack Benny they told a classic Jack Benny joke. Jack Benny, as you will recall, Mr. President, built his persona around his stinginess and his unwillingness to spend money. So here is the joke. Jack Benny went in to see his doctor. And the doctor looked at the x rays and said, ``Mr. Benny, you need an operation, and it is going to cost you $400.'' And Jack Benny responded by saying, ``Doctor, for $25 can't you just touch up the x ray?'' Mr. President, that is what we are being told now. ``Can't we just touch up the estimates? Can't we just touch up the forecasts, and avoid the pain of actually having to deal with the balanced budget? After all, we have been doing that for 35 years.'' You can find Presidents, Republican and Democrat, all the way back to Harry Truman who have promised balanced budgets sometime, promised balanced budgets in the outyears, promised balanced budgets down the road, far enough away that, if you just touch up the estimates a little, we can convince ourselves that we do not have to do anything now. Well, Mr. President, we do. And it is wonderful to say touch up the x ray for 25 bucks. But the underlying problem that the x ray tells us about is still there, and the operation dealing with it is still required. And if ever there was a signal coming to us as strong as anything that the retribution for our failure to act will be severe, it was in today's 100-point drop in value in the Dow as the market says for the first time we are beginning to get nervous about your willingness to do what you have said you will do. If it is necessary for us to be here on New Year's Eve, this Senator will be here on New Year's Eve. My wife is not going to be happy to hear me say that because she is in Utah, and I am not too happy about her being there alone because she has the credit cards, and she is doing all of the shopping. But if that is what it takes, that is what we will do because the stakes are too high, and the eventual responsibility is too great for us today. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I was in the Chamber last night when some rather harsh words were spoken on both sides of the center aisle and I said a few words myself in an attempt to, first, calm the atmosphere and, second, lift the cloud of obfuscation that seems to have fallen over the debate, after which it fell to my lot to assume the chair. Some people think sitting in the chair is a great honor, and, of course, it is. But it is also a very good way of silencing one's voice, because when you are in the chair you are forbidden to speak or react or do anything other than to declare whether a quorum is or is not present, or inform errant Senators that they should please take their conversations to the Cloakroom--not the most edifying kinds of things to be able to say. So I take the opportunity that today's circumstance gives me to offer a few more words in the ongoing debate about the balanced budget, in response to some of the things that were said last night. I want to focus a little bit on the issue of the tax cuts. We were told last night that the most disgraceful part of the Republican attempt to balance the budget was that in our Balanced Budget Act we called for tax cuts. Disgraceful, we were told, when the public needs the money that you are going to cut in taxes. Behind that statement lies one of the great misconceptions of this body, and frankly this Government and the various groups that advise this Government. It gives me an opportunity to get on one of my soap boxes that I have been on before. But I warn the Senate there is no such thing as repetition. You can give the same speech again and again and again and it is always treated as if it were new and, indeed, maybe the repetition is necessary. So I will launch, once again, into an attempt to set the record clear about tax cuts and the way they are viewed in Government. We make the mistake in this Chamber and elsewhere of assuming that the Government's business is like a family income, where mother and dad sit around the kitchen table adding up the bills at the end of the month, scratch their heads, with very nervous looks on their faces, and say, ``We cannot make it. We must do one of two things. We must either increase our income by dad's getting a raise or mother working more hours at her part-time job, or somehow getting an inheritance from a rich uncle, or we must cut down our expenditures.'' It is a two-dimensional problem. We must either increase revenues, or we must decrease expenses. That is all there is to it. And we are told around here that the Government has only two choices to balance the budget. We must either raise taxes or cut expenditures. And the analogy sounds wonderful, and it is easy to understand. Every one who sat around the kitchen table worrying about the bills identified the limit. There is only one problem though. It is not reality. It does not conform to the way the world really works. If I may switch the analogy, Mr. President, the Government is not like a family. The Government is like a business. And I have run some businesses. I have run some of them successfully, and I have run some of them unsuccessfully. Indeed, the lessons I learned from the business which failed under my hand were probably responsible for my ability to make some businesses succeed under my hand. The business is not a two-dimensional circumstance. It is three. There are three things you can do if your business is not making enough money to cover its monthly bills. First, yes. You can cut spending. You can cut your overhead. That corresponds with the family sitting around the table. You can say we do not need as many people as we have here. We do not need as fancy surroundings as we have rented. We can move into smaller quarters. You can do all kinds of things to cut your overhead and cut your expenses. Second, raise revenues. In business that is called raising prices. In Government it is called raising taxes. In business it is called raising prices, except every good businessman and businesswoman knows that raising prices is a very dicey way to try to increase your income because there are customers out there that may not like it. There are customers out there that may say, ``Oh. If you are going to raise the price on your widgets, I am going to buy widgets from somebody else.'' I have increased the bottom line in businesses that I have run by raising prices. It is a wonderful way to do it. It is painless. If the customer will, indeed, pay the increased price. In business we have a phrase we call price sensitive. That is a fancy way for saying we do not dare raise the price on this product because, if we do, nobody will buy it. But, if you have a hot product, if you have something everybody wants, it is not particularly price sensitive and you can increase your income 10 percent by raising your prices 10 percent. And that is clearly the easiest way to do it. Sometimes, however, Mr. President, businessmen know that they can increase their profits the third way, which is increase sales, cause the business to grow bigger than it is. And increasing sales sometimes comes from--wonder of wonders--increasing overhead. Oh, how can you do that? Well, you can buy an ad for one. You can put something on television telling people about your product. That is increasing your overhead but, if it increases your sales by significantly more than the overhead, it is the wise thing to do. You can increase your overhead by hiring additional salesmen who will go out and hawk your wares, and thereby cause the business to grow. Or, for many businessmen, the answer is cutting prices. Cutting prices--not increasing prices--many times is the road to success and profit. Look for just a moment, if you will, Mr. President, at the fastest growing portion of the economy which is the computer driven portion. What has happened to prices of computers? I will give you a rather graphic example. When I was once president--or actually chairman of the board, a fancy title; the company did not have any money; so they gave me a big title rather than a big salary--of a company that produced computers. We had two that we offered for sale. One, it was a dual-floppy disk computer. We sold it for $3,300. The other was a 10-megabyte hard disk computer which we sold for $30,000. We sold every one we could produce literally in a garage. Yes. This was one of those stories of a computer company that started in somebody's garage. We produced them in a garage, and every one we could produce we could sell immediately, there was enough demand for it. People would say, ``Gee. You are in the computer business. IBM dominates the computer business.'' With great foresight I said, ``IBM does not understand small computers. They only make mainframes. This is a business that will be reserved to us alone.'' Today for under $2,000 you can buy a computer that has 40 megabytes of hard disk connected with it. A color monitor connected to it in a laptop makes the thing we produce--it was about the size of a good washer-dryer set with these 10 megabytes of hard disk, and it sold for $30,000, under everybody else. Now you can buy something that is so much better than that, and there is no comparison at all, for a fraction of the cost we used to charge. If the people in the computer industry had been Government-oriented in their pricing, they would have said, ``Gee. Mr. Bennett, you are not making any money with that $30,000 computer. The solution is to raise your prices'' when the folks at Apple down the street understood that the solution was to cut the prices. Well, what does this have to do with the debate we are having here? Simply this: That all of the figures we are throwing back and forth around this Chamber about cutting taxes $240 billion, raising taxes $28 billion, and so on, are ignoring the fact that there are customers out there who will react to the new prices on Government service by changing their behavior just the way they are customers for products. An interesting article appeared in the Wall Street Journal about a month ago. I am going to dig it out and put it in the Record. Marty Feldstein, a respected economist, went back and did something we never do in Government. He analyzed the Clinton tax increase 3 years after it was put in place to see what happened. He came up with the most astounding fact, Mr. President. The Clinton tax increase yielded in revenue one-third of the amount of revenue that was projected at the time it was passed. We debated back and forth on this floor. And we were told again and again that we must have this tax increase to cut the deficit, and it will cut into the deficit x billion dollars. Now, 3 years later, the good economist Dr. Feldstein, has looked at it, and said, ``Do you know what? You raised the taxes x amount, and you got one-third x in revenue.'' We never look at that around here. We never pay any attention to that. We are like the businessman who says, ``I will raise my prices, and my revenue will come in without any question,'' and then discovers that the customers do not buy it. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the the article in the Wall Street Journal by Martin Feldstein be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNETT. I suggest to you, Mr. President, that we need to pay close attention to what happens when tax rates are cut. It is the same thing that happens to a well-run business when prices are selectively and intelligently cut on certain products. If we cut the tax rate on capital gains, which is where most of the heat is coming from on the other side of the aisle, I am willing to bet a fairly substantial amount of money that we will see Government revenue from capital gains go up and not down. Is not that what we are after? We want to balance the budget. We want more revenue, do we not? We ought to do that which will bring in more revenue. And the way to bring in more revenue is to cut prices on the products that are slow moving. I tell you, Mr. President. Ever since we raised prices on capital gains by increasing the capital gains rate, the Government revenue from capital gains has been going steadily down. And any decent business person will tell you we made a mistake with that price increase. We ought to cut the price back to where it was before, and people will start buying our widgets again. We ought to cut the capital gains tax rate back down to where it was before. I will tell you the figure that I will settle for, Mr. President. I will settle for the figure on capital gains proposed by John F. Kennedy, President of the United States. He wanted a capital gains rate lower than the one we are paying today and nobody accused him of trying to throw widows and orphans out into the street, or little children being driven away from their school lunches when John Kennedy proposed a cut in the capital gains tax rate. His cut was passed. And what happened when they cut prices on that particular governmental service? The revenue from capital gains went up. What is the objection? As nearly as I can tell, the only objection to the Government getting more money from people who have capital gains is that the people who have capital gains are supposedly the wealthy. I will not argue with whether they are the wealthy or not. We can do that at another time. And there are plenty of charts to indicate that that is not the case. The point I am making is this. If I am a businessman and I wish to increase my bottom line, I really do not ask whether or not the customers who are benefited from my cutting prices are rich or poor. I really do not care. All I want is enough money to keep my doors open. I do not think the Government ought to really care whether the people who benefit from a capital gains tax cut--in the rate--are rich or poor as long as the Government gets more money. I was not sent here by the voters of Utah to punish or reward. I was sent here to balance the budget, and one of the ways I balance the budget is to get more revenue to the Government. And one of the ways I get more revenue to the Government is to cut the prices on capital gains transactions so that more people will do more of them and the economy will grow and the Government will get more money. So I say to those who are hung up about tax cuts and tax increases and who we are hurting and who we are helping, will you change your focus just a minute and ask who you are here to represent and what your assignment is. Your assignment is to get the Government's fiscal affairs in order, and if that is done everybody benefits. And if in the process of getting more revenue into the coffers you happen to help somebody who probably does not need help in terms of his own personal financial circumstances, do not let that bother you. Go ahead, take his money anyway. Go ahead, balance the budget anyway, even if somebody who is rich now happens to benefit by the fact that you are balancing the budget and making life more secure for everybody else. Look the other way and take his money anyway. If we did that around here, I think we move toward solving the problem. I thank the Chair for his patience. I realize this is not the most stimulating conversation in the world because we are here, frankly, waiting on a group of negotiators to try to solve their problems. And the only comment I would give to them would be this one. You have made your point. You have shown how tough you are. You have shut the Government down. Everybody knows you are powerful. Will you please start to negotiate, having made your point, and let us get on with it. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I appreciate the recognition. I say to my friend, I know he has been on his feet. I have been in the Chamber for some time, also. I will not go on as long as my colleague from Pennsylvania, and I assure him he will get an opportunity to respond as quickly as I can make a few points. I will not use words like ``lie.'' I will not use ``despicable'' and ``disgraceful.'' I came over here a little bit angry, but I will not use the word ``anger.'' I will do my best to try to analyze what I think is really going on here and hope it might make a modest contribution to the dialog. I do not believe that anybody is proposing savaging Medicare. That was a phrase that was used earlier on this floor. I am willing to stipulate, for this Senator, right this moment, that I will accept the President's number for Medicare. It happens to mean, in terms of increased premiums--one of the things the President has been most upset about--that I am now sacrificing Federal revenue of 39 cents per day per recipient by going to the President's number. I know enough about forecasting to know that I am perfectly safe in saying I will take the President's number as to what the premiums will be 7 years from now, because anyone who really thinks we can make a forecast within pennies that is good for 7 years is kidding himself or herself. So I am willing to stipulate that the Medicare debate over numbers is off the table because I am willing to accept the President's numbers as the target numbers rather than the Republican numbers because they are literally pennies apart. There is no point in fighting over it. If that means that I am now redeemed from savaging Medicare, I appreciate the redemption. But what it really means, Madam President, is that the phrase savaging Medicare is a misplaced phrase because the President, himself, has proposed a number that is, as you go over the life of the program, simply pennies away from the number we have been attacked for in these many months. I would like to talk about the tax cut for the wealthiest among us. One of the most serious problems we face in this country--which we sometimes lose sight of, but occasionally turn to--is the fact that real wages among people who work for salaries and work for wages, who do not have investment income and interest income, have been stagnant for many years. The stagnancy goes back into past administrations. It has not changed under this administration. It is one of the economic problems we face--real wages for what we call ordinary people have been stagnant. I will confess that I approached the tax cut for children with some concern because I looked at it solely in economic terms, and I said to myself that this particular tax cut is not going to increase the rate of growth in the economy, which is the root problem. There are now economic studies that challenge that conclusion that demonstrate that this tax cut will, in fact, stimulate economic growth. But I will leave that debate for another time. I will simply raise this point. If, in fact, one of our more serious difficulties is stagnant real wages for ordinary people, and it is a fact that--being the father of six children, I know this one--the biggest impact comes upon those who have kids. They have to worry about clothing them and educating them and taking care of them. What could be a better way of attacking that particular economic problem than saying to those ordinary people, who have children, that we will allow you to keep an extra $500 per year for each one of your children, while we work on this long-term problem of solving our growth difficulties? The Senator from California was talking about people who are earning $350,000 a year who are going to get $100,000 in tax benefits. My reaction is that they are sure going to have an awful lot of kids if they are going to get $100,000 a year, because the tax break comes at $500 per child. That is going to require more children than I know of anybody having had to get to the full $100,000. We are talking about $500 per child for the man, or the woman, or the couple, who has a child, who is working for wages at $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000 a year and is having financial problems, because his or her real income has been stagnant for years. So I have revised my position on the tax cut, as I have looked at it in those terms, and said that this makes sense. It certainly makes a lot more sense than taking that $500 and bringing it to Washington and spending it on some kind of job retraining program in the hope that you can do something about the stagnant real wages of that wage earner. This is not a tax cut for the rich. The statistics demonstrate it. The demagoguery goes the other way. We need to keep our focus elsewhere. What is this really all about, Madam President? Why are we facing this kind of a crisis here tonight? Some would summarize it by saying the Republicans are willing to risk shutting down the Government in order to get a balanced budget. The President is willing to risk shutting down the Government in order to prevent a balanced budget. I prepared to say that and I decided, no, I better go farther than that; that is too glib a summary. This is what I think this is all about. Let us go back to the 1992 campaign. My friend, Senator Dorgan, who is probably going to be recognized next, and I both ran for the Senate in 1992. So did Bill Clinton run for President in 1992. I do not know what the Senator's campaign slogan was, but I know what mine was. It was change. I had a little trouble with that because somebody said, ``That is Governor Clinton's slogan. He is running on change.'' The woman elected to the second congressional district in Utah, Karen Shepherd, a Democrat, ran on change. We all got elected. President Clinton got elected on change, I got elected on change, and Karen Shepherd got elected on change, Republicans and Democrats, on the wave was change. Then the President put forth his first serious financial proposal. It was a $19 billion stimulus package saying we had to stimulate a sluggish economy by spending $19 billion in an emergency appropriation. Why do I point that out, Madam President? For this reason: Emergency appropriations do not go through the budget process. Emergency appropriations go directly to the deficit. We have an emergency, we have to bypass the budget process. We stood here on this floor recognizing that the procedure of taking emergency appropriations to bypass the budget and taking care of your political constituency in an emergency appropriations bill was not changed, it was the ultimate example of business as usual in this town. We Republicans like to say we brilliantly executed a strategy blocking that. As a matter of fact, we stumbled into it. There was not any brilliant strategy. It just kind of happened. Then we discovered something. The American people liked the fact that we blocked the stimulus package which was really business as usual. So the 1994 election, in my view, turned on this issue and this issue primarily: Which party is really the party of change? The American people had no change--what they wanted. They voted for change in 1992. They felt they did not get it, so they voted for it in 1994. What are we talking about tonight, Madam President? We are talking about change. We are talking about which party is most dedicated to changing the way the Government works. We are cloaking that debate in conversation about the rate of growth in Medicare, or slashing Medicare if you prefer that rhetoric. We are cloaking that debate in talks about tax cuts for the rich, and then others respond saying it is not for the rich. We can have that debate. What we are really talking about is whether or not the Government is going to fundamentally change the way it does business and the way it keeps its books--the balanced budget amendment, the balanced budget bill, a balanced budget in 7 years. Let me conclude by telling you Government as usual--and why I think we need change. I have been around this town or observed this town for over 30 years, even though I have been a Senator for only 3 years. I have seen politicians of both parties and of all political stripes-- liberals, conservatives, moderates--all stand up and claim their undying allegiance to a balanced budget. When? It reminds me of the old Wall Street advice by a wise old broker who says, ``When somebody asks you about a stock price, give them a number or give them a date but never give them both.'' Stocks going to double--do not tell them when. Give them a number, give them a date, but never give them both. That has been Government as usual with balanced budget--Republicans have done it, Ronald Reagan has done it, Democrats have done it, Jimmy Carter did it--give them a number, give them a date, but never give them both. We have to give a date here. When is the date that the budget will be balanced? It is always in the outyears. That is a phrase that the American people do not understand. The budgeteers tell you outyears means the years out there somewhere in the future. I discovered that outyears means never. The budget is going to be balanced in the outyears. That means never. What this fight is all about is whether or not we are going to take Government as usual and procedure as usual that promises a balanced budget in the outyears, or whether we will take the first steps this year and in this budget. President Clinton sent us a budget. It was put on the floor. It was defeated 99 to 0. I hope the people that are guiding the President in these budget negotiations remember that under law he has to send us a budget for fiscal year 1997. His budget for fiscal year 1996 was defeated 99 to 0. He has to send us a budget for fiscal year 1997. If, indeed, what we are proposing is too draconian for fiscal year 1996, and he really does want to get the budget balanced by 1997, he has to be far more draconian in 1997 than the Republicans will be, because we have a head start on him by virtue of what we are willing to undertake in fiscal year 1996. Of course he would prefer 10 years--10 years gives 3 more outyears in which to make his projections. I think with all the rhetoric that is going on, the real core problem here that is dividing the two parties and that has created the anger and the excitement and the specter of certain portions of the Government being shut down tomorrow is more fundamental than the rhetoric around. It is over the question of where is the Government going, and are we finally going to undertake the hard choices of doing it now rather than giving us the rhetoric of doing it in the outyears. In conclusion, Madam President, I offer this summary which may be a little irreverent but that I think helps us understand what we are talking about. The Presidency of John F. Kennedy has been summarized in shorthand now by virtue of a comment his wife made after his death when she said his favorite musical was Camelot. She described how she and he would listen to records in the evening as they were falling asleep. They would put a record on it and listen to it, and his favorite musical was Camelot. She said--referring to the Kennedy Presidency from the language of that musical--``Let the word go forth and let it never be forgot that once there was a place that was known as Camelot.'' And that name has stuck. If I may, with I hope appropriate respect, suggest that for this administration, the musical should not be Camelot but Annie because the hit song in Annie is ``Tomorrow.'' ``Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow, you're always a day away.'' I suggest that this debate is about whether or not we attack the difficulty of balancing the budget today or whether we leave it for the outyears--``Tomorrow, tomorrow, always a day away.'' I side with those that say tomorrow is never going to come. If we are going to deal with the problems of the balanced budget we must deal with it now. We must deal with it here no matter how difficult and problematic it becomes and how angry it makes us. We must step out to that hard choice and deal with it today instead of waiting for the time that is always a day away. I yield the floor. Mr. DORGAN addressed the Chair. (Mr. BENNETT assumed the Chair.)

Mr. BENNETT. Will the Senator yield for another question?

Mr. BENNETT. Will the Senator explain to me how increasing Medicare at the rate of 7 percent is described as a reduction in any budget? I have not seen a single budget anywhere that reduces the level of spending in Medicare. I have only seen a budget that reduces it from proposals. So I would ask the Senator why he uses the term ``reduction'' when in fact the amount of money being spent goes up each and every year?

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I want to take occasion to pay tribute to my senior colleague, Senator Hatch, for his leadership on this debate on the flag amendment. My one regret in this whole debate has been that some people in the State of Utah have characterized this as an issue that has divided Senator Hatch and me and tried to force us into picking sides. I did, indeed, vote against the amendment. It was a close vote. These votes are always close matters. My reasoning is that the Constitution of the United States is our basic law and, as such, should be held inviolate from legislative activities. I realize this was enabling legislation, but I have the fear that, if we start the precedent of amending the Constitution every time there is a Supreme Court decision with which we disagree, we run the risk of seeing the Constitution turned into something other than basic law. Coming out of a political science background and a lifetime of studying the Constitution, that is where I came down on this particular issue. But I want to make it very clear that I am not backing down from my admiration for and respect for my senior colleague and his scholarship and his leadership. I hope the people of Utah will understand that this has been an intellectual disagreement between us, and not an emotional disagreement between us. We spent many hours with each other--each trying to understand the other's point of view. I am sure Senator Hatch understands and respects my point of view, as I certainly understand and respect his. So I hope the people of Utah will understand that this is not something that has driven a wedge between their two Senators. While I am on the floor, I would like to read into the Record just one letter that I have received that I think is illustrative of the way this debate has gone in the State of Utah. The proponents of the amendment have been mounting an advertising campaign in Utah putting up television ads urging the people of our State to contact, write, fax, or phone Senator Bennett and urge that he vote in favor of this amendment. That, of course, is their appropriate constitutional right. I received this letter in response to that campaign. I would like to read it into the Record. It is addressed to the Office of Senator Bennett regarding the flag burning amendment. Dear Senator Bennett: I read the article in this morning's Salt Lake Tribune indicating that your position on the flag burning amendment differs from that of Senator Hatch. I also saw the commercial obviously put on by supporters of the amendment urging that I write you about this issue. I commend you for your independent and thoughtful position as indicated in the Tribune article. I am a West Point graduate and served with the 3rd Armored Division in Germany and the 5th Special Forces group in Vietnam. I am not in favor of flag burning. But I really don't think we need a constitutional amendment about flag burning. I am strongly convinced that the constitutional provisions should be reserved for only the most important governmental issues, and flag burning just is not such an issue. I was offended to realize that the television commercial I saw this morning flashed the scene of book burning and a scene of flag burning as if they were the same thing. By my sense of history they are opposite. Book burning denotes the suppression of ideas by government. Flag burning involves the offensive and distasteful expression of protest against government. Nigeria does not tolerate that. But I hope America always will. I commend you for your courage in taking the position which I suppose is probably contrary to what the opinion polls would tell you to do. Sounds like political courage to me. Wish there were more of us in Washington. Very truly yours. It is signed by Chris Wangsgard. I did not know Mr. Wangsgard before he responded to the commercial by sending me this letter. I can report that a majority of the calls that I have received in response to the commercial have been in support of the position that I have taken. I am grateful to Mr. Wangsgard and those who have so responded. But I conclude, again as I began, Mr. President, with a sincere statement of respect and admiration for my senior colleague and an assurance to everyone in the State of Utah that, whereas we differ intellectually on this issue, I do not know of two Senators who have worked together better to represent their home State than Senator Hatch and I. I know no senior colleague who has been more supportive or more helpful to his newcomer in the Senate than Senator Hatch has been. I want, now that the issue is over and settled, to take the opportunity to make sure the people of Utah understand the high regard that I hold for Senator Hatch and the highest esteem that I hold for his scholarship and his leadership. Mr. HATCH addressed the Chair.